Dangerous Wisdom – Details, episodes & analysis

Is trauma real? In what sense? These questions don't in any way deny the real suffering of people diagnosed with trauma. Instead, they ask how we might take a broader and deeper look at trauma, in order to heal and transcend it. How can we do better in reducing the emergence of traumatizing experiences, and how can we do better in supporting ourselves and other in healing from these experiences, and opening up new possibilities for evolutionary learning?

In her book Spacious Minds, anthropologist and clinical psychologist Sara E. Lewis invites us to see that resilience is not a mere absence of suffering. Sara's research reveals how those who cope most gracefully may indeed experience deep pain and loss. Looking at the Tibetan diaspora, she challenges perspectives that liken resilience to the hardiness of physical materials, suggesting people should "bounce back" from adversity. More broadly, this ethnography calls into question the tendency to use trauma as an organizing principle for all studies of conflict where suffering is understood as an individual problem rooted in psychiatric illness.

Beyond simply articulating the ways that Tibetan categories of distress are different from biomedical ones, Spacious Minds shows how Tibetan Buddhism frames new possibilities for understanding resilience. Here, the social and religious landscape encourages those exposed to violence to see past events as impermanent and illusory, where debriefing, working-through, or processing past events only solidifies suffering and may even cause illness. Resilience in Dharamsala is understood as sems pa chen po, a vast and spacious mind that does not fixate on individual problems, but rather uses suffering as an opportunity to generate compassion for others in the endless cycle of samsara. A big mind view helps to see suffering in life as ordinary. And yet, an intriguing paradox occurs. As Lewis deftly demonstrates, Tibetans in exile have learned that human rights campaigns are predicated on the creation and circulation of the trauma narrative; in this way, Tibetan activists utilize foreign trauma discourse, not for psychological healing, but as a political device and act of agency.

Sara Lewis, PhD, LCSW is co-founder and Director of Training and Research at Naropa University's Center for Psychedelic Studies. Sara earned her PhD at Columbia University in medical anthropology and public health; her research sits at the intersection of religion, culture and healing with an emphasis on non-ordinary states. As a Fulbright scholar, she conducted long term ethnographic research in India, culminating in her book, Spacious Minds: Trauma and Resilience in Tibetan Buddhism, which investigates how Buddhist concepts of mind shape traumatic memory and pathways to resilience. As a contemplative psychotherapist, she specializes in intergenerational trauma and healing through Somatic Experiencing and psychedelic-assisted therapy.

The dominant cultural worldview is based upon extraction and exploitation practices that have brought us to the precipice of social, environmental, and climate collapse. Braiding poetic storytelling, climate justice and deep cultural analyses, and the collective knowledge of Earth-centered cultures, The Story is in Our Bones opens a portal to restoration and justice beyond the end of a world in crisis.

Author, activist, and changemaker Osprey Orielle Lake weaves together ecological, mythical, political, and cultural understandings and shares her experiences working with global leaders, systems-thinkers, climate justice activists, and Indigenous Peoples. She seeks to summon a new way of being and thinking in the Anthropocene, which includes transforming the interlocking crises of colonialism, racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and ecocide, to build thriving Earth communities for all.

Lake calls forth historical memory of who we are in the Earth's lineage to bring into being the world we keenly long for, at the delicate threshold of great peril or great promise.

For anyone grieving our collective loss and wanting to take action, The Story is in Our Bones is a vital guide to remaking our world. This hopeful, engaging, and creatively lyrical work reminds readers that another world is possible, and provides a desperately needed antidote to the pervasive despair of our time.

Osprey Orielle Lake is the founder and executive director of the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN). She works internationally with grassroots, BIPOC and Indigenous leaders, policymakers, and diverse coalitions to build climate justice, resilient communities, and a just transition. She sits on the executive committee for the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature and on the steering committee for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. Osprey’s writing about climate justice, relationships with nature, women in leadership, and other topics has been featured in The Guardian, Earth Island Journal, The Ecologist, Ms. Magazine and other publications. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area on Coast Miwok lands.

To learn more, go to:

https://ospreyoriellelake.earth

www.wecaninternational.org

Our best science and philosophy suggest very clearly that we don't know what thinking IS. If large ecologies are mind, what is thinking? If mountains think better than most human beings, how can we learn to think like a mountain?

