Leslie Hershberger: Collective Change Conversations with The Hive

The Common Good podcast is a conversation about the significance of place, eliminating economic isolation and structures of belonging.  For this week's episode, we begin a live podcast series with The Hive about Collective Change.

Join us for any or all of these conversations, either in person at The Hive in Cincinnati or online via Zoom. This event will include music, poetry and small group discussion and while this event is free, attendees will be invited to be active participants in this emerging conversation.

The Hive  is a grassroots mindfulness community curating multi-week classes, workshops and a Membership community. It has been formed by facilitators asking the question, "What are the resources that lie within our vast lineages, traditions, and modalities of healing, and how can we place them in service of the common good?" In this series we’re talking to The Hive’s 6 core faculty members, all of whom have a unique perspective on navigating collective change.

For this first conversation, Chris Larue, the Director of The Hive, joins us in speaking with Leslie Hershberger, about collective change, three-centered awareness, hope and the importance of practice.

Introductory Resources for the 3 centered Enneagram and the centers.

The recited poems were For the Interim Time by John O'Donohue and Start Close In by David Whyte.

This episode was produced by Joey Taylor and the music is from Jeff Gorman. You can find more information about the Common Good Collective here. Common Good Podcast is a production of Bespoken Live & Common Change - Eliminating Personal Economic Isolation.

Transcript

Before I read the poem, I'd like to just go a little bit deeper inside. All right. So, in talking about the centers, a lot of times our energy gets pulled outside of ourselves.  Okay. By life. And so there's a, you can do the kind of the contemplative pause is to know, when am I in? When am I out? And when am I in and down? So I will start by allowing your eyes to close  and to just notice what happens when your eyes drop  and begin by bringing your attention while your eyes are closed.  Can you bring your attention to the far wall of the room,  the center of the room,  book reading distance,  now in and down inside yourself,  down through your throat. And  as you drop into your throat,  can you notice the difference between the thought of your throat?  And the actual felt sense of your throat.  And when you do  notice, give yourself a nod,  just kind of a cue.  Can you drop your awareness now to your heart?  And so often people say, I don't feel anything there.  And that's normal,  but the shift of attention  from outside to inside.  This is what we're noticing here tonight.  Can you drop down into your heart,  and perhaps notice the beat of your heart?  And if not,  simply notice the feel of your shirt on your chest.  Now allow your attention to drop a few fingers below your belly,  where breath and awareness meet.  This is a slight shift of attention from outside to in and down.  And now shift your attention back up into your heart.  And can you bring to your awareness?  Someone or something that matters to you, someone you care about,  can you allow their face or if it's an animal,  allowing the animal's face to just, uh, just show itself to you in your awareness,  the color of their eyes,  the shape of the face.  And as you look at this face  and allow them to look at you,  can you take in the care they have for you,  that you matter,  and just notice what it's like.  And notice if you pop up into your head  and start having a narrative,  because that's really normal.  Or notice if your attention wanders to perhaps what you had for dinner,  and then just bring it back  and just take in the care.  Now allow that image to recede.  And can you bring to your awareness.  A time  when you were in the midst of a change,  and you knew you were leaving something behind.  Or maybe you had a sense of it.  What were you leaving?  And just notice any sensation in your body  as you think of walking away from something.  It could be a part of your life, it could be a,  a group of people, a community, a relationship,  a body of work that mattered to you.  Because our focus over the next weeks.  is going to be change.  And collectively, we are in an experience of change unlike any we've seen in my lifetime.  So when you're ready,  but only when you're ready,  allow your eyes to open,  and can you stay inside yourself  as they open?  And then start taking in the room around you, this sense if you're in, at home, just noticing the room around you, the walls, perhaps a picture on the wall,  but also staying inside yourself.  And we're going to hear a poem from one of my favorite poets. It's John O'Donohue. And, um, he's a, he was an Irish philosopher poet.  This poem is called For the Interim Time.  When near the end of the day, Life is drained out of light, and it is too soon  for the mind of night to have darkened things.  No place looks like itself.  There's a loss of outline,  makes everything look strange and in between,  unsure of what has been  or what might come.  In this one light, even trees seem groundless.  In a while, it will be night. But nothing here seems to believe the relief of the dark.  You are in this time of interim,  where everything seems withheld.  The path you took to get here has washed out,  and the way forward is still concealed from you.  The old is not old enough to have died away,  and the new is still too young to be born.  You cannot lay claim to anything in this place of dusk.  Your eyes are blurred,  and there's no mirror.  Everyone has lost sight of your heart.  And you can see nowhere to put your trust.  You know you have to make your own way through.  As far as you can, hold your confidence.  Do not allow your confusion to squander this call which is loosening your roots in false ground.  That you might come free from all you have outgrown.  What is being transfigured here is your mind,  and it is difficult and slow to become new.  The more faithfully you can endure here,  the more refined your heart will become for your arrival in the new dawn.

