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Ghost Hounds, Dirty Angel, out now.
I'm dirty, little angel.
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Greetings to you, dear friends.
It is I, Dee Trussell,
and you're listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour
podcast.
If this is your first time listening, welcome.
Thank you so much for picking this episode to tune into.
The podcast is essentially the story of the road
and it's most importantly the story of the trembling egg
at the center of the earth that's about to explode
and cause the apocalypse by spreading super intelligent
spiders through the cities of the world
that are gonna eat all of our children
and eat our feet leaving us screaming in our hallways
with blood gouting out of our feet.
That's all they do is eat babies and feet,
but that's enough to take civilization down
and I'm here to warn you of this impending horror
that's about to happen and along the way,
hopefully make you laugh and teach you about how important
it is to come to terms with who you are
and forgive yourself and recognize that as Herman Hesse
said in his beautiful book, Demian,
that to be born you must first destroy a world.
And in this case, the world you must destroy
is the world of your former fear self,
that terrible prison you've been trapped inside of,
a prison of your own creation where you stare mournfully
out the keyhole of yourself,
not knowing that the key is in your hand.
And in this case, the key is recognizing that in only
three years an egg in the center of the earth
is going to explode and super intelligent
fear seeking spiders are gonna climb out of the volcanoes
and calderas of planet earth and they're gonna go right
for either your children or your feet, more likely both.
And you're gonna look down and there's gonna be a chittering
super intelligent spider eating your feet
and you're gonna think to yourself,
man, I wish I'd learned to not be so afraid.
Like I heard on that podcast
because I wouldn't be in excruciating pain right now
watching this horrible creature devour my feet.
But let's stay positive and not focus on the impending
arachnid foot devouring apocalypse.
And let's enjoy podcasts.
We have got a particularly wonderful podcast for you today.
Trudy Goodman is here with us today.
We're gonna jump right into it,
but first some quick business.
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the entire internet sits, which is that I know someone
who sells their socks online.
If someone's making money selling their stinky socks online,
my God, just think of that.
We live in a world where there was a time
when people were crawling through the cracks
of Mount St. Helens looking for a cricket to eat
and now, holy shit, there's sock mongers sitting
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Squarespace, it's got everything you need.
Everything's optimized for mobile right out of the box.
That might not sound impressive to you, oh youngster,
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by the United States government that connects,
I don't know, your brother or your sister to ISIS
and then email that to them and ask them
if they're aware that this website exists.
There's so many beautiful pranks that could be played.
PS, I mean, legal, good-spirited, fun pranks
that are designed to make your friends realize
how much you love them because you put this much effort
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Right now, if you head over to squarespace.com,
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I guess the main thing is I use a Squarespace website.
Anytime I upload a podcast to the internet,
I use Squarespace as my main website.
Check it out, it's at DuncanTrussell.com.
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My God, thank you so much.
I love you guys and these types of podcasts,
the one I'm about to release, they're my favorite kind.
I don't mean to create some hierarchy,
if these are the ones I like but Trudy Goodman
is a peace worker, she is a meditation teacher.
She runs a meditation center called Insight LA.
She is also married to another incredible teacher
of the Dharma, Jack Cornfield and I've had
the very good fortune of watching them teach
at a few different Ram Dass retreats that I've been to
and she's just an amazing person who has done
so many incredible things on this planet.
It's just always for me, it's incredibly healing
just to get to spend a little bit of time
with people like Trudy and so I'm really excited
to upload the conversation that you're about to hear.
Everybody please welcome to the DuncanTrussell Family Hour
podcast, oh wait, before I do the intro,
if you wanna find Trudy, all the links you need
to get to Insight LA are gonna be at DuncanTrussell.com
and of course you can Google search Trudy Goodman
or Insight LA.
They have a lot of great programs there,
every Sunday they have meditation,
you can actually, they live stream so you could,
if you're not in Los Angeles or if you're on the east side
and you don't feel like driving to the west side,
you can watch the live feeds and meditate that way
or if you're in some other part of the planet
you could just tune in but definitely check out Insight LA
and if Trudy happens to be in your area
and something's happening,
you should most definitely check her out.
Okay, here we go, everybody please welcome
to the DuncanTrussell Family Hour podcast, Trudy Goodman.
It's the DuncanTrussell Family Hour podcast, Trudy Goodman.
Welcome, welcome upon you,
that you are with us,
shake hands, don't need to be moved,
welcome to you, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah,
it's the DuncanTrussell Family Hour podcast, Trudy Goodman.
Trudy, thank you so much for coming on my show,
it's so great to have you in my house.
It's really fun to be here.
I have really been enjoying getting ready
for this conversation, listening to you speak
and I've been very moved, it's a bit like,
I know it's gonna be a great conversation
when prior to the conversation,
my life feels slightly better just by researching
the person I'm gonna interview
and so thank you for all of the beautiful stuff
that you have out there.
Thank you.
I'm putting it out there for us.
So I wanted to start this one off
with a Terrence McKenna quote.
I was really moved by listening to you
talk about your experiences in Darfur
and the refugee camp there
and what's it called, Ripple, what's it?
Little Ripples, little Ripples, yeah.
So I wanted to read something to you
and then I thought maybe we could just jump
off of this particular diving board of a quote.
This is Terrence McKenna said this.
The apocalypse is not something which is coming.
