Welcome to Wonder Cabinet. I'm Anne Strainchamps. And I'm Steve Paulson.
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to grow up picturing the face of God as female,
singing hymns and saying prayers not only to a holy father, but to a great mother,
the source of all life. Many religious traditions have language for a divine feminine,
sometimes in plain sight, sometimes in forgotten scriptures and teachings,
In names like Gaia, Sophia, Shakti, Shekhinah, Prajnaparamita.
Whatever she's called, there's often a sense that she embodies the deep wisdom of the earth.
So, what would it be like to grow up with her?
Because I heard it talked about and taught at a young age,
for me, as a child, the visualization of that was always that she is feminine, right?
She's the great mother, and that she's the earth.
You know, that ultimately everything springs from the earth.
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.
And Dekila herself is the daughter and granddaughter of a spiritual lineage of Tibetan Buddhist nuns.
So I want to hear more about Dekila, but first, I think you should talk a bit about this concept of the divine feminine.
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.
There's something about sacred women that just seems to pull you in.
Well, they're powerful.
True, yes.
Spiritually powerful, I mean.
And, yeah, that's something I didn't see a lot of as a child.
I grew up, as you know, culturally Protestant.
I guess all the Bible stories I heard were always about men.
God the Father, Jesus the Son, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John.
So you felt left out?
Disconnected, I think.
So when did you begin to think that there might be something in religious traditions that would speak to you?
I think it might have been my first experience of all that art you were just talking about.
I was 12 when we moved to Italy for two years, to Florence, birthplace of the Renaissance.
And I remember being transfixed by Botticelli's birth of Venus.
And then the iconography of the Virgin Mary, I mean, all those paintings covered in gold leaf of the Madonna holding a baby.
They're in every church, every museum.
They're so powerful.
And she's got such gravity and presence.
Yeah.
And there's a reason they've been revered for centuries.
But I know it's not just the images that have drawn you.
I mean, I've seen you for years reading books about women and nature and spirituality.
Those three things are linked for me, I guess partly because of ecofeminism, learning to
see the historical connection between the domination of the earth and the oppression
of women.
Like a lot of women, I feel a sense of urgency and anxiety and grief around climate change,
and it feels personal, I think partly because of my gender.
On the spiritual side, the modern earth-based religions like neo-paganism, Wicca, have always
really resonated for me.
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.
Part of what we're doing on this podcast is documenting that, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Which is why I wanted people to meet Dekila.
So how did you meet her?
Through two good friends, Brooke Hecht from the Center for Humans and Nature and Hilary Hart from the Caliopeia Foundation.
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.
And then Hilary held a workshop for women writers, and Dekila was there.
Okay, let's listen.
Actually, being in the circle of the women was amazing for me.
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.
Yeah, I feel that.
Yeah?
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.
We do a lot of this practice together.
And, you know, my grandmother took her vows after she was widowed and became a nun.
And my mother took her vows in her, I think, her late 30s.
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.
I wanted to ask you about that because that is so rare, actually, to have grown up in a spiritual lineage of women.
I mean, there are not that many in world religions.
It was a little unique when I think back.
Because my mother and my grandmother were practitioners and I spent so much time with them, I would watch them meditate and mimic them.
And, you know, the experiences would happen or not.
but I had very little instruction in many ways.
They didn't...
My mother tried.
She used to laugh because if she tried to instruct me
the way she instructed her students,
I was so resistant to be one of her students, right?
Because I resented her students growing up.
They got so much of her time.
So whenever she tried to instruct me,
I would fall asleep.
I would literally just sort of close my eyes and fall asleep.
So she, I think, had to devise sneaky ways of teaching me
to make sure I was still doing my practices.
You also grew up in this small community in the Himalayas,
surrounded by spectacular scenery and a landscape that was sacred.
Tell me more about that.
Well, where I come from, Sikkim, it's called Beyul Demojong.
Beyul actually refers to the secret hidden valleys.
