CIIS Public Programs Podcast

TRANSCRIPT

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[Cheerful theme music begins] 

This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 

How can we cultivate the traits of a vibrant community in our own lives and what would it look like to prioritize caring and acceptance in our interactions with others? How can we, collectively, create a climate of true inclusivity, one where our differences both challenge and strengthen us?  

After having meetings with different communities in the United States over the course of two years, psychologist Lisa Kentgen identified some key traits to vibrant, healthy communities that we can all apply to our own lives and networks. In this episode Dr. Kentgen is joined by CIIS professor in Counseling Psychology, Shoshana Simons, for a conversation about how we can transform our social relationships and build communities that appreciate difference, encourage authentic expression, and foster an environment of belonging and mutual care. 

This episode was recorded during a live online event on April 26th, 2023. You can also watch it on the CIIS Public Programs YouTube channel. A transcript is available at ciispod.com. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 

[Theme music concludes] 

Shoshana Simons: Welcome Lisa. 

Lisa Kentgen: Thank you Shoshana. It's good to be here. 

Shoshana: And it's a strange thing because here we are, but we're not really here. And I'm wondering, first of all, have you ever been into the building at CIIS in San Francisco? 

Lisa: Never, but I am curious. I haven't been to San Francisco in over 10 years. 

Shoshana: Next time you're here, I really want to welcome you into the building. And your book is about the practice of belonging and what is so rich, one of the things that was really rich for me in reading it is the importance of place. That comes through as an element of belonging. So just being aware that we're meeting in this sort of outside of place and time setting and just wanting to welcome you in. [Lisa: Thank you.] So, we had an opportunity to talk in advance last week, which was really a joy and we kept getting started and having to hold back on diving right in. So, this is our chance to like dive right on in. So, I just want to open the space for you to begin by sharing about your book. 

Lisa: Thank you. Maybe I'll just start by giving you a background of how the book called out to be written. I had just launched my other book, so I was kind of gearing up to put energy behind that. And I mean-  

Shoshana: Just remind us of your other book so we can see how they belong together for  

Lisa: Sure. The other one is An Intentional Life. And it really kind of what I brought to it was my work as a clinician and also 30 years of meditating. And it was really practices and living with intention. And that felt complete. So, it took me by surprise. Normally, I wouldn't be saying that I had a dream to write a book on community, or I wouldn't be so public about it. But I think it's very much related. I didn't understand why then I wasn't ready to start writing another book. And I wouldn't have particularly thought it was me that would have written it. It's not that I don't have communities. But I always, I have friends who live in you know, they have intentional, they live in intentional communities, or they really gather as community intentionally. I saw myself perhaps as more someone who has really intimate one on one relationships.  

So, I did what I typically do is I immersed myself in reading about community. And when I did themes of belonging came up frequently, and surprisingly, maybe you wouldn't be surprised, but I found that there was relatively little in the psychological literature on belonging. And why that surprised me is how much do we have on depression, anxiety, etc, etc. And belonging or a crisis of belonging is so related to these problems that we see. So, so there was a couple of lines and then one is seeing a theme on belonging that came up again and again. I reached out to a community that I actually went to for a week during spring break 30 years before, called Larsh Community.  

I went to a Jesuit university and they gave us you know, we had no money. So, they gave us a few bucks and a car to go be of service. And so I went to some Erie, Pennsylvania, to ostensibly, you know, be of service. And very quickly realized that they were just welcoming us to community and learning about celebrating and it's basically people living in homes with identified cognitive disabilities and people without identified disabilities. And what really struck me was, you know, after a long weekend, or it might have been four or five days, I was ready to come home. I thought I had my fill. And it stayed with me. And maybe you'll see themes in the book, but you it kind of defies how memory tracks are laid down. There's these quiet moments that I wouldn't particularly think of sharing with you, but they stayed with me 30 years later. And to me as I began to explore more about community, that is community is these quiet moments of connection, they make an indelible print. You know, they're not these like fabulous moments, although there are those too, you know,  

Shoshana: When I'm looking away, because I'm writing down things that are striking me about what you're saying. [laughs briefly] 

Lisa: And just one other piece that came into my mind is I, you know, I taught for a bunch of years, but my last year in New York, I moved to the Pacific Northwest about three years ago, were as primarily as a clinician in private practice. And there were these themes that maybe weren't foreground with my clients. And it was a longing for something greater, but it came, it wasn't always expressed like that. It was maybe someone who left the Catholic church, you know, a gazillion years ago and his daughter was in a choir. So, he ended up going and there were themes of community. And even though he wouldn't consider himself religious, he talked about how this moved him. Another person talked about wanting to be closer to his son. So, he became a Boy Scout. What do you call that? You know, the men that are the leaders of Boy Scouts, right? And he talked about, he found community, and it almost made him weep that he didn't even know it was a longing. So, there were just themes like that, that I started to then look back over the years and they increased over time. 