The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet
and it's only because we live within a bubble
of incredible privilege and social insulation
that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse
and I wanna talk with you a little bit about that
because not only you've had this experience
of firsthand glimpse of what a refugee camp looks like
in a place where there was genocide
but then also you have worked with dying people,
you have the experience of teaching insight meditation
and I guess you are aware of the fact
that many people don't seem to realize
that they're going to die
and that they're still enjoying anticipating the apocalypse
but they haven't experienced it in their life.
Well, they're not dead yet.
They're not dead yet.
Or they somehow haven't, you know,
we see these pictures of people with their elderly parents
and they're just like taking it for granted,
their parents are still around, you know,
they haven't had the loss yet, right?
And so I wonder if we could just start off
by talking a little bit about how your contact
with the thing happening in Darfur isn't the apocalypse.
Well, then I don't know what the apocalypse is.
For those people, that's the end of the world.
And in one of your teachings,
you were talking about how you leave your home
and you're never coming back to your home.
You leave your home and you're never coming.
It's done.
That's right.
That really, really hit me right in the heart.
I never thought of that.
Can you talk a little bit about what that's taught you,
being around these people who are in this sort of existence?
Yeah, I mean, that's why I went there too, Duncan,
because I imagine being,
I have a very vivid imagination
so I could imagine what it would be like
to not ever be able to go home, no longer have a home.
In many cases, no longer have a state,
a country, anywhere you belong.
And once I read a description
by a Tibetan Buddhist teacher who was talking about,
just what you're saying,
that people lack awareness of their mortality.
And he was saying, people don't realize,
now this is a tradition that believes
that there is consciousness after death.
So I just say that.
He said, people don't realize what it is like
to have your consciousness severed from your body.
And I thought that is what it would feel like
in some way to be a refugee,
to have your entire consciousness and existence severed
from its roots.
And not only did the people,
I mean, the camp that I was in was Darfurri refugees.
And we were about 45 minutes from the border
with Darfur, Sudan, Darfur is in Sudan.
And we were in Eastern Chad, right over the border.
And 45 minute drive on a red dirt road.
And there are hundreds of thousands of people now
who have been in Eastern Chad for 13 years.
Yes.
The genocide is still ongoing.
And it's as though they can't believe
that the international community doesn't care
that Al-Bashir is still in power.
Most people here have no idea who that is.
And that, without going into the whole history of the war
and what happened, I would just say that,
not only did they have to leave their homes,
they left their homes because the militia, the Janjaweed,
would come on horseback and torch their grass.
Their homes are grass huts.
This is very rural grass hut Africa.
We're not talking about urban Africa.
Right.
So they're leaving with things on fire,
under a rain of bullets.
They're not just feeling unsafe.
So gee, we should move on, they're fleeing.
And when I went to the refugee camp in Eastern Chad,
the leader of the community who speaks enough English
to interface with us, he explained that when he left,
he left with a lot of people,
but he couldn't get his grandmother out in time.
So not only are you fleeing, but sometimes you've lost.
Family members have lost each other.
So it's extremely intense.
They fled at night only.
They hid during the day.
And when you're in the Sahel, which is the sub-Saharan,
it's a very arid region.
There's nowhere to hide.
There's no big trees and forests.
I don't know how they made it, but they made it.
And they all are there in the camp.
And I was stunned by the organization of the community,
the pretty democratic and harmonious way
that they are living in this camp.
In this camp, there are about 30,000 people,
and they're dotted up and down the border with Sudan.
30,000?
Yeah, in that camp.
Who's paying for this?
Well, that's the thing.
The UN helped at the beginning,
and the government of Chad helped,
but there isn't money,
so their food has been cut in half.
So now everybody's hungry.
They only have between six and 800 calories a day,
which is not enough.
Just to put that in perspective,
I was just at Chipotle last night.
Your typical Chipotle burrito is 800 to 1400 calories.
So you're eating like a sandwich a day.
You're eating a burrito, yeah.
A burrito a day.
And I went there because they were looking
for a mindfulness teacher who had a background
in early childhood education to help bring mindfulness
into this beautiful preschool program,
and the anti-genocide group called IACT who invited me.
Wait, what's an anti-genocide group?
It's a small, I call them small, but mighty.
What are they called?
It's called small I, ACT, capital A,
capital C, capital T, IACT.
And they asked me, and I called everybody I knew
who worked with kids and knew mindfulness,
and said, you know, why don't you go?
They're looking for this, and I didn't really want to go,
but I was- Dangerous.
It is dangerous.
It's dangerous in lots of ways.
The rebels can pour over the border,
and at one time, the two directors were caught
in a hotel for three days with bullets flying
over their heads.
I mean, it's not, now it's safer because we stay in,
we call it Chinese Chad.
We stay in a hotel out in Jemaina, the capital.
We're only there one night, but we stay in a hotel
that is outside of all the Western hotels,
so it's not a potential target, but anyway-
Trudy, you're de-emphasizing your heroism.
I'm sorry to cut you off,
but to go into a place like that is,
it's not just like, when we, it's actually,
in situations like that, things can go south so fast.
Yeah.
So fast, and they can stay south,
and so the fact that you're going out there,
it feels like you're de-emphasizing, and that's cool.
I think I have to de-emphasize it
because maybe I wouldn't have gone,
but I mean, there's no doctors, there's no medical care,
and-
And people are sick out there.