I think most of the people in the room here, Leslie, and probably a lot of people on zoom will know kind of who you are, the domain within which you work but the way we wanted to start is by asking you to talk about the moment when you made a choice to apprentice yourself to the path that you're currently on. And so you'll have to say a little bit about what this domain is, but then what was the moment when you're like, Oh, this is what I'm being invited into. 

Well, if it wasn't the Enneagram, it was going to be cooking. So I was looking at the Culinary Institute of America. And then I was trying to figure out my children because they were coming of age and they were getting into middle school and early high school and I didn't have the control that I'd had before. They were becoming their own people. That wasn't great news. And you can cognitively say, be who you are but don't be anything that makes me anxious. And  they were more introverted than me. My strategy very unconsciously and there's a natural tendency is to go towards. And I was always the new kid in school. So I would always go towards and be like, Hey, Joey, how, you know that. And my children did not, they pull back. And so A friend of mine told me about this thing called the Myers Briggs, and so I looked up Myers Briggs, and I was blown away that there's these different temperaments. And I could see my family in Myers Briggs. But then someone said to me at Bellarmine, at Xavier, have you ever heard of the Enneagram? And I said, no. And so I picked up Helen Palmer's book and read every chapter. Thought I was a one, like my mother. Thought I was a two, like my father. Thought I was a three. Nah, I don't finish things that much. Definitely at that time, I didn't think I was, I kind of went through them. And when I got to seven, I was lying in bed and I started to like burn and blush. My face got really hot. I felt exposed. I felt seen. I was really uncomfortable. And I couldn't get enough of it. And I went to a weekend with a teacher named Tom Condon who came to Cincinnati and it blew me out of the water. He did demonstrations with people and he put me up front. So he would do one person at a time and he put me up front and I knew nothing about projection. So there was a woman sitting on the panel  and she couldn't have biological children. And he said, so what is the perfect mother? He's playing with her. And she, she started to describe, well, she's tall and she has three children and she loves to learn. And so then the audience started turning against the woman in her hand, but you're this and you're that. And I said, you have no idea what that woman is feeling. That looks like she's together on the outside. You have no idea. And I knew nothing about projection. Like I was projecting all over. I saw myself in the woman she was describing and the group was turning against her. And then I felt so embarrassed. I got home that night and that was why he put me on the panel the next day. And he started asking me about my life and I started doing all the positive reframes. Oh, it was good You know, we moved all around the time But I was really positive and I'd go in and so within five minutes He had me in tears of just the grief of all the losses the loss of Friendships the loss of community then the loss of  my sister in law the loss of my meat Oh, it was just like a cascade And I got home and said to my husband, this is what I want to do with my life. I just didn't want to do cooking school anymore. I still like to cook, but it blew me away. And I called around to people and said, who should I choose as my teacher, and everybody talked about this Helen Palmer who wrote the book that I'd read. She's a six on the Enneagram and their attention goes to doubt. What can go wrong? And she liked the Enneagram because she said it was negative at the gate. Now other  people are bringing more of a positive, but she said, I wouldn't have trusted it. I wouldn't have trusted it if it didn't tell the truth about the shadow of ourselves. And so that's what I saw in the book is I saw my shadow loud and clear as a mother. And it was very clear that my children were fine. It was me and my husband and said, they all seem fine. You're the one who seems the most anxious. 

Yeah, that's beautiful. Thanks for sharing that with us. So maybe just like shifting now into the topic of today and Chris, I can invite you to say something about this. Our intention is to explore this idea of collective change. I heard even in your meditation already that you talked about this moment is a moment of change unlike any other moment in history. And so I would love for you to talk about that, but before you do that, maybe Chris, could you talk just a little bit about why collective change and what does that have to do with the work you're doing here at the Hive?

