Finding Your True Calling Through Life's Darkest Moments | Parker J. Palmer

Parker Palmer shares how three seasons of profound depression led him to a surprising discovery about authentic living and finding your true calling. Through intimate stories of his journey from academic to activist to spiritual teacher, Palmer reveals why embracing our shadows and letting go of who we "should be" opens the door to who we truly are. His gentle wisdom offers hope and practical guidance for anyone questioning their path, facing inner darkness, or seeking to live with greater purpose and meaning. You can find Parker at: Website https://couragerenewal.org/parker-j-palmer/ | Facebook https://www.facebook.com/parkerjpalmer/ | Episode Transcript https://www.goodlifeproject.com/podcast/authenticity-depression-vocation-parker-j-palmer-best-of If you LOVED this episode, you’ll also love the conversations we had with Sharon Salzberg https://pod.link/goodlifeproject/episode/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5nb29kbGlmZXByb2plY3QuY29tLz9wPTc4MzM about mindfulness, lovingkindness, and inner resilience. Check out our offerings & partners: Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel https://jonathanfields.substack.com/aboutVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes https://www.goodlifeproject.com/sponsors/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Speaker 00

  It is profoundly therapeutic to be able to stand up in your world, whatever that world may be, private, public, whatever, and say, I am all of the above. This is who I am. I am my darkness and I am my light. And that became part of my ongoing healing.

• 0:21Jonathan Fields?

  So what happens when a legendary spiritual teacher and guide finds himself in such a deep depression, he can barely leave his bedroom? When the person others look to for wisdom about life's meaning spends months hiding behind closed blinds with blankets over the windows because he can't bear to see the light? And what if the path back to that light and eventually to finding your true calling requires letting go of everything you thought you, quote, "should be"? These are some of the powerful questions at the heart of today's conversation, as we head into this next season, wondering what might happen if we created space for our lives to show us what they truly earned to be. This exploration feels particularly timely. My guest today is Parker Palmer, a writer, speaker, and activist focused

• 1:06Jonathan Fields?

  on education, community, leadership, spirituality, and social change. He's the founder and senior partner emeritus of the Center for Courage and Renewal, holds a PhD from UC Berkeley, and has authored several influential books, influential in particular to me. Through really three profound seasons of depression, Parker discovered something surprising, that embracing our shadows can become a powerful catalyst for authentic living and meaningful work. And he shares how leaving academia for activism and then spending 11 unexpected years in a Quaker learning community led him to a deeper understanding of what it means to truly listen to your life. And what unfolds is a profound exploration of finding purpose, not in spite of our struggles, but through them.

• 1:50Jonathan Fields?

  We explore why real growth often requires letting go of who we think we should be, how to discern truth from the inside out rather than the outside in, and what becomes possible when we stop trying to hide our darkness from the world. Parker's just beautiful, gentle wisdom offers a radical reframe for anyone questioning their path or seeking to live more authentically. So excited to share this best of conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.

• 2:23Speaker 02

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• 2:53Speaker 03

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• 3:26Speaker 04

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• 3:57Jonathan Fields?

  I know part of your, the origin story, has you coming out of Berkeley, the PhD in '69, thinking that you were about to step into one particular path, but emerging from school at a time where the world was oddly experiencing a lot of similar things to today. And everything changed for you, sort of in the blink of an eye. I'd love to know more about that moment.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, it did. Well, as we all know, the '60s were a time when, at least for folks like me, our heroes had been assassinated. Important social movements were on the rise. A terrible, terrible unjust war was waging. And the racial reckoning in this country, which goes on forever from the get-go, was going on big time as well. The cities were burning. And I felt deeply called to use what I had learned about sociology and social change, not in the classroom, but on the streets of the city. And so I went to Washington DC and became a community organizer,

• 5:05Speaker 00

  working with a couple of other people to establish what we called the Institute for Public Life. And I spent five years doing that work, which was a huge education for me. I had grown up in a very homogeneous, white affluent suburb of Chicago, and I had ever so much to learn about justice across racial, economic, and many other lines, especially in terms of race. The five years I spent organizing in DC, fighting redlining and blockbusting, and all of the things that lead to horrible quality of life for so many people,

• 5:46Speaker 00

  segregated living for everyone, economic decline, residential deterioration. Fighting all these things and learning so much about how often our talk doesn't match our walk. So that was huge. And I burned out at the end of five years, basically. I don't want to carry the story on forever. At eighty-two, I think I could. But the I burned out, I was a pretty thin-skinned guy. My skin was getting a little thicker, but organizing took a toll on me. I thought I just needed a sabbatical for a year. I went to a Quaker adult living, learning community called Pendle Hill, near Philadelphia,

• 6:30Speaker 00

  and spent, ended up spending not just a sabbatical year there, but eleven years. I was hired as dean of studies, so in charge of an adult study program that had to do with the inner life and its outward reach in nonviolent social change. And more important than what we were studying was what we were living. It was a life of kind of radical equality, including in terms of salary. Everybody got the same base salary, no matter how many degrees you had or what position you had. And that was a huge learning for me. I mean, I'm white, I'm privileged, I'm male.

• 7:12Speaker 00

  And so you never completely grind away a sense of entitlement, I think, when that's how you're built in this society. But a lot of it got ground away during my 11 years at Pendle Hill, as I realized distinctions in terms of power, position, income, and all the external markers of status really mess us up as individuals and as communities. So that too was huge learning. And to cut to the chase, after 11 years there and five years of community organizing, I had taken up writing as a kind of, you know, midnight

• 7:51Speaker 00

  vocation and was able to to start working independently around 1985 as a writer and traveling teacher and activist in the fields that I cared most about. So that's the story and I'm sticking to it.