Shoshana: Okay. Yeah. I immediately got curious about, and this is always the choice points in an interview like this, and there's so much richness here, but in what was it about this time in all your years as a clinician that sparked the connection in this time? What was it about this particular time in the challenges that our communities are facing that maybe made this land in a different way? Because it sounds like, as you said, quiet moments of connection that have been there over and over again in the background. Is there something about these years that we've been through as communities that brought this up, brought this more out into the light, into the surface? 

Lisa: Yeah. You know, I would guess yes, but I think I, like everyone else, have felt the pain of the increasing discord between people. And I, as a professional, with tremendous appreciation and faith in the process of psychotherapy as an individual, was beginning to really grapple with this healing that happens behind closed doors is not going to be enough. It's the healing that we need in our communities, of course, in need of therapy. But even if everybody had a wonderful therapist, it's not going to address what we need in our communities, that kind of intimacy. Yeah. 

Shoshana: Yes. Yeah, that really makes so much sense.  

Lisa: So- an I just say one more piece about that? 

Shoshana: Absolutely. Yeah.  

Lisa: I think that we, as clinicians, aren't any, I certainly wasn't trained, aren't any more skilled at community building. I think one of the, I want to go back, and I think we have this in our, whether it's our cells, our DNA, it's just, we haven't been practicing it. And that's where I think the longing is, which is different from a desire. We have these desires in the world and we're busy, but the slowing down, the stepping back and learning to connect to each other in communal ways is really our true nature from my perspective. Now I wouldn't have said that perhaps five years ago. 

Shoshana: Okay. So, this makes me curious as you're talking about your own background as a clinician, as a therapist, a working therapist for three decades and having a lot of folks in your life who do live in intentional communities and sort of really holding that space too, and then becoming increasingly aware of the call to want to know more about that, this crisis of belonging. I'm wondering about who your, whether you had a sense of a primary audience when you were writing this and coming out of your own background as a clinical psychologist, were clinicians foremost in your mind? Was it more general than that? 

Lisa: It was more general than that. But it's funny because your publisher always wants to know who's your audience and I'm like, bloody everybody. I'm not saying the book I wrote, but everybody needs it. I almost wondered if clinicians might even be a little resistant to it. No. Because it's an idea of healing and gathering in ways, especially because where I come from, we're clinicians in New York City. So, finding places to gather has unique challenges, just the cost of everything everywhere, but particularly in cities. And as I began, I started to just have conversations with people about community. And one of the most remarkable things is that virtually no one said no to me because everybody wants to talk about community. Even people who really focused on it much more than I did in their day-to-day life, which by the way, I'm a convert now. Like we talked a few minutes last week. Once we start talking about community, we're off to the races. It's because it just touches on just natural ways of relating that we know in our hearts we need more of. 

Shoshana: So, if you don't mind, along with this, I had so many curiosities and there's so many questions I would love to ask you, but just to get us going. You use the word vibrant communities, the practice of belonging, six lessons from vibrant communities to combat loneliness, foster diversity and cultivate caring relationships. And that word vibrant really stood out for me. And I wondered was community vibrance an outcome of what you learned from meeting all these amazing folks and learning about what they were doing? Or did you go into this project seeking markers for it? Was it something that you learned through the doing of it? 

Lisa: I learned through the doing of it. And someone else had asked me, how do you know that it's a vibrant community? And it's not the most scientific way to just say, well, make a place. It's a place where you'd want to show up and not just meet other people. Now there were a number of people that gathered in living rooms that had a vibrancy about it but wouldn't have made its way to the book necessarily. And I don't necessarily know why either. And I want to talk just a moment on what a crisis of belonging looks like too. What was wonderful is oftentimes I'd be having these great conversations and even people who were familiar with community would say, well, tell me your communities. And it's kind of like asking you to define love. Like you'll go blank. And we know it, but it's hard to encompass it. But often at the very end of conversations, they would say, there's this place in Austin you really should see. Or there's this concert in Columbus, Ohio. So, I'd get on a plane, and I'd go to Columbus, Ohio. And it was almost like these last moment drops that ended up in the book. 