I would say for a lot of folks, it's coming out of necessity. I've heard some folks describe it as like the earth is having a fever. Maybe literally, right? It's getting harder and harder to stay atomized in your own world. And just be ignorant of the world around you. So I think a lot of folks are asking how can I participate or be part of collective change? What does that mean in a culture now that is maybe more individualistic than we've ever seen in human history? And then there's this discovery of resources.  Like the Enneagram and these kinds of spiritual traditions, lineages, modalities, there is an intersection where these modalities actually come to bear on collective change. And there's an intersection there that is crucial to attend to. Like I've had friends in the activist world  who felt really drawn toward that space. And then also saw these communities just eat each other alive,  had no sense of being able to drop in, be aware of projection. So all their shadow stuff projecting onto each other and the world and the world's the problem, you also have folks who maybe, I try to think of the opposite of that. Which like could be something like a monastery or maybe it's a meditation group that someone's part of, and  no one reads the news.  No one's aware  that they're part of something larger. And so I think here at the hive, we try to create a space where both of those paths are intersecting and weaving together. And I would love for you specifically to start to talk about what was that transition like for you and how do you make sense of this inner work that the Enneagram and Three Centered Awareness  and how does that bring you into the intersection of collective change?

Well, one of the other things I'm trained in is integral theory, and  it looks at things through the, that we evolve, and there's an I, and then a we, I, we. So it's like we're in this group, and we start to realize we're different from the group. We're not like everybody. The group, it gives us cohesiveness. It gives us meaning. It matters, but the I is lost in the group. I don't know who I am and I start to discover who I am separate from the group. So what I would say is we have to hold that tension between the I and the we, it's always there. So after you kind of left a group, you're starting to ask the questions and a lot of people come to the Enneagram and they're coming younger now but 20s, 30s, when they're starting to ask those questions of who am I? Okay, that's an important thing. With that said, this can become its own over identification. The way the Enneagram is being taught right now there's too much identification with my type. When actually the work is to loosen the strictures of the type so you have more availability, there's more of you available. As relates to the collective, and I think that is the 20, 000 question, is that we are always operating within relationship. It's always there. And in fact, one of the things I like to work with people is can you drop in and down while your eyes are open, where you're inside of yourself aware of your own internal state. So there's two sets of centers, there's the psychological centers and there's the spiritual centers and the spiritual centers aren't, you know, presence isn't something you read about in a book. Okay, you can do it in the moment, so if you're in a group, I can be aware that I'm projecting something. I'm projecting a narrative onto somebody right now. I'm doing it now and I can make the shift there's this awareness that I show up in a group a certain way and I have this narrative when I come into a group. I don't belong. I don't fit here. There's that narrative or there could be something around, I've got to struggle and go against them in some way. And so I can be aware of those patterns. When I get in a group or I have to be really big and shiny to fit in this group, or I have to shrink and can I do something different because we have to start with ourselves and then notice how we show up in a group and know it's an only partial story. It's highly limited and it's highly conditioned and those conditioned tendencies live in our bodies. And so a lot of the work I do with people is to be aware of what's going on in your body right now. If Joey came and asked me a question, one of the things I can be aware of is I might say yes too quickly and because if I'm a mental center, I've got all the time in the world up here, but in my body it takes 20 minutes to get to the hive. In my head it takes three, right? So the point is we have to drop into these three centers so that knowing the difference between say your yes and your no. If Joey asks me a question, I have habituated  ways of responding to that. Now, if if we zoom it out larger to what's happening in the collective right now is that we have no neurological tracks for dealing with this level of change and this level of constant information, just the whole notion of holding both and two things at once is pretty revolutionary and the rational mind can't hold it very long. The mental structure of consciousness divides things into this or that. Either or. Yes, no. Right, wrong. That's what it's job is. So the mental structure of consciousness isn't up to the task of this time. So in order to really be able to be conscious, useful people in this time is to change ourselves and to bring more centers online. And the MRI scans will show that people who are meditating are using a different part of the brain that most of us don't use. So, there are so many capacities that we have in these bodies that we live in and in these brains that simply aren't being used. And I think there's going to be a lot more that's going to come out on that in the future. So many people want to go back to a simpler time, when it was easy, the halcyon days. It's impossible. You can't go back. It's not a useful strategy. So to be able to stay in the unknowing, I don't think we can do it in our psychological centers. At least I can't. And I have to have some good strategies and this is why I was so attracted to the hive. It's like, Oh, somebody is doing this in a larger collective way. There aren't just people by themselves meditating. And here's the thing, y'all, and y'all know this, you're in a meditative state or you're relaxed with your group. And then you go out in the world and then within five minutes you're annoyed because we are shifting States all the time.

