Good Life Project - Priya Parker | The Art of Gathering [BEST OF]

Episode Date: May 20, 2021

So, how do you turn a gathering, whether over a meal or a giant event, into an experience of collective elevation? Priya Parker is on a mission to help us take a deeper look at how anyone can create collective meaning in modern life, one gathering at a time. She is a facilitator, strategic advisor, acclaimed author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters (https://amzn.to/2K95VyJ) and the host of the New York Times podcast, Together Apart (https://pod.link/1506057555). Priya has spent 15 years helping leaders and communities have complicated conversations about community and identity and vision at moments of transition. Trained in the field of conflict resolution, she has worked on race relations on American college campuses and on peace processes in the Arab world, southern Africa, and India.Parker is a founding member of the Sustained Dialogue Campus Network, a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on New Models of Leadership, and a Senior Expert at Mobius Executive Leadership. She studied organizational design at M.I.T., public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and political and social thought at the University of Virginia. Her work has been featured everywhere from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and TED to Real Simple, Oprah.com, Glamour, the Today Show and more. In today’s Best Of conversation, we dive into the art of gathering and how to create those shared moments of understanding and transformation, which we could all use more of right now. You can find Priya at:Website : https://www.priyaparker.com/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/priyaparker/If you LOVED this episode:You’ll also love the conversations we had with Mia Birdsong about building community and really reimagining family and chosen family : https://tinyurl.com/GLPBirdsong Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKED. To submit your “moment & question” for consideration to be on the show go to sparketype.com/submit. Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So in this sort of time of emergence, how do we turn a gathering, whether it's two people, a handful of people over a meal, to a larger gathering or event into an experience of collective elevation? Well, my guest Priya Parker is on a mission to help us take a deeper look at how anyone can create collective meaning in modern life, one gathering at a time. She's a facilitator, strategic advisor, acclaimed author of The Art of Gathering, How We Meet and Why It Matters, a book that I absolutely love, and the host of the New York Times podcast, Together Apart. Priya has spent some 15 years helping leaders and communities have these complicated conversations about community and identity and vision at moments of transition.

Trained in the field of conflict resolution, she has worked on race relations on American college campuses and on peace processes in the Arab world, Southern Africa, and India. And Priya is the founding member of the Sustained Dialogue Campus Network, a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on New Models of Leadership, and a senior expert at Mobius Executive Leadership. She studied organizational design at MIT, public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School,

and political and social thought at the University of Virginia. And her work, well, it's been featured everywhere from the New York Times, and political and social thought at the University of Virginia. And her work, well, it's been featured everywhere from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, and TED to Real Simple, Oprah, Glamour, Today Show, and tons of others. And in today's best of conversation, we dive into what exactly is the art of gathering? How do we bring together people and create those shared moments of understanding and transformation, which is something that we could all use more of right now. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series X is here.

It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black

aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference

between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. So my mother comes from kind of originally Benares, which is a sort of, you know, one of the oldest cities in India. And her father, who actually would have turned 100 today, Oh, wow. He passed away about a few months ago. Her father worked for the Indian government,

and so she and her four siblings traveled around India a lot. And when it was time for her to kind of get married, she decided she didn't want to, or at least not, she didn't want to have an arranged marriage, and she kind of secretly applied to graduate school in the U.S. and got into a few places. And at least in that generation, Virginia versus Iowa versus, you know, Minnesota, you're sort of just, you have no idea what is what and you just say yes.

And she ended up at Iowa State University, begged her parents to let her go and they allowed her to. Was that unusual for sort of that moment in time? It was unusual that she was a woman. So the U.S. immigration laws changed in 68 and allowed for a change from kind of country of origin to family unification. And so it was after that that a lot of Indians kind of came into the country. But the majority of the first kind of Indian to come of those families, particularly to graduate school, were men. So it was very unusual for the first kind of person to be a woman of a family. And she went to Iowa State and met my father, who was born and raised in Waterloo, Iowa, though the family kind of came from South Dakota. And, you know, white American, like in every way, you look at his high school pictures,

and it looks like the kind of Americana, like, you know, prom picture. But he had just recently come back from the Peace Corps. He did Peace Corps in Cameroon, and then stayed an extra year and hitchhiked across the Sahara, and came back and was sort of in reverse culture shock. And his teacher, his professor at graduate school or from undergrad said, why don't you just come do graduate school with me? And to kind of get over your culture shock, volunteer at the international students office. And I actually recently learned that culture shock originally meant when people came back to their own country after having an experience abroad. So it's actually not reverse culture shock, but anyway, and they met there and they, for about 13 years, they were each other's kind of adventure. And

at least my take on it as rebellion, and traveled the world. My mother's a cultural anthropologist, and my father became a hydrologist. And so they lived in fishing villages, mostly in Southeast Asia and Africa, doing research together. And so I was born in Zimbabwe because, at least as they tell it, the closest good hospital that would accept an interracial couple at the time, because it was also apartheid in South Africa, was in Bulawayo. And so I was born in Zimbabwe of all places. Yeah. I mean, it must've been a really interesting and challenging and fraught time for them to be challenging to travel, those parts of the world, especially, because it just, it kind of wasn't done or it wasn't, I mean, I think even these days it's probably challenging depending where you are, but those days I would imagine,

