In this podcast, I interview mindfulness coach and mentor Sunil Joseph. Sunil has a long and interesting background as a coach, teacher, and facilitator. He specializes in engendering and facilitating nonviolent communication (NVC) and has brought these teachings to imprisoned inmates in the Bay Area, California, who are often grieving over mistakes they have made in their lives. Sunil brings a message of hope and healing to all people by emphasizing our common humanity and ability to cooperate nonviolently.
Sunil's website is here: https://www.myempathycoach.com
Note that Don Thompson is now available as a coach or mentor on an individual basis. To find out more, please go to his website www.nextpixprods.com, and use the 'contact' form to request additional information.
In this podcast, I interview mindfulness coach and mentor Sunil Joseph. Sunil has a long and interesting background as a coach, teacher, and facilitator. He specializes in engendering and facilitating nonviolent communication (NVC) and has brought these teachings to imprisoned inmates in the Bay Area, California, who are often grieving over mistakes they have made in their lives. Sunil brings a message of hope and healing to all people by emphasizing our common humanity and ability to cooperate nonviolently.
Sunil's website is here: https://www.myempathycoach.com
Note that Don Thompson is now available as a coach or mentor on an individual basis. To find out more, please go to his website www.nextpixprods.com, and use the 'contact' form to request additional information.
I'd like to welcome you to today's podcast interview, which is with a very interesting mindfulness meditation teacher and coach, sanil Joseph. I met Sanil recently through an event through my mindfulness Sangha. He has a really interesting background in nonviolent based communication. What I'd like to do is, first off, I'll just ask Sanil to talk a little bit about his background and how he came to practice mindfulness and any general thoughts he has related to his background that he feels might be informative for us to hear about. So, sanil, please start.
Speaker 1:Hey, don, thank you for having me. I feel honored to be invited to share my experiences. So mindfulness and meditation for me started in an online date back in 2004 and ended up in a Buddhist Sangha in the town where I lived. I had no idea what we were doing All these people are meditating for 40 minutes and I sat there and acted like I knew what I was doing to impress the person I was with. She was like are you sure you're okay? I was like, yeah, I'm cool. I powered my way through it, then fast forward later on. I didn't meet this person after the first date, but I was like, hey, I want to go back and check out that meditation group. That is pretty cool.
Speaker 1:And then I learned about mindfulness classes in Sacramento a nine week inside meditation class that I attended as an introductory. I was like, wow, that's awesome. And then I heard about a meta retreat at Spirit Rock, which is five days, and I went to that. So, one thing after the other, and especially after that meta retreat, I came out and I remember going back into my tech job at that time and here I was, coming back on a Monday after five days of doing loving, kindness or meta meditation, hard opening and going, wow, what is this? And I went to my desk, I sat down and suddenly I was like, oh my God, my job is different.
Speaker 1:My relationship to my job had changed because my mind had changed during the course of that week of the loving kindness retreat, which made me realize it's not the conditions of my life that are the issue, it's my conditioning, inner conditioning. That's the actual challenge and that the transformation and the opening I'd experienced during that week of meditating, my mind was different and my problems were not there. So that really inspired me. I was like, oh my God, I want to live in this way, where these things in my life are not problems and the causes somewhere, not just here, but the whole being. And so that's what inspired me to keep practicing since 2004. I wouldn't say that I've been meditating every day since, but I feel like mindfulness and meditation have been a part of my life in different ways. There's sitting, but there's also movement practices, there's mindfulness as I'm engaging in life. So even taking a moment of silence together, taking a minute of silence together and the impact it can have, so it's just part of my life now.
Speaker 2:So I'm going to go a little bit off of script now. I don't mean to throw you a curveball, but what I mean you sort of really dived into the second question that I had for you. But I wanted to ask you are you originally from India? Is that? Were you born in India? Yeah, and did that? Do you believe that, even though perhaps you did not start meditating until later in life, do you believe that, coming from a culture such as from India, did you feel that sort of had some impact in terms of moving you in that direction later in life? I mean, I just curious how you feel about that.
Speaker 1:Actually it was coming to the US and getting exposed to a more psychological form of these spiritual practices, stripped off their cultural trappings. Yes, Because in India there's so much cultural stuff built in that I found a little bit difficult to get through, and there's so much history and there's guru relationships and I was just not ready for all that and I grew up Catholic in India.