Maybe we can shift a little bit to how you would describe and sort of frame the spiritual centers for us. What do they have to do with this navigating of collective change. And I hear you saying we have to start with the individual, but I just want to invite you to land in the collective though. 

Right. So if I were going to give a step by step from the mental structure, it would be start with yourself. You have to understand your own bias first and not only of my Enneagram bias, which tends to orient to the positive and reframe positively, but I have to be aware of my social and cultural biases. So know yourself, know your bias but knowing's not enough. if the mental structure was enough, we'd all be evolved because we've all got more information available to us than ever before. The spiritual centers, the three centers, the three Dantians, Chi, okay, is, is the. Gurdjieff, who was one of the progenitors of what's called the Enneagram of Process, called this the great energetic accumulator, the belly,  all right? And the heart center is that which attunes to other people. So in the psychological heart is I want you to like me. You know, I'm going to do what I can so that you'll like me and I might charm you so I can relax. So you'll like me. You'll like my kids. You'll like my, I can now relax. That's not collective change. What I have to be able to do is notice when I'm up and out instead of in and down  and pause, and it's that simple. It's a shift inward to drop in and down and notice, can I feel the beat of my heart? Oh yeah, now I can see you and I can see you as you are to yourself.  I can hear your story. I'm more receptive. It's called receptive awareness.  And so the difference from active to receptive, I can receive you now as you are to yourself. And I have more available to me when I'm in my body,  all right, open, when the heart is attuned and my mind is clear enough of all of those projections. That I'm placing on to you of the narratives and I can witness when I start to go on automatic and come back. Now what I would say is not everybody's going to change and not everybody's going to do this. And I think that if we start trying to have kind of pie in the sky idealism, which I'm very vulnerable to, there will come a time when we'll all be in peace. I don't know that that's going to happen, right? The actual living on this planet is a constricted state. But what we can do is have enough of us evolving to a state of consciousness where we're more prepared for what's coming and here you can come together so you're not so damn alone in it. You're not all by yourself and you don't feel so isolated. Just coming here tonight and guess what y'all, I didn't feel like it. I was home, I'd worked, I'd taken a nap, and I didn't want to come. Okay? And you come, you come anyway, because when you come here, and that's it, it's kind of that little hurdle, because COVID, it opened up something else in us that was pretty traumatic and we tend to be more homebound now. And I like this hybrid approach so people can come in online and then we can have also people here holding that somatic in person piece, but we have to be able to do this together. And I think a critical mass is putting new substances into the world. It's a toxic environment. Just watch how fast the comments on social media begin to polarize. It's not conducive to we, it's conducive to I, us versus them. It's how the algorithms work. What if we were putting spiritual substances into the environment by coming in and down, shifting states, and putting a little bit of patience out there, a little bit of courage. A little bit of fortitude, those kinds of spiritual, and they're actual substances. You can feel them when they're in the room. You know it when they're not in the room. 

Say more about the embodied sense of those substances. 

Well, what I found in any hive gathering. People come in one state and you prioritize the shift in states and then something starts to happen in the room. And that's what I said. I won't read a poem until I've brought people inside. Because you can put all sorts about signs in your yard about kindness and hope, but if no one has the capacity to take it in and if I've just come from work, And I'm all activated. You can be as kind as I'll get out, but I'm not going to be able to take it in. I don't see you and so when we shift states and  we're cultivating spiritual capacity. And so when you practice with a group like this, okay. And then you go out into the world, you're building new neurological grooves in the brain. And there is data on that, that your brain, when you're born is like freshly fallen snow. And your you go down a hill, like have you ever gone sled riding and freshly fallen snow? It's hard to get your sled down the hill. And then you do it and it gets easier and easier as the day goes on. That's your type. That's the neurological grooves. We can actually start to shift it and do something different. 

So, I'm just sitting here listening to you. And, I think one of the things that I find so magnetic about your lessliness is that it feels like you have this innate hope that things actually can change like that. We actually aren't stuck in these patterns of behavior and these neural pathways. But the minute I felt in my body, the minute you talked about the algorithms, I'm like, well, nevermind, we don't have hope anymore. And so I want to hear you talk about hope for a second. And especially as it connects to the changing world that we're in and also the prospect for us changing as a collective.