So all across the Himalayas, there are all these beautiful beyuls.
And they are all considered to be refuges for the dharma.
And the story or the origin story of beyuls is that they are safe for people during difficult times.
So during collapse, these are the places that will remain as refuges.
Like the source of the Shangri-La myth, it sounds like.
It very much is the source of the Shangri-La myth.
But I grew up surrounded by these mountains and lots of sacred sites and sacred areas that have a lot of power.
So there was this merging of sacred and the sacred feminine and the sacred feminine was also wild.
This is so what I want to know about.
So I think for me that all of that, it was the circle was full when I was growing up, right, in that sense.
And we have all of these rituals where we actually communicate with the mountains.
The mountains are alive for us, you know.
In West Sikkim, you don't even name any of the animals without adding an honorific, you know.
So if you see a bear and a bear is dom in Bhutia and Tibetan language, you cannot say dom.
You have to say Aku-dom, which is uncle bear.
It sort of made me laugh so much because I had these memories getting scolded for not doing it, right?
And I'm so grateful that some of these relationships are still intact where nature has an innate right to existence.
Well, it also sounds like nature actually has a kind of personhood.
Yeah, absolutely.
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.
You know, some are fast-moving and kind of a little irritable,
and some are slow to anger.
You know, there are all these storylines around it.
Oh, my God, I'm remembering talking with a woman who grew up in,
now I can't remember if it's Ecuador or Peru, surrounded by volcanoes.
And they're the same thing.
The volcanoes have different personalities.
Some are explosive and passionate.
Some are slow-moving, but then look out.
Yeah, it always makes me laugh because, of course,
our mountain is Mount Kanchenjunga. And he's alive to us, right? He's our
protector deity for Sikkim, for our Beyul Demojong. And he also has a personality. He's quite old.
I mean, there have been all these tests and it turns out he's made up of rocks that are over a
billion years old. So it's sort of funny because Mount Everest, of course, is the towering peak.
But Kanchenjunga, actually, is so much older.
Everest, he's like a younger brother, you know?
He's just very young.
And your mountain has never been climbed, right?
So the Sikkim side has not been climbed.
So the Lepcha have fought for decades to protect the mountains.
You know, there is really something to be said about indigenous peoples
and how they put their bodies on the line, right, to protect Earth
because she is sacred to them.
And also, I think, because there is this deep holistic understanding of how our well-being is dependent on her well-being, you know.
And I think most of us who leave wild areas or leave livelihoods where we are closely connected to the earth, we forget that.
We get used to taking money out of ATMs and buying our spinach in the store wrapped with a lot of plastic.
We forget where it comes from.
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.
It was almost like, oh, there she goes.
We all knew this was coming.
So, say more about that, the sacred wild or the wilderness and the sacred feminine, like that coming together.
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.
In Sanskrit, it's called Prajnaparamita, which is the great mother.
And that experience of that practice is really this pure union that you have with wisdom and emptiness, right?
This is one of the aspirations all of us have as practitioners, that we will eventually taste this great bliss, you know?
And for me, as a child, the visualization of that was always that she is feminine, right?
She's the great mother, and that she's the earth.
That association was so obvious to me.
There was this female quality to it.
And I don't mean that necessarily in the biological sense.
I think anyone can access the sacred feminine.
It doesn't matter if you're in a male body or a female body or a trans body or any of these things.
I think we can all access it.
What does it mean to call it the sacred feminine then?
I think it is about the softness.
And I think there is something there about all the things we cover up as we grow older.
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?
And so I think that the feminine principle really comes from letting go of all of that.
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.
But it's actually the other way around.
The female principle is pure wisdom and the male principle is compassion.
This is one of my favorite things about Tibetan Buddhism because it's so subversive.
It kind of forces you to really dig in and look at your own biases, your own assumptions, all of those things.
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.
And the union is beyond gender, is beyond our ideas and our conceptions of what is male and female.
