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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The Onondaga were the fire keepers. The grandmothers were at the head of the longhouse, on one end, and the warriors were down on the other. And when the warriors said, we need to go to war they’d pass that up the longhouse to the grandmothers at the other end.
And the grandmothers would sit in the pain of hearing the cries of the warriors, and those warriors’ children not having fathers.
And then the mothers and grandmothers would send their decision back down to the warriors whether this was going to happen or not.
And that was their supreme court. It was all mothers and grandmothers.
I think we need to do that with our own supreme court.
I think we need to allow only grandmothers to be appointed.
Matthew Cobb was born to a sharecropper’s son from southern Georgia and a nurseryman’s daughter from northern Florida.
Matthew is married to Erica for 35 years. He is a father to Ian and Emily Claire. He is a priest in the Order of Melchizedek, as ordained in The Episcopal Church a denomination of the Protestant Christian faith within the apostolic lineage of the Anglican Communion, and has lived and worked with the native people of the northern great plains for many years.
Currently, Matthew resides on Willow Street overlooking Loving Park in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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I did not share my work initially because I understood that first I must embody it. Susan Sutherland on the Missing Pages of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene
From the conversation with Susan Sutherland:
“let me enter this hurt, let me truly feel it. It has allowed me be truly present. And then the transmissions arrived ..
“The body often gets dismissed and one of the most beautiful recognitions that Mary Magdalene has offered me is the remembrance of the body as Divine – the Divine made flesh.
“the body holds codes, and it holds memories, and it holds lifetimes of experience ..
“When I was exploring the “New Age” my understanding was that I needed to meditate, I needed to escape. It was escapism. I was finding I had to remember that I was bringing divinity into this body, into this conversation, this carpool, this baseball game. It is bringing this divine made flesh into everything we do.
“She stayed, when things were hard, when her heart was broken ..
“Jesus being placed on a pedestal puts that relationship with God so outside us that it is unachievable, and one of the blessings of this work is to understand that the squabbles that we have in life, the hiccups, and and the heartaches .. all of that is divine too.
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The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely — Carl Jung
Practices that engage you in the natural world beyond the human realm become a practice of unconditional love towards all beings, human and otherwise. We step out beyond the human story that separates us from mountains, skies, and rivers. It is coming home. It’s the same for all of us, however urbanized we may have become, we realize we are an integral part of the natural world.
Remembering also means putting ourselves back together. Coming home is coming to wholeness.
It is essentially transgressive to come to wholeness in a society that encourages us to be fragmented and distracted. If queer identity is transgressive, that transgression is in the service of coming home, coming to wholeness.
Being queer is essentially transgressive because it primes us to to re-wild who you thought you were, and who you were taught to be.
When you turn ‘being present’, in a passive voice, to ‘presencing’ as an act of volition, your relationship to the world and to yourself in it changes completely.
Encounters with the divine have been described as equally filled with both wonder and terror, and so it is when we gaze into our own hearts.
In any situation there can be something to learn that teaches you to let go of your present view of the world.
Retreat with Ben and Caitriona, March 2023Click here
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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 tool; 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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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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