Shoshana: Ahh! So, is that your method for how you came to identify and go to all these different places? 

Lisa: Yeah. Yeah. 

Shoshana: So, can you take us into that? Take us into that. 

Lisa: Can I spend two minutes on belonging to set why? 

Shoshana: Yes, absolutely. Please do. 

Lisa: So even though there's kind of a paucity of studies, relatively speaking, there's data on belonging in the educational literature. And they show that a number of studies show that the number one variable that showed how younger children would do later in school, how well high school students would do in high school and how well high school students would do when they got out was whether they felt like they had a social home, whether they felt like they belonged. Of all the money that we spent, that's the number one factor. And so, I thought, wow, how would, if we really believe that to be true, how would we teach differently? How would we take it seriously? So that's one piece.  

An epidemiological study of like 70, I think 70 smaller studies, but over 300,000 sample size, it was looking at factors that predicted health, good health, mental and physical health, found that people who felt like they had a sense of belonging, it positively correlated with health, the equivalent of quitting smoking, physical exercise and a healthy diet combined. That's like extraordinary. And then the other piece of data looked at a 2018 survey, so this was pre-COVID, so you can imagine it's only exacerbated now, of nearly half of the 20,000 respondents said that they felt lonely. And if that's correlated with depression and poor health outcomes, and nearly half said they didn't have meaningful interactions on most days, that's a crisis. That's a crisis. So that's, so the whole premise of the book, and then we'll talk about the qualities of vibrancy are the primary incubator or platform for healthy belonging are vibrant communities, not any community, but vibrant communities where we can be authentic.  

Shoshana: What do you mean by authentic?  

Lisa: Where we can be who we are, all that we are. It doesn't mean that everybody's not, some people aren't going to not appreciate us, you know, that happens in communities too. But to think about the qualities where people felt like they belong, like communities of faith, right? Many times, people felt like they couldn't be authentically who they were. Many people who were gay or queer, or even in communities where they felt like it was a threat if we voiced our differences. Even if they didn't vilify people for doing so, you kind of wanted to keep the peace. So, in many communities, even where there was a sense of belonging, we didn't learn the skills of surfacing our differences, which really is one of the things that makes communities vibrant.  

Shoshana: So, I think this is like a nice opening into you talking about those key traits that you came, that you identified. 

Lisa: Could I read them just so I can be fairly concise? 

Shoshana: Why not? Yes, absolutely. 

Lisa: So basically, I just had hundreds of conversations. And after about a year and a half, I started to just think about what are some of these themes that are happening again and again. So, I'll just read three pages, three and a half.  

When I reflected upon the conversations and experiences I had with these communities, six qualities stood out that distinguished them from other types of groups and gatherings. And then these six qualities are the focus of the book. The first quality is an explicit commitment to care for each other, which is a universal attribute among all vibrant communities. I said I wasn't going to have an aside, but I am. Many times, we get together and we'll care for each other because we're caring human beings, we want to save the planet, we want to educate, whatever the purpose of getting together. But we don't make it explicit from the get-go that these relationships are primary, along with making these gadgets, educating people, saving the planet, worshiping together. The commitment of care nurtures a sense of belonging, which is a fundamental human need. This quality may seem obvious, but it's not explicit in most established groups and social gatherings, nor is it a given in personal relationships. As with with all six qualities, a commitment to care is a verb and not a noun, an active practice that is reflected in our perceptions, thoughts, choices, and actions.  

Now, these other five qualities are valued in all vibrant communities and are practiced to some degree. I found that each community often embodied two or three of the qualities in unique and powerful ways. The second quality of vibrant community is acceptance, valuing people for who they are, all that they are, which is essential for fostering authenticity. When we are accepted, we don't have to hide aspects of ourselves, including things that embarrass us or that we experience as broken. Chapter three introduces you to a community that practices radical acceptance and the members most skilled at community building have themselves known the pain of rejection.  

The third quality is diversity, valuing it and recognizing that it strengthens the community. Although most vibrant communities welcome diversity and aspire to greater inclusion, they can have difficulty making it a reality. A diverse community cannot happen without making it an explicit priority of the entire group. This is especially true in a well-established community where it's more difficult to make the kinds of changes needed for greater inclusion.  

