AS TEMPERATURES RISE

This episode is with Sophy Banks. Her eclectic background has included being a therapist, family constellator, radical footballer, environmental activist, engineer, computer trainer, and more. She was on the ground with Transition Town Totnes, the birth place of the global Transition Movement. Sophy’s keen interest and commitment to creating healthy human culture at all scaleshas underpinned all her work and what we explore here in this episode.

Sophy Banks: https://grieftending.org/

https://www.astemperaturesrise.com/

https://www.patreon.com/m/astemperaturesrise

Music is “Vibrancy" by Ketsa

Show notes:

* orienting question: why do humans create systems that create so much suffering and nobody does anything about it?

* not responding to the signals of pain and suffering

* power inequality and inequality in suffering

* the Transition Movement

* endemic nature of burnout = burning the planet

* what is it that organizes healthy culture to be life sustaining?

* grief tending and how do we re-create a form of circle where we can hold one another in our grief

* grief gives us insight into what’s wrong in our world

* conflict between inner transition vs. outer transition

* archetypes of doing and being

* balance of opposites: health is when these are in balance =

* yin and yang = Chinese medicine

* fire and water = Sobonfu Some

* love and will = Psychosynthesis

* sympathetic and parasympathetic systems = organizing systems

* what if a healthy culture is one supports a healthy flow between action and rest, between outward and inward movement?

* the medicine wheel = cycles of nature

* ground state of rituals and practices that support a healthy balance between action and rest

* Stephen Porges Polyvagul theory

* the return pathway + social technology for helping us come back to relaxed flow

* when that return pathway is not there

* double injury of the difficult experience + not having the support around to help us come back in a good way

* a whole people can go through mass trauma and these pathways are wiped out

* the inner world of a culture that’s been organized by trauma

* we lose a trust in life

* what do we do with pain in our culture?

* systems of oppression:

* those more identified with fight-flight tend to run things in our world because they have the energy to do so

* there the part of the system being run by trauma and part being run by health

* “The line between good and evil runs through every human heart.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

* George Lakoff on frames and metaphors

* Riane Eisler on partnership vs. dominator cultures

* Starhawk on good reality vs. bad reality

* What we put at the center matters and why our efforts at systems change fail

* Molly Scott Cato - our purpose should be to provide meaningful and dignified lives for everyone in the community

* No time for grief = it’s not normal to take time

* privilege gives us the illusion/possibility of avoiding the pain through comfort

* the false construct of privilege

* "those who most need to do the work are the ones least resourced and equipped to do it and have the most possibility to go on avoiding it"

* we are wired to support each other = the possibility for reconnection is always inside us

* attachment theory getting backed by neuroscience

* "primarily we are our attachments"

* Maslow’s view to put the needs as a hierarchy is a traumatized view

* the landscape of inequality

* the need to titrate, to be resourced = wisdom of touch it and come back

* when it’s wise to not go to the trauma and grief

* putting the relationship at the center

* letting the pain of the truth transform us so we won’t let it happen again

* Bert Hellinger - guilt is not an absolute moral compass but it depends on the moral compass of the group to which we belong

* even in perfect society there will still be loss, there would still be grief but we manufacture suffering

* the problem is not a technical problem

* Martin Prechtel on grief and praise

This episode is with Bayo Akomolafe author of These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to my Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home’ and Executive Director and Chief Curator for The Emergence Network (A Post-Activist Project]. Bayo is also host of the online writing course, ‘We will dance with Mountains: Writing as a Tool for Emergence’. And in this session Bayo takes us into the shapeshifting territory of monstrosity, glitches and fugitively.

http://bayoakomolafe.net/

https://www.astemperaturesrise.com/

Music is “Starlight” by Chad Crouch

Show notes:

* we start with a blessing

* The notion of the monster and the human

* the human is invoked when a pandemic strikes

* archetypal lens

* “withnessing” the transgressions of the monster

* the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis

* Stacy Alaimo: "forward movement is longer possible in the Anthropocene"

* only awkward movement is possible

* it’s time for descent and losing our way generously

* sci-fi vision of climate change fully escalated such that we find ourselves at the edge of the ocean

* shapeshifting — a new kind of form is required to be alive in these times

* maybe we need new gods

* James Hillman

* we need a story that allows us to shapeshift

* there is a place for fugitive departures

* our skins are transcorpreal transactions

* defraction and a micro-politics of inquiry

* making sanctuary together = about shape shifting more than safety

* unschooling/parenting as decolonial politics and breathing underwater

* co-accountability

* we are shaping each other

* “I need the playful defraction on your vision"

