UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast: Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after show community question and answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us. Explore. Come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
I also want to take a moment and introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation, our nonprofit that creates equitable access to transformational tools and teachings. You can learn more at soundstruefoundation.org. And in advance, thank you for your support. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Margaret J. Wheatley.
Meg is an expert in organizational leadership and has worked globally as a consultant, advisor, trainer with all levels, ages, and types of leaders and activists in multiple cultures. She has a deep appreciation for the science of living systems and life’s coherent directionality, along with being grounded in a life of spiritual practice. Meg has authored 12 books, including the classic Leadership and the New Science, Who Do We Choose to Be, and a new book. It’s called Restoring Sanity: Practices to Awaken Generosity, Creativity, and Kindness in Ourselves and Our Organizations. Since 2015, Meg has been training leaders and activists from more than 35 countries as what she calls “warriors for the human spirit,” and we’ll be talking about that. Meg, welcome.
Meg Wheatley: Well, I’m so glad to be here, Tami. Thank you.
TS: And I’m happy to be with you. Here’s where I want to start. You and I had a conversation four or five years ago, and in it you introduced me to this notion that we were in civilizational collapse. That this was not something that was happening out in the future, but something that we had actually entered into. And I think I had so much shock, I was so stunned by your clarity and the research and knowledge that you brought to that moment, I didn’t actually ask some of the questions I want to ask now.
MW: Okay, go for it.
TS: I don’t even know exactly what is meant by a term like civilizational collapse. What does that mean?
MW: Well, there are many definitions, but one of the most powerful expressions of this is when the systems that are created to make life possible within a civilization implode under their own bureaucratic weight and can no longer serve the functions for which they were created. So you look at education, you look at military, you look at banking, you look at health care especially, these systems no longer work well. And in fact, we’re now mired in such overbearing bureaucratization. That’s one sign of collapse. The bureaucracies we created to serve us actually collapse of their own way, just like the Twin Towers did. But the much more critical aspect of the final stage of a civilization is, and it makes so much sense that we start with high ideals, commonly shared values. Over time we become, every civilization becomes more and more materialistic. Business takes over. Comfort replaces common sacrifice or sacrifice for common values.
And then we arrive at the final stage of collapse, which is so well-marked in the work of Sir John Glubb, who’s a British historian, but many others speak about this now, and it’s the complete narcissism, focus on self, focus on entertainment and distraction. The elites take everything for themselves. There’s so much internal warring going on between factions that nobody pays attention to the real enemy at the gates, which in our case is definitely climate at this point.
And we go down from self-absorption, narcissism, a belief in entitlements. And this is not just us. So one of the things I have found so important to convey is that when you notice what the pattern of collapse is and then you can just check off our behaviors, our politics, our issues, and it shifts from, with the folks that I work with, it shifts from what we did wrong to, oh, this does always happen, now how are we going to respond to it?
TS: Tell me what you know from the same pattern discovery process that you went through about regeneration from collapse.
MW: Yes. Well, this is where my experience with living systems comes into play, but the first thing I just want to say is it’s so hard for us, especially if we’re American, to understand that life exists in cycles. When you look at life, when you look at your beautiful gardens right now, you know this was a result of spring and there will be fall and there will be winter.
So life is always cyclical, except in the American identity, where we believe it’s always getting better and better. That’s what’s unique about American exceptionalism. We can fix anything and we’re always getting better and better. So one of the things that I think we go too quickly toward thinking about regeneration—
TS: You notice I went there very, very fast. Five minutes into our conversation I was like, “Could we please get to regeneration as quickly as possible?”
MW: So there are people in your audiences who have lived through collapse. I have worked intensely in South Africa and Zimbabwe and know what the experience of collapse is. If you’re Venezuelan, you know what the experience of collapse is. But we in our lovely, comfortable, we-can-fix-this mentality, which I’m not mocking at all, I just want to take that energy of how do I contribute and put it in the right places, and we’ll talk more about that.
We’re a whole culture that doesn’t honor or do well with death. And so the first work is to understand where we are in a natural life cycle and we are approaching the dissolution and death phase. And of course, we want instantly to make use of it, so it’s a good thing that capitalism is going down. It’s a good thing, and there’s too much injustice. There’s too much of everything wrong, which is always the critique from every civilization that has collapsed.
