Bridging Contemplation and Action with Jonathan F. P. Rose

0:00So there's one thing, and I think in Western Buddhism we do a lot of this, which is to quiet your mind and kind of expand your sense to the world. But what we have not done as much as say and also receive that the world is sensing you, that is a reciprocal, multi-way relationship in your part of a larger consciousness. It's not just about your consciousness perceiving everything it's all about, the other consciousness perceiving you and your all in this relationship. That's a mind-shifting perspective that I have found really deeply connects people to place. Hello I'm James Shaheen and this is Life as It Is. I'm here with my co-host Sharon Salzburg and you just heard Jonathan Rose. Jonathan is an urban planner and philanthropist whose work focuses on creating more environmentally, socially and economically resilient cities.

1:02In 2003 he and his wife Diana co-founded the Garrison Institute. A retreat center in the Hudson Valley dedicated to the intersection of contemplation and engaged action. In our conversation with Jonathan we talk about how he first came to Buddhism, what led him to found the Garrison Institute and how the Garrison Institute focuses on building resilience both for individuals and for the planet as a whole. So here's our conversation with Jonathan Rose. Okay, so I'm here with Jonathan Rose and my co-host Sharon Salzburg, I'd Jonathan high-sharing it's great to be with you both. James and Sharon great to be with you. Hi. So Jonathan we're here today to talk about your work at the Garrison Institute and how Buddhist principles inform your work. But first I'd like to ask you a bit about your own background. So to start how did you first come to Buddhism? So when I was 15 I had a spiritual experience.

2:06It's just a you know a moment in nature in which I felt the connection to all of life. And I went to a high school teacher who I knew was kind of a mystic to ask him to explain this to me and because I just didn't understand it. And he said, oh you experienced Buddhist satari. And I said, oh what what is that? And he said read this book and he gave me the seven pillars of Zen which I completely did not understand at all. I knew that he was right and I knew that somewhere along the way I was going to become a Buddhist. So then I began to look at all kinds of different spiritual traditions and in my freshman sophomore year of college, some were probably sophomore junior. I felt like I was being disloyal to Judaism which I grew up with and I came across this

3:07guy Rabbi's Amid Shector. And I thought, okay I should really study what Jewish mysticism and Jewish meditation could be. Okay, so the way I came across Salman was I had visited the Lama Foundation where Ram Das had been working on, I remember that B here now first came out as a box. A box that I've never this before. Yeah, yeah. So I got a box set and so like it and I signed up for something they had called the Lord's Bountiful Delivery Service where you literally paid like a dollar or two a year and the Lama Foundation would just send you stuff every once in a while when they had something to send you. And I got this little thing in the mail is kind of almost like a memographed pamphlet from Salman Shactor called the first step and it was a Jewish guide to meditation. I thought this guy is really interesting and I feel like if I'm checking out all Hindu isbent Buddhism and sofism and all these other conditions I should check out Judaism. A year later I happened to be in Berkeley and Salman was holding high holiday services

4:12there so I connected, I attended them, they were mind blowing, I connected with Salman. And through him I felt like I really needed deeper understand that Jewish path which I did for some time. And one day he called me and then my wife Deanna we were then married. He actually married us and he said I'm doing a retreat in his call the rabbi the monk of the guy in between and you should come. He always knew I was interested in Buddhism. He was the rabbi the monk who wasn't really a monk but was a Buddhist teacher was Gaelic Rinpoche who became our Deanna's a mind main spiritual teacher and the guy in between was Alan Ginsburg and it was a retreated a place called Alathaim which was a Jewish retreated setter anyway. And so was meeting Gaelic Rinpoche through Salman that really then began our deep Buddhist study. So you ended up I think with Gaelic Rinpoche is that right?

5:12Yes. Yeah. So by the way alone the way I was also my main career is in building very green affordable housing and I knowing that I wanted to explore Buddhism and also applied Buddhism I had met Bernie Glassman who at that time had founded the Grayson Foundation and I became the chairman of his board. And so I was also involved in a context and so just about the same time I was meeting Gaelic Rinpoche I was also getting deeper and deeper involved with the Grayson Foundation the Grayson Bakery and trying to think about how do you apply Buddhist principles to low income community economic development. So you just talked about building low cost housing you've held a lot of different roles and you've worked in different fields and in 2003 you and your wife Deanna co-founded the Garrison Institute a retreat center in the Hudson Valley. So what led you to found Garrison and what was your vision for the institution?

