How to Begin Your Journey to Wholeness with Parker Palmer

of depression, that we're listening to true self. Welcome to the one you feed throughout time. Great tinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true, And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back

and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good Wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Parker Palmer, and author, educator, and activist who focuses on issues in education, community leadership, spirituality,

and social change. Parker is the founder and senior partner of the Center for Courage and Renewal. He's also the author of many books, including A Hidden Wholeness The Journey Toward an Undivided Life. This episode is brought to you by Casper Mattresses. Go to Casper dot com slash wolf and use the promo code Wolf to save fifty dollars off your first purchase. And here's the interview with Parker Palmer. Hi, Parker, Welcome to the show. Thank you, very good to be

with you. I'm happy to have you on UM. I've had a chance to explore some of your work, particularly in depth over the last week, and I think there's a lot that that really spoke to me about it, and I look forward to getting into some of those details. Before we do that, though, let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson, and he says, in life, there are two

wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed, hatred, and fear. And the grandson stops for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, grandfather, which one wins, And the grandfather quietly replies, the you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well.

I think it's a fascinating story, and I suppose paradoxical reactions to it. As you may know, paradox is a big word in my vocabulary, and we will probably return to it. On the one hand, I agree completely that we have these contrary forces inside of us, the forces of light on the forces of darkness, and a lot

depends on which one we feed. Um. I. When I first read that parable years ago, I thought of Abraham Lincoln's appeal to the better angels of our nature, and of course, in doing so, he was also implying that we have lesser angels in there as well. So On

that level, I'm I'm with the parable. On another level, I wrestle with the employ cations a little bit in the sense that but I think that in the long run, human wholeness has a lot to do with integrating the light and the dark in us, rather than trying to overwhelm one with the other, rather than trying to imagine that it's possible to drive out the darkness. It seems to me that we always live with our with our shadows, partly because they're the hardest things for us to see

in ourselves. We can we can see the shadow in another person quite easily, Oh he or she is greedy or or resentful or angry or whatever, But we have a harder time seeing that in ourselves. I want to find wholeness as in this way, wholeness is not perfection.

Wholeness is about embracing all of what we are and and acknowledging that our darkness is as important as as our light, and sort of holding that in our in our conscious awareness as we go through the day, um so that we can kind of manage our lives in that complicated force field. So like most stories are parables or metaphors that one sort of opens up a whole raft of questions for me that I find very fruitful. Yeah, I agree. I think it's on the surface it's very straightforward.

You kind of get it and it's about choice and then but as you go further into it, there really are these these things about how do we work with those bad wolf part of ourselves? You know. I think it's like as a parable it's just at a certain point you're like, well, it's not a literal story, so you can't take it that way. But the show has really spent a lot of time, I think, exploring how we work with with both parts of that. And you've

got a number of books. I spent time mainly with two of them, Um, And we'll start with the first one that I read, which is called Hidden Wholeness, the Journey towards an Undivided Life. And this really gets to kind of what you were just talking about in the Integration of the Wolves. Now, I have to say that anybody that starts a book with a Leonard Cohen quote is always going to be a favorite of mine. Um, And you start the book by by quoting a line

of his from the song The Future. It says the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold, and it has overturned the order of the soul. And what I'd like to start talking about is this idea of the soul. It comes up a lot in your writing, and I was wondering if you could explain what that means to you. Well, I'll take my best shot. Um. I hesitated a bit because I think ultimately soul is a word that points toward a mystery which we know by many names, and

for which no one has the right name. The closest I've ever been able to come to what I might mean by soul is the bing and human being. But other traditions name it in other ways. Of Secular humanists call it identity and integrity. Buddhists call it big self. Thomas Merton called it true self. The Hasidic Jews call it the spark of the divine in every being. I've always said that it doesn't matter to me what you call it, since no one knows its true name, and

fighting over the name seems utterly nonsensical to me. But it does matter to me that you call it something, because if you don't, if you don't have a name for it, by way of acknowledging its existence. It's it's reality. Then it seems to me we end up treating ourselves and each other as objects to be manipulated or manufactured into whatever shape the culture wants us to take, or empty vessels to be filled with other people uh knowledge

and quote, wisdom and guidance. So I think the naming of this mystery within the human self is a way of making a deep vow to every person, because every person has this thing called soul, whatever whatever it may be. I think for me, um, the discovery of soul happened under extremely stressful, difficult, dark circumstances, namely my own journey into clinical depression three times in my adult life. And whenever you'd like, I'd be glad to talk more about that.

