Rev Left Radio - Mental Health, Eco-Despair, & Revolutionary Optimism

Episode Date: July 22, 2021

In this second installment of our ongoing series "Dialectics and Psychedelics", Joshua Kahn Russell joins Breht to discuss anxiety and depression, how trauma shapes left movements and organizations, what constitutes a truly healthy left organization, the impact of climate change on our mental health, eco-anxiety, eco-grief, and eco-depression, as well as some reasons to be cautiously optimistic (and maybe even downright hopeful) about the coming decades.   Check out the First Installment of this series with Joshua here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/joshua-kahn 80 Year Trajectory mentioned in Intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eVdksZHqpo&ab_channel=CoolWorlds Please donate to The Wildfire Project at https://www.wildfireproject.org/donate   www.WidlfireProject.org    Instagram: @JoshuaKahnRussell  Twitter: @JoshKahnRussell Outro Music: "That Funny Feeling" by Bo Burnham ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, we have back on Joshua Con Russell to do our second installment of our ongoing sub-series that we have titled Dialectics and Psychedelics. This episode is going to be focused on mental health issues, both individually, organizationally, collectively, socially. One of the things that Joshua Con Russell's work. organization the wildfire project does is sort of goes into organizations, left organizations and helps them work through some of their contradictions, help them to be trauma-informed and to build a healthier culture within the organization so that it can be more effective

in its specific pursuits. And we get into that a little bit in this episode, but we'll have a full episode on that down the line in this sub-series because I think it's really important and can help a lot of organizations. And I know a lot of organizers listen to through this show. So that's definitely coming. But in this episode, like I say, we talk about anxiety, depression, trauma, grief. We talk about specifically the climate crisis and the mental health sort of fall out from looking in the eyes of it every single day. But we also offer reasons for optimism, reasons for hope, not naive reasons for optimism, but real true reasons why we should not give up hope and why there is still plenty of fight left in us.

And while the time seems like it is working against us in many ways it is, there are still reasons to be optimistic and to engage in this fight with a genuine belief that we can make change and that we can stop this 500-year-plus death machine known as capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. So we cover a lot of fascinating stuff. Joshua is incredibly insightful organizationally, personally, and it really comes through in this episode. So if you have struggled with climate despair, eco-grief, if you've struggled with anxiety and depression, any of that stuff, if you've been in organizations that have been torn apart by unprocessed trauma and interpersonal disputes that are rooted in unwellness, this is the episode for you.

and you know there's this we're talking about climate change there was this thing i watched the other day on youtube that brought me equal measures of optimism and pessimism and it's i'll link to it in the show notes it's like called the 80 year trajectory or something and it basically splits the screen in half and on the left side of the screen it paints the next 80 years in a positive light so what happens if we meaningfully tackle climate change you know we move to renewable energy we do all the things that We know need to be done. And, you know, where could that leave us by 2100? It could keep us under three degrees of warming.

Keep us around two degrees of warming. Not outside of the realm of us being able to manage as a species. And on the right side of the screen, it plays out a business-as-usual scenario. So you're sort of going back and forth between the two. Seeing a generally, we get this shit under control trajectory, and we keep doing what we're doing and we don't learn the lessons trajectory. It's equal parts horrifying because on the right, you see it go. up to four plus degrees of warming, which is catastrophic, civilization ending, at least, if not species ending itself, because of the feedback loops that that amount of warming would

trigger. But on the left, it does show you a possibility that it's within our capacity to solve these problems and come out the other end, a better, more wise species overall. And I think that can be helpful. And that balance between taking the dangers of what we're facing seriously and understanding where this fucking thing could go and counterbalancing that with a hopeful vision that is realistic and rooted in us taking proactive action and saying the future is yet to be determined. Despair and defeatism are just as cowardly as denialism in their own ways.

And we have to fight against those proclivities within ourselves and take the actions necessary to defend the biosphere and defend the humanity of our species for our children and their children and their children. So without further ado, here's a wonderful conversation. I have with Joshua Con Russell on a multitude of important and timely topics. Enjoy. My name is Joshua Con Russell. I'm a longtime social movement organizer and facilitator.

I'm right now the executive director of the Wildfire Project. And I'd really encourage everyone to listen to our first episode in this series. It gives lots of context. I'm coming from. But the short version is that I've spent the last 20 years organizing in movements, helping lay the foundation and build the climate justice movement in particular, but also multisectorally with economic and racial justice, as well as anti-war, indigenous sovereignty movements. And I spent a lot of that time sprinting, building organizations and networks, facilitating coalitions, fighting pipelines, work at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Mass Mobilizations,

training activists, facilitating group's drone strategy, etc. And all that sprinting put me way, way, way out of balance. And a little while back, I hit a wall. I got really sick. I was better than for three years with chronic Lyme disease, which I had along with other autoimmune disorders. And I began to notice how almost every single frontline organizer I know who's been in the work longer than a decade also had autoimmune

and inflammatory conditions that was deeper, than just burnout. And so for me, it forced a major spiritual shift in order to survive. And the hardship of that illness was the greatest gift I'd ever gotten because I didn't know how to listen to my body. I was doing all of this work from my head. And eventually when I became the director of the Wildfire Project, which I helped found in 2013, it's a capacity building project on the left that facilitates grassroots groups into being stronger versions of themselves. And I learned that while there's a lot of obstacles that are outside of our control, the biggest barrier that's within our control is the culture of the left itself,

which can be toxic, binary, reductive, enhanced alienation and despair that we feel in the society at large. And that the main thing getting in the way of groups winning wasn't needing, you know, the right strategy on paper, but it was a self-loaning beliefs in ways of, you know, relating to trauma and anxiety and despair. And so that's what brings me to this conversation. Yeah, absolutely. And the topic of this conversation is going to be focused on a lot of the things you just laid down there. Mental health issues, both socially as well as individually within our movements. And we're also going to be focused a lot on the sort of despair and disorientation and anxiety that comes with climate chaos because it's happening all around us.

And I've particularly suffered from it. I know you suffer from it. Lots of people suffer from it. Before I get into that and open up that whole question and that whole topic, I just wanted to say really quick, you mentioned something in your intro about going through this period of profound illness was actually in some ways a gift for you. And I can, that resonates with me a lot with my mental health issues that I've struggled with my entire adult life, which is I go through these rounds. They're cyclical. They come like every few years of these, you know, inflamed moments of mental illness, anxiety and depression being the most prominent.

And then there's like, you know, subgenres of mental illness that sort of fall out. of anxiety and depression broadly. But every time, I have started seeing them in a new light in which they spur me on to be aware of new dimensions of my existence, to take more proactive steps to make my physical and mental health better, getting really into like lately into fitness, into consistent routines, into a consistent meditation practice. These have all been things that are very positive that have fallen out of and been a result of me struggling with a mental health issue. So as rough as they are, they can sometimes

be the sort of genesis to bettering yourself in these ways or trying to be a healthier person all around. So there is this sort of weird back and forth between suffering and coming out of it and trying to better yourself in various ways. So I think that's interesting. All right, well, the best way to probably start this episode is to talk about the sort of sense of overwhelm that we each feel in the face of the ecological catastrophe that's taking place around us and, you know, the utter inaction that we see from the world's most powerful governments. We've recently had the, you know, extreme heat wave in the Pacific Northwest that I was in Seattle for that, you know, a hundred years ago would have been physically impossible. We've had the explosion of the oil thing in the,

The Gulf of Mexico, once again, an oil rupture that literally set the ocean on fire. Wildfire season and water concerns in the West are ramping up once again every summer. This is going to be the new normal in which wildfire seasons rage out of control. The drought becomes worse and worse. People are pressured to use water in more and more constrained ways. This is the new normal and it is scary as hell. So how are you feeling and how are you dealing with all of this stuff at the moment? moment, Joshua. Yeah, I mean, my, you know, my anxiety comes and goes in cycles, too, just like

yours. And as long as I can remember, I could feel ecological destruction in my bones. You know, I was writing punk songs about it in the 90s as a 14-year-old just to process it as an outlet, like as an outlet for my anger. And as I spent my life organizing on this issue, I came in tune especially with the science of collapse, you know, especially doing work at the UNF, triple C, the United Framework Convention on Climate Change about, you know, spending all of this time with climate scientists in their silent despair, you know, and with indigenous friends who've had, you know, most of their family members die from rare cancers because of extraction. And, you know, I identify as an empath. I took it all in and I didn't know how to protect myself.

