The Good Energy Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Today is a full moon and also the third year anniversary of my father’s death. It feels apt and honouring to share this conversation with you today.

Like my father, David is a big hearted Pākehā man who believes in breaking through social barriers and is courageous in pursuing his vision.

David’s background is in youth work. He started his career working for the Methodist Church as their National Youth Director. He spent many years working in Central Government where he led the National Youth Development Strategy Aotearoa under Helen Clark’s Labour government. He then ran his own consultancy before starting his current role at Wesley Community Action.

In the last few years his attention has turned from trying to shift the whole system to creating small islands of change - warm spaces where communities feel safe enough to come together and address the issues that affect them most, such as meth addiction, poverty and food security. He understands that people are the experts of their own lives and have the resources to create change if given the chance.

The stories that David tells of his work with the Mongrel Mob and local communities around the Wellington region are delightful and inspiring. Like my Dad, David looks for the good in people and doesn’t see social boundaries as barriers. Unlike my Dad, David has embarked on a personal journey to uncover and heal the trauma he’s inherited through his own family history.

What strikes me about this conversation is the way David connects the personal and political. He makes the point that Pākehā culture has been founded on a suppression of trauma - a denial which has fuelled colonisation. He dignifies healing as important work and points to how Pākehā need to acknowledge and address our own trauma, to show up as equal treaty partners.

We talk about how many of our Pākehā ancestors came to Aotearoa to escape trouble in the British Isles.

“If you were doing well in those societies, you didn't really wanna hop on a boat and travel to the other side of the world,” he says. “It was people who were trying to flee something; desperate for a new chance and a new break.”

And yet the science of trauma is teaching us that traumatic experiences that go unaddressed and unspoken, live on in our bodies and are passed down from generation to generation. While we deny our own trauma, it shapes the way we see each other and make decisions. David talks about how this suppressed trauma is baked into our political system; it’s in the language of our political processes and policies.

 ”The biggest barrier to change,” he says, “is the people who've got power and money thinking they don't need to change. And the problems that group over there.”

David shares stories of heart-breaking betrayal, suicide and war from his own family history. He reflects on his childhood in the archetypal middle class suburb of Tawa and the culture he grew up with which encouraged academic success and conformity while suppressing anything unpleasant. He was born in 1962, not long after two world wars, a pandemic and a great depression.

“Come the 1960s,” David says, “there was this desire to just progress, get ahead and dream, so all of that trouble and trauma was just pushed down. We developed ways to protect ourselves from feeling that. That became our culture.”

It feels comforting to reflect on my Dad’s life and our family history in the light of this conversation. My Dad was a deeply sensitive man who never learnt to acknowledge or express his feelings of grief. His mother was an alcoholic and his father suffered from depression. As the oldest, Dad grew up doing his best to hold his family together. Though he was an incredibly cheerful man, he suffered from manic episodes and late in life was diagnosed with manic depression. I can’t help but see these episodes as eruptions of suppressed grief. It comforts me to see a pathway to healing these old wounds by tending to myself and my relationships now.

Over the last few years as I’ve been learning about our environmental crises and the economic causes, I’ve found it easy to lose hope. The problems are so massive and large-scale. But I find something incredibly hopeful in David’s work and perspective. It reveals that we are all part of this system we live in and that while we separate ourselves and deny our trauma we remain stuck. But there is much hope in coming together and allowing space to heal and grow.

Links

Wesley Community Action: https://www.wesleyca.org.nz/

Just Change: https://www.wesleyca.org.nz/just-change

Te Hiko: https://www.tehiko.org.nz/

I’ve been exploring the economic forces that shape our world for a few years now and the more I learn, the clearer it becomes that underneath the many layers of economic and environmental crises is a kind of crisis of spirituality and of how we conceive of ourselves as human.

I feel deeply honoured and excited to share this conversation with Pip Ranby, who is, among many other things, one of my favourite people in the world.

Pip is both a spiritual teacher and a friend. I first came across her as my partner Rachel’s teacher in creative arts therapy. I got to know her when we asked her to be our marriage celebrant. She was an incredible comfort and guide as we navigated the difficult territory of working out what marriage meant to us as a queer couple and organising our love festival, which was amazing but stressful. Since then I’ve been seeing her regularly for what we call “spiritual accompaniment” sessions. She helps me make sense of life when I lose my way and has been an enormous support through the grief of losing my Dad and accompanying my Mum through her journey with dementia. I’ve attended many of Pip’s workshops, retreats and gatherings, and find them an enormous source of nourishment and peace in my life.

I first had the idea to invite Pip for this conversation in 2023 at a workshop she facilitated on trauma and spirituality, which I attended straight after the annual conference of Wellbeing Economy Alliance Aotearoa. I was struck by how the wisdom and presence Pip was sharing spoke to the heart of the economic problems we’d been circling at the conference.

I was struck by the way Pip dignified the struggle of trying to live within our economic system. She spoke about “industrial scale forces” that we experience intimately through our bodies. These forces are delivered through pervasive messaging which reduces women’s physicality to appearance, justifies sexual violence and silences voices of emotion and spirit.

In this conversation Pip tells her personal story of trauma, loss and healing with incredible vividness and generosity. She shares her experiences of disordered eating, sexual violence and being helped out of the CTV building when it collapsed in the Christchurch earthquake. She speaks to the way these experiences of wounding and trauma opened her to the healing power of spirit and greater perception. Her story tenderly points to a pathway of healing that I believe lies at the heart of our economic regeneration. It reveals a more noble and generous idea of what it could mean to be human and the possibility of rebuilding practices, culture and economies from this more generous interconnected point of view.

I hope you enjoy it.

Links

To find out more about Pip’s offerings visit her website: https://www.philipparanby.co.nz/

She also mentioned the following people who have been inspirations and guides:

* Cynthia Bourgeault: https://www.cynthiabourgeault.org/

* Gabrielle Roth’s 5Rhythms dance: https://www.5rhythms.com/gabrielle-roths-5rhythms/

Music

The music I’ve used in the interview is a glimpse of a song written by my wife Rachel (with a little contribution from me) and performed by the two of us. We haven’t shared the verses here, just the chorus. It’s called “Rising and Falling”. It feels special to share it in the context of this conversation with someone we both love and admire.

Earlier this year I took part in an eight week online course called Gathering at the Gate, created and facilitated by my friend Elli Yates along with her three friends and co-conspirators - Wren (or Tamsin) Blundell, Erin Thomas and Dani Pickering. The aim of the course is to offer a kind and encouraging space for Pākehā or white assimilated folk to come together and explore the difficult questions around our legacy of colonisation and how we show up as responsible treaty partners without being paralysed by shame?

Doing Gathering at the Gate has been a foundational part of my exploration of home and belonging. Through the course we were encouraged to delve into our own family histories and discover the stories of our settler ancestors who first arrived in Aotearoa - Where did they come from? Why did they come? Where did they settle? How did they establish themselves here? We learnt about the racist policies, laws and wars through which settlers were given land and Māori were displaced and disempowered. We were challenged to identify the ways in which we have benefited personally from those historical injustices through inheriting wealth and property and taking the opportunities we’ve had due to being white.

For me, Te Tiriti o Waitangi is a generous invitation to make this land my home. But acknowledging the stories of how I came to be here uncovers a deep well of difficult feelings - shame, anger, sadness and confusion.

Elli, Wren and the other facilitators held a gentle space for us to feel these feelings and make sense of them together.

In this interview I talk to Elli and Wren about how their personal journeys have led them into this work. We explore the massive issue of shame - how it can paralyse us, but how it can also wake us up and help us move into a more compassionate and responsive state. We talk about the richness of relationships and the sense of belonging that can be found amidst the compost of past hurts.

Show notes

If you’d like to find out more about Gathering at the Gate or sign up to one of their courses just go to

https://www.gathering-at-the-gate.org/

A big thanks to Elli, Wren, Dani and Erin for their brave work in this space.

The quote Wren refers to in the interview about shame being the thin lid on top of a well of grief comes from Maegan Chandler, one of the co-creators of “Re-calling our Ancestors” - another Turtle-Island based online program akin to White Awake and Gathering at the Gate.

The other quote Wren refers to is from an amazing documentary about reckoning with slave-holding ancestry called "Traces of the Trade" directed by Katrina Browne. Here it is in full:

“In the Dagara Tribe of West Africa it is believed that the dead do not pass over into peace until the living have cried all the tears that these ancestors did not cry in their lifetimes - for that which they suffered and for the suffering they caused others. May we, the living, find tears that will bring peace to both us and the ancestors.”

Malidoma Patrice Somé

The song I played half way through the show was recorded around the campfire at the Music Nature and Storytelling camp Wren attended in Northern New Wales (Hawk's Nest) with master tracker Jon Young. The singer was Junae Rodgers and the song came to her during her sit spot practice that morning.

The song we played at the end of the show is another song from the same camp. It came to teenager Reminy Holmes during her sit spot practice.

Charlotte Shade is a friend of mine and I’ve watched with interest and admiration as her group of housemate/friends have bought a house, had babies and brought them up together in a loving non-nuclear family group.

In this conversation Charlotte and I explore where the idea of buying a house with friends came from, how her group made it happen and what they’ve learnt in the process. Being a lawyer, Charlotte has a unique perspective and set of skills. She created this legal agreement, which enables the group to navigate potentially difficult situations like someone wanting to leave. They have made this agreement open-source so that other groups can use or modify as needed.

I was particularly struck by one thing that Charlotte said:

“I’ve realised that you can just do things differently if you want. You just have to do it. It's not necessarily going to be plain sailing, but when is life ever plain sailing? It's hard. There's going to be difficult things. So why not do something different?”

It struck me that these different pathways are open to us if we have the curiosity to look for them and the patience and confidence to navigate the challenges. It was clear from talking to Charlotte that the gains of energy, time and connection far outweigh the challenges of owning a house with friends. She call her and her partner “time millionaires” and she feels profoundly grateful for her situation.

If you’d like to learn more about the benefits and challenges of co-buying and how to go about it, Charlotte’s house-mate Rupert has written some excellent articles:

This article describes the process they went through to find their house.

This article provides details on the legal and financial side of the process.

This article describes the process of coming up with shared values.

And this article is about having a baby while buying and co-owning a house.

This week the tables have turned. Hannah gets to fulfil her dream of being a podcast host and I have a go at answering difficult questions about my childhood, the economics of my life, why I’ve chosen to focus on home and kāinga, what I hope to achieve in this project and why I feel like a piglet suckling an enormous industrial mother pig.

It was a treat to explore the ideas and epiphanies this project is bringing me. I feel shocked that it has taken me 41 years to begin to understand the ways our economic system controls our lives. Despite my deep desire to connect with community and the whenua, I find myself relying on big corporations for my day-to-day sustenance - supermarkets, banks, oil companies etc. Ironically it feels simpler and less risky to keep suckling at these impersonal industrial entities than it does to do business with friends and family. It seems to me that we’ve lost a fundamental ability to work together and to sustain ourselves from the earth. That feels scary! But I do have hope that by understanding more and connecting more we can start to detach ourselves from the teats of the industrial mother pig and reshape the way energy and resources flow.

I’m very excited to share this conversation with 19 year old activist and student, Anika Green. She grew up in an inner city Christian community called Stillwaters in Te Whanganui a Tara which aims to provide a space of belonging, transformation and faith for anyone who needs it. In her childhood home she was surrounded by all kinds of people who loved and cared for her, including homeless people, gang members, sex workers and refugees. She never learnt to view these people through a lens of difference. By hearing their stories and sharing in their grief and joys she learnt about issues of poverty, discrimination and injustice in a very personal and immediate way. By the age of four she was already a passionate advocate for social justice and her commitment has only grown since then.

I used to visit the Stillwaters community when I was at university for the dinners and services they hosted every Friday and Sunday evening. I remember feeling like I’d come across a warm cave in a bleak landscape when I stepped inside. I was moved by the warmth and generosity with which everyone came together to eat, sing, laugh and chat. The experience cut through a sense of isolation in my life. It was refreshing and nourishing to get out of my bubble.

In this conversation with Anika we explore the economics of her childhood home - how they afforded to feed so many people every week, where the energy and resources came from and how they balanced the needs of their family with those of the community. She told me about the home she’s creating for herself with other young students and her vision for how homes with open doors could provide the belonging and dignity people need to thrive.

I was particularly struck by one thing Anika said:

“When you know you’re loved and belong, it’s easy to be selfless.”

To me, this statement speaks to the heart of economic system change. The Good Energy Project has taught me that alternative economic systems which honour the planet and people are possible - but they require a profound shift in the way we relate to each other. As Bryan Ines pointed out in our conversation last year, we need to re-learn how to work together.

Talking with Anika, I had the sense that she lives in a wider field to other people. She has a huge capacity for service and connection because she receives so much from the people around her. She lacks the barriers, fears and indoctrinated ideas that cause other people to shut down.

This conversation spurred some deep reflections of my own sense of belonging and my capacity to open my door and welcome people in. This has been both inspiring and confronting. I don’t think I could live in a home with an open door as Anika does at this stage. I don’t feel I have the capacity, the skills to establish healthy boundaries or a deep enough sense of belonging to draw on. But I feel deeply inspired by the openness and generosity Anika shows and I want to engage in the slow work of opening up and connecting across difference.

It strikes me that unless we find pathways to belonging and ways to heal our own sense of displacement and shame, we won’t have the capacity to show up for each other or the planet.

After interviewing lots of inspiring and knowledgeable experts it was so lovely to sit down with someone I know really well and embark on a journey together. Hannah is such a great storyteller. I was captivated right from the start by her descriptions of her childhood, her uncompromising teenage passion for animals and the environment and the way she veered off her scrupulously developed life-plan (to become a vet like her Dad) into the chaos, beauty and terror of the world.

This is a beautiful story of the way life reveals pathways and hope where we least expect them.

One of the reasons I wanted to interview Hannah now is that her story aligns with a new focus for my project.

(By the way I have some very exciting news - I’ve been funded to continue the Good Energy Project for another year until October 2024!! I feel like I’ve spent my first year just getting my head around the topics of economics and climate change. In the next year I’m really excited to start to explore how I might be able to contribute.)

One of the focuses for the funding being renewed is speaking to more young people - because our ultimate aim is to support young people who will inherit all these challenges. Hannah is quite young - 27. She wants to be part of a more caring and connected economy and world. But it’s really hard when you’re at the beginning of your career, everything is expensive and none of the obvious ways of making money align with your values.

Another focus for my next year is to experiment with creative ways of working with the ideas and needs I’m discovering - I’ve spent my career devising creative interventions to help bring the humanity back to intellectual topics like science and engineering - things like magnificent science variety shows and storytelling events. I also find myself surrounded by creative people - my wife is an arts therapist, my brother and his partner are puppeteers and writers. I find myself drawn to creative people and I’m convinced that whatever the solutions are to these huge problems I’ve been exploring, they will need creativity to succeed. Hannah is one of my thinking partners for imagining what this could look like.

Another thing I think we’ll need, to bring to life the ideas and possibilities I’ve been talking to people about, is some kind of spiritual or cosmological revolution - something that supports us to change ourselves and our fundamental way of seeing the world. I’m not sure I like the word “spirituality” but it expresses something under the surface that effects everything. Lots of my interviewees have eluded to similar things. Hannah has a nice way of describing this.

So Hannah seemed the right person to help introduce some of these new themes and explorations. She’s also just fun to listen to!

I’m really pleased to be able to share this conversation with Max Rashbrooke - journalist, author, academic and expert on economic inequality and democratic renewal. I’ve seen Max around for years in Wellington. I’m pretty sure I remember him at parties a decade ago having rigorous political conversations. I’ve been stoked over the past year to get to know him and bit more.

I loved this conversation! We went right back to Max’s childhood in Eastbourne and learned about his teenage love of sci fi, his core belief that another world is possible and the values of generosity and reciprocity which he holds dear. We explored the connections between poverty and climate change and Max’s vision for the future.

I was struck by the resonances with my last conversation with Hemi Hireme (& Part 2) - the idea that forty years of market economy has stifled our imagination for what’s possible and eroded our faith that government initiatives can make a real difference in people’s lives. As a result many of us feel overwhelmed and fear that nothing works.

Max talks about the importance of being able to connect with people across society and have real conversations about the things that effect us. He says we need real examples of how alternative approaches actually work - not just visions and values. And that these real-life stories are out there - we need to start sharing them more.

“Now is the time for new ideas and frameworks to bubble up,” he says. “Are we building a nurturing society? And what would it take to make New Zealand genuinely the best place to bring up a child?”

I love these questions. It was a hopeful conversation and a remedy for the overwhelm and hopelessness I frequently feel.

This show is the second part of a two-hour conversation I had with Hemi over Zoom. It felt so rich I wanted to share it all with you instead of doing a separate interview.

If you missed the first half, you can find it here: Decolonising our imaginations - Part 1

I also recommend reading this article which Hemi recently wrote for the Spin-off: “The Sunday Essay: Two waka, three iwi, three hapū”. It tells a beautifully poetic story of his background and work.

Hemi is on a mission to re-establish the Māori philosophy of Ranginui (Sky father) and Papatūānuku (Earth mother) as a foundation for our society. He has spent the past twenty years researching the history of capitilism and colonisation while immersing himself in his own Māori cosmology, which views the earth as a living entity. Hemi has a vision of re-establishing marae as the political, economic and social centres of our communities and seeding a culture that celebrates difference while finding belonging and connection in the land.

Hemi talks about how our modern world is dominated by a European philosophy which separates us from the natural world and from each other. He believes that we need a spiritual and cultural renaissance to shake off old ideas that have colonised our minds and build the unity and strength we’ll need to survive climate change. He suggests that the Māori philosophy of Rangi and Papa offers a remedy to help bring our country together with hope, pride and diversity.

I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

This show is going to be a bit different. Instead of interviewing Hemi I decided to share the conversation we had over Zoom when we first met. It felt so rich I wanted to share it all with you. It was also quite long (2 hours) so I’ve broken it up into two parts. I’ll post the second half in a couple of weeks.

I met Hemi through Marceline and Tur at the Quatro Trust. As well as supporting The Good Energy Project, Quatro are supporting Hemi to create a book and an online course. Max Harris, who I interviewed a month ago, also recommended I speak to Hemi and admires his work.

Hemi is on a mission to re-establish the Māori philosophy of Ranginui (Sky father) and Papatūānuku (Earth mother) as a foundation for our society. He has researched deep into the history of capitilism and colonisation and pulls stories and ideas from across the centuries and around the world. He’s also deeply steeped in his own Māori cosmology and is passionate about sharing the richness of this, especially with other Māori who have lost contact with their own tradition. Hemi has a vision of re-establishing marae as the political, economic and social centres of our communities and seeding a culture that celebrates difference while finding belonging and connection in the land.

Hemi got in touch with Marceline after reading Tur’s guest blog post and hearing my interview with him. He wanted to express his excitement and support for Tur’s idea that Aotearoa could take a lead in reducing energy-use and waste through nurturing the pride and diversity of our communities.

Along with his email, Hemi attached an article which he recently wrote for the Spinoff called “The Sunday Essay: Two waka, three iwi, three hapū”.

It was reading this article that first drew me to Hemi. I was intrigued by the story he tells of his childhood, moving between worlds that had been touched to a different extent by colonisation. There was Waiotapu, the small forestry village near Rotorua where he lived, Whakatane, where he spent holidays with his cousins and a place called Pāraeroa in Te Urewera (or “up the river” as he called it). This was the spiritual home of Ngai Tūhoe, his mother’s whanau and the place that spoke most deeply to his soul. A place where he says: “Capitalism and the notion of private property had not arrived”.

In Pāraeroa, Hemi describes, “there seemed to be no barrier between adults and children, horses and dogs, whānau and whenua… Everyone and everything came together as one world. Our world. In this world, the connections to the land did all the speaking.”

I was so taken by Hemi’s description of Pāraeroa and the way it seems to have called to him as a beacon throughout his life as he’s come to terms with our history and the effects of colonisation.

Hemi talks about how our modern world is dominated by a European philosophy which separates us from the natural world and from each other. He suggests that the Māori philosophy of Ranginui and Papatuānuku offers a remedy to the crises we face and a spiritual foundation to bring our country together with hope, pride and diversity.

I was moved by how generous and inclusive Hemi was and inspired by his ideas.

I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.