Podcasts Archives ⋆ Page 2 of 9 ⋆ Humans And Earth

Architects of a New Humanity: Rhetta Morgan

Reverend Rhetta Morgan is an interfaith minister, facilitator, artist and healer. Her work encompasses the intersections of spirituality, creativity and activism, all rooted in an intention to work and live in a more just world. She currently facilitates Anti-Bias work for the Anti-Defamation League, leads The Ecclesia Fortify Circle, a group that supports activists to develop spiritual practices, and recently returned from South Africa working as facilitator and healer with Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity. Find her at www.reverendrhetta.com

If you want to be in service to love on this planet at this time, what can that look like?

How do you do the inner work needed so you can face domination in a potent way? How do you connect to something transcendent when the world feels unjust and painful? This are questions being asked by citizens and activists in many fields. Reverend Rhetta Morgan addresses how, if you’re working to support communities that are in trouble, you can handle fatigue and find sustenance.

In this tough time in our culture, it’s easy to lose touch with our vision for what we desire instead. Touching on awe can be regenerative for those who are feeling exhausted. “There is a way in which we can infuse the most difficult circumstances with a sense of power, awe, and sacredness.”

We can face exactly where we are and how we feel, yet also take an empowered, compassionate, visionary stance. This involves working with all of our identities, from victim to awe-maker, change-maker, and community nurturer.

Wholeness and oneness are the lenses she finds most powerful: “It’s not about winning. The ‘right side’ is the ‘whole side,’ as healthy as we can get it.”

How to believe in the legitimacy of your sense of mission or calling. “You’ve got to have a declaration: I am here to support this time! I am here to do what I can in this time.” Our ancestors and the planet require it. We must ask, “Who do I need to become so that I can answer that heart call?”

“I like to imagine the electromagnetic field of Earth claiming me so that as I move, I move in service to her.”

“I like to live as if it is possible for justice to be the way of the world…I am in the ‘yes’ of what is possible…We are called to stand before the ways culture works now and offer a different way.”

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The Restorative Power of Endarkenment: Deborah Eden Tull

Deborah Eden Tull is a Zen meditation and mindfulness teacher, author, activist, and sustainability educator. She spent seven years training as a Buddhist monk and has been living in sustainable communities for over 25 years. She teaches engaged awareness practice, which emphasizes the connection between personal awakening and global engagement. Eden draws upon teachings from the natural world and an embodied understanding of animism. She is the author of Luminous Darkness: An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown and other books. Eden offers retreats, online courses, and consultations internationally. To learn more, go to DeborahEdenTull.com.

If you’re an activist or a spiritual person, do you need ‘endarkenment’ as much as ‘enlightenment’? Hear Eden Tull explain in this interview why her answer is a resounding ‘yes.’

In this conversation, Eden and I discuss:

Why our ‘outer work’ of activism or contribution needs to be supported by ‘inner work’ that feeds compassion, resilience, and purpose. We are wildly creative beings who are meant to experience darkness “as the field of absolute rest and regeneration” that inspires our creativity.
A ‘dark time’ can be a personal experience or an experience a people or culture are going through. It can be ‘dark’ as in ‘unpleasant,’ or ‘dark’ as in ‘mysterious, uncertain or visionary.’
It’s counter-cultural to embrace darkness. But darkness includes beautiful halves of our reality such as the night, sleep, rest, interiority, sadness, wisdom, crisis, and fertile soil.
Ignoring darkness within and without can be a mistake because suppressing or ignoring our grief or horror at the world’s suffering prevents us from acting in healing ways.
Darkness can be a fertile space where we listen and discover creative solutions that are based in fierce compassion. “It’s in metabolizing our grief that we’re freed up to act in more constructive and creative ways.”
How her book offers a structure for going into ‘dark’ spaces—whether meditation, open inquiry, or grief for a planet in crisis—and letting them be fertile instead of without life. Endarkenment can be a process of transmuting pain into vision and vitality.
“We need to wake up more fully to our partnership with nature”—not by seeing ourselves as separate, but “by recognizing our innate oneness with the more than human world and Gaia consciousness…when we do this, we receive guidance and information.”