I didn't know how to build boundaries and I didn't know how to recognize the trauma of doing social movement work, you know, getting brutalized by cops of trying to push this boulder up the hill and seeing so many losses. And, you know, I have an analysis of the alienation of late stage capitalism, right? The loneliness of social media, of the addictive mechanisms that keep many of us stuck on, you know, Instagram for a dopamine hit or to give a fleeting relief to that aching feeling of overwhelm. But despite that analysis, I still get caught in it. And, you know, as it's hard to be constantly in tune with this level of collapse. You know, I've been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder

by doctors who never asked questions about how I navigate all this. And, you know, instead I got offered medication to dull it, which is not the kind of medicine that I work with. And to be clear, I'm not making a statement either way about those sorts of medications. I know many people for whom they help. But I found another path to navigate it. And, yeah, I mean, should I go into talking about anxiety specifically? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Let's go ahead and move in that direction. You know, I don't look away. I keep looking. at the destruction all around us. And when the anxiety comes in, I navigate my anxiety like it's a relationship, you know, and sometimes that relationship is more present than others. And sometimes I'm better at navigating it than others. But I try to not over-identify with it.

I no longer say, I'm an anxious person. I say I have a relationship with anxiety. And that's important for me to, so I don't identify too, strongly with it and let it consume me. You know, when I first became chronically ill with autoimmune disorders, it was very empowering for me to identify with it, to identify as a chronically ill person. One of the things about chronic illness is that it's mostly invisible in our culture, you know, the whole, you know, but you don't look sick thing.

And, you know, so many of us, whether it is depression, you know, chronic fatigue, exhaustion, burnout, anxiety, despair, you know, we get that, but you don't look sick response. And it's easy to become self-loathing or sit in shame or self-blame. You know, I used to look at my chronic fatigue and think, well, well, maybe I'm just lazy or I don't have the discipline or I should do this or that or if I just did enough meditation, then I could overcome it. So in the face of that, having a diagnosis and saying, I am this way, you know, I am sick. It was helpful to release that shame at the time. But then after a while, it kind of became its own prison. I lived in that identity of being an anxious person or being a

depressed person or being a sick person. I'd forgotten what it felt like to be functional and healthy. And I gave up on the idea that I could ever heal. And so with the help of psychedelics, with the help of other modalities, I began to identify not that way. I began to identify someone with this miraculous body that was currently sick right now. You know, I'm not a sick person. I'm sick right now. And that was really important for me to lean into a sense of agency, you know, agency meaning being able to see more choices than we might realize we have, regardless of what the material circumstance or conditions that we're in.

and that not identifying with it too much it's almost like not to go too far on a tangent but it's like the relationship between guilt and shame right so guilt is feeling like oh I did something bad right when you when you do something out of alignment with your integrity you may feel guilty but if you over identify with that feeling it transforms into something way more toxic which is shame which is the feeling of I am bad right and guilt can have a function, but shame is just toxic. You know, it's just so damaging and that's why our culture and the left, you know, weaponizes social shame to enforce its own purity politics and internal policing, but that's another conversation. So if you do something, you know, like that, that

transforms that shame, that guilt into shame by over-identifying with it, you know, we come from an egoistic society that's a me culture. And so so many of us in the U.S. are conditions to over-identify with all of our feelings and emotions. And emotions are really just sensations with stories attached, right? And so it worked the same way with my anxiety. You know, once I'm identified with it, it transforms into something much more toxic, and it kind of runs the show, and it becomes harder to step out of the intrusive thoughts or the, you know, the comfort-seeking compulsions that give momentary relief, like social media

that I mentioned, for example. And so I think the principle of not identifying with your thoughts or emotion applies across the board. You know, a lot of our movements encourage people to think of themselves as oppressed people, rather than what many decolonial struggles in Africa and Latin America and Southeast Asia did, for example, which was encouraged people to think of themselves as resilient and powerful people who are experiencing a condition of oppression. And that's one of the challenges with the liberal brand of identity politics that's gotten so popular. integrating oppression into one's identity makes it hard to build genuine visions of freedom that are rooted in solidarity. And so identifying with any emotion or material circumstance transforms it into

something that's harder to navigate and also harder to organize around, whether that's organizing your own healing journey on a personal level or organizing movement infrastructure. And so there's a variety of practices to not identify with it. But that's my main orientation. Yeah, I think that's very interesting and very helpful. And, you know, although I've probably never, never necessarily conceptualized it as like identification with or a relationship to, that has been a shift that has taken place as I've dealt with these rounds of anxiety and depression throughout my life. At first, you know, I would conceptualize it as the way that my society tells me to conceptualize it as I have a neurochemical problem, right? The brain chemistry is a little off and therefore

I needed to turn to pharmaceuticals in order to feel. fix the brain chemistry that perhaps I was given genetically, and it's like hyper-individualized, hyper-biologized, and nothing at all is ever said about, let's say, the social conditions that I exist in. I remember the first time that I was hospitalized for depression. I've talked about this stuff quite a bit throughout the four so years that revels spent on the air, but the precipitating event for me with my first, you know, going into an actual psych ward for a week, was this despair that I had as I was getting out of high school, toward the end of high school, looking at my life ahead of me, watching my family, you know, work jobs that they hated for very little

money, struggling month in and month out, choosing between which bills to pay, you know, having like the lights go out, being a routine thing that we went through as kids. And then now I'm burgeoning into adulthood, sort of leaving the careless childhood behind. And I had this breakdown where I was, like, telling my mom, I remember, like, crying, like, you know, hours before she took me into the hospital, like, is this all there is? Is this what life is? Am I now, because I come from a lower working class family, I don't have, like, parents with money that I'm going to inherit or can buy me a house or I'm not going to be ushered into this wonderful job because of my parents' connections? I know that my life and the people around me's life is going to be

kind of like my parents' life and even worse because of the economic differences generationally. And I was like, is this, is this all there is? And that was a huge dawning moment on me. And eventually I would, I would sort of understand that these bouts of anxiety and depression, they're not the results solely, at least, of just like genetically inherited neurochemistry. They are a product many times of the social conditions we exist in. And we see this with the pandemic. All mental health disorders, deaths of despair, addiction, they all skyrocket because what's going on. An already terrible social condition being working class or poor in the United States has now been exacerbated by a pandemic where every time you go out you have to feel that your physical existential health is at risk. And then climate change is just another layer of that. It's like these terrible social conditions and now we have this fucking thing barreling down on us that is going to radically shape and deform our future and our children's futures. and so this this medicalized individualized biochemical approach to mental health it needs to it needs to be undermined you know on the on every level imaginable and I think the social conditions that we exist in play a huge fucking role a bigger role I would argue than mere genetics or the

the just so story that we've been told by the medical profession for the last several decades yeah absolutely and there's there's a dialectical relationship between the two, they oppose and shape one another. And I think that's, that's a thing I used to get lost in, right, which is that our material conditions do shape our biology. And when I'm, I'm in a moment of anxiety, it can be helpful for me to recognize that, oh, I have a series of chemical reactions happening in my brain or a lack of dopamine in that moment or, or whatever. There there are physiological responses because our, you know, that Western idea that, you know, our bodies are just machines carrying around our brain and our thoughts are somehow separated

from the, you know, our bodies is just not true. It's all integrated. We are shaped by our social conditions and, and then we shape them in response based on our physiological responses. So we need to integrate the two, which is why to me that, you know, yes, there's a personal aspect of healing, and we should definitely get into that of things that you can do to find more choice in healing regardless of your circumstance, but then the best healing happens in solidarity with others through changing your conditions. And that's the role to me of social movements, which isn't just about, you know, fighting and changing systems, but actually being a site of healing, especially in a society where so few of us get to be members

of groups that give us meaning and purpose in our lives. And they're interconnected in ways that we're just beginning to understand. I really love that point about the dialectical relationship and that, you know, it's not that the causal arrow is pointed in one direction only, right? Like, you have low, you have a genetic situation or your brain chemistry is off. Therefore, you are depressed, but it's like I'm living in these conditions. And so being in these conditions that beat me down spiritually, mentally, emotionally, that eventually gets instantiated at the neurochemical level. Like, yes, you know, you have these, you could look at the brain and say, these things are happening. And this is the mind state that you're in. But it's that causal

arrow that I think is really important to think through and get down. And I think that's what we're wrestling with here. But you mentioned this, and I think it's a great way to shift into this next part of the conversation, which is to zoom out from the individual a little bit. And the question is, you know, how do these struggles with mental health and trauma more broadly tend to play out in leftist organizations or how does trauma maybe even draw people into them in the first place? Yeah, I'm really grateful to the ways that in particular, the Black Freedom movements in the last 15 years, the healing justice movement that's sort of been incubated within it as well as indigenous

sovereignty movements and immigrant rights struggles have really deepens their understanding of trauma, of the way that it relates to the body and the role that it plays in social movements. So I consider myself a student of those lineages, and I'm constantly learning in community with others. And in our organization, the Wildfire Project, we've tried to apply some of those lessons because so many people on the left come there because of the trauma that they experience from poverty, from all of the experiences that you just named earlier Brett or of having their families torn apart by ice or their kids shot in the street by cops or their lands stolen by industry or trees broken or they're water poisoned. And when people make meaning of that trauma that it's not just an individual failing, but the result of these systems, then they join or form movements to change those systems. But fighting empire, fighting colonialism,

capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy is itself traumatizing. So it compounds on itself that many of us come wounded to these movements. And there's a deep wisdom in that wounding. There's a deep clarity about the failings of these systems, which is why frontline leadership is so important for our movements because the people who are the most impacted by any given issue often have the most insight about how it harms our communities. And yet we take that unhealed trauma

and then throw ourselves into the kind of meat grinder of a struggle and have this compounding. And we often build analyses and ways of relating to each other that both reproduce that trauma, but also continue to nurture it. They, you know, keep us stuck in a fight or flight stance, keep our nervous systems activated with outrage and grief and blame ways that that can be comforting to people. You know, familiar discomfort can be a form of comfort, especially when that's all that we know.