Injustices prevail, growing numbers of the poor, disregard for anything that’s of value to us people. To go as quickly as you did and everyone wants to think positively.
TS: Well, it’s okay. But once we see the pattern, I’m also happy to track back and talk about where we are, what we’re going to have to pass through. But I just want to understand the pattern.
MW: You just look outside. If you’re living in a northern temperate climate right now, just notice the cycles and enjoy this period because collapse is inevitable with the dynamics, just the biological and cosmological and climate dynamics we’ve set in motion. So I don’t want to bring everyone down, but we have to face reality. So I’m not apologizing, which a lot of people do. Well, I’m sorry to be a downer. Let’s be realist. Let’s face reality so that we can identify what work will be of greatest meaning and value to others. And that’s the absolute description of where I’m focused. How can we find a path of contribution once we understand that things are not going to improve? We cannot reverse anything in nature. So we’re not going to reverse climate change.
We have to prepare for its increasingly destructive dynamics that were set in motion centuries ago and are now not stoppable. The same with societal dynamics. I mean, people turn on one another. People move into self-protection. And this is explained in neurobiology by when we’re under threat, we immediately go into fear and aggression from the amygdala.
And we don’t want to be people—I’m just assuming all of us here are fully aspiring to be fully awake and helpful and meaningful, do meaningful contribution. I’m just going to assume that, and I’m sure it’s true. So the question is we can’t fight these dynamics that are set in motion, so we need to recognize them and then get with what can we contribute now, what makes sense.
TS: Okay, I’m still in wanting to recognize the collapse of civilization pattern that you see, the kinds of destruction that you see, and the potential for rebirth. You are basing, I think, if I understand correctly, some of your observations on historical civilizations that have collapsed and in their place new structures were formed, new ways. Is that what we’re talking about or not?
MW: No, we are not talking about that because we all instantly think of Rome or we think of Egypt, or you could think of Mayan and Inca and Aztec civilizations as they collapse. They did not revive in a different form. This is where our denial of what’s going on is, so it stops us from actually being able to look reality in the eye and say, “Okay, this is happening. You don’t need me to validate these things.”
Just listen to the UN Secretary General António Guterres who sees what’s coming with climate, uninhabitable climate, and is trying to rouse the powers that be who do not respond, who just ignore him. Or you could listen to most climate—well 99% of climate scientists. Or you could listen to people who are working in the non-developing world, who are working in very poor communities, and there you will see the same dynamics, increasing injustice, increasing degradation of both the human spirit and the spirit of life.
And one of the things that really grabbed my attention in the pattern of collapse is that in every civilization, so I’m thinking now the example that was given in Sir John Glubb’s work was Byzantium, that people no longer worship divinities. They worship sports stars and sporting events become like wars. They worship entertainers and actors and musicians. They don’t worship deities. So where are we at this time in our culture? The Medal of Freedom is most awarded since Obama and before then probably to actors, to musicians, and to sports heroes, and a few scientists are thrown in and now a few activists who’ve made real difference. But this is the age of distraction. And I want to hold you to this description because that’s where we can—it’s incontrovertible.
I mean, it’s historic evidence everywhere, and it’s in-our-face evidence with what’s happening with increased aggression, increased war, not paying any attention to the needs of people who are suffering more and more, but growing in uninhabitable parts of this planet and how we are together in complete self-protection and fear. Let’s just stop wanting it to be different or thinking ahead to the future. We need to get through this period.
And I’m not at all confident we’re going to get through it because of what’s happening with rapidly increasing climate disasters and what’s happening at levels we simply cannot change. So I want us to face reality and realize there’s great work to be done and it’s very different in some ways from all of us great idealists from the past who thought we were going to save the world.
We were going to create positive change. We were going to create more justice. We were going to end poverty. We were going to serve the developing world and bring them up to some level of health and prosperity. No. Now, when we really see what’s going on, there’s very meaningful work and it’s all about serving people.
TS: Okay, I’m going to ask you—
MW: Community level.