especially in the port side, South Africa. Yeah. You know, it's funny. I think you're totally right in the sense that it wasn't really done. And at least the stories that I heard from them and that I've heard from other people of their generation was that in part, because it wasn't done, they were met with curiosity and openness. And because there was no Facebook to, you know, document every step of the journey, and they weren't in communication with the people from their world, they weren't being witnessed by the people in their world in the same way that we are now, you know, now you go to, you know, perhaps you go for a hike in Kilimanjaro, if you're lucky. And the first thing that people do when they, you know, summit the peak is they

take a selfie and everyone knows back home. And I think that in part, it was actually a very beautiful time. And at some level, almost easy. I mean, that easy may not be the right word, but to really experiment with many ways to be because they weren't witnessed by the people back home. Did they spend much time back home? So they would go back for, you know, sometimes for Christmas and they were moving very often. So between the age of zero and six, I lived in Botswana, the Maldives, Kupang, which is East Timor in Indonesia, The Hague, and then Tucson, Arizona. And so every time we'd move, we'd often go either back to Iowa or to New Delhi where my grandparents were to visit family.

And so we'd go and my parents were, you know, I've been recently looking at photos of them, I think a bit of an anomaly, but at some level, in both cases, they were the first of their family to marry somebody not from their community. And for the most part, both sides were met with openness and curiosity. They had two weddings. There's a picture of my mother in kind of a yellow dress in Iowa standing besides Ruth and Lyle Parker, my grandparents. And then my father and mother also got married in New Delhi. And my father came in on a horse wearing white, his face covered in flowers, big hippie mustache. And both were true.

That's amazing. So you spent the early part of your world, of your life, really sort of moving from culture to culture to culture to culture, and also doing so with parents who are navigating their own personal relationship and also their own cultural backgrounds individually and then together. Were you aware at all when you're at the youngest age that you or your family, union or structure was in any way different? Yeah, it's a beautiful question. The short answer is no. I, at least at a very early age, I think your family is kind of your world. And so I didn't really become conscious that this was different or most people had parents from one country, whatever that might be, or one tribe or one ethnicity until I moved to the

States and became much more aware of race. And then when they divorced, I was one of the few people in my class. There was one other student in my class who had came from like parents of divorce. And so at the time, I mean, this is no longer true, but at the time, if anything, there was the anomaly was actually coming from divorce rather than, than different ethnicities. And my parents, well, within three years, they were both remarried. And this is actually where it gets complicated. If you thought the earlier part was complicated. It's like, that was the easy part.

They both remarried and they had joint custody. And this was in Virginia. They came to an agreement where I would move back and forth every two weeks between these two households. And on my mother's side, it was my mother, Indian. She remarried an English guy. And that family, that kind of family unit became very liberal, kind of new agey, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, vegetarian. You know, on Sundays, we would literally have meditation hour with my mother and stepfather and me and read Thich Nhat Hanh and kind of came out of that tradition. Theosophy is sort of the tradition of my Indian line.

And then my father remarried and remarried a white American woman, Caucasian American. And they kind of at the time and since have become evangelical Christians. And she, my stepmother has two children, actually, one of which was my best friend in elementary school. We actually introduced our parents. So we do create our own destinies. And that family is, you know, conservative, Republican, white American, evangelical Christian, meat eating. In the Indian context, meat eating is sort of like a thing. So in India, people, if they're vegetarian, they don't say they're vegetarian. It's just kind of mainstream. So it's veg and non-veg.

So in the context of an Indian family, that other family was non-veg. And I went back and forth. I'm an only child. So every two weeks I'd switch houses. And then I was a full part of those two families. How do you do that? I mean, because it's not only two radically different environments, two radically different sets of beliefs. And also it sounds like strongly held beliefs on both sides. And that within theory, at least at some major points, strongly conflict each other. You know, I think the way I did it is, at some level, I became a bit of a chameleon. I think that we are each multifaceted and, you know, full of paradoxes, at least.

And I knew that I was. And so at some level, I think to survive, I became more like one family. I became more new agey when I was with my mother. And I became at some point more Christian when I was with my father. I would change my diet. And some level, it wasn't this conscious act. I just ate what was in front of me. And my you know, my husband, you know, many years later, noticed when he started spending time with me in these two different contexts was that when somebody would sneeze in my mother's home, I would say, bless you. And when someone would sneeze in my father's home, I would say, God bless you. And I didn't even realize. That's so funny.

