July 5, 2016 • 53 mins
Photo Credit: Dan Kowalski, Bainbridge Island, WA This week we talk to Parker J Palmer about finding wholeness Parker J. Palmer, is the founder and Senior Partner of the Center for Courage & Renewal. He is a world-renowned writer, speaker and activist who focuses on issues in education, community, leadership, spirituality and social change. He has reached millions worldwide through his nine books, including Let Your Life Speak, The Courage to Teach, A Hidden Wholeness, and Healing the Heart of Democracy. Parker holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley, as well as eleven honorary doctorates, two Distinguished Achievement Awards from the National Educational Press Association, and an Award of Excellence from the Associated Church Press. In 2010, Palmer was given the William Rainey Harper Award whose previous recipients include Margaret Mead, Elie Wiesel, and Paolo Freire. In 2011, he was named an Utne Reader Visionary, one of “25 people who are changing your world.” Our Sponsor this Week is Casper Mattress Visit casper.com/feed and use the promo code “feed” to get $50 off!! In This Interview, Parker J Palmer and I Discuss... The One You Feed parable That wholeness is not about perfection but it's about embracing all that we are His book, Hidden Wholeness: A Journey Towards an Undivided Life What the idea of "the Soul" means to him His experiences with clinical depression and the lesson he's learned, a.k.a. "the pearl of great price" What "the divided life" is That we need BOTH community and solitude The voice of depression The important concept of, "If you can't be in community, watch out for being alone and if you can't be alone, watch out for being in community." The idea of "The Circle of Trust" That sometimes giving advice to someone is like giving CPR to people who can breathe for themselves & when we give them CPR, we're actually inhibiting their own capacity to breathe The importance of letting another person work their way to the answer themselves His book, Healing the Heart of Democracy What he has to say about the current state of politics That rather than looking at the right vs left division in politics, another view is to look at the people who think they can't do anything politically and have given up vs the activists That our founding fathers really got it wrong when defining who "we the people" are The important role that conflict brings to our form of government The Five Habits of the Heart that are important to healing the heart of democracy For more show notes visit our webpage
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
We have multiple voices within us, and it's not always clear,
even when we're not in a state of depression, that
we're listening to true self. Welcome to the one you
feed throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized the importance of
(00:22):
the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out,
or you are what you think ring true, and yet
for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
see what we don't have instead of what we do.
We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
(00:44):
But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
good wolf m Thanks for joining us. Our guest on
(01:13):
this episode is Parker Palmer, an author, educator, and activist
who focuses on issues and education, community leadership, spirituality, and
social change. Parker is the founder and senior partner of
the Center for Courage and Renewal. He's also the author
of many books, including A Hidden Wholeness the journey toward
an undivided life. And here's the interview with Parker Palmer. Hi, Parker,
(01:39):
welcome to the show. Thank you, very good to be
with you. I'm happy to have you on UM. I've
had a chance to explore some of your work, particularly
in depth over the last week, and I think there's
a lot that that really spoke to me about it,
and I look forward to getting into some of those details.
Before we do that, though, Let's start like we always do,
with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his
(02:02):
grandson and he says, in life, there are two wolves
inside of us that are always at battle. One is
a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery
and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which
represents things like greed, hatred, and fear. And the grandson
stops for a second. He looks up at his grandfather
and he says, grandfather, which one wins, And the grandfather
(02:26):
quietly replies, the one you feed. So I'd like to
start off by asking you what that parable means to
you in your life and in the work that you do.
I think it's a fascinating story, and I suppose paradoxical
reactions to it. As you may know, paradox is a
big word in my vocabulary, and we will probably return
(02:46):
to it. On the one hand, I agree completely that
we have these uh contrary forces inside of us, the
forces of light on the forces of darkness, and a
lot depends on on which one we feed. Um. I.
When I first read that parable years ago, I thought
of Abraham Lincoln's appeal to the better angels of our nature,
(03:11):
and of course in doing so, he was also implying
that we have lesser angels in there as well. So
on that level, I'm I'm with the parable. On another level,
I wrestle with the implications a little bit in the
sense that but I think that in the long run,
(03:32):
human wholeness has a lot to do with integrating the
light and the dark in us, rather than trying to
overwhelm one with the other, rather than trying to imagine
that it's possible to drive out the darkness. Um. It
seems to me that we always live with our with
(03:53):
our shadows, partly because they're the hardest things for us
to see in ourselves. We can we can see the
auto in another person quite easily. Oh he or she
is greedy or or resentful or angry or whatever, but
we have a harder time seeing that in ourselves. I
(04:13):
want to find wholeness as in this way, wholeness is
not perfection. Wholeness is about embracing all of what we
are and and acknowledging that our darkness is as important
as as our light and sort of holding that in
our in our conscious awareness as we go through the day, um,
(04:37):
so that we can kind of manage our lives in
that complicated force field. So, like most stories or parables
or metaphors, that one sort opens up a whole raft
of questions for me that I find very fruitful. Yeah,
I agree. I think it's on the surface, it's very straightforward.
You kind of get it and it's about choice and
(04:59):
then but as you go further into it, there really
are these these things about how do we work with
those bad wolf part of ourselves? You know. I think
it's like as a parable it just at a certain
point you're like, well, it's not a literal story, so
you you can't take it that way. But the show
has really spent a lot of time, I think exploring
how we work with with both parts of that and
You've got a number of books. I spent time mainly
(05:21):
with two of them, Um, and we'll we'll start with
the first one that I read, which is called Hidden Wholeness,
the journey towards an undivided life. And this really gets
to kind of what you were just talking about in
the Integration of the Wolves. Now, I have to say
that anybody that starts a book with a Leonard Cohen
quote is always going to be a favorite of mine. Um.
And you you start the book by by quoting a
(05:42):
line of his from the song the Future. It says,
the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and
it has overturned the order of the soul. And what
I'd like to start talking about is this idea of
the soul. It it comes up a lot in your writing,
and I was wondering if you could explain what that
means to you. Well, I'll take my best shot. Um.
(06:07):
I hesitate a bit because I think ultimately soul is
a word that points toward a mystery which we know
by many names, and for which no one has the
right name. The closest I've ever been able to come
to what I might mean by soul is the being
(06:27):
and human being, but other traditions name it in other
ways of Secular Humanists call it identity and integrity, Buddhists
call it big Self. Thomas Merton called it true self.
The Hasidic Jews call it the spark of the divine
and every being. I've always said that it doesn't matter
(06:50):
to me what you call it, since no one knows
its true name, and fighting over the name seems utterly
nonsensical to me. But it does matter to me that
you call it something, because if you don't, if you
don't have a name for it by way of acknowledging
its existence, it's it's reality. Then it seems to me
(07:13):
we end up treating ourselves and each other as objects
to be manipulated or manufactured into whatever shape the culture
wants us to take, or empty vessels to be filled
with other people's knowledge and quote, wisdom and guidance. So
I think the naming of this mystery within the human
(07:35):
self is a way of making a deep vow to
every person, because every person has this thing called soul,
whatever whatever it may be. I think for me, the
discovery of soul happened under extremely stressful, difficult, dark circumstances,
(07:58):
namely by own journey into clinical depression three times in
my adult life, And whenever you'd like, I'd be glad
to talk more about that. We don't mention depression on
this show never. I'm sure you're talking about human experience.
I'm sure you never do. I'm a fellow sufferer, and
(08:18):
it it comes up often. How long ago was your last,
you know, major episode? And I'd be curious how much
of it sort of happens at a more minor level
for you when you're not in the middle of a
major episode. Is a kind of an on off switch
or is it? Is there a gradient there for you? Well,
I think like most of us, I you know, I
swing through a certain range of moods day by day,
(08:41):
like weather moving through. But as all of us who
have experienced clinical depression, no, it's not at all like
being sad or feeling bad. Um. In fact, one of
the features of depression that's so terrifying, as you really
can't feel anything, your your emotions are gone. So my
(09:03):
my most recent experience was what twelve years ago, when
I was sixty five years old. My two prior experiences
were in my forties, my early forties and then my
late forties. So the one at age sixty five I'm
now seventy seven. The one at age sixty five took
me by surprise. But what I what I mean the
(09:26):
perl of great price. In these very long, months long
um journeys underground, I used to say depression is like
being lost in the dark, but I eventually refined that
to say depression is like becoming the dark, which is
quite a different thing. Um. You know, when when you're
(09:50):
in depression, you don't have that capacity to take the
balcony view of yourself and say, oh, I see what's
going on with me, as we can when we're angry
or having other sort of normal range emotions. And once
we can get in the balcony and get a look
at ourselves, we can often find a way out. But
(10:12):
when you have become the darkness, you don't have any
outside view of it. You don't have any leverage on it.
