1 00:00:00,160 --> 00:00:06,240 Welcome to Wonder Cabinet. I'm Anne Strainchamps. And I'm Steve Paulson. 2 00:00:06,740 --> 00:00:12,420 Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to grow up picturing the face of God as female, 3 00:00:13,320 --> 00:00:18,980 singing hymns and saying prayers not only to a holy father, but to a great mother, 4 00:00:19,540 --> 00:00:25,220 the source of all life. Many religious traditions have language for a divine feminine, 5 00:00:25,460 --> 00:00:29,760 sometimes in plain sight, sometimes in forgotten scriptures and teachings, 6 00:00:30,000 --> 00:00:35,520 In names like Gaia, Sophia, Shakti, Shekhinah, Prajnaparamita. 7 00:00:36,040 --> 00:00:40,480 Whatever she's called, there's often a sense that she embodies the deep wisdom of the earth. 8 00:00:40,820 --> 00:00:43,640 So, what would it be like to grow up with her? 9 00:00:44,280 --> 00:00:48,080 Because I heard it talked about and taught at a young age, 10 00:00:48,180 --> 00:00:53,740 for me, as a child, the visualization of that was always that she is feminine, right? 11 00:00:53,820 --> 00:00:56,440 She's the great mother, and that she's the earth. 12 00:00:57,180 --> 00:00:59,920 You know, that ultimately everything springs from the earth. 13 00:01:00,000 --> 00:01:13,960 Meet Dekila Chungyalpa, an environmental scientist and conservationist who grew up in one of the most beautiful and sacred landscapes in the world, in the high Himalayan mountains, an area famous for Buddhist monasteries. 14 00:01:14,580 --> 00:01:19,960 And Dekila herself is the daughter and granddaughter of a spiritual lineage of Tibetan Buddhist nuns. 15 00:01:19,960 --> 00:01:26,880 So I want to hear more about Dekila, but first, I think you should talk a bit about this concept of the divine feminine. 16 00:01:26,880 --> 00:01:37,180 I mean, we have visited churches and art museums all over Europe, and you always gravitate to images of women, Christian saints and Greek and Roman goddesses. 17 00:01:37,780 --> 00:01:41,320 There's something about sacred women that just seems to pull you in. 18 00:01:41,480 --> 00:01:42,440 Well, they're powerful. 19 00:01:42,900 --> 00:01:43,520 True, yes. 20 00:01:43,740 --> 00:01:45,360 Spiritually powerful, I mean. 21 00:01:45,720 --> 00:01:48,960 And, yeah, that's something I didn't see a lot of as a child. 22 00:01:49,360 --> 00:01:51,480 I grew up, as you know, culturally Protestant. 23 00:01:52,160 --> 00:01:55,300 I guess all the Bible stories I heard were always about men. 24 00:01:55,760 --> 00:02:00,420 God the Father, Jesus the Son, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. 25 00:02:00,540 --> 00:02:01,860 So you felt left out? 26 00:02:02,540 --> 00:02:03,600 Disconnected, I think. 27 00:02:03,880 --> 00:02:08,520 So when did you begin to think that there might be something in religious traditions that would speak to you? 28 00:02:09,000 --> 00:02:13,180 I think it might have been my first experience of all that art you were just talking about. 29 00:02:13,180 --> 00:02:18,760 I was 12 when we moved to Italy for two years, to Florence, birthplace of the Renaissance. 30 00:02:19,620 --> 00:02:24,140 And I remember being transfixed by Botticelli's birth of Venus. 31 00:02:24,140 --> 00:02:33,420 And then the iconography of the Virgin Mary, I mean, all those paintings covered in gold leaf of the Madonna holding a baby. 32 00:02:33,720 --> 00:02:36,080 They're in every church, every museum. 33 00:02:36,260 --> 00:02:37,300 They're so powerful. 34 00:02:38,040 --> 00:02:41,140 And she's got such gravity and presence. 35 00:02:42,000 --> 00:02:42,240 Yeah. 36 00:02:42,760 --> 00:02:44,980 And there's a reason they've been revered for centuries. 37 00:02:45,320 --> 00:02:48,960 But I know it's not just the images that have drawn you. 38 00:02:48,960 --> 00:02:53,880 I mean, I've seen you for years reading books about women and nature and spirituality. 39 00:02:54,140 --> 00:02:59,640 Those three things are linked for me, I guess partly because of ecofeminism, learning to 40 00:02:59,640 --> 00:03:03,700 see the historical connection between the domination of the earth and the oppression 41 00:03:03,700 --> 00:03:04,220 of women. 42 00:03:05,220 --> 00:03:11,360 Like a lot of women, I feel a sense of urgency and anxiety and grief around climate change, 43 00:03:11,380 --> 00:03:14,300 and it feels personal, I think partly because of my gender. 44 00:03:15,140 --> 00:03:21,220 On the spiritual side, the modern earth-based religions like neo-paganism, Wicca, have always 45 00:03:21,220 --> 00:03:22,480 really resonated for me. 46 00:03:23,480 --> 00:03:34,720 And then in a larger sense, you know, I think that we are all living through a massive cultural shift away from thinking of the earth as purely material and therefore a resource to thinking of it as sacred. 47 00:03:35,300 --> 00:03:38,300 Part of what we're doing on this podcast is documenting that, right? 48 00:03:38,460 --> 00:03:39,140 Yeah, absolutely. 49 00:03:39,480 --> 00:03:41,160 Which is why I wanted people to meet Dekila. 50 00:03:41,600 --> 00:03:42,460 So how did you meet her? 51 00:03:42,720 --> 00:03:50,260 Through two good friends, Brooke Hecht from the Center for Humans and Nature and Hilary Hart from the Caliopeia Foundation. 52 00:03:50,260 --> 00:03:59,100 And the three of us have been talking for years about wanting to host some conversations for women about land and nature, ecology and spirituality. 53 00:03:59,800 --> 00:04:03,980 And then Hilary held a workshop for women writers, and Dekila was there. 54 00:04:04,340 --> 00:04:05,440 Okay, let's listen. 55 00:04:06,320 --> 00:04:10,120 Actually, being in the circle of the women was amazing for me. 56 00:04:10,120 --> 00:04:23,460 Mm-hmm. I feel like, I don't know, I've been having for the last year, I guess, these occasions where I'll be just with women, and it just feels like, I mean, water in a desert. 57 00:04:23,860 --> 00:04:24,980 Yeah, I feel that. 58 00:04:25,360 --> 00:04:25,520 Yeah? 59 00:04:25,600 --> 00:04:36,920 I mean, I grew up with women. I was raised by women, primarily. I come from Sikkim in the Himalayas, where the culture used to be quite matrilineal in many places. 60 00:04:37,680 --> 00:04:39,660 We do a lot of this practice together. 61 00:04:40,180 --> 00:04:45,440 And, you know, my grandmother took her vows after she was widowed and became a nun. 62 00:04:45,600 --> 00:04:49,280 And my mother took her vows in her, I think, her late 30s. 63 00:04:49,580 --> 00:04:58,700 So I was sort of raised not just by women and among women, but I was raised to look to women for spiritual practice and healing. 