The fourth quality is that vibrant communities have skillful ways to handle their differences that allow them to move beyond conflict toward understanding. Sometimes communities need the help of facilitators to structure the dialogue in ways that help build trust so they can hold conversations around difficult topics. Chapter five offers a model of how groups with a history of conflict shape their dialogues in order to facilitate solutions that create the possibility for future healing and reconciliation.  

The fifth quality in vibrant communities is the high value placed on celebration and ritual. Alongside sharing the mundane details of day-to-day life, these communities intentionally create opportunities for meaningful bonding and having fun. Celebration and ritual are meaningful only because they take place within the context of caring relationships.  

And the sixth quality is the gift of hospitality, which is the ancient art of welcoming guests. This attribute runs counter to the premium that our consumerist culture places on exclusivity. Vibrant communities put effort into finding creative ways for people outside their membership to meaningfully participate in the experience of community. We don't need tremendous resources or large numbers of people joining us to create community that's a positive force for change, both in our personal lives and in the world. Just one more point. Instead of finding the kind of community that we imagine ourselves belonging to, the better approach is to start building community right now in small, meaningful ways. Toward that end, an important question to reflect upon is, how do I bring the qualities of vibrant community into all of my relationships, into all areas of my life?  

Shoshana: Beautiful. As you’re speaking, I'm thinking, inside these six key traits, there are so many stories. 

Lisa: Yes. 

Shoshana: What you've done is you've distilled them into these six traits. But in reading the book, what you're doing is really bringing that vibrancy to life. And I felt like I got to know some of these folks that you were talking to. And it was so much also about the environment that they- to go back to what I opened with the opening question around welcoming into our space, the way that you were welcomed in the kind of we, the sense of we being part of something greater that you evoked in your writing. And I'm wondering if you can bring us a little bit into the stories. So, I know when we spoke in advance, you talked, you said, oh, yeah, Harmony Project. But that really stood, you know, that if there was one that you wanted to like, maybe open up a little bit more, I'm wondering if that's something you would like to talk about more specifically. 

Lisa: For sure. 

Shoshana: The storyteller, let the storyteller come out as you've done in your book. 

Lisa: And Harmony Project is gathering around song, right. And think about how we gather in our communities around food, around music. And it's after meeting community that I thought, why, you know, why do I wait to go to a concert to be part of music? It's like, how can we bring music to bring us together?  

So, the Harmony Project, I was talking to a woman who worked for the Obama administration on trying to solve the crisis of homelessness. I forgot what her title was. And at the very end, as I always do, I asked her, is there a community I should meet or No? And she said, oh, yes, there's in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, there is this amazing choir that meets twice a year for these incredible concerts. And you don't even have to audition. The only thing you need to do is to serve. And there's a concert coming up next month. I think you should see it. And she said, we bring our families. 

And so I went to Columbus, Ohio to see this remarkable choir. In a short period of time, what started out as, you know, like a mailer asking people to show up who want to be in a choir and 100 people showed up. Within a few years’ time, and I'll give you a little more background in a moment, the only place that they can fit now for their winter concert is the nationwide arena. It seats like 25,000 people. So, there's a 500-member choir and there's like 500 or 1000 people on the waiting list. They are from nearly every zip code in Columbus, Ohio. Now, Columbus, Ohio is an up-and-coming city. And like many relatively affluent cities, like New York City, it's very diverse, but incredibly segregated.  

And so, there are people that meet from every zip code. They differ along every dimension. I'll tell you a little more of the interesting story of, you know, you might have a judge singing next to someone who had been incarcerated. And when you go to a Harmony concert, so I flew there and I was by myself and people started welcoming, is this your first concert? So right away it just inspired connection and people from there's smaller choirs and people from the community that would come and sing with them. And what was really remarkable is they would have people from the harmony choir come out and sing, you know, solos. And then when they were finished, I've never seen a choir have such a fabulous time. They were giving each other high fives. And there was such sense that there is no barrier between us for that night, this connection. And what's wonderful is they also show on huge screens in the background, they show service projects.  

So, they work neighborhood by neighborhood. They work with the actual communities to make a park, to paint murals. And in doing so, they build connections with established community members. They don't just go in saying kind of, we're here to save your neighborhood. And so, connections are built.  