6:16So Deanna at the time had then become the executive director of Jewelheart which was Gaelic Rinpoche's organization. So we started studying with him seriously in the early 90s and his organization kept growing from a little place in Ann Arbor Michigan to a bigger place to a bigger place and he wanted a retreat center and through my work the Garrison Institute came up and we thought that that could be a great retreat center for a Jewelheart for his organization. He came at any look that although we had an active Sangha then Jewelheart Sangha in New York but he's really was Michigan based. I do want to make a long story short there were also complexities that came up in the trying to buy the Garrison Institute. We bought it in conjunction with the open spaces to which is buying to preserve land because this is a key part that connected the Garrison train station with the Appalachian Trail. In any way you were all this political opposition stuff that happened and so Gaelic Rinpoche went to his holiness, the Dalai Lama who went to his Oracle who said here's the sequence

7:23of events. This is not going to be the retreat center for Jewelheart. Jewelheart is going to get a retreat center in Michigan and then all the tomals are going to settle down and you're going to get the Garrison Institute but the world has enough Buddhist retreat centers. His mission should be to connect the contemplative wisdom of all traditions with civil society and the environment so connecting inner and outer and that mission which then Deanna's our founding executive director working with Sharon one of our founding board members worked on was so although retreat center is one of the key things that we do and we host amazing retreats. We really developed a much more expansive sense of what is an institute in terms of incubating ideas, growing fields, finding trends all related to taking inner wisdom and connecting the outer action. So what the work that the Garrison Institute does in the world in some ways is much bigger

8:28than the work that takes place on site or their partners. Right. You know, you talk about the inner and the outer and something I often hear at Garrison is focusing on the intersection of contemplation and engaged actions. So can you talk a bit about how you aim to bring these two together at Garrison? Well we always have it. I'm going to turn to Sharon because Sharon created along with my wife Deanna Wood of the first signature program is the content of the base resilience program. So Sharon why don't you describe that? Sure. Well this is really, this really was born in Deanna's great heart and vision. You know, she came to me, said I'd like to do a program for people who care for people. People in a way who are on the front lines of suffering trying to make a difference. And it was my first direct exposure to that you could say that population.

9:32And I've done programs before. Certainly many programs just open to anybody who would come. And I never know who was in the room. And there was a certain number of people, of course, who are a certain number of people who inevitably were in that kind of role. But this was clearly people who, I mean the whole idea of Icaria's trauma or the toll taken on people who really cared a lot. And yet we're often burning out and having a real bleakness arrive in their efforts. It was just beginning, I think, as a field of study. And so the program began with working with frontline domestic violence shelter workers. It was people who worked in the front lines. And it wasn't long before they were showing enough changes that the directors and supervisors of shelters came to us and said, well, can we have a program too? So we had a parallel program for them.

10:33And I just learned a huge amount from these people and mostly women who were doing that kind of work. And was able to really celebrate as the Garrison Institute, for example, took that program to internationally, humanitarian aid workers and people in all walks of life. And what I've discovered actually is my sense of who is a caregiver has changed a lot, you know, because people would call and say, when went beyond just domestic violence shelter workers, you know, can I come? Do I qualify? I take care of my partner or my parent or I'm a manager. I take care of my staff or I have a particular relationship to suffering. You know, I have empathy. I care. I'm trying to make a difference. This is really hard on me. You know, and so it really expanded so usually in my mind and began to include activists and

11:37all kinds of people. So I think it was for me, it was a tremendous program and still is and really taught me so much. And I think it has had and will continue to have a great effect. So the program also set a model for us, which is that all the Garrison Institute's work has a foot in contemplation, which is key to Contemplar-based resilience. Has a foot in science that we're using neuroscience, social science, behavioral economics. We're trying to really ground it in science. And part of it is because as you know, our field can also get new AG. So we think that there's a rigor that comes with science. This is important. And then always a foot in application in the real problems. So Sharon and Deanna started with the Boston Trauma Center, which was working with domestic violence shelter. They really workshopped this in the specific application of domestic violence and then it grew to humanitarian aid organizations.