But I think each of us, and if we kind of dig in a little bit, are from multiple worlds, and we all learn to code switch. And that's true. Even if you use certain jargon in your work world, whereas you wouldn't necessarily in your community of faith, or you wouldn't necessarily with a group of friends. And I just did it in a much more extreme way. Yeah. And it's interesting because it's also, I mean, to a large extent, it's an effective skill to develop at a young age. It is deeply. But at the same time, it can be really confusing because you've got one set of beliefs, you've got another set of beliefs. And then in the middle, this question is, well, what do I believe? Yes. And then where does that fall in that

whole conversation? Yes. And I think for me, in part because I didn't have siblings, so there was never a common witness to my life. And it wasn't really until I got married. I mean, even when I dated and had, you know, boyfriends, they'd see some parts of my life, but it's still relatively casual. It wasn't really until I started dating and then got engaged to my husband, my now husband, that I had one person who, in a way, had to hold me to account to be the same person, you know, in different contexts. And I think it was really more first account to be the same person, you know, in different contexts. And I think it was really more first in college and then in my, you know, growing adult life that I began to first just ask the question, what do I believe? And then it took me many years to begin to answer it in front of people who disagreed with me.

So, I mean, it's interesting. You've used the word witness a couple of times. What do you mean by that? So when I use the word witness, I mean the ability to see another person, the ability to observe and to consciously pay attention to somebody else's experience. To me, the most powerful gatherings are ones where people take risks, share stories, show a part of themselves that they may not be used to showing or perhaps have in the past even feared showing, and that the people around them are willing to allow that to be. And by doing so, they are witnessing a moment that because it is witnessed and lasts in multiple people's memories, it exists. So it's almost like they play a role in making it real.

Deeply. So when I use the word witness in terms of my husband, you know, I went back and forth between these two households and I knew the experience of going to, you know, mega churches or going to like, there's one conference, I guess, a rally, I don't know what you would call it. And this is 20 years ago, but it was called Light the Fire. And it was an evangelical Christian gathering where I went with my church youth group when I was at my father's house. And at one point in that gathering, I don't even really remember the details exactly. But on stage, the kind of the host or the minister played this infomercial, this kind of fake infomercial skit.

And in it, they were pretending to sell Hindu gods. And then they like blew them up. And then afterwards, they sort of, as often happens in these evangelical rallies, they ask people to like give their life to Jesus and come to the front. And I had just witnessed this kind of very, for me, sort of offensive, like painful moment where people in front of me were making fun of the beliefs of half of my family. And I couldn't go up. I didn't want to go up. And in the past, and then I'd go back to my mother's house, right? The next Friday. And in the past, if I could tell go back to my mother's house, right, the next Friday.

And in the past, if I could tell my mother what happened, but she wasn't there to witness it, right? It was these two bifurcated lives. And with my husband, I now, not that he's with me, you know, every waking moment, but in most moments of my life where I'm choosing to activate a certain part of my identity, he's part of it. And so in part, I think the power of a witness in a lot of different parts of your life is somebody who can see all of the different parts of you and still want to be there. I just want to linger on that for a moment because I think it's really important. You mentioned also that you hadn't really, even though you lived in these two different worlds, it wasn't until a bit later until you experienced what you would call racism.

When was your first sort of experience or realization that, huh, there's something going on here? It's my first experience that where I started to become conscious of race and realize that it mattered well beyond the meaning that I attributed to it was in college. So I went to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. And obviously after this past year, that has a lot more connotations than it did before 2017. And I don't think I necessarily ever experienced overt racism in the way that many Americans do. But I noticed very quickly that the first question people asked me was, what are you? Before they asked me which dorm I lived in or what year I was, many people would ask, so what are you? And they meant racially. And it was confusing to me as a question, but I kind of obliged. And I would say,

I first would say, I'm half Indian, half American. And I meant my parents, like my mother's Indian, my father's American. And then I learned that that wasn't an appropriate answer. And people were getting upset by that answer because American, the way I was using it, American was assuming whiteness. And so I, you know, I was, I entered a very racially fraught climate that had a, you know, verys, you can still see the slave quarters underneath the original student housing. Thomas Jefferson, as an amazing man as he was and did a lot for this country, also held slaves. And so there's a very complicated history at the University of Virginia and one that they're still very much owning. And I stepped into it. So I noticed that fraternity parties, which were largely white parties, though no one would call it that, would go on until the wee hours of the morning. And that this, you know, a few blocks away, the basically black parties would almost always get broken up by the cops. And these were, you know, black students and white students,

University of Virginia students. There'd be, you know, different racial epithets left on, you know, doors. And my senior year of college, a student who was actually half African-American, half Korean, Daisy Lundy, was running for office for president. And she reported being physically attacked the night before because of her race to not run for president. And it was sort of in national news. And basically, I came into a world that I didn't fully understand because I grew up abroad for the first kind of seven, six, seven years of my life. But really, really upset me. So where do you go from there?

Part of UVA, it's part of its best elements. It's DNA is the idea of student self-governance. So one of the things about UVA that I loved was that they deeply, deeply believe that students should kind of own things and run things. And this is true from the honor committee. If somebody, if a student commits a crime, they're judged by their peers all the way to starting kind of new organizations. And so I started talking to people about race and kind of all of the different issues that existed at UVA and was encouraged by older students to do something about it. And so I kind of researched what had already different student initiatives and, you know, conversations and plays and different ways people spoke about race. And I came across a process called sustained dialogue.