Another way that they're very intentional about community is let's say we're singing in the choir, you and I know each other. And then we go to do our service a few times a year. You and I don't do service next to each other. They intentionally place me next to people from the choir that I otherwise wouldn't meet. So, we might be painting curbs, starting out with, you know, how we got there. And before we know our differences, we share what we have in common. And right from the get-go, a friendship starts to develop.  

So, Harmony really highlights that if we lift our voices in song, it's one way to build community, but also working side by side. This is a theme I found. It's not just fun. It's people who show up for each other in non-sexy, non-glamorous ways day after day, working side by side.  

David who formed Harmony was a choir leader at one of the major churches. I guess if you're going to be a choir leader, it's in a church in New York. But at some point in his life, he became disillusioned and he didn't know if this was his path, but he didn't know what to do. So, he took some time off to heal and he went to college in Columbus, Ohio with no intention of staying in Columbus. It wasn't cosmopolitan enough. It was going to be in LA. It was going to be in New York. And then he ended up working on Obama and some other campaigns. And he realized that I've been too small minded. If I want a really diverse community, then I have to open to these people if I want them to open to me. So, there's an, if I'm kind of skipping around and you want, if you have some questions, let me know.  

So, there's the 500-member choir. There's a band. There's also choirs that began in prisons, the woman's correctional facility. And Ronnie, who's in the book is a warden who welcomed David into the prison thinking I'm either going to help these women or get, David's going to get me fired, you know? And they chose a program where women could actually, where women were healing from addictions. And that's where they formed the choir. And here is where women could actually not be in separate cells. So, there is the choir in a correctional facility. And while I was watching the spring concert, they came out as a special guest. The correctional facilities gives these women permission to come out for a night and sing. And they came out to me looking kind of terrified. It's a huge audience holding hands. And there wasn't a dry eye in the house, not because, and this is an important part of community, not because, wow, look at these women and they came out of prison and it's inspiring. It was because in that moment, there was no barrier between us. There was no difference. That's what community does. 

Shoshana: Right. And I think that really comes through in the book. One of the things that I take as the theme is that hunger and yearning for that. And yet there's all the social, cultural reasons why it's so hard and systemic more than anything else, the kind of structural and systemic reasons why people are segregated, positioned against each other, stratified against one another. And yet your book speaks to the hunger to move beyond that and pointing to some ways to actually practice, create those practices of breaking through. And in listening to you speaking to the themes that I was reading about, and I noticed how energized you are in the telling and the retelling. And I'm an expressive arts therapist and a drama therapist, and I can feel it in my body. And the act of storytelling is so important. Yes, the book is telling that. And how I'm hungering, how we're all hungering for these kinds of stories, the yes stories in the face of the overwhelming threats that keep coming in and keep wiring our brains towards threat, you know, as mammals, we're wired towards threat. And the news keeps pulling us in that direction. And your book is pulling us. No, hang on. This is happening all the time. It's happening and we don't know about it. And that your book is giving that space. So yeah, we get- I’ve got a lot of other questions that are coming out of this.  

And here's one of them. Community building, you're talking about community building, and you mentioned, especially across differences, and that it's difficult work. And working across differences in particularly in the United States with its deep history of segregation, and its lack of naming of social class, actually, you know, the sort of idea that if you're poor, it's your own fault is so deeply embedded. And yet, the stories that of the communities that you were working with are explicitly working against the grain, it seemed like more than the word inclusion, which can feel very, and you talk about this in the book, this isn't about inviting folks in this is about starting with the assumption that we are a community. How do we become the way? How do we be the way that we are? What if you could speak a little bit to that? To that? How does that happen? 

Lisa: You just spoke, I think, to the spiritual component, it is like this is we do belong. We belong everywhere, even if there's places in the world, because of the othering that aren't meant for me to be in in this moment in time, for safety or whatever. It doesn't mean that I don't belong everywhere. And so does everybody. And so does everybody. That is our inherent condition. That we have so many layers. So, while we talk about inclusion, it's sometimes the most obvious ways people think about. But damn, like if we can't surface our differences, where we all kind of have similar experiences, how in God's name are we going to attract people who look different or have very different life experiences, right?  

