Conversations with Remarkable People – The World We Long For
The World We Long For
lives lived on purpose, and the stories that shape them
Usually we evaluate people by their reach, their wealth, or what they have accomplished, but there are hidden leaders among us –Disruptors, Creatives, Artists, Educators, and Entrepreneurs, Innovators and Thought Leaders working quietly to transform the world from the inside out; touching the lives of others by stealth, by example, by riding the current just ahead of the wave.
And there are others, recognized for their public voice, leaders in their own right, with unknown dimension beneath the surface of what they are best known for.
Join us for this Podcast series of intimate encounters that illuminate what is hidden, and celebrate some remarkable lives lived on purpose, and some of the stories that shape them. We begin each conversation with a simple question, “Who Are You?”
... re Imagining the World We Long For
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Healing occurs when we connect to the eternal spiritual beings.
Plant medicines help us connect with the spiritual realm.
Pachamama is not just the Earth. The Earth is just one expression of the divine mother.
To get her attention we must give something. Ayni (reciprocal exchange) is the first law of the universe. In reciprocation, through offerings, we establish our commitment. It’s a too; for reconnecting with our common nature, as brothers and sisteres, sharing the same mother.
Instead of using the word Pachamama we can use phrses like “divine princess,” “dear grandmother,” “noble queen of the universe.”
Music is a way to communicate with all plants and animals and the Earth. It helps us communicate with the cosmos. It is medicine. It is a prayer.
Plant medicine is not a ‘trip’, nor is it a form of personal development. It is a way to connect to the living presence of the spirit of the universe.
All plant have their spirit. They are spirit.
Kike Pinto Cardenas is a a composer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist. His songs are testament to his lifelong path as a ceremonialist and teacher. He has spent a lifetime immersed in traditional Andean music. He is considered a living cultural treasure in his native Peru.
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By stepping into the energetic and intuitive field that Family Constellation work provides, you directly invoke the Sacred Feminine.
Family Systems Constellation work is more than a personal healing modality because it looks beyond personal healing towards our ancestral line and the generations of the future.
This work is a form of sacred medicine, immediately accessible and immediately able to illuminate our place in the family of living beings. It honors the Holy in the world, in our life, and in our body.
We have been blessed to be working with Constellation work in these times. It brings together and integrates a lifetime of work in the Dharma, with Hypnosis-Trance and Neurolinguistics, and yet remains accessible, simple, and easy.
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Ceremonial and Vision Quest leader, Sun Dancer, Pipe Carrier and Musician
The first thing we had to learn was respect for what we were experiencing, and putting it in a sacred context.
The oldest religion is wandering alone in the mountains.
We have the idea in the West that worship is bowing down before something, I think it’s more like celebrating and embodying.
A leader is someone who gives everything away.
The old guys in the Peyote Church used to say “You’re invited to come in, and sit down and shut up for a couple of years, and just watch, and maybe you’ll catch the flavor of it.”
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My entire life experience has been informed by the wilderness, by interacting with the creatures and mountains and deserts of Colorado, from a very young age, a lot of the time alone. My work has been informed by decades of noticing natural systems and the incredible great common sense involved with natural systems, and natural thinking.
Curanderismo means bringing healing modalities to the world, not in an egotistical way, but in bringing healing modalities that are appropriate to each person. There’s a humility in curanderismo that I am really attracted to.
Any creature will be happy to rest if they can, so if we are afforded the opportunity to rest we should take it. A bear, if they have enough calories, they like to rest. It’s also a good idea to vet your inner resources. A coyote or a lion will really look at how far away the prey is and how much energy it’s going to take to make an attempt to bring it down. We can really look at that, to learn from that, to learn from the animals, and rest deeply when we get the chance to. Fortunately, for a lot of us who live in the more privileged part of the world we do get a chance to rest; but humans create a lot of concocted urgency to prevent themselves from resting.
The alarm bells were going off for me when I was a child, fifty plus years ago, about the direction our Anthropocene is going. I reacted very strongly when I was young. As a teenager I was in Earth First. It occurred to me very quickly, because of my observations of wild creature, that they will only try a thing a certain amount of times. They’re not going to beat their head against the wall. After a few years I realized that what we were doing was a drop in the bucket, what we need is a change of consciousness. So that propelled me into this larger vision of helping to bring the consciousness of the beauty and enchantment of natural systems to people who aren’t so in touch with that.
What sustains me is that everything in our world is constantly changing, and we may not survive these changes that are coming, but I think there’s a deeper part of this, we can call it soul or spirit. Different cultures have different names for it. There’s a deeper part of us that will keep going, will sustain. To be able to navigate as a soul is very important. That’s where my work’s at this moment.