People have all kinds-
Well, the scary thing is they have a bad kind of malaria,
which I couldn't take the anti-malaria medicine,
so at six in the, and we couldn't stay in the camp,
because I think at dark, it's probably not that safe,
so we stayed in a UN compound about a half hour away,
and you know, barbed wire and guards,
and we stayed in a metal box,
and at dusk, at six, I would get in my mosquito net,
and I would just stay in it for 12 hours,
so I wouldn't get bitten.
So it was-
The kind of malaria out there, it'll, it kills you.
Yeah, you have five days, and then you're dead.
You don't have five days to get treatment.
I mean-
You really have two or three days to get treatment.
Those are painful, brutal.
But you don't dwell on this, Duncan.
If you did, you wouldn't go and do anything,
and I was tormented by the idea
there are 65 million refugees in the world.
This was before the election,
and I just felt this is something I need to do
because of that feeling of what it would be like
to be not only homeless, but nowhere to go and be that safe,
and-
Why don't people, right now,
this is what I don't understand,
and I mean this, when I say people, I mean me.
Yeah.
We watched this story of the refugees on our border,
and it has become a political statement to say,
I think we should help refugees.
That's right.
Saying that publicly now-
That's right.
Is become political.
So if you say that now, people will be like,
really, what's your plan?
Don't you believe in borders?
Do you not believe in borders?
I know.
And so you hear someone saying that,
and by the way, full disclosure,
this thought has emerged in my own mind,
so in a more refined way,
where the thought has emerged like,
well, when I go to Canada,
like going through that border there is almost,
it's difficult.
I've been detained in Canada for no reason.
I don't even know why they did.
They questioned me, they interrogated me.
They let me through into Canada
so I could do stand-up comedy,
but in Canada, Canadian comics
are always getting thrown out of the US
and going into Canada and coming back
is like a tricky thing.
So in a lighter yet equally,
I would say in human way,
my mind is thought,
well, you know, we gotta have borders.
Like what are we gonna do without borders?
If we don't have borders,
then we don't have a country.
If we don't have a country,
what are we gonna do?
We're being taxed.
Our taxes are going to people
who are from another country.
Shouldn't our taxes be going to schools
where our teachers aren't getting paid
or the kids who aren't getting enough food here
in the United States?
And so this terrible dehumanization of everybody
on the other side of an imaginary border
that got created by people a long time ago
starts happening in your mind.
Trudy, what do we do?
How do we look at this situation
in a way that is not only compassionate
but pragmatic, recognizing that what do we do?
Well, I took a lot of inspiration from IACT
because they went, Gabriel Storing,
who's the director,
and Katie Jase got, who's his wife,
when they went, they asked the refugees,
what do you want?
Now that's radical.
It seems like it would make be a no-brainer,
but that's radical to go ask people,
what do you want?
Because the big agencies, they can't do that.
They just have these top-down solutions
and they give what they can
and the refugees said, we want preschool
and we want soccer.
We want soccer so we can belong to the world,
feel some connection to the world
and we want preschool because the young kids
are watching the littler kids while the parents are out
trying to grow a few things to eat
or scrabble for fuel and they're getting hurt.
The little kids are falling into the wadi
and drowning or falling in the fire
and burning themselves and hurt.
So they essentially wanted educational daycare.
And so what we can do is ask people,
what do you want?
How can we help?
If everybody did one small thing,
obviously not everybody's gonna travel
across the ocean and go into
a very rural and dangerous area,
but if everybody did,
every time they felt, every time we feel hopeless
or despairing or frightened or freaked out
by what's going on in this country right now,
if we did one thing, if we asked around,
it would help us personally.
It definitely helps us.
And I think it would help the world.
You're saying like, so a person is listening
to an NPR story on children being separated
from their parents and the sort of,
which I just heard an incredible story
and it was up until that,
it was, man, it's so easy to dehumanize people.
It's so terrible.
But you can't dehumanize children.
You can't.
You can't.
But you can turn them into numbers.
You just tell others, you know,
there's a situation on the borders
and you go back to your job.
You don't really think about it.
And I guess not everybody loves children
as much as I do.
So maybe they can.
People love children.
People love helping.
It's just in people's minds.
Somehow there's this like ridiculous thing
that is happening, which is that
on the other side of the imaginary line,
for one of the, here's one of the things people say,
it's irresponsible for these parents
to be bringing illegally trying
to get their children into this country.
And they're saying that as though
these is a recreational activity.
These parents are not coming even
because they want a green card and they want to work.
They're coming to save their lives.
And the causes that are threatening their lives
actually began in this country.
So we actually have a responsibility to help.
That's sort of how I feel.
And I've been heartbroken Duncan
because I don't speak Spanish,
but I love kids and I've worked with kids all my life.
And then I think I want to go.
I want to go and help out.
I probably will go because I found somebody
who wants to be my translator.
I probably won't have access to kids,
but there's a lot of people who are just at the border.
Suffering.
And what we're looking at here,
people are acting like this is an anomaly.
And when we look at the projections for climate change,
when we look at what's happening in Europe right now,
where places are hitting the hottest
they've ever been in recorded history,
the ocean, I don't remember which ocean it is,
they just measured it,
it's hotter than it's ever been in recorded history.
Well, make a pilgrimage to Venice where I live
and jump in the ocean, it's tropical.