* Meeting the Universe Halfway

* we need the children to baptize us into the next

* Manish Jain and unschooling

* the pandemic helping parents to see their kids perhaps for the first time

* stay with the trouble of our kids

* those that come after us have things to teach us from a future that has already happened

* Yaruba, West African

* the psyche is not in the mind but the mind is in the psyche

* the world calls on us to be defeated again and again — calling on Rilke

* healing as recovery is vexed with tensions

* The goddess Akhilandeshvari — one who is never not broken

* Yaruba ritual that when the ground is unstable, the thing to do is be still = stay with the trouble

* being still before the elder the Coronavirus

* archetypes are still alive, we are co-creating with them

* the Abrahamic god may not know what to do with upheaval

* we need Pan, Ishu and Dionysus when we are fugitive — the gods of becoming

* going into the wilds

* exteriorizing the danger — the danger is not down the street but we are the products of danger, stars crashing into stars

* the invitation is to touch our own bodies and touch the alienness and monstrosity of ourselves as a way to wiser politics and education

* total man concept — trying to design the perfect man

* sitting in the lostness of things

* fear of the normal, being trapped in the normal = the normal as oppressive

* staying in the blackhole of the pandemic

Joe Brewer is a true polymath and lover of Earth! He is executive director of the Center for Applied Cultural Evolution and the founder of the Earth Regenerators network, a study group for restoring planetary health and avoiding human extinction. He is the author of The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth(which will be self-published soon), where he brings together the fields of complexity, Earth Systems, cognitive science, and cultural evolution.

Show notes:

* causes of the planetary predicament — difference between learning and instinct

* evolution of the human brain and technology, especially language

* environmental fitness using technology and building on what came before

* human ability to learn culture that can temporarily disconnect from the nonhuman environment (creating a temporary buffer)

* disconnected in causality in our short term thinking = displaced causality

* if we are to survive this time we will need to spread survival out in space, in time, and in causation

* a future that no one can see but somehow still move toward it = we become the past of some future

* collapse through the metaphor of hospice

* complex sequence of collapses of subsystems of the body

* civilizations as one long term living system, example of COVID and shut down as systems

* collapse is plural

* OPEC oil crisis in 1980

* wealth accumulation is like cancer

* collapse of the US economy has been happening for 40 years

* Confucius “If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children. ” and if you’re planning for 1,000 years grow a forest

* Aristotle and teleological thinking

* the original cathedral is forest building

* cultural evolution and design of culture

* population genetics

* cultural traits

* future fitness is our design challenge

* bringing sacred relationships to our environment is an essential ingredient

* cumulative culture = we can build on culture

* cultural scaffolding or developmental scaffolding

* David Sloan Wilson and wise management of cultural evolution

* regeneration is a dynamic pattern

* Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela

* autopoiesis = self generated self expression

* Janine Benyus and the Biomimicry Institute

* real sustainability is regeneration

* we need to work with living systems

* limits to growth

* Joe and his family decisions to move to Barichara, Colombia

* having a daughter in this time

* what do children need in this time?

* our daughter is learning that what normal people do is bring rivers back to life and grow forests

* Earth Regenerators Network

* regenerating at the bioregional level

* local living economies

* 97% of our history we lived in small hunter-gatherer tribes evolving with nature

* should we humans be here or not?

* there is no singular human culture

* we (humans) get to decide if we stick around!

* without enough complexity and diversity in a food web it will collapse

* loss of too much non human species and humans go away too'

* should there be too many humans or balance and diversity of life?

* “we need to deserve to be here"

* The Kogi and pagamentos

* debt of gratitude to Tierra Madre

* gratitude releases hormones of pleasure

* Paul Cherfuka’s addition to the stages of grief: the gift

* you grieve because you care

* to regenerate land we have to feel what has been destroyed

* an ability to love that has no end

* The true evolutionary adaptation for humans is teamwork

* Your medicine is what you give, it’s your genius

* we are the medicine if we realized we are the Earth loving itself

* how to live in a landscape - to live in a place you love so much you will give your body to it

* where should my body rest?