• 8:12Jonathan Fields?

  I'd love to touch down into a couple of moments along that story. You're five years into doing the community organizing in DC. And as you shared, that is a type of work where there's a level of toughness and thick skinniness that not everybody has or not everybody has built, especially earlier in life. And then you make this decision not to walk away from a lot of your beliefs and values and doing work, but to really profoundly change the way that you're doing it. In moments like that, I'm always curious how you know that it's time to do this, because I imagine this wasn't something that just you woke up one day and said, I'm going to make this change. You know, I would imagine this is something that was brewing over time. But there's, I'm always curious, what

• 8:56Jonathan Fields?

  was the inciting incident where a decision gets made that really changes the course of things?

• 9:02Speaker 00

  Yes. And I'm not sure I can name an incident, but I can certainly name a process. I think most change, personal and social change, begins to happen when the pain gets too deep not to recognize it, not to acknowledge it. And that was certainly happening to me and thus to my wife and To some extent to our three kids as my work in DC went on because whoever you're with intimately and closely and you care about and love is is suffering from your suffering. And so I think the most important kind of set of triggering incidents was active imagination

• 9:43Speaker 00

  saying, what would it be like to live in a radically different setting? And for me, the question was fairly precise. As a community organizer, I'm trying to lead people towards something, namely, community, that I've never really experienced myself in any depth at any scale. So what would it be like for our family to move to an intentional community of some sort where we could actually have a year of of deep immersion in a truly communal life? And of course, at the time, late 60s on into the 70s, a lot of communal experiments

• 10:27Speaker 00

  were going on around the country. So we went down to Coinenia Partners in Americas, Georgia, which was the root system of Habitat for Humanity. And we spent a week there. A guy named William Erwin Thompson had set up a community called Lindisfarne. We spent a week there. We did this with three, four, five places that were then available on the American landscape. And when we went to Pendle Hill, we just felt like this is where we belong. And that was partly because there was work there for my wife as well, who was a potter. And they had a crafts program that she very quickly ended up teaching and after I became dean.

• 11:10Speaker 00

  So, you know, I think one of the sayings that's always meant a lot to me, I'm not quite sure where I first heard it, is you don't think your way into a new kind of living, you live your way into a new kind of thinking. And on an experimental basis, using active imagination and then actually getting out and walking into situations of that sort.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  We began living our way into a new kind of thinking. And I will forever be glad that we did. Even though family and friends and former academic colleagues thought I was nuts. Could not understand what I was doing. And you know, at that level, you pay a bit of a price too. But when someone would press me, why are you doing this crazy? You know, upstream thing? I would say, well, I can barely articulate it to myself. So I'm sure I can't articulate it to you. But I can say this. It's very, very clear to me that I can't not do this. So it was a kind of via negativa to that.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  What turned out to be life transforming decision? Which was really an extension of my decision when I left Berkeley, not to go into the field that I thought I was getting trained for. So I had a little, I'd practiced, you know, I'd exercised those muscles some. And what's interesting about I can't not do it is where does that come from? And I think it took me some years to realize that underneath all of that, I was aware in a way that I didn't even want to name, I think, for a while. That if I didn't do this thing to which I felt deeply called, which seemed in the words

• 13:01Speaker 00

  of that old Shaker song, to be the place just right for my soul. If I didn't do it, I'd pay a soul price for it. I'd lose some chunk of my soul. And I'll never regret having done it, even though there were many, many, many passages of doubt, anxiety, financial anxiety, among others, I was making very little money. And yet I felt compelled to stay the course. And I'm very grateful that I did. One of those things that you can see better in retrospect than you can at the time.

• 13:38Jonathan Fields?

  Like so much of life, right?

• 13:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:41Jonathan Fields?

  And by the way, you're talking to the son of a potter.

• 13:46Jonathan Fields?

  My, my mother, um, for all of my earlier years in life was, uh, the, the basement of our house was this pottery studio with, you know, like three electric wheels, a massive kick wheel with a 300 pound concrete slab. And then, uh, like next door, a massive walk-in, you know, like gas-fired kiln that would take 24 hours to, uh,

• 14:07Jonathan Fields?

  so it's, uh, that, that resonates. That devotion to something, to creation, um, is something that has been around my life from the earliest days and has affected me in so many different ways.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. And to have that sort of furnace of creation going on in your own basement, it's like being present at the birth of the cosmos.

• 14:24Jonathan Fields?

  It, it was, it was pretty magical indeed. Um, you know, it's interesting. It, it occurs to me that the process that you're describing has got to be so resonant to what so many people these days are experiencing. And, you know, we're hearing this phrase, the great resignation thrown around all over the place. And that phrase that you use, the, the thing that you can't not do, it, it seems like that happens almost like in, there are two things that it relates to. One is the choice to leave the thing that you're currently doing. And then the other is to walk into something new. And it sounds like you were very clear that the thing that you couldn't not do was leave this thing. Like that was the right

• 15:05Jonathan Fields?

  choice. But you didn't have clarity around exactly what you were stepping into at that moment. So you ran this series of experiments, which again, I see so many parallels to what so many people are moving through in this moment in time.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, thank you for mirroring that back, Jonathan, because that's an important image to me. I remember when I ran across Gandhi's autobiography, which he titled My Experiments with Truth. And I thought, yes, of course, truth is pretty complicated stuff. You get to it slowly and. You take one step forward and two steps back about truth on most levels, but it's most especially the truth of your own life, your own gifts, your own vocation, why you're here, meaning, human meaning itself. And so it's a series of experiments that you conduct in hopes of getting there and, well, in hopes of getting there eventually.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  And you do that fully aware that in science, some experiments fail and you will have failed experiments as well. But what a scientist knows and what I think we need to learn in life is that you learn really more from a failed experiment than you do from one that succeeds because a failed experiment eliminates a set of variables pretty decisively. That is not who I am. That is not what I'm meant to do. And you proceed with learning step by step.