Marie Luna was raised in the Southwest United States on ranches in the high mountains and desert canyons. Nature and wild creatures were her formative teachers, and they remain so today. She was influenced by her Indigenous neighbors of the Ute and Dine Nations at an early age, attending Blessing Ways, dances and curings. Her plant medicine practice encompasses 40 years of experience with high-integrity lineage holders whom she still studies with today. She has done isolation meditations with various plant helpers under the tutelage of Amazonian healer teachers. Her Tibetan Buddhist path and dakini practice meld seamlessly with her articulation of plant medicine practices in ceremonial form. She is an herbalist, a midwife, and a mother living in the mountains of Colorado. She works full-time as a ceremonial facilitator, helping with weddings, wakes, births, flower water limpias, and plant medicine ceremonies.
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“Several years ago, Lisa Garr suffered a brain injury during a California State Championship Mountain bike race, where she was in second place, about to take over first. She fell down a long mountain to the bottom, cracking her helmet in 13 places. Lisa had a near death experience while lying on the side of the mountain until the helicopter medics came to transport her to the nearest hospital. This experience transformed her level of consciousness and was the catalyst for starting her media platform about awareness that now reaches millions of people per month worldwide. Lisa rebuilt her brain and her life using specific visualization techniques and accessing different levels of conscious awareness she calls Brain-nastics.
“Since that experience Lisa Garr created The Aware Show, a transformational radio show about natural health, cutting-edge science, personal growth and spirituality. Since 1999, Lisa has hosted a day-time talk radio program featuring best-selling authors and experts in the fields of spirituality and healing. She is considered an expert in the field of lifestyle and transformational media programming.” from https://theawareshow.com/
I was going down the wrong road. I was working in acting, I was working in television production, and I was working 24-7 and it was the wrong road here, the wrong person there. I don’t believe I was in the right place at all. I think God was saying, “Uh-uh. We put you here for another reason. Your purpose is not being fulfilled. We’re going to throw you down a mountain and knock your head around so that we can get you back on task.” I did have a brutal accident, and shattered my helmet, and had an incredible near-death experience, where I floated into an infinite, boundless state, with all that is. I saw that everything was alive and that there was no separation between anything. I realized, “How small I am living!” Also, it’s something you can’t un-see.
I started The Aware Show because the accident wiped out my memory.
Now, twenty years later I am doing the radio show, and I have these conversations with God, I say, “Look, you put me here for a reason. You saved my life multiple times. We are doing the show together. What is the next step here? What are we doing?”
In an age when telling the truth is no longer a requirement for the media, there is a parallel, unprecedented opposite movement towards truth-telling in a whole new way.
The unseen epidemics .. suicide, despair, perfectionism.
The purpose is to awaken the audience and allow that person to be a voice for a change, and if that effects one person who effects one person .. people start to make choices that brings the power back into their hands, so they’re not relying on some outside source to help them. That grassroots movement is how I believe we’re going to uplift humanity and heal as life become more and more chaotic.
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We are raised to look outside ourselves to measure the meaning and value of life, and it’s only much later that we may be challenged to shift to filter for internal markers to ascertain our lives.
I so often work with clients who are being challenged, and who completely miss seeing where the problem lies. It lies with them. It’s not that they aren’t intelligent, they just don’t have the habit of looking inside. A big part of the work I do is bringing people home to themselves.
.. I was given a terminal diagnosis .. I was lying in the hospital, and I realized that life was my choice, and the life that I created was an internal thing, and the external world was a reflection of that. The world shifted on its axis for me at that moment. Knowing that I had the power to do so, I chose to live.
We have the choice in every hour of every day whether we follow our own internal truth or whether we just keep quiet and do what we think is expected of us.
We choose life – in every moment – or not.
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There were so many ways, as I was growing up, that I felt very different. Feeling ‘other’ everywhere.
I grew up in a Muslim family in Las Vegas, I came out as queer in 7th grade. Coming out means continually peeling away layers to reveal ourselves, to ourselves and to the world.
The first time I was in a space that was both queer and South Asian was shocking. I felt like I had to hide from other South Asians. I had to start learning that I didn’t have to hide. I didn’t have to worry that it would get back to my parents.
A sense of wonder and curiosity pervades my life, and a sense of accepting what can really start to happen when you open up to who you are. And how you are safe when you really accept ALL of yourself. It’s the kind of space I want to create for people, especially the women who are attracted to my work.
After I came out to my mom, and her initial shock, she became my greatest ally.
When I saw her pain and suffering, and said, “This must be so hard for you,” and she understood that I really did see her, everything changed. People want, above all, to be seen.
I help people speak their truth, which is why it’s so important that I come out to my dad as soon as possible. I help them make the energetic shift that helps them take risks.
Business is not just about money but about liberation.
We have to listen to what’s coming out of our own mouths and take guidance from that.