And the times that we're in, you know, we are truly in a time of environmental and climate collapse.
So for me, one of the biggest questions I have is how do we learn from these traditions?
How do we learn from traditions that have really held on to the earth's wisdom?
And how do we bring it back?
Right.
Well, so for me, having grown up culturally Christian in the sense that we celebrated Christmas and Easter,
but they were about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Nevertheless, I do feel like I absorbed
traditional Western Christian attitudes that equate women and earth and place them under
masculine God, which is why I think to imagine the divine as feminine, that alone is radical.
And so I think, how beautiful.
I know exactly what you mean.
I mean, well, women historically have always been told that we are closer to nature, right?
There is me, I identify as an eco-feminist, studied eco-feminist theory all through school.
And so, yes, we, I do think, have been harmed throughout the centuries in probably every, almost every social setting we can think of
because we are identified as being closer to nature.
And that's true for people of color, right?
Black and brown bodies.
And that there is this deep-seated fear
that nature is something that cannot be controlled.
And women also exhibit those tendencies, don't we?
That we cannot be controlled.
We flow with the moon.
We give birth.
We have menopause.
There are all these things that our bodies do
that are beyond external control.
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.
So, friendship and companionship and caring and, I mean, psychological care, right?
Right.
You think about how women hold families together, hold communities together.
Families, children, elders.
Children, elders.
Traditionally, it was women took care of the sick.
Yes, that's right.
And one of the things I noted working with different religions was that often religious institutions are propped up by women.
Most religious institutions are propped up by women, whether it's donations, whether it's physical labor, whether it's organizing.
All of these are being done by women, but it is men who get to sit in the thrones, right?
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.
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?
Yeah.
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.
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.
It's not the same as a ceremony, a ritual.
Yeah, and you experienced some of those growing up, too.
I remember you reading, there was a story about ritual bathing in a river, in a cave.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
When I was a little kid, my grandmother and her nun-companions went on a ritual,
and they took me with her, and we went and visited all the secret hot springs,
the mineral springs, all across the landscape.
and would make our prayers in each one of them.
And one of the springs, you actually have to slither down
to get to this cave where the mineral springs is.
It's almost completely underground.
And how terrified I was, slithering underground.
And then also, I was so scared because the water was black,
and you couldn't see very much because we had to use candles and torches.
I remember being really terrified to put my feet in
until my grandmother yanked me in, you know.
And they were all there praying and singing out loud.
It was just this incredible experience.
How many women?
It just really stayed with me.
I mean, easily over 50, maybe 100.
I don't know.
Everybody crammed in, people coming alone or, you know, fully clothed or somewhere, I think, almost completely naked.
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.
But it was very unified.
It felt like we were all singing the same chorus, you know?
You were singing?
We were all singing, yeah.
And that was one of my earliest memories of being in practice with my grandmother, right?
As opposed to being dragged along and kind of hold the kid that holds the umbrella of the matriarch, you know?
And so when I came to the West, I came to the West when I was 15.
and my youngest aunt brought me here to study
and I arrived in New York City.
It was extremely jarring.
But I think I was just seeking that.
I was seeking that same sense of communal practice,
communal spiritual practice
and land-based practices in particular.
And so I keep coming back to the importance
of creating rituals for ourselves.
All of us need rituals that tie us back to land.
All of us need rituals to remind us that we are born off the earth, right?
And that we are inseparable from her.
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.
Is there a point in your body that you can identify and say, aha!
this is who I am and this is where oxygen is. Is the oxygen alien? Is that even possible?
There is no life without nature. We are indivisible. And so really the ritual has to
be something that wakes us up and reminds us that. And the ritual has to create joy. It has
to be an experience of joy for us, right? We're not alone. It's the thing that terrorizes us the
most. We're so terrified of being alone. And so having a ritual that brings us to recollect that
we are in union all the time, every single second, is a joyful ritual. Okay, hold that thought.