It's like swimming in Hawaii right now.
I mean, Hawaii in the winter maybe.
The oceans are heating up
and we're going to be seeing this.
This whole refugee thing,
and this is where to me it gets particularly,
I think what you're doing is incredible
in your ability to articulate is incredible
to humanize these people
because everyone in this country,
people who are living anywhere,
there's an ocean nearby.
People who are living anywhere
or there's any chance
that some climate related catastrophe could happen,
they act like they're not going to be refugees eventually.
I know, I know.
And that comes back to where you began,
which is there's a saying that,
it's in the Maburata Indian holy text,
that what is the most wondrous thing in the world?
Like the eighth wonder of the world,
what is it?
And it's that we see people die all around us,
but we somehow never think it will happen to us.
Wow.
And that was millennia ago.
This is human nature.
Right.
And it's not that we're supposed to terrorize ourselves
with thoughts of our impending death
and how's it going to happen and so forth,
but to realize the preciousness of life and of each other.
That's what it's for.
And it's a matter of learning,
just learning to open our hearts
and open our consciousness to see what this life actually is
and in the light of what we see,
what matters most to us.
And I have to say, I feel people say this
and I always thought it was sort of trite,
but I feel so much more gifted
by the time in the refugee camp
than anything I was able to offer there,
meeting people who are so resilient,
so committed to the kids and their education.
These programs are now refugee run.
There are young women who are teaching
in the Little Ripples program,
who are cooking for the kids.
They get one meal six days a week,
which is often their only nutritious meal of that day,
but the kids in that program do not have orange hair,
which is the sign of total protein deficiency.
They have black hair and it's,
and the teachers, this one teacher, Zaneb,
she said, before I became a Little Ripples teacher,
I didn't know, she said, I knew the words human rights,
but I didn't know what they meant.
Oh God, wow.
And now I realize that men and women have equal power
and I didn't know that before.
I didn't know that women in the home
and outside of the home can speak up
and have a say just like men.
And when people say these things to you,
it's so moving and so powerful.
And all you wanna do is go back.
And all I have, I actually have wanted to go back,
but we can only fit five people at once in a UN Jeep
and you have to be in those because it's so unsafe.
And so until they, mindfulness has been established
in that program.
So there isn't, I trained, somebody came with me,
Jocelyn Hitter came with me as an assistant teacher
and then she went back next time and taught.
And I don't know if there'll be a need for me to go back,
but maybe I'll go to the border now.
We have a different situation.
And everybody is in some sense,
I'm not trying to, I'll just say it,
we're all refugees in some tiny sense
in the sense that we're all fleeing
some kind of pain or suffering that we were either born with
or the causes and conditions in our families
or we've lost our job or we don't have a home
or we're traumatized by having been in the military
or the victim of a crime or endless possibilities, right?
And the practices of mindfulness and compassion
and awareness and loving awareness,
they really make a difference.
I've seen it just in, and it doesn't matter what culture,
it doesn't matter where you are.
We all have consciousness and we all have emotions
and we all need to be able to learn
more skillful ways of being with our emotions
and our insane reactivity,
which is the cause of most of our suffering, really.
Right.
So, you know, I really-
How do you not be reactive?
I hear you, when I was listening to you,
talk about your experience,
and I'll post the link to this wonderful talk you did
with Jack where you're talking about
this Little Ripples program.
And in between like-
And we can give a shout out for IACT too.
And IACT, I'll put the link-
And Insight LA, because we're partners with them.
Yes, all the rivers people can go down to find you.
We'll be there.
Trudy, I was fluctuating between beating myself up,
just thinking like, Duncan, you jerk,
you've been allowing your mind to sink back
into this ridiculously lazy position
regarding the current refugee crisis.
You haven't been saying anything about it.
And the stuff you have been saying
has been veering in the direction of dehumanizing
a group of people in some kind of weird way,
just because I don't have the solution.
I have no idea what we would do.
And then it was listening to your voice.
This is you had just come to-
You'd left Darfur to go to the Romdoss Retreat in Maui.
That's right, it was just a couple.
I had just been in Eastern Chad.
So you were dealing with culture with Darfur.
So you had gone from this complete, the apocalypse.
I couldn't face all the food at that buffet.
Right, and I heard it in your voice.
And I was-
Oh, it makes me cry right now, thinking of it.
I was, and I could hear, what I heard in your voice
was a very skillful suppression
of what would have made me want to sit up there and scream.
Like, you guys don't understand what's happening.
You're here with the ocean and the buffet,
and we all are doing great.
But they're over there.
They have, these children have trauma
that's never gonna go away.
And they're not getting enough food.
And their hair is turning orange.
And so how do we not, like, for me,
it makes you wanna scream.
Well, I do write certain things.
I try to help people understand by saying,
imagine you went camping,
and then you just had to stay at that campsite
for 13 years.
Oh my God.
Like, I try to, you know, give people images
that would help them understand and care.
There's so many things to care about here and everywhere
that there's really room for us all to pitch in
and do something.
And I do think that's the antidote to despair
and rage that you're talking about.
I also, you know, I live here.
I have a privileged life too.
I have plenty to eat.
I have to worry about not eating too much.
You know, that's my life in America.
Right, that's our problem here.
So, because it's also abundant and fabulous.
And then I just realize, well, that's how it is for us.
How would we know we're not being told
these folks are forgotten?