After working through the oppressions of racism, homophobia etc. we must work through the barrier of, “I am unlovable.” Regardless of who we are, our work become the work of reflecting love back to the world.
I was talking about the Buddha as transgressive, as ‘queer’ to a group of straight couples. I suggested that everyone in the room was actually ‘queer’. I witnesses this room full of straight people nodding in enthusiastic assent.
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Michele Benzamin Miki in Conversation with Dr. Scott Mills Step Aside and Allow others to Have Their Experience
From her beautiful home at Manzanita Village, a spiritual retreat center in Southern California, Michelle Benzamin-Miki joined me for an inspiring conversation about the crossing the boundaries into a world that no longer remembers what it is to be at war — at war with ourselves, with each other and with the planet. And as soon as she began to imagine this world with me, she also provided guidance on how to begin this journey, right now, and live a life that you love.
She explains that what she’s really about is “loving life — feeling like is a gift — and staying interested in it no matter what.” Considering how many people I come across who have gotten bored with themselves and the world, I’m excited to hear how she gets there day after day.
Michele is an Aikido master as well as a gifted artist whose work has won many awards. She has taught Buddhism, meditation and deep ecology around the world with luminaries like Nobel Peace Prize Nominee Thich Nhat Hahn. And her experience as a biracial woman with a foot in Japan and a foot in the U.S. has also informed her. This has allowed her to walk between many differing worlds, mediating between what can seem like opposing forces. .
Our conversation was so rich but I want to highlight five of the life lessons that I will be reminding myself of this week.
1 Release the need to take things personally. It’s so easy to make it all about me. Of course, you are the center of your universe. I am the center of mine. But once we step out of the house in the morning our universes begin to collide. We get ourselves into trouble when we think that the person who bumped us on the street or was grumpy in the elevator is a bit player in our life rather than the center of their own universe. When we release into this truth, we gain a better perspective on life.
2Get into agreement with yourself. What a beautiful way to remind us that all of us is okay. Many of us spend so much of our time beating ourselves up for having an errant emotion or thought. But Michelle starts from this place of self-compassion that allows us to be okay and present to whatever emotion you may be feeling. Receive it like a welcome guest rather than turning it away at the door. This allows it to complete and creates a space for something new to emerge.
3 Step aside and allow others to have their experience. This deep insight from the world of Aikido makes me want to spend my life in Michelle’s dojo. I think of all the times that I want people to act the way I would like. (It’s hard sometimes to remember that their universe is more relevant to them than mine, especially in moments of pain.) We can choose to allow for others to complete or to block the flow of their emotions most often creating escalation. Most of the time it’s not about you. It’s about them. Just as you allow your own emotions to complete, allow those of others so that something new can emerge.
4 Invite your active, fierce compassion. The notion of fierce compassion couples with allowing others to complete. It allows you to also have fierce compassion for yourself. It is about being “able to engage fully and say yes to the moment and the love you feel.” At the end of the day, fierce compassion is about being able to stand with someone in the fire of their experience, perhaps a little singed but expanded. (Of course, nowhere is Michele suggesting that someone should allow themselves to be injured or abused. As a matter of fierce compassion for yourself, if you are in danger get to safety.)
5Unleash your inner Obasan. When I asked Michelle about how art informs her teaching she tells me a story about her grandmother (Obasan in Japanese). When she was three years old the artist impulse that every child possesses had already invited Michelle to color outside the lines. Rather than limit her, Michelle’s Obasan covered the walls with paper and encouraged her to color wherever her imagination led her. This was first time she felt “the freedom and the liberation of the line.” And this permission to fully express has travelled with her to this day. If you did not receive this permission, it’s not too late. You can give it to yourself right now!
When I asked her what is the biggest change she wants to see in the world she laughed and said, “I want a lot.” (How can you not love her?) But at the core of her wanting is a world where children don’t know what war is. Where “this notion of war becomes an old thing of the past, an old story, maybe a metaphor of how we used to deal with things.” She dreams of a day when we can be more creative in our solutions with each other and release the violence that has become an easy solution to far too many problems.
I’m excited to live in this world with Michelle! The work she does is helping to make that dream a reality. Scott Mills
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Diego Marmolejo and Samuel Velez: The Wisdom of the Earth and Our Ancestors with Abraham Garcia
We’re here to receive the wisdom of the Earth and of our ancestors. Everything that surrounds us – places, people, plants – is medicine. When you understand that, you can call yourself a shaman, a medicine man.
I am the plants and the rivers and the animals. People know that about me because I can transmit that essence to others.
I remain the same person despite all the ups and downs of life.
A long time ago I had a vision that I was in a desert. I was driving and there was a lot of dust. I asked an elder, who told me that probably one day I would come to the U.S. to teach. Being here is not an accident. We have a mission here.