I'm Anne Strainchamps, and we're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
Hey, it's Steve.
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Thank you.
I'm talking with Dekila Chungyalpa, and I want to pick up her story with her experience
of working in conservation science, which ultimately led her to found the LOKA Initiative,
a program that brings faith leaders from a huge range of religious traditions together
with scientists who are working on climate change.
So I want to ask also about your path to this work with faith communities, because you initially
came to the U.S. to study science and you wound up a field conservationist and running programs
and at a certain point you just felt like what this wasn't enough? I've sometimes described the
experience I had as a kind of bifurcation of identity. I wanted to be an environmentalist
in a professional way and work on environmental protection. As my career I started experiencing
this strange bifurcation where I was a scientist by day and a practicing Buddhist by night.
In science, in general, any profession that is science-related, talking about your faith
is absolutely unacceptable.
We've created such a separation.
And this, it's fascinating because this is, of course, part of, you know, Euro-derived
scientific knowledge, right, that we really can think our way out of everything.
You know, what I was taught in school was very much that your emotions are what are going to lead you astray.
And I sometimes tell the story because I can tell you what the training was like.
One of my first field trips, I was with a chief scientist, very famous conservationist in the field.
And we were in the Terai, which is the long sort of the grasslands.
This is tiger elephant habitat between Nepal and Bhutan.
It's absolutely gorgeous.
and we were in a jeep and I was in behind taking notes as he's talking and sort of showing me and
teaching me you know and then I saw a baby rhino for the first time in my life and I just squealed
it just sort of came out I had no idea what I said anymore but actually was like oh my god that's so
cute you know something came out and he whipped around and looked at me and he said we don't use
those words we say charismatic megafauna it was hilarious and it was sobering and I knew exactly
what he meant. And I started using those words, right? But that is the training, because what we
are trying in the science world is to convince everybody that we are actually not emotional,
spiritual beings, right? We are beyond that. You know, we are bias-free. That's really what we want
to convince everybody. And of course, that's not true. And so I think in my case, there was always
going to be a breaking point. But the breaking point came when I actually had sort of climbed
the ladder towards what I thought was success. And I had very recently been made the director
for a field program for WWFUS. I was the only woman of color who headed any of those programs,
and I was definitely the youngest by far, and the only brown woman from the global south who
headed that program. And so I'd arrived. What everybody had told me all along was success,
And then I started having nightmares.
The region that I was working on at that time was the greater Mekong region.
Absolutely stunning, second most biodiverse river in the world, the mighty Mekong.
And I was based there, I was based in Laos.
But I kept having this recurring dream that I'm walking in a forest.
And initially, everything is wonderful.
It's beautiful.
And then all of a sudden, I realized that it's very quiet.
And then I cannot hear birds.
All I can hear are my feet.
And then I realized I cannot see anything or hear anything where life exists.
So everything's dead, and I'm in this dead forest, and I'm now frantic trying to get out.
So no one needs to interpret that dream.
I would wake up kind of, you know, panicking and really struggling.
Those dreams were petrifying because here is this thing that I hold most sacred, which is nature.
It is the basis of my being.
My entire practice is inseparable.
from this experience of being one with nature.
And in my dream, what I was processing is that nature is extremely wounded.
Your dream was also telling you that part of you is dead.
Yes, absolutely.
That you, part of you had died.
Part of me had died.
And there was no confusion around this message.
I held it for some time, and then I remember I expressed it to one of my good friends,
and he said, oh, I have panic attacks.
He was working on regional climate projections
of what was coming in 10-year cycles.
And he said that this is, I'm having panic attacks about this.
I don't know how to get the governments to care.
And pretty soon it just became this conversation
among all my friends, all my colleagues.
And I remember the first time I brought it up in D.C.,
which is the headquarters,
they just pretty much laughed me out of the room
because to say that conservationists are experiencing PTSD
seemed so ridiculous at that time.
They were like, oh, pull yourself together, girl.