12:38And this program has been carried out in Africa and in Jordan for people coming out of the Syrian refugee crisis, etc. Jonathan, you anticipated my question to Sharon. So I just like to follow up with one thing, Sharon, how has your understanding of resilience changed if it has at all? I mean, you talked about a broadening out to include a larger number of professions and people whom you consider caregivers or activists who burn out. How is your view of resilience changed? I think it's expanded and deepened in many ways. I mean, the kind of older understanding I had of resilience, of course, was bouncing back. So it was about restoration. It was coming back to to some status quo state. It wasn't about moving on or furthering and understanding or having this strength and ability to make change, for example.

13:40It was more about some inner composure in my mind in being with things as they weren't as certainly as I met the people and saw what happened as they not only employed a number of contemplative tools, but they formed a different kind of community. And they were really helping one another in a different way. It really surprised me, for example, at first with the domestic violence shelter workers who never really talked to one another about their experience. They certainly didn't take the experience home. They felt not just for reasons of confidentiality, but they would say, you know, my family, they can't bear these stories, that they couldn't deal with what I hear. And yet they weren't even talking to one another in a deeper way. And they began to. And it was both the inner tools of contemplation and

14:41the experience of the community that had them and me to find resilience as moving forward. And being able to undertake some effort toward changing the institution, changing the work environment, changing situations from that kind of pillar of collective action and also the kind of composure and centeredness that they were developing. You know, you've been doing this for a few decades. You and Diana founded this program quite some time ago. And I wonder how it's been for you because resilience and helping people develop resilience is one thing, but what about your own resilience? I mean, it really, it really seems pretty amazing to be dealing with people who've experienced such trauma. You've dealt with people who have been whose children have been the victims of mass shootings. You've you've dealt with nurses during the pandemic. And all of this came out of the scarism program.

15:46And I think of it so institutionally and yet there are people involved like you. How did you hold up and who you turned to? Oh, my friends. It's true. I think one of the great lessons I took from that program and there were many, you know, but we would always start the program with having people. You could do this as a kind of journaling exercise or or just a reflection and we would have them write down saying one column, what do you do to get a break to get some perspective to be able to breathe again? What do you do? And people would write down all kinds of things like I listen to music or some people had a very strong faith tradition that they turned to or they go out in nature or some people would write down, you know, in a fit of frankness. I drink a lot.

16:47And then in the next column we'd say, look at what you just wrote down and write down how you feel about it. And people would either say, you know, I need to do it more like I'd add in nature or if it was drink a lot they say, whoa, you know, maybe that was something I need new skills, you know, to deal with the stress or whatever. But I took that exercise, which I learned at the Gareth's an institute to a program I was doing for military caregivers for chaplains and medics and so on. So somebody had written down in that first column, I go out into nature and I kayak and it gives me such an incredible feeling, you know, and it's so relieving of all the stress. And then in the next column, this is actually a true story. In the next column he wrote down, I hadn't done it in about seven years. So I took from that, you know, that not only of course meditation practice, which is

17:48the pillar of my resilience, but the things that I maybe used to do and get too busy or too tired and remind myself, you know, don't just abandon that. You really need a kind of holistic approach to the things you know will support you. You know, Jonathan, I want to get back to something you said, you start working get new age, but Gareth's in his last place, I associate with new age things. It seems very practical to me and very hands on, but it does have a spiritual basis. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about Gareth's theory of practice and change. Hmm. So one of the things we really focus on is what we call field development. So we sense that something is emerging. I'll give you an old example and a new example, but we sense that so for example, when we started again, Deanna sensed that there was a field of contemplation and education that there were teachers all over the American, all over the world and ranging from preschool teachers

18:53to college professors who were using contemplation as part of their educational process. It could be for executive function in classrooms. It could be for a variety of things to have people think more systemically to open their minds. And so number one is we develop a high-pocket week since an emerging field, you know, what Peter Sangay calls an emerging social field. And then if we think there's something there, number two, we would map it and we still do this and we use Greg's through interns and other people and we go around and we try and figure out who are all the leaders and the practitioners in this field. And if we can find enough people, then we form a steering committee with some thought leaders because this is really, it needs collective leadership. And we use the steering committee to kind of find the essential themes and we hold a convening. We publish the map so we tell everybody, hey, look, here's the others who are doing what you're doing. And typically when you publish the map, people are amazed because they feel like they're alone or they're working alone or they don't know that many people. And all of a sudden they find