We don't mention depression on this show never since you're talking about human experience. I'm sure you never do. I'm a fellow suffer, and it it comes up often. How long ago was your last, you know, major episode? And I'd be curious how much of it sort of happens in a more minor level for you when you're not in the middle of a major episode. Is it kind of an on off switch or is it is there

a gradient there for you? Well, I think like most of us, I you know, I swing through a certain range of moods day by day, like weather moving through. But as all of us who have experienced clinical depression, no, it's not at all like being sad or feeling bad. Um. In fact, one of the features of depression that's so terrifying is you really can't feel anything. Your your emotions are gone. So my my most recent experience was what twelve years ago, when I was sixty five years old.

My two prior experiences were in my forties, my early forties, and then my late forties. So the one at age sixty five I'm now seventy seven. The one at age sixty five took me by surprise. But what I what I mean the pearl of great pride in these very long months long um journeys underground. I used to say depression is like being lost in the dark, but I eventually refined that to say depression is like becoming the dark,

which is quite a different thing. Um. You know, when when you're in depression, you don't have that capacity to take the balcony view of yourself and say, oh, I see what's going on with me as we can when we're angry or having other sort of normal range emotions. And once we can get in the balcony and get a look at ourselves, we can often find a way out. But when you've become the darkness, you don't have any outside view of it, you don't have any leverage on it.

But I discovered in depression, and of course some of this is in the aftermath or on your way out, discovered that the faculties that I normally depend on we're dead and gone. And there are four of them that I at least depend on with some regularity. One is my intellect, another is my ego, another is my emotions, and another is my will. Well, in depression, you can't think your way out of it, so the intellect is useless. Your ego is shattered. You have no sense of self,

so that doesn't work either. Your emotions, as I've said, are dead and gone. You can't feel anything, and your will power is limited to the tiniest, tiniest steps, like getting up at eleven o'clock instead of eleven thirty, being able to to face the day just a little earlier. And it was under those circumstances that I began to a sense from time to time that there was this little tiny spark of life way back in the thicker it's of the dark forest that my life had become,

that wanted me to stay alive. I came to liken it to a wild animal, which is very very widely and can can tough, and can survive where there's little to eat and little encouragement, but like the wild animal, is also very very shy, And I became very interested, under those circumstances in what it might be like to create conditions where the soul or whatever you want to call it, could put in a more regular appearance than it does in normal, everyday society, where we create so

many conditions that that drive the shy soul back into hiding. As I like to say, we all know that if if we want to see a wild animal out in the woods, the last thing we want to do is to go through the woods shouting for it to come out. What we want instead is to sit quietly at the base of a tree, breathe with the earth, and after a while the thing we're seeking may put in an appearance. We may catch it only out of the corner of our eye. But once you've seen it, you won't forget it.

And and that was the image that came to me as I emerged from the depths of depression. I love that analogy about the wild animal, and will come back to what are some of the ways that you've worked to create a potentially you know, drawing the soul out um you say that, I'm just going to quote you. Hear that you So, the divided life is a wounded life, and the soul keeps calling us to heal the wound.

Ignore that call, and we find ourselves trying to numb our pain with an anesthetic of our choice, be substance abuse, overwork, consumerism, or mindless media noise. Such anesthetics are easy to come by in society that wants to keep us divided and unaware of our pain. So, from your perspective, is the divided life? Was that behind what's happening in the depression sense?

For you? I think so? I mean when I talk about depression, as I think you know, Eric, I'm always eager to say that depression comes in many forms, and those who specialize in studying and trying to treat depression are the first to say that there's a lot of mystery surrounding what's in wise of depression, So I'm reluctant to make huge generalizations as if they apply to everybody. Some depressions are strictly genetic or related to brain chemistry,

I think, and others are highly highly situational. And then what gets what gets really confusing, is the no matter which end of the spectrum you start at, the two can intermingle. So if you start with a situational depression or something in your life where you're living a divided life and something is troubling you so deeply that you're losing sleep and you develop radical insomnia, that can change

your brain chemistry in a way that creates depression. On the other hand, apart exactly, and if you start with a genetically based depression that distorts your perceptions and your behavior, then you're going to end up in situations that worse than it. So it's a it's a tricky thing to unrample.