And, you know, I think the online left is a different thing. You know, like the media sphere, there's tons of bad faith actors and disingenuous people trying to get famous. But, you know, in the social movement left, I think most of our problems in terms of toxic behavior and lateral violence come from sincere people doing the best they can who are stuck in conditions of trauma that our movements haven't given a pathway of healing through. And so that's why the Wildfire Project works with groups to shift their internal culture. You know, we realized how much of the left is traumatized people, traumatizing people, and how much the self-limiting beliefs that emerge from trauma can get in the way of building long-term vision of actually trying to win,

as opposed to having, you know, a self-marginalizing righteous stance that's more concerned with being correct than the messy contradictions of actually trying to win or practice governance, you know, to sit in judgment of others or shrinking the terrain of politics to the, you know, individualized dimension of interoperative. personally policing each other's behaviors and words, all of that I see as a trauma response. And the way to shift out of it is to be trauma informed, which is, you know, a trendy concept these days. But, you know, we in the Wildfire Project really believe our groups really need to learn what we call relational skills to re-learn how to be in groups effectively together because regardless of our social location here in the U.S., but we almost all of us grow up in, you know, the most anti-soliduristic society on earth right now and need to relearn

how to be in groups effectively together so that our movements can be a site of healing and transformation, not just compounding the issues that brought us here in the first place. Yeah, that resonates a lot with me and my experiences in like local organizing circles and many different organizations where I'm from and just, yeah, it is, it really speaks to something that is, I think, sort of entrenched in leftist organizations, but is rarely, if ever, examined. And so I think that's one of the great things that the Wildfire Project does is it sort of takes this meta approach to organizing where we're trying to, you guys are trying to create healthier organizations so that they can pursue their laudable goals in a healthier, more, as you would

say, trauma-informed way that doesn't reproduce traumas, but actually can transcend them and make make organizations healthier. And with that in mind, you know, what constitutes a healthy organization? And maybe you could talk a little bit more about how the Wildfire Project approaches unhealthy and healthy organizations and helps organizations get toward a healthier sort of outline for them all. Yeah, there's, I'll outline one approach we have and go through some parts quicker, but then then zoom into others that I think are particularly, useful, also just for individuals listening, especially for individuals navigating the ecological

grief that we're talking about. So we have these six, six pillars of our approach, the six elements of how we facilitate groups. And the first, you know, we just call thriving groups. And so one aspect of that is supporting groups to enter into generative conflict, to engage conflict that creates more possibilities and greater connection. You know, polar expression, conflict shut things down. And so a lot of, you know, we call it conflict literacy. And that's one super important, you know, we could do a whole episode on conflict within groups. But so while, you know, it's easy to see people attacking each other constantly on the internet, for example, and the, you know, the call out culture stuff, within most organizations.

internally, there's sort of a middle-class culture of conflict avoidance, which can come from a place of wisdom or a place of fear where, you know, a sense that if we get too deeply into a conflict, the group will break apart. And so one aspect of what we do is realize that if you are just arcing towards the lowest combinator and can agree to without getting into genuine disagreements. And so how do we do that in a healthy way? Another aspect of that is balancing purpose and belonging that all movement organizations need to fulfill, on one hand, purpose, meaning what are the actual concrete, tangible changes that your group is trying to bring about and to keep your eyes on the prize of doing that? And then on the other hand, solving this alienation problem. Many people get their sense of belonging and meaning in the world through their participation in social movements. And some groups arc too much on one side or on the other side.

You know, there's groups that focus so much on outcomes. They chew up their people and spit them out and don't take care of their people. And then there's groups that basically become subcultural social clubs, you know, focusing exclusively on belonging and sort of losing their sense of what they're actually trying to do in the world. So we help groups find that balance. Within this, you know, element, there's a number of other things. We help people navigate rank and power to practice feedback. and accountability, to practice joining and differentiating, to, you know, build groups that can

hold risk, things like that. Our second element is helping groups build what we call compelling visions of freedom. So helping groups find a North Star that's bigger than themselves so that you can stay connected to the bigger picture so that you don't get overwhelmed by all of the little losses that are part of organizing in this uphill battle. And then to deepen that vision and make it collective. And an aspect of that is also doing political education. And in the context, that political education, assessing strategies, impacts in the interpersonal dynamics of a group, the third element is building power across difference. You know, we, in a wildfire project, believe that, you know, North American social movements have benefited from generations

of critical analysis around race, class, gender, difference of various kinds. and that constitutes what people call anti-oppression. And while we celebrate a lot of those insights, we also believe that that whole canon of doing internal work can become reductive, it can become shame-oriented, it can become individualistic, and become binary. And so we support groups with having other frameworks to, you know, pro-solidarity frameworks

to navigate differences in power within a group. Our fourth element is study and practice, which we believe needs to be, you know, part of any organization. And that's pretty straightforward. The fifth element is around, I've mentioned before, which is transformative strategies and actually building the skills to strategize, which we believe are mostly relational skills, even more than they are analytical skills. So helping groups identify the impact that they're best suited to make. You know, I actually think most social movement organizations don't have a strategy. They might have a critique and kind of throw themselves against that critique over and over again,

but don't necessarily have a culture of assessment where they can bite off a piece that is right-sized for them while still being rooted in that North Star. But the last element is the one that I think is most relevant to this conversation, which is, we call it cultivating spirit and faith, which is not a religious orientation. But it includes a variety of relational skills such as, you know, developing and incorporating ritual. You know, rituals help us remember to remember. They can support us to feel connected with that bigger picture of the values and truths that oppression pushes us to forget and to integrate those values into our group identity. And so that includes bringing,

music, song, and art into the work, things that nourish the soul so that it's not just sort of this endless sort of, you know, critical analysis slog, doing things like helping groups increase their capacity to sit in contradiction, you know, in the work we face so many dilemmas that require us to hold competing or contradictory truths, right? And the more that we can let those truths coexist, the more we can hold the nuance and complexity and wholeness of ourselves and the world and the people that we work with. And the more, you know, when we're attached to this either or thinking, you know, good or bad, right or wrong, oppressive or liberatory, we can fail to see things as they are and our work

suffers as a result. And so the way that we support groups to get more comfortable with contradiction is to look at them head on. So for example, one contradiction that helps me with anxiety, helps me with despair is to cultivate the capacity to, Surrender, which we could talk more about later if you want. You know, it's one kind of contradiction. Activists in particular are really bad with the concept of surrender. You know, the idea that we find power when we can let go of what's beyond our control and therefore free up our energy and capacity to work where we have impact.

