Margaret Wheatley – Becoming a Warrior for the Human Spirit

Thomas Hübl: I’m very happy to sit here today with you, Margaret “Meg” Wheatley, I welcome you here into our summit and into our community.

I see you as a senior leadership developer and I see you also with a lot of experience in the work of consulting organizations and movements in the world. And I see you as a woman that is deeply interested also in the spiritual and consciousness development path, let’s call it like this. And I would love to look at how all of your experience and what you maybe also came across as difficulties throughout your own development and growth through your work, how that relates to trauma or to collective trauma. And so I’m very curious to hear and learn from you and dive into that together now.

And maybe let’s start with a little bit of an arc of your own development. We all start off with enthusiasm, most probably, and some creativity, and then we bump into the reality of our world. And I would love to hear how that was for you and what you learned or the maybe major learning steps in developing your own wisdom. And then we take it more specific.

Meg Wheatley: Okay. Well, I’m not going to give you a full autobiography, but I have been giving this some thought. I just turned 76 last week and, as my grandmother used to say, “That’s three-quarters of a century.” So, I’ve been thinking about themes in my life or what led me to right here right now.

I always had a desire to be out in the world and my first opportunity to be in the world was to go into the Peace Corps in post-war Korea. It was a completely different society, different vocabulary, different alphabet, different traditions, different faiths, different culture, everything was totally foreign. Or as I summed it up for my 11-year-old grandson recently, they didn’t even have chocolate. And it was a country recovering from terrible war. The hillsides were devastated, they had taken down all the trees, women were in a very traditional role. So, I and the other Peace Corps volunteers who were female were really different. We rode bicycles, we attended Taekwondo training, and this was all very unusual for women.

But what I learned being in Korea was that after that experience of such foreignness, such difference, that I could feel comfortable anywhere I went in the world. And it was a real privilege to see a traditional culture, a deeply Buddhist culture that had suffered real trauma from years of devastation in the Korean War, which had ended I think in 1956. And I was there in … Maybe it ended in ’54 and I was there in ’66.

That gave me ground that I still value, that I never believed that cultural differences would separate me from being with people. And I just had that awareness, I had that capability from age early 20s on. So, I’ve never been afraid to be in any situation thinking, “Well, this is too strange and different and I’m uncomfortable with it.” I’ve gone easily into very poor Indigenous communities in the U.S. and Australian Aboriginal communities, and in depth in Zimbabwe and South Africa. So that started, what, 50 years ago, more than 50 years ago. And since that time, I’ve had an unending curiosity in people. And now when I look back, I see that how we work and especially how we are when we’re together, so the whole role of being in a collective, what happens to us? Well, a lot of bad behaviors happen to us, but there is something about the collective.

And from my own background, which is in history and biology, I now understand that collectives are an emergent phenomenon, they are created by our interactions and our relationships. But once this system, this collectivity is present, it actually possesses qualities and dynamics that are different than the individuals that created it. That is not good news because our whole approach to creating change in a community or in an organization has been to just change the parts or we come up with these statements—which I think is very relevant for this summit—other people come up with these statements, “Well, we created this so we can change it.”

But from the perspective, the science of how life works—and for me, this is not up for conversation, this is irrefutable, demonstrable science—that living systems come together with their individual needs and working with the environment that brings them together. And out of those interactions and relationships, emerges a collective culture. If it’s been people who’ve experienced trauma as individuals, you get a collective traumatic culture. And then the question is, how do we change that? So I want to come back to this. I want to stay with my life, but I just got into the topic that most fascinates me. So, I’ll park this piece and go back to it.

Thomas: We’ll come back to this, definitely.

Meg: Okay. Over the years, I had a life of great opportunity. Even though I was from a lower middle class, struggling family, it wasn’t that important after World War II. So, I grew up in an America which really did have a lot of educational opportunities and a lot of optimism and such. And my own life career pattern has been I’ve always had beautiful, beautiful mentors. People who really took me in hand and gave me opportunities and showed me different ways of seeing.

All of this came to a head in my mid 40’s when I tuned into what was happening with new sciences, quantum theory, chaos and complexity theory, and basically the overall arching frame of living systems, which I was more familiar with, having studied biology. And I could read science and I could translate science for my fellow practitioners in the field of leadership and in management.

So when I wrote Leadership and the New Science in 1992, that was a departure point for everything now that I’ve been doing since then and will continue to do. And it is first working at the systems level, trying to understand these interactions, the interplaying of dynamics that create these emergent cultures.

And then, because I was deep inside major organizations, including the U.S. Army, which was one of the best, most learningfull consultancies I had, and I had it at a formative age when I was just starting to understand this new paradigm that I was presenting of how does life organize? How does life self-organize? What’s the role of hierarchy? What’s the role of command and control? When in fact life doesn’t operate from any central plan or any central leader, it’s all self-organized it’s self-created, and then it emerges into these ecosystems, into these organizational and national cultures, into these family cultures. It was my experience with science and my experience with leaders and being inside major organizations and it was, I was forever curious. I realize that now, I never felt blocked in any way. And I always found great mentors or they found me.

So, in this decade or the past two decades of the 2000’s, up until now, I feel that one of the things I became skilled at was understanding systems dynamics and understanding that they are created through emergence, which then means you don’t change them by working backwards, you can’t deconstruct what has emerged. The only opportunity is to start over, create a new system based on different values, which a lot of people are still doing right now. I was very engaged in that work of creating alternative ways of doing money, doing education, doing activism generally. And this was all from 1992 onward.

But the world kept changing and the world kept revealing itself to me as we’re dealing with emergency, we’re dealing with systems of destruction, of greed, of corruption, of failed of leadership. And these have emerged as the dominant global culture now, so I knew they were incapable of being changed. And for many years, starting in 2000, I have a nonprofit institute, the Berkana Institute, which we formed in 1999, with no idea of what we were going to do with it. And then when Leadership and the New Science came out, it was, okay, we’re going to train people to understand how life organizes, how life works. And we did that for several years with the prominent scientist Fritjof Capra as well. So, it was a combination of science and organizational development theory. And we educated a few thousand people, I think, through our seminars, and the world kept changing. So, starting in, maybe it was 2009, I really felt and received clear information that this is an emergent phenomenon we’re dealing with, global destructive culture, destroying people’s spirits, destroying the spirit of life, destroying the environment, destroying the future.

And by 2012, I wrote a book So Far From Home: Lost and Found in Our Brave New World, in which I … It was a very dark book and people wondered what happened to Meg, she used to be so hopeful and optimistic? And I would just reply, “Have you noticed what’s going on in the world?” And it’s still my comeback when people say, “Well, you’re so dark, you’re so negative.” It’s, no, let’s be realistic about what this world is. And it is traumatizing to all of us. And we have different responses to it. And so I do want to talk about this also in greater detail.

But from 2012 on, I realized that my work was to summon, and I use that word very carefully, to summon leaders who were willing to be dedicated and disciplined and use their power and influence for good. Which would mean standing up against the negative dynamic, standing up risking their careers, speaking out, taking stands, being activists inside these large organizations, or as activists who have left.

My work became totally focused and joyfully focused on training those few leaders, given the percentage of people who are leaders, those few people who in times of desperation, in the end of a civilization, they always step forward to serve and they realize that their values of community health engagement, really devoted to people’s creativity, to bringing out the best in people in spite of everything that’s going on around them, that this is what I now call warriors for the human spirit. This is the historic role, it only is needed in times of desperation and collapse. So, I’ve been engaged in that work since 2012, but actively training leaders in many different modes, but in long-term, in-depth training since 2015. So, that’s the arc of my work. And I would sum it up in two ways. That I’ve always been delighted to get to know people at the human to human level. And then I’ve had this perspective now for 30 plus years of, we’re dealing with emergent phenomena, what is the work that is needed from us now?

And when I defined that as warriors for the human spirit, I was basing it on the Shambhala prophecy, which is known as well. Joanna Macy made this her life’s mission to get this prophecy out, once it was given to her, I think in the 70s or 80s, by her Tibetan Buddhist teacher, that there is a time when all of life hangs by the frailest of threads, the great barbarian powers have arisen that threaten us with their weapon, they threaten each other with their weapons of mass destruction. And at that time, the Shambhala warriors come forth, not with the usual weapons, we only have the weapons of compassion and insight, and we are in the halls of power to dismantle these fear-based destructive dynamics as best we can.

And increasingly, because I do operate from this awareness of emergence, we are declaring ourselves, naming ourselves as warriors so that we can serve people, the people who are being harmed. We cannot stop these global forces of destruction, just like we cannot stop climate crisis in its rapid evolution now, of what’s happening to us all on the planet and every other species. The image of the Shambhala warrior has been my foundation, in the work that I’m doing now, which we can talk more about, is actually what I want to talk about with you, Thomas. The work that I’m doing with people, some of whom have been severely traumatized, but it’s a work of meaning and contribution and service that transcends trauma, it moves them into a higher way of being.

Thomas: Yeah. I’m very interested to hear more about that.

Meg: I gave you a lot that we could talk about.

Thomas: Yeah, you gave me a lot, absolutely. So many inspirations to continue the conversation. I want to rewind a bit. First of all, thank you. And also thank you for your journey throughout your life and all the people that you touched and your own learning. I can also feel, when you speak, your own transmission of what you experienced and whatever you developed in yourself. And I want to rewind fully, at the beginning you said something that caught my attention. You said, “I worked in Korea.” And a good friend of mine, William Ury, maybe you know William Ury, the mediator.

Meg: Yeah, I do.

Thomas: So, we co-taught some courses. And so William speaks a lot about the Shambhala warriors. And William is in the mediation process of the U.S. and North Korea at the moment, he’s an anthropologist also and he is working a lot with Korea at the moment. And so we had a lot of conversations about that. And now when you spoke about Korea, about the collectively traumatized nation, because that’s what happened. And before we go into trauma maybe as a concept or a scientific, or like a process in us, let’s look, I’m curious, how did you experience, just in being in that culture, are there symptoms or ways that you would define as trauma symptoms in a culture that went through a …

Meg: I was too young for that. I was fresh out of college, I was there to save the world, I was one of the first Peace Corps volunteers, so working with the … Just wanting to serve John F. Kennedy, who has since been assassinated, and all about serving. And so what I remember is the students were still in military uniforms, the whole structure of the school, I was teaching junior-senior high school there, the poverty of the students was egregious, it was quite, in many cases, overwhelming.

The importance of education, which still exists in Asian countries, was paramount. The tension of either making it … Your whole future depended on how you did with your final exams at the end of high school. There were signs of this great poverty, but there was also, now that I think of it, there was just the genuineness of how you were together. So, I didn’t know what they had experienced in the war, I heard a few stories. Now, I’m much more interested. When I meet an elder European, I want to know what their experience was in the war.

When I was working in South Africa in great depth, I knew the stories of how people had suffered under apartheid and that level of trauma. But then, as a young idealistic young woman ready to change the world and do good wherever I could—and I don’t dismiss her at all, she was wonderful—but what I realized is I did have a lesson in perseverance and in resilience, I definitely saw that people had overcome.

And I felt this in South Africa also, people overcome unimaginable suffering, human tragedies beyond my comprehension in some cases. And yet when I was in the presence of speaking with them, it was human to human. So, I believe that was more important for me because that is now the basis of my work. What is the human spirit? And then this is worth defending, this is worth standing up for, this is worth activism, and this is worth our work. And so that was my first experience with the human spirit, I would say. And true resilience, or as we’ll talk later, they would never name it resilience because they don’t even have that word in their vocabulary. But the strength of the human spirit was really very evident to me there.

Thomas: Powerful. And I love your interests, I like it very much what you said, “I was very interested later on in hearing people’s sufferings or experiences through war times.” And I had a similar experience with doing a lot of work on the Holocaust on both sides, in Germany and Israel, and the whole Second World War in Europe. And it’s unbelievable what kind of atrocities we survive as human beings and how we grow out of it and through it.

Meg: We need to mark that and honor that because for all that we’re complaining about right now, about our suffering as a result of the collapse of these economies and job loss and the pandemic itself, it’s nothing in comparison to what we’re capable of transcending as human beings. My teacher put it very well to his Indian students in India, he said, “You didn’t lose your life, you just lost your lifestyle.”

Thomas: Yeah. After hearing some of the experiences of concentration camps or other experiences, the amount of human suffering that people survived and also went through, in a way, that is unbelievable. So, yeah, I agree with you. And you said something very interesting afterwards, that caught my attention. You said, “When many traumatized individuals come together and create a society or a system, so there is the trauma-informed system, in a way.” And I would love to hear more about how you see that emergent system that we create because that’s very interesting, also in the context of the collective trauma.

Meg: For me, what you heard is actually a new thought. Because how emergence happens generally is through our individual experiences in interactions with one another, then something emerges from that, that has different properties than the individuals who created it. That’s why you can’t accept responsibility, saying, “Well, we created it, we can change it as individuals.” No, it doesn’t work that way.

But the new thought that you put in my head, thank you, is about what was the culture that emerged, not only among survivors of the Holocaust, but in—I’m just going to stay with the American context—which was the combination of a can do robust optimism and technical superiority that created a “we can do anything we want” culture, which did not feel that it bore any of the even minor fears of people who’ve been traumatized.

And that would be interesting to really look at in each country. What was the result of the trauma of going through World War II? I had a real come up as a cheerful American when I was working in Slovenia and I was working with a wonderful violinist, Slovenian violinist Miha Pogacnik. And we would hold these gatherings at this broken down castle which had a deep mythic history with the Parseval story. And at one place Miha was playing, he was always trying to, which I also think is an important part of my work now, to use music, to use poetry, to use the arts, to really release our human spirits into a fuller richness of our experience because words don’t do it at all.

But we were in this castle and he had just played a beautiful Brahms or Bach concerto with a pianist and it took people to a place of deep grief. And then we took a break and we’re coming back in the room, and there is a woman there who’s from the Steiner school of movement, who had clearly gone through World War II by her age, and she’s getting ready her materials to lead us.

And I just said, quite casually but with certainty, to her, “Well, we just went through an experience of grief, collective grief, we need to process that.” To which she instantly replied, and this was my wake-up call, “Well, everyone goes through grief.” She just dismissed it, like, “Well, that’s just part of life. You silly Americans, you don’t know this.” So, she would have no patience for processing what I felt was such a deep experience because it was her life experience. So, I think one of the things to observe, that was a European versus an American experience of the same world war.

I know that my mother, who lost a brother at the end of World War II, had it very different. She had fear in her body and that fear was found in my body by a psychic healer who was working on me. And he said, “So was your mother fearful when she was carrying you?” And I said, “Well, what about World War II? Would that be the basis?” And he said, “Oh yes, that would do it.”

It feels hard for me to identify any one culture in which there is a shared understanding of what the trauma meant. So when we use the word ‘collective’, everyone feels traumatized, but for different reasons. And I think that’s very evident right now, with COVID virus. We’re all experiencing some level of, “Oh my God, what’s happened to my life? What’s happened to my job, my work, my future?” But there’s no shared identification of what the trauma is.

Some of us are seeing it as, “Yeah, it’s scary, but it’s a wake up call.” Some of us are seeing it, “Well, here’s the planet, finally, this is what we’re in for now, the planet is pushing back on our incredible greed and abuse.” Some of us are saying, “It’s a hoax, it’s all conspiracy theory.” So, they’re suffering trauma but from a very different worldview, that others are paranoid, their paranoia creates a sense of trauma. So, I was thinking about this last night, prior to this, that it’s difficult to define what a collective experience is right now. And even in World War II, I think we could say that for any major trauma, it gets filtered through who we are and so it’s open to multiple descriptions, definitions. Yes, I have been traumatized, but what do you think was the cause of that? Or what was the cause for someone else? I think this is where we are. So the whole notion of collective experience is no longer available.

We talk a lot now, especially in America, of being in parallel universes because there’s no other way to describe descriptions that come out of the crazies on right-wing here and other people. We have multiple universes in which we’re working and yet we do experience an event like COVID as traumatic, but we each give it our individual definition of why I’m traumatized by this. Did I lose my job? Did I lose my faith in government? Did I lose my faith in God? Did I lose my faith in people generally? Or is this just a negative experience that I’m going to do something with?

And this is, I’m leading in now, if you’re ready to go with me, into the realization that bad things happen to us, but then what makes the bad thing that happened into a trauma is our personal response to it. So, what I’ve just been saying is we don’t all have the same response to an event like COVID and therefore, I do not experience it as traumatic because I have my spiritual ground and I have my practices for wanting to work with this, to make meaning of it, and to define what can I do to serve this situation? So, trauma is not in the painful event itself, it’s in how we interpret it.

And the basis of what I’m saying became very clear to me when I was working with Tibetans and people who use Sanskrit as their basic language, so this includes Hindus. There’s no word for resilience and there’s no word for trauma. So, whenever I encounter a culture that does not have a word for what in my culture is preeminent or is ground, I pay attention because suddenly I realized, “Oh, I’m in a cultural experience with that concept,” rather than saying, “This is universal, this is what all humans suffer.”

And why there is no word for trauma? And the experience of the Tibetan lamas when they were imprisoned and tortured by the Chinese when they took over Tibet and the experience of Tibetan nuns who were raped, who did not experience trauma, is what I’m drawing on. So, I remember the experience of one nun who, as she was being raped, just felt pure compassion for how could this man do this to another human being? But she wasn’t taking it personally.

But then the lamas in prison, as they were being tortured on a very regular basis, some of them had their thumbs cut off so they couldn’t do their malas, they couldn’t speak, and yet when they survived and came out, they were not traumatized. They felt that was the richest experience of their life, the richest opportunity for really deep spiritual practice. That gets my attention, correct?

And I was on stage with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, in 2013 in New Orleans, and the whole conference was on compassion and resilience. And I remember, because I was sitting right next to him, there was a big banner behind us that said, “Compassion and Resilience.” He kept looking at the banner because he could not even remember this word resilience.

And so someone asked him in the audience, “So, why is there no word for resilience?” And the answer is in their worldview, in their understanding of why negative things happen to a person. And it’s all about the rule of karma. So, when something bad happens, there’s a meaningful explanation that does not make me victim, does not isolate me from my community, or make my experience feel I’m the only one suffering in this way.

Instead, when something really negative happens to me, I just feel, I’m just giving you the Tibetan view here, well, I’m completing this karma. There is a logic to why this happened to me. Now, I don’t buy into this to the level that they explain. Some of the Tibetans, they have a whole rule book of well, this happened, that happened to you because you did this in another life. I’m not talking about that, but I am talking about a sense of you reap what you sow, even if it’s just this life.

And once you have this notion of cause and effect, which is irrefutable in these cultures, then when something bad happens to you, you don’t talk about bouncing back, you talk about, “I’m going to make meaning out of this, this is a great opportunity for me to learn and from that learning, I am going to transcend the experience.” I’m never a victim or traumatized individual, there’s a great cosmology here that’s at work.

And I also know, from the training I’m doing with now several hundred leaders to be warriors for the human spirit, that their own experience, they don’t come from Asian cultures, they do have the word resilience and we have the concept of trauma, and they have been severely traumatized. And they’ve done a lot of the work that needs to be done, somatic clearing especially has been very effective.

And yet, when they are capable of just getting that out of the physical body, and we know it’s in the physical body for sure, I won’t deny that for a moment, when they’ve done that work and they turn toward a higher, a more meaningful work of how do I use my power and influence for good in the midst of such degradation and destruction, how do I use it for good? Then that is a moment of transcending from the individual experience to a higher level work.

And the other thing I want to say about trauma that I’ve learned directly is when we are capable of moving from feeling victimized or alone, profound terrifying loneliness that can come to victims of trauma, when we realize that this experience is common, it’s part of the human experience. No matter how terrible it is, it wasn’t done to me as an individual, it is what happens to humans. That is transcending as well.

And I want to tell you one experience. After the Columbine school massacre in Colorado, in which 20 plus students were murdered by fellow students, it was the first great school massacre in the U.S., the surviving children were truly traumatized. They went into survivor guilt, they went into terrible depression, and they became suicidal. And the mother of one of these boys, 15-year-old boy I think, told me that her son was on suicide watch. They had all received counseling, counseling, counseling, and nothing shook the children out of their suicidal needs, really to just get out of here, until someone had the genius to invite Elie Wiesel, the great Holocaust not only survivor, but the person who brought us the Holocaust for us to know. They invited Elie Wiesel to come and talk to the children about his experience in the death camps.

Now, I would never have had the courage to do that with teenagers, but it transformed them. They realized that what they had gone through, just as all the horrors that you are now aware of in your research or listening to the stories, the children realized, “Oh, this is what it means to be human, this is part of being human.” I think that is a story that just requires more and more contemplation because there’s just some real kernel of truth about how the human spirit can transcend its individual experience, unite with what is common to humans, our terrible behaviors and our beautiful luminous behavior, and regain itself as a spirit, not as someone who’s just been victimized by life.

Thomas: Yeah. I hear so many things. I listen to you and I can go in so many directions with this, but I’ll try to summarize, like a short summary of what I hear and a few thoughts about it. First of all, I hear you describing a lot of very precise, in my understanding, a lot of very precise understandings about the nature of trauma. Because you described beautifully the isolation effect that we experience, that we feel isolated, but if we find a community or some kind of environment where we can make meaning together, it’s something that connects us and that’s already a step in the healing process.

And I love this, I didn’t know at all about Elie Wiesel and the meeting with this teenagers, but it’s very inspiring because I think also, yes, there’s the aspect of listening that it’s part of human suffering, which I think is true, I think that’s part of being a human being. What you said I think that’s very true. And I also think that in meeting someone like Elie Wiesel, that went through a serious traumatization and worked this traumatization into a deeper or higher transcendence, that has an effect. That’s a fantastic remedy, it’s like a herb that is spreading in an effect, it’s like a remedy in a system. And I like this very much, thank you for bringing that. I think it’s very inspiring.

Meg: Can I just comment on that, you’ll remember?

Thomas: Oh, yeah.

Meg: Okay. There is a practice in Tibetan Buddhism called _tonglen_. It just means giving and receiving. But the practice is there so that when we are having a terrible experience or a strong emotion, like maybe we’re deep in grief or we’re deep in loneliness—I’m not talking about just traumatized people, all of us have these experiences—that when you can, you flash on the question of, “I wonder how many other people on the planet at this very moment are experiencing this same degree of loneliness or this same degree of rage?”

And the minute you do that, you’re flooded, your imagination is flooded with the millions or the tens of millions or the hundreds of millions of people who at this very moment are experiencing loneliness. And what that does, when you bring them in, just like me, there are these hundreds of millions of people experiencing loneliness. It changes your experience. Because what shifts is … And this is the great penalty of our culture of individualism where we think these experience are just, “Poor me, only me, nobody else feels the way I do, and maybe I’m a terrible person for feeling this way, maybe I just have to commit suicide to get away from this intense pain I’m feeling. And it’s all in this tiny little box called me.” That’s the great imprisonment of our Western culture, is this … And in the US it’s just gone bizarrely crazy about, “I’m an individual, I don’t participate in society, I don’t need anyone, and you don’t tell me what to do.”

But generally, when we’re in these periods of grief or sadness or rage, if we tune in to how many other people, we just get curious for a moment, “I just wonder, is anybody else feeling this way?” And then you come up with hundreds of millions of people. And then it brings a kind of a release, I think. It goes from being like this, to being like this, “Oh, oh, I get it, this is what happens to human beings.” And so that is transcendence, actually emotional transcendence, from tight little me to understanding what it means to be human. And that is always, always healing at a profound level.

Thomas: Yeah. And it’s also activating, it’s a beautiful example that you brought that shows that the basic relational wiring is _I feel you feeling me_, _I feel you feeling me_. And in the moment in my isolation I manage to open up even a tiny window, there is a wind coming in and it immediately changes. So, that’s a very powerful practice. And I see this also in many of my groups where, we’re very large groups, and every time somebody shares something, and I ask, “Okay, who knows this, a similar experience?” And then so many hands go up. And then I say, “Okay, so we didn’t collect all those people just for you, in the questionnaire, but it’s so calming. And then it’s such an opening, that we share that suffering. We share that, and then it creates a different sense of intimacy.

Meg: And wholeness. A different sense of wholeness. Healing comes from the old English word for wholeness, which comes from an earlier word meaning holiness. And so my favorite scripture is, “Whenever two or more are gathered, there will I be also.” And so spiritual transcendence into the spiritual realm is available when we are not just sharing stories. But through that, we are connecting at a profound level. And then you don’t take such stuff personally.

Thomas: That’s right.

Meg: This happened. And it’s not because of me that it happened to me, it’s because this is what it means to be a human. And then in those moments of transcendence, of course, we experience our better human qualities, our great capacity to love, our generosity, our willingness to sacrifice for others.

Thomas: That’s beautiful. And also then it’s different, because there’s a trauma symptom that is not taking things personally because they’re split off. And this is different, not taking it personally, which is transcendent, so these are two different levels. And I think if you get to that high understanding, then that’s really, really beautiful.

And you said something else that I want to underline that I think is very important in the understanding of trauma, there’s the spiritual bypassing and creating spiritual flowers. But then you spoke to something else, you said that this deep spiritual practice—which is a thing in itself that I would like to talk with you at the end of our conversation because I think it’s a very profound thing—but the deep spiritual practice, like you shared about Tibetan monks and nuns, Meg, is such a tremendous resource, if it’s not a bypass to create a flowery world and a dissociated world, but it’s a deep grounded resource in the way we experience life. Then he creates clarity.

And that’s one part of your work that I very much like, it’s the direct experience and the clarity. Because in my understanding, trauma overshadows my current experience and puts a lot of past between me and you. But a good spiritual practice clears that and creates clarity in the current moment. And I think that’s something that you also speak about, and I really like your take on that.

And I have one more question for you because you spoke now about this hyperindividualism and, “I don’t want to, I’m free from everything, the free culture, and nobody will tell me anything, and I decide only for myself as if I am free of the rest of life.” And so that’s a statement that we hear very often. I heard you speak to something that I think is really profound and I would love you to share this because I think it’s interesting for this summit, also. We talk now about systems and how trauma is also, how it informs the creation of our systems, but then you, as a historian, you speak about a cycle of cultures going through different stages. And the worrisome stage is the one where we cherish sports people and I think musicians.

Meg: And actors.

Thomas: Yeah. And so I found this very interesting. First of all, deeply resonant, but also it’s interesting that we see that symptom exactly in our time, very prominently. And maybe you can speak a little bit to how cultures start to disintegrate or fall apart or dissolve when a certain quality is being expressed.

Meg: Because what we’re talking about is a historical pattern that is well established, well researched of what every human civilization goes through, from—it’s just the cycle of life—every being alive goes through a cycle of birth, flowering, harvesting, decline, and death, rebirth. The Greeks had this clear. Even Isaac Newton, when he proposed his earth-changing theories, science believed in the Golden Age that had happened long ago.

Everything is cyclical, so let’s just start with that reality. This applies to civilizations and societies as well. And there’s been enough research done now, really starting at the turn of the 20th century with Arnold Toynbee and probably Greek historians that I should be quoting here as well. People have always been interested in understanding the cycles in order, hopefully, to transcend them.

In our culture, we have a completely different model. We don’t believe in cycles, we believe in unending progress. It’s only a 300-year-old idea, but it’s so deep in many psyches, especially American psyches, that life will just get better and better because we’re the ultimate of our species, we’re at the highest point of evolution of the human species, not only all the other species, and we can make this work. Whatever mess we create, we can find a way out of it with our technology. And this is just pure bullshit basically, it’s a great deception. It’s still very prominent in everyone who right now is using the breakdown caused by COVID—or accelerated by COVID, COVID pushed us ahead, there were already these things happening, but it just gave us a big shove into the chasm of collapse, I think.

But people are already saying, “This is a great opportunity, we’re going to create a new world, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that. There’s a big opening, let’s get together, let’s organize, let’s plan.” And I just keep saying, “We first have to get through collapse, people.” We don’t know what this feels like. We first have to go through the loss of systems supporting us, the increased number of migrations that will happen because of famine. We haven’t any idea of what climate crisis is. We do have some idea, it’s just it’s too fearful to even look at.

If you really understand the cyclical nature of life, so your own youth, flowering, highly productive, highly innovative times, and then gradually the wisdom years of making sense of it all, preparing for death, we need to be respectful and applying this life process. What is so interesting about the pattern of collapse, which I did describe in detail in my 2017 book, _Who Do We Choose To Be?_, that the pattern of collapse is down to precise details. Every culture in its last, what Sir John Glubb described as the Age of Decadence, worship celebrities, they worship sports stars, actors, and musicians. Every culture does that. And when I read the pattern, I have to keep reminding myself and my readers, this is not about us, this is what happens all the time. So, what’s the value of a pattern? Well, I think you should respect it. I think you should realize that your own rejection of it is purely suicidal. We don’t stop history. History was created by human beings and we always form the same responses. And we go from the golden age of idealism and just sacrificing for the common good and gradually the merchant class takes over, consumerism rises, and every generation expects more and more while giving less and less. That is the pattern of history of human civilizations. It’s so well-documented, I’m only describing it based on wonderful research of many, many others.

So, what it has raised for me is the question of assuming we all want to make a difference. All those who are now working to grasp after, “Well, we’re going to create a new world, finally we get a chance.” I want to honor their intention and their desire to contribute and their open heartedness here. But you have to realize where we are. You can’t just decide, without understanding the general context, the greater whole of what’s going on. All of the dynamics and forces at work over which we have no control. Climate is one of them, so is greed, so is lack of leadership. We have no control that we don’t have the leaders we need at this point. And the ones who appeared, get shot down or assassinated very quickly.

So, my whole work with warriors for the human spirit is we are all people who want to make a difference. We’ve made difference in our careers, our lives up to now. But what is the difference that we can make now depends on how much we take in and perceive the context of what’s going on, all the forces at work. And so, when I apply, this is going back to my own work now, when I apply the pattern of collapse over our—courage—civilization, and it fits like a beautiful silk glove, it’s just where we are, that gives me the ability not to just feel traumatized or destroyed by grief or anger, those emotions are still part of my daily life, but I also have great clarity now.

Okay, I see what’s going on, I stay tuned into what’s going on. Now, how can I serve people? How can I relieve the suffering, relieve the fear, relieve the anxiety of people who don’t have this perspective? They’re just suffering and they have no way out, really. They don’t have these practices of awareness or spiritual grounding, they’re just suffering. And then we have the physical suffering caused by famine and floods and natural disasters.

The question is, what is the difference that we can now make with the full understanding of what’s going on in the world, opening your eyes to the world and then finding a path of contribution. So, this is not the time, seems to me, very clear to me, is not the time when we can innovate. This is the time when a lot of people are using the word _hospice_. That was a term I introduced many, many years ago. I don’t actually think that’s what’s needed now, but hospicing the dying of a civilization is something I do still feel is important. But for me now, it’s more direct, it’s how can I serve the people near me, around me that I work with, that come to me? How can I be available to them so they see in me the embodiment of our best human qualities, my presence, my ability to listen, my ability to not get triggered, my ability to really just be tuning into what’s needed here, not what do I need, but what’s needed here?

And then from that, on a daily moment by moment basis, I find deeply rich and meaningful and joyful work that I’m honoring where we are. There will be a Golden Age coming. But as the Dalai Lama said to a group of my friends many years ago, they were all despairing about, and this was in 98, they were despairing about not feeling their work was bearing fruit. And he said, “Oh no, don’t worry about this. Your work will bear fruit in about 700 years.” So, he gave a very different time perspective. So, my need actually, is for us to honor where we are. And from that realization, that clarity, we can find very good meaningful paths of contribution.

Thomas: So, that’s also what you said before when you said, “When we recognize patterns, then there is a chance to transcend them?” Can you say a few words about transcending the patterns?

Meg: When we see the pattern, we wake up to what’s going on, we encounter reality. And so the pattern gives us a lens for understanding what is going on and not being deceived by something good that just happened and I get really hopeful again and say, okay, we’re going to … “See, it’s not as bad as Meg says.” So, when you see the pattern, it helps you define what is meaningful work. I wouldn’t say we’re transcending the pattern, we’re actually honoring it, trying to see it clearly, because that gives us a road in to say, okay, how can I be useful here? How can I be useful? How can I serve? Which is the basic question we all need to be in, “How can I serve?”

Thomas: How do you see the relation of service? You said in the beginning, systems are more service-based like at the beginning when systems are emerging.

Meg: Idealistic.

Thomas: Yeah, idealistic. And people are more serving and giving to the system.

Meg: So, historically it’s like what we see in the fanatics of terrorists. They’re just giving their all, self-sacrificing their life, blowing themselves up in order to serve a cause. And the service that I’m speaking of is just the more genuine, I’m not serving an ideal, I’m serving another human being or a group of human beings.

Thomas: Right.

Meg: So, it doesn’t have that fiery blind passion. It’s a relationship, it’s a genuine relationship, human to human.

Thomas: And so, in that, because that service I consider as a deep spiritual quality, also, of service, like being able to be present, to be of service, to deeply listen, these are all cultivations of deep spiritual qualities and compassion. So, I want to hear a bit from you how, and maybe then we can wrap up the conversation, but how that your own spiritual journey or spiritual path became a foundation. Or what are the important parts of this spiritual path that become a foundation for being able to be in the world of today and, moment to moment, be of service. And maybe you can speak a little bit to that.

Meg: I’m very grateful to end this with your question. So, for many years I have been saying to leaders that you cannot get through this time without some type of spiritual practice in which you realize that you are not the only game in town, that you are participating in incredibly marvelous, miraculous planet universe, and that basically, you just need to get over yourself and realize you’re basically nothing, but you do have opportunities to use your power and influence. But you need a spiritual practice that will give you that realization that I’m not, as someone’s father said, “The axis of the planet does not run through your backbone, through your spine.”

Thomas: Lovely. I love that.

Meg: I do love that. And my own spiritual journey, which began as a mystical Christian since my youth and a deep relationship, which I credit to my English parentage, my father is English, of a deep Celtic Druid connection with the planet, with the earth, with realms beyond the visible. And I’ve learned to meditate many, many years ago, probably 97, no 87.

And then gradually woke up to Buddhism, first through the Dalai Lama and then through some very deep connections with Pema Chödrön, who is still just a great spiritual teacher and presence for so many of us. In fact, her book _When Things Fall Apart_, which she wrote in 1997, became the number one nonfiction bestseller in Washington D.C. in May. Everybody was reading _When Things Fall Apart_, but they were probably looking for simpler strategies.

My friendship with Pema became a formal teacher-student relationship for 10 years, starting in 2007. And during that time, she just said, “Meg, first of all, you have to realize we have to get rid of Meg Wheatley, we have to get rid of any sense that there is a fixed identity here.” And that was hard work with me. And she told me, “You need to start doing long retreats.” And so the first retreat I did in 2010, 2011 was 100 days, very intense. And thereafter, every year until 2018.

Through 2018, I did a two-month retreat every winter with her very careful guidance and supervision. And so I had a rapid course of development through these very intense retreat experiences, some of which were incredibly traumatic, truly traumatic because you go into these very dark realms of self-doubt and self-loathing. I had one retreat that it took me five months to recover from. And then when I did, it was a different way of being with me as a result. So, that was truly transcendent.

And then since then, since 2018, I have not been able to take these very long retreats because I’m just manifesting right now. I’m doing warrior training, I feel I really need to be present in the world. Now, I’m trying to do a week a month, and that seems to be working well. I just stop, shut down, turn off and close in for about a week. And that’s very, very restorative.

My spiritual practice is at the center of my life. And without it, I could not maintain any degree of calmness or composure or presence or clarity because I have to be able to silence my mind. At this point, I have to be able to understand that when I have these very strong emotional reactions to Trump and the incredible destruction that’s going on here, I have to calm my rage at leaders not stepping up to climate crisis, I see that very clearly and I now expect that I will have periods of rage, I will have periods of the deepest sorrow, where all I can do is weep.

And I’m not afraid of these emotions because they don’t control me any longer. When they appear, I recognize them and then I just wait for them to pass. I don’t have to do anything with my rage. Although it has given me a great sense of empathy for those who have no means to control their rage and go onto the streets and burn and protest and all the anger that’s coming out now, I understand what that feels like. And I have the ability to take control of my mind and not have to act it out. But I have great, great empathy now. The more I feel the sorrow, I have greater empathy and understanding for people whose lives are just filled with sorrow.

This is all the result of working with my mind in very deep and continuous ways and increasing levels of clear seeing. And I do this not for me, but I do this so I can be of benefit to those who are listening to me or those who are training with me, not about me at all anymore. But without my regular spiritual practice of retreat, I would not be sitting here so calmly. You should have been around me yesterday, I just had about two hours of just not being able to tolerate the cruelty and insanity of what’s going on in America right now. But I knew it would pass. I didn’t know how I was going to show up today, but this has been a wonderful conversation with you, Thomas.

Thomas: Oh, lovely conversation, I loved it. And I can feel the wisdom that you cultivated through your whole life’s journey, it’s beautiful. And it’s also deeply touching how honestly you speak about your own path and your own experience. And I think that’s a very, very deep sign of an inner congruency or authenticity that you feel comfortable resting in and sharing from, and that’s really beautiful, I love it.

And you also said something that, “In being able to allow ourselves to feel more deeply or feel deeper parts of ourselves, it enables us to do the same thing with the world and others and people that we meet and understand deeper from that place.” And maybe, because we’re coming to the end of our conversation, which I deeply enjoy, and I have so many more questions, I think I need a follow-up conversation, but if you share with our listeners, so everybody who is listening in, if you have maybe one practice or one pearl of wisdom for everybody, because we are living in this time now.

Meg: And this is not a _takeaway_, this is a real _to-do_, which is pay attention to your inner life, pay attention to your capacity, whether you have it or not, to really go quiet, to really go into what Heidegger called dwelling mind not analytic mind. Because as I said to these leaders, there is no way to get through this time of increasing pain and suffering to others, there’s no way to get through it as a useful contributor without knowing how to cultivate our inner peace, knowing how to take control of our minds. And for me, there is only one method for that, and it is meditation. So, whatever meditative practice appeals to you or comes to you, I would say, please, please do it. It’s a life saving skill at this point.

Thomas: I want to underline what you said, very important. All right, that’s very important. So, Meg, it’s so wonderful, I have so many other questions but I think we had a lovely journey throughout your life and your life’s work and the wisdom that you accumulated. And I’m so happy that you took the time and shared this with me.

Meg: It’s been very rich for me, yeah.

Thomas: Thank you very much in my name and all of our names, everybody who listens to this, and I’m sure that everybody can take a lot out of this conversation for his or her life. So, thank you very much, it was very rich.

Meg: You’re very, very welcome. May we all be well at a deep level.

Thomas: Right.

Meg: May we be well.