I think there is in my background, my family background, some genetic predisposition toward depression um and I think that in my case, the balance of factors were more situational than a metic or biochemical h So, one of the things that I have discovered as we've done this show, when I think about personal development or this whole area of the soul of spirituality, there's so much thought and writing and literature on that need to go within, um,

the need to understand our thoughts, to meditate. And as I've done this show, certainly we've talked a lot about that, but I've been surprised by how often we've talked about you know, people have brought us back to the importance of other people. And one of the things that I found most profound in your writing was the way that you very over and over drive home this idea that it's not an either or thing that we really need in order to nurture the soul. We really need both

the community and solitude. Can you explain a little bit more why both those things are so critical. That's a very important point, certainly to me, and I'm glad it is to you and apparently to other guests on your show. Um. You know. Dietrich bon Hoffer was a great German theologian who took a stand against Hitler and was executed just before the end of the war. He wrote a wonderful book called Life Together, and the life he lived kind of gives him a lot of street cred in my mind.

And what he said, and one of the great sentences in that book is this, let the person who cannot be in community be aware of being alone, and let the person who cannot be alone be aware of being in community. And I think that behind that is this very important paradox that we need to first of all, But you could start in either place. But I'm going to start first with the inner journey and with listening to the voice of true self or the voice of

the soul. I'm a Quaker, and as we Quakers would say, the voice of the inner teacher. Um, that's obviously critical. But as you know, and I know, and anyone who's suffered from depression knows, there's something called the voice of depression that speaks lies about who we are. It tells us that we're worthless. It tells us today is the day to take your life, because there's no whole left. And if you journey with depression, you have to fight

that voice off with some regularity. In other words, we have multiple voices within us, and it's not always clear even when we're not in a state of depression that we're listening to true self. Perhaps we're listening to a voice of resentment or hurt or agreed, or of simple anger. So it's important to have a community in which to test, to sift and Winnow what it is you're hearing from within?

And I don't mean a community that that listens to what you have to say and then tells you you're right or you're wrong, or you're half right and half wrong. That doesn't work. I'm talking about a community of discernment where we have a chance to speak our truth, whatever we may think it is, into the center of the circle, or or into the space between us in a in a relationship and be deeply listened to by the other person and get the gift from the other person of honest,

open questions. One of the ground rules in the work I do, which I know we'll be talking about a little later, is no fixing, no saving, no advising, and no correcting each other. Um. This is what creates safe space for the soul. And if you think about those four words correcting, advising, saving, and fixing it. If you think about those four words correcting, fixing, advising, and saving each other. Um, those are the things that we mostly

do when we listen to other people. Somebody comes to us with the problem, and we may listen for a few minutes, maybe a little longer if we've recently been to a listening workshop, and and then we'll say, well, you know, I I read this great book on that subject. Why don't you go read it. I'm sure it would do a lot of good. Or there's some exercises you can do, or a diet you ought to go on,

et cetera. Instead, we learned in the work I do to ask each other on us to open questions, which are the kind of questions that hear other people into deeper and deeper speech, and that cause us to pause and wonder, is that the voice of true self I've been listening to, or is it something else? An honest, open question which has serves no purpose except to enable us to have a deeper conversation with ourselves, and which can only come in community, whether that's a community of

two people or ten people or fifty people. That's the kind of of inquiry that constitutes communal discernment of the sort I'm talking about that can help us sort out the wheat from the chaff in our own internal dialogue. To me, this is a very important principle and it explains why bon Hoffer said, if you can't be in community, watch out about being alone, and if you can't be alone, watch out about about being in community. When when you look at that, the second half of that, if you

can't be alone, beware of being in community. Aloneness is one of the conditions under which we we come home to ourselves, and we can show up in community as who we really are, not as some well Thomas Martin, he used a great phrase. He said, most of us live lives of self impersonation, so we can show up in community is who we really are, rather than as

self impersonators. So I'm I'm fascinated with this paradox of solitude and community and with how it is that we take our our discernment of our own truths in solitude and community, how it is we take that into the larger world of social and political action or simply of neighborly concern. There's so much in what you said there.

