Ep 6 - Part 1: Retreat, Community & Leadership: A Conversation with Jim Dresher

In this episode of The PLA Podcast, host Dr. Stephanie Costa is joined by Dr. Phil Cass, founder of the Physicians Leadership Academy. Drs. Costa and Cass have a heartfelt conversation with contemplative forester, longtime meditation teacher, and PLA faculty member Jim Dresher. 

Together, they explore the value of solitary retreat, the lessons nature offers on resilience, and the power of community for physicians and leaders alike. Listeners will gain insights on mindfulness, boundaries, and agency in leadership—practical wisdom to enrich both professional practice and personal life.
 
 🐦 Produced by the Columbus Medical Association.
 🔗 Learn more at physiciansleadershipacademy.org

Produced by the Columbus Medical Association

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Transcript

AI Generated

Welcome, friends, to the play podcast. I'm Stephanie Costa, and today I'm so happy to be joined by the Physicians leadership Academy founder and president, Doctor Phil Kass. Phil, good to be with you again. And I was hoping that, you could introduce, our guests today. And, for those that that may not have met him in the past.

Share a little bit about your good friend.

Thanks, Steph. I hope that many of you have listened. Do know, Jim, but you'll there's some of you that will not. So that's fair. Jim, I think I've known you now for almost 25 years. And I can't remember the year that I asked you to be my meditation instructor, but I think we're going on 20 years there, too.

So, Jim is a long time friend. Mentor? Meditation instructor for me. And, you know, he's one of those people I dearly love. And I would be. My life has been, so much more rich because of it. Jim is a contemplative forester. You know, when we start to talk about some of the more formalities, do it.

I bet most of you have never met a contemplative forester. And what that means to me is that Jim. Jim's. Jim's practice, Jim's background. And in this work is based in the two things. One, basic goodness. Well, assumption of basic goodness about human beings and about also about enlightened society and of all the years that I've known Jim, his work at both those levels, his practice at both of those levels.

What is manifested in the world and Wind Horse Farm, and in other places are examples of enlightened society. So to me, Jim is the living example of what is practice has always been about. And and, and that's a rare thing to be able to be in relationship with someone like that. So it's a gift to have Jim here today.

And, I'm just really pleased to be able to be part of it. Welcome, Jim Dresher. Thank you.

Jim, I know, when I went through the second PLA class, I had heard about this almost mystical place called Wind Horse Farms. Can you talk to us about this area that you call home?

Yes. Thank you.

Thank you, Phil, and thanks, Jeff. Very happy to be here today. Steph asked me, just before this, how many podcasts and done. And I said, this is my first one. So very exciting. You know, this place where I live, where I can, look out the window here at, Wenzel Lake, which is a lower water level than I think it probably has ever been in the since humans have been in this place, but certainly the lowest in the 35 years that I've been here.

We have. It hasn't rained here since, May. And, we've had a couple of sprinkles that didn't even settle the dust. So it's, it's interesting to see, how all of the wild plants and animals are responding to this very unusual drought that we're in. And, I think what's remarkable to me is to see how much is thriving.

It's, most people are talking about in this drought, about how much is suffering, which is true. But I think also it's interesting to see how much is thriving and how, much kind of flexibility and life and vitality there is. And, the plants and the animals and the soil. So, so I'm living in this place. I'm very curious every day to see how these animals, particularly animals that are really dependent on water, how they're living, how they're coping.

So I'm I'm fascinated to be here and delighted to, be in this cabin in the middle of the forest, next to the river. So nice to be with both of you today and with all of you listening.

Thank you. Jim. And for those of us who have never been able to experience Wind Horse in person, can you help the listener get a visual image of what this place is like?

You know, the forest, the lake, the streams, the size of it, and kind of what it feels like to be there.

You know, thanks. Well, you know, if if I were talking to a real estate person, I would say, well, this is 200 acres of, forest that is, really old growth forest, of which there is very little left in Nova Scotia or in eastern Canada altogether.

One time someone said that forest like this is, one tenth of 1% of the land in Nova Scotia. But if I'm not talking as a real estate person, I would say this is the land and it doesn't have any boundaries. And, and the land here includes as its main artery, the La Haye River, which is the second largest watershed in Nova Scotia.

And on both sides of the La Haye River are, forested hills and with people living in them, there are farms and there are people living on, on the main road. And, people's occupations here historically have been mostly farming and forestry and fishing. But now, actually, most of the people that live here, traveled 15 minutes to, Bridgewater to work in, retail and manufacturing.