• 16:36Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, I remember reading a book by Eric Ries called Lean Startup a number of years ago about sort of applying a kaizen approach to starting up businesses. And the thing that stayed with me is very similar to what you were just sharing, which is if you step into this next season of choices, not with the expectation of succeeding by having whatever the experiment you're running, be it quote capital S success, but rather the primary metric is learning.

• 17:03Speaker 00

  Right.

• 17:04Jonathan Fields?

  Then no matter what happens, you've won because you've gotten more data coming out of that, even if you've closed down a path that you thought might be interesting.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's absolutely key. And again, I'm glad you noted that a lot of people are struggling with, well, you know, what about this pandemic? What about walking away from my job? What about this? What about, what about all the deaths? What about the suffering? What about all the racial injustice? What about the pathological politics? And we all want to solve, cure all of those things. It's not within our reach individually, certainly, although I think it is collectively if we have a will for it. But the one thing we can do is adopt that learning modality and keep saying, what am I learning here? Not only about who I am, but about what the world is like

• 17:56Speaker 00

  and how the two can most fruitfully intersect.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  A very small example, because it's just very personal about such a learning. Those learnings often come from the shadow side of our experience. And I think that's important to note. And you fall into your own shadow. And if you can recognize it, which means learn about it, you can go somewhere with it. And, and what happened to me, Jonathan, was I had worked in a series of larger and smaller organizations, institutions, including Pendle Hill, which was not only a commune, but it was an educational organization as well, with a board and a director and the whole nine yards.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  And I started coming to a realization, somewhere toward the end of my time at Pendle Hill, which was my mid forties was the end point. I'd come to a realization that my hobby was constantly getting conflicted with whoever number one in power was. And as dean of studies or any of the other positions I'd had, I wasn't number one in power. It was either shared or I was subsidiary. I was, you know, down the organizational chart. And I had this moment of revelation when I really took a serious look at that shadow

• 19:21Speaker 00

  that always had me expending energy on being embattled with the lead person. And I, the moment of revelation was, Parker, you could spend the rest of your life using that energy toward no good end and for no good reason. Or you could do the obvious, which is to get out on your own, where you are your own boss. You call the shots. You have no one to blame but yourself when you make bad decisions. And use that energy in some form of creative endeavor. And that was one of the things that took me from Pendle Hill into an independent career

• 20:04Speaker 00

  where I've been for the last, you know, nearly forty years as a writer, traveling teacher, and activist. And that's, I think, an important piece to note. I'm sure that people who are Engaging in the Great Resignation, which I applaud. I mean, I think it's one of the things that needs to happen to shake up our highly dysfunctional institutions in this society, including workplaces. But I think one of the things that will happen inevitably is they will fall into their own shadow. Most of us do. Most of us step right into that pothole because we don't even know it's there. And so then the task is, okay, what's

• 20:46Speaker 00

  to be learned here? And what does it, in a sense, dictate about my next steps in life? Because if you learn something like I did, on your shadow side, you'd be foolish to continue to put yourself in a position where that can be your hobby for the rest of your life.

• 21:09Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, it's so interesting, right? Because I wonder if sometimes we focus so much on what am I being pulled to when there's really interesting data on the other side. Not that you would completely discount what you're being pulled towards, but I think we spend so much time just wanting to pretend the other side doesn't exist because it's their struggle. Like, there is, you know, discovery doesn't often come easily there, and yet there's so much value in spending, not living there, but visiting and exploring and examining that space as well.

• 21:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. I sometimes think, Jonathan, that, you know, that we have tropisms like plants. And that means that we're attracted towards certain things and we're repelled by other things. And it starts happening very early in life. You can watch a little kid closely and find that same tropism at work, which actually has some interesting predictors for the future life of that human being who doesn't come here in a totally malleable shape, but sort of has a character already, a shape already. And those things are really, really worth paying attention to.

• 22:20Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah.

• 22:23Speaker 03

  And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.

• 22:27Jonathan Fields?

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• 23:10Jonathan Fields?

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• 23:52Jonathan Fields?

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• 24:37Jonathan Fields?

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• 24:54Speaker 02

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• 25:28Jonathan Fields?

  I think we're sort of, we're talking around a little bit the notion of calling, which is something that you've written about, you know, quite a lot and spoken and thought about, which is interesting a lot of different ways also. There's, because I think a lot of people ask the question like, how do I find this thing that dwells within me so that I may, might devote more of myself to it? And very often, we go looking for it outside of ourselves. And it sounds like you were really strongly influenced by more of the Quaker philosophy that, that this thing may be influenced by what lies outside of you, but it's much more in dwelling, and that's where you go searching.

• 26:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I do believe in the notion of calling. And by that, as you know, I don't mean any loud and clear external voice from the top of the heavenly vault. It seems to me that it more often comes from within. For me, it's always come from within, and it's always come in interaction with the world around me. I'm a big believer in what I've come to call life on the Mobius strip. And I'm I'm sure that many of the folks who listen to this program know what a Mobius strip is. You can Google it if you don't, M O B I U S. It's this really, really interesting, three dimensional object.