The first is the process you're describing as something that you call a circle of trust, and your book The Hidden wholeness really explores that in great, great detail, and I would encourage people to definitely check that out. UM will have a download on our site at one you feed dot net slash Parker that will have some of that, and we'll have links to your site and all the

great things that are available out on your site. I wanted to explore a couple ideas within the circle of trust that I thought was interesting because this idea of you know, we're not going to advise other people, are not going to fix them. As I was listening to you, I was thinking, well, in some cases, that's exactly what we're asking for and what we want. Like if I come to someone and say hey, like I I coach people who come to me and say, hey, I can't seem to uh, I can't seem to get a daily

exercise practice going right. In a situation like that, you know, very concrete advice can be really useful. But what you're talking about is really going into that deeper level of discovering who we are, um to reaching our soul. And you you talk a lot about the thing that I think is so important in what you're saying there is that that answer is only going to come from ourselves.

You know. It's that idea of having an inner teacher, and that that the circle of trust in these methods you talk about are really there to get us in touch with our own inner teacher, and that's why it needs the quiet and the respect and the safety of that circle of trust. Absolutely, of course, there are circumstances when some sort of advice is both wanted and helpful.

I do think that sometimes that we have a tendency generally to give advice, whether it gets wanted or helpful or not, partly because in everyday life giving it gets us off the hook. You know, you come to me with your problem. I'm kind of mentally looking at my watch and thinking, I'm kind a busy day out of

me and a lot of things to do. If I can give Eric a piece of advice about this, I can kind of wash my hands of any further responsibility for him, because if he takes my advice, he'll he'll be fine, and if he doesn't, that's his problem, not mine, right, So so advice giving can be a form of of brush off and and one of the big dangers about the frequency with which we give advice is is the fact that it's it's kind of like giving CPR to

people who actually can breathe for themselves. Um, And when we give them CPR, then we're actually inhibiting their own capacity to breathe. There are people who need CPR because they can't breathe, but when we're giving it in the

inappropriate circumstances, it's not helpful. And I think the other thing to always remember about our advice, and I'm sure that this is something you think about a lot as a coach, is that a person may ask for advice, but if there is not a readiness within that person to receive it and let it sink in and then implemented,

the advice is not going to help. And and so anything we can do two to let the answers to that person's problem arise from within that person, I think that then the greater service we're being to that to that individual. Yeah, yeah, there's no doubt that that when people can work their way to the answer themselves, they're much more likely to buy in and do it. And I just I really like the circle of trust idea, and I would if we had more time, I would

like to really go deeper into it. But I it's I know, for me, it's one of those things I'm going to keep spending some time on and look at. And I've looked at a couple of the retreats that you do, and so I you know, I may may go to one of those because I think of myself as somebody who listens well. But but your book and the way that you approach this is very different than most of what we're taught, and it resonates as as

very true. And I thought that part where you talked about the fixing and advising others is a way to get ourselves off the hook. Is a is a really profound idea that I had never thought of before. Yeah, I'm quite sure that professional coaches and counselors don't do that, but I think in the ordinary, everyday life we do a fair amount of that. Oh yeah, it's a good

cautionary idea to keep in mind. You know, a classic case would be a parent with a child who's who's just come home from a hairy day at work and looking forward to it, you know, a relaxing evening and here comes your teenager with a terrible, terrible problem. Well, there's you know, there's an inevitable human tendency to just want to get to get this exchange over with as quickly as possible. And so I think we all recognize that we need to cut ourselves some slack about that.