TS: I’m going to ask you a very direct question, because I want to see if I can, to the best of my ability and our listeners’ ability, through your eyes, see clearly through your eyes what you’re seeing. Are you equating civilizational collapse at this time with something like human species extinction or near human species extinction? Is that how you see it?
MW: It’s how I see it, because I hang out with certain scientists who explain that as a strong, strong 85% possibility at this point, I think.
TS: Okay, so what do you do through your vision. It’s okay. No, it matters to me. I’m just still trying to understand. We’re going to get to what can be done at this moment and what actually helps and community level organizing and being genuinely of service from a humble heart. We’re going to get there, but I still just want to see the picture.
Because even when I hear you say that, 85%, because of the—I’ll just use the word possibilitarian that I am, I’m going to focus on that 15%. I’m built for that. I’m built to focus on what’s possible. I started a company. It’s still around 40 years later. Only 5% of people ever make a company to 10 years. 15%, I can work with that. Let’s go. Yet I hear you being maybe, I don’t know, suspicious or critical even of that orientation of give me the 15%, I’ll work with that.
MW: Well, what would be interesting is if, let’s say there’s 15%, and some of the scientists I hang with would say that’s an exaggerated number, but let’s just say, so what would you be doing now that is different than what I’m doing now? I think that’s where it gets really interesting.
Do we need to believe that a certain number of humans will continue to exist on an uninhabitable earth, or do we focus both of our works on what can we do for people now that restores their humanity, their confidence, their sense of self, because so many people have lost any sense of what it means to be a fully human being? So I don’t think there’d be any difference there.
What is different is whether you or anyone needs this possibility of the future being good. The whole focus of restoring sanity is this beautiful quote from Marvin Weisbord, the great elder of organizational behavior, who said, “I used to go into a place or system and ask, what’s wrong and how can I fix it?” Well, that was my whole life for a long time. For any activist, we want to know what’s wrong, we diagnose it well, and then we get about fixing it. But then Marvin changed the perspective.
He really affected me deeply. And he said, “Now I go in and I ask what’s possible here and who cares?” So I am with you in creating possibilities. I just think we might have a very different—maybe it’s a different reason for doing it. I want to be the best human. I want other people to know the richness of being human now as we go through increasingly desperate times. You’re there also. Maybe things will turn out well. Well, they won’t, but maybe 15%, 10% of people will be living in very different places and combinations.
And this is where we can get, Tami, into where I have to go in these days, what is a meaningful life and a meaningful work? And then it doesn’t matter so much the results of it. If we really identified meaning as spiritual development, service, developing true compassion and love, and doing the best we can wherever we are, that’s my definition of a meaningful life. And then whatever happens in the future, which is not within our control, we will have led rich, good human lives.
TS: Specifically being a warrior for the human spirit, that, as my understanding, is your response. Who do you choose to be a warrior for the human spirit? What does that mean?
MW: It means that we are in the tradition of warriors who always arise when something of value is threatened. Now, throughout history that has meant usually what’s being threatened is the power of the king or the lands of the feudal lord or the emperor’s at risk. So those warriors who train impeccably are in service to what is of value, but it’s defined by huge egos. And they use military weapons, and that’s why the word warrior comes from, the word war.
But throughout our history, there are always spiritual warriors, nonviolent warriors, peaceful warriors. This is written about in the Don Juan books by Carlos Castaneda who speaks a lot about that kind of warriorship, and I quote him a lot in some of my books. And what I mean by warriors for the human spirit, and that’s a very important preposition, it’s not of the human spirit, it’s for the human spirit, is in a time of great suffering, we want to be the presence of insight and compassion.
Now, these are the Shambala warrior weapons that Joanna Macy defined. And that text was given to her by her Tibetan teacher in the ’80s, I believe. How do we develop compassion and insight in this hyper aggressive, challenging, slandering, want to kill one another if not physically, at least kill us in our reputations and take away our work? How do we maintain compassion and insight in those situations?
And how do we know what to do that is of greatest benefit in any situation? That requires training. And that’s what Jerry Granelli and I, we’re both coming out of the lineage of Chögyam Trungpa and Shambala, the path of the warrior, deeply ingrained in us. But it takes commitment. It takes dedication to this path of service. And when there are certain skills we need to develop, that require training over time.