• 26:44Speaker 00

  It lives in three dimensional space, which has only one side. It's a form that mathematicians can crank the numbers for in which what seems to be inside the Mobius strip comes around and merges seamlessly into what seems to be the outside of the Mobius strip, which then comes around and merges seamlessly in what seems to be the inside. So you have to keep saying what seems to be, because the truth of the Mobius strip is that there is no inner and outer. There's only these two joined surfaces constantly co-creating each other. And when I first saw that physically represented by holding a Mobius strip,

• 27:28Speaker 00

  I thought, well, life is like that, too, that we're constantly standing at the intersection of what's going on inside us and what's going on outside us. And two things are happening. We are making choices about what from inside of us we're going to put out there. And in that process, we're co-creating the world in some small measure. And the world is constantly throwing backs, throwing stuff back at us in response to what we put out there. And in that measure, the world is constantly co-creating us. So I think the message is be cautious, be careful, be thoughtful about those moments of exchange between the inner and the outer.

• 28:14Speaker 00

  And somewhere in that mix is the discovery of vocation. Again, it's experimental.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  You put certain parts of yourself out there and you start to feel, okay, I'm good. This is really me. This feels authentic. It may not be easy, but it feels real and it's life sustaining. You put other stuff out there and say, whoops, that wasn't what I wanted or expected. And I think maybe I'm running crosswise to my own nature here. And so the Quaker principles that I learned in depth during my 11 years at Pendle Hill, this Quaker living, learning community, those principles very much support this notion because two things are important to Quakers. One is that we each have an inner teacher,

• 29:03Speaker 00

  an inner light, some kind of indwelling guidance that is ultimately our best teacher in life. But it's also true that we have other voices within us. Ego, greed, fear, all kinds of voices. We're, all of us are, I think, complex cities inside and a lot, there's a lot of cacophony that calls for our attention. And so we need community. We need that external engagement to help us sort and sift which of the voices that we hear from within is

• 29:42Speaker 00

  real and true and trustworthy. And it takes time because sometimes the voice of fear is so compelling, or sometimes the voice of ego is so compelling. But sorting and sifting in a community that knows how to listen, that knows how to ask you honest, open questions, that does not attempt to save, fix, advise, or correct you, but simply lets you work it out in dialogue with other people. That was one of the huge insights that came to me at Pendle Hill and a lot of my life work for the last 40 years has been translating

• 30:23Speaker 00

  that, that kind of approach to life into things like the nonprofit that I founded called the Center for Courage and Renewal, taking it on the road, as it were, because most people aren't going to be able to end up living the life somewhat in intentional community. But there are ways to replicate critical elements of that.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  With ourselves, our families, our friends, our colleagues, with trustworthy circles of folks.

• 30:53Jonathan Fields?

  Hmm. I mean, it's so powerful when you bring in the notion of the community, you know, but also in the context of not asking the question, you know, like not, not posing this, this thing and saying like, here's what I'm thinking about. What do you think? But, and then expecting back some sort of answer or advice, but rather just having a community that sort of understands the construct of listening deeply and reflecting back intelligent questions that might allow you to keep the exploration inside. Yeah, I think a lot of people would look at community and say, you know, so effectively you're using them because now you get all sorts of different points of view, but you're talking about something very different here.

• 31:36Speaker 00

  Right.

• 31:36Jonathan Fields?

  Which I think is an important distinction.

• 31:39Speaker 00

  Right. Exactly. So thank you for pinpointing that. I mean, isn't it a blow to the soul when you share, let's say, a very deep grief with someone? And they say, oh, I know exactly how you feel. And here's what you should do because this worked for me, or this worked for my uncle, or there's a great book on the subject, or a diet that would really help. Those are the things that make us feel unseen and unheard, which are the great wounds of a lot of humankind, or among the great wounds of a lot of humankind. Nobody can get inside of me and know exactly how I feel, or exactly what I ought to do,

• 32:24Speaker 00

  or anywhere near what I ought to do. Even if they have what technically turns out to be the right answer, that answer means zippo, until it arises within me. And becomes operative, embodied in my own life. And so a lot of the stuff that I work with and they work with at the Center for Courage and Renewal, the circles that we sponsor around the globe, have to do with teaching people the skill, the art of honest, open questions, so that they can evoke a sort of deeper and deeper truth in the person who has the grief, or who's struggling with the decision, or the problem, whatever it may be.

• 33:08Speaker 00

  Rather than saving, fixing, advising, or correcting them, you know, straighten them out in one way or another. Turns out that asking honest, open questions is a very high art. Most of us are trained to ask questions that are really little speeches in disguise. Like, have you ever thought about seeing a therapist? That's not an honest, open question. But there are all kinds of ways to help people understand what an honest, open question really is. And the phrase that I love on this comes from a feminist theologian named Nell Morton years ago.

• 33:49Speaker 00

  She said, "Our task in this time is to help hear other people into deeper and deeper speech." And I love that very much. I'll often tell a group that I'm working with, "We have a strange conceit in Western culture that just because we've said something, we understand what we just said." And that's a real conceit.

• 34:15Jonathan Fields?

  And I'm raising my hand like I am a part of that conceit, like every day of my life.

• 34:21Speaker 00

  Me too, man. It's a hard habit to overcome.