Well, I am an idealist on the Enneagram and my idealism has gotten me in a lot of trouble because I've been so crushed sometimes, especially the past few years, all of us in some ways, both personally and collectively. We all have. And so I think it's dangerous territory to tie hope to outcome. If I have hope for something to happen and then it doesn't happen, it's so deflating. Hope is a spiritual substance. Hope is a state. What I have found is change does happen, but it's not always what I had hoped for. We have to hold space for when it's not good and that's where I think groups can be supportive. There. I have hope in in us. I have hope in,  and for me, it's kind of a knowing that change happens and it's much more subtle than what we might experience in this constricted human reality. I know that to be true is that it's not about me getting what I want because if I'm in the mental structure, things are good when the good things happen to me Or, when they happen to my group, that's not hope. There's something larger happening right now, and we have to hold space of hope when things are really shitty, we have to allow whatever's happening  in the field instead, because we put so much attention on canceling the resistance, when sometimes it's the resistance and the constriction that shocks us to a wake up.  So, instead of it being so tied to outcome that it's going to be this, we just do the next right thing. We just take the next step. And to me, that's hope. Getting up, getting in my car, coming here, is hope. Because I believe  in you two. I believe in the core faculty that you've put together here. That's why I said yes, because of who you, the hive and who you asked. I believe in these people. I trust in each one of them. And to me, that's hope. And I have no idea what this is going to look like, Chris. No idea. You neither. Right? And we have to hold space for that part of ourselves that I have no idea what it's going to look like. We just do that next right thing. And then notice what happens inside when you do do that. And it's different. And so what I would say is the practice of the shifting of states, and it's the pause. It's that simple to saying, I give my clients a pause card with that big pause card and practice. And you can build not only individual neurological grooves, but you can build new collective grooves. And I believe that in my bones, that it's not about can I change this group to be this way? I think they should be because you know what they're praying for us to change, right? So it can't be about that. It has to be about us saying, okay, I am going to hold a larger container for what's really happening, which includes the really crappy stuff, because that's what evolution has always looked like. That's what nature is like. It's hard. And I think in a very privileged society that we live in with the, I mean, sometimes I lay down in my bed last night and put covers on. It was so comfortable. The comfort that we have, we're not real good at when things don't go well. We don't have a lot of tracks for that and so we're building capacity here and we can do that not only individually of committing to practice, but collective. 

How do you know when you're up and out and when you're in and down and receptive? Can you feel it? And if you can't name that, that's okay. Cause we don't have a lot of training in it, but how do you know when you're reactive and when you're receptive, when you shift states and do you know how to do it?  

So this poem is another Irish poet.  It's by David White. Many of you may have heard it.  So start close in.  Don't take the second step or the third. Start with the first thing. Close in.  The step you don't want to take.  Start with the ground you know.

The pale ground beneath your feet. Your own way to begin the conversation.  Start with your own question. Give up on other people's questions. Don't let them smother something simple.  To hear another's voice, follow your own voice. Wait until that voice becomes an intimate private ear that can really listen to another. 

Start right now. Take a small step you can call your own. Don't follow someone else's heroics.  Be humble and focused. Start close in.  Don't mistake that other for your own.  Start close in.  Don't take the second step or the third.  Start with the first thing. Close in. The step you don't want to take.

Well, I want to take us back to Leslie what you were articulating and saying, in meditative practice or in spiritual practice, when you drop in, there's an encounter with those kind of spiritual substances, right? And that kind of encounter starts to create new neurological grooves and that then creates a possibility for new collective groups, right? And  the way that hits my body is that feels like  maybe something new and novel and exciting to aspire toward, and I was in a high faculty meeting and Shonda was there talking about something like this and saying if only we could aspire toward that or if only we could finally realize that. And there was a way in which Shonda was like, what you're talking about is our birthright. Which completely flipped a paradigm for me. So to think of this space you're going, it's not some new kind of unknown thing to go after, even though it might feel that way, but to think of that as that's our individual birthright and that's our collective birthright, another way of saying that might be our birthright as individuals and as a collective is to be agents of loving change in the world. That's something I've been meditating on recently. To be agents of loving change in the world. And that's our birthright. That's not something for a certain amount of people or a certain group

that's why it's so familiar to people when you come home to yourself. There's almost a memory of it. It feels like remembering, 

Yeah. So then my question is what's the one story that's getting in the way Of the collective living into its birthright. What's the one story that's getting in the way of the collective living into its birthright? 