And what’s constant in all of this is that we are part of what always emerges in the last stage of collapse, which is Sir John Glubb defined us as at this time, there are a few people, please notice it’s a few people, who notice that it’s only through self-sacrifice that community can be preserved. And these people, I call them warriors, raise the banner of duty and service against the depravity and despair of their time. That’s what a warrior for the human spirit is and does.
TS: You mentioned compassion and insight.
MW: Yes.
TS: I think most people have some sense of what compassion is in their life. They feel it for other people and want other people not to suffer. I think insight’s a little bit like what kind of insight are you talking about? What’s the insight of the warrior for the human spirit?
MW: You could use the word discernment. You could use the word of being able to see clearly, which means we work with to decrease our filters. All of the work now on DEI is about how do we overcome our judgments and our biases? Well, those are filters, those are habits, those are conditioning, those are acculturated biases. And they’re also built into the human brain in a rather startling way that we fear difference automatically. You can work to see more clearly.
And the reason we’re seeing more clearly, clearing our filters, all the work on perception, paying attention to more and more, bringing in more and more information so that we can discern, determine what would be useful here. And it’s never what I think I need. It’s always being able to develop the skill to look around through clear filters, less filtered, and see clearly what is needed here and then to understand. The second question is just as important.
Once I see, oh, this is what’s needed in this little team or this organization or this community or this moment, then I also have to reflect on, am I the person to contribute at this time? Am I the person? And that means we really need to understand our own situation. Do I have the right skills? Am I stable enough? Is my home life stable enough so that I won’t go off emotionally in situations?
So we have to prepare ourselves to have stable minds and open much greater perception that takes in more and more, and then we do develop insight. And I use the phrase ad nauseum at this point, that warriors need to see clearly so we can act wisely. We can’t just act and react, which we all want to do, because we see something’s wrong, and we want to rush in and fix it, and then it doesn’t work. So we need to really be much more stable, centered, and have much fewer filters so that we can see where I might possibly make a good contribution.
TS: One of the teachings that I benefited experiencing from you in preparing for this conversation had to do with seeing clearly without the filters of hope and fear. And I found this incredibly useful and grounding and sobering, and it wiped my vision clear in a way. And I wonder if you can talk some about that because I think a lot of people think there’s something like, I want to be positive, so I’m going to be hopeful.
MW: That’s right. And I’ve written at length on this in many different forms, because hope is a set of blinders. Hannah Arendt said that quite beautifully, that with hope we kind of leap over, just like we did with what’s regeneratively possible. We leap over the current situation and focus on what we want to create, but we’ve leapt over the situation at hand, and we can’t see clearly what’s needed. Now, the combination of hope and fear is in every Asian spiritual tradition.
It’s seeing the world through filters that actually seem very positive at one point. And then when it doesn’t work, when we fail, when our projects, our budgets get wiped away, when something terrible happens beyond our control in our community, and we understand that all our hard work has just maybe literally been washed away, what we feel is fear. We feel failure. We blame ourselves perhaps. But these two emotions, they’re like yin and yang. If you’re going to hope for a certain outcome, you’re going to be very fearful when it doesn’t work out.
This is the great Buddhist teachings of these oppositions that is worth stating here that when we’re looking for respect, we instantly bring in blame. We want something from people and we’re going to get the opposite of it. When we want a good reputation, we’re opening ourselves instantly to this whole field of slander and criticism. And when we work for gain, for some form of profit, we bring in a sense of loss, because you can’t just go for something and not bring in its opposite.
So that’s a classic Buddhist teaching, and it is emotionally how we work. So when we’re very hopeful—I mean, anyone on this call, your listeners, could realize, when was something you really put your heart and mind into and it didn’t work out, but you had really put all your expectations, energy, devotion into it because you needed it to end in a certain outcome. And when it failed, sometimes you made a mistake. And often in this very toxic environment, our good work is destroyed by crazy politics or people who just want to destroy us, who are jealous of our work.
How did you feel when it failed, when it didn’t come to fruition? So it’s a setup. It’s called the ambush of hope. We’re seduced by possibilities. But if we don’t achieve those possibilities, we go down in despair. I always use Václav Havel from the Czech Republic, his definition of hope, which is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out. And that’s doing our work because we know it’s our work.
It’s very hard to give up hope. It’s certainly hard to give up wanting our good labor to bear fruitful results. But in this environment, we’re just setting ourselves up to experience failure, pushbacks, loss of budgets, etcetera. So the way to be in our work, I’ll give you—I’ve actually prepared a glass for this. This is my great demonstration. Is this glass half empty or half full? We know the right answer, right? You have to be positive. So of course, it’s half full. I don’t care about the measurement in the glass.
I look at it and warriors look at it and say, “Oh, there’s water here. Wow! Who needs it and how can I get it to them?” So we’re dealing in the moment with clarity about, in this case, my word, there’s water here. Let’s find who needs it and let’s work our butts off to get it to them. That’s not about hoping for an expectation. That’s being in the present moment, but constantly asking what’s needed here and am I the person to contribute?
So clarity is how I describe the place beyond hope and fear and clarity of our purpose, clarity of our aspiration, not a definite, well, I have to do this, this, and this in order to feel I led a meaningful life. No, it’s our aspiration that for as long as I can, I want to be available and I want to serve. And to do that well, I have to be out there and I have to cleanse my filters of the judgments and biases and preconceived notions, and then I see what’s possible.
TS: This question, what’s needed here and am I the right person to do it? I notice that there’s something that takes me over at times when I’m called to create something in the world. And it’s not even really a rational process like, am I the right person? It’s like something happens inside my body. It’s like there’s an eruption of some kind that I have to do this thing. And I wonder what you think about that because it’s not quite that analytical.
MW: No, it’s not analytical at all, and I think that is being summoned by grace. I mean, since I did so much work in the past with people before we were in this mess and before I was doing warrior training, I wanted people to discover the issues that were most important to them so they could start working on them. Because I had so much experience at that point with noticing, wow, everyone has a really different issue.
I showed a photo of elephants in Thailand for some other statement I was making, but a woman came up to me, she said, “Those elephants were standing on concrete. That’s terrible. It’s really damaging to them.” And I thought, oh, well, that’s your issue. I’m glad you’re dealing with it, but it’s the last thing in my mind to worry about elephants. But I’m grateful everyone has their issue. And I had the sense at that time of really is what it felt like the issues would come and tap us on the shoulder.
That was 20 years ago I was thinking that way. Now with my own experience and what you just described, I know that we are being assisted and grace is available. Anne Lamott had a beautiful definition of grace, which is we never know why it discovers us, but we can count on—this is not her exact quote—but it always leaves us changed. And so I think full-body recognition of, yeah, something has just entered me, depends on your cosmology and theology, what you think, how you name that entering, but this is coming from beyond us.
You and I talked about synchronicities. That’s also evidence that something or someone or something is working to make our work possible. And I’ve forever used as a measure, am I doing the right work? Well, I look at the number of synchronicities and that’s my measure that, yep, this is the right track. And when it gets hard, I realize, no, I’m really not supposed to be doing that in this way at least.
So I think it’s a great importance for me now for all of us to wake up to the fact and just look at the number of synchronicities in our lives that we are being supported, we are being held, we are being assisted, however you want to name it. It’s not us who are responsible even for creating what needs to be created. So I value that experience over and over.
TS: We’re being assisted. I think that there’s a possibility that somebody could take that idea and turn it into their narrative about how everything is going to be okay for the human species because we’re being assisted, but I don’t think that’s what you’re talking about. How do we have our spiritual sense of being assisted without getting into magical thinking that’s distorted?
MW: It takes a lot of time to be clear and not just make these quick assessments. Well, that’s evidence that it’s all going to be okay. No, we screwed it up, folks, and we are responsible for this. We can’t change where we are. We can’t stop these dynamics. But I feel assisted when I truly embody compassion and insight, when I truly recognize that the work I’m doing is a gift to me and I want to be a gift to people. I think this is a bigger conversation of, how do we ground ourselves?
How do we develop the confidence that I can do the work that seems to be mine to do? How do I develop the confidence that I’m not making up this feeling of being assisted, guided, but how do I not get lost in the ego dynamics that are so frequent? When you truly feel guided or you know you’ve been guided to not feel special, that’s another level of responsibility and accountability for me. Oh, I really am supposed to do this work, so I better give it my best. I better give it my best and stay connected.