And I'm just talking about a few hundred thousand people
amassed in Eastern Chad.
There are people, there are Syrian refugees.
There are people all over the world.
People drowning in the seas, you know,
between, in the Mediterranean.
I mean, I think that I keep feeling like
if we weren't pouring all of our money into the military,
if enough people rallied to care
and share our caring and listen, deeply listen
to the people who don't see it the way we do.
Everything so politicized now and polarized
that I wrote one of my little weekly blogettes
about diversity and inclusion.
And as an organization of mostly white people,
how we're looking at that and learning
what are our implicit biases.
And anyway, I wrote about this
and I got this very, one very hateful response
saying you drank the Kool-Aid
and why do you feel so guilty?
And that's reverse racism.
Trumped Arrangement Syndrome.
Yeah, and on and on.
And I thought, but if we sat down with each other
and made an agreement to deeply listen
and had enough, just a little bit of mindfulness
that we could learn to notice when we're still caught
in our fabricated thought world of how I'm gonna answer
and how I'm gonna rebut that argument
and just quietly listened to each other
just that is healing and powerful.
And I have a friend who's a very,
I think he drank the Kool-Aid.
He's a total Trump supporter.
And people say to me, well, how can you be friends with him?
I said, because I learned so much from him
and we listened to each other.
And we're saved by a sense of humor.
Yeah.
He's trying to get me to come to Zambia
and do a program for women and girls there.
And he said, when you and your team leave here,
you will all be Republicans.
I'm practicing my speeches so we can joke about it
and have some capacity to connect,
even though we don't necessarily persuade each other.
I don't, this is, even that is a political,
you can't, so I've caught heat on this podcast
for certain guests where people are like, how dare you?
Now, how dare you?
No, I've had people from both sides of,
I guess you could say both sides of the spectrum,
brilliant professor, Jordan Peterson,
a brilliant journalist, Abby Martin.
And you have people on and put a microphone
in front of their face and Abby Martin says,
oh, Palestine, that's an open air prison.
And boom, get ready for the attacks on Twitter.
How dare you give that person a voice?
That person is anti-Semitic.
I know, Abby, she's not anti-Semitic.
Not at all, she's brilliant.
And, but that, you know, or how dare you give
Jordan Peterson a voice?
He's against, he doesn't like trans people
or he's a, you know, alt-right icon.
And so even the concept of producing a dialogue
with people who have been deemed too far
on one side or the other is considered to be,
do you wanna go back in time and have a conversation
with Hitler?
Do you wanna just have a nice little chat
about why Jews are destroying the planet?
You know, like, do you wanna give a voice to these people?
And I keep thinking like, well, number one,
neither of those people are close to being,
or close, it's not a fair categorization,
but also, like, if we, how do you know you're about
to go to war with another country?
You cut off all lines of communication.
That's the first thing that happens, right?
You can't hate each other if you know each other.
You can disagree.
You can disagree ferociously.
But you can't hate each other when you know each other
in that way.
And I'm not talking about, you know, criminal abusers
or people who've hurt you the most in this life.
But I actually have a poem that I wanna read
because I think it speaks to this.
It's a poem by Fred Lamotte,
and it's called My Ancestry DNA Results Came In.
Just as I suspected, my great-great-grandfather
was a monarch butterfly.
Much of who I am is still wriggling under a stone.
I'm part larva, but part hummingbird, too.
There's dinosaur tar in my bone marrow.
My golden hair sprang out of a meadow in Palestine.
Genghis Khan is my fourth cousin,
but I didn't get his dimples.
My loins are loaded with banyan seeds from Sri Lanka.
My uncle is a mastodon.
There are traces of white people in my saliva.
3.7 billion years ago, I swirled in golden dust,
dreaming of a planet overgrown with lingams and yonis.
More recently, say, 60,000 BC,
I walked on hairy paws across a land bridge
joining Sweden to Botswana.
I am a bastard of the sun and moon.
I can no longer hide my heritage of raindrops
and cougar scat.
I am made of your grandmother's tears.
You conquered rival tribesmen of your own color,
chained them together, marched them naked to the coast,
and sold them to colonials from Savannah.
I was that brother you sold.
I was the slave trader.
I was the chain.
Admit it.
You have wings, vast and golden, like mine, like mine.
You have sweat, black and salty, like mine,
you have secrets, silently singing in your blood,
like mine, like mine.
Don't pretend that the earth is not one family.
Don't pretend we never hung from the same branch.
Don't pretend we don't ripen on each other's breath.
Don't pretend we didn't come here to forgive.
So that poem helps me.
Poets give voice to our deepest, deepest stirrings
of our hearts, and the reality is we are not separate.
And it's tragic not to realize that.
Right, yeah.
That is beautiful.
That is beautiful.
That is beautiful.
I just, forgiveness thing is like such a,
it can feel so ambiguous, can it?
What is it?
Forgiveness is tricky.
I debated about whether to read the last line of the poem
for that reason, because forgiveness,
you have to be ready to forgive, and it's a process,
and forgiveness is the end point.
We all wanna start there usually,
because we are spiritual people, and besides,
it feels better to forgive than to be enraged
and carrying around grudges and resentments,
and with just being tied in knots,
but the reality is that some things are unforgivable,
and that often the best we can do is,
think of forgiveness as for freeing your own heart
from these states of grudge and resentment
and anger and ill will, and sometimes that's
the best we can do.