Speaker 2:So only I was kind of different.
Speaker 1:There's less than one person of India that's Christian, rather yeah. So when I came here, like when I went for that mindfulness course actually before that I remember my parents were staying with me and they had this book, the Out of Happiness, by the Dalai Lama, and one night I was going to bed they were, you know, staying with me and the book was there and I was like let me look at this book. You know, there's a happy, bald man on the cover. Let's check out what he has to say. And I read that book and I was like he's like the point of life is to be happy, and that just cut through all the other stuff that I learned growing up.
Speaker 1:So I was 23 when I came from India. I was born in India, came to the US when I was 23. And then I, you know, I was working, doing my stuff, and then I encountered this book and it just really cut through and it just really landed in my heart and this way like wow, this makes sense. You know all the Christianity that I experienced and grew up with I'm not saying it's always like that For me it was a fear-based practice and it was about threat and like if I pray I can keep the bad things away, which is important. I mean, you know, if you live in a world that is threatening, then that's good. It makes you feel safe. So, but I like this other way of looking at it. It's really about happiness. I was like, yeah, tell me more.
Speaker 2:So I've actually been a fan of the Dalai Lama for a long time Myself, and did study Tibetan Buddhism from almost from an intellectual standpoint, which his school thought can be rather intellectual, but, as you indicated, at the same time it's a very simple message of happiness which resonates with me and obviously with you and others. So, but anyway, in terms of India, I find it interesting and that I do notice that sometimes well, a is that people don't sometimes recognize that in India there are so many different religions and so many different even within Hinduism and the Vedic traditions, and I don't tend to be an expert, but it seems to me that there are so many different sects and there's different flavors and different, there's all kinds of gurus of many different stripes, and so it is such a diverse cacophony of spiritual practice which I always found fascinating. And I think some Westerners are attracted to India because they're looking for an alternative to some of the Western models of religion, I guess, and they look at India from a different perspective. And I do find that from India I see people who come from India. Sometimes it's almost like the inverses they see the United States and its culture as a path, as a more free country as a I don't know. There's various qualities that they do find with the United States and sometimes the people in the United States don't really see as clearly as people who come from outside the United States see, and I would venture to say that people going to India see India in a different way, which is I just think it's an interesting thing about human nature and hopefully we have somebody doing a lawn work, hopefully.
Speaker 2:Anyway, I'm going to go back on script. So well, actually you know what? I apologize, I was on script. I thought I was going off script but I refreshed my memory in here. I was actually on script because I had a question about India in my series of questions that I wanted to pose to you. So I know you've done quite a bit of work to engender nonviolent communication and you know that's been a passion of yours. I know for a fact. Of course, I've been introduced to you and actually introduced to a couple of practices which we can get into in a minute, because personally, when I went through the practice that you laid out, it was very impactful. It really opened my eyes to a couple of things related to how I looked at any particular topic, and again I'll get into that more in a second, but could you just define in your mind what you mean by nonviolent communication and why you feel it's important?
Speaker 1:Sure. So first of all I want to define what nonviolence means. So it's not the absence of violence, but it's the presence of compassion. And so Marshal Rosenberg, who created nonviolent communication, says you know some basic assumptions about our nature, right? So there is.
Speaker 1:In the world we live in, in the culture we live in, there is an assumption that we are sort of inherently bad or evil and we need power over us in order to keep us in check, keep our impulses in check. And whereas he came from the assumption that our nature is compassionate, you know, and we enjoy giving to each other, there's nothing more, he said, than when he goes around the world and he talks to people, it doesn't matter which culture, where, who they are. People enjoy giving to each other when they can do it freely. And the simple example in my mind is a little child, a baby, we've all seen this. There's another child crying. This child, you know, takes their own toy, goes over to the child that's crying and gives it, not because the parents have said go give you a toy to that child, right, don? You've seen this behavior, right? Who hasn't right?