• 34:27Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, it's so powerful. And you know, I think one of the, one of the assumptions that that underlies sort of like this conversation too, is that somebody is ready and willing to step into a place of examination, that they're at a moment in their lives where they're willing to look for, for truth, not for validation. And so often, it seems like we only come to those moments after enough suffering has pushed us there.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's really, really true. At least it has been for me, various forms of suffering across the 82 years. And of course, that would be the case. But it, it's an amazing moment of turning toward vulnerability, toward, as you say, a search for truth rather than anything else, like self justification or self affirmation. Yeah, we all need to practice self care, but we don't want to bandage over those places that are really bleeding in us. Those deserve examination. And what I love about the whole theme of self examination and vulnerability to it, you don't have to revert to any of

• 35:41Speaker 00

  the formal spiritual or let alone religious traditions to go there. The great tradition of secular humanism, which I've always regarded as a form of spirituality, gets kicked off by a guy named Socrates, who says, "The unexamined life is not worth living." And, and right there is the nub of what we're talking about here. People have also flipped that in an interesting way, "The unlived life is not worth examining." And I'm not sure it's not worth examining, but it tends not to get examined if you're not really living it. But the motive to go to self examination is present in every tradition that has ever supported

• 36:24Speaker 00

  anything vaguely related to what it means to be human. And that takes us right back, I think, to life on the Mobius strip, where that self examination then yields maybe something new flowing out into the world. And we discover, oh, now I feel more like myself. Now I feel more real and more authentic. I'm going to stick with this and then see what the world feeds back to me and then make good decisions about how to internalize it. What is it that I just don't really need or want to listen to? What is it that may critique me or interrogate me in some helpful ways that the world is coming back with? It's a really fascinating process that becomes a project called

• 37:08Speaker 00

  Living Your Life, or to coin a phrase, Living a Good Life.

• 37:15Jonathan Fields?

  You know, in that process of examination, there's so much power. And as you mentioned, you know, it involves your own discernment, it involves your own experience, it involves other people who are sort of like, hold you in a certain context. I wonder sometimes when we're in that process of self-examination, if we look at certain things and they're not easily measurable or quantifiable, we dismiss their importance in the weighting of their value. And we say, well, if I can't quite figure out, if I can't place a number on this in terms of how it factors into this, we ignore it when so much of the data that

• 37:56Jonathan Fields?

  is, that really is valuable to us, is often, at least in my experience, I'm curious what your experience is, really difficult to quantify.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  Right. No, absolutely. I mean, the image that comes to mind when we talk about that particular shadow side, and I think it is a shadow side, because the urge to quantify is somehow a bogus impulse towards absolute certainty and security, which is not a good basis on which to live one's life. You'll never get there except through, you know, paralyzing ideologies, or other traps of the mind, heart, spirit, and even body. The image that comes to mind is, it would be like walking into a magnificent forest with a shoebox and saying, I'm gonna-

• 38:50Speaker 00

  Come out of this place with a report on the forest, but I'm only going to report on whatever fits in this shoebox. You know, so you come out with a few acorns, you come out with some leaves and maybe some pretty wildflowers and a few stones and it would fill up pretty soon and that would be it. You'd miss the giant redwoods, you'd miss the, the suffing of the wind in the trees, you'd miss the sky and the clearing that just opens into infinity when you get there out of the thick, thick woods. You'd miss so much and that sort of narrow understanding of empiricism applied, you know, a double problem because it then gets applied to the wrong things is a real problem

• 39:34Speaker 00

  for a lot of people. And if, you know, the, the drive for certainty is, is huge, isn't it? And it's deeply paralyzing of the human experiment. I cannot think of, and I'll just use this to value judgment, but I'll use it. I cannot think of any form of pathological religion or pathological politics that isn't driven by this need for certainty. And this kind of conclusion that people quickly reach, especially when certain kinds of leaders persuade them of it, that, okay, now I haven't nailed, everybody else is wrong and I can

• 40:18Speaker 00

  get on with my life with a sense of safety and security that ends up distorting everything.

• 40:25Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah. And I mean, doesn't that also speak to how pervasive and how deep the yearning is to just lock as much of our lives down as possible, you know, like not realizing, A, it's actually not possible, no matter what anyone else tells you. But also, I mean, there's, life is, is in the lock downable nooks and crannies, you know, that, that's where the magic happens, are the places where you don't actually know what's about to happen next.

• 40:55Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 40:56Jonathan Fields?

  You know, and, and we, I think unwittingly. You know, close the door to those just because we feel like for a hot minute, it'll let us breathe a little bit more easily.

• 41:05Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I think, you know, the everyday word for the lock to down life is death. And you don't have to extend that image too far to see a lot of that happen in our world.

• 41:18Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah. I mean, that Mobius strip that you speak of, you know, on one scale, we're talking about our own lives, but really it's, it's not just intrapersonal, it's interpersonal also. I mean, I think, couldn't you look at indeed all of society as living on that Mobius strip?

• 41:35Speaker 00

  Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And it, you bring to mind, Jonathan, when you opened up that idea, you bring to mind the fact, I think, that one of the reasons some people have a lot of problem with embracing diversity for the life-giving reality that it is, is that it makes certainty harder. And you, you start looking at life through other people's eyes, the eyes of, of people of another gender, or, or sexual orientation, or religion, or, or race. And suddenly you see some things like, oh, well, okay, that, that makes at

• 42:18Speaker 00

  least a little sense. Do I have to now bring that into my worldview? No, because it just complicates things all over again. And I've spent the last 40 years simplifying. So I don't want to go there. I don't want to have that experience. I don't want to have that conversation. And again, that's, that's a path toward death. You know, one of the ruminations that, so I know you're an outdoor guy as well as an indoor guy, me too, big time. And one of the ruminations that I find so engaging.