You know, that helps groups release the fear and hypervigilance that keeps them grasping for control and celebrate the sense of power and possibility that they do have. So we can mark that to return to it because I'd love to get your thoughts on it. But just to finish sharing some other aspects of this, we help keep the real big picture in mind. And that's why we often talk about things in the context of ecological collapse of the timeline of the earth. And this is a gift that we've gotten from indigenous movements

where they look at history in much, much, much larger, cycles and understand history, not just in terms of, you know, a material history of, you know, the formation of nation states, for example, but these longer natural cycles. And through that, we can support groups to draw on untapped sources of resilience. You know, there's immense resource in the wisdom of our bodies and the earth elements in the particular ecosystems that we're part of. And, you know, one thing that black movements talk about is ancestors and the ancestors that you're back. And one thing that Native women talk about is, you know, orienting towards future generations that will inherit what we build. And that, all that helps you see yourself as

part of a much, much longer struggle. And you don't have to get so overwhelmed with the idea of, you know, completing the work within your lifetime. But instead, seeing yourself as a larger project where you're just moving the ball forward a little bit. And through that, you know, I talked earlier about building, you know, a vision. We support groups to actually feel their visions of freedom, to move from thinking about what liberation means to feeling it in our bodies in a way that anchors us in the reality, that we're not just fighting for ideas, but for a world where our people get to feel and experience freedom. And, you know, there's many ways that our bodies already know what freedom feels like. And we find deep and intuitive guidance

when we remember how to listen and trust them. And then we help groups, you know, increase their sense of interdependence with the final one that I think we could also go in much deeper on when we talk more about personal ways of navigating some of this stuff, which is practices of gratitude, that helping organizations build gratitude practices into the day-to-day function of their work, into their meetings. You know, gratitude helps us open and soften to release vigilance and doubt and scarcity. And so when we bring gratitude into the work, we're present with what is and we feed what's good rather than just only focusing on what's bad, which is what the left is really, really good at. And I'll pause there because I know that was a lot of

different stuff, but that's a little bit of a snapshot of how we view healthy organizations. Yeah. No, I love it and I can't overstate the importance of an organization like the Wildfire Project. And as people know, this is an ongoing series. So I think we're going to pick up some of these threads in later installations because I want to dive deep on those six points, talk about these practices more in depth. And even when we dive deep on psychedelics, I think we can really go into an interesting conversation about surrender. And back on the individual level, when I'm dealing with my own anxiety or depression, things that I cannot control in the moment, there's this question that I ask myself that comes out of spiritual practices within Buddhism, which is, you know,

What's going on here now? Instead of letting the mind run away with the sort of anxiety or the depression and weave tales of horror and tragedy that just increase the anxiety or the depression, it's as you mentioned, like sort of falling in into a feeling of what's actually going on sensationally within my body here and now. And when you can make that jump out of the sort of the incessant chatter of the mind to the feeling and the wisdom of. the body. It doesn't eradicate the anxiety or the depression by any means, but it reorient your relationship to it, thus that a lot of the worst aspects of it, the sharpest edges of it become blunted and you have a new sort of way of engaging with that sort of set of sensations without the dialogue, the inner dialogue taking you astray and creating layers of suffering on top of already existing suffering that actually don't need to exist. But these are all things

I think that we can dive deeper into on subsequent installments of this series, and I very much plan to. I think now, let's go ahead and shift to just going deeper into this discussion of climate and the sort of topic of this episode, which we opened with a little bit of chatter on. And, you know, a huge source of anxiety for me lately is climate change. And one thing that I do, and I've had, you know, somebody who helps me with therapy say that because I'm an intellectual, I want to understand things. So if I'm dealing with anxiety, I want to like understand everything about anxiety, how it manifests in the body, you know,

what are the inheritance factors, etc. What are the studies done on rats that say these are the best things to do to reduce anxiety? And when it comes to climate change, my mind does that same thing. So I become deeply, I think it's fair to say, obsessively into studying the topic. A couple days ago I spent six hours straight, just reading through articles, watching documentaries, thinking about and researching the various trajectories, understanding deeply all the nuances of what happens at two degrees of warming, versus three degrees of warming, verse four degrees of warming. And there's like a sense of me that feels like if I don't study it, it's trajectories, the various scenarios, et cetera, that will likely play out in the coming years that I'll

somehow be letting my family down, letting my audience down, my community, down, myself down. It's like, you know, it's, I almost see it as like a burden that I must bear. And just a little anecdote that recently drove that home to me even more is so I'm dealing with all this stuff. I'm studying it deeply, deeply, deeply. And then I just have like a sort of conversation with my wife about it. We have a little quiet time. The kids are playing. And I just like, you know, talk about some of the things that I've, my mind has been mired in about like these trajectories at different degrees. You know, here's how we stop from getting to four degrees by 2100, et cetera. And all of a sudden, she just broke out bawling. She doesn't study this

stuff very, you know, closer than any, like an average person isn't going to obsessively dive into this stuff. And so me just saying things that I thought were commonsensical and not even that emotionally charged because they've been so integrated into my being, it made her start bawling. And it was a sort of a wake-up call to me as like, you know, I can't, I don't even want to share this stuff like sometimes I'll mention it to my kids and my daughter will say that really scares me and I'll just stop saying it to my wife and my kids stop talking about it but it's like I have to learn it it I have to know it and then I've noticed that all my hobbies all my interests are now geared toward making you know me and my family as resilient as possible to be an asset in a future scenario

of collapse or catastrophe so I'm getting into harvesting rainwater composting permaculture fishing different sorts of fish to be able to go out and harvest if I need to from the natural world. It's like everything that I'm doing now is shaped around this future that I see barreling down on us. And that causes a great amount of anxiety. It also inspires me to do these things that I hope will build resiliency, but it also feels like I am helpless in the face of it as well, no matter how much I scream into this mic about it, no matter how much I study it, no matter how much I try to protect my family from it, there is this sense of helplessness that comes in the face of it, and it's sort of terrifying. So there's not really a question there, but that's just sort of where

I'm at with it, and you could pick up any thread that you'd like and run with it. Yeah, I'm there too, brother. I mean, it's, and it can be helpful to do all the things you just said. You know, I do love that Joan Baez quote, that act. is the antidote to despair, that just getting into motion and doing something, even if ultimately it doesn't solve the bigger picture of the problem, can just be a way to process it, right? And, you know, for me, that's everything you just described is grief. And it's interesting to hear you say this interaction that you had with your family, because, you know, I think those of us in the climate justice movement who first sort of about 20 years ago,

at least for my generational cohort, started to be feeling these things, seeing a whole society become aware of them all at once. And I often wonder, you know, what role can that movement play in helping steward processing those feeling? So when I first started fighting pipelines and oil companies directly, which was about 2006,

I realized that I would need to make a constant, place in my heart for grief, a place that would always be there where grief could always live. And, you know, I came from a family and a culture that taught me to repress my emotions and to try to disassociate and numb out. And my way of trying to break that cycle is to learn that grief will always be there. And if I make a home for it in my heart, it wouldn't be deafeningly loud all the time because I wouldn't be constantly trying to mute it until I can't anymore. And when I do that, then I can also make a place in my heart for joy, for love, for calm, alongside it. And I could experience all of that. And I could get familiar with grief and get to

know it in a more intimate way. You know, most cultures have lots of ritual around grieving. So much more than we have in the dominant cultures in the United States, in part because capitalism keeps us in a constant denial of pain so that we constantly consume to distract ourselves from it. And that's why it's so important that our social movements include grief rituals. And I think it's going to become more and more important as we experience more and more loss and more and more collapse. We need to practice grief in solidarity with each other to ritualize it in community and in movements. That's something that indigenous sovereignty movements do very well, for example, that others can learn from, as well as black liberation movements in particular, I think, are on sort of the forefront of building the practices of that.

You know, just before we had this conversation today, I was reading about how First Nations in Canada were doing burial rituals for each one of the remains of the children that were found in a particular residential school. And those rituals were done with care. involving the hands and the body, you know, with weaving, with smudging, with tenderness. And all of that has great wisdom that I think the rest of us can learn from. And it's something that especially the secular left really misses the boat on. You know, we're losing so much animal species every day. The coral reefs are going to die no matter what we do. The loss of homes, habitat, clean water. All of this is something that our movements will need to constantly be present too. And, you know, even though I, like you, am also sort of almost compulsible,

well, I won't put words in your mouth, I feel almost compulsively driven to the analysis of everything that's wrong. We need to spend at least as much time organizing mourning, right? So we'll need to have grief and loss ritual as a greater and greater part of our movements. If we want our movements to be a place that sustain us in the fight, and also if we want our movements to offer something to the rest of society. And if our movements instead stay in a constant outrage and blame cycle, they're going to fail to fulfill that function, because why would people who are hurting want to come to a movement that just amplifies it, right, other than the masochistic people like myself that already attracts? And the other thing I'll say about grief is that

if I make a place in my heart for grief, you were speaking earlier about just being present to sensation. I can then experience that grief as a sensation without attaching a story to it and then also be present to what else is. And that's to go back to what we were saying earlier about the role of gratitude, which is, you know, for me, when I am stuck in overwhelm or anxiety or or ecological despair. Gratitude is a shovel that I used to dig myself out of a whole. And I need to do it over and over again. I need to look at it as a tool.

And it works the same with humility and with awe. But if you're feeling gratitude, you're present, right? And we know that anxiety lives in agonizing over the past or worry about the future. And there's a lot to worry about. And it's hard, you know, so it's hard to not worry about. the future with climate collapse. In fact, I mostly only get a break from worrying about the future if I'm present to gratitude. And so that's why it's so important that our organizations do it, because what you focus on is what grows, right? That's a concept that is in wisdom traditions

from all around the world, that what you pay attention to grows, what thought forms are you nourishing, what are you watering, what are you encouraging to grow? And the challenge that I have with the left and having been in many ways raised by the left is that, you know, our brains are wired or pattern recognition. And the left is rooted primarily in having a critical analysis of what's wrong with the world. So we hyper focus on that. And eventually that can become all that you see. And, you know, being able to pick apart what's problematic with everything is not the same thing as having a robust political analysis because it robs yourself of seeing life as it really is, which is beautiful and painful and full of contradictions.

