Awakin Calls

Dr. Eric Elnes is a minister, biblical scholar, author, speaker and media host. Since 2008, he has been the Senior Minister of Countryside Community Church (UCC) in Omaha, Nebraska. Countryside recently became the Christian partner in Omaha’s heralded Tri-Faith Initiative – in which a synagogue, a mosque, and a church are co-locating to a 37-acre campus to learn what it is like for the three Abrahamic faiths to live in relationship with each other. Temple Israel, Countryside Community Church (UCC) and the American Muslim Institute have chosen to be in relationship together as neighbors on one campus, committed to practicing respect, acceptance and trust. They combined with the belief that God is leading them to be together and to be a blessing to one other and their communities. The shared physical commons is the only undertaking of its kind in the world.

Elnes often preaches about the need for inclusivity, the foundation of the Tri-Faith Initiative. He explains that one of the clearest, most emphatic messages of Jesus in the Gospels is that those of us who would be his followers are to love God with heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. To Jesus, our “neighbor” includes our so-called “enemies”, so if we are to take our Christian faith seriously at all, according to Elnes, we must take Jesus’ commands seriously as well.

But for Elnes, religious practice is not just about following commandments. It is primarily about worship. His aim for worship is to help people experience within the worship hour – if even for a quarter second – awe, wonder and surrender. Worship is about opening up to the spirit of the living God. Elnes is internationally recognized for creating multi-sensory, experiential services that transcend classification as “traditional” or “contemporary." Rather than making worship message-based, he makes it experience-based, grounded in the belief that the spirit of God is fully present and, when we open even a crack, the spirit doesn't hesitate to jump down and mess with us.

“Religion does us a disservice when it seeks to remove uncertainty from life,” he says. “The fact of the matter is that life is messy and no amount of doctrine or dogma changes this. Faith built upon certainty is a house of cards that falls apart when the ‘unshakable foundation’ shifts even slightly.” And so preaching for Elnes becomes more of an interpretive guide broken up into small segments with reflective questions – with musical interludes as restful, open invitations to let the spirit do its work.

Initially having aspired to a career in science, specifically solar research, Elnes ended up the Reverend Dr. Eric Elnes. "Evolution," he says, " is love trying to work its way out into the universe." It was while reassuring a friend who was going through trauma that he felt God's love surround them. He describes God as raising our vision and expanding our hearts to a Love that is great enough to embrace the whole world. This sense of cosmic cohesiveness and profound Love is at the core of Elnes' preaching and personality. 

Elnes earned a degree in Economics from Whitman College and graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary with a Master of Divinity in 1991 and a Ph.D. in 1997.  He was Senior Pastor of Scottsdale Congregational United Church of Christ in Scottsdale, Arizona from 1995 to 2008. During this time, Elnes co-authored The Phoenix Affirmations, consisting of 12 Statements of Faith that broadly describe a Christian's love of God, neighbor, and self.

In 2006, he helped lead a 2,500 mile walk from Phoenix to Washington, D.C. to promote awareness of the progressive/emerging Christian faith, one tenet of which is to be a constructive force for social and environmental justice and peace in the world. The contemporary convergence movement is the result of reconciliation among post-evangelical and post-liberal Christians “who have previously been on opposite ends of the theological spectrum,” as well as among members of “certain Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, and other communities on the fringes of their traditions [who] are discovering that they share more in common with each other than with the more resistant strands of their own traditions.” Each brings gifts to the table and the result is non-violent resolution to conflict. The premise of reconciliation and inclusivity is a foundation of Elnes' life and work.

Elnes' work extends beyond the Sunday church service. His internet television program, Darkwood Brew, was the first faith-based, weekly, interactive web television program in the world and has produced the world’s largest collection of progressive small group video resources. His books include The Phoenix Affirmations: A New Vision for the Future of Christianity (Jossey-Bass, 2006), and Gifts of the Dark Wood: Seven Blessings for Soulful Skeptics (and Other Wanderers) (Abingdon Press, 2015). His 2,500 mile journey is recounted in his book, Asphalt Jesus: Finding a New Christian Faith on the Highways of America (Jossey-Bass, 2007) (discussion guide), and is also the subject of a feature-length film, The Asphalt Gospel.

Elnes says he has a deep intuition that if we were to meet God and had a chance to ask why He has given us some, but not all, of the essentials that make for peace in this world, God would respond that He has given some to us and some to our enemies. Our "enemies" share the same hopes and yearnings as we do and bear the gifts that make for peace and justice, if only we had the eyes to recognize them and the ears to listen. This recognition moves us to be less quick to judge who is, and who is not, an enemy, and keeps us from making overly easy generalizations about entire populations of people – because if we look carefully enough, Christ may be found in their midst.

Join us in a holiday conversation with this inspirational leader!

Miki Kashtan is a self-described “practical visionary pursuing a world that works for all, exploring the application of the principles and tools of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) to social transformation.” In 2002, she co-founded, with her late sister Inbal Kashtan, Bay Area Nonviolent Communication (BayNVC), an organization that offers training, mediation, and facilitation to individuals and organizations using the skills and consciousness of Nonviolent Communication.

One of the central areas of learning and application for Miki is exploring the shift from the paradigm of exchange and accumulation to the paradigm of a full gift economy, especially looking at how we can restore our relationship with the abundance of nature and increase the interdependent flow of energy and resources.

Miki describes encountering feminism in the mid-1980’s as a huge personal awakening, leading her to embrace nonviolent communication when she discovered it in the 1990's. From the principles and her 25+ years practice of NVC, Miki developed Convergent Facilitation, a decision-making process that enables groups to look beneath the surface and find the essence of what’s really important to each member, and bring it together into one set of principles that lead to proposals and ultimately decisions that everyone can embrace. Miki believes that Convergent Facilitation is a methodology that can help us recover our collaborative capability, an essential ingredient if we are to have a future. She offers six free interactive calls a month on different topics, including Facing Privilege, Overcoming Patriarchy, and Questioning Money.

“I dream of local and global systems based on care for the needs of all life,” Miki says. “In my work with individuals, I focus on supporting a movement towards rapid empowerment in service of the whole. In my work with organizations, I focus on creating collaborative systems and processes. In my work with multi-stakeholder groups, I focus on transcending polarization and advocating for solutions that work for everyone.”

Inner freedom, nonviolence, dialogue, collaboration, interdependence, leadership, conscious use of power, and a commitment to structural change are some of the lenses through which Miki looks at every moment and interaction. She is particularly inspired by those who are open and willing to learn together how to remove barriers to looking at reality without illusion, holding vision without compromise, and living with integrity and all its consequences.

“My deepest sources of inspiration are many feminist theoreticians, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Marshall Rosenberg, Mary Parker Follett, radical economics, and the commons movement," Miki says. "I strive to bring together theory and practice, spiritual commitment and conceptual clarity, radical vision and practical applications, heart and mind, self and other, and personal change and social transformation.”

Miki offers meeting facilitation, consultation, retreats, and training in many countries for organizations and committed individuals, and regularly blogs at The Fearless Heart. She is the author of three books, Reweaving Our Human Fabric: Working Together to Create a Nonviolent Future, Spinning Threads of Radical Aliveness: Transcending the Legacy of Separation in Our Individual Lives, and The Little Book of Courageous Living. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Tikkun magazine, Waging Nonviolence, Shareable, Peace and Conflict, and elsewhere. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley.

Join us in conversation with this practical visionary and change-maker with a fearless heart!

 

Phil Cass is a host, facilitator/trainer and consultant, a mentor and part-time college level instructor, a constant advocate for community, and a life-long student. For the past two decades, Dr. Cass has put into practice methods of leadership throughout his community of Columbus, Ohio that move beyond the hierarchical, "top-down" method of leading, in favor of a model where the leader is not a hero, but a host who creates a space and conversational process that encourages a collective intelligence to emerge, and where everyone involved comes up with something that they could never do alone.

During Phil’s 16-year tenure (from 2000-2016) as CEO of four affiliated not-for-profit health corporations — the Columbus Medical Association, Columbus Medical Association Foundation, Physicians Care Connection and Central Ohio Trauma System — he implemented this model of leadership as host.  He convened a group of leaders of local healthcare institutions, along with some community members, with the idea that they could rethink their purpose — from the zero-sum game of treating the sick, to a system that would promote optimal health.  His initial experiments with conversational leadership later led to the creation of a county-wide multi-stake-holder initiative, Our Optimal Health, aimed at creating a fundamental shift in individual and community well-being while simultaneously enabling the current health system to function more effectively.

As Margaret Wheatley, notable author and thought leader in organizational learning and change, described, “To bring all these people together, [Cass] had to shift his own internal construct of what it meant to be an effective leader. He was already a skilled, traditional heroic leader; now he became the kind of leader whose first responsibility is not to command others, but to ensure that they feel invited and welcome, so they can participate in making something happen that none of them could do alone.”

With the catalytic effect of his transformational style of leadership, more and more people in Columbus became trained in productive conversational leadership processes that include all relevant stakeholders in figuring out problems and solutions. This form of leadership continued to spread into institutions within the community — the Ohio Food Bank, hospitals, Ohio State University, even to a federal initiative on homelessness.  Columbus has as a result become a model of change for other municipalities and organizations, and Phil's and the community's work were the subject of a chapter of Walk Out Walk On: A Learning Journey into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now (2011), by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze, which highlighted people who have walked out of limiting beliefs and assumptions and walked on to create healthy and resilient communities.

Phil was inspired to transform himself and his leadership style when, in 2002, he attended The Shambhala Institute—Authentic Leadership in Action (ALIA), where he met skilled practitioners of circle and community building from around the world who profoundly changed his entire approach to leadership. They were practicing the Art of Hosting, conversational processes that resolve conflicts, develop strategy, analyze issues and develop action plans. Like the open-source computer operating system Linux, the Art of Hosting has been described as a set of social technologies that allow for order without control. Its “source code” is a set of core principles and practices for how to host 12 conversations that matter: setting intention, creating hospitable space, asking powerful questions, surfacing collective intelligence, trusting emergence, finding mates, harvesting learning and moving into wise action.

Phil has provided hosting/facilitation and training for numerous organizations locally and internationally, and has served on many Boards of community organizations.  His passions are in helping organizations create cultures of participatory leadership, collaborative strategic planning, thriving environments for staff to excel, and community mental health. He is now affiliated with the TLP Group, Inc. a strategic consultation, process design, facilitation and coaching company where integrity and wholeness open up possibilities for clients.

True to his belief that all change begins first in one’s own heart and immediate environments, he has implemented the style of conversational leadership in his own work environment.  “Our company is based on friendship and in many ways authentic relationships is our business model,” he describes. “The three of us decided from the beginning that if our core competency was to support others in developing meaningful relationships, then we needed to make this one of our core practices, as well. … We intentionally pierce the artificial veil between who we are as co-workers and who we are as private people. …[W]hen you meet deliberately over time, using circle practice, the end result is wise decisions and loving the people you work with. That mythical line of our business persona and who we really are fades away. Here, we are real people, caring for each other and doing good work.”

Prior to his leadership of the Columbus Medical Association and related entities, he served for more than a dozen years as President of the Franklin County Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services Board, and before that for five years as the CEO of Southeast, Inc., a mental health services provider. Phil co-founded the Physicians Leadership Academy (a mindfulness based leadership initiative for physicians at the Columbus Medical Association). He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Biology from Kenyon College, a Master’s degree in Counseling and Guidance from Fairfield University, and a Ph.D. in Counseling and Guidance from The Ohio State University. He lives with his wife Laura and is a proud father, step-father and grandfather. 

Join us in conversation with this inspiring and transformational leader!

“Ignorance just means you don’t know that there is a way out of your suffering.”

 

At once a lawyer, life coach, yoga teacher, and mother, Denise Bonnaig has been force of transformation in the lives of many. As a founding member of the boutique law firm Bonnaig & Associates, Bonnaig has been working to give voice to the voiceless in the contexts of civil rights, immigration, and workplace litigation for over thirty years. When not practicing law, she is busy as owner and teacher at Princeton Power Yoga and as a coach at Authentique Coaching, of which she is also the founder. And while the threads of Bonnaig’s work may be numerous, something very powerful holds them all together: a commitment to personal transformation.

 

Be it in law or in life, transformation, for Bonnaig, has meant bringing to light what holds us back. Bonnaig’s work, as she describes it, is to help others “transcend limitations, transform wounds into love, power, forgiveness, and gratitude.” Doing so means knowing how to see.

As a young girl, Bonnaig’s own journey of transformation began when death asked her to ask the question “who am I?” At the age of five, Bonnaig lost her mother, whose absence elicited a constant inner sounding of identity. Often feeling like she wasn’t fully understood, Bonnaig became attached to a need to always be right. “I decided not to allow anyone to ‘make me wrong,’” recalls Bonnaig, “but rather make sure that I was ‘always right’ and in the process, ‘make everyone else wrong.’” This “wanting to be right all the time,” as Bonnaig puts it, was, she later recognized, also an underlying motivation for the decision to study law at New York University. Yet as an unresolved inner question, this imbalance was a continuous source of suffering, both personally and in the context of her marriage, where she found that her propensity for wanting to be right often led her (unhealthily) to seek the last word.

Then Bonnaig found yoga, taking up her studies under Baron Baptiste. Baptiste’s method allowed Bonnaig to begin to make sense of the now definitive, deeply ingrained question of self, offering a pathway to explore the practice of gaining mental clarity and letting go of inhibiting beliefs and habits. Self-inquiry ceased being a restlessly revolving door and became a labor of love and a path to freedom. Bonnaig delved into the study of yoga and meditation, earning her 500-hour certification as a teacher of yoga and learning various techniques aiming to guide individuals to happiness as a way of being.

 

Among these practices, Vipassana meditation, or meditation anchored in seeing things as they are, grew to occupy an especially powerful role in Bonnaig’s life, teachings, and practice. Vipassana was a way for Bonnaig not only to encounter her own struggles and tendencies, but also to come to illuminating, instrumental insights. “There is something in particular I keep noticing,” remarks Bonnaig: “there is a tendency to be ignorant, which all of us have in common, no matter how bright and talented we are (…) ‘ignorant,’ meaning not knowing that there is a way out of [our] suffering.” In committing herself to sit silently with herself for more than a week during yearly Vipassana retreats, Bonnaig eventually came to recognize a simple process for helping to eradicate suffering:

“The process is simple. It certainly is not easy. All it takes is commitment. You all know commitment—you have acquired advanced degrees, raised children, started foundations, and run marathons. You’re totally capable of doing what’s simple, even if it’s not easy. The first step is acknowledging that you’re suffering and don’t know your way out of it. The second step is deciding that you want to find your way out of it. The third step is determining that you will use your mind and your matter (your physical body) to go beyond mind and matter.” 

For Bonnaig, being able to help others out of their suffering is a commitment and a passion as well. “If I can give you the gift of knowing how to eradicate ignorance, I would feel like a large part of my life’s mission is accomplished,” says Bonnaig.

And so it is that Bonnaig’s sense of fulfillment, joy, and peace in her work as a trial lawyer, yogini and yoga teacher, and spiritual guide (not to mention in her “life experience as someone who has experienced illness, death and has raised three successful black men – two of whom are medical doctors, against all odds”) have been inseparable from her own journey toward self-understanding. And while Bonnaig has known the beauty of experiencing no tethers to definitions of the self, the wisdom of her story and her teachings lie in the fact that they bespeak the easy, natural possibility of being able to be fully present to the spiritual dimension of life while still occupying one’s worldly role and persona. This dynamic balancing act is both the space in which transformation can occur and the means by which it does—once we begin to truly see.

More about Bonnaig’s spiritual journey and journey to coaching can be found on the Authentique Coaching website, where she also keeps a blog. 

Shabnam Virmani is a documentary filmmaker, former journalist, and singer of Kabir folk songs. In 2003, stung by the religious riots of Gujarat, India in 2002, she set out in quest of the 15th century mystic poet/saint Kabir, exploring how his poetry intersects with ideas of identity, religion, nationalism, harmony, impermanence and orality. She “ventur[ed] into diverse socio-cultural, religious and musical landscapes, meeting with people who sing, love, quote, revere and make meaning of Kabir” in their lives. In 2009, following six years of journey, Shabnam and the Kabir Project team offered to the world a set of 4 musical documentary films, and several music CDs and books of translated poetry, for reflection and healing.

The journey in search of Kabir in present-day India and Pakistan had a few unexpected and intangible twists for Shabnam. Living in Ahmedabad at the time of the communal riots in Gujarat in 2002 and witnessing some of the mob violence first-hand, she had recalled a line from Kabir at the time: ‘Sadho, dekho jag baurana! (Oh seekers, see the world has gone mad!)’. This flash of insight propelled her to seek out living Kabir folk traditions, with the conviction that here was something that she had to preach to “the violent, misguided ones out there.” But the magic of Kabir’s song and poetry began to slowly seep within, and to hold up a mirror to the fault-lines within her own mind.

She began to see how her subtle ‘othering’ of some people was securing her ego’s sense of self, and how this ‘othering’ trapped her in dualistic ways of thinking of ‘self’ and the ‘other’. It became clear to her that the inner and outer realities were linked, and that “dishonesty and violence at the individual level unfold into pogroms and war at the larger level.” To find herself complicit in the social scenario that she had set out to condemn was an unexpected and humbling outcome of her journey.

Into that now loosely-held space, however -- where there was once a certainty of truth and a strong judgment of the outside world -- there came the gift of music and of a guru, neither of which she expected to find on this journey. Prahlad Tipanya-ji, the wise village school teacher and Kabir folk singer from Malwa, Madhya Pradesh was an ideal guru for Shabnam, with her wariness of the hallowed Indian guru tradition, because he never set himself up as anything other than a seeker on the same path. His impish disdain for hierarchy and gentle barbs aimed at the guru traditions were a perfect fit for Shabnam’s way of thinking. And so, now encouraged and guided by Tipanya-ji and inspired by the inclusive spirit of folk music, Shabnam took up playing the 5-stringed tambura herself and now performs a wide repertoire of folk songs of Kabir and other mystic poets.

The release of the Kabir Project documentaries also resulted in a wave of other events that celebrated the tongue-in-cheek, pithy wisdom of Kabir and the folk singers who serve as channels for this wisdom. It led to Kabir festivals in various Indian cities, annual editions of the Malwa and Rajasthan Kabir Yatra, and the launch of a YouTube channel ‘Ajab Shahar’ in 2009 that features an eclectic mix of songs and snippets from Kabir, as well as other Bhakti, Sufi and Baul poets, including uploads of the complete documentaries for any and all to partake in. Shabnam is currently also working on ideas for taking mystic poetry and folk music to school classrooms and continues to perform music in public.

Perhaps, fittingly, for someone who is a feminist, Shabnam ensures that when she sings Kabir songs, she edits out lines and metaphors that are disrespectful of women. “I am not making Kabir sacrosanct. He was a man of his time and I am a woman of my generation,” she explains. Being a staunch advocate for women’s rights is a theme that runs through Shabnam’s career. As a young journalist for the Times of India in Jaipur in 1987, she filed a story on the young widow Roop Kanwar who was burnt to death on her husband’s funeral pyre, which led to the ban on ‘sati’ being reinforced once again in India. She then quit her journalism desk-job and, after studying mass communication in Cornell, co-founded the Drishti Media Collective at Ahmedabad in 1991, a non-profit group of media professionals "to support, document and strengthen grassroots struggles for gender justice, human rights and development." 

Inspired by the spirit of Bhakti, Sufi and Baul oral traditions, the Kabir Project team has now been engaged for over 15 years in curating and re-expressing the power of Kabir’s poetry through documentary films, music CDs, books, urban festivals, rural yatras, school workshops and a web archive. The work of the Kabir Project was awarded the Chishti Harmony Award, New Delhi, in December 2013 and the Sadbhavana Award, Mahua, Gujarat, in June 2017 for contributing to inter-faith understanding in the country. The Kabir films directed by Shabnam have won several awards including the Special Jury Prize, 52nd National Film Awards, 2010 for her film 'Kabira Khada Bazaar Mein".

Shabnam is currently working on two upcoming books on Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai and Kabir. She is an artist in residence at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore.

Join us in conversation with this singer of Kabir and fierce love-warrior!

“With awareness, we can create a better world for all beings, human and non-human alike.”-- Dr. Melanie Joy 

 

Like many of us, Dr. Melanie Joy, a Harvard-educated psychologist, professor, and vegan activist, grew up without giving too much mind to a behavior that most of the human beings living on the planet share: eating animals, and eating some animals rather than others. Have you ever wondered why you can eat a turkey sandwich, bowl of chili, or hot dog but still love your cat or feel your heart melt at the sight of a baby lamb? This is the question that, after a serious bout of illness causing a stark turnaround in attitude toward eating meat, led Dr. Joy on a nearly two-decades-long quest for an answer. That answer culminated in a now increasingly popular term and concept: carnism.

 

Carnism, explains Dr. Joy, “is the invisible belief system, or ideology, that conditions us to eat certain animals.” Because carnism is an ideology, it’s invisible, meaning that it is easily internalized, resulting in normalization and institutionalization. In her work, Dr. Joy makes a vital link between carnism and other violent ideologies, suggesting that “ideologies such as carnism run counter to core human values, values such as compassion, justice, and authenticity.” So in order to survive, such ideologies “need to use defense mechanisms that distort our thoughts and numb our feelings so that we act against our values without fully realizing what we are doing.”

And so arose one of the main motivations of Dr. Joy’s work: raising awareness. Dr. Joy suggests that even an issue of great global scale is possible to confront with hope. “Simply becoming aware […] allows us to reclaim our rationality and freedom of choice and to become more active participants in creating a more humane and just world,” believes Dr. Joy.

 

Dr. Joy’s activism has found many forms over the years.  In 2010, Dr. Joy founded Beyond Carnism, an international organization working to expose and transform carnism; she is also the co-founder of ProVeg International and the co-director for the Center for Effective Vegan Advocacy (CEVA). She is the author of the award-winning book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism, published in 13 languages.  She is also the author of Beyond Beliefs: A Guide to Improving Relationships and Communication for Vegans, Vegetarians, and Meat Eaters and of Strategic Action for Animals.

Dr. Joy’s commitment to raising public awareness about carnism drives the creation of shareable resources such as this online presentation, “The Secret Reason We Eat Meat,” and. her presentations on carnism, such as her interview with The Plant Based News, have been acclaimed on six continents. The video of her recent TEDx Talk on carnism is in the top 1% of the most-viewed TEDx talks of all time. Dr. Joy has received press through media outlets such as BBC, ABC Australia, NPR, and The New York Times. 

Dr. Joy has won the Institute of Jainology's Ahimsa Award, whose recipients include Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama, for work in global nonviolence.

Join us in conversation with this committed activist and compassionate, lucid thinker!

Janessa Gans Wilder is a former CIA officer turned peacebuilder and social entrepreneur. She discovered in the war zones of Iraq that eliminating the “enemy” did not lead to peace – nor did it solve the more immediate problem of the growing counterinsurgency and terrorism.

Gans Wilder was working on issues in sub-Saharan Africa when, in the middle of a military briefing during the 9/11 terrorist attack, she was struck by the certainty that our world would never again be the same. She joined a task force to support joint wartime efforts in Afghanistan. Then, after the Iraq war started in 2003, she volunteered for a 90-day tour, which extended to nearly two years, supporting democracy building and counterinsurgency. She got a taste of “the darker world of antiterrorism efforts” when she interrogated insurgents in Abu Ghraib prison in response to four American security guards who’d been ambushed, burned, and strung up on the Fallujah bridge.

“As the only female CIA official and one of very few civilian women at the Marine base just outside Fallujah, it was my job to provide additional intelligence to the military effort: Who exactly was fighting us, and why? Were they Saddam loyalists or Islamic jihadists? Were they supported from abroad? And whose side were the people on? … But as with too many other battles, Fallujah ended without moving us forward,” Janessa discovered. 

It was the beginning of a personal turning point for her. About a month after the battle in Fallujah, while at a Special Forces base in Ramadi, she went up on the roof at dusk to cool down after a run. The base was along the Euphrates River and “the first thing I noticed was the stillness” of the river. Then it struck her that Fallujah was just downstream – “Not far away the river flows under the bridge where the four guards had been hung and on into the battleground between Marines and Iraqis. Whoa! It struck me how diametrically opposed those two images were: the quiet of the river and the intensity of the war zone. … A question formed, ‘Which one will you choose?’ … I choose the river, I declared silently, almost instinctively, seeing that it was the more powerful force. No matter how many bombs went off, the water flowed on, undisturbed, undeterred, unaffected. I sensed at that moment that, even in the bleakest of human circumstances, there is hope, there is life. We just need to open our eyes and see it.” 

Janessa’s epiphany at the Euphrates led her first to shift to democracy building efforts in Iraq, and then eventually to create an organization and to dedicate her life to shedding light and inspiration on the “dark issues” of the Middle East. The Euphrates Institute would be a connecting force between East and West, just as the River is a boundary – or rather bridge – between East and West.

The Euphrates Institute, a non-profit grassroots peacebuilding organization, aims is to build bridges of understanding between the Middle East and the West through sponsoring educational trips, championing change agents in the Middle East, and leading a global network of 30 local chapters in 15 countries in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Its work helps transform people from seeing the “other” into seeing a “brother” – a need that Janessa has felt her entire life as people have encountered her special-needs brother as the other. 

The Euphrates Institute seeks to inform, inspire and transform: to help people think about the Middle East; to open our thoughts to what's possible and to those doing the work already; and to bring those ideas home so everyone can become a visionary and a peacemaker. It hosts summits like the Euphrates Summit: “Our World Beyond 9/11”, where the question asked is how to have the biggest impact on the world for good with the same commitment and dedication as terrorists have had on the world for evil. The Euphrates Institute also hosts students to travel to the Middle East through a Fellows program. Through the Euphrates Institute, Gan Wilder applies the Golden Rule to nations, civilizations, and religions as a deeply held Christian value that unites and improves all relationships and acts as a key building block.

Gans Wilder has also transformed. She had been cynical and bought into the idea that change can't happen. In seeing those working in the Middle East and the students who participate as fellows, she describes how their attitude of being hopeful and believing that change can happen has rekindled her hope. She suggests that people open their hearts enough to compassion and to take that first step toward the “other” out there, advising people to start small and in their communities. She takes comfort in the Diffusion of Innovation Theory proposed by Everett Rogers: it only takes a small percentage of the population to create a tipping point for massive social change. Even though it looks like nothing is happening, she explains that change is one person at a time, a journey, and a process.

Gans Wilder strikes that middle ground between being a member of her local community and a global citizen herself.  As an Ambassador with California Vision 2020 she applies her values to her community. Living in Shasta County, California, an area that has been devasted by drought and fire due to climate change, she proposes imagining a world in which California leads the way forward in generating innovative ways to deal with climate change and encouraging inner transformation on a personal, collective and systemic level. She helps her community “unlearn” certain behaviors as a coach with Educare Unlearning Institute. And in her work with the United Religions Initiative, she explains that what gives her #tangiblehope is the moral courage of the people around the world with whom she has had the privilege of working. Moral courage is the courage to act for moral reasons despite the risk of adverse consequences, to address the issues of violence, extremism, racism, and discrimination non-violently regardless of the costs to yourself.

Janessa has written dozens of articles and been interviewed by major news outlets, including CBS, CNN, Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, Democracy Now, and many more. Previously, she taught political science at her undergraduate alma mater, Principia College, and was a consultant to the State Department. She has a Master’s degree in International Policy Studies from Stanford University and a bachelor’s in International Relations from Principia College. Janessa lives in Redding, CA with her husband and three young children. She enjoys spending time in nature, running, and yoga.

Join us in conversation with this transformational change agent!

Jessica Roach is the Co-founder and Executive Director of Restoring Our Own Through Transformation (ROOTT), a nonprofit organization focused on providing community-based maternal-child health and birthing support in Columbus, Ohio.  As a Black women-led reproductive justice organization, ROOTT offers affordable doula services, healthcare provider trainings, and organizational consultation, while validating their clients' environmental stresses.

Roach came to understand later in life just how influential her family stories and arguably, DNA, played in her calling to this work. Her great-grandmother was known as a healer who assisted women with childbirth in her area of Irondale, Ohio at a time before Black women were allowed into hospitals. Growing up, Roach remembers there always being other women and babies being around, as well as hearing her father talk about how he was the "sickly" child and how Mama Hart was always making teas and salves to help him  Jessica learned about these practices for helping mothers and their children, as well as about the vital role healers like her great-grandmother played in the community's life.  

As a teenager, Roach gave birth to her first daughter, and was cautioned by medical professionals that she was at risk for a pre-term baby, high blood pressure, and gestational diabetes because she was African American. She had a healthy pregnancy, however, and credits her support team -- which included her great-grandmother, grandmother, father, and uncles -- for her positive experience.

Seven years later during her second pregnancy, Roach faced a different situation. She was told that she had an incompetent cervix, a condition that can lead to premature delivery or even miscarriage. She developed preeclampsia, a pregnancy disorder characterized by high blood pressure, and delivered her daughter at 34 weeks. The only explanation she was given was that being African American placed her at higher risk. "It just really didn’t make any sense to me," Roach said. "I was really upset, and I was angry, and I had some issues with postpartum depression." 

Roach went on to become a clinical nurse, serving women as they gave birth, terminated pregnancies, and adopted children.

When she was pregnant with her third daughter, Roach tried to avoid the complications of her second pregnancy. She focused more on self-care – engaging in prenatal yoga and eating well during her pregnancy – and had a home birth assisted by a midwife. Her daughter was born at 42 weeks with no major health concerns. After her youngest daughter's birth, Roach was inspired to leave nursing and instead to become a doula and home birth midwife. "Seeing the differences in each one of my children and the differences in my experiences in those pregnancies, and those births, and the follow-up care ... [I thought], 'There’s something not right about this,'" she said.

In July of 2017, Roach founded ROOTT together with co-founder Monique McCrystal, with the mission of addressing black maternal and infant health. Jessica had long before discovered that the statistics surrounding infant mortality rates for the African American community are staggering – the mortality rates are two to three times higher for black infants than for white infants, and black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women. Research suggests that the cause of the disparity is not biological, but instead a result of health, social, and economic determinants, at the root of which lies racism. In Columbus, Ohio, the neighborhoods with the most inequities are also those with the highest infant mortality rates. According to the Columbus Infant Mortality Task Force, "The lifetime stress of living as a minority in our society has an adverse effect on birth outcomes."

Roach believes she experienced this phenomenon firsthand with the birth of her second daughter, but it wasn't until later she considered the impact of racism-related stress. "My whole life had been this environment of really high levels of toxic racism," she said. "My interaction with law enforcement, my interaction with peers, ... noticeably being treated differently [and] feeling like I had to perform at 120 percent versus my counterparts that only had to perform at 80 [percent]. And that was just the work environment."

ROOTT's full-spectrum doulas assist clients at any and all stages of pregnancy, from preconception to postpartum, with a pay-what-you-can pricing model. They facilitate body positioning, meditation, yoga, connection to community resources, and more. The typical support timeline will include prenatal guidance, education, processing past births and how they contribute to the current pregnancy, and formulating and following through on a birth plan. Those who request postpartum services can obtain them for at least a year after birth. Additionally, ROOTT offers support with abortion and adoption.

Collectively, ROOTT's staff has provided services to over 250 clients throughout their careers. "We don’t have the high percentages of preterm and low-birthweight babies," said Roach. "We don’t have the cesarean section rate. We don’t have the issues with maternal mortality or morbidity. We have never lost a mother."

Roach is currently pursuing a master's degree in public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her former research includes structural racism and social determinants of health as well as the impact of intergenerational and historical trauma on African-American health. Her career spans more than 20 years, and includes the additional roles of public health advocate and independent scholar.

Seeking through ROOTT to revive the tradition of communal birthing practices that’s rooted deeply in black history, and that she experienced as a young girl on the heels of her great-grandmother, Roach puts forth a community-based model of care where meetings, focus groups, and workshops all take place within neighborhood spaces. Indeed, community self-investment is a key part of ROOTT’s work as it combats infant mortality. As part of its model of community economic stability and sustainability, ROOTT pays its doulas for doing the work, rather than relying on external “saviors” to come in and establish neighborhood needs and goals. “That’s revolving the money inside of the community,” Roach says.

Join us in conversation with this transformational healer and leader!

How do leaders become wise and compassionate stewards? And how does one go from vision to action?

These questions have guided Simon Hempel in his work as a Partner (and former Managing Partner) of Leaders’ Quest, a London-based global organization that trains leaders in business, government and civil society worldwide to become purposeful, conscious, and transformational leaders – those able to lead in increasingly changing, complex, and disrupted environments in order to contribute towards a more sustainable, inclusive world.  

And these questions have also guided Simon Hempel forward in his own changing personal journey. The narrative leading to Hempel’s place on a global team of forward-thinking collaborators appears to have fallen into place fluidly, meaningfully, powerfully. And yet, as Hempel himself explains, life also had a way of speaking to his intuition, carrying him from one adventure to the next, and, eventually, compelling him to come to terms with the way in which he was authoring his own story and creating his place in the world.

 

Hempel became a serial entrepreneur at a very young age, resisting the traditional route to college.  He created companies across UK, Europe, the US and Canada in the fields of financial services, leisure, consultancy and technology.  After great success, in 2002 he lost everything he had and ended up joining an Amazonian expedition.

And while this was a dark, difficult place to be, it brought upon him a vital shift of another order. “I think what it did,” says Hempel, “is it forced me to look at life through a different set of lenses. I wasn’t necessarily thinking while I was building these things; I was building because it felt like the right thing to do, but I wasn’t aware of my footprint and what I was doing and why I was doing it. That sense of purpose had never come through.” Seeking to radically shift his context and find a more connected, heart-centered way of being in the world, Simon decided to leave London and found his way to Spain, where he lived simply yet vibrantly. Time eventually brought him to South America, where he partnered with an explorer for nine years, leading expeditions through the Amazon, the Himalayas, Mongolia, India, and Africa.  

In 2006, he became the CEO of Right to Sight, an International NGO tackling needless blindness, and worked on developing sustainable eye care projects across Africa and India. Four years later, Hempel found himself at a Zen monastery in Tamil Nadu, India, where a gifted teacher helped him find his practice, which set the foundation for a daily commitment to go inward, one that he maintains to this day.

“There’s so much more than just us,” says Hempel; “and there’s so much noise in our heads, and so much noise all around us, that we just can’t feel it, and see it, and taste it.” Going inside became, for Hempel, a way to connect with a place of inner stillness and observation that also allows for a more porous, genuine, and compassionate relationship to the outside world and to others. “Look in your internal state,” says Hempel. “Where are you?”

 

It’s from this same space of inner attunement that Hempel believes the truly transformative, conscious, and purposeful leader can emerge—the leader who is able to align vision with action. And in a world that, as Hempel acknowledges, is getting more noisy, more complex, more demanding, and more uncertain as it faces global challenges such as climate change and shared resources, leadership will need to be both able and visionary.

Bringing these personal lessons to bear in his work, Simon was for many years Managing Partner of Leaders’ Quest, which pioneered a “unique approach to experiential learning for senior leaders.”  “Leaders' Quest's practice is grounded in the belief that a company, community or ecosystem can only truly transform if those leading it are willing to work on themselves.”  The organization’s approach involves taking people outside their usual environments to meet with leaders, change-makers and local communities. “We engage with innovators, entrepreneurs, scientists, artists and grassroots leaders – from all generations. And we spend time with people who have diverse perspectives on what’s important, and whose views may challenge our own. We blend this external focus with time for reflection, introspection and deep dialogue.”

Simon recently stepped aside as Managing Partner of Leaders’ Quest to launch a new form of organization exploring consciousness, energy & technology to create tipping points for change in the world.  He has explored growth and how to sustain profit through purpose, people and our planet. He works with individuals, companies and inside systems to help catalyze the transformation required to shape our future.  His current inquiry is how do we build better relationships?  He has a portfolio of activities, including coaching, facilitation and leading workshops and retreats.  He remains a Partner of Leaders’ Quest, and is also a Partner of the Global Leaders Academy and is a Trustee of the Ministry of Entrepreneurship. He is a non-executive Director at Positive Group and is an Ambassador for Embercombe and Beautiful Corporations.

Today, Hempel’s voice is one of many teaching us that the key to a more connected, sustainable, and heart-centered world is the individual’s brave, willing embrace of an inner journey. But this journey, says Hempel—and he clearly speaks from experience—requires time. If the quest is always now, the seeds of a more harmonious future are already inside each and every one of us, from the moment we decide to become its conscious seekers.

Join us in conversation with this inspiring leader. 

Everyone is an invited guest of the universe. Lobsang Phunstock tells the children of his community this frequently.

But the message he received at a young age was the opposite: he was an uninvited guest of the universe. His mother was very young when she gave birth to him in the state of Arunachal Pradesh in Northeastern India in 1971. Trying to avoid disgrace in their village, she delivered him in secret and left him in the leaves used to cover human waste. Thinking a goat had gotten into their fields, his aunt and grandparents followed the sound of crying and found him, almost dead. His birth was not a celebration, but a time of pain and embarrassment to his family.

He refers to himself as being a lost boy. He created problems by breaking people’s windows and destroying their prayer flags. Someone told him that he was never going to change to be better, which he can still remember and feel. If an adult tried to discipline him with anger or out of frustration, it made things worse. Before he was seven years old, he considered ending his life. Luckily, his grandparents loved him even when he felt he was not lovable. They saw something inside him, a potential that he could change. So, at age seven, they sent him to study at Sera Je monastery near Mysore, Karnataka in South India. Lobsang likens it to being sent to a mental hospital -- they were sending him there asking for help, to free him from all the disturbing emotions he was going through. He believes it is because of their kindness that he is alive.

The monastery had a very rigid schedule, strict discipline, and was very formal. It was difficult but it kept his mind engaged and he did not have time to think. Through formal and informal trainings, he began to see that he was part of a larger family in the universe, one in which he could contribute.  It took a while for him to get better, but over time, he started thinking positively, growing in confidence, and believing he could become a better human being. He was encouraged to do something meaningful in his life, something useful for himself and others.

And so he did. He became one of 10 Buddhist monks selected by His Holiness the Dalai Lama in the late 1990s to undertake a two-year training program in India and then travel to the West to teach Buddhism. In 2000, he was invited by one of the rinpoches from Sera Jay Monastery in India to translate for him during the United Nations Millennium Peace Conference in New York. While in New York, he began sharing teachings and sermons with the First Unitarian Church in Concord, Massachusetts. His talks on love and compassion were powerful. After his two-year training translating at the United Nations, he returned to his monastery in India and spoke with his teachers about returning to Concord to teach Tibetan Buddhism. He received permission, was hosted by a local community member, and returned to the United States.

From 2000-2008, Lobsang stayed in North America, giving weekly teachings, leading workshops and retreats, visiting local high schools and colleges, working with hospices and training doctors and medical professionals to incorporate compassion in their professional practices.  But when he would return to his village in India during vacations, he would see so many children on the road, in the village. They were young Lobsangs struggling in their lives. When he saw their faces, it was a clear message that he had to do something.  He did not want what happened to him to happen to any child. A few members of his Massachusetts community came together, talked about his vision, and in 2005 formed a U.S. non-profit, Jhamtse International, dedicated to educating and nourishing young hearts and minds in the Himalayas with love, compassion, wisdom, and tolerance. They opened Jhamtse Gatsal Children’s Community in 2006 with a group of 35 children.

Through Jhamtse Gatsal Children’s Community, a garden of love and compassion, children in one of the most disadvantaged regions in the world are now given the opportunity to dream. The world seemingly has given up hope on these children, but the place is not called an orphanage or a charity, even to help with fundraising. Lobsang does not want to sell or market the children’s adversity. He does not want his children to feel less than anybody else or to label them. Lobsang knew growing up that he was not a holy person or a saint, and is still challenged by the labels he received as a child.  And so he considers these children “jewels in the dirt,” the ones nobody wanted, like him, but who have equal potential to become amazing human beings. Without doctors, psychiatrists, medications or psychologists, Lobsang is demonstrating the healing and strength that come from love and compassion.  In 2015, HBO created a documentary, ˆTashi and the Monk”, about a five-year-old girl at the children’s community who puts teachers to the test with her behavior. 

“People should know something like this exists.” More than that,  people should know there is a place where everyone is an invited guest in the universe.

Join us in conversation with this extraordinary visionary and gardener of compassion and love!