But I discovered in depression, and of course some of
this is in the aftermath or on your way out,
I discovered that the faculties that I normally depend on
we're dead and gone. And there are four of them
(10:35):
that I at least depend on with some regularity. One
is my intellect, another is my ego, another is my emotions,
and another is my will. Well, in depression, you can't
think your way out of it, so the intellect is useless.
Your ego is shattered. You have no sense of self,
so that doesn't work either. Your emotions, as I have said,
(10:58):
are dead and gone. You can't feel anything, and your
will power is limited to the tiniest, tiniest steps, like
getting up at eleven o'clock instead of eleven thirty, being
able to to face the day just a little earlier.
And it was under those circumstances that I began to
(11:20):
dissense from time to time that there was this little
tiny spark of life way back in the thickets of
of the dark forest, that my life had become that
wanted me to stay alive. I came to liken it
to a wild animal, which is very very widely and
(11:44):
can can tough, and can survive where there's little to
eat and little encouragement, but like the wild animal, is
also very very shy. And I became very interested, under
those circumstances, in what it might be like to create
(12:06):
conditions where the soul or whatever you want to call
it could put in a more regular appearance than it
does in normal, everyday society, where we create so many
conditions that that drive the shy soul back into hiding.
As I like to say, we all know that if
(12:27):
if we want to see a wild animal out in
the woods, the last thing we want to do is
to go through the woods shouting for it to come out.
What we want instead is to sit quietly at the
base of a tree, breathe with the earth, and after
a while, the thing we're seeking may put in an appearance.
(12:48):
We may catch it only out of the corner of
our eye, but once you've seen it, you won't forget it.
And and that was the image that came to me
as I emerged from the depths of depression. I love
that analogy about the wild animal, and will come back
to what are some of the ways that you've worked
(13:09):
to create of potentially, you know, drawing the soul out
um you say that, I'm just going to quote you.
Hear that you said the divided life is a wounded life,
and the soul keeps calling us to heal the wound.
Ignore that call, and we find ourselves trying to numb
our pain with an anesthetic of our choice, be a substance, abuse,
over work, consumerism, or mindless media noise. Such anesthetics are
(13:34):
easy to come by in society that wants to keep
us divided and unaware of our pain. So from your perspective,
is the divided life? Was that behind what's happening in
the depression sense for you? I think? So, I mean
when I talk about depression, as I think you know, Eric,
I'm always eager to say that depression comes in many forms,
(13:56):
and those who specialize in studying and trying to treat
depression are the first to say that there's a lot
of mystery surrounding what's in wies of depression. So I'm
reluctant to make huge generalizations as if they apply to everybody.
Some depressions are strictly genetic or related to brain chemistry,
(14:19):
I think, and others are highly highly situational. And then
what gets what gets really confusing, is that no matter
which end of the spectrum you start at, the two
can intermingle. So if you start with a situational depression
or something in your life where you're living a divided
(14:40):
life and something is troubling, you so deeply that you're
losing sleep and you develop radical insomnia that can change
your brain chemistry in a way that creates depression on
the other hands apart exactly. And if you start with
a genetically based depression the distorts your perceptions and your behavior,
(15:02):
then you're going to end up in situations that worse
than it. So it's a it's a tricky thing to unrample.
I think there is in my background, my family background,
some genetic predisposition toward depression UM. And I think that
in my case, the balance of factors were more situational
(15:27):
than genetic or biochemical. H And here's the rest of
(16:00):
the interview with Parker Palmer. So one of the things
that I have discovered as we've done this show, when
I think about personal development or this whole area of
the soul of spirituality, there's so much thought and writing
and literature on that need to go within um, the
need to understand our thoughts, to meditate. And as I've
(16:21):
done the show, certainly we've talked a lot about that,
but I've been surprised by how often we've talked about
you know, people have brought us back to the importance
of other people. And one of the things that I
found most profound in your writing was the way that
you very over and over drive home this idea that
it's not an either or thing that we really need
(16:44):
in order to nurture the soul. We really need both
the community and solitude. Can you explain a little bit
more why both those things are so critical. That's a
very important point, certainly to me, and I'm glad it
is to you and apparently to other guests on your show. Um.
(17:05):
You know, Dietrich bon Hoffer was a great German theologian
who took a stand against Hitler and was executed just
before the end of the war. He wrote a wonderful
book called Life Together, and the life he lived kind
of gives him a lot of street cred in my mind.
(17:26):
And what he said, and one of the great sentences
in that book is this, let the person who cannot
be in community be aware of being alone, and let
the person who cannot be alone be aware of being
in community. And I think that behind that is this
very important paradox that we need to first of all,
(17:53):
but you could start in either place, but I'm going
to start first with the inner journey and with listening
to the voice of true self or the voice of
the soul. I'm a Quaker, and as we Quakers would say,
the voice of the inner teacher. Um. That's obviously critical.
But as you know, and I know, and anyone who's
(18:15):
suffered from depression knows, there's something called the voice of
depression that speaks lies about who we are. It tells
us that we're worthless. It tells us today is the
day to take your life because there's no hope left.
And if you journey with depression, you have to fight
that voice off with some regularity. In other words, we
(18:39):
have multiple voices within us, and it's not always clear,
even when we're not in a state of depression, that
we're listening to true self. Perhaps we're listening to a
voice of resentment or heart or agreed or of simple anger.
So it's a portant to have a community in which
(19:02):
to test, to sift and Winnow what it is you're
hearing from within? And I don't mean a community that
that listens to what you have to say and then
tells you you're right or you're wrong, or you're half
right and half wrong. That doesn't work. I'm talking about
a community of discernment where we have a chance to
(19:24):
speak our truth, whatever we may think it is, into
the center of the circle, or or into the space
between us in a in a relationship and be deeply
listened to by the other person and get the gift
from the other person of honest, open questions. One of
(19:48):
the ground rules in the work I do, which I
know we'll be talking about a little later, is no fixing,
no saving, no advising, and no correcting each other. Um.
This is what creates safe space for the soul. Um.
And if you think about those four words correcting, advising, saving,
and fixing hit. If you think about those four words correcting, fixing, advising,
(20:13):
and saving each other, um, those are the things that
we mostly do when we listen to other people. Somebody
comes to us with a problem and we may listen
for a few minutes, maybe a little longer if we've
recently been to a listening workshop, and and then we'll say, well,
(20:33):
you know, I I read this great book on that subject.
Why don't you go read it. I'm sure it would
do a lot of good. Or for some exercises you
can do, or a diet you ought to go on, etcetera. Instead,
we learned in the work I do to ask each
other honus to open questions, which are the kind of
(20:53):
questions that hear other people into deeper and deeper speech
and cause us to pause and wonder, is that the
voice of true self I've been listening to or is
it something else? Um an honest, open question which has
(21:14):
serves no purpose except to enable us to have a
deeper conversation with ourselves, and which can only come in community,
whether that's a community of two people or ten people
or fifty people. That's the kind of of inquiry that
constitutes communal discernment of the sort I'm talking about, that
(21:38):
can help us sort out the wheek from the chaff
in our own internal dialogue. To me, this is a
very important principle, and it explains why bon Hoffer said,
if you can't be in community, watch out about being alone,
and if you can't be alone, watch out about about
being in community. When you look at that the second
(22:00):
half of that, if you can't be alone, to be
aware of being in community. Aloneness is one of the
conditions under which we we come home to ourselves, and
we can show up in community as who we really are,
not as some well, Thomas Martin. He used a great phrase,
(22:21):
he said, most of us live lives of self impersonation,
so we can show up in community is who we
really are, rather than as self impersonators. So I'm I'm
fascinated with this paradox of solitude and community and with
how it is that we take our discernment of our
(22:41):
own truth in solitude and community, how it is we
take that into the larger world of social and political
action or simply of neighborly concern. There's so much in
what you said there. The first is the process you
described mean is something that you call a circle of trust.