And, you know, life is constantly birthing and deathing itself. And if we can ease up on our sort of, you know, intensely rigid moral judgments in the stories we attach to it, we can experience, you know, what in my field of facilitation, we call inner diversity, your ability to hold competing thoughts and feelings simultaneously. and the way that I do that is by making a constant place in my heart for grief. Yeah, so much wisdom in everything you said there,

especially the points about gratitude and how gratitude can be an antidote that pulls you out of anxiety because you're right. When you're anxious, you're thinking mostly about how things are bad or things are going to go in the next few moments, the next few years, in the next few decades. The common threat of anxiety is this incessant worry, often about a vague and undefined threat and gratitude is this grounding thing. It's like, well, what is okay right now? What am I thankful for right now? And so I'll be off in these anxiety loops about how will my kids be in 2081 when this terrible thing is supposed to fucking happen? And then I look over and my kids are

like laughing and playing with the dog. Now I have to hold both of those things as like things to care about it because I do care about their future. In the moment, however, maybe it would be more helpful to their development if I went over and played with the dog with them instead of sitting in my chair bending myself in mental pretzels about, you know, the decade by decade timeline this thing's going to fucking play out in. And just anxiety more broadly, I find consciously cultivating gratitude to be something that can really counterbalance the worst elements of anxiety and even of grief. One thing that falls out of my grief, as I think you alluded to, is anger, is this like sort

of impotent desire for revenge, particularly when I look at like, there's like this thing inside of us that wants to like put this on somebody or some institutions and they're certainly culpable individuals and institutions to put that on and then there's like you know these fantasies of like being able to like dismantle Exxon and sort of terrorize the people that are terrorizing the future reading about how you know Exxon mobile for example knew of this stuff in the 70s and then spent decade after decade buying politicians and sewing doubt and muddying the water and funding denialism, these are all 80-year-old white men that are going to be long gone when the worst of it is barreling down and battering the heads of my children and everybody's

children and their children shaping the entire trajectories of their lives. And so, you know, I can get into these grief spirals that turn into anger and revenge spirals and it's poisonous to myself and my own well-being as well. And so one of the more constructive ways that I've found, you were mentioning at the beginning of your answer of like taking proactive steps is to enmesh myself and engage with the development of life whether that is buying a pet at a young age and seeing them grow my children obviously in human form watching them and engaging with their development and then just getting really more into like botany and plants like i want to cultivate a garden and different flowers and think about how ecosystems are complex and get my hands dirty

engaging with the nurturing and protecting of life human animal plant or otherwise and that is something that I think is important to engage with to develop the consciousness that is intertwined with the development and taking care of life the bringing beautiful greenery out of the dirt is is magical in its own way and it's certainly better than scrolling on any social media site or consuming which is as you mentioned earlier the way that our society often basically implicitly tells us to deal with difficult emotions. This is like go on a shopping spree, turn on social media, get your little dopamine hit, maybe to fill that raging hole in your soul, just go consume something, throw something on your Amazon list. Why not? You deserve it. And it never actually solves the problem. And in fact,

I think sort of adds a hysteria and intensification to the problems. But I found the conscious engagement with life and the conscious cultivation of gratitude to be a proactive things that really do really do help yeah and that's that's a piece of you know if if i'd love to talk for a second just about how we navigate it as individuals in regards to you know and i wish there was a better term for it now um because the word the word self-care is a term that's entered the popular discourse you know in a way that it's kind of become this individualized bougie thing like oh you know take a bath, go to the spa, you know, a kind of neoliberal response to what is actually a collective condition of nervous system activation, anxiety, you know, we're in an epidemic of depression,

even for people who aren't sure why they're depressed, you know, even for people who aren't looking at the news every day of ecological collapse, you know, an epidemic of addictions and other coping mechanisms that, you know, both, you know, both to handle the material deprivation of so many, but also the information overload at this stage of history where everything's collapsing. But for me that, you know, for a long time that term self-care before it kind of became sort of co-opted by the, you know, yoga industrial complex or whatever you want to call it. It was a powerful and important intervention on left-wing culture in the U.S. You know, many of my mentors came up in the late 60s and early 70s, and they had this self-sacrifice. attitude that was more oriented towards sprinting because of their moments.

They, their revolutions happening all over the world, these decolonizing revolutions in particular, and they, they believed a revolution in this country was imminent. So they didn't take care of themselves. And I've seen the consequences of so many of my mentors who are bitter and scarred and projecting old traumas on to current conditions that I think muddy the water of, of being able to assess what's really going on. You know, at first, when I was looking towards eldership and looking towards mentors, I looked to people who I thought, you know, accomplished great things in their life because

I wanted to be like them. And I realized how many of them were suffering as a result of this sort of, you know, mode of being on the left. And now I look to mentors who are in their older age, are. relatively healthy and balanced and still connected to movements in some way. And that is, you know, there's a deep wisdom that comes out of, out of movements now that is around the idea that taking care of yourself is a real practice. It's not just about resting, which is something that I think all of us could do a better job of doing myself in particular. I'm pretty

bad at resting. But in addition to that, it's hard work to practice gratitude in the way that you just described or things, all of the individual options that we have of things like changing your eating habits, your screen time habits, your relationship to your body, your relationship to exercise, to breathing and breath, to spirits, to compulsions and coping mechanisms to to rest. It means retraining your nervous system as well as your thought patterns, as well as the trauma that we have stored up in our body. And that is our responsibility as individuals to do despite our conditions, despite the world that we have come into that has trained us away from all of that stuff. And both for the sake of being effective agents

of change in the world, but also by living out a different way of being. And to me, the ability to be present to what, you know, overwhelming stage of history that we're in and still find meaning and purpose in it and find some level of balance in it, that's the work right there that's going to help the next generations navigate the way forward, which is where I root, you know, hope and faith as well. Not in this sort of abdication of responsibility like the youth are going to save us kind of mentality, but in a way that really is seeing, you know, each generation as iterative and building on the next. And one thing I've learned from native movements is how do I want to be a good elder? How do I want to be a good ancestor? When I

gain the enough experience to, you know, enter into those roles and what do I want to leave on? the ability to be as resilient as we can in our conditions where on one hand we we don't just blame the individual for our circumstance we have a right-sized analysis of the systems but nor do we let ourselves you know nor do we hold ourselves hostage to that analysis like there is a way that the left has abdicated the concept of of personal responsibility for healing because the right wing says oh pull yourself out by your bootstraps your your your suffering is your own faults and then the left basically accepts and then reverses that and so we say okay well then there's you know none of this is your fault so um so therefore don't you know we we give up the

concept of personal responsibility and i think that's a mistake incredibly well said i've been thinking about that a lot lately and i could not agree more and just to the bare fact that that what we're dealing with right now um with all of the the challenges that we face as a species as a left is that we're in it for the long haul for better or worse. This is going to be a lifelong struggle. It's not three sets of demands that we just need to lobby hard enough and maybe they'll get enacted and then we're good. This is a long, lifelong fight. And to be effective warriors in that fight, which is being imposed upon us, like we don't really have a choice. We have to fight for the future of humanity. The stakes could not be higher. To be

effective means self-care in the sense that you're talking about. healthier organizations, a healthier approach to your own life, disengaging from the ways that you're conditioned into thinking you should deal with these problems and conceptualize these problems. And there's a prefigitive element as well in this to try to reorient our own life experience and dealing with our own existence in ways that prefigure the world that we are trying to build instead of replicating the trauma that the old world has imposed upon us. so for all these reasons and more i think that um you have a lot of wisdom and what you're saying

is incredibly important and really worth taking seriously from everybody listening um you know we can get and i have deeply pessimistic and frightening about this stuff i just released an episode on rev left where after waking up after three hours of sleep with with climate anxiety i came in and made a show touching on all things from you know aliens to exon mobile to how politicians are bought off to our consciousness and how it's a product of the earth, et cetera, as a way to sort of deal and hopefully inspire others to deal with this problem of climate change.