We're not gonna love our enemy,
but we don't have to be obsessed for our lifetime
with the harm that was done to us.
Forgiveness is tricky.
I think that, I like it too.
No, I mean, I guess what I mean is what I'm saying is,
I like that poem, and I like that he said we're here
to forgive is the primary thing,
because I think of it as like this ultimate
spiritual pull-up bar.
Like when I was a little doughy kid,
they used to do these monstrous exercises,
which I don't think are presidential fitness exercises.
I could never do those.
Oh, oh, I do. Do you remember that too?
My daughter went through that hell.
I'm too old, thank God we didn't have that.
So you get in line.
I'm this like pudgy, I don't know how to put it,
like a weeble wobble, essentially, right?
And you get in line and it's like,
there's this pull-up bar waiting for you,
like looking at you, like, oh, get ready.
Oh, I feel it in my stomach right now.
You gotta go and you're so, this is what-
Because I was a couch potato.
The swine president, I don't know who it was at the time,
whatever that monstrous person was, was like,
I don't know, a child should be able to do
in three-in-poll arms.
And so like, so-
These humiliation, right?
Life, children are jumping up on that pull-up bar.
They're doing like 17 pull-ups just for fun.
They love it, they love the pull-ups.
And then you march up to the thing.
It's like not a firing squad,
but it's the same feeling of like,
as you desperately tried to just-
Oh, in front of everybody too.
Yeah, right.
So, but you know, and I remember getting it,
like a few years ago, getting a trainer
and he like brought me to the pull-up bar
and he's like, we're gonna get you to start doing pull-ups.
I'm like, can't do it.
And he's like, no Duncan,
I'm gonna teach you how to do pull-ups.
And I'm like, I can't, it'll never happen.
And so sure enough, I couldn't do a pull-up the first time.
But then he's like, let me show you something.
And he starts putting like these embarrassing,
I don't know what they are,
these straps on me or something.
And so it's a little lighter.
Oh, he gave you some support.
Some support.
And then you put within a few weeks, pull-ups.
I'm doing pull-ups.
I've liberated myself from-
Can you still do a pull-up?
I don't know, because I haven't been going to the gym,
but I know that I can now.
So what I mean is-
That's fantastic, Duncan.
Forgiveness is the pull-up bar.
We look at it and we think no fucking way.
That son of a bitch, are you kidding?
I can't.
He didn't.
Okay, but you didn't do it alone, Duncan.
All right.
We can't do it alone.
You got support.
This is Maya Angelou.
She's like, okay, auto play next video,
lying, thinking last night,
how to find my soul a home.
Where water's not thirsty and bread loaf is not stoned.
I came up with one thing and I don't believe I'm wrong.
That nobody, but nobody can make it out here alone.
And then there's the reframe.
She goes on, you know, you got support.
We need each other.
We need community.
And that's actually why I started Inside LA.
I came here, I was like already middle-aged.
I didn't have any money.
I didn't have connections.
I wasn't like, you know, young and beautiful anymore.
It was like, oh no.
I was driving around in my car
and I didn't understand that you have to group your errands
in Los Angeles or you'll spend all day and you come.
I'd come home and I would have gone to the cleaners
and bought some groceries in like eight hours.
Or do you know, it was just insane.
I thought, if I'm this lonely and finding this so hard,
what you learn when you practice mindfulness and meditation,
you come to realize what I experience
is what human beings experience.
So I thought, okay, other people must feel this way too.
Why don't we get together?
Why don't we create some community together?
And then we need that.
And just like that guy, he gave you a lift
and then you could develop the strength to do it yourself.
That's right.
And it's the same with forgiveness.
It's the same with mindfulness.
It's the same with love.
We can't do it ourselves.
I hear you say that and I think,
just on the phone, my friend,
who he, just his mother just passed away.
His father died years ago.
His brother, he's estranged from his brother.
And thank God for Ramdas.
And thank God for people like you have taught me,
like, oh yeah, let's just be available for folks, you know.
And so I talk to him sometimes.
And I've told him, you know, just call whenever
and I talk to him.
That's all.
We just talk and I was so lucky.
I feel really, really lucky.
Like you're talking about, you go to the refugee camp
and the cliche thing is you realize like,
who's helping who here?
And similarly, in these little situations
where we deal with, where we talk to people like that,
and you realize like,
I'm the one who should be calling you for help
because your strength is giving me inspiration
and your contact with reality is helping me.
And I think I'm so lucky this person had the guts
to not be afraid to reach out to me.
Yeah, but it's not luck.
It's because you listened.
Right.
We have sonar for when people are deeply listening to us.
Right.
It's so healing to be listened to in that way.
Right.
So that's why he came to you.
Right.
But I think to myself of people listening right now
who are thinking, I don't really have a Duncan to call
and I'm really alone.
Yes.
Or maybe I have people I could call
but they are not listening.
What do they do?
What about that?
What about those people who are still in the forest
from whatever house burnt down,
whether it's a metaphorical house or an actual house
and they're completely,
they feel completely disconnected and alone.
I just sometimes, what do they do?
Who do you talk to when you've got nobody?
Yeah, that's a hard one.
And I think, I have a friend, he's a public health doctor
in Boston named Jeremy Nobel
and he just started something called the Unlonely Project.