• 42:51Speaker 00

  Has to do with comparing what's going on in a homogenized society, or homogenized segments of our society, with what goes on in a restored prairie, which can help us see how that virgin prairie looked and operated. I live in the Midwest, and I live in Madison, Wisconsin. And the state I live in and the states around us are just filled with agribusiness, where you get maybe one or two species of plants per thousands and thousands and hundreds of thousands of acres. Beans and corn, soybeans and corn. And the consequence of that is the soil gets depleted.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  You have to add chemicals to enrich it. It gets thin. It's subject to drought and to insects and to other forms of biological degradation. But a restored prairie had something like 160, 180 species of plants on it, and God knows how many species of creatures. And that gave it resilience. That gave it creativity. That gave it the capacity to weather through this storm or that, because while some plants wouldn't make it in the drought, others would. And on and on it goes. The parallel, I think, is very direct. We're coming apart right now as a social system

• 44:18Speaker 00

  because we don't have the capacity to really embrace and affirm, at least a lot of Americans don't have the capacity to embrace and affirm the kind of diversity that would actually teach us how to be resilient, give us the resources to be resilient, help see us through if we could learn from one another. Because there are people whose life story, very different from mine, have known about resilience for 12 generations. This is not true in the life story I've lived, which is a story of quite privilege.

• 45:02Speaker 00

  So I think the metaphors are rich. I think the connections are quite direct. And I think what we're talking about is important stuff.

• 45:12Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, I mean, I think it really speaks to the moment that we're in. And you hear some variation of the phrase, you know, like striving for unity these days, which is always blended as interesting to me because what's the assumption underneath that is that we are not all the same in many substantial ways is that unity is not the natural state, is that we have to fabricate this thing rather than step back and allow it to return to what it always was.

• 45:40Speaker 00

  Right, right, that virgin prairie again, or that restored prairie and create the conditions for it to flourish, absolutely. And in an earlier generation, it was the melting pot, you know, okay, all these different people can come, but we're going to melt everybody down to, you know, come out in the same way. It's again, I think that fear of unpredictability and that pathological desire for control that does us in every time. And, you know, if there's one thing that you learn as you age, and if there's one thing that we all should be learning right now, there's a lot that's not under our control.

• 46:21Speaker 00

  And it drives some people nuts because they have not, nobody's helped them develop the capacity to say, okay,

• 46:31Speaker 00

  that's true. There are some things that I can't control. So what is it that I can control that will make the situation tolerable, not only for me, but for everybody? And maybe not only tolerable, but actually improve the situation. The agricultural metaphor metaphor works again because that's how a good farmer operates. Does a lot of work to plant a crop. The hailstorm wipes it out in the spring, but it's right back to work and prepare for the next thing, controlling what you can while knowing there's no way to protect against another hailstorm.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  You just, as John Lewis liked to say, keep on walking, keep on talking. That's the way you build a better world.

• 47:23Speaker 03

  And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.

• 47:27Jonathan Fields?

  This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Ah, fall, that cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scars. But before the Halloween decorations are put away or Thanksgiving table has been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close. Time to kick end of year into high gear. When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2% daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts, and more. Get a head start on your end of year purchases. Apply for your Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone today and start using it right away with Apple Pay. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake

• 48:12Jonathan Fields?

  City Branch. Terms and more at applecard.com. Good Life Project is sponsored by TinCan. So if you grew up in the 70s or 80s, you probably still remember your best friend's phone number and stretching the kitchen phone cord around the corner for privacy. Our executive producer, Lindsay, wanted that same freedom for her kids, eight and 10. So in January, she got them a TinCan. Now, friends call the house to chat, make plans, and check in without borrowing her phone. They even keep a handwritten phone book next to it. I kind of love that. TinCan is the new school way for kids to talk with their friends. It's a secure landline that lets them call all their favorite people, but with parental controls to keep them protected.

• 48:55Jonathan Fields?

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• 49:29Speaker 02

  With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One Bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends. It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com/Bank. Capital One, N.A., Member FDIC.

• 50:04Jonathan Fields?

  It's funny, there's a couple of years back, we had someone in conversation on the podcast who had left this very successful career in the entertainment business in Hollywood and moved north with his wife and taken this piece of property that people said was un-farmable, completely arid, and over a period of seven or eight years, turned it into this biodynamic farm. And it was a process of reintroducing, over a period of years, all of the things, all of the animals, all of the plants, everything that would have just occurred naturally in that space a couple of hundred years ago, before we sort of got involved in the picture, to simply restore to the way that it naturally was, where everything sort of worked harmoniously together.

• 50:49Speaker 00

  Beautiful.

• 50:50Jonathan Fields?

  And yeah, the metaphor is alive and well in a lot of different ways. We just, very often, we choose, we choose a different path. You know, I often wonder, what if we devoted the same energy that we devote to certainty to instead skilling ourselves and finding equanimity in the face of uncertainty? What possibilities would that allow to flourish? You know, if we literally invested differently in that way, both as human beings and, you know, climate and everything around us?

• 51:24Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And one of the reasons I'm loving this conversation, Jonathan, and you know this because you're helping us do it, is that it's been moving between the inside of the Mobius strip and the outside of the Mobius strip, even as we've talked. And what you just said, I think, takes us back to the inside, because the question then becomes, who is helping young people especially, develop those inner skillsets that will allow them to discern well?