Much of the ancient knowledge has been lost, so we use the sacred plants to help us remember the essence, to awaken the elders that belong to every place and every life.
The land is a great master. But a human without land, without a place they know deeply, is not fully human. The first thing we must learn is how to take care of the land, of the Earth. Afterwards we learn what it can provide to us. Without a relationship with the land we have no direction.
Ultimately we are the land.
We use the sacred plants to remember the ancestral teachings and the wisdom of the earth.
The land – the specific territory where you are – is your school.
I teach my children, not by repetition, but by keeping them close to me and helping them experience the land and the inner territory. This is not something they teach in schools.
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I have been immersed in personal growth and spiritual development for the past thirty years.
Curiosity is the source of everything that is rich and excellent. It’s the source of authentic art, and of science.
When everything is in harmony a creative energy is called forth. Its intention is to experience its own bliss through you. Suddenly, you are in a state of authentic connection with life, nature, with flow. Curiosity is the starting point.
When I tune in to who I am, I only see the person I have always been. As far back as I can remember being aware, I am still that same awareness. Though I’ve played so many different roles, and I’ve had so many experiences.
All my life my head and my heart have been in conflict with each other; What do I really want versus what’s practical? Living from my heart or for what society says is acceptable?
… the infantilism of a culture that lives on children’s’ food: chicken nuggets and ice cream …
I stood in my living room and prayed to know what unconditional love is. I learned that it is devotion to the truth of who I am. It is knowing what is ‘me’, and what is ‘not me’. The flow and momentum of that question led me to experience my life as I have.
Climbing a mountain, climbing Denali, going deeply into quantum physics, immersing yourself in spiritual practice .. all of those things can change your neurology. They change the foundation of who you are.
The antidote to resignation and existential sleep is to pursue whatever keeps you on the edge of the crevasse, whatever keeps you flowing with your life.
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I’ve been exploring how to live personally in the constant now, while also asking the question, ‘Who are we now as human beings?’ and ‘Who can we become?’
There’s a difference between being in a Now based on anxiety, and being in the Now with a sense of vision. Now is the entry point to past and future. It’s also the entry point to all the possibilities of who we can be. It’s not an abstract point in time where the reality of the world, past and future, is suspended.
It’s so easy to get lost in hopelessness and frustration, in constant survival-mode; but what I’ve been more and more aware of is the amazing human spirit. I was at the march for gun control and it so filled me with such hope. There are so many people who are so endlessly resourceful. It’s fascinating to be in the middle of these two polarities, between resourcefulness and hopelessness.
Singing in the choir for the Oregon Symphony performance of Beethoven’s Ninth I used a tool that helps me expand my sense of the Now, connecting the three times:
remembering all the people who have supported me, and this performance of Beethoven
remembering everyone who has sung or been moved by Schiller’s Song of Joy before,
and reflecting on everyone who will discover, and hear, or perform this song in the future.
The story of ‘everything is getting worse’ make it’s hard to feel any hope. But when we stand in our creativity and resourcefulness, we can start to imagine real change. It’s as simple as that! We have to be honest about what’s going on, and look at where are resources are. We have to get beyond the feeling that things are getting worse, that there’s no hope, because feelings are often misleading. Our brains can take us into hopelessness or resourcefulness. And the choice is ours.
When we lean into the suffering in the world we make it okay for us to open to our own suffering. We stop protecting ourselves, or hiding parts of ourselves from the world.
This choice to be fully present and available to life is a difficult choice to make. That’s what spiritual practice is, to constantly come back to the fullness of ourselves.
The choice we must make is to not put off living until tomorrow. At any moment we can stand in the place of joy and breathe and ask, “What is in this world around me?”
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I would hide under the kitchen table. I was so empathetic, so overwhelmed by the energy I sensed around me. I wanted to engage with life, but part of me was afraid to do so. Would it be too much for them? Would it be too much for me?
At first I played the ‘good’ boy. But in first grade I wanted to be like the kid who had dropped the f-bomb and I started hanging out with him. I played with the bad kids because I wanted to be noticed. Then when they started telling me what to do, I learned how to say no. But they ostracized me. It wasn’t easy to navigate. I had violent fantasies. There’s a price to pay for refusal.
I came to realize my abilities and potential as I moved forward.
I was sent to the psychiatrists, then in grad school I studied psychology, and people asked me, “How do you know so much about your clients?” They just didn’t understand how I could tune in to people so well..
Unless people are able to express their true self they get sick and depressed.
I learned that if you become certain about something happening, then it just happens. I didn’t think I needed to know anything else. But it became so exhausting, trying to prove to myself that I was right all the time. I started learning new things that opened me up, peeling away old beliefs. I’m still doing it.
I help visionaries not go through the pain I went through.
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