TS: One thing I wasn’t really clear about when I was reading Restoring Sanity is your sense of faith, because you refer to it a couple of different times. You say, “I’m faithful, therefore I’m not afraid.” That that’s one of your mantras. And I thought, okay, it’s not hope. You’re not engaging in some kind of optimism or anything like that. What is it? What is that faith?
MW: Well, I need to tell the story of where that came from, which was with the Catholic nuns, the leaders of Catholic nuns in the United States who were under severe attack by the Vatican. The Vatican at that time with the former Pope, Pope Gregory, and some pretty evil bishops decided that they would take the focus off of themselves for all the charges being brought to them around pedophilia, and that would be good to focus on the sisters, on the nuns, and what they were doing wrong.
So they started these investigations. They sent teams of—they didn’t call them investigators. They called them visitation committees to visit each of the chapters, which is the name for how they’re organized, different chapters across the US. They wanted to bring them into obedience. They told them they were not living spiritual lives, they were not living the gospel. And it was heartbreaking for these elder nuns who had devoted their lives to serving Jesus, serving the poor, running schools and hospitals, etcetera.
At one point, the three leaders of the Leadership Council of Women Religious were in the Vatican, and they were delivered this condemnation and told these visitations are now going to begin. They stayed calm, but they were really shocked, but they stayed calm. And then the cardinal who was doing this, who was a truly awful, awful person, he came over as they were packing up. I was told he leaned over them and just said, “You are not afraid, are you?”
To which one of the three leaders said, “We are faithful, therefore we are not afraid.” And the way I have used that is not about my ultimate faith in God, which they had, and they were always working for the God of the future, who was definitely feminine, and I still speak about that all the time, but where I’ve gone with that is, what is my faith in my guidance? What is my faith in my work? What is my faith in restoring sanity?
I ask us all, what is your faith in people? Do you really believe that just about every human being could be generous, creative, and kind? And I give practices for exploring that. Because in my own experience, when something has gone wrong, and I really feel that I’ve failed, or that was stupid, Meg, why’d you do that, or it’s not working the way I thought it would, I take time in a very quiet, meditative way, and I ask myself, have I been faithful to this work?
Have I been faithful to everything I was taught about how to do this work? It’s always about warrior training now and the human spirit. So if we don’t have that kind of grounding, then we have no means to restore ourselves when things go wrong. When I ask the question, have I been faithful, I can still say, I really screwed up on that one, but I can recover from that because I’m still trying to find the path of contribution to what I know is what I’m intending with my work.
It’s not about faith in God. I mean, I use the quote from Emmanuel Levinas that faith is not your belief or non-belief in God, it’s your understanding that love without rewards is valuable.
TS: So if someone answers the question, yes, I have faith in human beings to be generous, creative, and kind, yes, I do, not all the time, but ultimately most of the time, and at the end of the day, yes, how does that help me?
MW: I think we could all answer that question. How do you find your way through this despicable, hateful culture? How do you find your way and keep focused on what I’m trying to create without getting lost, without being overwhelmed by my despair and fatigue? We’re in company with other people who have persevered through extreme trials. We hear these stories from war time. We hear this story. Certainly I know a lot of them from South Africa in the fight to end apartheid.
The other way of saying this is the negative, you don’t know where you’re going. Any path road will take you there, and you’ll get ambushed instantly by this very hostile time that we’re in. It’s very destructive. And if I didn’t have faith in the human spirit, I wouldn’t be doing this. For each of us to answer what my faith, not my belief system, which is things that are told to us that we adopt, but what is my faith, it has to come from my direct experience.
So I ask people in the book, when have you been surprised by people? When have you been surprised by the human spirit? What is your feeling about your own human spirit and what you need? Without that, you’re just—I think we all have experienced, we get really lost. We get very depressed. We feel battered, bruised, defended, disrespected, lost, and without some you could call this a guiding star, my north compass. I’m quoting Stephen Covey there.
You have to know why you’re doing your work. You just have to. Otherwise, you’re going down. And many of us have experienced these moments of complete loss of meaning. They’re called dark nights of the soul for a good reason. And if we come out of them, we come out of them with greater faith and confidence in ourselves. That’s where we are now.
TS: So Meg, when I attempt to look through your eyes at the current state of civilization and civilizational collapse, I’m struck by seeing waves and waves of destruction, death, despair, pain, suffering. And I wonder, in the face of that, where have you come to in terms of what will actually be helpful?
MW: Yes. Well, I first want to honor how impossibly difficult it is with these images coming from Gaza, from Ukraine, from Sudan, from the floods in Yemen, from earthquakes, forest fires. We are being overwhelmed with these images that are of what you just described, Tami, inordinate human suffering. And it’s impossible. It’s important to honor that at this time, the more we open to the world, the more we will feel despair, overwhelm, rage for what shouldn’t be happening, but is because of really awful leadership.
And we get overwhelmed and we can get totally depressed and despairing. But if you have a sense of wanting to find a path of contribution, you can rouse yourself out of these moments and not get caught in them as a permanent way of being. And out of the sadness and out of the despair, it is possible to find good local work, or it’s possible to just find absolute delight in being with a baby, to find present moment awareness with someone who just needs us to listen, to start a campaign in my community, to create resources, food, clean water, clean air.
These are all important things to do, and they’re very satisfying. They bring great joy as you’re doing it with others, and they’re nothing satisfying in the old definition of, well, we’ll clean up the water here, but actually we need to clean up this whole river and we need to stop the polluters and we need to stop the dumping of toxic chemicals. We’re not going to be able to do that. In most cases where it’s done, it’s extraordinary and wonderful. But for us, we have to define what’s needed here.
We all have different spheres of influence. I mean, I have global spheres of influence, but we all define what our sphere of influence is and then we work quite hard, quite devotedly to gather with others to see what they want to work on, and then we see what’s possible here. But it is local work. And I always quote President Teddy Roosevelt, who said, “Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.”
TS: And why do you emphasize the local so much? This conversation we’re having will be listened to by people all over the world. I mean, why not be depends on what you’re called to do?
MW: Well, it does. What I just said is I know my sphere of influence is global. I’m in a very privileged position with that. But for people who are still working at a global level, like trying to cut carbon emissions or trying to switch to renewable energies or trying to bring more justice and more peace or to end racism and all forms of -isms that deny and demean people, working at the global level simply has not worked. Period. End stop.
What’s possible in a community still feels to me like it has more potential, because we need to recreate our relationships and we need to work on these things. We’re not going to end racism, but we certainly could do work within our local communities to change the narrative, to change the temperature, to change the atmosphere at our public meetings and see what’s possible there.
We can’t change things at the level of scale that I worked years on, and we can’t change things at the level of scale where they needed to change, but they did not. So these dynamics, I’ll keep saying, we have to recognize that the dynamics set in motion are not going to be changed at a global or even a national level. My last hope here, my last experiment is, can we create things at the local level that do create possibility to create refuge, to create community?
TS: Meg, you’re almost 80. And dare I say, you have a quality that I find like an inner effervescence about you as you’re talking about quite despairing topics and very confrontational and clear and presenting it, but yet there’s this inner quality of something I might call joyfulness in the present moment, something like that. And I wonder how you experience that and feel that. And I’d also like to know how you’ve worked through your own despair on this journey to get to the place you are.
MW: Yes. Well, there’s two questions. The first is I still feel despair. I still find myself going out for a walk and suddenly I’m just weeping, or I’ll see a little news headline and suddenly I’m enraged again. But I know to allow those and I understand I will not stay there. And I have a commitment not to stay there. But I also have practices, which sometimes includes just having fun, just getting consciously distracted for a while.
But there are mornings when I wake up, I think I’m past this now, but of course, it’ll happen tomorrow morning when I say that, that I wake up and I’m just overwhelmed with the world and everything that I see cascading to this moment of collapse. And when I see that, I just say, okay, this is my morning to be in despair. I allow it. I’m not afraid of it, but I have had years of practice with it.
And so feeling my joyfulness is about… Years ago, people would come up to me and say, “Are you all right? You seem so depressed.” And I think that was a true statement, but I do find this work joyful. Once we accept the reality of now and what’s coming, being together as human beings in the fullness or the richness of our qualities of generosity and compassion and being creative together, those are moments of joy.
We’re together in the midst of horror. We’re together in the midst of degradation and destruction. And the reason we can feel joy is because we’re together. And I’m grateful to emanate this when it’s possible. I feel it genuinely. But it took years and years of learning that when I face reality past the denial, past the despair, past the rage, there’s lots of great work to do. It’s just different than what I thought it would be when I first trained as a systems thinker and consultant, there is no greater joy than working together where it’s truly selfless.
We’re not struggling with what we need from each other. We’re just doing the work. And the work now, as horrific as the circumstances are and will continue, being together is joyful. I use this quote all the time, we were together, I forget the rest. And that’s what I want. I’m not going to have a gravestone, but my fantasy gravestone would say just let’s be together.
And then we do find moments of joy and great companionship and real dark humor. All of that is very evident now. And when I’m in despair, I know the antidote. The antidote is just spend a minute and think, who needs a conversation with me right now? Or who should I write to right now? So the minute I go from here to, oh, what could I offer right now, then despair is a faint memory.
See, we have a lot to learn. Other cultures, Indigenous people start with community, and it gives them extraordinary capacity to go through terrible hardships and destruction. So we’ve been imprisoned in this western mind which says, it’s all up to us, and I make myself, and I’m going to fix things, and I can be better and better. And we’re just so disconnected. So the first work is reaching out, and that’s why it has to be local as well, although it can be on the internet as well.
TS: Well, Meg, as we end, maybe you can just tell people a little bit more if they’re interested in going further with you and studying more what the…
MW: Thank you. Well, first, I just want you to relax with whatever has stirred up in you and to name it, but not be afraid of it. Because the first step of finding a meaningful path of contribution is getting real and understanding where we are. And that’s an extremely difficult, painful, despairing practice, but it’s the first step toward finding meaning and finding meaningful way to contribute. I’m just going to add one thing here.
When I wrote about and studied about people who are lost in the wilderness, and this is not my work and I don’t remember the author unfortunately, but when people are lost in the wilderness, their first stage is to deny they’re lost. Like, no, I know exactly where we are. It’s fine. Second stage is start to question the map. And then the third stage is you get really anxious, but where you go back to is, this map has to work.
One of my friends who was on a hike in the high mountains here in Utah got caught in a blinding snowstorm, and he turned around to head down. And as he was headed down, he didn’t know he was lost, but he saw a grove of aspen trees on the wrong side of the path from his map. And his first reaction was, don’t those trees know where they belong? So that’s what we do with denial.
We deny the information and we want it to be different. We want to hold on to the old map. People who are lost in the wilderness, who are genuinely lost, the way they are saved is to recognize, I’m not lost, I’m right here. And that’s what I would like all of us to practice. We’re not lost. We’re not lost. We will figure out a meaningful work for ourselves, but first we have to know, I’m right here.
And then you look around for new information. You pay attention to different things. It’s very easy. On my website, which was designed as a resource, everything is free on there. So I have a top tab called Current Thinking with practices and with other podcasts and the articles I’ve written. But next to it is a tab called Warrior Training, and there you can see why I began this as a leadership person, why I began this, and what’s available in terms of—we have a self-paced warrior training that uses clearly the most beautiful, magnificent work that I co-created with my well-known jazz friend and spiritual companion, Jerry Granelli. We, as I already said, we created warrior training out of our lineage with Chögyam Trungpa and [inaudible 01:04:07] It’s a beautiful experience. You can just listen to it. It will deeply affect you because of the music and the narrative.
So you could just listen to a sample of that and maybe you’d like to try out warrior training by listening to the song line. And then there’s moments of interaction with me as well. So I do my best to keep things current. So it’s called Current Thinking. Just spend some time there. Thank you, Tami.
TS: Thank you so much. Thank you. I think I’m going to call our podcast together: Seeing Clearly Beyond Hope and Fear. What do you think?
MW: That’s lovely.
TS: All right. Okay. Thank you so much, Meg. Great to be together.
MW: Many blessings for us all.
TS: Many blessings.
MW: Good work.
TS: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after show Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations, and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