I'm a great believer in self forgiveness because I've screwed up so often. That is the advantage of screwing up as often as I have. And it sounds like you have as you you really get you have to get good at self forgiveness and forgiving others. Yep. And you've got to make all of life a learning journey, or as Gandhi said, experiments with truth and then you then

you have to learn from the failed spyraiments. One of the things that I wanted to go deeper into is I want to move from your book on the Hidden Wholeness and go to Healing the Heart of Democracy. Although I find a great deal of commonality between um, I find a lot of the concepts carry over in those books. But obviously when you wrote that book, we weren't in

the middle of the election circus we're in now. Is anything that you wrote in there, or do you feel any different or anything that you would add to that book after kind of what you're you know, what we've been watching this year? Yes and no. Um. And as I'll say in a minute, in fact, I have been sort of in a way adding pages to the book with some things I've recently written and published. Um, it seems to me that the fundamental principles I laid out

in that book are still very sound. And one of the things that that's happening right now is something that's happened for a very long time in our American political discourse,

but now it's happening on steroids. And what I'm referring to is is this, as I say in the book, when Americans talk about politics, and this has been true for many, many years, that we almost always talk about them, about those people in Washington, d c. Or in the state capitol who are either screwing something everything up or or on occasion whom we regard as heroes for taking the right stand. But whatever it is, we're always talking

about people who aren't in the room. And when I talked to audiences about this, I say, you know, when was the last time in your personal life, or in your work situation, or in your congregation or neighborhood, when is the last time that talking about someone who isn't there has solved any problem, As we all know it doesn't. In fact, it's better classified as gossip than as political discourse or as just letting off steam, and we all

understand it on that level. But my belief is that in a country founded on the on the fundamental premise that this is all about we the people, that this is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, we the people need to get our act together. And what that means is learning to talk across the lines that divide us on a local level, um. Not to talk about them, but to talk with each other, um.

And to do that across lines of division in a way that would at least give us a fighting chance to to a rough consensus on a few items of the common good, so that we can articulate that common good to people in power and hold them accountable to it more effectively. I'll put this in slightly different terms. We have succumbed for a long time to the divide and conquer tactic that is often used in American politics by people who wish to seize power at high levels

of political office. And you know they're very very good at that, and our media play along with it in ways that divide us artificially. It seems to me that you know, if if you read the screaming headlines in the newspaper, or the streaming headlines on CNN, or that flow across your computer screen, you know, you would think that the people who live up and down my block and the people who live up and down your blocker at each other's throats most of the time. But that's

not true. There is there. There is when you drill down to the local level, to the level of we the people, there is a surprising amount of consensus um and I can tell micro stories or macro stories about that. Let me tell a macro story, since those tend to be more impressive to people who are who are cynics,

or who have given up on this possibility. In American political life, a lot of people are unaware of the fact that sixteen states have now called by referendum or legislation, have now called for a constitutional amendment to overcome the Supreme Court decisions called Citizens United, which gave big money extraordinary overweening power in our political process. Most people who have looked at American politics have said the game is lost.

Once the Supreme Court established the Citizens United Laws, it was no longer possible for ordinary people to get their voices heard in the American political process. But sixteen states have now called for a constitutional amendment, and another six team have such calls in the pipeline, and that's moving in on the two thirds of necessary among the states to eventually pass that constitutional amendment in the Congress. Now, we're a long way from passing a constitutional amendment. That's

not the argument I'm making. The argument I'm making is very simple. The calls that I'm talking about, which have either happened or in the pipe why would never have happened if there had not been a broad conversation and a broad coalition across the political spectrum left, center and right of people who, despite the fact that they range from progressive Democrats to members of the Tea Party, are

in agreement that chrony capitalism is a bad thing. That it's a bad thing, whether you're left, right or a center, to have a Congress that is essentially bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations and other folks who have benefited from Citizens United. So is that conversation possible. You bet it is. And one of the best macro examples

is the one I just gave. What I found really interesting about that section of your book was we tend to think of the divide in the political spectrum between right and left. You know, that tends to be where we draw up our lines, and and think that that's really where we're divided. And and you said that a more use maybe maybe useful isn't the right word. But a different division to look at is the division between the people who have given up and think they can't

do anything politically and absolutely believe that. And I've never, you know, found an activist at any point on the plitical spectrum with with whom it wasn't possible to find at least patches of common ground. Because we begin by sharing the sense that we are part of we the people, and we have a voice that wants to be heard, and we have agency the capacity to translate that voice into effective action. All that remains is for us to find those substantive issues on which we agree, and there

are lots of them, left, right and center. In poll after poll and in action project after action project have found consensus not only around chrony capitalism, but around the reform of our drug laws, around prison reform, around meaningful reasonable forms of gun control, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, all of these things that if you simply read the head lines you would imagine we're totally polarized on when when in