19:54that there could be hundreds of people who are doing the work that they're doing. And then we hold this convening. And when they all show up at the institute, you have 100 or 150 people all working in contemplation and education or spiritual audience, social justice or whatever we're convening on. You get this incredible energy. And that kind of confirms that we're ready to launch a field. Now we need to find funders to help support this and write about leadership steering committee continues. We need to find program leadership. But in many, there been many cases now where we have helped launch a field. Now when Sharon was talking about template of base resilience training, our goal was not just to do the training, but when Sharon and Diana started, the view was that the human frontline workers were almost expendable. They burnt out. They weren't tough enough to do the job. And this idea of caring for the caregivers as a so they create a lot of advocacy for this

20:54idea. No, you have a duty of care and moral responsibility to your workers to actually care for their well-being and mental health. And now that's well, when we started that was considered a not a mainstream thought. And now the idea of caring for your care, caregivers is much more of a mainstream thought and it anyway. Field development is the, I'd say the key methodology for our change work. We both recently did a mapping of spirit organizations, frontline social justice organizations of all kinds working in the prison system, working in education, working poverty in low-income communities that are spiritually grounded and contemplatively grounded in their social justice work. We mapped about 300 of them. We found not only, and the mapping, now the social network tools we use something called Kumu was getting much more sophisticated. You can see interdependencies and relationships and where there are gaps in the system. Again, we did a mapping. We did found a steering committee. We created a convening. It was amazing.

21:59We got a grant. We have some, we're now really working on growing that field. That's great. So in addition to personal resilience, garrison focuses on the well-being of the planet as a whole, particularly through pathways to planetary health program, the pathways to planetary health program. So tell us about this initiative. So when we started our first environmental program was actually focused on the Hudson River Valley, where the garrison student is founded. We did some wonderful work of growing, connecting religious organizations and spirituality and the us valley. Then we did a program called Climate Mind and Behavior to look at the neuroscience and social science and behavioral economics of how people behave and to see how we could shift those behaviors towards more environmental behavior. The pathways to planetary health program got started by doing a mapping

23:01of all the different environmental strategies. If you lay them out, you know, there was technology like solar and there was investment and there were a wide range of things. We had like a list of 20 something. We said, well, that's two. Anyway, the bottom is we kept consolidating, saying what fits with what, what fits with what. And we said that they, all environmental strategies come down to the following four. So the first one is that we need to create what is called an ecological civilization. All the things about creating green buildings and having, you know, carbon credits. Anyway, then look at that in a minute. But all the elements of like, what do we do in the world? We need to create a more ecological civilization. Second thing is that our civilization is run by an economic system. So we need regenerative economics. But what it became clear to us was that all these strategies, the other one was that we really need to protect the earth.

24:04E.O. Wilson had done this study called half earth and that nature was being assaulted and there was something that formed that has become very successful called the planetary health lines that the health of humans and the health of nature is so intertwined. So how do we really protect nature and bring back biodiversity? So we said, these are all amazing things and they're wonderful people doing this work. What is our center of gravity? And we said, it's the idea of the common good that we as a society have become overly individualistic. And then you're never going to achieve the first three pathways until human beings and the social systems that we organize return to things that we saw in the past, particularly with indigenous cultures, which is a prioritization of the common good over the individual good or certainly a rebalancing. Certainly in Western materialism, we are very self-ish versus communal-ish. And so the garrison is through pathways of planetary

25:07health program as many manifestations. But at the core of it is this idea that we are here for the benefit of all sentient beings, not just human beings, and that a vernacular way of describing being for the benefit of all sentient beings is for the common good. Coming up, Jonathan talks about the Bio-Reach-Norrisilians Project, the relationship between local action and global systems, and how the garrison institute supports activists to address social challenges through a contemplative lens. Start every week off on the right foot. Every Monday, Trisco the Buddhist Review hosts a leading Buddhist teacher for guided meditation and lively discussion over Zoom. Join us for Trisco's newest offering to spend time with new teachers to get to know your fellow Trisco subscribers and to establish or reinvigorate your regular meditation practice. Learn more at trisco.org slash events. If you're not already a subscriber,