And it's really addressing what is an epidemic of loneliness
in our society, just what you're talking about.
Looking at how can we connect?
How can we connect?
There's somebody, one of our teachers at Inside LA
teaches mindful writing and she has a writing group
at a place where people who are experiencing homelessness
and also mental illness can come.
And so everybody comes
and they do a little bit of mindfulness meditation together
and then they write
and then they read their writing to each other
and they listen to each other.
Yeah.
And the people love it.
And then things happen.
There's magic that happens.
Like this one lady, she had been,
I guess all her stuff was stolen
from the place while she was sleeping.
And she's all alone, God knows where she's sleeping.
She woke up, but she wrote about this experience.
And then these two guys in the group who were friends
said, you know, come sleep under our bridge.
We'll watch over you and we'll keep your stuff safe.
And they reached, now, you know,
this is the kind of, I mean, it's a shame
that people would have to be sleeping under bridges,
but creating chances for people to hear each other.
I keep coming back to that.
And if we don't have a place, maybe starting a place
because if you're lonely, you know other people are lonely.
It's just find another lonely person.
Trudy, you're a very amazing, special person.
You start, I'm thinking like in times of my life
where I've been lonely, I'm not starting a center.
I'm gonna sleep on a mattress and try to forget life.
We didn't start with a center.
We started my first sitting group.
And keep in mind, I came from Boston
where I had a big life, you know,
I was a very well-known psychotherapist.
I had a waiting list, what do you call it,
line of people around the block waiting.
I had my husband, my husband, my then husband and I
were pillars of a, you know, a Zen community.
But when I came here, I didn't know anybody.
And I started my first sitting group with two people.
Fred and Steve came, two people.
I didn't start a center.
It grew organically.
It was like cooking from scratch.
I didn't even have the idea of starting a center, Duncan.
I wanted company.
Right.
And I found, I don't know how I found Fred and Steve.
I think it was through a friend of my cousins or something.
You know, it was just a...
Right.
When we set an intention.
That is so cool.
To have something happen,
then somehow the world seems to magically come to meet us.
Have you felt that?
Yes.
And it is stunning to see,
it's almost as though the world is waiting for you
to decide what side you're on.
And what matters most to you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
How to gather your energies around what really matters
and what's most important to you.
And that means in the moment when you're lonely,
company is what's most important to you.
When you're hungry, food is what's most important.
We've got a little bit of time
and I wanna close with this question
and I'm gonna set the question up with a very quick story.
Very quick.
Oh, no, it's not a story.
You were talking about listening a lot
and you talk about listening in many of your teachings.
The other night I was at a party
and ear-beating somebody,
like giving someone the most brutal ear-beating of all time.
I was talking to him about my modular synthesizers.
His eyes had glazed over.
This I'm sure doesn't happen to you
because you have a regular practice.
But like it was like I was sitting
in a giant yappy meat robot
and I lost control of the mouth function.
Like I couldn't stop myself from talk
and I'm yapping about modular synthesis.
I'm looking at this guy.
All he's thinking is how do I get away from this dude?
And I'm thinking how do I get away from this dude?
Like I'm wanting to get away from myself.
Like if I could have like ejected from the robot
to not listen, I was boring myself.
So God knows how this sweet man felt
because he was really listening to me.
Anyway, and this is kind of a sinister way to end the story.
But it actually happened.
And I didn't know the guy very at all.
I just met him at that party.
I come to find out the next week,
he died in a car accident.
And so, you know,
like in his last moments on earth,
15 minutes was filled up with what must have been
the most rotten ear-beating about modular synthesizers
on earth and I didn't listen to him.
And you know, it's not like I'm beating myself up
or anything like that,
but it does sort of like,
if I had known that he only had a few days left to live,
I don't think that I would have done that.
So my question for you is,
sometimes to me, I know I can listen,
but sometimes I really feel like I lose the ability
to listen.
I get so caught up in my own bullshit
that I can't listen to people anymore.
And I'm faking listening.
You know, like I'm nodding and looking
and being intent and everything,
but I'm not hearing a damn thing they say.
Can you tell us a little bit about how we can cultivate
the skill of listening in our own lives?
Yes.
And the story you told,
it also links again back to the beginning
when you were talking about how we don't,
we don't get it.
We don't really let it in about our mortality.
Because if we really did understand
that this body will be a corpse,
right?
The time of death is uncertain,
but death is certain.
If we really got that,
we would
have fewer of the kind of moments where we regret
having wasted our time or somebody else's that way.
And we would be more acutely,
I mean, people who have a terminal diagnosis,
sometimes they say this weird thing
about how they're grateful
because they never felt more alive.
Right.
And you think, really?
But that's what they're pointing to,
that they're acutely sensitive
to the fleeting nature of being alive.
And it's so precious and just as horrible and brutal
as the world can be.
It's gorgeous and exquisite too.
So I think to listen to each other
requires a little bit of mindfulness
and we have to learn to recognize
what's going on in our own minds while we're listening.
We have to learn to,
how do you be aware that you're actually thinking
about something else while somebody's talking to you?
Right.
You know, cause lots of times we don't even realize it.
We just realize, oh God, I didn't even hear the last
paragraph.
That's right.
What about that?
And then you have to pretend that you did hear it.
Tell, I don't mean to stop you,
but let's stop there just for two seconds.