So, we have to get over this habit of mind that excludes us. I talk about and I'm still every time I say this, I'm slightly embarrassed. So Uta is my friend who I met at Community First Village, and she was chronically homeless. I say homeless because I think of home as much greater than just yes, people need houses, first and foremost, for sure. But in my head, when people said, who's Uta? Like because I would be Uta this and Uta that, I was excited after I meet these folks. And in my head, even though I wouldn't say it, it would be like some thought bubble that was Uta who had been homeless for 10 years. Why do we do that to some people? Why did I do that? It's like we're so conditioned that what is the norm, whatever that means is not named and everything else becomes how we characterize somebody. The person that was once homeless. Can you imagine if you were like, oh, my friend Shoshana who had an anxiety disorder, who was out of work for six months, can you imagine if that would be what?  

Shoshana: But as you're saying that, I'm thinking that is the training, the conventional training of a therapist and why I stopped wanting to be a therapist. Because particularly in the US where it's diagnosis first, it's diagnosis that's going to open the door to treatment, to reimbursement, etc. That that's a deeply ingrained habit of mind that's trained into therapists. And again, thinking, wow, the gift of this book is opening that space up and saying, no, this is about person first. Like forget these names. How do we come together as human beings with common needs, common basic needs actually?  

Lisa: And diagnosis is like a deep hit, right? Like you're suffering, how do I help you? I have these techniques for something that's called anxiety. Okay. But even analytic, because I was trained before early on psychoanalytic, psychodynamic, I can't tell you how, there'd be these camps of, the theory was six months or three years of what was, and they would say, 44-year-old woman who has two children, and then they'd be off to the races and theory. And I had no idea who this human being was. So, there's a way that we're so attached to our narratives, man, as opposed to tell me about yourself in this moment. Now having said this, people who are othered and wounded also wear those identities that are damaging because that's what they've been told, or that's why they've been excluded. So, there is healing that needs to take place in communities of very vulnerable people. Yeah. 

Shoshana: Yeah. I mean, this is like such an important conversation thinking about also another effect of COVID-19 and the pandemic has been the fact, the crisis for healthcare workers, for nurses, for doctors, for therapists, who ourselves, themselves, we're all humans, right? Folks have lost family members, the vicarious traumatization, the ways in which healthcare workers are now being maligned. This is not an us and them, this is all of us. 

Lisa: Thank you.  

Shoshana: We are all races, we are all backgrounds. And I mean, again, I'm wondering what the power is of writing a book like this right now to speak to breaking down these artificial barriers between us and them in so-called clinical roles, like coming out from behind the mask in some ways, in bringing our own vulnerability out in challenging the hierarchy of the therapeutic relationship in a sense. 

Lisa: Hierarchies, expert models. I mean, yes, you do need to be accompanied with someone that knows a bit about accompanying for these things. 

Shoshana: How do I accompany you? But you're at the center of this journey and I'm here with you, but I am not here as the expert knowing where you're going. I am beside you. 

Lisa: Right. 

Shoshana: Yeah. 

Lisa: And how about clinicians? It's one thing in private practice, but how about in hospital settings where clinicians aren't even given time to have a human relationship. So that's why I hope if the take home of the book is it doesn't have to be time consuming. It could be like you welcomed me and I'm going to come to California because I want to see you in person. By the way, I did after some of the people I met because I wanted to get more kinds of communities happened after COVID, but I then traveled to Austin and it felt like I already knew them, but it was so important to get a hug. And so, it might be okay where we have to do our business, but we can take two minutes. Does anybody have a family member that they want to hold up or does any just two minutes or even if you're so frustrated at a healthcare system that's treating you as like just symptoms for someone to recognize that and to see you. So, it's like, how do we begin to practice this in the time we have in the settings we have?  

Shoshana: I love that. Yeah, I was doing some- I’ve been doing some work with a regional health organization, and we did, there's a group of folks who are using narrative medicine. And so, I'm working with, been working with some doctors who are doing narrative medicine in their training. And I was working with the doctors who are using narrative medicine, and we had a one-day kind of retreat for them, which was so moving for me. And one of the biggest issues that was on their agenda was what they call in the field moral injury, that the feeling that they can't possibly care for the needs for all these folks is completely impossible. And the moral injury that they feel as healthcare workers, that they've perpetuated what space is there. And we've been using arts-based approaches to help them be able to tell these almost unbearable stories of what they're dealing with.  

Lisa: Is that the narrative medicine, them telling their own stories?  

Shoshana: The narrative medicine is, we use poetry, narrative medicine uses poetry a lot and prose to sort of read a poem that might be a way for them to start making connections with their own stories and be able to write and share from that so that they're not retraumatized by the whole process. But again, it's very much within these practices of belonging that they need to be together to share those stories. They're not appropriate, of course, to share with their clients, but in order to keep rehumanizing themselves from a dehumanizing system, how can we create communities where they can belong, and be real and tell their truth? 