26:11sign up today for as little as $6.99 a month at trisco.org slash subscribe. Now let's get back to our conversation with Jonathan Rose. Trisco holds its annual retreat up at garrison, and I had a chance to chat with you a little bit last time I was up there. And I was especially curious about the Bio-Reach-Norrisilians Project. So first, what do you mean by Bio-Reach-Norrisilians? Great. So much of the world in certainly America is organized around political boundaries. We have counties. We have cities. We have states. And if you look at their lines, their lines are often pretty straight. Occasionally they follow river. But the way nature organizes herself is around Bio-Reach-Norris. And so if you think, for example in the Midhuston Valley, there's a series of mountain ranges to the east of west and the north. And they define a watershed. And actually the

27:12rain all flows into essentially the four counties of Putnam, Dutchis, Ulster, and Orange. There are a particular series of tree species that live within that and other plant species and animal species. So the Bio-Reach-Norrisilians, if you want to connect humans in nature, let's start with how nature organizes herself. And she starts in organizing by Bio-Reach-Norris, by following these natural geological boundaries. Now let's step back. The climate is certainly suffering now. Much of the world is suffering not only on an environmental basis, a tremendous loss of biodiversity, but we're also seeing a rise of income inequality. We're seeing society becoming more and more brittle for a variety of economic and social reasons. And many people feel like the system is cracking. It's certainly not working for a large body of people not only in America, but around the world. The sense of the future is that the future is likely to be worse and not better. And for

28:17much of the last, probably 30 or maybe even 40 years, the major economic theme is we're going to globalize and that's going to bring prosperity. And that idea is now as run passes due day. So it seems like the Bio-Reach-Norris is a wonderful way to organize this not too big like the world, like I can't change the world, they're not too small like a village. So it feels like the right organizing reason. And if we can then map its different parts and look at how we connect them, we can create greater resilience because resilience comes from connecting diversity. That's just like a biological principle. It's a psychological principle. Dan Siegel, one of our board members says the healthy mind integrates diverse parts. So for example, New York State has a program in which school systems get paid a little bit more if they buy food from local farmers. It's better for low-the-local farm economy. It's healthier

29:19for the kids. It's a win-win situation. So we're beginning to map all these different relationships in the food system, the education system, the healthcare system, the housing system, the political systems to look at where can we weave pieces together to create greater interdependence and along with it to create greater resilience. Right. So you gave us an example of schools buying local food. Can you give another example of what this looks like in practice? So if you think about it, it's like how do small actions have larger systemic effects. So for example, it just happens the Midhuston Valley has its own utility system. This kind of utility in downstate in New York City, but we have something called Central Hudson. And about in 2012, Central Hudson got bought by Canadian companies. And Central Hudson earns a 9.5% return. So for all our electric bills, the profits are all going to Canada.

30:24So imagine if we could raise a local bond issue and buy our own utility back. And if we're say, raise a bond whose interest rate is 5 or 6%, that means there'd be 3.5% that could be reinvested to create community solar to create resilience, maybe to provide more affordable electricity to low income families. So how would we do this? Imagine if all the local universities and foundations and endowments and wealthier people in their bond portfolio allocated something towards buying back their electric system. So like right now, when a like at the big on them, but VASTER University, a wonderful university of Assa College is in the Midhuston Valley. Has an endowment. It's invested wisely, but imagine if as part of its bond portfolio, it bought a set of investing in, you know, bonds all over the world. They invested in buying back

31:25the utility. They'd get the same return. But their money would be recycling within the system. It'd be connecting more of the parts. That's another example. Oh good. So the next question builds off this. Your bio-regional resilience work emphasizes place-based ethics, a kind of small as beautiful approach. And at the same time, your work has always involved larger systems thinking. So how do you think about the relationship between local action and global systems? I'm going to add one more piece before we get to that. Okay. Which is, everything I've described to you could be done by somebody other than the Garrison has to. So what is the Garrison has to bring to this bio-regional resilience? So we got a wonderful grant from the best foundation a couple years ago, best family foundation, that helped us generate a mapping of what we call earth-based contemplative practices. What are the meditation-cisted practices that people are doing? Some Buddhists, some not,

32:30that deeply connect them to a sense of place and sense of nature. And our view is that if you are can really carry out bio-regional resilience in your heart, in your being, you have to feel the all-centred beings and feel this connection with them that the contemplative worldview is a a catalyst for deepening this work. And so our approach is that, well, again, I'm thinking about very technical things like how do you do a bondage and buy back a utility? We're also thinking about how do you really use a contemplative, a bit of earth-based contemplative practices, connect people to the intimate, most intimate nature in their places. So it's super local. We are parts of loose associations with other people who are also doing bio-regional work. To last fall, I attended a meeting with that King Charles hosted at St. James Palace, something called the Circular