So that's kind of the, the human demographic. But the animals that live here, the wild animals and wild plants, are still pretty much living the way they have lived for, hundreds of thousands of years. Right. What animals do you have there? Well, if I were to. Even if I knew their names, if I were to name them, they would go to thousands and thousands of names.

But, usually when people ask what animals they mean, what big animals are there? And, so the big animals here are, deer, bear, coyotes, bobcats. And then we get to slightly bigger big animals like beavers, which are only like 80 pounds. And then to, smaller, water based mammals like, mink and otter and muskrats and, and that's just the mammals and, birds are much more prevalent.

But the dominant birds here are bald eagles. And, the reason I say dominant is because they're so big and they have such division. So it's a very interesting animal to, and imagine if you what if you had the vision of an eagle and you could fly over the land and at, what, maybe several hundred feet above the ground and see everything as small as an acorn in full detail.

So that's, that's a dominant bird here, but also many, many birds. And, you could say, because it's very, clear in this place and in most places, that things are changing a lot. And one of the things that's happening is, that, a lot of the animals are that were here even a few years ago are not here now.

So, I've heard ornithologists say that, 75% of the birds that were here 30 years ago are not here now. And it's even more dramatic with the insects that, most of the insects are gone. So it's easy to get up in the morning and say, oh, wow, I remember how rich it used to be. And then it's much more, interesting and delightful to get up in the morning and say, wow, look at the incredible beauty and diversity that there is here now.

So these are two different ways one could look at this, great extinction that we're in the midst of is, and I really prefer to look at it that way, to just marvel at the incredible, diversity that there is and to be able to witness and be a part of the,

This field of generosity that is that we commonly call nature. But really, it just means the way things are in the land that, every being here is offering whatever it has to offer and, taking whatever it needs to take to survive. And it's, it's a real privilege to be here and be a part of this, be one of the animals in this place.

Well, Jim, you are just oozing, and wonder and appreciation, and living in a place like this. And you've been there for a long time. How are you spending your days now?

Yeah. Thank. It's very different for me now because, I, I did a lot of work all of my life up until three and a half years ago, at which time we, transitioned this winter storm, which we, took care of for 30 years and a little more.

And, and now it belongs to the people who to whom it always belong. The indigenous people of this region, the McMahon. And once that happened, then I was so relieved of all of my business responsibilities. So I was, free to just wander and, spend more time napping in the moss. And my principal occupation now is, sitting in this retreat cabin that's in the forest, by myself and, solitary meditation practice.

And my wife, Margaret is doing the same thing in her retreat cabin or at this time in, in our home, which is just off the lake a little ways. So our pattern is, five days in solitary retreat, and then two days we're together, and, couples retreat at home. So. So that's what I'm doing. Where you're seeing me sitting now.

I'm sitting here, on this nice floor in front of this beautiful, this window looking out on the lake and the forest. Well, I'm pretty much sitting here all the time. I'm not sleeping in the bed in the next room or walking in the forest. That I'm on the river.

So our, physicians that participate in the leadership academy get accustomed to 20 to 30 minutes on the cushion in meditation.

And I would imagine the thought of five days in solitary retreat would be a bit of a stretch for most. You didn't just start doing this, but at this time in your life, what are you noticing? Because you're spending five days in solitary retreat. And then when you do reconnect with Margaret on weekends, how is that different for the two of you?

Well, that's a that's a very rich question. I think the most exciting thing about being in solitary retreat is that you don't know what's going to happen next. Yeah, I have a tendency to think, oh, well, how it is today is what it will be like tomorrow and tomorrow morning. I'm surprised because it's not. So this is really, a practice of becoming accustomed to, my own mind, which, can be delightful, humorous, scary, humbling.

I'm. I'm right face to face with all of my habitual patterns and some of those, are not very much fun, and some of them are delightful. And I share this. I say solitary retreat, but by that, I just mean there aren't any other human animals here. But I share this time with, multitude of wild plants and animals just outside my door and my window.

So I don't know whether that answers this question stiff, but, it's a delightful opportunity. I'm so grateful for the opportunity in my life to be able to do this, to be able to really become accustomed to what is the nature of my own mind. And, and then the other part of your question is, what is it like when I get together with Margaret and, she's been doing the same thing for five days, and, we get together and it's so wonderful.

It's really delightful. And we're, we've been married now for 47 years, and, it's better than it's ever been, which doesn't mean it's perfect. I, if anybody has a perfect partnership, should let me know about it. I haven't heard of it, but, yeah, it feels very much like being with Margaret, even though we're five days in our own cabins, because we're doing the same thing.

And we're. She's experiencing her mind. I'm experiencing my mind, which aren't the same, but it's the same practice. So we have a lot to share.