Support Joe: https://www.patreon.com/joe_brewer

The Earth Regenerators: https://earth-regenerators.mn.co/

Joe on Medium: https://medium.com/@joe_brewer

Support the ATR podcast: https://www.patreon.com/astemperaturesrise

Music is “The Light Within” by Gavin Luke

After an epic, heart-rending, wildfire ravaged past 10 days in Southern Oregon (and on the entire west coast of the U.S. and in the world). I decided to pull out my interview with Francis Weller from 2 years ago for the documentary RE:MEMBER, as it is more relevant and important than ever and the interview in its entirety has not been publicly shared!

Francis Weller is a psychotherapist, writer and soul activist. He is a master of synthesizing diverse streams of thought from psychology, anthropology, mythology, alchemy, indigenous cultures and poetic traditions. Author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. He founded and directs WisdomBridge, an organization that offers educational programs that seek to integrate the wisdom from indigenous cultures with the insights and knowledge gathered from western poetic, psychological and spiritual traditions. 

In this episode we talk about:

– Welcoming grief and apprenticing to grief

– Obsession with happiness in our culture

– How grief keeps us current

– Ritual and going deep into the well of grief

– Containment and release and the need for community

– Soulful repetition vs. superficial repetition

– Correlation between the currency of sorrow and currency of joy

– Building communal strength

– Practices that help provide ballast

– Coping doesn’t get us there where soul wants to take us

– The ecology of the sacred — the sanity of knowing trouble will come and the only way through is together

– The San Bushmen

– When one of us is ill, we’re all ill

– A living culture is one that knows what the people require in order for the soul to survive

– Community first vs. me first

– We are devouring our world because of a profound emptiness and at the heart of that is the grief of the loss of living culture

– The broken heart that allows us to feel again

– Ancient memory that remembers how we wept together

– We cannot do this grief work alone

– Right now we are desperate, we can’t pretend it’s not happening

– Amnesia around grief work

– Ancient Scandinavian village practice with people in grief — sleeping in the cinders — living in the ashes

– Grief is holy work — Rilke

– Divine quality to the descent, god of the depths

– Those who stay faithful to the journey of grief, will be our elders

– Blake — emotions as divine influxes

– What does it want from me? How do I serve this?

– Alchemy — make the black blacker than black, move towards the darkness with fidelity

– Suffering will come to you, it’s part of being in the body

– Rough initiation — severing; can’t go back; ending of something; to step into a larger identity

– Everything you love you will lose; to be faithful to that love, you must be faithful to this grief

– Every living culture had ritual at its center to maintain itself

– We moved away from it to intellectualism

– Ritual has the capacity to derange us — part of psyche that speaks in art, beauty, song

– Healing must address the psychological, the sociological, and the cosmological

– Healing repairs what is torn and prepares for what is to come

– Soul activism

– To be re-dreamt

– Ritual comes out of the land

– Victor Turner — “communitas"

Support the podcast here: https://www.patreon.com/astemperaturesrise

More about Francis Weller: www.francisweller.net/

RE:MEMBER where grief and beauty co-exist: www.rememberdoc.com/

As Temperatures Rise website: www.astemperaturesrise.com/

Music is "Time of Sorrow" by Martin Carlberg

This episode is with my friend Janice Rous, the somatic psychonaut. Janice was pioneering in the field of somatics (body work, yoga, breathwork)before it was all the contemporary rage. Now as an elder, her life experience and love for life bear the fruit of practical wisdom. Janice developed her work into what she calls *Body Dialogue* because she was in search of a practice to integrate all of her different studies. Body Dialogue is a unique form that effectively combines Alexander Technique, breathing and yoga. She also partners with Polly Howells and Jean Esther annually to host a women’s retreat based in the practice of Body Soul Rhythms Leadership Program, a program Janice graduated from in 2003.

To support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/m/astemperaturesrise

To learn more about Janice's work: http://bodydialogues.com/

Music in this episode is "Undying" by Blue Dot Session

In this episode we talk about:

- The body as the guide

- The mind-body connection relating to the chaos in the world today

- Body Dialogue

- Inflammation in the body, in the planet signaling out of balance

- Body as the first responder

- We were not born to sit in chairs

- Spiritual poverty in the western world

- BLM is revealing how we've exploited our bodies

- Autoimmune disease is our inner intelligence not working properly

- Getting your knowledge from within

- Attune to nature

- Vitality and where are we in deficit

- Come back to love and gratitude

- "Teach us to number our days"

Links to mentions in the episode:

The Alexander Technique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Technique

Marion Woodman: https://mwoodmanfoundation.org/

Pat McCabe (Weyakpa Najin Win, Woman Stands Shining) is a Diné (Navajo) mother, grandmother, activist, artist, writer, ceremonial leader, and international speaker. She is a voice for global peace, and her paintings are created as tools for individual, earth and global healing. She draws upon the Indigenous sciences of Thriving Life to reframe questions about sustainability and balance, and she is devoted to supporting the next generations, Women’s Nation and Men’s Nation, in being functional members of the “Hoop of Life” and upholding the honor of being human.