(23:02):
And uh, your book The Hidden Wholeness really explores that
in great, great detail, and I would encourage people to
definitely check that out. UM will have a download on
our site at one you feed dot net slash Parker
that we'll have some of that, and we'll have links
to your site and all the great things that are
available out on your site. I wanted to explore a
(23:23):
couple of ideas within the circle of trust that I
thought was interesting because this idea of you know, we're
not going to advise other people, were not going to
fix them, because I was listening to you, I was thinking, well,
in some cases, that's exactly what we're asking for and
what we want. Like if I come to someone and
say hey, like I I coach people who come to
me and say hey, I can't seem to uh, I
can't seem to get a daily exercise practice going right
(23:46):
in a situation like that, you know, very concrete advice
can be really useful, but what you're talking about is
really going into that deeper level of discovering who we are,
um to reaching our soul. And you you talk a
lot about. The thing that I think is so important
to what you're saying there is that that answer is
only going to come from ourselves. You know. It's that
(24:09):
idea of having an inner teacher, and that that the
circle of trust in these methods you talk about are
really there to get us in touch with our own
inner teacher, and that's why it needs the quiet and
the respect and the safety of that circle of trust. Absolutely,
of course, there are circumstances when some sort of advice
(24:30):
is both wanted and helpful. I do think that sometimes
that we have a tendency generally to give advice, whether
it gets wanted or helpful or not, partly because in
everyday life giving it gets us off the hook. You know,
you you come to me with your problem. I'm kind
(24:50):
of mentally looking at my watch and thinking, I'm kind
a busy day out of me and a lot of
things to do. If I can give Eric a piece
of advice about this, I can kind of wash my
hands of any further responsibility for him, because if he
takes my advice, he'll he'll be fine, and if he doesn't,
that's his problem, not mine, right, So, so advice giving
(25:12):
can be a form of of brushoff and and one
of the big dangers about the frequency with which we
give advice is is the fact that it's it's kind
of like giving CPR to people who actually can breathe
for themselves. Um, And when we give them CPR, then
(25:34):
we're actually inhibiting their own capacity to breathe. There are
people who need CPR because they can't breathe, But when
we're giving it in the inappropriate circumstances, it's not helpful.
And I think the other thing to always remember about
our advice, and I'm sure that this is something you
(25:55):
think about a lot as a coach, is that a
person may ask for advice, but if there is not
a readiness within that person to receive it and let
it sink in and then implemented, the advice is not
going to help. And and so anything we can do
(26:18):
two to let the answers to that person's problem arise
from within that person, I think that then the greater
service we're being to that to that individual. Yeah, there's
no doubt that when people can work their way to
the answer themselves, they're much more likely to buy in
(26:40):
and do it. And I just I really like the
circle of trust idea, and I would if we had
more time, I would like to really go deeper into it.
But I it's I know, for me, it's one of
those things I'm going to keep spending some time on
and look at. And I've looked at a couple of
the retreats that you do, and so I you know,
I may may go to one of those because I
think of myself as somebody who listens well. But but
(27:03):
your book and the way that you approach this is
very different than most of what we're taught, and it
resonates as as very true. And I thought that part
where you talked about the fixing and advising others is
a way to get ourselves off the hook. Is a
is a really profound idea that I had never thought
of before. Yeah, I'm quite sure that professional coaches and
(27:24):
counselors don't do that, but I think in the ordinary,
everyday life we do a fair amount of that. Oh yeah,
it's a good cautionary idea to keep in mind. You know,
a classic case would be a parent with a child
who's who's just come home from a hairy day at
work and looking forward to it, you know, a relaxing evening,
(27:47):
and here comes your teenager with the terrible, terrible problem.
Well there's you know, there's an inevitable human tendency to
just want to get to get this exchange over with
as quickly as possible. Yeah, and uh yeah, so I
think we all recognize that we need to cut ourselves
some slack about that. I'm a great believer in self
(28:09):
forgiveness because I've screwed up so often. That is the
advantage of screwing up as often as I have, And
it sounds like you have as you you really you
have to get good at self forgiveness and forgiving others. Yep,
And you've got to make all of life a learning journey, or,
as Gandhi said, experiments with truth and then you then
you have to learn from the failed experiments. One of
(28:32):
the things that I wanted to go deeper into is
I want to move from your book on the Hidden
Wholeness and go to Healing the Heart of Democracy. Although
I find a great deal of commonality between UM, I
find a lot of the concepts carry over in those books.
But obviously when you wrote that book, we weren't in
(28:55):
the middle of the election circus we're in now. Is
anything you wrote in there or do you feel any
different or anything that you would add to that book
after kind of what you're you know, what we've been
watching this year? Yes and no. And as I'll say
in a minute, in fact, I have been in a
way adding pages to the head book with some things
(29:18):
I've recently written and published. UM. It seems to me
that the fundamental principles I laid out in that book
are still very sound. And one of the things that
that's happening right now is something that's happened for a
very long time in our American political discourse, but now
(29:40):
it's happening on steroids. And what I'm referring to is
is this, as I say in the book, when Americans
talk about politics, and this has been true for many,
many years, we almost always talk about them, about those
people in Washington, d c. Or in the state capitol
(30:04):
who are either screwing something everything up or or on
occasion whom we regard as heroes for taking the right stand.
But whatever it is, we're always talking about people who
aren't in the room. And when I talked to audiences
about this, I say, you know, when was the last time,
(30:24):
in your personal life, or in your work situation, or
in your congregation or neighborhood, when was the last time
that talking about someone who isn't there has solved any problem?
As we all know it doesn't. In fact, it's better
classified as gossip than as political discourse or as just
(30:47):
letting off steam, and we all understand it on that level.
But my belief is that in a country founded on
the on the fundamental premise that this is all about
we the people, that this is a government of the people,
by the people, and for the people, we the people
need to get our act together, and what that means
(31:10):
is learning to talk across the lines that divide us
on a local level, um. Not to talk about them,
but to talk with each other, um, and to do
that across lines of division in a way that would
at least give us a fighting chance to come to
(31:31):
a rough consensus on a few items of the common good,
so that we can articulate that common good to people
in power and hold them accountable to it more effectively.
I'll put this in slightly different terms. We have succumbed
for a long time to the divide and conquer tactic
(31:54):
that is often used in American politics by people who
wish to seize power at high levels of political office.
And you know, they're very, very good at that, and
our media play along with it, um in ways that
divide us artificially. It seems to me that, you know,
if if you read the screaming headlines in the newspaper,
(32:20):
or the streaming headlines on CNN, or that flow across
your computer screen, you know, you would think that the
people who live up and down my block and the
people who live up and down your block are at
each other's throats most of the time. But that's not true.
There is there. There is when you drill down to
(32:41):
the local level to the level of we the people,
there is a surprising amount of consensus um and I
can tell micro stories or macro stories about that. Let
me tell a macro story, since those tend to be
more impressive to people who who are who are cynics,
or who have given up on this possibility in American
(33:06):
political life. A lot of people are unaware of the
fact that sixteen states have now called by referendum or legislation,
have now called for a constitutional amendment to overcome the
Supreme Court decisions called Citizens United, which gave big money
(33:32):
extraordinary overweening power in our political process. Most people who
have looked at American politics have said the game is lost.
Once the Supreme Court established the Citizens United laws, it
was no longer possible for ordinary people to get their
(33:54):
voices heard in the American political process. But sixteen states
have now called for a constitutional amendment, and another six
team have such calls in the pipeline, And that's moving
in on the two thirds of necessary among the states
to eventually pass that constitutional amendment in the Congress. Now
(34:17):
we're a long way from passing a constitutional amendment. That's
not the argument I'm making. The argument I'm making is
very simple. The calls that I'm talking about, which have
either happened or in the pipeline, would never have happened
if there had not been a broad conversation and a
(34:40):
broad coalition across the political spectrum left, center and right
of people who, despite the fact that they range from
progressive Democrats to members of the Tea Party, are in
agreement that chrony capitalism is a bad thing. That it's
a bad thing, whether you're left, right or a center,
(35:02):
to have a Congress that is essentially bought and paid
for by lobbyists and corporations and other folks who have
benefited from citizens united. So is that conversation possible? You
bet it is. And one of the best macro examples
is the one I just gave. What I found really
(35:55):
interesting about that section of your book was we tend
to think of the divide in the political spectrum between
right and left. You know, that tends to be where
we draw up our lines and and think that that's
really where we're divided in And you said that a
more use maybe maybe useful isn't the right word. But
(36:15):
a different division to look at is the division between
the people who have given up and think they can't
do anything politically. I absolutely believe that, and I've never
found an activist at any point on the political spectrum
with with whom it wasn't possible to find at least
(36:36):
hatches of common ground. Because we begin by sharing the
sense that we are a part of we the people,
and we have a voice that wants to be heard,
and we have agency the capacity to translate that voice
into effective action. All that remains is for us to
(36:57):
find those substantive issues on which we agree, and there
are lots of them, left right and center. In poll
after poll and in action project after action project have
found consensus not only around chrony capitalism, but around the
reform of our drug laws, around prison reform, around meaningful
(37:22):
reasonable forms of gun control, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, all of
these things that if you simply read the headlines you
would imagine we're totally polarized on when when in fact
we're not. And the other thing, the other point that
I make in the book, and I as you know, Eric,
and this is an important point to me, is that
(37:45):
all the founders of this country really got it wrong
about who constitutes we the people. You know, for them,
it didn't involve women, didn't involve enslaved human beings, it
did involved Native Americans, it didn't involve white men who
didn't own land. We the people was people who looked
(38:09):
looked like them, like the Founders, quite male gentry landowners,
and they essentially wanted a country that was that was
governed by that kind of elite. Well, they got that
terribly wrong, and they planned DNA in this American experiment
(38:31):
in democracy that we are, you know, that is still
bearing bad fruit today and will for a long time
to come. It's called racism, it's called sexism, and so
forth and so on. And candidates, in certain candidates Mr.