But I have wanted also to be optimistic in some sense, not in this naive, polyanish sense of like, everything's going to turn out fine, you know? If we just have positive thoughts, we'll be fine. But to list the reasons for hope alongside the reasons why we need to get activated and need to take serious action now. So I'll name a couple of these. reasons for some general optimism on this front. And maybe you can build off that and come up with

a few of your own. So one thing that gives me a little bit of hope on the climate front specifically is that people are seeing through the propaganda, the hyperfunded denialism that has been part and parcel of our political situation for the last several decades is sort of crumbling. Even Republicans, they'll have to shift their argument. They won't just come outright and say it's bullshit. Fewer people can possibly believe that. If, you know, if your house burned down in a wildfire like you've never seen, or a storm swept through your neighborhood with winds higher than you've ever imagined, or you've dealt with a hurricane you never thought you would see, or you're going through a decades-long drought, you're not going to

believe in these mystifications. So they're having to shift their arguments, and more and more people are seeing through it, and it's becoming clear, pull after poll, that people are taking climate change seriously in a way that even a few years ago they simply weren't. That's going to continue to build as the sort of fallout from climate chaos continues to pile up. And that leads into this next reason for hope, which is the more impact that climate destabilization and the destabilization of the biosphere has, the more resistance it generates. It's sort of dialectical. You can think of like the more oppressive a regime is, the more resistance to that regime

is going to be cultivated among the people being repressed. And that same fact is true about climate change. It's undeniable. It's impacting people all over the world. Everybody is being impacted by it, and that's going to generate its own intensifying resistance. Another one is the young people coming up, and I know this because I have a daughter and a niece who are very smart, very mature, entering middle school and high school, and just more broadly, we see youth movements taking this more and more seriously. Young people, unlike 80-year-old Exxon CEOs and Republican politicians, snakes, know that they're their entire futures are on the line here.

And that is already mobilizing them and will continue to mobilize them as they look into their future like all of us do at a young age. Where do I want to be when I'm 50, when I'm 60, when I'm 70? You know, what kind of career do I want to have? Like these are luxuries that we've had in past generations that like now is like all of that has a shadow cast over it from the climate chaos. So young people are not going to sit by and watch their entire futures be flushed down the drain for the profit of a few.

That resistance is already here and going to build in the coming years. And then the last thing that gives me some hope is that nature does bounce back. If given half a chance, the resiliency of nature is profound and beautiful. And if we work with nature, if we think of like, you know, these natural ways of reforestation, of expanding protected lands all over the planet, et cetera, of doing agriculture and producing food in a way that aligns with, the processes of nature instead of acting harshly against them that if we give it a chance it can bounce back and so it's not over until it's over so those are some reasons for optimism and again I think it's important to point to these things because the doom and gloom can become so intense

that it more or less blackpills people that it just creates a state of despair without ever providing any hope and that can actually deactivate somebody from wanting to get involved in the fight if they see this as a hopeless battle. And I heard a quote the other day that I absolutely love is like the defeatist finds comfort in inevitability in the same way that the denialist finds comfort in uncertainty. Both of these are sort of delusions and we have to reject them both. And so offering some lines of hope, some silver linings, I think is one way that we can do that. So what are your thoughts on any of that?

And do you have any other reasons for being somewhat cautiously optimistic on this front? Yeah, I love all the things he said. And especially the, you know, what you just named at the end of sort of like the arrogance of the certainty that DeVitas have. One thing I've been doing for a long time that is, you know, I do almost as much as I kind of dooms scroll is I watch things like PBS eons to understand geological time. Yeah. And understand the life cycle of this planet and really locate our. ourselves in that. And not just of this planet, but of which humans have, you know, been on here on this, this planet for a tiny fraction of time. But even in the immense vastness of human history

before we started recording it, you know, most of human history, we know nothing about. And that gives me a little bit of a sense of wonder, awe. And, you know, that that contradiction that you can find meaning and importance when you realize your insignificance. And, you know, I really believe that it's, you know, it's a terrible gift to be alive at a time of such momentous change that is change that is in itself escalating exponentially, especially, you know, in what's to come is the biggest change that humans have ever seen. And even if all of the trends are alarmingly bad, we can have the humility to know that we don't know what's going to happen. And as change itself accelerates, that wildcard factor of not knowing what's going to happen

of game-changing moments increases as well. And the future, I think, becomes less and less predictable. And so that is one way that I sort of ground myself through looking at all of the sort of horrifying trends that are happening. And I have, you know, confidence that the, you know, the Earth will be fine. You know, we are living in the sixth grade extinction in the history of this planet. But we're in bigger cycles than we realize. And the extinctions are part of the Earth's cycles. And even if humans are bringing about this current one that we're living in, we are nature just as much as an asteroid hitting the Earth was nature. And, you know, I do believe that there's going to be a lot more

suffering coming in this century no matter what we do. And I don't want to sugarcoat that, but I can experience both the pain of that and hold on to hope simultaneously, you know, in what I had mentioned before, that kind of inner diversity of making a place for them to exist simultaneously. And, you know, I think many people try to reach for hope in the belief that it somehow doesn't have room for despair too. And I think that's foolish. And, and the, and that style of trying to do hope can ring false and hollow to people, you know, and again, like the way we started this conversation, I've lived a personal experience of being so out of balance and unable to listen to my body that the universe said, all right, I'm going to

give you something that's so debilitating that it's going to force you to transform if you want to survive. And I may not have survived, but I did. And I do believe that Mother Earth is saying to us now as a species, y'all have been out of right relationship with each other for really long-ass times, especially the last 500 years. And that's put you out of right relationship to me, the planet. And, you know, that nature is a self-correcting system that brings things back into balance. And that is what we're going through now. And so the planet's, you know, saying, now I'm going to give you something so debilitating that it will force you to transform everything about how you're living on this planet if you want to survive.

And there's hope for me there because the last 500 years of human history, including in the arc before that, have been horrible. You know, the default condition of humanity has been suffering and unnecessarily so. And this is, even though the century that we're embarking on might be a really difficult one, you know, the way that scientists talk about is the 21st century bottleneck. We're either going to transform to survive or we're not going to survive. And I do think, you know, ultimately the human species is going to learn how to be in balance or go extinct. And I've made my peace with both of those outcomes, you know, and it's not to say that I don't have fears that exist outside of those outcomes.

You know, the billionaires colonizing space, elysium fears that can prolong imbalance by extending beyond the planet's finite, resources. But when those creep up for me, that's where faith comes in. And that's why I think faith is important. And it's important to divorce the concept of faith from like theism, which is I think most people think of faith in the context of religion. But one of my Wildfire Project comrades was sitting with his teacher whose name I don't remember, but I wish I could credit with this, who said that, you know, the opposite of faith isn't skepticism. or rationality. The opposite of faith is control. And so faith is about letting go of the illusion of control on some level. And recognizing that, you know, something is going on that's much,

much bigger than us, you know, and we have a very small role in it. And we're going to be doing our best to manage human affairs in the context of huge shifts on this planet. And to me, you know, the purpose of life is itself evolution and that we are in a process of learning how to take care of each other. And that's my sense of purpose is to support, is to learn how to do that myself and to support movements that learn how to take care of each other in the context of escalatingly difficult conditions. And that comes back to what we were talking before about surrender, that surrender is not submission. I think, I think on the left we can few surrender force submission. And I think it's possible to maintain a vigilant, even militant

approach to rejecting the unnecessary suffering that these systems create while still reconciling us to the fact that, you know, on a deeper level, we have no idea what's going on. There's a bunch of, you know, humans running around the planet with all these perceptions that we think we know what's going. We don't know what's going on. And so I find some solace in that and that's where I find hope. And also, I try not to intellectualize it too much. It was like what you were saying earlier. Like, if we could think our way out of the problem, then the left would have won by now.

The left is full of smart people with great analysis. If all it took was figuring it out, then we'd be in a different place. But that's not how it works. And, you know, just to, since I know we're wrapping up here, kind of land this, thought back in the personal of personal practices to cultivate hope and what you were talking about of being present to your body. I mean, it's amazing to me how many of my personal problems and my overwhelm and my own internal life is helped just by stretching my body every day. Yeah. I mean, it sounds so simple, but, you know, we're just a bunch of tubes, you know, physiologically and

energetically and emotion as well as pathogens get stuck and we got to roll them out and I and I find that the for me stretching is uncomfortable because then I have to be present to all of the aches and pains and discomfort in my body and the more that I do that the more that I can allow myself to sit in that that kind of surrender that kind of bigger picture faith and that's that's one of ways that I try to hold on to it. I love that. Completely true. The logic that underpin yoga is within what you just said there. And I find that to be true as well. And my decade plus of meditation practice, you know, there's things I still struggle with, things that I still have in front of me. But one of the things that I've really noticed is it reorients my relationship to physical pain.