There's probably a lot of answers, but here's mine. Given where I stand. We see from where we stand.  It's our addiction to our individual stories. It's our addiction to my pain, my hurt, my, my, my, me, me, me, me, me. And so doesn't that feel kind of paradoxical when I say start with yourself? Right. But we don't end with ourselves. There's other people with other stories who are just like you. Pema Chodron, the Buddhist teacher, has a practice. When you go out and you see someone, they cut you off. They're just like me. They want to be loved. They want someone, they want to matter to someone, I think this is the most individualized culture ever. You know the Dr. Seuss book that everybody gets at their graduation, oh the places you'll go, that little person's all by themselves. In all of the images, they're by themselves, and I was listening to a podcast the other day where they gave it to a group of Hispanic immigrants who were just like, oh, that looks awful, and I'm not saying all Hispanic immigrants feel that way. I'm just saying as a collective, as an energetic, it tends to, oft times, a more communal culture. But we have to recognize that we live in this highly, highly individualized culture. And I remember one of my dearest friends did a his doctoral dissertation on what is pathology in the east and what is pathology in the west? And he did a lot of traveling in the east. It's like, they're not being collaborative enough. They're not communal enough. They're not honoring their father, mother, the family, the group, that's pathology. And in the West, they have a failure to launch. They're not going out on their own. So how do we hold those two? But I would say for us here, it's primarily this obsession with our own individual selves. And I think when we talk about this notion of our birthright, all right, it's our birthright and it's yours. I am loved and so are they. I am loved and so are you. It's always holding the both end of that. And if you look at social media never have we had so many access to say, look at me. Right, including me, I don't want to like other the people doing that. I'm on social media as well. We have to be really mindful that  it's a collective energy we're in right now. That's my dream. What I want. And there's not a whole lot of attention to how that fits in the Wii. So I think that's the current, the obstacles.

Thank you. Yeah. And we will ask that same exact question to each of the faculty members. So it'll be, we'll have to maybe create like a little montage, because the way Shonda might answer that, it's going to be different than the way Daniel answers or Lizzie. But I think we need that. Yeah, we need that quilt though.

And that's what's, that's the beauty of that quilt. All right, to open to what's, you know, we see from where we stand.  Yeah. And I'm also a self referencing type on the Enneagram,  right? So there's a, you know, there's an, there's a amplification of that in my self sense.  

SO Paula's group was talking about behavior and I think she's wondering about the distinction between the inner observer and being able to really go inside and drop in.

So the first step is, is awareness, is the pause. I'm going on automatic. I'm doing it again.  All right. So for me, you come to me with a problem. I'm a seven on the Enneagram. My mental habit is the mental habit of planning. So it's ideating and planning. I'm doing it again. So I'm not in the present moment with my feelings. Okay. And then I want to jump in and maybe go for the fix, so I can be aware of my habit and there's a ton of other habits that aren't as enneagram related that I have.  Pause.  Notice  how does that land when I'm when I'm doing that? What am I noticing? Oh, I can't feel my feet  Uncross your legs feel your feet on the ground.  All right, that's a start It's starting to come home in and down now. I'm getting kind of more in my body All right, when I'm in that mental habit of planning it literally sometimes hurts right here There's a ton of mental energy. I can feel it and I can't really see you  Right? Because I'm in all my ideas. I'm that person, they're like, that they say, thou shalt not fix, advise, save, set, straight. I'm the one fixing, advising, and saving, and setting straight when I'm in my habit.  Okay? So it's the awareness that that, that I'm doing at one, that's the inner observer. The pause is the shift in, down. And I have a whole centering practice that I do. And it's a very, it's a real repetitive practice because those neuro grooves, 300 times to actually charts to change the habit. You need 300 repetitions is what research is showing and you need 3000 for it to become automatic. So  the practice in your chair is the morning meditation. And I, like all of you, when I sit, my mind's all over the place, the meditation, anybody who said it's like, cause you're going to feel more inner peace, no, you'll feel a lot of turbulence cause that's what happens when you first go in. But what it's doing is it's starting to build the neurological grooves where I can  that I can slow down and pause. Now I can do it when I'm in a conversation, usually with those closest to me, one of my kids, my husband, and I start doing it. And for me sometimes, because I'm a assert type, I'm usually forward. It's to just sit back and feel the chair on my back,  right? Just doing that right now. I can feel the support of the chair and then breathe,  right? And then I can do something different. 

So, we were talking in, during  the small groups about this question of cultivating the spiritual centers, which is what you're beginning to talk about now. I wonder if you want to take another pass and go a little deeper. What does it look like to cultivate spiritual practice? 