• 51:56Speaker 00

  As to when to embrace it and when to try to change it, when to accept it, but what not to accept because it's unacceptable. Um, those are viable questions. Those are answerable questions. But I, it's very rare to find in our spiritual communities, in our religious communities, and in our educational system, that kind of attention paid to the inner lives of young people, where we're equipping them with the very kinds of inner life skills that you just were touching on and that I so deeply believe in.

• 52:39Speaker 00

  I'm pretty clear that I wouldn't be alive today if I hadn't gotten some help along the way, both before the bad stuff hit and while the bad stuff was hitting, in developing inner tools for holding life's complexities.

• 52:55Jonathan Fields?

  Hmm. And I know you referenced the bad stuff. I'm sure there've been many things along the way, but I know you've also spoken and written, um, in a very open way about what I've heard you talk about earlier in life as, as, as two fairly profound seasons of depression in your 40s, um, and then again in your mid 60s. And, and I've also heard you describe at least the earlier ones as more situational than biochemical. And, and I've been curious, both what, what you mean by that, but also how you discern the difference between the two, especially when you're in it.

• 53:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that's a great question and I'm always glad to talk about it, Jonathan. As you know, I've written and spoken a lot about it because when you've had an experience like that, not just once, but two, three times, where for months on end, you're wondering each time whether it's worth living another day. Um, if, if you're fortunate enough to come out of it. What you want to do more than anything is make meaning out of it. And one of the ways you make meaning is making it available to other people. Because there's an epidemic of depression going on. Lots of people in it, lots of people living with folks who are in it.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  So when you're in depression, you don't know anything about the way out. I've come to say, I didn't, originally, my metaphor was it's like just being lost in a very deep darkness. But after a while, I realized, no, that's not quite right. It's more like becoming the darkness. If you're just lost in the dark, you make it, you're still making a distinction between you and the darkness of the place you are. And you can grope around and look for a window or shade or light switch or something. But if you've become the dark, you, there's, you can't negotiate your situation that way. You're it, you're in it, and it's, it's, it's inelectable.

• 54:55Speaker 00

  No way, no way out. And at that time, you don't know, is this situational? Is this genetic? Is this biochemical? So my hunches about that come from the particulars of my own situation. As they must, because depressions are widely different. And even the experts, the psychiatrists with whom I've consulted, don't know a lot about it. And I think the sign of a good psychiatrist is that he or she will say that. They won't pretend to have a panacea. I examined my own family history. I found some genetic depression there.

• 55:39Speaker 00

  The situational elements had in part to do with what we were talking about earlier, vocational decisions that I made. Which have worked out for me wonderfully well, but that was not at all clear at the time. Hmm. There were moments of sheer terror, passages of sheer terror. And it's very hard to discern what's what's situational and what's biochemical. Because if situ- the situational depression leads you to radical insomnia, as I had. You just can't get sleep for days on end. That creates chemical changes in your body and your brain chemistry. At every level of your being, and who's to say what's the chicken and what's the egg?

• 56:24Speaker 00

  What's the cause, what's the effect? N- nobody can say. But to the best of my discernment, and here here was me looking for something over which I might get control. Which had to do with some of the decisions I was making in life. Here was me saying, well, if it is genetic, there may not be a lot I can do about that beyond medication, which I was on for nine months to a year, year and a quarter during each of those three. I've been fortunate. I I've I've been able to get off. Um, I don't want to say fortunate, because some people are on them for the rest of their lives and they should be. They need to be.

• 57:08Speaker 00

  Um, whatever puts a floor under you, living your life without following through. Um, but I needed to take what was in my control. Which wasn't the genetics, but it was the situations. And find a couple of things. One was better ways to hold whatever I was in. Better ways of interrogating myself about whatever I was in. Better ways of seeking a path forward if the way seemed impassable. And then more discernment about who I was and what the world was like that would allow

• 57:48Speaker 00

  me to make a next vocational decision that wouldn't take me right back to that kind of misery. So I think the two in my forties were very much vocation related and I'm glad to talk about that because sometimes we tell a hero's story about making a countercultural decision and wow, isn't that cool? Well, not in my experience, it's not all cool. And there's, there's, there's a certain quality of resolve that I needed anyway to see it through. In my sixties, I think it was more about aging and some unexamined fears about getting old and dying.

• 58:33Speaker 00

  And also, here comes vocation again, knowing that I was on a collision course between aging and vocation. I mean, my vocation for the better part of forty years was flying around the country, appearing in front of audiences, hosting retreats, workshops, giving lectures, you know, a lot, a lot of folks do that kind of thing, that was my bag. And it became increasingly clear as I got deeper into my sixties and then into my seventies that the old body and even the old mind wasn't going to be up for that for a whole lot longer. So I, how do I sort that out?

• 59:13Speaker 00

  And I actually used those, some of those Quaker processes to try to discern best answers to those questions so that I wouldn't have to go back to the misery of having made a decision in, let us say, in old age that was all about pretending I was still fifty-five when in fact I was seventy-five. And as you well know, in this culture that this is age and valorizes youth.

• 59:45Speaker 00

  There are a lot of temptations for us to do that to ourselves.

• 59:49Jonathan Fields?

  Indeed. You know, so much of this also, so this is during a broader season of your life, this period of four decades plus, where what you're flying around the world and speaking about in the books that you're writing about are deeply grounded in a blend of social consciousness, activism, and also deep questioning on an existential level and spirituality. And you're sort of making your bones as somebody who has something to say in the spiritual domain. And I'm wondering, when you inhabit that identity, and maybe I'm assuming that you did, and then you find yourself in your own existential darkness, does the temptation

• 1:00:32Jonathan Fields?

  to layer shame on top of this experience enter the equation?