Cause I want to hear, cause that is a common,
that has happened to me many times.
Sure.
And it happened to me too.
What do we, so instead of lying and nodding and being like,
I just heard this thing,
what is a way that we could gracefully say,
I'm sorry, I just completely tuned you out accidentally.
Like, I think you can just be honest and say,
you know, I was listening up until here
and then my mind just like took a holiday.
Right.
Spaced out.
And I missed the last thing you said.
Right.
Yeah.
And if you do it that way, like, wow,
that's really amazing how that happens.
I could be sitting here, nodding, looking at you.
Yeah.
And completely gone.
Yes.
To the point where I didn't even hear what you said.
Yes.
Even though my ears can hear the sounds.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the kind of wild thing.
If you think about it.
Yes, it is.
But we spend a lot of time that way
in these sort of fugue states.
Yes.
Where we, what did you say?
The robot.
Yeah.
We're not even sitting in the robot control chamber.
You're like down in the bathroom.
So I think that that's where I really do feel
like a cheerleader for awareness.
But it has to be what Ram Dass calls loving awareness.
It has to be, mindfulness can just devolve
into this self-surveillance system.
That's riddled with judgment, you know,
if we're not careful.
Yeah.
It's not that.
It's supposed to be kind.
Right.
It's supposed to be loving and caring.
It's supposed to come from a place of wanting
to uncover the goodness that we all have in us.
We all have sanity and goodness and clarity
and love and compassion.
It's our birthright.
These qualities are innate.
They just get totally covered over.
So I am a cheerleader for doing practices
that help us uncover and learn what it is
that covers over our capacity for radiant presence
with each other.
Right.
Right.
And usually it's that we are lost in thought.
We're in our encapsulated thought world,
but we don't know how to recognize that even.
Right.
And that's where, I mean, I'm sure there are other ways,
but the way that I've learned and practiced my whole life
has been this way of mindful awareness.
When we sit and meditate, you know,
they say meditation is the practice,
is practicing for death.
But I like now you're practicing for life.
Practicing to listen.
Yeah.
I love that.
Continue, I'm sorry to cut you off there.
No, I think that's all I would say,
except I was intrigued by what you said
about practicing to listen,
because in a way, listening is how we connect
with our aliveness, like listening to our own bodies,
listening to the sounds of life around us,
that grounds us, you know, in the present moment,
listening to our own inner voice and intuition.
Every time I override that intuition,
it's a disaster.
Every time.
Every time, Duncan.
Yeah.
I did it this year, recently.
You did?
I was in a Tabata class.
I had, I had this, I was just totally overdoing it.
I had done an hour of water exercise,
and then I did an abs class,
and then I went to the Tabata,
and then she took us out on the sidewalk
to do these sideways jumps.
Yep.
And I heard this voice in my head.
It said, let's skip this one.
You're tired, let's skip this one.
But I went out anyway.
Yeah.
And we were on cement, and we were going fast,
and I slammed, tripped on the sidewalk crack,
and slammed my back into the cement, and broke my back.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
I remember when you were through the tree,
I saw you heroically.
You saw me, it was only two and a half weeks later
that I came to Maui.
With a broken back.
Well, you saw me, I always had to lie down on the stage.
I couldn't sit up.
But I'm just saying, the more it seems to me,
it seems to me for my own life,
like the more sensitive I get, and the more I know,
what was it, John?
Instant karma.
But it comes hard and fast when I overlook
what I know to be true, and just forge ahead.
So I think that deep listening protects our aliveness too.
Wow, listening is the connection to the universe.
It's the thing that like, wow, it's like a weird,
like, you know, they say when we breathe,
we're connecting by breathing in everything,
and breathing, but then when we listen,
it's almost a form of respiration, isn't it?
We're just receiving, receiving aliveness, yeah.
Aliveness in the form of your voice,
or in the form of the stillness in this room.
Yeah, receiving it.
What a joy to get to chat with you.
Thank you so much for this conversation.
My delight, Duncan.
I will have all the links where people can find you,
but do you have anything coming up at Inside LA?
Yes, I do.
We have, well, we have Joseph Goldstein coming Monday night,
one of the great icons of Buddhist meditation,
and then we have a really unknown person
who's terrific named John Lockley.
He's a South African Sangoma, which is a traditional healer,
and a medicine man,
and he's doing a day long on August 16th,
and he wrote a book called The Way of the Leopard Warrior
about his journey to becoming this.
It's insane.
He's a white South African who has-
I met him at the Ram Dass Retreat in New York City.
Yes, you know him.
Yeah, okay, cool.
So John is coming August 16th.
George Mumford, my beloved friend who wrote
The Mindful Athlete is coming in September.
So we have great people coming,
and then every Sunday morning,
we have a live stream between 10 and 12,
and when I'm in town, I teach it.
When I'm not in town,
other wonderful Inside LA teachers are there,
and if you aren't able to physically battle
whatever distance if you're living in a faraway place,
you can always join us to meditate,
and here's some teachings,
and you can ask questions through the live stream
and be part of our community that way.
Beautiful.
At Inside LA.
Wonderful.
I'll have all the links you need.
That was Trudy Goodman, everybody.
All the links you need to find Trudy
will be at dunkatrustle.com.
Much thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this episode,
and much thanks to you for listening.
I hope you have a great week,
and I'll see you real soon.
Hare Krishna.
Thank you.
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