Still have trouble with mental and emotional pain. But physical pain, I've revolutionized my experience of it in a similar way we're talking earlier about sensations in the body or you being present with the discomfort of a deep and challenging stretch that is in some level on some level that's pain and to sit with it and experience it and not to try to scurry out of it you realize that so much of the suffering that comes with physical pain is the the deep desire to get out of a situation that you can't get out of it's like this learned helplessness sort of sensation of like okay I'm feeling pain I hate this I'm scared of what's going to come in the next moment so I'm freaking out even more like these two arrows of suffering there's the first arrow that

you can't you know control the the brute fact that pain is here but there's that second arrow that you can sort of somewhat control or at least veto which is you can freak out and let your mind run with the the pain and be scared of it and scramble or you can just like sit stoically and accept it And that relationship shift, I mean, I cannot tell you how profound that is. But, you know, just talking a little bit more broadly, some of the things you went off on for optimism and reason for hope is, you know, these centuries of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, brutal racism, slavery, genocide, it's coming to an end. Nature is putting its hand in our chest and saying enough is enough. Now, that could result in the pessimistic worst-case scenario of more or less civilizational colloquial. and human extinction, but it's also just as likely, if not even more likely, because of

the resiliency of human beings and the fact that most people, I think, really are good and want to make and see change in the world. The other possibility, and it's worth entertaining this, is that we'll look back on this period, this century in hundreds of years as a species and say this was, this was the bottleneck of the 21st. This made us radically reorient our relationship to ourselves, to one another, to break out of nation state tribalism and to form a global community because we had to cooperate globally to tackle this problem, that this is a sort of, you know, in retrospect, something that we had to go through to teach us crucial lessons that now that we've overcome it, we're a new, better species. And I think

that is a possibility too. And us acting in the here and now to defend the biosphere, to defend humanity is the earth acting in its own defense you know i've i've made this point many times that human consciousness is not something separate from earth but is a product of it it is to the earth what an apple is to an apple tree it is beautiful like a mountain or or a pristine ocean environment it's just as beautiful and just as natural as those things and it's deserved and it requires protecting um on that same level and so i kind of think of that too and sometimes i'll get this sort of perspective shift of, you know, when I'm caring about these issues, studying them trying to educate and act in the Earth's defense, it's like sort of self, even if it's just

a fleeting snap of a finger moment, slips away. And I kind of feel viscerally that I am one of the many nodes by which nature itself attempts to heal itself, tries to resolve the contradictions that are inherent in human society, which is a product of nature itself. And that can be profoundly motivating and inspiring and perspective shifting out of the ego into the eco. And that brings me to the last point that I want to discuss as we wrap up this episode. Before you go there, can I just point out one thing that I love about what you just said, which is that you just summed up sort of the logic behind my favorite slogan that the climate justice movement has ever produced, which is we are nature defending itself.

Absolutely. And to really take that into your bones is crucial and really, really powerful. We all know, everybody listening to this, you and I, we both know that we need a new social, political, economic order, that capitalism and the hierarchies that it produces are absurd, are unjust, and are literally destroying the planet. The incentive structures that it creates is antithetical to long-term human survival, and that's becoming crystal clear by the day. But there also seems, and I think you and I agree on this, and as part of the reason we're doing the series, there needs to be a simultaneous shift in consciousness along with it, one that realizes the errors of the past and present by becoming hyper aware of them and then fixing them, you know, one that reflects the deepest wisdom from indigenous and spiritual communities, you know, that have been saying, namely, that we exist within an interdependent web of life and that we must work with the flow and the processes of nature as expression. of it instead of acting against those processes under the delusion of separateness that sees that the natural world that others are not me and that they're there to be exploited and plundered by me. I mean, what is capitalism and colonialism? If not, the delusion of separateness run rampant.

I can genocide those people because they're not me. I can enslave those people because they're not me. I can exploit and plunder and pollute the world because it's not me. It's something separate from me. That is like the core of the delusion that I think is either going to be overcome in this century or going to not be overcome and be the end of us, our civilization and our species. So I feel like knowing that, we have a duty to cultivate that new consciousness within ourselves as part of the struggle. This new consciousness is dialectical. It's interdependent. It's eco-minded. It's holistic. It's process-oriented. It's global. I'm not a fucking American. I'm a human being.

What happens to human beings across the planet is what's happening to me and vice versa. To break out of this little nation state nonsense that capitalism necessitates. It requires that imperialism, colonialism, require the nation state mentality and dividing the world into these little false borders and little enclaves that can be either exploited or be the base of the exploiters. That needs to end. So I think this is happening. it's starting to happen. People are thinking of stuff like regenerative, you know, agriculture. People are looking at these wisdom traditions from indigenous cultures that lived for millennia in balance with the earth and never, you know, brought it to the point of a mass extinction event like colonialism and capitalism has, etc. This is blossoming. This is burdening. You know, it's sort of happening. And I'm just wondering what your thoughts are on all of that if you have any sort of things that come to mind when I discuss that and what your thoughts on it.

Yeah. I mean, it's, gosh, there's so much to say. I feel very excited seeing everywhere I look almost. And granted, I'm trapped in my own filter bubbles of people coming, waking up from that delusion of separateness. And, you know, there's ways that I do think that, you know, the current hegemony hijacks that into the sort of what we, were making fun of earlier, the sort of individualized self-care approach, the notion that you can spiritually wake up as an individual without working on the systemic level. For me, the hope is in blending those two, right? And that's why I was so excited to do this series with you, have to talk, you know, like in the psychedelic world, for example, there are so many people returning to different wisdom traditions without a political analysis with which to remake the world outside of themselves. And on the other hand, you know, there's a resurgence on the left of a materialist analysis of sort of breaking out

of the silos that the left has been stuck in since the 80s and coming into, you know, a unified sense of class struggle, for example. But, you know, still doing so with these projections. And so my hope is in the integration of the two. And I think some movements are further ahead than others, including the ones that I keep referencing. And, you know, one thing that might seem a little bit adjacent to what you're saying, but just kept jumping out to me in what you were sharing, is the role of inflammation in the body, which is that, you know, one of the things that I've learned from having chronic inflammatory conditions is how the somatic sort of root of, or maybe not root, but sort of, conductor of so much illness is inflammation. And there's a strong correlation between anxiety and inflammation between depression and inflammation between brain fog and inflammation. And I believe that separateness or the delusion of it causes a systemic inflammatory response in

the body. And I think we can also use that as a metaphor to understand the larger whole that, you know, inflamed political approach pushes up against the common and flow that we could embrace, right? There's, you know, I'm going to, this is kind of a cliche. I'm not sure where it came from, but the phrase, you know, slow is smooth and smooth as fast of moving at a pace that can allow for that inflammation to just calm a little bit. And so I guess I'll just mention, since we're threading the person, and the collective, a lot of my own inner work is around reducing inflammation. And so whether that is through breathwork, limb-hoff, breathing, or whether it is by, you know, working with different herbs, you know, I'm not a doctor or herbalist, so I'm not prescribing

something for anybody else. But I will just mention, since we're trying to offer people some solutions, for me, the response to my own stress and anxiety, I've been really helped by L-theonine, B vitamins, ashwaganda, zinc, omega-3, vitamin D. And to also then notice the way that we've built our economic system of cash crops around things that cause inflammation, both in the body politic and in the body, like sugar, for example, of, you know, sugar being a primary source of inflammation and us having organized the whole global economy around it to the point where it was the justification

for slavery and genocide of native people. And so I might be connecting some kind of broader dots here, but I think part of that coming together of seeing our interdependence also requires kind of calming down our own individual freakouts around that delusion of separateness and the inner work around calming that inflammation helps me. Yeah. I really love that you mentioned that because I'm really really into the inflammation aspect because I've had anxiety and depression. I have this propensity to try to understand so as to do whatever I can that's within my control to address these things proactively, I keep coming across inflammation. The connections between depression and inflammation are incredibly interesting, and I really urge people who, especially if you're struggling with the depressive episodes, to study that.

And, you know, I've become now very, in my 20s, I was much more sloppy with what I ate, when I drank, when I woke up, all that stuff, and I paid the prices for that. And so now in my 30s, I'm taking discipline. and consistency very, very seriously. And I have a schedule now that I create for myself that involves, you know, meditation, you know, daily fasting. I know there's some criticisms of fasting and plenty of great criticisms of diet culture more broadly. But for me personally, I found that a 16-8 or an 18-6 intermittent fasting schedule

really helps with my overall well-being, my energy levels throughout the day, and my inflammation more broadly. Exercise is huge. It's a great way to deal with anxiety because so much anxiety is this bubbling up and anxious sort of overwhelmed physical sensation that can sometimes be dissipated effectively through the exertion of the physical form.

So running, taking long walks in nature, resistance training. These are all things I've incorporated into my life. And then a healthy sleep schedule. I've found the benefits of that. and then eating as healthy as I can. So when I'm breaking a fast, for example, I'll do it in the most healthy way possible. And my body, my mind, everything becomes clear and is better when these things are done

consistently with discipline, with compassion, like self-compassion, right? I'm not grinding myself to dust in these things. I'm just working at my level, what's comfortable, and they really do help in all of these things, right, from sleep to healthy eating, to how you eat, to exercise, to meditation, to herbs and medicines, they all participate in the decreasing of inflammation in the body, which I found to be extremely helpful. So take that for what it's worth and go do your own research if you're struggling with anything in particular, but I have found it to be enormously helpful in my personal life.