fact we're not. And the other thing, the other point that I make in the book, and as you know, Eric, and this is an important point to me, is that all the founders of this country really got it wrong about who constitutes we the people. You know, for them, it didn't involve women, it didn't involve enslaved human beings, it didn't involve Native Americans, it didn't involve white men

who didn't own land. We the people was people who looked looked like them, like the founders, quite male gentry by landowners, and they essentially wanted a country that was that was governed by that kind of elite. Well, they got that terribly wrong, and they planned DNA in the American experiment and democracy that we are, you know, that is still bearing bad fruit today and will for a long time to come. It's called racism, it's called sexism,

and so forth, and so on. And candidates, in certain candidates Mr. Trump being the most notable example at the moment, are playing on all of that in a really demonic way. We can talk about that in a little bit if you'd like. Um. But the founders, despite the fact that they blew it when it comes to who's included and we the people, had a particular form of political genius

which we cannot forget. And that is that they crafted the first form of government that I'm aware of any way, in which conflict, even intense conflict, is regarded not as the enemy of a good social order, but as the engine of a better social order. Um. That's why we have the structure of government that we do, which in the book I likened to a weaver's loom, holding the tension of threads on which the fabric of a good

society can keep getting woven and rewoven. The historian Joseph Ellis has written eloquently about the fact that our form of government was not intended to come to quick solutions to problems. Instead, it was intended to keep the salient problems on the table long enough that we, in holding their tension, we could open our minds and hearts to better and better solutions, a more perfect union, to use

the language of the founders. So it's it's that structure of government that over the years has allowed us to expand the definition of we the people way beyond what the founders imagined, and much for the better, especially in a society that by is going to be over half

people of color. You have five habits of the heart that you describe that are important to heal the heart of democracy, and we're not gonna have time to go through all of them, but I wanted to circle back to one that you reference there, which is an ability to hold tension in life giving ways. Can you explore

what that means a little bit more. We have this primitive brain stem that the lizard brain, I guess some people call it, that has these instinctive behaviors, the most famous of which is the fight or flight response, So that when we're hit with the tension of a sudden stimulus, our tendency is either to turn around and punch it out or to flee from it in fear. So we don't like we don't like tension. We either run away

or try to kill it off. And there's you know, there's evidence after evidence of how difficult it is for us to hold tension at all, let alone to hold it creatively. Um One of the studies that fascinates me as someone who has a deep belief in the power and the necessity of silence to do any kind of

meaningful discernment. There have been studies that show that the average group can tolerate about fifteen seconds of silence before somebody has to break it because because suddenly people are experiencing the tension of thinking something has gone wrong, this is getting awkward, this you know. And in our groups where we practice silence in these circles of trust and learn, it's its value. We like to say to people, silence

isn't a sign that something is going wrong. It may be a sign that something is going really, really right, as people reflect deeply on what they've been hearing and try to integrate it into their own lives. So there are a lot of examples of how hard it is for us to hold tension, as in the tension of political viewpoints left, right and center. Well, tension holding does create stress. But in writing the book, I was intrigued to discover that there's an antonym to the word distress.

So We talk a lot about how distressing tension is, but psychologists talk about you stress e U s t r e s s U stress, which is the positive effective tension. That the tension that opens us up to new ways of looking at the world, the tension that opens our hearts to new levels of humanity and compassion. I'm as you know from reading the book Um, I work a lot with this image of the human heart, by which I don't mean simply the seat of our emotions.

If you if you go back to the root of the word heart, it comes from the Latin core c o r So it's that center place in the human self c o r e where all of our faculties converge emotion, will intellect um you know, ego in the positive sense, bodily knowledge, relational knowledge, problem solving knowledge, etcetera.

So we enter life circumstances, especially if we care about other people and about what's going on around us, we enter life circumstances that that takes us to something called heartbreak. It's a very common human phenomena, but I've observed over seventy seven years of hanging out with myself and others, that the human heart can break in at least two ways.