Trump being the most notable example at the moment, are
(38:53):
playing on all of that in a really demonic way. Um.
We can talk about that in a little bit if
you'd like. Um. But the Founders, despite the fact that
they blew it when it comes to who's included and
we the people, had a particular form of political genius
(39:18):
which we cannot forget, and that is that they crafted
the first form of government that I'm aware of any way,
in which conflict, even intense conflict, is regarded not as
the enemy of a good social order, but as the
(39:41):
engine of a better social order. Um, that's why we
have the structure of government that we do, which in
the book I likened to a weaver's loom, holding the
tension of threads on which the fabric of a good
society can keep getting woven and rewill them. The historian
(40:03):
Joseph Ellis has written eloquently about the fact that our
form of government was not intended to come to quick
solutions to problems. Instead, it was intended to keep the
salient problems on the table long enough that we, in
holding their tension, we could open our minds and hearts
(40:25):
to better and better solutions, a more perfect union, to
use the language of the Founders. So it's it's that
structure of government that over the years has allowed us
to expand the definition of we the people way beyond
what the founders imagined, and much for the better, especially
(40:46):
in a society that by fifty is going to be
over half people of color. You have five habits of
the heart that you describe that are important to heal
the heart of democracy, and we're not going to time
to go through all of them. But I wanted to
circle back to one that you reference there, which is
an ability to hold tension in life giving ways. Can
(41:10):
you explore what that means a little bit more. We
have this primitive brain stem that the lizard brain, I
guess some people call it, that has these instinctive behaviors,
the most famous of which is the fight or flight response,
(41:30):
so that when we're hit with the tension of a
sudden stimulus, our tendency is either to turn around and
punch it out or to flee from it in fear.
So we don't like we don't like tension. We either
run away or or try to kill it off. And there's,
(41:54):
you know, there's evidence after evidence of how difficult it
is for us to hold tension at all, let alone
to hold it creatively. Um One of the studies that
fascinates me as someone who has a deep belief in
the power and the necessity of silence to do any
(42:18):
kind of meaningful discernment. There have been studies that show
that the average group can tolerate about fifteen seconds of
silence before somebody has to break it because because suddenly
people are experiencing the tension of thinking something has gone wrong.
This is getting awkward. This you know, and in our
(42:41):
groups where we practice silence in these circles of trust
and learn, it's its value. We like to say to people,
silence isn't a sign that something is going wrong. It
may be a sign that something is going really, really right,
(43:01):
as people reflect deeply on what they've been hearing and
try to integrate it into their own lives. So there
are a lot of examples of how hard it is
for us to hold tension, as in the tension of
political viewpoints left, right and center. Well, tension holding does
create stress. But in writing the book, I was intrigued
(43:25):
to discover that there's an antonym to the word distress.
So we talk a lot about how distressing tension is,
but psychologists talk about you stress e U s t
r e S s U stress, which is the positive
effective tension that the tension that opens us up to
(43:47):
new ways of looking at the world, the tension that
opens our hearts to new levels of humanity and compassion.
I'm as you know from reading the book, Um, I
work a lot with this image of the human heart,
(44:09):
by which I don't mean simply the seat of our emotions. UM.
If you, if you go back to the root of
the word heart. It comes from the Latin core c
o r So it's that center place in the human
self c o r e where all of our faculties
converge emotion, will intellect um you know, ego in the
(44:35):
positive sense, bodily knowledge, relational knowledge, problem solving knowledge, etcetera.
So we enter life circumstances, especially if we care about
other people and about what's going on around us, we
enter life circumstances that that takes us to something called heartbreak.
(44:57):
It's a very common human phenomena, but I've observed over
seventy seven years of hanging out with myself and others,
that the human heart can break in at least two ways.
It can shatter into a million pieces, and sometimes as
(45:18):
it's in the process of shattering, it gets hurled at
the ostensible source of its pain, in the in the
manner of a fragment grenade, trying to to do harm,
to do damage to where that pain is coming from.
(45:38):
That's one way for the heart to break, and we
see a lot of that these days. But it's also
possible for the heart to break not apart, but open
into greater capacity. And if we look carefully at the
microcosms of our lives. We'll see a lot of that too.
(46:00):
At my age, I know a lot of people who
have lost the dearest person in their lives to death,
and their hearts are broken. They go into that long,
deep underground period of grieving and slowly slowly emerge awakening
(46:21):
to the surprising revelation that they have become larger people,
more compassionate, more open, more understanding, more forgiving. Their hearts
have grown bigger, not in spite of their loss, but
because of their loss. There's something about that kind of
(46:42):
loss that actually makes life more precious and makes the
people around you, the world around you, more precious as well.
So one of the questions I like to think about
on a daily basis is how do I keep my
heart supple enough that it can break open rather than
(47:05):
apart when the big hits come. And that includes the
political realm that that includes you know, as much as
I despise the Trump phenomenon and fear the fascist possibilities
(47:26):
in it, to speak very frankly, um, I need to
keep my heart open to the pain among we the
people that Trump has tapped into. I think he's tapped
into it in a totally irresponsible, very dangerous, racist, misogynist way.
(47:48):
But there is pain out there. There is real pain
and fear in that base in all of us. I mean, honestly,
I think that there's there's some of that I really
like In your book. You talk about how in both
books there's there's ways of finding common ground with people
who seem to hold extremely different viewpoints and and the
(48:11):
basic of it is to hear their story. Yeah, exactly.
One of the things that you know that I talked
about in the book is just to make this very concrete,
is a series of workshops that I'm aware of where
people are brought together around very contentious issues such as abortion,
and people come into a room, um, nobody knows upfront
(48:35):
who holds what position UM, And for most of the
day until the last hour or so, they are forbidden
from announcing their position, but instead invited and coached to
tell the personal story of whatever the experience was that
led them to the position they hold. And they learned
(48:58):
to craft these stories and tell these stories, which a
lot of us don't know how to do, and then
to tell them to each other one on one or
try adds small groups. Well, by the end of the day,
when when it starts to be revealed what people's positions are,
something remarkable has happened. The human thing has happened. People
(49:22):
have realized that the same story can lead to people
to two quite different positions. People have realized even more fundamentally,
that the more you know about another person's story, the
less possible it is too despise or dislike or dismiss
(49:44):
that person, no matter how different he or she may
be from you, politically, ideologically, or whatever. There's something about
the human story that is that is not only appealing
and attractive. There's something about the and story that's that's universal,
especially if it's if it's what I like to call
(50:05):
a soul story as opposed to an ego story. UM.
One thing I know for sure, we all know this,
I think in one way or another, is that if
I want to connect with another person at a deep level,
boasting about my successes isn't going to do the job.
And frankly, it doesn't even do the job for me,
(50:27):
because I've learned more from my failures or my journeys
and darkness than I have from my successes. When I succeed,
I kind of pet myself on the back and I
think I've got really got my act together. And it's
not until I fall on my face that you know,
I stay up until three in the morning trying to
(50:48):
figure out how to get it right the next time. Um,
so what connects us is those broken places. To quote
Leonard Going Again writes about he not only wrote about
the blizzard of the world, but he has that wonderful
lyric in anthem I think is the name of the
song where he says, forget your perfect offering, ring the
(51:11):
bells that still can ring. There's a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in. But it's also through
those cracks that we connect with one another. So when
you hear the human story in the workshop like this,
where you know people are talking about an ideologically contentious issue, um,
(51:32):
you may not change your mind, but you re forge
the human bond. And one principle that's very very important
to me is that in the long run, it's more
important to be in right relationship with each other than
it is to be right. Um. That doesn't mean that
we have to give up on what on our beliefs
(51:56):
about right. I don't want to do that, No one
wants to do that. But what's right is a complicated subject,
and if we're not in right relationship with one another,
we can't hang in with the conversation long enough to
make any progress on those complications at all. Yeah, exactly, Well,
(52:19):
I think that is a good place for us to
wrap up. I think I could probably do this for
about three more hours with you, but um, you know
we're near, we're past the end of the show. So um,
thanks so much Parker for coming on. As I said earlier,
we'll have links to all of your personal Facebook page,
the Courage and Renewal Center, all those different things at
(52:41):
one you feed, dot net slash. Parker will also have
a download there, and I encourage people were just google
Parker J. Palmer and you will find all of your
wonderful stuff there. So thanks again so much. I've got
a lot out of your reading that I'm going to
continue to think about and come back to, and uh
I certainly want to explore more. Well, thank you, Eric,
(53:02):
it's been a delight to be on with you, and
just all good wishes with the good work you're doing.