And it appealed to me very deeply because it was a process that believes that you can transform a culture of a place if you transform the relationships between the people in the place. Kind of logical, at least in my mind. And it was a process coined by a man named Hal Saunders. He was Kissinger's assistant secretary of state and wrote the Camp David Accords. And after decades in government, serving multiple presidents, realized that while governments can make peace treaties, if you don't actually change the hearts and minds of citizens on the ground, nothing much changes. And so he left government and devoted the rest of his life to working with citizens in kind of post-conflict environments to see if they could consciously through coming

together and kind of structured dialogue, transform their relationships to begin to transform the communities. And so I learned how to facilitate sustained dialogue, asked Dr. Saunders to help me start at UVA. And he was very excited to apply this process to race relations on college campuses that he had just started it with a couple other students at Princeton University the year start at UVA. And he was very excited to apply this process to race relations on college campuses that he had just started it with a couple other students at Princeton University the year before. And they, to my great luck, decided that they would help us start at UVA. Do you remember the very first experience that you facilitated around this? It's funny. No one's ever asked me that before. I do remember my first, my very first dialogue,

and I didn't know what I was doing. And we had facilitator training. So people came from Washington to teach us things like active listening and how to hold a conversation and how to make sure that different people are speaking up, even the quiet voices. But even with the training, I was very scared. And I had a co-moderator. We were in a classroom, dimly lit, terrible lighting at night, 7 o'clock. The conversations would be from 7 to 10 p.m. every two weeks with a group of 14 students from different backgrounds, different races. And I remember in part because I was overwhelmed, in part because I was trying to, I guess, model vulnerability. We started with a question that's something like, it may have even been, would you rather be white or black? So this was not like softballing into a conversation.

It was not softballing. I mean, the curriculum has since matured. But I think one of the things, you know, whenever in any context, when you're bringing people together to talk about taboo subjects, it's awkward and it's difficult and you're going to put your foot in your mouth. And I definitely did. And I think in part because I'm a person of color, I had much more space to make a lot of mistakes than my, you know, white co-moderators or my particularly my white male co-moderators. And so in part, because I'm biracial and I think in part because it was pre-social media, you could kind of say a lot of different things in these safe spaces and people wouldn't stop talking to you. And so I remember in that first dialogue, I at one point I started crying because of my own kind of relationship to race and feeling overwhelmed by the whole thing. And like rule number one as a moderator is like, you do not cry.

It's like rule 0.5 before you even get to one. Do not cry. Exactly. And by the way, it was completely fine for participants to cry. If anything, those were the moments of breakthrough. But as a moderator, you're creating a safe space for others and to have your own emotions kind of get all wrapped in. All of a sudden, I couple of times. Does you sort of becoming strongly emotional effect as the facilitator or the moderator, does that have an effect on the safety of that container? Do you feel? Yeah, it's a great question. It definitely affects the container and the container just kind of being the psychological, the kind of physical space that you're creating for other

people as they decide to engage in this conversation. It depends on the context. So in some contexts, if you're having a dinner party, you know, or if you are creating an environment where you're wanting your friends to show more of themselves, modeling vulnerability is almost a prerequisite. It's like so powerful. It's so powerful. When you are in a higher stakes gathering and trying to create a space for others to share, and you haven't yet processed your stuff, then it can be complicated. And so sharing vulnerability on purpose to take meaningful risks with integrity is different than kind of spilling over yourself and not being able to moderate your emotions because you haven't yet processed your relationship to whatever is happening in the room.

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I mean, it's so interesting also, right? Because I think there's a question that has come up a lot in the context of sort of modern day spirituality and personal growth in this whole world, where it seems like we see a lot of people processing their own stuff in real time, in public, and then inviting others to come along with them, but simultaneously wanting to serve as the guide, the teacher, the mentor, and with good intention very often. Really wanting to say, I'm figuring this out myself and come along with me and maybe I have some extra skills in facilitating or inquiry or

something like that that'll make it okay for all of us. It's hard and maybe not the best way to go about doing it for both parties. Can you give an example? I think social media has actually made this, has amplified the stakes and the publicity around it. Somebody who would position themselves as wanting to help others through a process like this. Well, using the example that you just gave, it's one thing to cry, but then if you had started to say, okay, so can we all talk about what I'm going through? And then you can share what you're going through too. And we'll all process this together.