33:34Bio-regional Economy Alliance, which was groups of people working all over the world on these same ideas. And there are many other networks that are emerging. And what's interesting about this then is that we can share ideas between us, and again, it's an emerging field. And as long as each of us is only doing a local project, it has minimal less impact, but as we connect the field and make the idea itself of that we should create circular bio-regional economies more and more prevalent, it gains weight and impact. And so that's the global aspect of this. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If I could wake up tomorrow, when we'd be better at one thing, it would have to be patience. As the great Buddhist St. Chantideva taught, there is no evil like hatred and no fortitude like patience. Thus, I should strive

34:40in various ways to meditate on patience. So I'd like to get better at cultivating patience and daily life. And one way to develop patience is through working with the therapist, and at BetterHelp, you can connect with the therapist who can help you work toward your own goals and feel better, whatever that looks like for you. Better is a feeling defined by you, and for BetterHelp, it's a BetterHelp therapist who really gets you. It's a focus on global, emotional well-being, with thousands of therapists and millions of members in over 100 countries. It's progress, and it's getting better at life enriching virtues like patience, at least in my case, that can make all the difference. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com slash Christchal. That's better H-E-L-P dot com slash Christchal. So what are some of the spiritual or contemplative practices that you found help people connect to

35:41the earth? You mentioned indigenous peoples earlier. Were there any synergies across traditions there? There are amazing traditions, synergies, and one is obviously just to quiet your mind, and to be in place, and to reduce your internal noise, and to observe what's going on. So the indigenous people of the garrison area were the Vinope Munson people who were actually moved away, and there are very, very few who live in our area now. We won't many more live in Wisconsin and make a long story short. And indigenous women from Wisconsin came to the Hudson Valley and discovered this deep, and even though she hadn't grown up there, this deep connection. Anyway, we were holding a retreat, and she was speaking, and she said, you know, as you move through the forest and as you were in nature, be aware not only that you're listening to nature, but that nature is listening to you.

36:47You know, we now know that plants can actually hear, plants can send chemicals that actually some studies show certain plants can see, which is kind of amazing. And this idea that you're in a two-way relationship versus a one, two, so there's one thing, and I think in Western Buddhism, we do a lot of this, which is to quiet your mind and kind of expand your sense to the world. But what we have not done as much as say, and also receive that the world is sensing you, that it's a reciprocal, multi-way relationship in your part of a larger consciousness. It's not just about your consciousness perceiving everything it's all about. The other consciousness perceiving you and your all in this relationship. That's a mind-shifting perspective that I have found really deeply connects people to place. Another one we work with a wonderful indigenous leader, Tiocus and Ghost Horse, who lives in Woodstock nearby. And Tiocus and is really

37:52focused on the idea that English as a language makes everything unknown, like a specific thing, and that indigenous thinking is much more that everything is a verb, that is in process, that is continually unfolding. And by the way, which totally aligns with the Buddhist idea of impermanence. Sure. Yeah, you know, before I get into the podcast, more deeply, which I, I mean, you get it too. I actually want to ask you a question. It's a little bit like the question James asked me. And it's background twice in the last week. I've been accused of being an optimist, which is very unusual for a Buddhist. Once I was recording another podcast and the guests said to me, I can tell you're a kind of a class half full kind of person, which no one has ever said to me before. And then I was teaching an online class on ethics and somebody wrote in the chat, well, that seems a little optimistic to me. So the question that I usually get asked without

38:56making assumptions about what I feel is where do I find hope? Do I find hope? And knowing the work that you do and the kind of large-scale issues that you're dealing with, even if you step by step, or in bite-sized pieces, these are huge issues. I mean, the planet, you know, and so on. So I'm wondering, would you call yourself an optimist? And where are you finding hope these days? So I'm an optimist by nature. I think it's kind of just how your internal thermostat is set. And first of all, I want to be realistic. You know, Europe is burning and its future is to be hotter and burn more. And the same thing and the weak crops are failing. And the food shortages are coming. You know, the ignorance of our actions is at so many levels is creating increasing conditions of suffering. And I also really see that in the United States with the cutback

40:03on food stamps and on Medicare and Medicaid. If you're realistic, you can see the trends are only going to increase suffering. But what I also see is that this approach of deeply understanding systems, which is aided by deep contemplation, this desire to connect wisdom and compassion, is so much more vibrant than it was 20 years ago or 23 years ago when the Garrison was founded. There are so many more people sharing this language, sharing these ideas. There's amazing, one of the things my company does is we raise impact investing funds. And the impact investing world has grown so much bigger and so much deeper. And I mean, I'll get like I haven't been going to a conference in Singapore in September, thousands of people, a big impact investing conference. And the theme of the conference is the currency of transformation is love.