This interview took place at the beginning of this year before the disruptive mayhem of COVID and social uprising. Pat shares her hard-earned insight and beautiful vision of what futures are possible as we choose to enact our "free will accounting." If you'd like access to the entire 90 minute interview, become a patron here: https://www.patreon.com/astemperaturesrise

To learn more about Pat: https://www.patmccabe.net/

Music in this episode: "You are Home at Last" by Anders Ekengren

To entice you, in this full show we talk about:

– Putting life at the center

– Radical self love

– Power over paradigm vs. Thriving life paradigm

– Culture of low self-esteem

– "I come from original beauty"

– Integrity of the sacred hoop of life

– How do I uphold the design for thriving life?

– The Trickster and one deception at a time

– Free will construct + sovereign being

– Speaking to a sage plant

– Our participation and awakening

– The importance of our actions

– Consent

– "Your joy matters"

– The vehicle of the human body is so profound

– Tobacco as an ally plant

– Expanded cause and effect

– Asking for help from the more than human world

– "If all times are happening at the same time, then what's possible?"

– Retelling the old story changes the trajectory of the future

– "Blood, snot and tears"

This episode is with beloved teacher and elder Joanna Macy. Joanna is an activist, author, and a scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking, and deep ecology. She is the root teacher of "The Work That Reconnects", a ground-breaking framework for personal and social change. Her wide-ranging work addresses psychological and spiritual issues of the nuclear age, the cultivation of ecological awareness, and the fruitful resonance between Buddhist thought and postmodern science.

In this episode we talk about:

- The Great Turning

- Belonging to the Earth

- Strengthened by uncertainty

- Practices are key

- Positive Disintegration

- Evolutionary shift

- Industrial Growth Society

- Fear of death

- The Ohlone, the native people of what is known as the Northern California coast

- Herman Hesse's "Narcissus and Goldman"

- "How Everything Can Collapse" by Pablo Servigne and Raphael Stevens

- The splitting of the atom

- The hell realm of releasing nuclear power on Earth

- Rilke's Book of Hours

This short episode is with Lyla June Johnston. Lyla June is poet, musician, educator, anthropologist, activist and community servant of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages. She holds a degree in Environmental Anthropology with honors from Stanford University and a degree in American Indian Education with distinction from the University of New Mexico. Her internationally acclaimed performances and speeches are conveyed through the medium of prayer, hip-hop, poetry, acoustic music and speech. Lyla's personal goal is to grow closer to Creator by learning how to love deeper.

Music in this episode is "Final Transmission Home" by Amaranth Cove

Please support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/astemperaturesrise

More about Lyla June: https://www.lylajune.com/

Lyla June performing All Nations Rise: https://youtu.be/nr2VLI8jKww

Dahr Jamail is an award-winning journalist and author. His stories have been published with Truthout, Inter Press Service, Tom Dispatch, The Guardian, Foreign Policy in Focus, Le Monde, Le Monde Diplomatique, The Huffington Post, The Nation, The Independent, and Al Jazeera, among others.

His most recent book is ‘The End Of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption.’ Currently, Dahr is collaborating with elder and teacher Stan Rushworth on a new book project, titled ‘The Changing Earth: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island." "The book emerges from how Indigenous peoples' experience has given them a unique understanding of civilizational devastation, one that has endowed them with knowledge and solutions that present both radical and pragmatic responses to crises beyond anything known before."

Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/astemperaturesrise

Learn more about Dahr and his work: www.dahrjamail.net

Learn more about Dahr and Stan Rushworth’s new book project ‘The Changing Earth’: www.thechangingearth.net

Support their fundraiser for the book: gf.me/u/x3jd52

Stan Rushworth is of Cherokee descent and an enrolled citizen

of the Chiricahua Apache Nation.

He is the author of "Going to Water: The Journal of Beginning Rain" and "Sam Woods: America Healing", and teaches Native American Literature at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California.

Stan and journalist Dahr Jamail are raising funds for a new book "The Changing Earth: Indigenous Voices From Turtle Island." Learn more and contribute here: https://gf.me/u/xt39dq