So it's a really interesting question. And I think to me, it really depends on power. It's very different for somebody who is a victim to kind of process through in community than somebody who is a perpetrator. Those conversations need to look different. And part of the, you know, when I was doing research for this book, I looked at more traditional ways that communities came together to heal. And we are very unsophisticated. Our tools are very blunt to know how to create gatherings, conversations, spaces where,

whether it's victim or perpetrator, to process and to integrate in ways that allow a community to move forward and to integrate ourselves. And I think part of, going back to your question of whether or not it's appropriate to process kind of out loud with other people and guide people through that, in my mind, it's very difficult, whether you're a victim or the, you know, victimizer, to do that well because you're part of the dance, you're part of the drama, you're part of the rupture. And so what we actually need are people who can create those spaces for heat and pain and trauma and figure out how do we actually integrate these darker parts of our community in a way that feels both fair and safe to the victim,

but also allows for transformation, rehabilitation, learning from the person who is involved in the perpetration of the incident or action. Yeah. I mean, it's so complicated, right? And I think it feels like we live in a world where we want answers fast. We don't have tolerance for slow and complex. And increasingly, we don't see the gray, which is 98.9% of everything. We just immediately want it to be a yes or no. We want it to be this or that. We want the answers to be very crystal clear. And I think also because, and you brought this up also, in that heated context, and then you pile on the speed and the acceleration of anything through technology and social media and hyper-connectivity, anything that happens becomes amplified profoundly in the blink of an eye. And while that can be incredibly useful to get information out and to get news out and to protect people and to start conversations, it can also be incredibly destructive to the sort of intelligent, deliberate, intentional processing of the emotion and the pain

and what's going on. and then figuring out how do we come to the table? How do we come to our own individual tables to figure out, okay, like what is my role in this and how do I find my way through it? And then how do we come to the collective table when that table is now seating millions and millions of people in real time? It's a beautiful question. And I think, you know, one of the dangers of a tool like Twitter or Instagram or Facebook is that we forget its purpose and we use it for all types of conversations when actually it's very good for very specific conversations. So as you said, getting information out or, you know, spreading an idea quickly, you know,

some of the darker parts of sort of mob justice that you see on Twitter, you know, spreading an idea quickly. You know, some of the darker parts are sort of mob justice that you see on Twitter, you know, people kind of attacking one person all of a sudden. But Twitter is not a place for deeper processing. It's not a place for deeper listening and deeper complicated conversations, in part because it wasn't designed to be that. And so one of the things, you know, there was a great piece, I think it was in New York Times, but by a BuzzFeed reporter. I can't remember where it was, but basically there was a woman who's a journalist for BuzzFeed and she wrote this great piece about what to do with the Me Too men. So a few weeks ago. And in it, she basically compared what's happening now with the journalism that she did in 2011 with the sexual assault on campuses.

And she basically said that when she studied these different campuses to see what they actually did with these men, the only tool that these campuses basically had was expulsion. And the men, in most cases, there were men would be either expelled or moved around to another campus. In some cases, you see the same thing with the Catholic Church, with priests kind of being shuffled around when they were accused of abuse, in part because we actually don't have, we don't know how to come to tables in a collective way when there has been so much pain created. And one of the things that she said when she was interviewing these men that really struck me was one of the men said, I don't understand. Yes, I did something horrendous. Yes, I am ashamed of it. Yes, it was wrong. But I don't know where you want me to go. This isn't verbatim, but he basically said, I don't know where you want me to go. You don't

want me to ever have a job. You don't want me to ever date anybody. Do you want me to kill myself? And I read that quote and it really struck me because I didn't know what my answer was. And we want to kind of just push these terrible parts of our life away, but we don't actually have the tools to look at the darker parts of our communities and figure out how do we actually first acknowledge and see what happened and see the truth of the darkness. So one of the reasons why this lynching memorial in Alabama is so powerful is because Bryan Stevenson and his team and that entire organization has created this incredible monument to witnessing a dark part of our past before you do anything else to go back to that word of witness, to see what happened, to own what happened, and to face what happened, whether it's campus

sexual assault or whether it's lynching, and to not avoid it. And facing it doesn't mean minimizing it. It actually makes it a little bit bigger because we have to see what we have done to each other and then begin to figure out how do you actually restore a community? What do you do with these men? What do you do with the realities of having to integrate these people back into community? And the last thing I'll just say on this is she said, you know, part of the danger of not reintegrating these men and having kind of a public collective witnessing, apology, you know, therapy. And it's not to say that a lot shouldn't be done. But after that, if we don't, a lot of when you kind of keep people

out of mainstream society, they can actually get kind of more and more dangerous. And so we are actually not serving our community, our collective life, if we just basically exile people who have done bad things. Yeah, I mean, I think we're seeing that on so many levels culturally now. It's interesting. We all love a comeback story, but we really struggle with a redemption story. You know, there's especially when you are the person who has been harmed. Absolutely. Understandably.

And continuing to be harmed. And maybe culturally continuing. How do you conceive of redemption when the harm is still being done? And yet, if in some way down the road, there isn't even a window of possibility. And again, like you said, not just moving from harm to instant forgiveness to redemption, that's ludicrous. Nobody's suggesting or asking for that. But through whatever process of transformation, change, punishment, whatever it is that may have to happen along the way, if at some point there never is even the slightest possibility that you would hold of redemption and communion, like that quote said, what then? Absolutely.