Speaker 1:That, I think, is an example of our inherent compassion and nature. That doesn't have to be taught. But that gets covered over by these assumptions and certain ways of relating and thinking that Marshall Rosenberg pointed to that actually overlay that compassionate nature and it disconnects us from the life within us and the life within others. So nonviolent communication, really, you know, I like to call it compassionate or connected communication, because it really is, rather than saying it's not about violence, it is about compassion, it is about human connection. And the place where we make human connection is in our shared humanity, where it doesn't matter where you come from, who you are, we all long for respect, connection, community, belonging At the level of our human needs. That's where we are. We shift from othering, you know, like, oh, that's somebody else, they're not like me. And once we make a connection at that level, we're like wow, you're just like me.
Speaker 1:You're human, you know it's, and that touches, brings out that compassionate nature which then makes it harder to cause harm to the other. In fact, we care and we're like it's kind of like reading about somebody and it's like we can other them. You know, they're so different, but once we hear their story they become human to us. Then the natural caring emerges. I'm curious if that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Well. As a matter of fact, believe it or not, the mission statement of our production company, nextpix, had to do with creating what we were calling humanistic media, and humanistic media was defined pretty much exactly the way you defined common human values how do we find and relate to each other with or through common human values? And to look at not so much self and other but to reconcile self and other. And so, believe it or not, I mean, given the nature of Hollywood and the media in general, to try to do such a thing might seem to be a little, you know, outside the box here in the United States, let's say. But over time we were able to actually attract and produce and work with some folks in the documentary film space and also even in narrative features, that were interested in doing this kind of media, doing this kind of film.
Speaker 2:Granted, it's not Marvel Comics, it's not blockbuster material, but it does have its impact on film festivals and sort of independent, the independent market you might say, for film. So I completely resonate with that definition and I think that that's you know. When I mentioned before my interest in nonviolent setting before we started our conversation, what I was alluding to was that I felt a symphatica with your message and that that was coming out through my attempt our attempt, my spouse and my attempt to work in a media space, work within the field of media, to actualize that in a way. So I completely resonate with that and I appreciate that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just want to add to that, you know. So there's nonviolent communication, which many people have experienced, and it's like the dialoguing and you know, when you did this, I felt this and how do I resolve conflict. And there's a lot of this external, relational component of this approach which is good. There is also this spirituality of this approach, which is more of what we talked about, right. So it's not. And one of the teachers, Robert Gonzalez, talks about how, when, when we're not connected into the spirituality of NBC and we do this external thing, it becomes a technique, and so it really.
Speaker 1:I like to think of NBC, or nonviolent communication, as the spirituality of our humanity. You know, like the, the preciousness of seeing the other not as the other, but as another human being like me, and where that takes us to, you know of that. And it doesn't mean that we, our individual differences, go away. So I like Daniel Siegel, the UCLA psychiatrist. He talks about the integration of differentiated parts and he says it's not about making a smoothie which blends everything, but it's about making a fruit salad where you have the individual elements coming together to create something bigger. And that's what happens in that quality of human connection, right, and then also what happens in some of the default world we live in, where it's based on. You know the idea that we are. Inherently, you got to keep everything in check, and if you let people be themselves, somehow everything's going to be chaotic. And so, yeah, I'll pause there. There's a lot to say.
Speaker 2:Well, I think that I think that it's an interesting getting back to the inherent nature of human beings, whether or not it's nonviolent or compassionate, and I think that you're, you know when you, I agree with you completely. I mean, children are naturally I think that shows us what people are naturally they're very innocent, they're very playful, they cooperate with one another. If you put them in a room together, they'll typically I mean, sometimes they might cry and you know, there might be a little altercation, but I think as a rule they're innocent little beings. And so I think it's a process of acculturation to other cultural priorities and I think, within a capitalist society, one of those priorities is competition.
Speaker 2:And I just spent working I do some work and looking at media too and analyzing media, and I've written quite a bit about that too, and even in the book of essays I showed you, I've written about films within the context of well, what does it tell us about our attitude towards nonviolence or towards compassion or towards these things we've been talking about? And I think that some of the movies that we have do accult. They're sort of like propaganda really. I mean, they're propaganda for violence. And having said that and I have found that in my own screenwriting that I've, as I try to get projects done within the Los Angeles community that I have, some of the screenplays have dealt with violence, but I do always try to use it in a way that comments on the violence, as opposed to says this is a great thing, use it as a vehicle to comment upon the negative aspects of it. So, as opposed to glorifying the violence or whatever, which happens, I think, too much, this is a big topic right there.