Thanks so much. Bye, bye, okay bye. You can learn
(53:26):
more about this podcast and Parker Palmer at one You
feed dot Net slash Parker
We have multiple voices within us, and it's not always clear,
even when we're not in a state of depression, that
we're listening to true self. Welcome to the one you
feed throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized the importance of
(00:22):
the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out,
or you are what you think ring true, and yet
for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
see what we don't have instead of what we do.
We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
(00:44):
But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
good wolf m Thanks for joining us. Our guest on
(01:13):
this episode is Parker Palmer, an author, educator, and activist
who focuses on issues and education, community leadership, spirituality, and
social change. Parker is the founder and senior partner of
the Center for Courage and Renewal. He's also the author
of many books, including A Hidden Wholeness the journey toward
an undivided life. And here's the interview with Parker Palmer. Hi, Parker,
(01:39):
welcome to the show. Thank you, very good to be
with you. I'm happy to have you on UM. I've
had a chance to explore some of your work, particularly
in depth over the last week, and I think there's
a lot that that really spoke to me about it,
and I look forward to getting into some of those details.
Before we do that, though, Let's start like we always do,
with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his
(02:02):
grandson and he says, in life, there are two wolves
inside of us that are always at battle. One is
a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery
and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which
represents things like greed, hatred, and fear. And the grandson
stops for a second. He looks up at his grandfather
and he says, grandfather, which one wins, And the grandfather
(02:26):
quietly replies, the one you feed. So I'd like to
start off by asking you what that parable means to
you in your life and in the work that you do.
I think it's a fascinating story, and I suppose paradoxical
reactions to it. As you may know, paradox is a
big word in my vocabulary, and we will probably return
(02:46):
to it. On the one hand, I agree completely that
we have these uh contrary forces inside of us, the
forces of light on the forces of darkness, and a
lot depends on on which one we feed. Um. I.
When I first read that parable years ago, I thought
of Abraham Lincoln's appeal to the better angels of our nature,
(03:11):
and of course in doing so, he was also implying
that we have lesser angels in there as well. So
on that level, I'm I'm with the parable. On another level,
I wrestle with the implications a little bit in the
sense that but I think that in the long run,
(03:32):
human wholeness has a lot to do with integrating the
light and the dark in us, rather than trying to
overwhelm one with the other, rather than trying to imagine
that it's possible to drive out the darkness. Um. It
seems to me that we always live with our with
(03:53):
our shadows, partly because they're the hardest things for us
to see in ourselves. We can we can see the
auto in another person quite easily. Oh he or she
is greedy or or resentful or angry or whatever, but
we have a harder time seeing that in ourselves. I
(04:13):
want to find wholeness as in this way, wholeness is
not perfection. Wholeness is about embracing all of what we
are and and acknowledging that our darkness is as important
as as our light and sort of holding that in
our in our conscious awareness as we go through the day, um,
(04:37):
so that we can kind of manage our lives in
that complicated force field. So, like most stories or parables
or metaphors, that one sort opens up a whole raft
of questions for me that I find very fruitful. Yeah,
I agree. I think it's on the surface, it's very straightforward.
You kind of get it and it's about choice and
(04:59):
then but as you go further into it, there really
are these these things about how do we work with
those bad wolf part of ourselves? You know. I think
it's like as a parable it just at a certain
point you're like, well, it's not a literal story, so
you you can't take it that way. But the show
has really spent a lot of time, I think exploring
how we work with with both parts of that and
You've got a number of books. I spent time mainly
(05:21):
with two of them, Um, and we'll we'll start with
the first one that I read, which is called Hidden Wholeness,
the journey towards an undivided life. And this really gets
to kind of what you were just talking about in
the Integration of the Wolves. Now, I have to say
that anybody that starts a book with a Leonard Cohen
quote is always going to be a favorite of mine. Um.
And you you start the book by by quoting a
(05:42):
line of his from the song the Future. It says,
the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and
it has overturned the order of the soul. And what
I'd like to start talking about is this idea of
the soul. It it comes up a lot in your writing,
and I was wondering if you could explain what that
means to you. Well, I'll take my best shot. Um.
(06:07):
I hesitate a bit because I think ultimately soul is
a word that points toward a mystery which we know
by many names, and for which no one has the
right name. The closest I've ever been able to come
to what I might mean by soul is the being
(06:27):
and human being, but other traditions name it in other
ways of Secular Humanists call it identity and integrity, Buddhists
call it big Self. Thomas Merton called it true self.
The Hasidic Jews call it the spark of the divine
and every being. I've always said that it doesn't matter
(06:50):
to me what you call it, since no one knows
its true name, and fighting over the name seems utterly
nonsensical to me. But it does matter to me that
you call it something, because if you don't, if you
don't have a name for it by way of acknowledging
its existence, it's it's reality. Then it seems to me
(07:13):
we end up treating ourselves and each other as objects
to be manipulated or manufactured into whatever shape the culture
wants us to take, or empty vessels to be filled
with other people's knowledge and quote, wisdom and guidance. So
I think the naming of this mystery within the human
(07:35):
self is a way of making a deep vow to
every person, because every person has this thing called soul,
whatever whatever it may be. I think for me, the
discovery of soul happened under extremely stressful, difficult, dark circumstances,
(07:58):
namely by own journey into clinical depression three times in
my adult life, And whenever you'd like, I'd be glad
to talk more about that. We don't mention depression on
this show never. I'm sure you're talking about human experience.
I'm sure you never do. I'm a fellow sufferer, and
(08:18):
it it comes up often. How long ago was your last,
you know, major episode? And I'd be curious how much
of it sort of happens at a more minor level
for you when you're not in the middle of a
major episode. Is a kind of an on off switch
or is it? Is there a gradient there for you? Well,
I think like most of us, I you know, I
swing through a certain range of moods day by day,
(08:41):
like weather moving through. But as all of us who
have experienced clinical depression, no, it's not at all like
being sad or feeling bad. Um. In fact, one of
the features of depression that's so terrifying, as you really
can't feel anything, your your emotions are gone. So my
(09:03):
my most recent experience was what twelve years ago, when
I was sixty five years old. My two prior experiences
were in my forties, my early forties and then my
late forties. So the one at age sixty five I'm
now seventy seven. The one at age sixty five took
me by surprise. But what I what I mean the
(09:26):
perl of great price. In these very long, months long
um journeys underground, I used to say depression is like
being lost in the dark, but I eventually refined that
to say depression is like becoming the dark, which is
quite a different thing. Um. You know, when when you're
(09:50):
in depression, you don't have that capacity to take the
balcony view of yourself and say, oh, I see what's
going on with me, as we can when we're angry
or having other sort of normal range emotions. And once
we can get in the balcony and get a look
at ourselves, we can often find a way out. But
(10:12):
when you have become the darkness, you don't have any
outside view of it. You don't have any leverage on it.
But I discovered in depression, and of course some of
this is in the aftermath or on your way out,
I discovered that the faculties that I normally depend on
we're dead and gone. And there are four of them
(10:35):
that I at least depend on with some regularity. One
is my intellect, another is my ego, another is my emotions,
and another is my will. Well, in depression, you can't
think your way out of it, so the intellect is useless.
Your ego is shattered. You have no sense of self,
so that doesn't work either. Your emotions, as I have said,
(10:58):
are dead and gone. You can't feel anything, and your
will power is limited to the tiniest, tiniest steps, like
getting up at eleven o'clock instead of eleven thirty, being
able to to face the day just a little earlier.
And it was under those circumstances that I began to
(11:20):
dissense from time to time that there was this little
tiny spark of life way back in the thickets of
of the dark forest, that my life had become that
wanted me to stay alive. I came to liken it
to a wild animal, which is very very widely and
(11:44):
can can tough, and can survive where there's little to
eat and little encouragement, but like the wild animal, is
also very very shy. And I became very interested, under
those circumstances, in what it might be like to create
(12:06):
conditions where the soul or whatever you want to call
it could put in a more regular appearance than it
does in normal, everyday society, where we create so many
conditions that that drive the shy soul back into hiding.
As I like to say, we all know that if
(12:27):
if we want to see a wild animal out in
the woods, the last thing we want to do is
to go through the woods shouting for it to come out.
What we want instead is to sit quietly at the
base of a tree, breathe with the earth, and after
a while, the thing we're seeking may put in an appearance.
(12:48):
We may catch it only out of the corner of
our eye, but once you've seen it, you won't forget it.
And and that was the image that came to me
as I emerged from the depths of depression. I love
that analogy about the wild animal, and will come back
to what are some of the ways that you've worked
(13:09):
to create of potentially, you know, drawing the soul out
um you say that, I'm just going to quote you.
Hear that you said the divided life is a wounded life,
and the soul keeps calling us to heal the wound.
Ignore that call, and we find ourselves trying to numb
our pain with an anesthetic of our choice, be a substance, abuse,
over work, consumerism, or mindless media noise. Such anesthetics are
(13:34):
easy to come by in society that wants to keep
us divided and unaware of our pain. So from your perspective,
is the divided life? Was that behind what's happening in
the depression sense for you? I think? So, I mean
when I talk about depression, as I think you know, Eric,
I'm always eager to say that depression comes in many forms,
(13:56):
and those who specialize in studying and trying to treat
depression are the first to say that there's a lot
of mystery surrounding what's in wies of depression. So I'm
reluctant to make huge generalizations as if they apply to everybody.
Some depressions are strictly genetic or related to brain chemistry,
(14:19):
I think, and others are highly highly situational. And then
what gets what gets really confusing, is that no matter
which end of the spectrum you start at, the two
can intermingle. So if you start with a situational depression
or something in your life where you're living a divided
(14:40):
life and something is troubling, you so deeply that you're
losing sleep and you develop radical insomnia that can change
your brain chemistry in a way that creates depression on
the other hands apart exactly. And if you start with
a genetically based depression the distorts your perceptions and your behavior,
(15:02):
then you're going to end up in situations that worse
than it. So it's a it's a tricky thing to unrample.
I think there is in my background, my family background,
some genetic predisposition toward depression UM. And I think that
in my case, the balance of factors were more situational
(15:27):
than genetic or biochemical. H And here's the rest of
(16:00):
the interview with Parker Palmer. So one of the things
that I have discovered as we've done this show, when
I think about personal development or this whole area of
the soul of spirituality, there's so much thought and writing
and literature on that need to go within um, the
need to understand our thoughts, to meditate. And as I've
(16:21):
done the show, certainly we've talked a lot about that,
but I've been surprised by how often we've talked about
you know, people have brought us back to the importance
of other people. And one of the things that I
found most profound in your writing was the way that
you very over and over drive home this idea that
it's not an either or thing that we really need
(16:44):
in order to nurture the soul. We really need both
the community and solitude. Can you explain a little bit
more why both those things are so critical. That's a
very important point, certainly to me, and I'm glad it
is to you and apparently to other guests on your show. Um.
(17:05):
You know, Dietrich bon Hoffer was a great German theologian
who took a stand against Hitler and was executed just
before the end of the war. He wrote a wonderful
book called Life Together, and the life he lived kind
of gives him a lot of street cred in my mind.
(17:26):
And what he said, and one of the great sentences
in that book is this, let the person who cannot
be in community be aware of being alone, and let
the person who cannot be alone be aware of being
in community. And I think that behind that is this
very important paradox that we need to first of all,
(17:53):
but you could start in either place, but I'm going
to start first with the inner journey and with listening
to the voice of true self or the voice of
the soul. I'm a Quaker, and as we Quakers would say,
the voice of the inner teacher. Um. That's obviously critical.
But as you know, and I know, and anyone who's
(18:15):
suffered from depression knows, there's something called the voice of
depression that speaks lies about who we are. It tells
us that we're worthless. It tells us today is the
day to take your life because there's no hope left.
And if you journey with depression, you have to fight
that voice off with some regularity. In other words, we
(18:39):
have multiple voices within us, and it's not always clear,
even when we're not in a state of depression, that
we're listening to true self. Perhaps we're listening to a
voice of resentment or heart or agreed or of simple anger.
So it's a portant to have a community in which
(19:02):
to test, to sift and Winnow what it is you're
hearing from within? And I don't mean a community that
that listens to what you have to say and then
tells you you're right or you're wrong, or you're half
right and half wrong. That doesn't work. I'm talking about
a community of discernment where we have a chance to
(19:24):
speak our truth, whatever we may think it is, into
the center of the circle, or or into the space
between us in a in a relationship and be deeply
listened to by the other person and get the gift
from the other person of honest, open questions. One of
(19:48):
the ground rules in the work I do, which I
know we'll be talking about a little later, is no fixing,
no saving, no advising, and no correcting each other. Um.
This is what creates safe space for the soul. Um.
And if you think about those four words correcting, advising, saving,
and fixing hit. If you think about those four words correcting, fixing, advising,
(20:13):
and saving each other, um, those are the things that
we mostly do when we listen to other people. Somebody
comes to us with a problem and we may listen
for a few minutes, maybe a little longer if we've
recently been to a listening workshop, and and then we'll say, well,
(20:33):
you know, I I read this great book on that subject.
Why don't you go read it. I'm sure it would
do a lot of good. Or for some exercises you
can do, or a diet you ought to go on, etcetera. Instead,
we learned in the work I do to ask each
other honus to open questions, which are the kind of
(20:53):
questions that hear other people into deeper and deeper speech
and cause us to pause and wonder, is that the
voice of true self I've been listening to or is
it something else? Um an honest, open question which has
(21:14):
serves no purpose except to enable us to have a
deeper conversation with ourselves, and which can only come in community,
whether that's a community of two people or ten people
or fifty people. That's the kind of of inquiry that
constitutes communal discernment of the sort I'm talking about, that
(21:38):
can help us sort out the wheek from the chaff
in our own internal dialogue. To me, this is a
very important principle, and it explains why bon Hoffer said,
if you can't be in community, watch out about being alone,
and if you can't be alone, watch out about about
being in community. When you look at that the second
(22:00):
half of that, if you can't be alone, to be
aware of being in community. Aloneness is one of the
conditions under which we we come home to ourselves, and
we can show up in community as who we really are,
not as some well, Thomas Martin. He used a great phrase,
(22:21):
he said, most of us live lives of self impersonation,
so we can show up in community is who we
really are, rather than as self impersonators. So I'm I'm
fascinated with this paradox of solitude and community and with
how it is that we take our discernment of our
(22:41):
own truth in solitude and community, how it is we
take that into the larger world of social and political
action or simply of neighborly concern. There's so much in
what you said there. The first is the process you
described mean is something that you call a circle of trust.
(23:02):
And uh, your book The Hidden Wholeness really explores that
in great, great detail, and I would encourage people to
definitely check that out. UM will have a download on
our site at one you feed dot net slash Parker
that we'll have some of that, and we'll have links
to your site and all the great things that are
available out on your site. I wanted to explore a
(23:23):
couple of ideas within the circle of trust that I
thought was interesting because this idea of you know, we're
not going to advise other people, were not going to
fix them, because I was listening to you, I was thinking, well,
in some cases, that's exactly what we're asking for and
what we want. Like if I come to someone and
say hey, like I I coach people who come to
me and say hey, I can't seem to uh, I
can't seem to get a daily exercise practice going right
(23:46):
in a situation like that, you know, very concrete advice
can be really useful, but what you're talking about is
really going into that deeper level of discovering who we are,
um to reaching our soul. And you you talk a
lot about. The thing that I think is so important
to what you're saying there is that that answer is
only going to come from ourselves. You know. It's that
(24:09):
idea of having an inner teacher, and that that the
circle of trust in these methods you talk about are
really there to get us in touch with our own
inner teacher, and that's why it needs the quiet and
the respect and the safety of that circle of trust. Absolutely,
of course, there are circumstances when some sort of advice
(24:30):
is both wanted and helpful. I do think that sometimes
that we have a tendency generally to give advice, whether
it gets wanted or helpful or not, partly because in
everyday life giving it gets us off the hook. You know,
you you come to me with your problem. I'm kind
(24:50):
of mentally looking at my watch and thinking, I'm kind
a busy day out of me and a lot of
things to do. If I can give Eric a piece
of advice about this, I can kind of wash my
hands of any further responsibility for him, because if he
takes my advice, he'll he'll be fine, and if he doesn't,
that's his problem, not mine, right, So, so advice giving
(25:12):
can be a form of of brushoff and and one
of the big dangers about the frequency with which we
give advice is is the fact that it's it's kind
of like giving CPR to people who actually can breathe
for themselves. Um, And when we give them CPR, then
(25:34):
we're actually inhibiting their own capacity to breathe. There are
people who need CPR because they can't breathe, But when
we're giving it in the inappropriate circumstances, it's not helpful.
And I think the other thing to always remember about
our advice, and I'm sure that this is something you
(25:55):
think about a lot as a coach, is that a
person may ask for advice, but if there is not
a readiness within that person to receive it and let
it sink in and then implemented, the advice is not
going to help. And and so anything we can do
(26:18):
two to let the answers to that person's problem arise
from within that person, I think that then the greater
service we're being to that to that individual. Yeah, there's
no doubt that when people can work their way to
the answer themselves, they're much more likely to buy in
(26:40):
and do it. And I just I really like the
circle of trust idea, and I would if we had
more time, I would like to really go deeper into it.
But I it's I know, for me, it's one of
those things I'm going to keep spending some time on
and look at. And I've looked at a couple of
the retreats that you do, and so I you know,
I may may go to one of those because I
think of myself as somebody who listens well. But but
(27:03):
your book and the way that you approach this is
very different than most of what we're taught, and it
resonates as as very true. And I thought that part
where you talked about the fixing and advising others is
a way to get ourselves off the hook. Is a
is a really profound idea that I had never thought
of before. Yeah, I'm quite sure that professional coaches and
(27:24):
counselors don't do that, but I think in the ordinary,
everyday life we do a fair amount of that. Oh yeah,
it's a good cautionary idea to keep in mind. You know,
a classic case would be a parent with a child
who's who's just come home from a hairy day at
work and looking forward to it, you know, a relaxing evening,
(27:47):
and here comes your teenager with the terrible, terrible problem.
Well there's you know, there's an inevitable human tendency to
just want to get to get this exchange over with
as quickly as possible. Yeah, and uh yeah, so I
think we all recognize that we need to cut ourselves
some slack about that. I'm a great believer in self
(28:09):
forgiveness because I've screwed up so often. That is the
advantage of screwing up as often as I have, And
it sounds like you have as you you really you
have to get good at self forgiveness and forgiving others. Yep,
And you've got to make all of life a learning journey, or,
as Gandhi said, experiments with truth and then you then
you have to learn from the failed experiments. One of
(28:32):
the things that I wanted to go deeper into is
I want to move from your book on the Hidden
Wholeness and go to Healing the Heart of Democracy. Although
I find a great deal of commonality between UM, I
find a lot of the concepts carry over in those books.
But obviously when you wrote that book, we weren't in
(28:55):
the middle of the election circus we're in now. Is
anything you wrote in there or do you feel any
different or anything that you would add to that book
after kind of what you're you know, what we've been
watching this year? Yes and no. And as I'll say
in a minute, in fact, I have been in a
way adding pages to the head book with some things
(29:18):
I've recently written and published. UM. It seems to me
that the fundamental principles I laid out in that book
are still very sound. And one of the things that
that's happening right now is something that's happened for a
very long time in our American political discourse, but now
(29:40):
it's happening on steroids. And what I'm referring to is
is this, as I say in the book, when Americans
talk about politics, and this has been true for many,
many years, we almost always talk about them, about those
people in Washington, d c. Or in the state capitol
(30:04):
who are either screwing something everything up or or on
occasion whom we regard as heroes for taking the right stand.
But whatever it is, we're always talking about people who
aren't in the room. And when I talked to audiences
about this, I say, you know, when was the last time,
(30:24):
in your personal life, or in your work situation, or
in your congregation or neighborhood, when was the last time
that talking about someone who isn't there has solved any problem?
As we all know it doesn't. In fact, it's better
classified as gossip than as political discourse or as just
(30:47):
letting off steam, and we all understand it on that level.
But my belief is that in a country founded on
the on the fundamental premise that this is all about
we the people, that this is a government of the people,
by the people, and for the people, we the people
need to get our act together, and what that means
(31:10):
is learning to talk across the lines that divide us
on a local level, um. Not to talk about them,
but to talk with each other, um, and to do
that across lines of division in a way that would
at least give us a fighting chance to come to
(31:31):
a rough consensus on a few items of the common good,
so that we can articulate that common good to people
in power and hold them accountable to it more effectively.
I'll put this in slightly different terms. We have succumbed
for a long time to the divide and conquer tactic
(31:54):
that is often used in American politics by people who
wish to seize power at high levels of political office.
And you know, they're very, very good at that, and
our media play along with it, um in ways that
divide us artificially. It seems to me that, you know,
if if you read the screaming headlines in the newspaper,
(32:20):
or the streaming headlines on CNN, or that flow across
your computer screen, you know, you would think that the
people who live up and down my block and the
people who live up and down your block are at
each other's throats most of the time. But that's not true.
There is there. There is when you drill down to
(32:41):
the local level to the level of we the people,
there is a surprising amount of consensus um and I
can tell micro stories or macro stories about that. Let
me tell a macro story, since those tend to be
more impressive to people who who are who are cynics,
or who have given up on this possibility in American
(33:06):
political life. A lot of people are unaware of the
fact that sixteen states have now called by referendum or legislation,
have now called for a constitutional amendment to overcome the
Supreme Court decisions called Citizens United, which gave big money
(33:32):
extraordinary overweening power in our political process. Most people who
have looked at American politics have said the game is lost.
Once the Supreme Court established the Citizens United laws, it
was no longer possible for ordinary people to get their
(33:54):
voices heard in the American political process. But sixteen states
have now called for a constitutional amendment, and another six
team have such calls in the pipeline, And that's moving
in on the two thirds of necessary among the states
to eventually pass that constitutional amendment in the Congress. Now
(34:17):
we're a long way from passing a constitutional amendment. That's
not the argument I'm making. The argument I'm making is
very simple. The calls that I'm talking about, which have
either happened or in the pipeline, would never have happened
if there had not been a broad conversation and a
(34:40):
broad coalition across the political spectrum left, center and right
of people who, despite the fact that they range from
progressive Democrats to members of the Tea Party, are in
agreement that chrony capitalism is a bad thing. That it's
a bad thing, whether you're left, right or a center,
(35:02):
to have a Congress that is essentially bought and paid
for by lobbyists and corporations and other folks who have
benefited from citizens united. So is that conversation possible? You
bet it is. And one of the best macro examples
is the one I just gave. What I found really
(35:55):
interesting about that section of your book was we tend
to think of the divide in the political spectrum between
right and left. You know, that tends to be where
we draw up our lines and and think that that's
really where we're divided in And you said that a
more use maybe maybe useful isn't the right word. But
(36:15):
a different division to look at is the division between
the people who have given up and think they can't
do anything politically. I absolutely believe that, and I've never
found an activist at any point on the political spectrum
with with whom it wasn't possible to find at least
(36:36):
hatches of common ground. Because we begin by sharing the
sense that we are a part of we the people,
and we have a voice that wants to be heard,
and we have agency the capacity to translate that voice
into effective action. All that remains is for us to
(36:57):
find those substantive issues on which we agree, and there
are lots of them, left right and center. In poll
after poll and in action project after action project have
found consensus not only around chrony capitalism, but around the
reform of our drug laws, around prison reform, around meaningful
(37:22):
reasonable forms of gun control, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, all of
these things that if you simply read the headlines you
would imagine we're totally polarized on when when in fact
we're not. And the other thing, the other point that
I make in the book, and I as you know, Eric,
and this is an important point to me, is that
(37:45):
all the founders of this country really got it wrong
about who constitutes we the people. You know, for them,
it didn't involve women, didn't involve enslaved human beings, it
did involved Native Americans, it didn't involve white men who
didn't own land. We the people was people who looked
(38:09):
looked like them, like the Founders, quite male gentry landowners,
and they essentially wanted a country that was that was
governed by that kind of elite. Well, they got that
terribly wrong, and they planned DNA in this American experiment
(38:31):
in democracy that we are, you know, that is still
bearing bad fruit today and will for a long time
to come. It's called racism, it's called sexism, and so
forth and so on. And candidates, in certain candidates Mr.
Trump being the most notable example at the moment, are
(38:53):
playing on all of that in a really demonic way. Um.
We can talk about that in a little bit if
you'd like. Um. But the Founders, despite the fact that
they blew it when it comes to who's included and
we the people, had a particular form of political genius
(39:18):
which we cannot forget, and that is that they crafted
the first form of government that I'm aware of any way,
in which conflict, even intense conflict, is regarded not as
the enemy of a good social order, but as the
(39:41):
engine of a better social order. Um, that's why we
have the structure of government that we do, which in
the book I likened to a weaver's loom, holding the
tension of threads on which the fabric of a good
society can keep getting woven and rewill them. The historian
(40:03):
Joseph Ellis has written eloquently about the fact that our
form of government was not intended to come to quick
solutions to problems. Instead, it was intended to keep the
salient problems on the table long enough that we, in
holding their tension, we could open our minds and hearts
(40:25):
to better and better solutions, a more perfect union, to
use the language of the Founders. So it's it's that
structure of government that over the years has allowed us
to expand the definition of we the people way beyond
what the founders imagined, and much for the better, especially
(40:46):
in a society that by fifty is going to be
over half people of color. You have five habits of
the heart that you describe that are important to heal
the heart of democracy, and we're not going to time
to go through all of them. But I wanted to
circle back to one that you reference there, which is
an ability to hold tension in life giving ways. Can
(41:10):
you explore what that means a little bit more. We
have this primitive brain stem that the lizard brain, I
guess some people call it, that has these instinctive behaviors,
the most famous of which is the fight or flight response,
(41:30):
so that when we're hit with the tension of a
sudden stimulus, our tendency is either to turn around and
punch it out or to flee from it in fear.
So we don't like we don't like tension. We either
run away or or try to kill it off. And there's,
(41:54):
you know, there's evidence after evidence of how difficult it
is for us to hold tension at all, let alone
to hold it creatively. Um One of the studies that
fascinates me as someone who has a deep belief in
the power and the necessity of silence to do any
(42:18):
kind of meaningful discernment. There have been studies that show
that the average group can tolerate about fifteen seconds of
silence before somebody has to break it because because suddenly
people are experiencing the tension of thinking something has gone wrong.
This is getting awkward. This you know, and in our
(42:41):
groups where we practice silence in these circles of trust
and learn, it's its value. We like to say to people,
silence isn't a sign that something is going wrong. It
may be a sign that something is going really, really right,
(43:01):
as people reflect deeply on what they've been hearing and
try to integrate it into their own lives. So there
are a lot of examples of how hard it is
for us to hold tension, as in the tension of
political viewpoints left, right and center. Well, tension holding does
create stress. But in writing the book, I was intrigued
(43:25):
to discover that there's an antonym to the word distress.
So we talk a lot about how distressing tension is,
but psychologists talk about you stress e U s t
r e S s U stress, which is the positive
effective tension that the tension that opens us up to
(43:47):
new ways of looking at the world, the tension that
opens our hearts to new levels of humanity and compassion.
I'm as you know from reading the book, Um, I
work a lot with this image of the human heart,
(44:09):
by which I don't mean simply the seat of our emotions. UM.
If you, if you go back to the root of
the word heart. It comes from the Latin core c
o r So it's that center place in the human
self c o r e where all of our faculties
converge emotion, will intellect um you know, ego in the
(44:35):
positive sense, bodily knowledge, relational knowledge, problem solving knowledge, etcetera.
So we enter life circumstances, especially if we care about
other people and about what's going on around us, we
enter life circumstances that that takes us to something called heartbreak.
(44:57):
It's a very common human phenomena, but I've observed over
seventy seven years of hanging out with myself and others,
that the human heart can break in at least two ways.
It can shatter into a million pieces, and sometimes as
(45:18):
it's in the process of shattering, it gets hurled at
the ostensible source of its pain, in the in the
manner of a fragment grenade, trying to to do harm,
to do damage to where that pain is coming from.
(45:38):
That's one way for the heart to break, and we
see a lot of that these days. But it's also
possible for the heart to break not apart, but open
into greater capacity. And if we look carefully at the
microcosms of our lives. We'll see a lot of that too.
(46:00):
At my age, I know a lot of people who
have lost the dearest person in their lives to death,
and their hearts are broken. They go into that long,
deep underground period of grieving and slowly slowly emerge awakening
(46:21):
to the surprising revelation that they have become larger people,
more compassionate, more open, more understanding, more forgiving. Their hearts
have grown bigger, not in spite of their loss, but
because of their loss. There's something about that kind of
(46:42):
loss that actually makes life more precious and makes the
people around you, the world around you, more precious as well.
So one of the questions I like to think about
on a daily basis is how do I keep my
heart supple enough that it can break open rather than
(47:05):
apart when the big hits come. And that includes the
political realm that that includes you know, as much as
I despise the Trump phenomenon and fear the fascist possibilities
(47:26):
in it, to speak very frankly, um, I need to
keep my heart open to the pain among we the
people that Trump has tapped into. I think he's tapped
into it in a totally irresponsible, very dangerous, racist, misogynist way.
(47:48):
But there is pain out there. There is real pain
and fear in that base in all of us. I mean, honestly,
I think that there's there's some of that I really
like In your book. You talk about how in both
books there's there's ways of finding common ground with people
who seem to hold extremely different viewpoints and and the
(48:11):
basic of it is to hear their story. Yeah, exactly.
One of the things that you know that I talked
about in the book is just to make this very concrete,
is a series of workshops that I'm aware of where
people are brought together around very contentious issues such as abortion,
and people come into a room, um, nobody knows upfront
(48:35):
who holds what position UM, And for most of the
day until the last hour or so, they are forbidden
from announcing their position, but instead invited and coached to
tell the personal story of whatever the experience was that
led them to the position they hold. And they learned
(48:58):
to craft these stories and tell these stories, which a
lot of us don't know how to do, and then
to tell them to each other one on one or
try adds small groups. Well, by the end of the day,
when when it starts to be revealed what people's positions are,
something remarkable has happened. The human thing has happened. People
(49:22):
have realized that the same story can lead to people
to two quite different positions. People have realized even more fundamentally,
that the more you know about another person's story, the
less possible it is too despise or dislike or dismiss
(49:44):
that person, no matter how different he or she may
be from you, politically, ideologically, or whatever. There's something about
the human story that is that is not only appealing
and attractive. There's something about the and story that's that's universal,
especially if it's if it's what I like to call
(50:05):
a soul story as opposed to an ego story. UM.
One thing I know for sure, we all know this,
I think in one way or another, is that if
I want to connect with another person at a deep level,
boasting about my successes isn't going to do the job.
And frankly, it doesn't even do the job for me,
(50:27):
because I've learned more from my failures or my journeys
and darkness than I have from my successes. When I succeed,
I kind of pet myself on the back and I
think I've got really got my act together. And it's
not until I fall on my face that you know,
I stay up until three in the morning trying to
(50:48):
figure out how to get it right the next time. Um,
so what connects us is those broken places. To quote
Leonard Going Again writes about he not only wrote about
the blizzard of the world, but he has that wonderful
lyric in anthem I think is the name of the
song where he says, forget your perfect offering, ring the
(51:11):
bells that still can ring. There's a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in. But it's also through
those cracks that we connect with one another. So when
you hear the human story in the workshop like this,
where you know people are talking about an ideologically contentious issue, um,
(51:32):
you may not change your mind, but you re forge
the human bond. And one principle that's very very important
to me is that in the long run, it's more
important to be in right relationship with each other than
it is to be right. Um. That doesn't mean that
we have to give up on what on our beliefs
(51:56):
about right. I don't want to do that, No one
wants to do that. But what's right is a complicated subject,
and if we're not in right relationship with one another,
we can't hang in with the conversation long enough to
make any progress on those complications at all. Yeah, exactly, Well,
(52:19):
I think that is a good place for us to
wrap up. I think I could probably do this for
about three more hours with you, but um, you know
we're near, we're past the end of the show. So um,
thanks so much Parker for coming on. As I said earlier,
we'll have links to all of your personal Facebook page,
the Courage and Renewal Center, all those different things at
(52:41):
one you feed, dot net slash. Parker will also have
a download there, and I encourage people were just google
Parker J. Palmer and you will find all of your
wonderful stuff there. So thanks again so much. I've got
a lot out of your reading that I'm going to
continue to think about and come back to, and uh
I certainly want to explore more. Well, thank you, Eric,
(53:02):
it's been a delight to be on with you, and
just all good wishes with the good work you're doing.
Thanks so much. Bye, bye, okay bye. You can learn
(53:26):
more about this podcast and Parker Palmer at one You
feed dot Net slash Parker
Host
Eric Zimmer
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