I think that, first of all, redemption should only be allowed if and when the victim is part of it. So looking at, you know, and there's an entire field that does this very well, which is the field of restorative justice. And, you know, in Rwanda, after the genocide there, there was a lot of different community practices, the conchacha courts, where a victim and perpetrator would be brought together and have to kind of admit to what happened. And the entire community would witness and grieve together, in part because they were all neighbors and the entire country was involved with the killings. And similarly here, you know, part of the redemption, one should not be forced and no one can require anybody to forgive. So after the shooting at the church in Charleston, South

Carolina, one of the, there were calls on the, you know, the congregation, the members of the congregation to forgive. And there were a number of people that said, you know, it is my right to forgive, but it is not my duty. And that is absolutely correct. One of the groups, organizations I spoke with in this book on the art of gathering is the Red Hook Community Justice Center. And they have these groups called Peace Circles. And one of the things that they do is when there's an incident in a community in Red Hook, one of their insights is that if there's an incident, if there's some kind of rupture or violent episode, it's not just the two people who are involved in the attack or the abuse. It's that on both sides. It's that person's partner. It's their sisters. It's their brothers. The community is involved in an incident, even if you weren't part of it, that you're affected. My brother has to go to court or my sister is experiencing a lot of fear or, you know, my son has moved back in and is now sleeping on my couch.

That individual incidents are never individual. They affect others who weren't there. And so one of the things that the Red Hook Community Justice Center is doing is, first of all, they've designed their courtroom in a radically different way. They create these gatherings called peace circles where they bring together not just the two people involved in the incident, but everybody who is kind of psychologically involved in the narrative. And they have a series, usually I think it's four meetings that's voluntary. And they come together to basically process both what happened and begin to integrate and come back together because they all live with each other. They all, they're neighbors, they're family members. And so part of this entire process is figuring out how do we come together, not just around the light, but around the dark? And how do we do that in ways that both hold the victims, but also offer a possible way through so that we can continue to be a community? Yeah. Such a powerful need, such a powerful conversation to be had.

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Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. We can wander in a lot of different directions here. And this has really become your life work. I mean, this conversation, all the different parts of it, starting from your earliest upbringing, navigating two worlds and resolving two different belief systems and cultures and then arriving in college and then learning this communication technology or technique modality. That wasn't just something that you relied on to say, hey, let's see what we can do on campus.

This then becomes your vocation. It does. And I believe that the most important things in life tend to be with other people. And much of the time that we spend with other people, what I call gatherings, don't reach the potential of what they could be. And so I went on a journey four years ago to begin to ask other gatherers, whether they define themselves that way or not, to understand what creates transformative gatherings. And I met with everybody from a Japanese tea ceremony master to a choreographer of Cirque du Soleil to a camp director of Seeds of Peace, which is a summer

camp that brings together Jewish and Arab and other kind of young people along lines of difference, to a dominatrix, to a rabbi, to a schoolteacher, to all types of different people who basically create group experiences for other people and do it well enough that people are changed by the experience or they're moved by the experience. And my work now is to create kind of transformative experiences for groups and communities that change their relationships because of the gathering, but also that helps them often face the taboo or the important conversations in their kind of communal life, in part because that's where the heat is. That's where our values lie. That's where our identity is. Many of the conversations we're not always sure how to have are the conversations with

the most meaning. What is it that stops conversations from getting there, the gatherings from getting there? Because like you said, most people, when they come together, even if it's with the intention of doing some work, don't come close to hitting the potential of what is possible. Why not? Some of it is pretty simple stuff. I think one of the, frankly, travesties of our kind of, you know, language around gathering is that we tend to focus on stuff rather than people. So we tend to outsource our knowledge and our wisdom about how to gather, you know, I mean,

no offense here, but to the Martha Stewart's of the world. And part of that generation of gathering is focused on table settings and floral arrangements and the kind of the three steps of how to actually make a crudité stay fresh over three days as you prepare for the gathering. And not that they necessarily intended this, but hosting became over the last, you know, 40 years or so with the equivalent of entertaining. And entertaining is a problematic word when you're bringing people together, because it basically means you're putting on a show. And most of the ways that we think about gathering and by proxy, think about creating meaningful moments is focused on the physical environment. So, you know, flowers and lighting, and not that that doesn't create a context, but it doesn't end there.

And then the second thing is focusing on food. And my husband will be the first person to say that I'm not a good cook. And I think some of the best gatherings of my life have been around pizza and takeout. And I think in part, one of the reasons why we never get to the conversation is because we're not paying attention to it. We've focused most of our attention on the things of gathering rather than the technology of conversation. So the first thing I would just say is, you know, don't worry so much and don't spend so much time on the food or preparing kind of the things of the gathering. Focus on preparing the people and think about how you want to structure the conversation to get to much more meaningful conversation.