Yeah, just to riff on that for a second. And that is that the most helpful thing for me about navigating chronic inflammatory conditions and the kind of mental health consequences of them is that concept that we've been talking about with surrender of realizing my body's telling me I don't have a choice you know I either need to take care of myself or I'm going to die and so um that removes for me all of the hand ring about it all the shoulds it stops being about willpower and I don't enter this web of self blame or or you know having anxiety about having anxiety or or any of that stuff and I can just listen to my body and the thing about that is is that it's so empowering you know one of the ways to

build integrity of the heart is to, you know, commit to something that I try to build a practice of before I go to bed, committing to something I'm going to do for myself the next day and then do it. And so I'll commit to something that I can actually follow through on. And every time I do it, it strengthens the integrity of the heart. And as opposed to the way that I used to live and still fall back into, you know, like it's not like it's what, you know, this is totally non-linear. I get stuck in my bouts of depression and despair and get stuck in moving instead to having vague intentions that I never follow through on, which ultimately is a way of teaching my body. I can't be reliable. I can't count on myself. I can't, you know, and that is compounded

the depression. That compounds the kind of self-loathing aspect of it. And so building integrity of the heart is one way out of it. And I think that principle can also be applied towards strategy for social movement organizations is that it's a function of empowerment when we pick strategies and when we pick campaigns that we can follow through on, whether we win or lose, that we can follow through on. Rather than just having, you know, vague, abstract intentions, it moves us into a place of agency. And it's a way to process our anger. It's a way to process our despair that is ultimately arcs towards, you know, one of the things that, the, the, that I often comment on in the dysfunction of the internet.

And the whole cancel culture, call-out culture thing on the left, for example, is the real cancel culture stuff, not the right-wing fantasies about it, I mean, is that, you know, it comes from such a fundamental place of disempowerment. If you are in a state of ecological despair because your house burned down or you see the ocean on fire or you listen to the rev left, red hot take episode and listen to how much Exxon knew for decades and intentionally, you know, obfuscated the climate science, you know, you can't reach out and punch the CEO of Exxon or as an individual have a sense of efficacy on that. So what do you do? You reach out

and punch the person sitting next to you in the meeting for only agreeing with you on 99% of things. Exactly. And so all of these ways that the culture of the left is self-defeating are an expression of disempowerments. And this is a way that the inner work, the self-work, can shift that, is that if we are all doing our best to build integrity of the heart and be in a sense of identifying choices where we may not have realized we had them, leaning into them in whatever circumstances we're in, as gruesome as many of our circumstances are,

that shifts our political attitude within organizations. that shifts the vision and horizon of behavior of groups out of the circular firing squads that the left is so comfortable getting stuck in that are ultimately an expression of the kind of despair that I think is unnecessary. We talked about making a place in our hearts for grief. And we also talked about not over identifying with a feeling. And when I mentioned earlier that if you over identify with guilt, it can become shame and then it's more toxic, same thing. If you over-identify with grief, it can become despair. And then if you act out of a place of that despair, you're mostly probably attacking your comrades next to you because that is within your field of, that's, that's,

you're punching distance. But really what you're doing is punching yourself because you, you're not following through on the ways that you want to live. And so that, that, that's, I think, the piece that gets missed when people talk about self-care and, and the ways that the inner work and the outer work are, you know, in, in that dialectical relationship. Yeah. So fucking important. So insightful. It could not agree more. In fact, I saw that on a microcosmic level in myself today that I'm out of control of something. And so I want to lash out at somebody else with no power at all. And it came in the form of student loans. So, you know, once in a while I'll wake up with like this daunting realization like student loans and my inability to ever fucking pay off this gargantuan amount of fucking money that hangs over my head every day. And so I'm thinking about it already. And then I go on to Twitter and I'm like searching up student loans. Like I just want to. see our other people as pissed as me like people saying like fuck it i'm not paying it they're going to come give me it somehow gives me like a little jolt of of happiness and relief that other people are like this fucking sucks and i'm not fucking paying it you know that sort of mentality so i'm going

through these things and you know you just search student loans on twitter you're going to see people all over the board on this thing and somebody posted i just paid off my student loans and it showed a little like email they got from the same uh student loan borrower that i go through right um saying Like, great, you paid off your student loans. Now, this is objectively wonderful for this person. Good for you. The fucking burden is off your shoulders. Like, awesome.

What was my first instinct? To say something snarky in the comments. Like, I had this urge that came up. Like, I should fucking, like, say something shitty. And I don't even know what I was going to say. And then I was able to catch myself immediately and say, look what you're doing here. Because you feel like this thing is out of your control, you don't have any agency when it comes to dispense. this thing that is hanging over you and your financial future every fucking second of the day,

you want to lash out at this person that has no control over your situation simply because they did the thing that you feel is impossible for you to ever do. And so I caught myself, I didn't do the thing. I didn't say anything bad. I think I actually liked it as a little encouragement to do the opposite of my initial base reaction and I moved on. But that's a tiny microcosm of a very human thing that I think we would all benefit from becoming more aware of in ourselves and in our organizational capacity.

Well said. All right. Well, this is a fascinating, wonderful episode. And, you know, it makes me feel generally optimistic. We talk about dark stuff, but, you know, there is hope. And I always, always love and honor and appreciate your insights that come out of personal work and organizational work that is really unmatched. So thank you again.

And some of the stuff that we talked about today that we didn't get a follow up on, they will be followed up on in future installments of this ongoing sub-series. So before I let you go for this one, though, Josh, was there anything you want to, you want to plug or promote before we, before we wrap this one up? Well, first, I just want to say how great I am to get to have these conversations with you and to, you know, I really respect your platform and what you do with it. And so it means a lot to me. So thank you so much. And also just want to emphasize, like, everything I'm sharing is also a reminder to myself. Like, I just so frequently get stuck in not practicing these things, you know, all of these, all of these approaches are a practice. And

I get stuck all the time. And so I just want to reemphasize, I'm not someone who's, you know, figured this out. I'm very much some aspect of that wounded healer archetype. And so trying to, I'm just trying to figure it out for myself. And, and sometimes I'm good at practicing this stuff and sometimes I'm really bad at it. And so I just wanted to name that. But yeah, if folks want to check out our website, the Wildfire Project is just www.wildfireproject.org. I also have a Twitter at Josh Con Russell and Instagram at Joshua Con Russell. And, you know, in the future, I also should just mention I'm actually on a path to towards building out a personal practice of coaching and supporting activists through burnout on a more

individual level. And so at some point in early 2020, I'm going to be taking on, you know, new offerings and clients. Because one of the challenges with the Wildfire Project is that if you're not part of an organization that wants to commit to a long-term partnership, it's really hard to connect to what we do. And so a number of us are thinking about ways to build out personal practices with that that can be offerings for people. And so one way to stay in touch with that is just to follow my social media stuff and I'll announce when that when that's available. Wonderful. And I will link to all of that in the show notes. I'll link to our first episode that we did together as well. So if you haven't gotten out, there's no, there's not a huge

need for an order, but I guess it really does help provide context for the rest of this series broadly to listen to that first episode. So I'll link to that in the show notes as well. Thank you again. our next episode will probably be within a month or two and we'll tackle another topic in this series so I'll talk to you soon. Looking forward to it. Stunning 8K resolution meditation app In honor of the revolution

it's half off at the gap Deadpool self-awareness, loving parents, harmless fun. The backlash to the backlash to the thing that's just begun. There it is again that funny feeling. That funny feeling. There it is. Again, that funny feeling, that funny feeling. The Surgeon General's pop-up shop, Robert Iger's face.

Discount at sea adjutop, bugles take on race. Female Colonel Sanders, easy answers, Civil War. The whole world at your fingertips, the ocean at your door The live-action Lion King, the Pepsi halftime show 20,000 years of this, 7 more to go Carpool, karaoke, Steve Aoki, Logan Paul A gift shop at the

Gun Ranger Man shooting at the mall There it is again that funny feeling That funny feeling There it is Again That funny feeling that funny feeling

reading porn hubs terms of service going for a drive and obeying all the traffic laws and grand theft auto file full agoraphobic losing focus cover blown a book on getting better and delivered by a drone

Total disassociation Fully out your mind Googling Drealization Hating what you find That on a parent Summer air in early fall the quiet comprehending of the ending of it all

there it is again that funny feeling that funny feeling there it is again that funny feeling Hey, what can you say We were overdue But it'll be over soon You wait Hey, what can you say We were overdue

But it'll be over soon Just wait Hey, what can you say? we were overdue but it'll be over soon you way hey what can you say

we were overdue but it'll be over soon you way hey what can you say we were overdue Where soon you away?