Not only that, it was like, oh, your generation is so weak.
In my time, right? So it's very sort of like, you guys are too emotional, you know.
Yeah, millennial snowflake, get over it.
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.
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.
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.
And then, what, you watched a Buddhist monk give a talk.
His Holiness, give a talk.
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.
So Obama had just come in.
There was a lot of hope and enthusiasm and excitement.
I had colleagues and very close friends working on what was going to be the greatest climate, first climate bill, right?
And that crashed and burned in the Senate.
It went through the House of Representatives, but it completely didn't make it.
It was devastating for everybody because, you know, we believed that with Obama would come this real transition.
And then I think it was like five or six months later, I was in Copenhagen for the Convention of the Parties.
So this is around climate change.
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?
And COP15 in particular was a disaster.
And I have to be honest and just say the U.S. government was part of the reason why it collapsed.
The U.S. government really scuttled that deal.
I and actually almost all my friends kind of just lost heart.
I have a friend, very senior person on climate change, who actually would not get out of bed for months.
We had to hold an intervention to get him out of bed.
I mean, it was just devastating for us because we are the people,
Professional environmentalists are the people who spend every moment of their day in communication with the earth.
And what the earth was telling us is that we're running out of time.
We have to turn things around now.
So one of the experiences that really brought it home to me was that I was in Bodh Gaya,
which is kind of the biggest pilgrimage site for Buddhists around the world.
It's where Buddha was enlightened.
And we have these massive periods where pilgrims come from all over the world.
And His Holiness, the Karmapa, was holding the Kagyu Mönlam at that time.
So I'm sitting there in the audience, kind of checked out.
I'm here mostly to keep my family happy, right?
And His Holiness suddenly out of nowhere starts talking about vegetarianism.
And as Tibetans and Himalayan people, this is very atypical.
We are meat eaters, right?
We come from the highlands where green doesn't grow a lot of the places because we're high up and it's cold.
So we kind of lean on meat and dairy quite a lot.
and he started talking about vegetarianism
and at one point he just said
and because of climate change
it's really necessary
and I was just completely just transfixed
you know
there are tens of thousands of people in the audience
and so he said
I've become vegetarian
it's not that hard
would any of you
based on the Buddhist principles of compassion
would any of you consider giving up meat
and the sea of hands went up
including mine
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.
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.
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.
They also are masterful at creating joyful occasions, joyful gatherings.
There is something skillful about doing that, right?
It doesn't just happen.
You have to actually design it in a skillful way.
And so I turned to WWF and I convinced them to let me work with religions in five different places around the world.
And what I said to them is, this is a pilot project.
It doesn't matter what religion.
It doesn't matter what background.
It doesn't even matter what conservation issue.
And I love them because they let me.
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.
I guess I'm very curious about how this worked with Christian leaders.
So I worked with all of these different religions in different places around the world.
I worked in the Amazon, in East Africa, in the Mekong, the Himalayas.
The hardest place to work was the U.S.
because there is such a huge schism, right,
between science and religion the way we see it
in the U.S. and Europe in particular
and because there is this whole projection
that it's Judeo-Christianity and its values
that has brought us to this point.
But what I learned was that
even in my earliest overtures
with the evangelical church in 2009,
they were really willing to hear me out.
They didn't trust me.
They didn't trust the institution I represented,
but they were willing to hear me out. And I'm not sure you can say that about science, actually.
There have been times where scientists have really shut me out when I said I'm going to
work with religions, right? So we have to be really honest and say that these biases exist
at both ends. It's not just one. But the other thing I learned was that if I stopped trying to
convince them to see the world the way I did, there were actually meeting points where we
naturally agreed. So it turns out we naturally agree that natural disasters are terrible for
human beings, and we should do everything we can to help people recover. The evangelical church
is one of the most generous donors post-disaster anywhere, everywhere in the world. If we bring
someone from the congregation, from a similar church, from somewhere else, let's say Africa
or Latin America, and they come and talk about how climate change is devastating the planet,
Nobody walks out.