Speaker 1:Because in Marshall's book he talks about this theologian, walter Wink, and Walter Wink talked about the myth of redemptive violence. And according to Walter Wink, he said if you look at all the cartoons that kids are shown, it's always about the mouse overcoming the cat with a lot of violence. And so there's this. And in the Hollywood movies too, it's all about the struggle and finally, the hero conquers good, conquers the evil through violence. So he talks about how there's this myth.
Speaker 1:There's an underlying myth across all of that that keeps propagating through Hollywood, through all our media, which is that violence actually sets things right.
Speaker 1:We need this violence, we need this punishment, and so Marshall talks about it and says that's a tragedy, because we believe that we need violence as a strategy to meet our needs, that the other thing that's at play here, that causes violence, that Marshall names all these things, is the blame idea that, oh, you are responsible for my feelings, and so and all our songs and culture says that you're making me happy, right, I'm happy with you, don, you make me happy, I love Don.
Speaker 1:And then you say something or do something I don't like, and now I'm mad at you Because it's all your fault about how I feel, and so this fundamental denial of responsibility for our actions, for our feelings. And we have talked to judge and label everything in the world along their good and bad lines. So, for instance, if you say something that I like, then I'll say Don is a good interviewer. If you say something I don't like, I'll say Don is a bad interviewer. I make it about you rather than about me and what I need, and Marshall says that's a tragic way to frame it, because now if I come to you and say something, you'll hear my judgment and my blame and that causes ultimately to the loss of compassion.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the key elements that I took away from mindfulness training that I went through myself was really not blaming other people for your reaction to anything or your reaction to life is your responsibility, it's not the responsibility of the other person. And I mean I understood this because I've studied Buddhism. I've understood it intellectually, but I think, you know, for me it's taken a while to really embody it, to really understand it at a felt level. That makes it easier for me to put into practice. Because, again, you know, I could think about it intellectually and say, well, yeah, yeah, yeah. But then when the rubber meets the road, as they say, and you're sitting there with your house and you get upset, you know, there you go. So anyway, that's to me a real benefit of mindfulness. Is that exactly what you laid out in terms of really trying to accept responsibility for your own life, your reaction to things? I mean it really. You know, nobody's telling you to get mad, Nobody's telling you to do anything. If you just take a step back and observe, you can nip it in the bud, so to speak. Not that you want to suppress it or repress it, but you know that's a whole other psychological topic, I guess A big one. A big one, yes.
Speaker 2:So now I know that you know you've done some work in prisons. I've actually had a chance to do some reading about some of your work in prisons and was very impressed and very moved actually by some of your experiences with prisoners at San Quentin. And there was one prisoner that I read about in Joe I think I got that he was the pseudonym he gave him. I think Maybe his name was Joe, but could you tell, just to explain to our listeners a little bit about what that experience was like and what it was like to work with him and to have him really grapple with and come to a sense of really awakening, in my mind at least, to his feelings and how that process went?
Speaker 1:Sure, so in my writing I don't disclose a real name or the actual prison where I had this experience to protect the identity, so I would not confirm it with San Quentin.
Speaker 1:For that reason, I can edit it out too. Oh no, it's all good, it's all good. I work in multiple prisons and so that's fine. Yeah, so what we were doing was that day we were there was a group of. This is within the context of a program that goes for a year.
Speaker 1:We were meeting every week with about 33 to 35 students and on that particular day we were working on grief and the idea being that going back to the topic of reactivity and the rubble meeting the road, so this program really is about helping the incarcerated students manage their reactivity, because for many of them, they got into prison because of their reactivity. It was just a few seconds where they flashed. Of course, there was other factors contributing to it, but the intensity of the reactivity and so this is a lot about managing, tracking your reactivity so you don't harm anyone, and one of the key components of that reactivity and when it explodes, the intensity of it is based on how much trauma and unprocessed pain you have from the past. Because, like in the present moment, if somebody says in folks one of my buttons or triggers me, it may be connected to a whole bunch of pain from my past which explodes on somebody else. So we were working on grief to sort of drain some of that fuel tank of that pain. And so I was leading a small group of about six or seven students and this gentleman, joe not his real name was reading his grief letter to his mother, and it was really powerful because it's such a vulnerable thing to process.