Lisa: Yes. 

Shoshana: Yes. 

Lisa: And maybe where you can share it. So, if a client comes in, I'm thinking an older client, family member of mine, who told the same story and no one listened, even though there were severe symptoms, it would be appropriate when someone finally listened to her and say, I know I get frustrated too, that people can't be listened to the first time they walk through the doors. You know, because how many people want to step outside? We know we're working in broken systems, but it's like, where do we go? That's why this book is how do we begin to infuse these qualities into broken systems, make them more connected. That's where transformation happens. 

Shoshana: So that brings me to another question. I really wanted to get to all of these questions I wanted to get to, [both laugh] but something about, you know, this could be an overwhelming, this is overwhelming on some level, right? There are these traits, how the hell do we even begin to practice them? Well, what did you learn about leadership? Like what did you learn about the folks that were the instigators who were like on fire to make things happen? What were the traits of, what are the leadership? I want to go and say the leaders, what are the leadership traits? What are the traits in communities that allow for these six traits to come through? 

Lisa: Well, there are leaders and that could look different ways, but leadership in a community isn’t hierarchical and things are imperfect and, you know, but I had a conversation with Parker Palmer who writes on community, and I am sure I am botching his metaphor, but here goes.  

He talked about, you know, leadership in a community is almost like an orchestra. That's what I think was so fitting to harmony. It's, you know, you basically give some ground rules or like good teaching. I'm going to say good teaching. You give some ground rules and then you let people have at it. There is no hierarchical leadership or it's like Indigenous circles. My friend Vince Two Eagles, who is in one of the chapters on holding tension, he said that in, you know, the word Indian Chief is not used. You know, what is, what really happens is it could be an Auntie that selects someone to be a leader in the circle for a particular time and then when that problem is done, they come to the circle again. And now having said that, because reservations sometimes have been infused by capitalism, there is hierarchies in cultures, but traditional ways are the circle.  

And so, leadership is very different. It's messy, it's not convenient, but if you really want change to surface the gifts of everybody, that's going to be the game changer. It is not going to come out of the person we elect to save the day. It's not, it's going to come from our skills at not only surfacing differences, but our capacity to have eyes, to see what we miss and our ableistic culture. You know, especially I wrote a chapter on people with cognitive disabilities and sometimes people might see that that's so sweet. It's beyond sweet. It's everybody has gifts. And what we realize, and I get emotional when I think of this is when you are in community, it's not like, wow, what a, I'm going to remember this story, but it's more like, how could I have missed this? How could I have not seen this beauty? And this is someone who thinks that I am open, but I, you, this is where grieving comes in. When we're in community, we're going to grieve at how much time has been missed. What we miss by just including some people to the party. And even if we come from places where we think, oh, you know, we're an organization that seems more open and we still only include so many people to the party, you know? 

Shoshana: I'm really, I'm sort of struck by that word grief. And I've been thinking, I was just thinking about it this week. And actually, I think after I told you before, before we started that I had been at this, the Mount Madonna overnight retreat at this beautiful retreat center. And I was talking to some folks there about, about, about living there. And I was talking to this one woman and she said, she just came back after 30 years. She had grown up there as a kid and several of them had, and that it's a beautiful spiritual community that embodies many of these traits that you're talking about. And I thought, well, this is very synchronous. And I said, well, what brought her back? And she said, well, what's brought many of us back is the grief of all the losses since the, since the, you know, COVID-19 and the pandemic and the desire and the way it's impacted the community here and our desire to come back and be of service and bring our skills home, bringing our skills home and thinking about the larger, again, culture of the United States as the dominant culture of what, what happened to the grief? What happened to the grieving of these thousands and thousands of humans who have passed over the last few years from this, from this terrible disease? It's like we have, where's, where's the grief expressed? 

Lisa: Yeah. Well, I wonder how much will be delayed, but if we don't have communities to grieve and also communities where you can grieve, I lived in Africa for a bit and a friend died while I was there, and the community were writhing and yelling in a way that was so disconcerting to me. But I realized like they knew how to grieve in their bodies and in their song, you know, I think also our defensiveness about the grief of, and it's not, it's our culture, but it's, it's all countries that bought into enlightenment to recognize we're not enlightened because it was on the backs of people that we have caused harm, not us personally, but to really own this is not a defensive thing. It's a way of, it's a way of having our lives and our humanity because, and people will tell you, people who've been oppressed will tell you, you know, I don't want to just say differences white folks or, but you know, it comes down to we, we are harmed too by not experiencing our full humanity. There is so much grief.  