Lovely. I'm imagining you must have such appreciation for each other. Because of this, Phil, I know you carve out time 1 to 2 times a year to do solitary retreat. What's it like for you?

You know, I did my first solitary retreat there at winters. And, I have to tell you, it was really hard. I thought I was a person who, was comfortable with solitude. I was comfortable with myself. And when I sat in retreat for eight days. Oh, that wasn't the case. And so, it told me that I had a lot of work to do with myself.

And so I do. Yes, I do annual retreats, at least annual retreats. As part of my practice so that. I have found that, and I'm a daily meditator, but, I have found that when I go on retreat about the second day of a 5 or 6 day retreat, I shift into a whole nother place.

Both with my self, with my mind, with everything around me. And I, I come to a level that I'm not used to calming, on a regular basis. And I always end up seeing insights and things both about myself and about what's being asked of me. And so, I would be I would not having an annual retreat would not be good anymore.

I need to do that every year. And, recently just came back from winters. And, what we did there was, I hadn't seen Jim and Margaret in person for three years, and, I was desperate to see them in person. And so we carved out a week of during the day, I spent parts of my days at, the cabin, and then the rest of the time we talked, we sat by the lake and we talked for hours, and we cooked together, and we became a community together.

And a real, really important way. Yeah. So this was an interview for me. It was a a different kind of retreat, but it was absolutely perfect. It was absolutely perfect. And, Yeah, I, I will do another retreat this year as long as I'm on this earth. I will continue to do that because, it's it's the work I have to do with my own self, in my own mind, to be both the person I want to be, but also to be the person I want to be, to help and be part of, helping others.

So I'm sure there are few alumni listening to this saying, should I do a solitary retreat? Or how would I go about doing that? And you know, you know what? What a stillness practice is for a lot of our our alumni. What recommendation would you give them if they're a little bit curious about a solitary retreat?

You know, it's funny stuff.

This year, for the first time, I go down to an abbey in Kentucky, the Abbey of Gethsemane in Kentucky, where Thomas Merton lived his life. And I this kind of just my place now. And, this year we had three physicians go on retreat down there, and it never happened before. And I kind of wondered, what's that about?

And because I kept thinking, did I say something? I wasn't trying to encourage it. It was just, I think.

My experience in any way. Is that something the inside needs to say? It's time. And then the case of the three of the people physicians that went down this year, that was what happened. They came to the conclusion it was time. And, in all three cases, they came away with, because I've talked with them since then and debrief with them afterwards.

A profound experience, both and helping them settle, but also to.

Start to see how their lives could be even enriched more. Yeah. That's right.

You would use the word feel, community a little bit ago, how you and Margaret and Jim had created community the week that you were up at Wind Horse. And this podcast is, came about because we wanted to create a way for alumni to reconnect with the play community.

In that play mindset. Jim, you and I have had a conversation recently about community and your own community right up there near where you live and communities in other parts of the world. And I was curious if you could just lend your thoughts on what community means to you and, the spirit of generosity that comes, from being in community?

Thank you.

We're living in the world at a time when it's, there's a lot changing very rapidly. And, for, I think many of us, are still thinking that that somehow solutions to, harmony in our world should come top down. That, governments or, important people that have a lot of influence should be doing something.

And I think rather than that, we could think of what is a, or how do you create society from the bottom up? And I think that's from us as individuals, and it's from us as families, from us as neighbors and communities. So, that's really where my attention goes now is to, how do we I don't even want to say build community because that implies that it's not already here.

But I think it's really recognizing the natural community that exists among people. And, when that's recognized and acknowledged, then it seems to come alive and people will say, oh, community was created. It wasn't actually created. It was just noticed. And so I think that's what's important. And this is not different when we talk about, retreat and the purposes of retreat in terms of, calm, abiding and insightful investigation, these are the practices of community to like, how does a community, live in, kind of mutual harmony and, generous reciprocity and.

Acknowledge that even though we may have, different opinions about this or that, we live near each other and we share a lot. And how do we, really encourage that sharing? And I think the main, main way that and this is being encouraged in the community where I live, this this, neighborhood community is through, generosity, you know, people really just offering what if they ever have a neighborhood that just moved in, a year ago up the road, and it has, you bought a small Kubota tractor that has a loader and a and a small backhoe on the back of it.

And I said, Harry, why do you have this, or how are you using it? He said, oh, I got this because I wanted to make a relationship with my neighbors. So that's happening now. All the neighbors borrow this tractor and use it at their place. So I think that's an example of community like, not how can I benefit from this community as much as what can I offer to this community that would be enriching?

And that's actually what's happening in the so-called natural community here, that every plant and every animal is offering something, whatever they have. And it's a completely self-sustaining community. So my question is, how can we use that as a mirror of human community?