There are four qualities of people who change Awareness This is a research of the Institute of Noetic Sciences repetition guidance from a teacher So somebody who's walked the path before so we have to do it and when the first one was intention I'm gonna I want to so it's intention Something awareness awakening repetition and guidance from a teacher. So I think you have to practice so what's your practice? What's different for everyone? Start where you are. What works start in the morning with a 10 minute sit. It could be centering prayer from the Christian tradition. It could be a Vipassana meditation from the Buddhist tradition. What I've noticed a lot of times as a high energy assert type, sometimes I can't sit in my chair first. Sometimes I have to do a yoga. I have a bend app. There's so many great apps to support you now. It's called bend. And the older you get, by the way, you can't do it. You have to bend. I have to move my body and get it moving to do what it used to do in the morning. So I start with a bend to start moving energy through my body then I do my sit and start three days a week, start there. And, the practice itself isn't going to be where you're going to walk away like a monk feeling inner peace and love everywhere, but what it's doing is building new neurological grooves and helping you slow. But this is my practice. I get up in the morning, I go sit in my chair, alright, I do my meditation, Insight Timer app,  I then do it, thanks to Paulette, we have a Quaker chant person here, I've learned that chant moves something through me in a different way. And so I chant just short, maybe a minute or two, and then  I do my bends and I do some Tai Chi that I learned from a friend. And that's my practice. The centering practice that I do throughout the day, I learned from the Strozzi Institute, which is embodied transformation. And they work a lot with, okay, what do I do when I get out into the collective? They're all about collective change. And so what I do with that is a centering practice where I feel the length of my spine. The width of my body, the ancestors standing behind me who support me, and then relax, and doing that multiple times a day, and I state my declaration or my intention. It's repetition, repetition, repetition, and it works.  It's not go for 80, you know, start with, can I do 10 percent? Do I notice a 10 percent change? Then go to 20. What are the conditions of satisfaction? How will I know I've changed? Get clear about that. For me, you know how I know? I don't go on social media first thing. Right? That's how I know that's a condition of satisfaction. So if I can come home to myself 50 percent of the time in the morning, do something concrete like that, that when I'm with my husband, I don't jump into fix, advise, save, and set straight 50 percent of the time in six months I get feedback that you seem a little bit different you're interrupting me less, you're fixing less. It feels like you're listening better. You get feedback that something's happening.  And so it's changes.  Chris, you're talking about aspirational. I think we get in trouble because we get so, so aspirational. We feel defeated at the gate, so just start with three minutes. Follow your breath for three minutes in bed. Start there before you even get up. James Hollis says at the foot of our bed every day is fear and lethargy. It sits there every day. And trust me, y'all, the older you get, they get larger, right? Especially the lethargy one. And I'm this high activity person, right? So it's just like, I'm noticing that there's this part of me that just loves the feeling of this bed and so, okay, I'm going to take a moment, enjoy that, but so I'm bringing conscious awareness. And what I've noticed is when I bring conscious awareness to whatever's happening, all of a sudden I kind of want to get out of bed so I'm not shaming myself for being in bed. I'm noticing that I'm really enjoying this and  so the and is the opening. So we first have awareness, then we have an opening. Can I do something a little different just right now? And then the third is practice. So, awareness opening and then practice, one person said to me, I realized that I would tell myself to listen to my body and then I would get in neighborhoods where I had conditioning to be afraid. I can't say I'm going to listen to my body, my body's telling the truth that she has conditioning to be afraid in that neighborhood, it's not telling the truth of the neighborhood, it's telling the truth of her body and her conditioning in the neighborhood. What if I could open to 10% and then maybe smile at somebody in the neighborhood, have an encounter in the neighborhood, make contact. Okay, I did it. It's just a small incremental change. That would be a collective thing to do because I've been practicing in my practice. Coming home to myself, grounding that I think I can, I'm a fear type. I can say hi to that person behind the counter checking out. I gave a six one time homework to smile at the grocery checkout clerk. And he said, Oh my God, it's transformational. They smile back most of the time, right? as a six, I expect them to be like, what the hell are you smiling about? It's going to be different for every person. So when I'm in, when I'm working with clients, I'm listening for the patterns. 

So Jen's asking a question around like the refrain. I heard that you said multiple times was the grandness of the world suffering, Which you might say  we have more than any time in history. You have so many nodes to tap into that right with news and social media. And then there's a sense of what work is mine to do? And there's a overwhelm of the world's suffering. And then this frustration like, well, what work is mine to do in the midst of all this suffering? And, uh, Leslie talking about these increments of satisfaction, how do you find that when it feels like nothing's ever enough? So many different stories start to pop up in the body. So how do you find yourself oriented in the work of collective change and being part of healing collective suffering? 