• 1:00:37Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And I would say that especially about the depressions that I experienced in my 40s, where, you know, to some extent, most of us, as we try to build a career, are still doing a certain amount of masking about, you know, I'm just fine, don't worry about me, I've got everything under control, I know exactly what I'm doing, even though it looks crazy, as it did to many people in my case. And I didn't know exactly what I was doing. And so the shame comes, like, and it took, you know, very precise forms, as you just suggested. So I'm regarded by some as a spiritual leader, and now I want

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  to take my own life? How is that going to pan out in public? And that terrified me for a long time, just to take one example of the kind of shame that we're capable of loading on ourselves. But here's the short story about what happened. I was able to survive by good luck, grace, privilege, tenacity. I don't know what enabled me to survive. As I have written,

• 1:01:50Speaker 00

  Don't ask the question, "Why did so-and-so kill themselves?" I can tell you why. They were exhausted. They needed the rest. Depression is, first and foremost, after it's isolating, is exhausting. The mystery is why some people come through and not only survive, but thrive on the other side. So I was able to survive, but then I started saying, "How do I make meaning out of this? Do I just tick that off as a nine-month bad movie in my life? I can't, because it has some sort of meaning. What is the meaning? And I began to realize, oh, the meaning of any suffering,

• 1:02:35Speaker 00

  if possible, is to put it at the service of other people, to put it in support of other people. Just as if you have gifts galore, hand them around to other people. Engage the community with whatever you've got. Point I want to make is that it took me ten years, from the time of my first depression, to the point where I could talk openly about it. And the reason for that was very simple. Something in me knew I needed to wait until that horrible experience was so fully integrated into my sense of who I was, that I could stand before a group and say without shame,

• 1:03:20Speaker 00

  "Yes, I am my gifts and I am my potholes. I am my light and I am my darkness. I am the guy you see standing before you who wants to join in community with you. And I'm also the guy who lived for months in a bedroom with the shades pulled down and blankets over the shades, because I couldn't stand light. And nor could I get outside for risk of running into another person. The world was full of knives. That's how it felt. And here I am, you know, in San Francisco, talking to 1,500 people.

• 1:04:00Speaker 00

  But that's all me. I am all of the above. And what I started to learn, Jonathan, is that it is profoundly therapeutic to be able to stand up in your world, whatever that world may be, private, public, whatever, and say, I am all of the above. This is who I am. I am my darkness and I am my light. And that became part of my ongoing healing. And I never wanted to put this out, let's say, in a retreat setting, let alone an audience setting, in a way that was so quivery and so filled with ambiguity about myself,

• 1:04:46Speaker 00

  that people would start to think, are we gonna have to take care of this guy? You know, is he about to fall apart? I needed to wait till that, to that point where I could do my work, which includes a certain form of leadership, as a teacher, a speaker, as a writer, whatever, without scaring other people off, while still inviting them into the reality of the human experience, which I know they share. I've often told people after

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  long conversations about what they're struggling with, I've said, you know, I, I feel ready to say a word to you that has always meant a lot to me when I've heard it from someone else after sharing my vulnerability. And that word is, welcome to the human race. Welcome to the human race. That's what we're talking about here, the experience of being human. And there's no shame in it. The, the shame, in the sense of it's a shame, is when people feel they have to tuck all of that away and pretend to be something or somebody they're not. And the last word I'll say about that is that

• 1:05:59Speaker 00

  it has really come to me, especially as I've gotten deeper into my eighties. While I can imagine a lot of painful ways to die, I can't imagine a sadder way to die than with a sense that I had all these years on the face of the earth, but I never showed up as my true self.

• 1:06:22Speaker 00

  I always hid it away because I was fearful of what other people might think. And therefore, I was also playing my cards close to my vest and not sharing my gifts. I never showed up as my true self. That just seems ultimately sad to me. And I'm grateful that a lot of drivers in my life have taken me to a point where I think that, you know, I, I won't, I won't take my leave with, with any sense I did it perfectly. I'll take my leave with a sense, I hope, I think, that to the best of my lights, cutting

• 1:07:05Speaker 00

  myself slack for my many faults and failures, I did the best I could and I showed up as who I really am, shadow and light. And I think that will bring a certain sense of satisfaction.

• 1:07:22Jonathan Fields?

  Hmm. You know, I was about to say that this feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation. And I generally end these conversations with a simple question, which, which is not necessarily a simple answer, which is, in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? But I'm getting the sense that you just answered that question.

• 1:07:43Speaker 00

  Thank you. I think that's the best answer I can give, Jonathan.

• 1:07:47Jonathan Fields?

  Nah, thank you so much for this conversation. I so enjoyed it.

• 1:07:50Speaker 00

  Thank you. I did too. It's been wonderful. And I wish you and your colleagues and your audience all the best.

• 1:07:56Jonathan Fields?

  Thank you so much. Hey, before you leave, if you loved this episode, say that you'll also love the conversation we had with Sharon Salzberg about mindfulness, loving kindness, and inner resilience. You can find a link to that episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez and Troy Young. Christopher Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable, And inspiring. Chances are you did because you're still listening here. Do me a personal favor, a seven second favor, share it with just one person.

• 1:08:40Jonathan Fields?

  I mean, if you want to share it with more, that's awesome, too. But just one person even, then invite them to talk with you about what you've both discovered, to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter. Because that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

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