Shoshana: There's so much grief. And I think again, you touch on it in the book around racism, around ableism in particular and classism come through very strongly as three unmentionables really in the dominant culture and how can, how can, how can that, how can we heal without naming them and addressing them directly? But because of time, but we don't have very much time left and I, I don't, everything's connected, but everything is connected, but I wanted to just jump to one of your, another one of your, another one of these six traits, which was around ritual. And cause I'm wondering what the relationship might be between ritual, right? Ritual and grief, ritual and naming the losses, ritual and restitution, you know, and maybe making a whole, whether there was, whether there's a sense for you of what that might, how that can look from your, from the experiences that you've been gathering and the knowledge you've been gathering. 

Lisa: Well, ritual is we, we ritualize what matters most. So, if you want to see what matters to a community, look at the rituals. And I think sometimes I'm going to just say an aside, we, we like borrow these rituals or we go to these weekend retreats and do these rituals, but it kind of misses the point. And I don't mean to say that we shouldn't do rituals and weekend retreats, but rituals have meaning because they're practiced again and again within relationship with people. And so, I do think rituals of grieving are going to be crucial. And even like people who lost many people like me, who've walked away from communities of faith where there was this kind of belonging, but we, I needed to walk away the kind of ritual, that's a loss and we haven't necessarily replaced that. Right. And sometimes we want to borrow other, other cultures, rituals. I think sometimes it reflects a lack of faith in our own ability to create them by doing them with sincerity with people we care about and over and over again, somebody in the book just quickly said, again, I, there's never been a metaphor. I haven't botched, but kind of, you know, I'm not even going to say it, but it's kind of like the finger that points to the moon. And someone said, we become so obsessed with the finger that we've missed out on what it points to, you know. 

Shoshana: Thank you so much, Lisa for that. Yeah. I've, I've, I've read that and that really stood out for me. Absolutely. 

Lisa: Did I answer your question on the grief? 

Shoshana: I think what I'm hearing, what I'm sitting with as you're, as you're talking about that is the sense that we haven't gotten there yet. You know, that it's somehow we're still holding the space and that we're not there. The we, I don't even know who the we is, but somehow as a collect, this collective we, and it's not just this country, it feels like it's a global thing of not really, I don't know, we haven't somehow metabolized it. 

Lisa: But what we could do in a small gathering that we decide to call each other community, it's like, tell me what you've lost. Tell me what you've lost and just go around and maybe things will come up that you couldn't imagine. And it's not just the other side of grief is it opens up to the beauty that we missed the, even in these times that are so there's so much beauty. And so, when we touch grief, it opens us up to everything. You know, it's like someone else in the book said, if you, you know, to do anti-racism work, you have to have your heart broken. You have to be willing to have your heart broken, but that makes us tender. You know, it's not about. 

Shoshana:  It's coming up to time and I want to be sure that I have asked you what is the most meaningful question for you. So, I wanted to give you the chance to say, is there any question you would, you'd like me to ask you that I haven't yet asked? There's any one thing that you really want to be sure to share before we are done. 

Lisa: What I hope the book inspires people to do. Okay. 

Shoshana: Yes. What would you, what's your hope that this book inspires people to do? 

Lisa: My hope is that it inspires them to, to get inspiration from these, but not to have to model after that, to begin to have faith that, that even if they get together with three people and  start to cultivate, maybe even pick one quality, I'm going to work on this quality this year in the experience of caring for this group. There is no difference between that and a 500-member choir. No difference. It's part of the same river and it, and this is why we don't want to give energy to people who are trying to divide us. But if we keep our finger in the river, we're part of that energy and it is making a difference. It is making a difference right now. And then lift up your story and tell people about it.  

Shoshana: Thank you. Thanks so much. Wonderful to talk to you. 

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS Public Programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Izzy Angus, Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Patty Pforte, and Nikki Roda. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 
 
CIIS Public Programs commits to use our in-person and online platforms to uplift the stories and teachings of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; those in the LGBTQIA+ community; and all those whose lives emerge from the intersections of multiple identities.  

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