64 00:04:58,700 --> 00:05:08,480 I wanted to ask you about that because that is so rare, actually, to have grown up in a spiritual lineage of women. 65 00:05:08,640 --> 00:05:12,600 I mean, there are not that many in world religions. 66 00:05:13,160 --> 00:05:15,360 It was a little unique when I think back. 67 00:05:16,220 --> 00:05:24,180 Because my mother and my grandmother were practitioners and I spent so much time with them, I would watch them meditate and mimic them. 68 00:05:24,180 --> 00:05:26,960 And, you know, the experiences would happen or not. 69 00:05:26,960 --> 00:05:29,420 but I had very little instruction in many ways. 70 00:05:29,660 --> 00:05:30,380 They didn't... 71 00:05:30,380 --> 00:05:31,340 My mother tried. 72 00:05:31,920 --> 00:05:34,660 She used to laugh because if she tried to instruct me 73 00:05:34,660 --> 00:05:36,220 the way she instructed her students, 74 00:05:36,560 --> 00:05:39,660 I was so resistant to be one of her students, right? 75 00:05:39,720 --> 00:05:42,080 Because I resented her students growing up. 76 00:05:42,180 --> 00:05:43,480 They got so much of her time. 77 00:05:43,880 --> 00:05:45,840 So whenever she tried to instruct me, 78 00:05:46,400 --> 00:05:47,540 I would fall asleep. 79 00:05:47,780 --> 00:05:51,480 I would literally just sort of close my eyes and fall asleep. 80 00:05:51,780 --> 00:05:55,400 So she, I think, had to devise sneaky ways of teaching me 81 00:05:55,400 --> 00:05:57,780 to make sure I was still doing my practices. 82 00:05:58,320 --> 00:06:02,180 You also grew up in this small community in the Himalayas, 83 00:06:02,520 --> 00:06:08,520 surrounded by spectacular scenery and a landscape that was sacred. 84 00:06:09,220 --> 00:06:10,280 Tell me more about that. 85 00:06:11,140 --> 00:06:14,300 Well, where I come from, Sikkim, it's called Beyul Demojong. 86 00:06:14,940 --> 00:06:18,640 Beyul actually refers to the secret hidden valleys. 87 00:06:18,800 --> 00:06:21,400 So all across the Himalayas, there are all these beautiful beyuls. 88 00:06:21,560 --> 00:06:24,960 And they are all considered to be refuges for the dharma. 89 00:06:25,400 --> 00:06:33,280 And the story or the origin story of beyuls is that they are safe for people during difficult times. 90 00:06:33,560 --> 00:06:38,080 So during collapse, these are the places that will remain as refuges. 91 00:06:38,080 --> 00:06:41,280 Like the source of the Shangri-La myth, it sounds like. 92 00:06:41,500 --> 00:06:43,900 It very much is the source of the Shangri-La myth. 93 00:06:44,460 --> 00:06:51,440 But I grew up surrounded by these mountains and lots of sacred sites and sacred areas that have a lot of power. 94 00:06:52,100 --> 00:07:00,680 So there was this merging of sacred and the sacred feminine and the sacred feminine was also wild. 95 00:07:01,140 --> 00:07:03,140 This is so what I want to know about. 96 00:07:03,900 --> 00:07:10,400 So I think for me that all of that, it was the circle was full when I was growing up, right, in that sense. 97 00:07:10,400 --> 00:07:15,860 And we have all of these rituals where we actually communicate with the mountains. 98 00:07:15,980 --> 00:07:17,760 The mountains are alive for us, you know. 99 00:07:18,300 --> 00:07:24,600 In West Sikkim, you don't even name any of the animals without adding an honorific, you know. 100 00:07:24,680 --> 00:07:30,800 So if you see a bear and a bear is dom in Bhutia and Tibetan language, you cannot say dom. 101 00:07:30,920 --> 00:07:32,980 You have to say Aku-dom, which is uncle bear. 102 00:07:32,980 --> 00:07:40,180 It sort of made me laugh so much because I had these memories getting scolded for not doing it, right? 103 00:07:41,180 --> 00:07:50,340 And I'm so grateful that some of these relationships are still intact where nature has an innate right to existence. 104 00:07:50,460 --> 00:07:53,280 Well, it also sounds like nature actually has a kind of personhood. 105 00:07:53,460 --> 00:07:54,220 Yeah, absolutely. 106 00:07:54,420 --> 00:08:05,360 And if you also, the indigenous communities in Sikkim, the Lepcha in particular, you know, they have these stories of the rivers where the rivers have identity, personality, likes and dislikes. 107 00:08:06,120 --> 00:08:09,700 You know, some are fast-moving and kind of a little irritable, 108 00:08:09,880 --> 00:08:12,320 and some are slow to anger. 109 00:08:12,680 --> 00:08:15,000 You know, there are all these storylines around it. 110 00:08:15,060 --> 00:08:18,260 Oh, my God, I'm remembering talking with a woman who grew up in, 111 00:08:19,140 --> 00:08:22,580 now I can't remember if it's Ecuador or Peru, surrounded by volcanoes. 112 00:08:22,820 --> 00:08:23,660 And they're the same thing. 113 00:08:23,740 --> 00:08:26,180 The volcanoes have different personalities. 114 00:08:26,740 --> 00:08:28,340 Some are explosive and passionate. 115 00:08:28,640 --> 00:08:31,140 Some are slow-moving, but then look out. 116 00:08:31,140 --> 00:08:34,100 Yeah, it always makes me laugh because, of course, 117 00:08:34,100 --> 00:08:40,200 our mountain is Mount Kanchenjunga. And he's alive to us, right? He's our 118 00:08:40,200 --> 00:08:48,900 protector deity for Sikkim, for our Beyul Demojong. And he also has a personality. He's quite old. 119 00:08:49,080 --> 00:08:53,800 I mean, there have been all these tests and it turns out he's made up of rocks that are over a 120 00:08:53,800 --> 00:08:58,860 billion years old. So it's sort of funny because Mount Everest, of course, is the towering peak. 121 00:08:58,860 --> 00:09:01,320 But Kanchenjunga, actually, is so much older. 122 00:09:01,380 --> 00:09:03,980 Everest, he's like a younger brother, you know? 123 00:09:04,120 --> 00:09:05,400 He's just very young. 124 00:09:05,980 --> 00:09:09,240 And your mountain has never been climbed, right? 125 00:09:09,460 --> 00:09:11,440 So the Sikkim side has not been climbed. 126 00:09:11,760 --> 00:09:16,160 So the Lepcha have fought for decades to protect the mountains. 127 00:09:16,640 --> 00:09:20,840 You know, there is really something to be said about indigenous peoples 128 00:09:20,840 --> 00:09:24,240 and how they put their bodies on the line, right, to protect Earth 129 00:09:24,240 --> 00:09:26,280 because she is sacred to them. 130 00:09:26,280 --> 00:09:34,360 And also, I think, because there is this deep holistic understanding of how our well-being is dependent on her well-being, you know. 131 00:09:34,620 --> 00:09:43,600 And I think most of us who leave wild areas or leave livelihoods where we are closely connected to the earth, we forget that. 132 00:09:43,700 --> 00:09:49,640 We get used to taking money out of ATMs and buying our spinach in the store wrapped with a lot of plastic. 