Speaker 1:I have a mentor, susan Shannon, who was the Buddhist chaplain on death row at Sanquin for 10 years, and she says that prisons are places of so much unprocessed grief and loss, because there's so much loss and that's what you feel when you go into these prisons. So here's Joe, he's reading, and there's all these men waiting for their turn to read, and they're all listening in a little circle, and it was really powerful because, as he was reading, what came through was well, there was, there was a tattoo he had which was a white power tattoo. I'm not going to describe the tattoo, but as he started reading, I saw the tattoo and I just, you know something in the event oh shit, that looks like a white power symbol. And I was, you know, just jarred me and and here's somebody who I'm holding space for and the group you know, and so this too, and NBC, right, so a nonviolent communication.
Speaker 1:There's this idea of an enemy image.
Speaker 1:When I other somebody and I separate from the, I don't see the humanity. And so I know, in that moment I was aware I had separated from this person's humanity. He was, he was a white supremacist, potentially, or a threat, and so you know what my body is doing, right there, right, and so I luckily had the mindfulness to notice that and and also we had other members in that small group who were black and brown, and they all seem to be fine with him. So I was like, okay, they know him, they live around him, I'm going to trust this tattoo is a relic of his past. And so I kind of leaned in to support his reading and and as he read, what I heard was the deep sadness and his love and his regret. You know that he was reading to his mother saying you know how bad he felt for all the choices he made which ultimately led him in prison, into prison, and and just as deep appreciation for how his mother had always loved him, regardless of anything that he did, you know.
Speaker 1:And so I worked with them, I guess like, in summary, to support him in you know, support him and the group in first honoring the grief that was emerging you know, because we all know this feeling when someone shares grief authentically, we can feel heavy, we can feel like there's a big blanket and we feel helpless often because it's like what do we do now? Okay, great, the grief is here, but, man, it's too much. It's like being in an ocean of grief With NVC. What we do with any emotion, including grief, is to look at especially grief. It's pointing to something that was lost. And so in NVC, what we do is we say, hey, what is the preciousness of what was lost? And in this case it was the loss of his connection with his mom, where he felt unconditionally loved, and so it was the preciousness of that love that was lost with this connection with his mother.
Speaker 1:And so, because of my training, I was able to sense into the grief and find the love that was there, and it's not an intellectual thing, it's more like you can feel it in the grief. So it's almost like this ocean of grief and in that is the preciousness. And I asked him you know, hey, I asked him, do you feel the love here in the grief? And he said yeah, and I said Okay, let's put our attention on that love. It doesn't make not to put the grief away.
Speaker 1:But when we can connect with the preciousness in the grief, it changes the quality of the grief. So it's not just grief based on loss and pain, but it's grief, grief with this, with the love, and it's a different quality of grief. And then we see this is called mourning, and when you touch that, touch the preciousness in this grief, it starts a process of healing which is alchemical, which has its own life, and so it's yeah. So as I'm saying all this, you know, I just feel the sacredness of what I get to support in prison, but these men who trust me to hold them in such vulnerable places, you know, it's just an honor and privilege for me.
Speaker 2:When I was reading the story I was very moved and I thought to myself what was interesting was that light is getting kind of stranger.
Speaker 1:To be feeding out.
Speaker 2:Yes, I'm going into an altered state of awareness. It's funny. We'll just leave it. Leave it do what it's going to do. I guess what I found fascinating was a couple of things, was the? This is kind of freaking me out here.
Speaker 1:You're like an apparition now.
Speaker 2:I'm like a ghost interviewer.
Speaker 2:So, anyway, what happened was is that I was very moved and I realized how much I related to him actually, in a way, and I thought to myself you know there's so there's such a really, in a way, there's only a scintilla of difference between a person that doesn't land in prison and a person that does.