Everybody is there witnessing, right?
And so what became clear to me, again, over the years was that the most fundamental piece of working with religions is trust, right?
Because they have been othered for so long and because so often the language is so sort of emotionally riling for both groups, right?
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.
People just listen. One of the things I've learned along the way is that a lot of evangelical
preachers feel very lonely. They understand what is happening. They know what is coming,
but they might be in a congregation that is more conservative than them, or they don't have the
science or the vocabulary to actually explain it in ways that make sense. A lot of faith leaders,
almost every faith leader I ever spoke with around the world has said, I know what the problem is,
but I don't know what to do because my resources are limited.
The objections are not necessarily paradigm-based
about the climate science or about denialism.
So it's not necessarily, no, forget it.
We don't think this is all a liberal myth.
Yeah, no.
There's a whole diversity of where people stand.
And I think for me, one thing I know is that
someone like me will never reach a far-right person.
Someone like me will never reach someone
who really genuinely believes that
if you don't believe in Christ,
that it's over for you and that you are undeserving
and you should not be in America, right?
People who really believe that America
should be a Christian nation, I will never reach them.
But an evangelical pastor can.
And so I'm very clear about the fact
that this is partly why I created this project.
I want to feel safe in America.
I'm American.
I would like to feel safe here, right?
And so I know without a doubt
that the way forward cannot be
that I pretend like this is not happening.
How does that protect me and the people I love, that this kind of nationalism is rising, right?
And we have to find ways to bridge.
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.
And so I see that as part of my responsibility now, you know, doing this work with faith leaders.
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?
I feel like, I mean, I'll be up front.
I'm raised Buddhist, brought up Buddhist, so obviously Buddhism is what I know.
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.
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?
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.
Everything is happening here.
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.
The fact that we look at someone on TV and we're filled with loathing for that person.
All of these things are happening in this closed system.
And the amazing thing for me is that we as individuals, we are born, we live, hopefully we thrive, and then we die.
And then the coolest thing happens, which is we decompose.
And when we decompose, we become energy for another life cycle.
And this amazing recycling of energy and nutrients constantly again and again to create life, this is interdependence.
This is actually how life is created, right?
We are constantly weaving into one another.
There can be no real separation.
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.
I philosophically cannot accept that, right?
Which is partly why my life's work has been about bridge building, you know.
I have to figure out ways where we are able to put down our hate and then move forward
because ultimately what happens to them happens to me and vice versa.
And I do feel like this is, you know, circling back to mother wisdom
and to the way we all begin in a mother's body.
Oxygen and carbon that came possibly from somebody who had a life and died and decayed, and here you are.
I mean, that's the ultimate female principle.
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.
you know, Prajnaparamita, and I think about how there is such a deep-seated sense of play and
humor in the design of life, you know, had this idea that no matter how separate we think we are,
actually we are inseparable. No matter how divided and alone we feel, we're actually
completely in union all of the time, right? And so it is less of something, a wisdom that is alien
to us that we have to go out and find and more of just allowing us to sink into what we already
know. I think for people who really don't feel connected, I really, really urge them to just go
spread eagle on land. Allow yourself to just experience the sensation of being held by the
land, by the earth. There is not a moment of existence where she's not holding us up.
Dekila Chungyalpa founded and directs the LOKA Initiative
at the Center for Healthy Minds in Madison, Wisconsin.
This episode was produced in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature
and the Kalliopeia Foundation.
And during the next year, we'll be bringing you more conversations
about spiritual ecology, the earth, and women's lives.
I'm Anne Strainchamps.
And I'm Steve Paulson.
Wonder Cabinet comes to you from Madison, Wisconsin, and Vershire, Vermont.
Our audio engineer is Steve Gotcher.
Our digital guru is Mark Riechers.
Send questions or comments to us at wondercabinetproductions.com
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Be well. See you next time.