It can shatter into a million pieces, and sometimes as it's in the process of shattering, it gets hurled at the ostensible source of its pain, in the in the manner of a fragment grenade, trying to to do harm, to do damage to where that pain is coming from. That's one way for the heart to break, and we see a lot of that these days. But it's also possible for the heart to break not apart, but open

into greater capacity. And if we look carefully at the microcosms of our lives, we'll see a lot of that too. At my age, I know a lot of people who have lost the dearest person in their lives to death, and their hearts are broken. They go into that long, deep, underground period of grieving and slowly slowly emerge awakening to the surprising revelation that they have become larger people, more compact,

it more open, more understanding, more forgiving. Their hearts have grown bigger, not in spite of their loss, but because of their loss. There's something about that kind of loss that actually makes life more precious and makes the people around you, the world around you, more precious as well. So one of the questions I like to think about on a daily basis is how do I keep my heart supple enough that it can break open rather than

apart when the big hits come. And that includes the political realm that that includes, you know, as much as I despise the Trump phenomenon and fear the fascist possibilities in it, to speak very frankly, UM, I need to keep my heart open to the pain among we the people that Trump has tapped into. I think he's tapped into it and totally irresponsible, very dangerous, racist, misogynist way. But there is pain out there. There is real pain

and fear in that base, in all of us. I mean, honestly, Um, I think that there's there's some of that I really like. In your book, you talk about how in both books there's there's ways of finding common ground with people who seem to hold extremely different viewpoints, and and the basic

of it is to hear their story. Yeah, exactly. One of the things, as you know, that I talked about in the book is, just to make this very concrete, is a series of workshops that I'm aware of where people are brought together around very contentious issues such as abortion and twenty five people come into a room, um nobody knows upfront who holds what position, and for most of the day until the last hour or so, they are forbidden from announcing their position, but instead invited and

coached to tell the personal story of whatever the experience was that led them to the position they hold. And they learned to graft these stories and tell these stories, which a lot of us don't know how to do, and then to tell them to each other one on one or try adds small groups. Well. By the end of the day, when when it starts to be revealed what people's positions are, something remarkable has happened. The human thing has happened. People have realized that the same story

can lead to people to two quite different positions. People have realized even more fundamentally, that the more you know about another person's story, the less possible it is two despise or dislike or dismiss that person, no matter how different he or she may be from you, politically, ideologically, or whatever. There's something about the human story that is

that is not only appealing and attractive. There's something about the human story that's that's universal, especially if it's if it's what I like to call a soul story as opposed to an ego story. UM. One thing I know for sure, we all know this, I think in one way or another, is that if I want to connect with another person at a deep level, boasting about my

successes isn't going to do the job. And frankly, it doesn't even do the job for me, because I've learned more from my failures or my journeys in darkness that I have from my successes. When I succeed, I kind of pet myself on the back and I think I've got really got my act together. And it's not until I fall on my face that you know, I stay up until three in the morning trying to figure out how to get it right the next time. UM. So

what connects us is those broken places. To quote Leonard Going Again writes about he not only wrote about the blizzard of the world, but he has that wonderful lyric in anthem I think is the name of the song where he says, forget your perfect offering, ring the bills that still can ring. There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. But it's also through those

cracks that we connect with one another. So when you hear the human story in the workshop like this, where you know people are talking about an ideologically contentious issue of um, you may not change your mind, but you re forge the human bond. And one principle that's very very important to me is that in the long run, it's more important to be in right relationship with each other than it is to be right. Um. That doesn't mean that we have to give up on what are

on our beliefs about right. I don't want to do that. No one wants to do that. But what's right is a complicated subject, and if we're not in right relationship with one another, we can't hang in with the conversation long enough to make any progress on those complications at all. Yeah, exactly, Well, I think that is a good place for us to wrap up. I think I could probably do this for about three more hours with you, but um, you know we're near, we're past the end of the know So UM,

thanks so much Parker for coming on. As I said earlier, we'll have links to all of your personal Facebook page, the Courage and Renewal Center, all those different things at one you feed dot net slash. Parker will also have a download there and I encourage people were just google Parker J. Palmer and you will find all of your wonderful stuff there. So thanks again so much. I've got a lot out of your reading that I'm going to continue to think about and come back to and uh

I certainly want to explore more. Well, thank you Eric, it's been a delight to be on with you, and just all good wishes with the good work you're doing. Thanks so much. Okay bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly don't nation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community. With this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support now. We are so

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