Speaker 2:Now, there's a lot of difference, obviously, but in a way it's just when they were triggered, they reacted in a certain way, violently perhaps, perhaps even to the state of performing a crime violently against somebody, and so that's, that's a big difference, of course, but in a way it could just be a very transitory. It could just be a few minutes or a few moments that they were triggered and went off, went over the edge that caused the whole event to happen. I'm not saying that it wouldn't happen some other time, in some other context, but basically, it's just to me a fascinating thing, how it's just a scintilla of difference really, and I really relate it to the fact that is. I mean, I'd stop my video here for a second. Now I see what the problem is the sun has cracked through the window, oh, nice.
Speaker 1:Look at that in the back. The sun was coming through.
Speaker 2:That's what it was. That was a true. So the sun wanted to talk to us, basically, I guess. So I related to his feelings about his mother, which I think a lot of people share, that they have very warm feelings towards their mother. They feel like their mother was very supportive, and I thought to myself, again, getting back to common human values, there was a point of relationship with this person, even though he was so, he had ended up in such a different place simply by choosing, making different choices.
Speaker 2:And mindfulness ultimately, in my interpretation, is it comes down to choice. It comes down to empowering us to really know that we have choice, and I think that some people almost doubt that they have choice. They think that the emotion arises and it's almost like an instinctual thing. It's like, well, animals don't have a choice. I mean, if the animal sees a tiger, they're going to run, so they don't have a choice, right, don?
Speaker 2:But I think that in terms of human beings, in terms of our modern culture, and the reality of being a human being, is that we do often have choices, and I think that's demonstrated obviously through people, that they react in a way that causes them to make a bad choice and the ramifications can be obviously tragic, and I think that they can be tragic in a personal level for most people, simply on the level of, well, are you hitting your spouse, are you slapping your spouse, are you doing something violent? And it might not land you in jail, but that doesn't make it a good thing. It's something that you shouldn't be working on and getting over Anytime when couples physically react to any emotion or anything like that, or even vocally. So anyway, I'll leave it at that. I kind of got on my high horse.
Speaker 1:I chime in there because there's a few different things that you said that touched me. One was how much you related to this to Jill and how much it brought up your own story and your own relationship with the mother. And to me, like you said, this is where you feel you shared humanity and it doesn't matter if he's what his life circumstances are and yours are. You identify with them because you feel your common humanity. And that's what good media will do is portray characters in ways that you go wow, you see yourself in them and I think that's also when you see the common humanity and what they try to do is I mean, I wouldn't go down that tangent and that ultimately, is so beautiful Because when we get to that place, seeing them as human.
Speaker 1:The other piece of this is is the awareness of the different kinds of violence that we perpetuate. So if, like, there is so many different kinds of violence and you only get locked up for certain kinds of violence, so you know energetic violence, emotional violence, you know verbal violence and so on, and I've been reactive, I've heard people right, but, like you said, I haven't committed a crime. So when I go in and I sit with my students it's. We've all committed acts that have harmed other people and you're still a human being. I'm still a human being and I don't want to be remembered for the worst thing that I did the worst day of my life. There's more to me than that, and so I'm really there to reflect the humanity.
Speaker 1:Yes, they did something. It's important to be accountable for it, but we do it in a way that's aligned with restorative justice principles. So, rather than condemning them and saying only if you're punished again, the redemptive use of violence and punishment, no, if, when you take into account how you've harmed somebody else, you've taken accountably. So in my mind, that's the accountability of your own heart for harming another human being, and once somebody does that, I trust that they are less likely to reoffend because they actually care about, they've actually touched into their own heart and why it matters to not do that again. More than punishment is going to motivate them to change.
Speaker 2:That's so important. I mean, if they do have a good chance of parole in some cases and they can get out of it and just not having a situation where they would have the same pattern happen over again. And so I think, to the extent that you can work with prisoners to help prevent that, it's so important. I think it's wonderful work. I really commend you for it.