You know, one of the things I think also prevents us from having powerful conversations is frankly, kind of embarrassment that we, to admitting that we want to have those conversations. And, you know, rather than talking about like what's happening at work or what's happening kind of, I don't know, in politics though, that's, you know, very interesting conversation itself. And I think a lot of hosts, myself included, and I write about this in the book, once people are actually in the room, it feels a little bit embarrassing or awkward to kind of feel like you care too much or that you want to actually impose a question on people or that you're not chill. And so I think a lot of

the reasons we tend to not connect is because we're embarrassed to admit that we want to. Yeah. I wonder how much of that is generational also. Because I think, so I'm sort of the trailing edge of Gen X. And I think that's probably the way that we were taught together. Which way? More the, it's about the stuff and it's beautiful and let's not go too deep and ruffle too many feathers. I feel like the generation that's coming up underneath and then underneath is much more interested in, can we talk about some real stuff here?

Hashtag real talk. Yeah, which is fantastic. And I think just in general, they tend to be much more interested in purpose and why we're here and how we contribute to the world and what we give to and take from it. But in the context of gatherings, yeah, I wonder how much of the assumption about what is supposed to unfold is generational and also cultural. Absolutely.

I think it's hugely both generational and cultural. And some of my favorite experiments as I watch my peers experiment with different models of gathering is our intentional conversations that kind of get right to the point. And so some of the most interesting experiments are actually conversations around death. So two gatherings that I love, one is Michael Hebb's Death Over Dinner, and the other is, I think her name is Lennon Flowers. She started this series of gatherings called The Dinner Party. And it's for 20 or 30 somethings that have experienced loss and want to talk about it. And in both contexts come in the form of a dinner party usually, and they are invitations to talk about the things and show the

sides of yourself that we usually don't talk about or feel inappropriate or feel too dark. And they, in their name, they embed the intention of the gathering in their name. Death over dinner is pretty obvious what it is. And it's within the invitation. So people are self-chosen. They're self-selecting to come in and have a conversation about that. But, you know, I think a lot of the reasons we're starting to see among the millennial generation desire to have more meaning and depth in our common culture and community is because of the shrinking role of traditional institutions of meaning. So the church, the temple, the mosque, and the assumption trust institution declines, the desire for meaningful conversation doesn't decline. It just moves elsewhere.

Yeah, we don't have those same places to have it anymore. Exactly, exactly. And so I think for better or for worse, and we could talk about this for a while, the kind of the priests and the shamans and the kind of the people who used to kind of hold this space are now self-selected and kind of decide like, hey, I'd like to do a dinner on this because why not? sourced. That's both beautiful, but it's also dangerous because a lot of these conversations need to be held with care. And so when you don't have seminary, you don't have a priesthood, you don't have the equivalent of medical school for the people who are training to have these conversations, social workers or rabbis, it is also possible to get in over your head or to have conversations that aren't grounded in any common text. And so there's also a, you know, there's as much opportunity as there is danger in

the fact that we're now just kind of making it up. Yeah. I mean, that's the first thing that came to mind when you're talking about this. I do agree that the need and the desire, and I think the willingness to have these conversations has never been higher. And yet all the places that we used to feel safe having them, and we used to trust somebody to create the safety in the context, to go where we need to go, to actually have a real conversation that either don't exist anymore or we're fleeing them. That the fastest growing group in spirituality are the nuns, the people who are non-affiliated, yet they consider themselves spiritual and want to have the conversations. And your point about to get that real in a conversation can be dangerous, emotionally dangerous and potentially physically dangerous

if it elevates. And if you don't have somebody who understands how to create the safety, how to plant the provocations in a way where real things, real conversations can be had and people can be vulnerable and people can tell their truths and it not turn really ugly and really combative. And instead of having some sort of constructive, intentional end, ending up in just, you know, outright brutality. So how do you go there and be okay? Absolutely. Whenever a community is deciding to intentionally create a gathering, one of the things that it's important to begin with is a set of explicitly, is a set of common values and ground rules. And different communities do this in different ways. Some are literally like Burning Man, list out their 10 rules and others. But basically, whenever you're creating a gathering and a community for that gathering, to start with

a very simple question, which is what is our purpose? And why are we doing this? And who is this for? And by the way, you could do that for a birthday party. So one of the reasons I think birthday parties tend to be a little bit boring is we assume form. We assume a specific form before we know what the function of the birthday party is for. And so stepping back and saying, what do I need this year? And who in my life could help enable or explore that with me? Opens up a radically different assumption of what a birthday party could even look like.