41:03All right, so thousands of impact investors of wealthy families and pension funds and foundation officials all coming together on the idea that love is the core and consciousness must be expanded to use investment to change the world. I couldn't imagine that happening 20 years ago in a place like Singapore. So I am seeing a movement founded in the principles that are underlie Buddhism, that underlie the Garrison Institute, that with enthusiasm and with discipline are growing like crazy. And the whole question is we're small relative to the larger world. Can we grow faster than the suffering is growing? And I don't know, but what else to do is what you should do. You know, there's a wonderful phrase when you come to the end of the world, what should you do? Platotry. That's wonderful. So in that light, because I think it fits, let's talk a bit about the podcast,

42:09common good, which focuses on compassionate action, particularly in the context of climate activism. And I wonder if you could say some more about the podcast. Thank you. So interviewing on the podcast, amazing thinkers and doers who are doing transformational things, some about climate, some others. And so it's a chance to hear some thinkers. So for example, I don't know if you know the work of Janine Benius, she's the one who came up with the idea of biomimically. She has this wonderful phrase that life creates the conditions conducive to life. If you look at biological evolution, it's not just about an individual species doing better. It is always also making the environment in which it thrives in the other ones better too. So life as an unfold, take the Midhutzen Valley, 12,000 years ago were completely covered by glaciers. There was micro biological life under the glaciers, but there were no trees, no plants, no animals. And as the glaciers withdrew, the first little plants, and then they grew into bigger plants,

43:14and then trees and then animals. And you could just see in that 12,000 years life, just making it better for more life, better for more life, better for more life. So you get to hear ideas like that of a woman named Suzanne Samard, who is the leader who really figured out how trees talk to each other. And again, trees are both supporting themselves, and they're creating, they're definitely supporting the common good through their roots. They're distributing carbohydrates and nutrients to each other. So we have thought leaders who are, and then we have action leaders. So most recently, we did a podcast with the guy who is an immigrant to the United States from Uganda, and he and another African partner, he's Indian, started a company called Zusu, which provides credit to low-income families. It actually helps low-income families. Every time they pay their rent, they report it on time. They reported your credit bureau, and they grow credit, which is a key step towards building more prosperity in your life.

44:18So it's this mixture of amazing thoughts and amazing actions. I'm wondering if there were any recent guests who really changed how you thought about climate activism? Well, the one that surprised me the most was early in the series Bill McKibbin. So Bill McKibbin came to the Garrison Institute in I think 2008 or something like that, and he was in a very cranky mood. There have been some major losses in the environmental world, and he was kind of railing about the stupidity, by the way, right, of the system and the inability of the system, the larger political system that actually addressed climate change. And I know I have not known him well, but I ran into him, had meetings with him stuff throughout the time, you know, throughout the following decades, and there was that there's a fervor to him. There was criticism as much as there was enthusiasm.

45:21Anyway, the podcast with him is 100% enthusiasm. What he is talking about is how the world of solar and batteries are so cheap now they're just taking over the world. And he told this story of Pakistan. So Pakistan is a very unreliable energy system. And somehow the solar panels are now so cheap from China that people started selling solar panels from China into Pakistan. And people could buy like one or two panels and put on the roof or even put on their balcony and started getting electricity. And so that when the power went out, they still had a light so the family could do homework or whatever. And this grew and literally in something like 24 months or something like that. Something like 40% of Pakistan's electricity is now coming from this homemade solar. And they've completely changed that by the way, the grid is now actually selling less electricity that their use of fossil fuels is going down. It's this amazing combination of