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Shifting to a ‘We’ Culture: Nina Simons

“We are in a paradigm shift from an ‘I’ culture to a ‘we’ culture.” “We are collectively co-creating a new world.”

Nina Simons is the co-founder and Chief Relationship Officer at Bioneers and leads its Everywoman’s Leadership program. Bioneers is a nonprofit that uses media, convening, and connecting to lift up visionary and practical solutions for many of our most pressing social and ecological challenges, revealing a regenerative and equitable future that’s within our reach today. Nina is a social entrepreneur who is passionate about reinventing leadership, restoring the feminine, and co-creating a healthy, peaceful, and equitable world for all. Throughout her career spanning the nonprofit, social entrepreneurship, corporate, and philanthropic sectors, Nina has worked with nearly a thousand diverse women leaders across disciplines, race, class, age, orientation, and more to create conditions for mutual learning and leadership development. In 2017, Nina was a recipient of the Goi Peace Award, presented annually to individuals who have made outstanding contributions toward the realization of a peaceful and harmonious world. She is the author of Nature, Culture, & the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership, and of Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart.

Hear Nina discuss:

“The Earth needs us all to be leaders now.” And hierarchical models of leadership won’t provide the restoration that is needed.
Her experience of redefining leadership as non-hierarchical and collaborative so that it became a role she could accept. What humans and Earth need is a “full-spectrum leadership” that departs from patriarchal values and instead values both feminine and masculine strengths and contributions. This leadership honors bodily and emotional wisdom as much as rational thought.
Our old definitions of leadership allow for leadership only in a few circumstances. We need to recognize that vital forms of leadership include parenting, art-making, teaching…”There are probably as many expressions of leadership as we are human beings.”
“The most inspiring leaders I know are those that can show up with vulnerability and not knowing, turn to each other for help, and exercise what I call relational intelligence. They’re helping create a culture where transformation is possible.” We all become leaders by supporting these skills in ourselves and others.
Our whole culture is up for review and renewal. We need to nurture this within models of regeneration, not depletion of self, others, and our planet. “It’s not really our power we’re reclaiming, it’s actually the power of life’s energy coming through us.”

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Humanity’s Journey with Earth

Hear David Nicol, Ph.D. eloquently describe the big picture of humanity’s long journey of relationship with Earth and how we’re now ready to create dynamic transformation to benefit all life.

David discusses how those of us alive today are undergoing the personal and collective initiation of releasing outmoded patterns of hierarchy and stepping into co-creating new ways of collaborating with one another and our planet. The inner soulful journey many are experiencing is mirrored by the social, political, and environmental transformations we are endeavoring to co-create.

He notes how this is an egalitarian, inclusive process of transformation that welcomes each person’s or being’s sovereignty, individuality, and unique insights and abilities. He also explains how he sees a consciousness of healing and peace growing world-wide.

This conversation originally aired on the NEO Network in early 2022.

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How to Connect to Earth for Mutual Benefit

Hear Rachel Pfotenhauer discuss how to connect to Earth for her benefit and your own.

Tremendous shifts are available as we pair conscious connection with our regenerative actions. You can contribute easily, and increase your own thriving as you do.

This conversation originally aired on the New Earth One Network in February of 2022.

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Regenerative Collaboration in Science and Spirituality

We’re experiencing a revolution in our understandings about how life on planet Earth really works. Hear why collaboration is actually how things are meant to function on Earth, and why that’s good news for anyone who cares about healing our planet and human well-being. I talk about what this means for your sense of hope, your own thriving, and your experience of connection to the people, plants, and animals with whom you co-exist on this lovely planet we call Earth.

In this episode I cover:

New scientific findings that are identifying collaboration as perhaps the most vital aspect of how life on Earth thrives.
Evidence of how human cultures have been leaning more into collaboration for the past three centuries.
What this means for your well-being and for our joint work of restoring our planet and human well-being.

Despite the messiness occurring on planet Earth, there’s evidence everywhere that we’re outgrowing mistaken stories of domination and hierarchy. This is a thrilling time to be alive as science and spirituality converge in conversations about how we can renew life on Earth by witnessing and encouraging the collaborations that are fundamental to how Earth’s systems function.

Collaboration is a key to turning life on Earth from foundering to flourishing.

It’s up to us which story we choose, and which story we live inside.