And so similarly, you know, one of the people that I interviewed for this book that I deeply admire is a man now rabbi named Amikai Lau-Levi. And he runs an experiment in New York called Lab Shul. And their tagline is everybody welcome God optional. And it's a radical tagline. And they're a kind of Jewish community. You know, as part of this book, I went to a number of different gatheringslaimed atheist. And both of us in over the core of the day and a half were very sort of deeply moved in tears at different moments because of the beauty of the gathering and interpreted Amikai's language very differently based on our different beliefs. But I think the reason why he and his team are able to create that space is because the precondition for coming into the community are these two values, everybody welcome, God optional. And the context of a religious gathering, particularly the God optional part, is a pretty radical statement. And so

similarly, when you're thinking about gatherings and creating a safe space and context, to put your values up front. And often when your values are either paradoxical or have some heat in them, they become very interesting. Yeah. No, we've definitely seen that. We actually, when we launched Good Life Project, we had a creed posted on our website, which recently came down because we're doing some work on it. But it was like, this is what we believe. If you see the world the way that we see it, awesome. If you don't see the world the way we see it, that's awesome too, but you just may not be your people. It was not a condemnation. It was just like, this is us. Exactly. I recently had a conversation with a young minister who's running a church in LA.

And he asked me this question. He said, on one hand, I think one of the problems, this is what he said, one of the problems with modern day Christianity is that it's associated with so many exclusionary elements. And one of the problems within the evangelical movement is that it's become politicized. There's a group, at least, that's associated with Trump. It's become a proxy for whiteness. All of these things that he was saying to me. And he said, I want to start a church in LA where none of that is associated with it. So what do I do? But part of my problem is that if I don't put something in the ground, my church will just become the culture of East LA or the culture of Silver Lake or the culture of Beverly Hills, wherever he puts the church. I want this to be a separate space from the predominant culture as well. So what do I do? And I said to him, there's no such thing as a culturalist space. Culture isn't something that you bring in. Culture is what happens whenever two or more people come together. And so if you're creating a gathering in the form

of a church, you need to put a stake in the ground as to what is your culture. Because if you don't define it, it will be defined for you. And you can have some amount of porousness in your boundary to allow different things that you didn't expect to come in, but you need to have some non-negotiables so people know who they are and who you're, you know, who do you want to belong here? That's another way to think about it. Yeah, that makes so much sense. So, you know, when we look at the way the world is right now and the need to gather, the need to have conversations, the need to do this not online, but in person, in a room or in a hall or in a, you know, like wherever it may be,

and it doesn't have to be big. Maybe it's just dinner with a handful of people. How do we begin that? I mean, if somebody listening to this right now is like, yeah, I get it. I buy into it. This is important. I don't know where to start or how to begin. How do I take the first step? Think about the people in your community that you would like to invite. So here's a challenge for your listeners. Within the next month, host a dinner, ideally in your home. Ask people to bring things or have takeout. Don't spend a lot of time on the food in advance, but spend time thinking about what it is you want to talk about. And I would encourage you to have some structure.

So some of my favorite questions, actually, there's a New York Times list of 51 questions to fall in love with anybody. Many of those questions are beautiful questions to ask in groups. And choose a question or a series of questions that you want to explore together over the course of an evening that would be meaningful to you. So a couple of questions that I love, some of these are from Theodore Zeldin of the Menu of Conversations Project in the UK. One is, what have you rebelled against in the past? And what are you rebelling against now? It's a question that I love because there's so many different ways the conversation can take.

Another suggestion is in this book, The Art of Gathering, I write about a process that I developed with a colleague, Tim Lebrecht, called 15 Toasts. It's a lovely, I love structure because I think structure, just the right amount of structure, I shouldn't feel like you're being beaten over the head with it, but just the right amount of structure allows a group to organize and have a common focus. And so you could hold a 15 toast dinner, which is you choose a theme that's interesting to you. The theme could be everything from fear to risk, to community, to borders, to what does it mean to be American, to goodness, to evil, to anything. And you gather together and 15 people. And at the beginning of the night, you introduce a theme or you could send it in advance. And you basically, at some point in the night, everybody has to kind of ding their glass, old school style, stand up and give a toast to that

theme. And their toast needs to be a story or an experience, something in their life, a moment in their life that they can speak to that relates to the theme. And then to toast, you know, based on that story. And the only rule is that the last person has to sing their toast. And so the night ends in song. And at least in the US context, most people don't like to sing. And so it's making friends of mine and I've done this with different companies and organizations. It's a beautiful process that's just a little bit of structure that gets people's stories out in ways that you would never otherwise's a much more interesting night. So themes like fear, risk, we did a dinner to a stranger, however you want to interpret that, tend to bring out stories that people don't often hear. And you can talk, you know, after the toast and ask people questions. But sometimes we actually need a little bit of structure to bring out some of the stories that we don't always get to in everyday conversation. I love that. I'm going to try that now too. So this feels like a good place for us to start to come full circle. So I always wrap with the same question for everybody. So context of this is a good life project. If I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

To come full circle, to live a good life to me is to bear witness to others and to be witnessed, to see and to be seen. And to do that consciously in all parts of one's life, to me, is a good life. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, safe bet you will also love the conversation that we had with Mia Birdsong about building community and really re-imagining family and chosen family. You'll find a link to Mia's episode in the show notes. And even if you don't listen now,

be sure to click and download so it's ready to play when you're on the go. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app so you'll never miss an episode and then share the Good Life Project love with friends. When ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. We'll be right back. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

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