Yeah. Instead of having that mindset of taking, you know, what, if we instead started with giving

back, all right, what do rather than what do I need?

What can I offer?

Right, right. Totally shifts things and I, I would imagine I used the term appreciation before. But man really brings that into the forefront of your thinking. You have communities beyond, what is right there around you in Nova Scotia as well.

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. And I think that's important to realize. The community is not just geographical.

I, I belong to a book club that I've, 12, man. And we've been meeting together every month for 30 years. And we, we started out with 12 people. And so each of us can host one month of the year, and then now four of us have died and one more has come in. So there are nine of us now, but we're still growing.

So we we read a book every month together. Not everyone always reads the book. And I rarely read the book, but, now I'm in the book club, and I've offered to leave because they don't read the book. They won't let me go. And, we all have realized that we call it a book club. Zoom calls the BBC.

It's a boys book club. And, It's not primarily about the book. It's about getting together for one day every month. Often that's overnight. And, we, And so I'm, I know all of these men that I would not know any other way. They're not in the same occupation. They're not in the same neighborhood. They're not in the same, meditation group.

They're. I don't have anything in common with them other than that. We have become very close friends over 30 years by meeting together every month. So that's one. And I have a spiritual community, in fact, more than one spiritual community, because we have a teacher and, and, we go to see every year in Colorado. And that's a very vibrant community in Crystal in Colorado.

And, and another, spiritual community in Denmark. We go there every year. And, so and, and interestingly enough, we are kind of tangential, members of communities that are primarily, people of our grandchildren's age. And that's a really delightful one, has actually has a lot to do with, athletics and, I'm, I'm appreciating athletics through my grandchildren in ways that are that surpass the way I appreciated it when I was to arrange

so many opportunities for learning.

If you're open minded, Phil, from your experience, can you talk about how community can transcend distance?

So to me, there is the, literal transcendence of distance, and there's the. What do I, I don't want to leave with the spiritual transcendence of of, that's also present.

Before I go there, let me just simply say, in response to what Jim was talking about,

There is been research done in by the UN that has discovered that about 70% of people in the world feel they have no agency, they have no capacity to make change in their lives. That's a very scary piece of data to me. This whole area of community is a place I believe we have agency.

We can call a book club. We can call a conversation. As you know, staff, I have a good friend and she and I have a monthly call and we've been doing for 20 years.

I'm in control of that. You're in control of that. We can we do not have to be alone. And we can begin to have relationships that make a difference in our lives. And I will contend that when that happens, when you initiate a community of learners, friends, lovers, you name it, you start to create some centers of, of sanity.

And in a world that oftentimes feels very insane, we have the capacity to initiate sanity. We have a capacity to initiate coherence. We all do. Even a group of introverts can be a group of introverts. So I just want to I want to say that a course that can transcend geography. As I said, my friend lives in Tucson now, but I've been through 14 different places that she lived over 23 years and had never made a difference.

So there's all that.

But I think the most important aspect of this is the connection. Regardless of where we are, the connection to other people in a way that makes our lives fuller and more sane. And we have the capacity to do that. It's part of what I'm going to be pushing on more this year in this class with the play is how do we become more consciously, able to initiate sanity in our lives?

Could you tell? One of those just add one thing to this that, about a misconception that I had about, my participation in this community when we stopped working and decided to really spend our lives in meditation retreat. I was very hesitant to express that to any of the people in this neighborhood who are not who do not have this same spiritual practice because I thought, you know, they might consider it to be weird.

But, you know, no matter your intentions, things leak out. And everybody knew what we were doing and what we found was that, it wasn't that then. Oh, yeah. Everybody wanted to do meditation retreat. But what we found was that we were had tremendous support from all of our neighbors, both expressed and expressed verbally and expressed in other ways, like, how can we support your meditation retreat?

So then that caused me to think, oh, am I really appreciating what their their life is? And am I saying, oh, how can I support your practice? So I think I'm just kind of repeating what what Phil is saying and what you're asking. But when you bring up this subject of community I'm feeling in my body, I'm feeling a lot of kind of, vibrations, cheerful, kind of excited vibration.

Well, and I think you're demonstrating that when we show up in a way that we are so fully ourselves how well that's received by other people. And if they don't get it initially, that's okay. Just keep being you. 

That wraps up part 1 of our conversation. Thanks for tuning in to the Physicians Leadership Academy podcast. This podcast is produced by the Columbus Medical Association. We hope today's conversation has inspired and equipped you on your journey as a physician leader. For more resources and to learn about applying to the PLA, visit us at Physicians Leadership academy.org.