Speaker 1:I just feel really blessed. I never thought I'd be doing this kind of work. It's contributed to my own healing because during the nonviolent communication classes and sitting around talking about my feelings, I always was like, oh, I think I'm too soft a guy to be doing something like this. The truth is, and this is where we also in this program, talk about toxic masculinity or the ideas of masculinity which get us in trouble, and the ideas of what men are, women are and gender roles, and we've all been harmed by these very narrow stereotypes of what a man is, what everyone else is, and it's been healing for me to realize, hey, you know, this is needed too. It's not just that image of that big, heroic male figure that we've taken to be the man you know, the real man. And no, we're all needed. And it's been healing for me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that in our current political environment that we have an example of that. We don't have to go down that route too much. We all know who we're talking about. But it's incredibly it's almost like a movie script that we as a culture in the United States are being presented with a situation which is a very, very big cultural choice I think that we are confronted with and hopefully we get beyond it. I hope that we will.
Speaker 2:The other thing is, I also was thinking about my dad in terms of toxic masculinity. My dad was actually quite a wonderful person in many ways. He was a very sensitive person. In many ways he's an artist and he had a very sensitive side to him. But he would also create a mask of this angry male that he would bring up periodically in order to get what he wanted, in order to stop somebody from doing something or just to move a situation in the way he wanted. He would use his masculinity and his anger and I found that with my getting back to my mom a little bit, she would recoil from that in a way, and I think that all of the sons, in a way, were coiled from that anger.
Speaker 2:But one will find that when you're out gone, your parents are gone and you're out in society, you might revert to such a strategy because it was a learned thing and I think that my practicing Buddhism has really helped me, of course, deal with that. And I wouldn't say I wouldn't put myself at the same level with my dad. But I know that there was a period in my life, particularly when I was trying to move up in my career, my corporate world, that I would turn on the masculine anger once in a while to get something done, and it was a window of time in my life and it's gone. I don't do that anymore. I recognize that pattern and I think that it's something that many men have to deal with.
Speaker 1:That's exactly right and that's the work we're doing inside too is this program looks at how were these men harmed by toxic masculinity?
Speaker 1:They had fathers who raged and maybe were violent, and their fathers of the older generation had the idea that they needed to dominate to be a real man.
Speaker 1:So these guys often got beat up or whatever.
Speaker 1:And then when they do the reflections, they usually look at how they harmed the next generation or somebody else, maybe their spouses or their partners or their kids and it's more often than not the students wake up and go. When they do this reflection they go oh my God, I see that I harmed, say, my kid, because of my beliefs, of what I needed to be as a father and how I was harmed. And then they see the cross-generational transmission of this what you talked about so beautifully, which is this transmission of this way of being and the pain and also this idea in society that as a man, you need to be these kind of ways and this a man has to be powerful and the way you are powerful is by being raging and like domination as opposed to connection, and you've got to have power to get your way and all these ideas, and this is what a weak man is, and then these are the ways women can be, and they should not be powerful like big, and this causes us harm. It's harming all of us.
Speaker 2:It's really, it is a life's work to deal with it and within your own psyche and then, as you're doing, or I'm trying to venture out there and do as well as to try to be a little bit of a positive influence out there to try to counter that and hopefully, but again we do see that it has this entrenched sort of representation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and to bring it back to novel and communication, what happens when I get out of this? And initially when I studied in normal communication, I was like there's something wrong with me because I'm sitting in groups, circles of mostly women talking about my feelings. So this again is the idea of what a man is. So my, the encoding beliefs in me were like I should be watching football. What's wrong with me? There's something wrong with me for being here talking about my feelings. Thank God I didn't.
Speaker 1:I challenged that, I stuck with it so I can be in service. So I guess what I was wanting to say is it took me, it had to challenge my own belief systems to be able to open to the range of my humanity, the full range, not the narrow BS they tell us men are capable of. And also there's BS story which you know I get angry about men can't feel or men don't feel. It's that's BS. We are taught something and we are taught not to feel, not to express, hence we show we turn up this way. But so for me, nvc has been a healing and a reclamation of my humanity, because it's it's this approach which says, yes, you have all feelings, yes, you have all these needs and the more I open to it, I let go of these ideas of what a man is. You know all this stuff. I'm a human being and that's liberating, you know. So that's how I'm doing this work, one of the ways I'm doing this work.
Speaker 2:It is. It is, it is very liberating and, again, the work is certainly important and I'm happy that there are people such as yourself that have taken the really, you know, it takes some courage. Frankly, it always takes courage to stand outside of the prevailing consensus, and the prevailing consensus of what a man should be, as you've described, is definitely, you know, still very pervasive out there. I mean, it is slowly changing in some ways and certainly I guess the messaging in some ways is changing, but then psychologically and the reality of it on, you know, in life, seems to be a very slow process. Sometimes it can be slow, which is too bad. I mean, I don't know if we have the time.
Speaker 2:Sometimes, you know, I think that we, humanity has backed itself into a corner in a way, and that we need to make some rapid changes on a couple of different levels, one of them being the relationship of humanity to the earth, to the environment, and that a lot of it stems, I feel, from all of these issues that we've been talking about in terms of this need to dominate, and this need to dominate, the really is part and parcel of what, frankly, coming out of Greece and the Greeks and the Greek dramas, and I deal with that, you know, I deal with that myself, that whole lineage of storytelling which does have its benefits but it has its downside. But I won't bore you with that right now.
Speaker 1:Can I just add a little bit to that, because Marshal Rosenberg, the creative novel communication, talks about domination systems which I think again Walter Wink the theologian talked about, and he talked about how those systems really were set up to have a few people at the top control the masses below right and and our language reflects that and that is in ouronly email that oneOf and so non-violent communication is trying to change the way we speak and think and relate, to make it a power with a collaborative culture. But our language, our current language, encodes the top-down.
Speaker 1:Yes way of relating, so I just want to name that.
Speaker 2:That's, and the. What I always think about in terms of the east, almost from a visual perspective, is, uh, you've probably seen it, the, the shri yantra, which is like it has the, the, the, the, this A, you might say, and then the v, and then the v and the a come together with a dot in the center, and to me that's, that's an archetype for the balance that we need between this top-down masculine a With the feminine V. I mean, it's almost like it's an archetype of the mountain and the valley, and then all of that implies is multiplicity and singularity. You know, there's various aspects. It's a really powerful archetype I feel To, to to think about.
Speaker 2:I mean, maybe I got a little bit, that's a character, but I think it speaks to what you're saying is that you have this imbalance, I think, where you have this top-down approach, which it is still so dominant, and I think it comes from a fear of Surrender to what is Considered to be dangerous, which would be nature, which would be the forest, yep, the, the evil things out in the woods. You know, it's almost like we're at the tribal fire and we're still afraid to just step away from it and look out into the dark and see those, hear those animals. I mean it's just, I think there's almost a maybe, perhaps even a genetic encoding. I I don't know, but hopefully I didn't go off the. I'm not trying to, no, but that's simple.
Speaker 1:It's about unity, right and wholeness, versus just identifying with one part of our nature and Sure, that works. That's what the world teaches us. You act this way, like you said, you stomp and you fume. You get your way. People will respond to anger.
Speaker 2:You're right.
Speaker 1:It is harder to be to not use that strategy to get your needs met, and that's where many of us don't want to beam that range of experience because it feels vulnerable and Threatening you feel, so it actually takes more strength to go there and to yield than to be the stomper. So I think it's about you know, unity and all of us expanding into our full expression and and discovering what it is. I think that's what makes life rich is the experience of it, you know absolutely I'm with you.
Speaker 2:So Now we've come at the the top of the hour for our interview. It went kind of by kind of quickly. I Actually love speaking with you about this, these topics it's. It's really wonderful To. I feel we have a lot of sympatico, of course, and I just wanted to wrap it up by just saying is there anything else you want to to say about mvc or your work? How do people get in touch with you? Do you have a website? That that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, yeah, it's been a great conversation. I wasn't expecting To go into all these topics and it's really rich, right? So, um, yeah, my website is my empathy coach dot com. Um, all one continuous word and, yeah, I think I'll just come back to end by saying that you know, nonviolent communication, mindfulness, all of these for me are ways back to our humanity and you know the humanity around us, and when we can connect with that, we operate in a very different way and and that's violent, I believe. So thank you for this opportunity, don, has been wonderful chatting and, yeah, thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thank you, sunil, and I'm sure we are passable across again. Of course we'll be back and forth on getting the interview information to you, and so, yes, thank you again and, um, we'll get this out there to the, to the audience, and you know, I'm sure they're gonna get something out of it. Thanks for that All right, bye, bye, bye you.