133 00:09:49,760 --> 00:09:51,180 We forget where it comes from. 134 00:09:51,180 --> 00:10:06,400 So, because it was stamped so early in me that the sacred feminine and also that spiritual practice could be wild and could be in wilderness, I don't think it surprised anybody that I became an environmentalist. 135 00:10:06,720 --> 00:10:08,620 It was almost like, oh, there she goes. 136 00:10:08,680 --> 00:10:09,900 We all knew this was coming. 137 00:10:10,260 --> 00:10:17,780 So, say more about that, the sacred wild or the wilderness and the sacred feminine, like that coming together. 138 00:10:18,560 --> 00:10:30,560 So I think in Vajrayana Buddhism in particular, there are practices where you really sort of become one with what is often described as mother wisdom or mother clear light. 139 00:10:30,680 --> 00:10:34,000 In Sanskrit, it's called Prajnaparamita, which is the great mother. 140 00:10:34,500 --> 00:10:41,280 And that experience of that practice is really this pure union that you have with wisdom and emptiness, right? 141 00:10:41,280 --> 00:10:49,940 This is one of the aspirations all of us have as practitioners, that we will eventually taste this great bliss, you know? 142 00:10:50,480 --> 00:10:57,100 And for me, as a child, the visualization of that was always that she is feminine, right? 143 00:10:57,160 --> 00:10:59,800 She's the great mother, and that she's the earth. 144 00:11:00,320 --> 00:11:04,380 That association was so obvious to me. 145 00:11:04,740 --> 00:11:07,760 There was this female quality to it. 146 00:11:07,760 --> 00:11:11,660 And I don't mean that necessarily in the biological sense. 147 00:11:11,780 --> 00:11:14,540 I think anyone can access the sacred feminine. 148 00:11:14,840 --> 00:11:20,000 It doesn't matter if you're in a male body or a female body or a trans body or any of these things. 149 00:11:20,260 --> 00:11:21,960 I think we can all access it. 150 00:11:22,300 --> 00:11:25,460 What does it mean to call it the sacred feminine then? 151 00:11:26,160 --> 00:11:29,120 I think it is about the softness. 152 00:11:29,560 --> 00:11:36,200 And I think there is something there about all the things we cover up as we grow older. 153 00:11:36,200 --> 00:11:53,980 I think it is all the softness and the yielding that we are so comfortable to do when we are younger that we are unable to do because we are trained to really not just have an identity and make it solid, but to then build our ego castle around that, right? 154 00:11:54,560 --> 00:11:59,300 And so I think that the feminine principle really comes from letting go of all of that. 155 00:11:59,680 --> 00:12:08,700 And when you break it down, one of the things I love in Tibetan Buddhism is the assumption would be that the male principle is wise and the female principle is compassionate. 156 00:12:08,880 --> 00:12:10,280 But it's actually the other way around. 157 00:12:11,140 --> 00:12:15,140 The female principle is pure wisdom and the male principle is compassion. 158 00:12:15,460 --> 00:12:19,540 This is one of my favorite things about Tibetan Buddhism because it's so subversive. 159 00:12:20,320 --> 00:12:27,340 It kind of forces you to really dig in and look at your own biases, your own assumptions, all of those things. 160 00:12:28,040 --> 00:12:37,600 But I think ultimately, even when I talk about the sacred feminine, I find myself really having to pause and say, listen, though, ultimately, our goal is non-dualistic. 161 00:12:38,060 --> 00:12:44,480 And the union is beyond gender, is beyond our ideas and our conceptions of what is male and female. 162 00:12:45,380 --> 00:12:51,740 And the times that we're in, you know, we are truly in a time of environmental and climate collapse. 163 00:12:52,200 --> 00:12:58,600 So for me, one of the biggest questions I have is how do we learn from these traditions? 164 00:12:58,780 --> 00:13:03,600 How do we learn from traditions that have really held on to the earth's wisdom? 165 00:13:04,100 --> 00:13:05,640 And how do we bring it back? 166 00:13:05,640 --> 00:13:06,000 Right. 167 00:13:06,800 --> 00:13:13,020 Well, so for me, having grown up culturally Christian in the sense that we celebrated Christmas and Easter, 168 00:13:13,020 --> 00:13:19,280 but they were about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Nevertheless, I do feel like I absorbed 169 00:13:19,280 --> 00:13:29,580 traditional Western Christian attitudes that equate women and earth and place them under 170 00:13:29,580 --> 00:13:40,940 masculine God, which is why I think to imagine the divine as feminine, that alone is radical. 171 00:13:40,940 --> 00:13:44,280 And so I think, how beautiful. 172 00:13:44,760 --> 00:13:46,040 I know exactly what you mean. 173 00:13:46,760 --> 00:13:51,300 I mean, well, women historically have always been told that we are closer to nature, right? 174 00:13:51,420 --> 00:13:57,860 There is me, I identify as an eco-feminist, studied eco-feminist theory all through school. 175 00:13:58,560 --> 00:14:08,140 And so, yes, we, I do think, have been harmed throughout the centuries in probably every, almost every social setting we can think of 176 00:14:08,140 --> 00:14:11,780 because we are identified as being closer to nature. 177 00:14:11,920 --> 00:14:13,640 And that's true for people of color, right? 178 00:14:13,720 --> 00:14:14,780 Black and brown bodies. 179 00:14:16,040 --> 00:14:19,840 And that there is this deep-seated fear 180 00:14:19,840 --> 00:14:22,280 that nature is something that cannot be controlled. 181 00:14:22,400 --> 00:14:25,040 And women also exhibit those tendencies, don't we? 182 00:14:25,100 --> 00:14:26,280 That we cannot be controlled. 183 00:14:26,840 --> 00:14:28,120 We flow with the moon. 184 00:14:28,500 --> 00:14:29,740 We give birth. 185 00:14:30,000 --> 00:14:31,320 We have menopause. 186 00:14:31,320 --> 00:14:33,540 There are all these things that our bodies do 187 00:14:33,540 --> 00:14:36,040 that are beyond external control. 188 00:14:36,040 --> 00:14:50,500 And there are some behaviors, I think, that we pick up and we learn that are innately feminine and that put value on things that I think are not measurable by money or by numbers. 189 00:14:50,660 --> 00:14:56,740 So, friendship and companionship and caring and, I mean, psychological care, right? 190 00:14:56,880 --> 00:14:57,060 Right. 191 00:14:57,240 --> 00:15:01,620 You think about how women hold families together, hold communities together. 192 00:15:01,760 --> 00:15:03,120 Families, children, elders. 193 00:15:03,120 --> 00:15:03,840 Children, elders. 194 00:15:04,340 --> 00:15:06,260 Traditionally, it was women took care of the sick. 195 00:15:06,520 --> 00:15:07,500 Yes, that's right. 196 00:15:07,500 --> 00:15:14,260 And one of the things I noted working with different religions was that often religious institutions are propped up by women. 197 00:15:14,620 --> 00:15:21,180 Most religious institutions are propped up by women, whether it's donations, whether it's physical labor, whether it's organizing. 198 00:15:21,760 --> 00:15:26,700 All of these are being done by women, but it is men who get to sit in the thrones, right? 199 00:15:26,700 --> 00:15:40,300 And I think maybe one of the things that I'm most grateful for about my childhood was that I was never made to feel that as a girl, I would be lesser as a practitioner. 200 00:15:40,860 --> 00:15:51,420 And so it meant that I really felt the sense of freedom and spiritual freedom in the way I would practice and how I would embody that in my life, right? 201 00:15:51,980 --> 00:15:52,300 Yeah. 202 00:15:52,300 --> 00:16:12,760 Yeah. It's interesting thinking about not just our hunger to get back into relationship with the natural world, but I'm also thinking about the value of ceremony, of having ways to really express your relationship with the natural. 203 00:16:12,760 --> 00:16:19,540 As opposed to, you know, you can like stand and say, oh, what a beautiful mountain, or oh, look at those rocks, or wow, what a gorgeous lake. 204 00:16:20,020 --> 00:16:24,520 It's not the same as a ceremony, a ritual. 205 00:16:25,300 --> 00:16:27,940 Yeah, and you experienced some of those growing up, too. 206 00:16:28,060 --> 00:16:34,120 I remember you reading, there was a story about ritual bathing in a river, in a cave. 207 00:16:34,240 --> 00:16:35,600 Oh, yeah, yeah. 208 00:16:36,120 --> 00:16:40,760 When I was a little kid, my grandmother and her nun-companions went on a ritual, 209 00:16:41,220 --> 00:16:46,440 and they took me with her, and we went and visited all the secret hot springs, 210 00:16:46,640 --> 00:16:48,760 the mineral springs, all across the landscape. 211 00:16:49,540 --> 00:16:52,260 and would make our prayers in each one of them. 212 00:16:52,260 --> 00:16:56,120 And one of the springs, you actually have to slither down 213 00:16:56,120 --> 00:17:00,340 to get to this cave where the mineral springs is. 214 00:17:00,400 --> 00:17:02,060 It's almost completely underground. 215 00:17:02,620 --> 00:17:05,440 And how terrified I was, slithering underground. 216 00:17:05,660 --> 00:17:08,920 And then also, I was so scared because the water was black, 217 00:17:09,400 --> 00:17:12,660 and you couldn't see very much because we had to use candles and torches. 218 00:17:13,300 --> 00:17:15,780 I remember being really terrified to put my feet in 219 00:17:15,780 --> 00:17:17,780 until my grandmother yanked me in, you know. 220 00:17:17,780 --> 00:17:22,120 And they were all there praying and singing out loud. 221 00:17:22,340 --> 00:17:24,560 It was just this incredible experience. 222 00:17:24,740 --> 00:17:25,400 How many women? 223 00:17:25,580 --> 00:17:26,260 It just really stayed with me. 224 00:17:27,040 --> 00:17:29,920 I mean, easily over 50, maybe 100. 225 00:17:30,260 --> 00:17:30,800 I don't know. 226 00:17:30,940 --> 00:17:38,100 Everybody crammed in, people coming alone or, you know, fully clothed or somewhere, I think, almost completely naked. 227 00:17:38,600 --> 00:17:47,520 And it was interesting because I don't recall it just being, depending on what those women, I could see there were other kinds of women too, other practices that were being done. 228 00:17:47,780 --> 00:17:49,240 But it was very unified. 229 00:17:49,500 --> 00:17:52,000 It felt like we were all singing the same chorus, you know? 230 00:17:52,800 --> 00:17:53,540 You were singing? 231 00:17:53,760 --> 00:17:55,280 We were all singing, yeah. 232 00:17:55,280 --> 00:18:03,120 And that was one of my earliest memories of being in practice with my grandmother, right? 233 00:18:03,160 --> 00:18:07,700 As opposed to being dragged along and kind of hold the kid that holds the umbrella of the matriarch, you know? 234 00:18:09,240 --> 00:18:14,360 And so when I came to the West, I came to the West when I was 15. 235 00:18:14,360 --> 00:18:17,540 and my youngest aunt brought me here to study 236 00:18:17,540 --> 00:18:19,080 and I arrived in New York City. 237 00:18:19,200 --> 00:18:20,420 It was extremely jarring. 238 00:18:21,820 --> 00:18:24,940 But I think I was just seeking that. 239 00:18:25,040 --> 00:18:28,560 I was seeking that same sense of communal practice, 240 00:18:28,740 --> 00:18:29,920 communal spiritual practice 241 00:18:29,920 --> 00:18:32,500 and land-based practices in particular. 242 00:18:32,840 --> 00:18:35,840 And so I keep coming back to the importance 243 00:18:35,840 --> 00:18:38,320 of creating rituals for ourselves. 244 00:18:38,800 --> 00:18:41,620 All of us need rituals that tie us back to land. 245 00:18:41,620 --> 00:18:48,020 All of us need rituals to remind us that we are born off the earth, right? 246 00:18:48,460 --> 00:18:50,580 And that we are inseparable from her. 247 00:18:51,260 --> 00:19:04,840 You know, when I have to lead meditations or when I'm giving talks, I often do this exercise where I invite people to just take a moment to see if they can identify where the oxygen ends in themselves and where their selves begin. 248 00:19:05,320 --> 00:19:10,180 Is there a point in your body that you can identify and say, aha! 249 00:19:10,180 --> 00:19:17,640 this is who I am and this is where oxygen is. Is the oxygen alien? Is that even possible? 250 00:19:18,600 --> 00:19:26,220 There is no life without nature. We are indivisible. And so really the ritual has to 251 00:19:26,220 --> 00:19:32,360 be something that wakes us up and reminds us that. And the ritual has to create joy. It has 252 00:19:32,360 --> 00:19:37,600 to be an experience of joy for us, right? We're not alone. It's the thing that terrorizes us the 253 00:19:37,600 --> 00:19:45,980 most. We're so terrified of being alone. And so having a ritual that brings us to recollect that 254 00:19:45,980 --> 00:19:54,240 we are in union all the time, every single second, is a joyful ritual. Okay, hold that thought. 255 00:19:54,880 --> 00:19:58,500 I'm Anne Strainchamps, and we're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back. 256 00:19:58,720 --> 00:19:59,880 Hey, it's Steve. 257 00:20:00,200 --> 00:20:03,260 I want to invite you to visit our Wonder Cabinet website, 258 00:20:03,860 --> 00:20:07,160 where you will find more information about the show and Anne and me. 259 00:20:07,560 --> 00:20:09,960 And I really hope you'll subscribe to our newsletter. 260 00:20:10,460 --> 00:20:13,000 We'll tell you the story behind the name of this podcast 261 00:20:13,000 --> 00:20:17,060 and some of the amazing guests we'll be talking with in future episodes. 262 00:20:17,660 --> 00:20:20,920 You can find us at wondercabinetproductions.com. 263 00:20:21,240 --> 00:20:23,640 And please, tell your friends about Wonder Cabinet. 264 00:20:23,820 --> 00:20:28,200 This is a brand new podcast, and we'd love your help in getting the word out. 265 00:20:28,500 --> 00:20:58,480 Thank you. 266 00:20:58,480 --> 00:21:06,400 I'm talking with Dekila Chungyalpa, and I want to pick up her story with her experience 267 00:21:06,400 --> 00:21:11,260 of working in conservation science, which ultimately led her to found the LOKA Initiative, 268 00:21:11,720 --> 00:21:16,980 a program that brings faith leaders from a huge range of religious traditions together 269 00:21:16,980 --> 00:21:19,640 with scientists who are working on climate change. 270 00:21:20,140 --> 00:21:27,580 So I want to ask also about your path to this work with faith communities, because you initially 271 00:21:27,580 --> 00:21:34,440 came to the U.S. to study science and you wound up a field conservationist and running programs 272 00:21:34,440 --> 00:21:41,560 and at a certain point you just felt like what this wasn't enough? I've sometimes described the 273 00:21:41,560 --> 00:21:48,140 experience I had as a kind of bifurcation of identity. I wanted to be an environmentalist 274 00:21:48,140 --> 00:21:54,600 in a professional way and work on environmental protection. As my career I started experiencing 275 00:21:54,600 --> 00:22:01,400 this strange bifurcation where I was a scientist by day and a practicing Buddhist by night. 276 00:22:01,940 --> 00:22:06,920 In science, in general, any profession that is science-related, talking about your faith 277 00:22:06,920 --> 00:22:08,760 is absolutely unacceptable. 278 00:22:09,140 --> 00:22:11,060 We've created such a separation. 279 00:22:11,780 --> 00:22:16,160 And this, it's fascinating because this is, of course, part of, you know, Euro-derived 280 00:22:16,160 --> 00:22:21,280 scientific knowledge, right, that we really can think our way out of everything. 281 00:22:21,280 --> 00:22:27,940 You know, what I was taught in school was very much that your emotions are what are going to lead you astray. 282 00:22:28,340 --> 00:22:31,800 And I sometimes tell the story because I can tell you what the training was like. 283 00:22:32,140 --> 00:22:38,400 One of my first field trips, I was with a chief scientist, very famous conservationist in the field. 284 00:22:38,400 --> 00:22:42,420 And we were in the Terai, which is the long sort of the grasslands. 285 00:22:42,580 --> 00:22:45,580 This is tiger elephant habitat between Nepal and Bhutan. 286 00:22:45,720 --> 00:22:46,820 It's absolutely gorgeous. 287 00:22:46,820 --> 00:22:52,240 and we were in a jeep and I was in behind taking notes as he's talking and sort of showing me and 288 00:22:52,240 --> 00:22:58,680 teaching me you know and then I saw a baby rhino for the first time in my life and I just squealed 289 00:22:58,680 --> 00:23:03,740 it just sort of came out I had no idea what I said anymore but actually was like oh my god that's so 290 00:23:03,740 --> 00:23:09,800 cute you know something came out and he whipped around and looked at me and he said we don't use 291 00:23:09,800 --> 00:23:16,040 those words we say charismatic megafauna it was hilarious and it was sobering and I knew exactly 292 00:23:16,040 --> 00:23:21,700 what he meant. And I started using those words, right? But that is the training, because what we 293 00:23:21,700 --> 00:23:26,720 are trying in the science world is to convince everybody that we are actually not emotional, 294 00:23:26,880 --> 00:23:32,180 spiritual beings, right? We are beyond that. You know, we are bias-free. That's really what we want 295 00:23:32,180 --> 00:23:37,240 to convince everybody. And of course, that's not true. And so I think in my case, there was always 296 00:23:37,240 --> 00:23:42,780 going to be a breaking point. But the breaking point came when I actually had sort of climbed 297 00:23:42,780 --> 00:23:48,260 the ladder towards what I thought was success. And I had very recently been made the director 298 00:23:48,260 --> 00:23:54,540 for a field program for WWFUS. I was the only woman of color who headed any of those programs, 299 00:23:54,740 --> 00:24:00,180 and I was definitely the youngest by far, and the only brown woman from the global south who 300 00:24:00,180 --> 00:24:07,940 headed that program. And so I'd arrived. What everybody had told me all along was success, 301 00:24:08,340 --> 00:24:09,780 And then I started having nightmares. 302 00:24:10,480 --> 00:24:14,360 The region that I was working on at that time was the greater Mekong region. 303 00:24:14,500 --> 00:24:19,000 Absolutely stunning, second most biodiverse river in the world, the mighty Mekong. 304 00:24:19,500 --> 00:24:21,440 And I was based there, I was based in Laos. 305 00:24:21,440 --> 00:24:25,100 But I kept having this recurring dream that I'm walking in a forest. 306 00:24:25,380 --> 00:24:27,240 And initially, everything is wonderful. 307 00:24:27,560 --> 00:24:28,320 It's beautiful. 308 00:24:29,060 --> 00:24:32,200 And then all of a sudden, I realized that it's very quiet. 309 00:24:32,460 --> 00:24:33,980 And then I cannot hear birds. 310 00:24:34,580 --> 00:24:35,820 All I can hear are my feet. 311 00:24:35,820 --> 00:24:40,640 And then I realized I cannot see anything or hear anything where life exists. 312 00:24:41,160 --> 00:24:45,600 So everything's dead, and I'm in this dead forest, and I'm now frantic trying to get out. 313 00:24:45,900 --> 00:24:47,820 So no one needs to interpret that dream. 314 00:24:47,980 --> 00:24:52,720 I would wake up kind of, you know, panicking and really struggling. 315 00:24:53,420 --> 00:25:01,240 Those dreams were petrifying because here is this thing that I hold most sacred, which is nature. 316 00:25:01,480 --> 00:25:03,460 It is the basis of my being. 317 00:25:03,460 --> 00:25:05,620 My entire practice is inseparable. 318 00:25:05,820 --> 00:25:08,340 from this experience of being one with nature. 319 00:25:08,900 --> 00:25:13,100 And in my dream, what I was processing is that nature is extremely wounded. 320 00:25:14,120 --> 00:25:17,500 Your dream was also telling you that part of you is dead. 321 00:25:17,660 --> 00:25:18,680 Yes, absolutely. 322 00:25:18,800 --> 00:25:20,440 That you, part of you had died. 323 00:25:20,440 --> 00:25:21,500 Part of me had died. 324 00:25:21,680 --> 00:25:23,700 And there was no confusion around this message. 325 00:25:24,320 --> 00:25:28,300 I held it for some time, and then I remember I expressed it to one of my good friends, 326 00:25:28,640 --> 00:25:31,020 and he said, oh, I have panic attacks. 327 00:25:31,540 --> 00:25:34,400 He was working on regional climate projections 328 00:25:34,400 --> 00:25:36,600 of what was coming in 10-year cycles. 329 00:25:37,080 --> 00:25:39,680 And he said that this is, I'm having panic attacks about this. 330 00:25:39,760 --> 00:25:41,400 I don't know how to get the governments to care. 331 00:25:41,600 --> 00:25:43,940 And pretty soon it just became this conversation 332 00:25:43,940 --> 00:25:45,860 among all my friends, all my colleagues. 333 00:25:46,360 --> 00:25:48,660 And I remember the first time I brought it up in D.C., 334 00:25:48,660 --> 00:25:49,560 which is the headquarters, 335 00:25:50,320 --> 00:25:52,580 they just pretty much laughed me out of the room 336 00:25:52,580 --> 00:25:56,540 because to say that conservationists are experiencing PTSD 337 00:25:56,540 --> 00:25:58,960 seemed so ridiculous at that time. 338 00:25:59,320 --> 00:26:01,700 They were like, oh, pull yourself together, girl. 339 00:26:02,000 --> 00:26:04,380 Not only that, it was like, oh, your generation is so weak. 340 00:26:04,400 --> 00:26:08,840 In my time, right? So it's very sort of like, you guys are too emotional, you know. 341 00:26:09,100 --> 00:26:10,700 Yeah, millennial snowflake, get over it. 342 00:26:10,700 --> 00:26:19,160 That's right. So it was sort of, there was this real inability for, I think, us to understand what was happening and for others to care. 343 00:26:19,860 --> 00:26:30,040 And so in many ways, it was very organic that I began working with faith leaders because it just happened to be this beautiful, wonderful journey. 344 00:26:30,040 --> 00:26:45,060 It was also kind of, in some ways, a very practical move in the sense that the thing I read, you said something about, you know, no matter what project you were working on, you just felt like, you know, this is not going to scale fast enough to make a difference. 345 00:26:45,540 --> 00:26:50,800 And then, what, you watched a Buddhist monk give a talk. 346 00:26:50,800 --> 00:26:51,340 His Holiness, give a talk. 347 00:26:51,340 --> 00:26:52,620 His Holiness, give a talk. 348 00:26:52,620 --> 00:27:01,960 So to explain why I lost faith, I feel like I have to explain 2009, what it was like for environmentalists, probably all around the world, but in the U.S. 349 00:27:02,500 --> 00:27:04,300 So Obama had just come in. 350 00:27:04,920 --> 00:27:07,640 There was a lot of hope and enthusiasm and excitement. 351 00:27:08,040 --> 00:27:13,600 I had colleagues and very close friends working on what was going to be the greatest climate, first climate bill, right? 352 00:27:14,220 --> 00:27:16,080 And that crashed and burned in the Senate. 353 00:27:16,340 --> 00:27:19,620 It went through the House of Representatives, but it completely didn't make it. 354 00:27:19,620 --> 00:27:26,200 It was devastating for everybody because, you know, we believed that with Obama would come this real transition. 355 00:27:27,040 --> 00:27:33,060 And then I think it was like five or six months later, I was in Copenhagen for the Convention of the Parties. 356 00:27:33,300 --> 00:27:35,060 So this is around climate change. 357 00:27:35,180 --> 00:27:43,540 The UN actually brings all the government representatives together and we're supposed to come up with a climate accord that actually protects the planet, right? 358 00:27:44,360 --> 00:27:47,120 And COP15 in particular was a disaster. 359 00:27:47,560 --> 00:27:52,820 And I have to be honest and just say the U.S. government was part of the reason why it collapsed. 360 00:27:52,980 --> 00:27:55,400 The U.S. government really scuttled that deal. 361 00:27:55,980 --> 00:27:59,240 I and actually almost all my friends kind of just lost heart. 362 00:27:59,240 --> 00:28:05,620 I have a friend, very senior person on climate change, who actually would not get out of bed for months. 363 00:28:06,120 --> 00:28:08,600 We had to hold an intervention to get him out of bed. 364 00:28:09,100 --> 00:28:12,560 I mean, it was just devastating for us because we are the people, 365 00:28:13,460 --> 00:28:18,400 Professional environmentalists are the people who spend every moment of their day in communication with the earth. 366 00:28:18,840 --> 00:28:22,080 And what the earth was telling us is that we're running out of time. 367 00:28:22,240 --> 00:28:23,880 We have to turn things around now. 368 00:28:24,180 --> 00:28:30,180 So one of the experiences that really brought it home to me was that I was in Bodh Gaya, 369 00:28:30,360 --> 00:28:34,280 which is kind of the biggest pilgrimage site for Buddhists around the world. 370 00:28:34,400 --> 00:28:35,620 It's where Buddha was enlightened. 371 00:28:36,260 --> 00:28:42,360 And we have these massive periods where pilgrims come from all over the world. 372 00:28:42,560 --> 00:28:46,120 And His Holiness, the Karmapa, was holding the Kagyu Mönlam at that time. 373 00:28:46,980 --> 00:28:49,480 So I'm sitting there in the audience, kind of checked out. 374 00:28:49,600 --> 00:28:51,840 I'm here mostly to keep my family happy, right? 375 00:28:52,180 --> 00:28:56,440 And His Holiness suddenly out of nowhere starts talking about vegetarianism. 376 00:28:56,580 --> 00:29:00,360 And as Tibetans and Himalayan people, this is very atypical. 377 00:29:01,000 --> 00:29:02,320 We are meat eaters, right? 378 00:29:02,420 --> 00:29:08,140 We come from the highlands where green doesn't grow a lot of the places because we're high up and it's cold. 379 00:29:08,320 --> 00:29:11,280 So we kind of lean on meat and dairy quite a lot. 380 00:29:11,280 --> 00:29:13,880 and he started talking about vegetarianism 381 00:29:13,880 --> 00:29:15,140 and at one point he just said 382 00:29:15,140 --> 00:29:16,520 and because of climate change 383 00:29:16,520 --> 00:29:17,560 it's really necessary 384 00:29:17,560 --> 00:29:22,080 and I was just completely just transfixed 385 00:29:22,080 --> 00:29:22,480 you know 386 00:29:22,480 --> 00:29:25,060 there are tens of thousands of people in the audience 387 00:29:25,060 --> 00:29:26,100 and so he said 388 00:29:26,100 --> 00:29:27,240 I've become vegetarian 389 00:29:27,240 --> 00:29:28,320 it's not that hard 390 00:29:28,320 --> 00:29:30,120 would any of you 391 00:29:30,120 --> 00:29:33,940 based on the Buddhist principles of compassion 392 00:29:33,940 --> 00:29:36,920 would any of you consider giving up meat 393 00:29:36,920 --> 00:29:38,880 and the sea of hands went up 394 00:29:38,880 --> 00:29:39,960 including mine 395 00:29:39,960 --> 00:29:54,580 It sort of was this amazing moment of seeing just mass behavior change because that one person who can influence behavior change for all these people happened to make an ask. 396 00:29:54,580 --> 00:30:12,580 And to be clear, I think what you're saying also is it's not necessarily that it's an authority figure, even if he's an authority within a faith, it's what the faith itself represents, which is an entirely different way of relating to and thinking about the natural world. 397 00:30:12,580 --> 00:30:33,180 Absolutely. I think there is something to be said about how we message, who the messenger is, and how close is the message to your own belief system and your values. So it's these three things. Right now, working with faith leaders, what is really clear to me is that they are master communicators. 398 00:30:33,180 --> 00:30:38,460 They also are masterful at creating joyful occasions, joyful gatherings. 399 00:30:39,020 --> 00:30:41,980 There is something skillful about doing that, right? 400 00:30:42,040 --> 00:30:42,940 It doesn't just happen. 401 00:30:43,080 --> 00:30:45,440 You have to actually design it in a skillful way. 402 00:30:45,920 --> 00:30:52,700 And so I turned to WWF and I convinced them to let me work with religions in five different places around the world. 403 00:30:53,280 --> 00:30:55,860 And what I said to them is, this is a pilot project. 404 00:30:56,020 --> 00:30:57,200 It doesn't matter what religion. 405 00:30:57,360 --> 00:30:58,540 It doesn't matter what background. 406 00:30:58,900 --> 00:31:00,840 It doesn't even matter what conservation issue. 407 00:31:01,420 --> 00:31:03,340 And I love them because they let me. 408 00:31:03,700 --> 00:31:12,660 For five years, they funded me to work with the Catholic Church, with the Vatican, with indigenous leaders, with Buddhist monks in Cambodia, in the Himalayas. 409 00:31:12,980 --> 00:31:16,500 I guess I'm very curious about how this worked with Christian leaders. 410 00:31:17,060 --> 00:31:21,980 So I worked with all of these different religions in different places around the world. 411 00:31:22,120 --> 00:31:25,480 I worked in the Amazon, in East Africa, in the Mekong, the Himalayas. 412 00:31:25,880 --> 00:31:27,680 The hardest place to work was the U.S. 413 00:31:27,680 --> 00:31:31,840 because there is such a huge schism, right, 414 00:31:31,920 --> 00:31:34,040 between science and religion the way we see it 415 00:31:34,040 --> 00:31:35,720 in the U.S. and Europe in particular 416 00:31:35,720 --> 00:31:38,540 and because there is this whole projection 417 00:31:38,540 --> 00:31:40,940 that it's Judeo-Christianity and its values 418 00:31:40,940 --> 00:31:42,280 that has brought us to this point. 419 00:31:43,140 --> 00:31:45,640 But what I learned was that 420 00:31:45,640 --> 00:31:47,520 even in my earliest overtures 421 00:31:47,520 --> 00:31:49,800 with the evangelical church in 2009, 422 00:31:50,580 --> 00:31:52,440 they were really willing to hear me out. 423 00:31:52,440 --> 00:31:54,100 They didn't trust me. 424 00:31:54,700 --> 00:31:56,740 They didn't trust the institution I represented, 425 00:31:56,740 --> 00:32:01,580 but they were willing to hear me out. And I'm not sure you can say that about science, actually. 426 00:32:01,580 --> 00:32:05,420 There have been times where scientists have really shut me out when I said I'm going to 427 00:32:05,420 --> 00:32:10,600 work with religions, right? So we have to be really honest and say that these biases exist 428 00:32:10,600 --> 00:32:16,480 at both ends. It's not just one. But the other thing I learned was that if I stopped trying to 429 00:32:16,480 --> 00:32:21,820 convince them to see the world the way I did, there were actually meeting points where we 430 00:32:21,820 --> 00:32:28,300 naturally agreed. So it turns out we naturally agree that natural disasters are terrible for 431 00:32:28,300 --> 00:32:33,680 human beings, and we should do everything we can to help people recover. The evangelical church 432 00:32:33,680 --> 00:32:40,380 is one of the most generous donors post-disaster anywhere, everywhere in the world. If we bring 433 00:32:40,380 --> 00:32:46,800 someone from the congregation, from a similar church, from somewhere else, let's say Africa 434 00:32:46,800 --> 00:32:51,620 or Latin America, and they come and talk about how climate change is devastating the planet, 435 00:32:51,820 --> 00:32:52,860 Nobody walks out. 436 00:32:53,120 --> 00:32:54,740 Everybody is there witnessing, right? 437 00:32:55,140 --> 00:33:04,420 And so what became clear to me, again, over the years was that the most fundamental piece of working with religions is trust, right? 438 00:33:04,460 --> 00:33:13,280 Because they have been othered for so long and because so often the language is so sort of emotionally riling for both groups, right? 439 00:33:13,280 --> 00:33:21,460 Like it riles our emotions every time we talk about it, that we really have to create these safe spaces where people can talk and nobody interrupts. 440 00:33:21,460 --> 00:33:26,860 People just listen. One of the things I've learned along the way is that a lot of evangelical 441 00:33:26,860 --> 00:33:32,900 preachers feel very lonely. They understand what is happening. They know what is coming, 442 00:33:33,280 --> 00:33:37,360 but they might be in a congregation that is more conservative than them, or they don't have the 443 00:33:37,360 --> 00:33:43,400 science or the vocabulary to actually explain it in ways that make sense. A lot of faith leaders, 444 00:33:43,560 --> 00:33:48,520 almost every faith leader I ever spoke with around the world has said, I know what the problem is, 445 00:33:48,520 --> 00:33:51,520 but I don't know what to do because my resources are limited. 446 00:33:51,980 --> 00:33:54,960 The objections are not necessarily paradigm-based 447 00:33:54,960 --> 00:33:57,340 about the climate science or about denialism. 448 00:33:57,340 --> 00:33:59,740 So it's not necessarily, no, forget it. 449 00:33:59,840 --> 00:34:02,140 We don't think this is all a liberal myth. 450 00:34:02,220 --> 00:34:02,820 Yeah, no. 451 00:34:03,080 --> 00:34:05,640 There's a whole diversity of where people stand. 452 00:34:06,480 --> 00:34:08,580 And I think for me, one thing I know is that 453 00:34:08,580 --> 00:34:11,720 someone like me will never reach a far-right person. 454 00:34:11,860 --> 00:34:13,280 Someone like me will never reach someone 455 00:34:13,280 --> 00:34:15,520 who really genuinely believes that 456 00:34:15,520 --> 00:34:17,300 if you don't believe in Christ, 457 00:34:17,300 --> 00:34:20,220 that it's over for you and that you are undeserving 458 00:34:20,220 --> 00:34:22,180 and you should not be in America, right? 459 00:34:22,480 --> 00:34:23,960 People who really believe that America 460 00:34:23,960 --> 00:34:26,800 should be a Christian nation, I will never reach them. 461 00:34:27,500 --> 00:34:29,280 But an evangelical pastor can. 462 00:34:30,060 --> 00:34:32,340 And so I'm very clear about the fact 463 00:34:32,340 --> 00:34:34,640 that this is partly why I created this project. 464 00:34:35,140 --> 00:34:36,940 I want to feel safe in America. 465 00:34:37,720 --> 00:34:38,380 I'm American. 466 00:34:38,600 --> 00:34:40,180 I would like to feel safe here, right? 467 00:34:40,440 --> 00:34:43,160 And so I know without a doubt 468 00:34:43,160 --> 00:34:44,900 that the way forward cannot be 469 00:34:44,900 --> 00:34:47,020 that I pretend like this is not happening. 470 00:34:47,020 --> 00:34:52,140 How does that protect me and the people I love, that this kind of nationalism is rising, right? 471 00:34:52,560 --> 00:34:54,700 And we have to find ways to bridge. 472 00:34:55,060 --> 00:35:02,980 We have to empower people who are in the middle, who are trying to understand what is happening to their own faith and how it's being co-opted into politics. 473 00:35:03,520 --> 00:35:08,280 And so I see that as part of my responsibility now, you know, doing this work with faith leaders. 474 00:35:08,280 --> 00:35:26,760 We've talked about the struggle to find and hold on to a different paradigm in terms of both how we see and feel ourselves in relation to other beings and the natural world. Is there another paradigm that is compatible with science? 475 00:35:27,560 --> 00:35:29,780 I feel like, I mean, I'll be up front. 476 00:35:29,900 --> 00:35:33,080 I'm raised Buddhist, brought up Buddhist, so obviously Buddhism is what I know. 477 00:35:33,680 --> 00:35:43,240 One of the things that has been really obvious to me is that there are certain principles in Buddhism that really mirror nature and natural principles that mirror Buddhist principles, you know. 478 00:35:43,560 --> 00:35:52,280 And I think going back to this idea of interdependence, what I absolutely love is when I look at the planet, what I see is a massive closed loop, right? 479 00:35:52,280 --> 00:36:05,740 What I see is a planet as an entire system where you have the atmosphere, the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, so air, water, land, and nothing really leaves or enters it. 480 00:36:06,100 --> 00:36:07,520 Everything is happening here. 481 00:36:07,800 --> 00:36:20,780 The people we love, the people we hate, all the wars, the people we're bombing right now with U.S. money, and what comes from that, that there will be retaliation, that is also a karmic cycle of its own. 482 00:36:20,780 --> 00:36:26,260 The fact that we look at someone on TV and we're filled with loathing for that person. 483 00:36:26,700 --> 00:36:29,680 All of these things are happening in this closed system. 484 00:36:30,760 --> 00:36:39,200 And the amazing thing for me is that we as individuals, we are born, we live, hopefully we thrive, and then we die. 485 00:36:39,680 --> 00:36:42,800 And then the coolest thing happens, which is we decompose. 486 00:36:43,120 --> 00:36:47,200 And when we decompose, we become energy for another life cycle. 487 00:36:47,200 --> 00:36:59,560 And this amazing recycling of energy and nutrients constantly again and again to create life, this is interdependence. 488 00:36:59,880 --> 00:37:02,360 This is actually how life is created, right? 489 00:37:02,420 --> 00:37:06,160 We are constantly weaving into one another. 490 00:37:06,600 --> 00:37:08,620 There can be no real separation. 491 00:37:09,580 --> 00:37:16,420 So for me, this idea that we other somebody else just because they don't agree with us, even let's say they hate us. 492 00:37:17,020 --> 00:37:19,860 I philosophically cannot accept that, right? 493 00:37:20,120 --> 00:37:23,460 Which is partly why my life's work has been about bridge building, you know. 494 00:37:23,460 --> 00:37:30,640 I have to figure out ways where we are able to put down our hate and then move forward 495 00:37:30,640 --> 00:37:34,240 because ultimately what happens to them happens to me and vice versa. 496 00:37:34,960 --> 00:37:38,020 And I do feel like this is, you know, circling back to mother wisdom 497 00:37:38,020 --> 00:37:44,360 and to the way we all begin in a mother's body. 498 00:37:45,180 --> 00:37:55,380 Oxygen and carbon that came possibly from somebody who had a life and died and decayed, and here you are. 499 00:37:55,700 --> 00:37:59,160 I mean, that's the ultimate female principle. 500 00:37:59,160 --> 00:38:14,120 Yeah. I think a lot of the time when I'm meditating, especially on impermanence, I find this almost deep humor where I start laughing because I think about Mother Earth and I think about the great mother. 501 00:38:14,360 --> 00:38:21,480 you know, Prajnaparamita, and I think about how there is such a deep-seated sense of play and 502 00:38:21,480 --> 00:38:28,240 humor in the design of life, you know, had this idea that no matter how separate we think we are, 503 00:38:28,300 --> 00:38:33,080 actually we are inseparable. No matter how divided and alone we feel, we're actually 504 00:38:33,080 --> 00:38:40,200 completely in union all of the time, right? And so it is less of something, a wisdom that is alien 505 00:38:40,200 --> 00:38:46,320 to us that we have to go out and find and more of just allowing us to sink into what we already 506 00:38:46,320 --> 00:38:52,920 know. I think for people who really don't feel connected, I really, really urge them to just go 507 00:38:52,920 --> 00:39:00,380 spread eagle on land. Allow yourself to just experience the sensation of being held by the 508 00:39:00,380 --> 00:39:05,200 land, by the earth. There is not a moment of existence where she's not holding us up. 509 00:39:06,000 --> 00:39:09,740 Dekila Chungyalpa founded and directs the LOKA Initiative 510 00:39:09,740 --> 00:39:12,840 at the Center for Healthy Minds in Madison, Wisconsin. 511 00:39:13,180 --> 00:39:17,100 This episode was produced in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature 512 00:39:17,100 --> 00:39:18,860 and the Kalliopeia Foundation. 513 00:39:18,860 --> 00:39:22,020 And during the next year, we'll be bringing you more conversations 514 00:39:22,020 --> 00:39:25,540 about spiritual ecology, the earth, and women's lives. 515 00:39:25,940 --> 00:39:26,920 I'm Anne Strainchamps. 516 00:39:27,100 --> 00:39:28,040 And I'm Steve Paulson. 517 00:39:28,420 --> 00:39:32,140 Wonder Cabinet comes to you from Madison, Wisconsin, and Vershire, Vermont. 518 00:39:32,400 --> 00:39:34,440 Our audio engineer is Steve Gotcher. 519 00:39:34,440 --> 00:39:36,860 Our digital guru is Mark Riechers. 520 00:39:37,180 --> 00:39:41,300 Send questions or comments to us at wondercabinetproductions.com 521 00:39:41,300 --> 00:39:43,520 and sign up for the newsletter while you're there. 522 00:39:43,940 --> 00:39:45,820 Be well. See you next time.