So, first of all, it's not enough, right? It's not ever, we're not going to solve the world's suffering.  And so that can sound really glib and it's true.  I think people on this path tend to feel that a lot. iN this training with  Strozzi around collective embodied transformation, one of the things they point to is the importance of resilience practices for people who are doing any kind of work within the collective, that your body can't sustain. And you're not us sinking into and it's normal.  I mean, if you're not experiencing, you're not paying attention, right? But we can pay. I think what we have to do is what we can do in that present moment. We have to come. That's where you come home to yourselves in the present moment and say, what do I need right now? Cause Jen,  I've been around some bitter, bitter activists that are putting into the field what they're fighting. We become sometimes what we're fighting, okay? And I think some sort Of resilience practice has to be is crucial. So what I'm talking about is kind of that practice when you're on your when you go before you go on automatic, so my son did a semester at sea one time and for six months. On the semester at sea Archbishop Desmond Tutu was there and I don't know if you're familiar with Archbishop Desmond Tutu But  he really led the fall of apartheid in South Africa. He was kind of the spiritual director With Nelson Mandela the fall of apartheid and my son was like, he's so happy. He's so joyful all the time. He just like laughs and he sees such hope in the world. And this is a guy who's been in the trenches has experienced the worst of things. That to me is this sign of a practice. And one of the things my son said too was during Easter that he went into, he says they asked, how long do you meditate? He says, well, I meditate an hour a day unless I'm under stress. And then it's two hours a day, that I'm even actually more in my practice and then to have resiliency practices too. What brings you resilience?  You know, watching you karaoke the other night brought me so much joy. I just sat there, these two young women standing up there singing their hearts out in karaoke. I could weep as I talk about it. It was so genuine and so full of joy.  Do that.  And that's putting substances into the world. I mean, my body's buzzing, just talking about it.  That's a substance. And that matters in the field. Take breaks. I take news breaks too. You know, the body can only handle so much. I hope that helps. It feels really, you know, inadequate, but it's a start. 

So we got a question from Catherine online. She says, you're given a lot of examples about yourself and about your family. Do you have any examples of collective change? 

Yeah.  I've been to a number of protests and a passion of mine is immigration and Typically when I do a march for immigration, oft times I find myself with Franciscans,  that's a lineage of the Catholic priesthood, and nuns, and pastors, and People doing spiritual practice and the energy in the field. The most recent one we did was in front of Rob Portman's office. And  we were in front of his office and we did our march. And I remember feeling slightly embarrassed cause we were all smiling and we were in the inquirer when they did a story on it and we were smiling like that maybe should, we should look sad and feel, but it was a feeling of expansion. And these were people that, to me, were so obviously grounded in the practice. I then did a recent march where there wasn't that. And it was like an assault to my body and the thing I was concerned about  is that, and I think this is why anger has to be an important part of our practice. Right? But I get concerned with how much we take to the energetic field because it's contagious aNd I have to be really careful of that because I'm not saying to not be angry. Sometimes anger is the response, but I think there has to be some skill and those of us who do this practice can. Practices and can lead there that anger is to me. It's the motivating energy that sometimes gets me out to the protest. It was anger that got me in the car, the anger that that got me on the street. Okay. It was anger that had me write the letter to the congressperson and canvas, those kinds of things but what I was concerned about with this, it was putting so much into the field and I'm watching the bystanders, right? And it creates kind of an amplification and so that's where I think and I could get some pushback around that, but I think I want to stand by that because we have to be aware of what we're putting into the field. So for me, doing these two very different protests, it was quite remarkable because I I left one feeling hope and feeling motivated to continue and I left the other just feeling this kind of deflation of, um. Yeah, I felt hopeless. I felt hopeless. So I just want to say something that I'm noticing in my body right now, my heart's beating because I'm, I'm really aware of this thing around anger and I can feel my attention there. It's such an important energy and what I see is there has to be some skill with how we channel that. I'm just aware that I'm feeling a little agitated about that, that question, because it feels really big. And I know what I feel inside when I go to these different protests. So I would just invite you to sit, to ask yourself, how do I hold that? How do I hold those emotions and how do I bring them into the collective? And just to ask yourself what do I do with that?