One of Sophia's owls of wisdom made friends with a delightful and insightful human, the author and ecologist Carl Safina. If you enjoyed My Octopus Teacher, you will love hearing about Carl Safina's fabulous feathered friend, Alfie. Carl's book, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe, is a wonderful work of philosophy and ecology, and I think you'll enjoy this dialogue as much as I did. It was a great pleasure to speak with him.

Carl Safina’s lyrical non-fiction writing explores how humans are changing the living world, and what the changes mean for non-human beings and for us all. His work fuses scientific understanding, emotional connection, and a moral call to action. His writing has won a MacArthur “genius” prize; Pew, Guggenheim, and National Science Foundation Fellowships; book awards from Lannan, Orion, and the National Academies; and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. He grew up raising pigeons, training hawks and owls, and spending as many days and nights in the woods and on the water as he could. Safina is now the first Endowed Professor for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University and is founding president of the not-for-profit Safina Center. He hosted the PBS series Saving the Ocean, which can be viewed free at PBS.org. His writing appears in The New York Times, TIME, The Guardian, Audubon, Yale e360, and National Geographic, and on the Web at Huffington Post, CNN.com, Medium, and elsewhere. Safina is the author of ten books including the classic Song for the Blue Ocean, as well as New York Times Bestseller, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. His most recent books are, Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace, and Alfie & Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe. He lives on Long Island, New York, with his wife Patricia and their dogs and feathered friends.

Find out more at https://www.carlsafina.org/

For photos of Alfie:

https://www.instagram.com/meetalfietheowl/

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61551548969047

Dr. Tawni Tidwell is an exceptional—and exceptionally interesting—person. She is the first person from the dominant culture to go through the whole Tibetan medical curriculum and earn a Tibetan medical degree. She also has a Ph.D. in bio-cultural anthropology. And her impressive experience and insight go beyond even this already remarkable education. We discuss her education and some aspects of Tibetan medicine. This is one of my favorite dialogues with one of my most favorite guests, and I look forward to having Tawni-la back to inquire further into the nature of health, healing, and liberation.

What is it to think like a mountain? How is it that many of our decisions go wrong, sometimes producing negative side-effects?

You might remember hearing about a hole in the ozone layer that appeared last century. No one intended to create that hole. But we did it.

We didn’t intend to put mercury in our brains and lead in our bones. A recent study tested 62 samples of human placenta and found microplastics in every single one of them.

How do things go wrong on personal and planetary scales? And how can we do better?

Lars Chittka is the author of the book The Mind of a Bee and Professor of Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen Mary College of the University of London. He is also the founder of the Research Centre for Psychology at Queen Mary. He is known for his work on the evolution of sensory systems and cognition using insect-flower interactions as a model system. Chittka has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of animal cognition and its impact on evolutionary fitness studying bumblebees and honeybees.

I often say that human beings have lost the sense of the mindedness all around us—that we exist fully embedded in mind. In this episode we cultivate an appreciation of the remarkable mind of a bee.

The Mind of Nature and the Nature of Mind

Part 2 in an Introduction to Ecological Thinking—A Wisdom-Based Approach

What is the nature of mind? What is the mind of Nature? We inquire into some radical and revolutionary aspects of mind and ecological thinking.

What is ecological thinking? Why does it matter? A contemplation for everyone—a series of contemplations for everyone. It’s an incredibly important series, because the idea of ecological thinking as we will approach it relates to the basic question of why we have so many problems in our world, and how we can resolve them, and it relates to the nature of mind and the mind of Nature, and how we realize our highest potentials. In other words, it’s about what we are.

The biggest bite of knowledge fruit humanity has taken in the past millennium or two has to do with complex systems—the very stuff of life. Neil Theise has written an excellent, accessible introduction to complex systems, and we discuss the basic elements.

Neil Theise is a professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Through his scientific research, he has been a pioneer of adult stem cell plasticity and the anatomy of the human interstitium. Dr. Theise’s studies in complexity theory have led to interdisciplinary collaborations in fields such as integrative medicine, consciousness studies, and science-religion dialogue. He is a senior student of Zen Buddhism at the Village Zendo in NYC. His most recent book is, Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being.