46:23affordable technology and people in all these small businesses now helping people install it and stuff like that. And totally changing the climate profile of a whole country. And Pakistan's a big country. So Bill was full of stories of just enthusiastic opportunity for change. That's wonderful. We can use some more and more of that energy. So another initiative is on spirituality and social change. And I wonder if you can talk about the work you've done to support activists and policymakers to address social challenges through a contemplative lens. Yes. And by the way, our podcast series is grown beyond just me. And so Steve Arley has done some interviews and the Anna did an interview. And Gretchen Saital, who leads our spirituality and social change program, has just launched a series of interviews that are really, really interesting

47:24about people using with leaders using contemplative practices for social justice. So we did this mapping. We had this sense that that social change and social justice, more and more people were using spiritual and contemplative methods. We got a grant. We did a mapping of that. We discovered about 600. And we say said we recorded about 300 of them. We found a whole this incredible convening. And there's some key principles to it, which is that the spiritualality is not only key to their individual resilience of the people who are on the front lines of this work. But it's also key to how they understand the world in the world in greater interdependence and impermanence. It is also key to the development of and the maintenance and the growth of their compassion. And so the spiritual part of the social justice work, Gela Grimbechius used to say,

48:29it's like water and water or milk and milk. It's like it's completely permeating through it. And what it's creating is deeper and better results. So it's again, we've built a network now. These organizations were trying to grow the field of it, help them share lessons, learn best practices and to co-emerge this field together. I'm wondering what are some of the biggest challenges you faced in this work? And especially what are some of the biggest challenges that the participants tell you that they're up against? Several of the organizations are smaller. So number one, the challenge in any, or any part of the not-for-profit world these days is funding. And when you're struggling for funding and when you're under-resourced, it makes everything more difficult because you can't hire sufficient staff to do the work. So being under-resourced of which funding is a part of it is a key challenge. And then this is a harder time. We're in a time of enormous income inequality.

49:34We're in a time, by the way, where there's a whole Silicon Valley movement today that says, empathy is weakness, that empathy is a disease of society. It used to be that maybe people were more or less empathetic themselves, but everybody at least pretended to be empathetic and compassionate. We're now in a time where there are major social media voices that are saying that empathy is wrong. So the under-resourced number one, and we're working in a larger cultural context, which is making it more difficult to do this work. But on the other hand, when people find each other and they can connect on a common spiritual ground and a common ground of compassion, a common ground of deep commitment to justice and a common ground of wanting to bring forth a more just and fair society, that connection is also deeper too. Jonathan, anything else before we close?

50:38I want to thank James, you and Sharon, because you are, you know, I've been talking to some degree about field development and how we grow the fields of these ideas and how we grow the communities carry out these ideas. And Tricycle has been just a center of gravity or core, not only in the magazine itself, but in the programs and the ideas in your podcast that you two do together. You've been a key light to the field and it light being light to the field. And so I'm extremely grateful for that. And Sharon, you are teaching and the number of people who I run into now when I say and, you know, who's your teacher? I mean, there are really people who think you're their personal teacher. It's really beautiful. It's an amazing contribution. So what, but the two of you are doing is, and you started long before the garrison institute started. And so we're very

51:40grateful for what you're contributing. Yeah, we're very grateful for the work that you do and the work that Sharon does. So thank you so much. Jonathan, it's been a great pleasure. Thanks so much for joining us for our listeners. Visit garrisoninstitute.org and listen to Jonathan's podcast, the common good. So we like to close these podcasts with a short guided practice. So I'll hand it over to Sharon. Thank you. And thank you, Jonathan. So much. I'm still failing to use the English term over an investment conference that uses the word love. How loud, you know, it's like, wow. There's a source of hope. Okay, let's sit together for just a few minutes. You can rest your attention on the feeling of the breath. The word is rest. And I love that sense of listening to the world. Listen to your experience, allowing thoughts and feelings and sensations to come go. And understand the world is also listening to you.

52:49Here we are, joined together. And if you get lost, spun out in the fantasy, fall asleep, something happens. Doesn't matter, it's fine. Because that act of letting go, that act of beginning again is what resilience is about.

53:49I don't know. Now when you feel ready, we can end the meditation. Thank you, Jonathan. And thank you, Sharon. Thank you. Thank you. Wonderful. See you. Bye. Bye. Bye. So write us at feedback at tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple podcasts.

54:50To keep up with the show, you can follow tricycle talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle talks is produced by Sarah Fleming and the Pod Glamourett. I'm James Shaheen, Editor and Chief of Tricycle the Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening.