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Oh, Miserable Modernity! with Yin Paradies
1k Plays10 months ago
Dr. Yin Paradies is a loving tearer downerer of teetering assumptions, a recalibrator of compasses, an Aboriginal-Asian-Anglo Australian conducting deep research on racism, anti-racism, Indigenous knowledges and decolonisation.
Despite inhabiting a comfortable burrow in academia as the Chair of Race Relations at Deakin University, he’s also an anarchist, an animist, a trickster, a disruptor and a sage voice on so many topics that Reskillience is interested in. This is one of those convos that creeps up on you, that builds in energy and quietly blows shit apart.
We discuss the aliveness of everything, the possibility in passivity, the nature of prayer, the perils of intentional communities and how Yin and his kin at Anam Cara are doing things differently. We talk about karma yoga, eldering, sociocracy and little bits of carrot floating in the soup of consciousness. I loved my time with Yin, and welcome you intto this quietly radical conversation.
The Everything Seed ~ Carole Matignacco
In the Time of White Raven: Activism and Animism talk ~ March 3rd 2024
Carol Sandford – Indirect Work
NBLT – Nature Based Leadership Training
Spell of the Sensuous ~ David Abram
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Reskillience
00:00:03
Speaker
Race aliens!
00:00:06
Speaker
Hey, this is Katie, and you're tuned into Reskillience, a podcast about skills, the resilience they bring, and living closer to the ground so we don't have quite so far to fall if our fragile modern systems fail us. These waveforms are rising and falling on Jara people's country, unseated and unbelievably beautiful lands in central Victoria.
Tech Trust and Navigational Challenges
00:00:30
Speaker
For the last few weeks, I've been doing a lot of squinting and pointing.
00:00:35
Speaker
I'm trying to hone my sense of direction, calibrate my internal compass. At least once a day, and especially when I'm in new places, I ask myself and whoever happens to be around, alright, which way is north? We squint. And we point, using the position of the sun and the maps in our heads to make an educated guess. Pretty obvious, right?
00:00:57
Speaker
But just to ensure accuracy, I've been whipping out my phone and checking the Compass app. And to my horror, I'm consistently wrong, off by a mile and 90 degrees. What I thought was north shows us west, east as south, familiar rivers and ridges and roads warped by this new and troubling information.
00:01:17
Speaker
Sure, I did wonder if my phone was broken, but fiddling with the settings and downloading different apps produced the same result, so I hung my head and accepted directional defeat. This morning at the farmer's market, I played the Point North game with some friends, who flat out refused to believe my phone's verdict. With the sun and the land and good sense on their side, plus two impartial compasses, it was clear that my device had been gaslighting me.
00:01:47
Speaker
This experience got me asking some serious questions. Like, why am I so quick to trust technology despite evidence to the contrary from my eyes and gut and whiskers? And where else does modern culture and its magnificent machines lead us astray? We're told that the direction of progress is up.
00:02:05
Speaker
That time marches on. That money is power. That humans are greedy. That good and bad exist. That working yourself to the bone is noble, unless you're a lowly labourer. That big problems require big solutions. That emergencies need speed. That paradoxes are impossible. And that everything started with a big, loud, violent bang.
Alternative Views on Cosmology
00:02:30
Speaker
What if instead we saw the Big Bang as a seed, the everything seed as Carol Martin-Yacow writes? What if we took a view like the Amara people of the Central Andes who see the past as ahead and the future as behind? Because what's ahead of you can be seen and understood while the future is unknown behind you in the mystery. So many unexamined truths form our mental scaffolding, and it's really fun to dismantle them every once in a while, even if you perched on top.
Introducing Dr. Yin Paradis
00:03:01
Speaker
Today's guest, Dr. Yin Paradis is a loving, terror downer of such teetering assumptions, a recalibrator of compasses, a person I've been lucky enough to run into without hurting myself on multiple occasions. First on a mountain, then in a valley, once in a yarning circle, and now in the ether for this virtual conversation.
00:03:24
Speaker
Yin is an Aboriginal Asian Anglo-Australian conducting deep research on racism and anti-racism, as well as teaching Indigenous knowledges and decoloniality.
Racism and Decoloniality with Dr. Yin
00:03:35
Speaker
Despite inhabiting a comfortable borough in academia as the chair of race relations at Deakin University, he's also an anarchist, an animist, a trickster, a disruptor, and a sage voice on so many topics that reskillience is interested in. This is one of those convos that creeps up on you.
00:03:53
Speaker
that builds in energy and intensity and quietly blows shit apart. We discuss the aliveness of everything, the possibility in passivity, the nature of prayer, the perils of intentional communities, and how Yin and his kin at Adamkara are doing things differently. We talk about karma yoga, eldering, sociocracy, and little bits of carrot floating in the soup of consciousness. I loved my time with Yin and welcome you in to this quietly radical conversation.
Creative Language and Identity
00:04:25
Speaker
I am curious to know how you like to introduce yourself because I have a bunch of A words like animist, anarchist, actionist. You forgot avid alliterator. I get in trouble for that. I get in trouble from my partner Victoria for too much. It's like a addiction to alliteration or something. Yeah. Why is alliteration so juicy? I just fall back on it constantly.
00:04:50
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. There's something just very satisfying about nourishing, about just the wordplay of it. Simple enough sort of thing, but it feels, it just feels right to do. Yeah. Maybe it's one of those limitations that makes you more creative in your expression and somehow like a meaning emerges that you didn't intend. And that's a lot easier to do than a haiku. So yeah. Do you have a haiku, a professional haiku on LinkedIn?
00:05:17
Speaker
No, no. I know you can get AIs to do all of it for you these days, but I prefer not to do that. Yeah, so my latest is the whole animist, anarchist, actionist. I saw someone use the word actionist quite recently and I thought, it's a good conversation starter for the nature of activism and what that means.
Exploring Identity and Indigenous Heritage
00:05:41
Speaker
Hmm. So you're going with that at the moment, but it's more of a, you have a transient set of identifying words. It changes a fair bit. Yeah. Yeah. Well, is there anything you want to say to kind of preface the conversation so people know who you are and what you're about, or are you happy to hold some mystery? I'm a Wakaya man and my mob come from up near the Gulf of Carpentaria where
00:06:11
Speaker
My grandmother was born and I myself and my mother were born in Townsville. I lived there till I was nine and then I moved to Darwin and I grew up in Darwin. I lived in Darwin for 20 years and then about 15, 16 years ago I moved to the Melbourne or Naam area and I've been enjoying the mostly cooler weather ever since. Not so much today.
00:06:36
Speaker
Yeah, I've got a bead of sweat dripping down into the crevasse of my elbow. So that's quite a nice feeling. So, yeah, I mean, can you briefly describe what the animist, anarchist, activist, actionist, sorry, words mean? And I did say activist then accidentally, but I would love to hear your thoughts on whether you do consider yourself an activist. Yeah, it's interesting question.
00:07:03
Speaker
So animism is a very much a core experience of indigenous peoples around the world. You know, we just, we feel like and we experienced the cosmos as a place that's alive, you know, the whole shebang from the famous rocks are alive, controversial statement to all the other things that we actually
00:07:29
Speaker
are increasingly understanding as animate like trees, the increasing intelligence and vocabulary and grammar of trees, communication that only a few decades ago would have been laughable by Western science. So the world is alive, very important to me. Anarchism is a very much indigenous type of political project as well. You could easily
00:07:56
Speaker
draw parallels between the way indigenous peoples organize socially and anarchist principles. So I quite like that. Egalitarian, distributed power, communal action aspects of anarchist philosophies and political approaches. And I do feel like an activist, but
00:08:22
Speaker
Actually, at the moment, we're doing a seminar series and coming up in a couple of weeks at BlackSpark's books. There'll be a talk that we're doing on animism and activism, me and Victoria. And there's, I guess, a question of what is activism? Does it have to be about protests and resistance to the system itself, or can it be a more
00:08:52
Speaker
quieter activism that's about growing alternative ways of and cultivating alternative ways of knowing being and doing. So I feel like more of that sort of quiet activist I guess and I use the term action as just to indicate I guess just getting on with trying to live otherwise rather than
00:09:13
Speaker
the sense of trying to tear down a system or to convince a system that it should transform or retire or what have you. That's a lot of activism seems to me a kind of a direct reaction rather than being more kind of parallel forms of
00:09:37
Speaker
of refusal to participate. They all come under a broader sense, but that's why I used to action as label as a way of studying conversation about what is activism.
00:09:47
Speaker
think Carol Sanford is someone who talked a lot about direct action versus indirect action. And again, in the ways in the way that your sentiments and offerings online and in person often do for me just explodes my brain. It's like what you mean, there's another way to do things that isn't pushing back and reacting and tearing down, as you say, but there are these other ways of working. So I really value that extremely disruptive idea that we can be more we can be indirect and subtle and quiet.
00:10:16
Speaker
So you're the Chair of Race Relations at Deakin. What does that mean? What are you doing in that role? Well, that's a role that gestures towards my research on racism and anti-racism, cultural competency, intercultural understanding, those sorts of ideas. And so I'm doing that sort of research alongside teaching and also research on
00:10:47
Speaker
indigenous perspectives and decolonization. So it's all comes pretty well under that. It's a pretty, it's a kind of a fairly American, I guess, 1960s, 70s term race relations. There would be other professors of race relations in the US, but none in Australia. And I just picked it because it was kind of a little bit strange and quirky and it's a progressive kind of leftist project, the idea of race relations.
00:11:14
Speaker
I want to gesture towards that and also kind of exploded at the same time. What are you working on at the moment? Is there something that's really juicy and alive that you're discovering through this research? Look, the stuff that really gets me up in the morning and I'm passionate about is the teaching and the research I do on Indigenous knowledge is really in perspectives and decolonisation. So, yeah, I've got a bunch of projects on racism and
00:11:43
Speaker
anti-racism in various places, spheres of life. But the teaching opportunities are very much a gift to, as you said before, people tend to be quite blown away by some of the ideas of the deeper.
00:12:05
Speaker
understandings of how indigenous cultures work and also how our modern cultures work and the kind of assumptions that underpin them. And sometimes I write, you know, papers, I just wrote a paper with a colleague about basically Aboriginal approaches to spirituality and country as a form of contemplative religious practice. And those are really, really fun too. All the stuff where we try and
00:12:35
Speaker
delve deeper into the interplay between modernity and what I call primal or Indigenous cultures and perspectives. How do you go with being in that institution, that formal academic setting when you are such a disruptor and you are such a trickster and someone who likes to really push the boundaries and not necessarily fall into line? How are you
00:13:05
Speaker
How do you keep your job? Yeah. I know a lot of people find academia to be very challenging. I think what I've done is I've somehow excavated a niche and almost buried myself alive. I think just my nostrils are kind of showing through so I can breathe. So people wander past me on the academic landscape and they don't even really know that I'm there.
00:13:33
Speaker
Occasionally I pop my head and shoulders up to have a quick Zoom meeting with my boss every six months. And he seems happy with all the grants and publications. In some ways the intense commercialised, corporatised kind of quantification of life in academia is actually helpful because as long as you tick a few boxes, no one actually notices what else you do. Good to know. And what led you down that path as opposed to the million and one other
00:14:03
Speaker
possibilities that life would have presented to you? Well, I feel very much like a very small being as an extension of vast the titanic forces of the universe. So I don't feel like I've had a great deal of choice. I just feel buffeted by the vagaries of existence. And I have always been interested in
00:14:30
Speaker
in research and academia from an early age. I read a lot of science fiction books and I wanted to be a theoretical physicist and I did start studying theoretical physics as an undergrad at university. And then things just happened and suddenly I was here and suddenly I was there and
00:14:50
Speaker
My parents thought it would be a good idea for me to get a job, which I didn't really appreciate the idea of much. But I found this cadetship and I ended up working at the Australian Bureau of Statistics and those were the first days of writing kind of national reports on the health and welfare of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. So then I became really interested in that health inequality stuff.
00:15:14
Speaker
I wanted to dig deeper to the causes of health inequalities and I realised that racism was a powerful determinate of health so I did a PhD on that and then I just kept sort of
00:15:25
Speaker
digging deeper into the roots of things and below racism is colonisation and then what's the answer to that? Well, there's decolonisation and what are examples of societies that live differently? Well, there's all this rich detail of indigenous cultures that I needed to learn more about because I just certainly didn't know as much as my ancestors and I still don't have nearly that much knowledge. So it just became a kind of one of those paths in the forest, you just get
00:15:54
Speaker
distracted and you wander off in a new direction, I guess. Yeah, it brings up two questions for me that are quite dissimilar. So I'll ask you one and then ask you the other if I remember. But can you go a little bit deeper into the connection between racism? I mean, I've heard about the effects of stigma and people's wellbeing, and I feel like there's still a bit of a hazy connection between things like racism and our physical
00:16:24
Speaker
and well-being and ability to actually function in this world? Yeah, yeah, sure. It's just a classic case of the Cartesian mind-body divide, really. This modern idea that the mind is separate from the body, which is separate from the spirit. And it's all really just spirit, substance or mind material intertwined, woven like a kind of fabric. And so, yeah, our experiences of
00:16:55
Speaker
Particularly as humans, humans are very sociable creatures and forms of exclusion and stigma and hierarchical forms of inferiority. They hit us really hard as humans. The studies show that those sort of social sufferings are much more dangerous and much more damaging than physical abuse. Social abuse is more dangerous to us.
00:17:21
Speaker
And so racism is like that and impacts various hormonal balances in the body, the blood pressure that we have, immune system functioning, heart health, things that affect aging in the body, cellular reproduction type of things. So there's been studies on all these types of, essentially racism as a form of stress and there's a lot of literature already on the stress effects on the body.
00:17:48
Speaker
that build up over time and lead to various forms of disease and ill health. And also the problem with stress, of course, is people have to cope. And this modernity is kind of like a novelty box of, not of chocolates, but of, chocolates is one of them, but of addictions and cravings. And we are easily called to cope
00:18:17
Speaker
through our kind of misplaced longings for things like chocolate and sugar and social media likes and so forth. Yeah, and that's bad for health too, because a lot of what we do in modern societies just isn't very, very nourishing. Yeah, well said. So a subsidiary question that isn't the other question, knowing all of this year,
00:18:40
Speaker
How do you not become a rabid perfectionist about insulating yourself against those kind of stresses so you live forever? Well, there's always the temptation to seal yourself off hermetically from the world. But the problem is that we are inherently intertwined with all of creation. There's no essential difference between us and any other part of the universe.
00:19:08
Speaker
It's all just a kind of blended continuum that appears to be thingified and therefore distinct. So it's a false attempt. I guess there's been a bit of discussion at our talk on activism and animism about spiritual bypassing and that would definitely be one of those things if you try to escape. And of course living forever is a very foolish idea and takes us out of the life-death, life cycles of
00:19:36
Speaker
of the world. But having said that, I do live on a 50-acre homestead and it does feel like a different world, a kind of a sanctuary and a safe haven from the madness of modernity. And yeah, I can't survive long in large shopping centres, so it makes sense.
00:20:01
Speaker
even though they do everything to trap you in there. So you'll be the mouse who continuously eats the cheese. Yeah. So when you were just talking about the thingification, are we just consciousness thingified? Pretty much, yeah. The cosmos is basically very large soup of consciousness that sometimes seems to have little bits of carrot floating in it. That's us.
00:20:32
Speaker
Are you sure you're not describing a big vomit? It could also be vomit too because, you know, it's all connected. We've got to compost our own shit. We've got to regurgitate our, our kind of, our issues and our predicaments. Yeah. Yeah. The little chunks of corn. All right. The last question I have in the bank, um, you mentioned not actually feeling that in control of your life path.
00:21:01
Speaker
not making those decisions consciously, rather being buffeted by the prevailing winds of whatever will happen. You also said once around a campfire on the NBLT retreat, I think I remember this correctly, you were talking about our kind of Western approach to the attainment of knowledge and the striving and the questing for understanding and smartness. And I think you kind of countered that with
00:21:30
Speaker
Well, actually the other perspective or maybe an indigenous lens on that is your gifted knowledge or knowledge is bestowed upon you when you're ripe and ready for it, either from elders or from the cosmos. Am I remembering that correctly? Sounds about right. Yeah, it's a sense of, and this is what we're getting at with this talking about animism and activism is that
00:21:57
Speaker
It's a question, something like, what if passivity wasn't the opposite of activity, but a kind of activity in itself, a certain openness and receptivity that happens when you kind of relinquish a sense of certainty and mastery and control, and that creates a kind of context, or cultivates a context where
00:22:24
Speaker
you can actually channel and catalyze change, for want of a better word, or growth, or increase of complexity and connection and relationality and kinship. These are the kind of, the point of the cosmos, if there is such a thing, points are very modern in some ways, is to manifest more beauty in existence.
00:22:52
Speaker
And those things that make us sort of focus on our own agency can take us away from all the wisdom that's out there if we pay attention to the conduct of the stars and the moon and the sun and the mountains and the rivers and all the other animals and plants. Humans are a very young species and we have a lot of elders
00:23:21
Speaker
are all around us in the form of all those creatures that I mentioned. And we have a lot to learn from them. Yeah, I think the fear of dropping into a more passive and receptive state is that you just become an invertebrate, wobbly jellyfish. You know, what happens when you do surrender like that? There's a fear of that. Yeah. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, for me, for sure.
00:23:51
Speaker
I think there is, yeah. And yeah, I guess it goes along with our modern fear of death as well. What happens when we die? It's all about cycles, yeah. We have cycles of focused, kind of driven attention. And then we have other aspects or periods where we're receiving knowledge and wisdom. And as with all things, it's a balance. And I just feel like,
00:24:22
Speaker
that modern societies are out of balance, not that there's particular ways that are inherently wrong in and of themselves, it's just that they're not really balanced with the other ways of doing things. Yeah, I certainly learn a lot when I remember to surrender and relinquish and learn from my environment what I need to know.
00:24:52
Speaker
So you're very welcome to undermine the intention of this podcast with your answer, because sometimes I wonder if asking people a bunch of questions through a filter of there's this big problem and what do you think about this and what are the solutions? I do really at times wonder if it's all just my brain kind of chewing on a bone and all of us enjoying ourselves kind of intellectually, but it's not really the point.
00:25:19
Speaker
and there is nothing really to solve or to do. Yeah, what do you think about this idea of having a conversation that's kind of me peppering you with questions and producing a podcast that's all around this idea that there's some big looming problem that we have to solve? Well, it is unnatural in many ways, the constant obsession with questions and answers that we have in modernity. It's a kind of
00:25:50
Speaker
Yeah, truncation of the human condition along with a lot of other things that we do. But we seem to be stuck in it at this point. And there's a lot of need for bridging medicines in this time. We'll be moving from an age to a different age and the age of modernity is coming to an end and there's lots of ways we're gonna have to
00:26:17
Speaker
kind of stumble our way through to something potentially wiser and questions and answers. May well be one of those bridging medicines and that's how we do things. We discuss and dialogue and there are other ways but we don't have the skills to inhabit those other ways just yet. So yeah, having a chat about the challenges of the world and
00:26:46
Speaker
some of the problems and maybe trying to ground in some more complex responses to predicaments rather than simplistic solutions I think is probably quite a useful thing to do. And yeah, I guess I would say that the bigger the problem, the smaller the response that's required.
00:27:11
Speaker
or in other words, when times are urgent, it's best to slow down. It's a different way of putting the same thing. And that we can be lured into this sense of reproducing the predicaments by using the same, by reproducing the predicaments by kind of using the same responses that got us into the mess in the first place. So it is a,
00:27:40
Speaker
Yeah, that's why this activism stuff comes up and actionism versus activism and the sense of, I really do think that people growing as not so much self-improvement but maturing into eldering as humans is a very powerful response to global issues rather than some sort of
00:28:07
Speaker
massive collective action in response. It's not so much from little things, big things grow, but from little things, the cosmos is stitched together. I've got some brain seeping out my ears, which is a good sign of explosion. Here come the explosions.
00:28:36
Speaker
I actually have a bunch of things written down that I've read on your Facebook over the last little while that I wanna ask you about a bit later because it's just, I just love the waking up that happens when you say something like the bigger the problem, the smaller the response. I love that, yeah. It feels, sometimes the most absurd things feel the truest to me. Yes, yes, the power of paradox, I think is part of that.
00:29:06
Speaker
Because the law of non-contradiction is one of those other modernity laws that we need to question. And it's in those contradictions that really we have those brain leaks that help us to become more than we imagined ourselves to be.
00:29:26
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So I, you did mention Eldering and you also mentioned the Bridging Medicines, which I read, I think on Victoria's bio on the Anamkara website. And those two things bring me into this next part of the conversation that I'm, I'm really, really excited to, to talk with you about Yin, which is Anamkara, the place you call home. But I would really love for you to describe what that is and the intention
00:29:55
Speaker
for that life you're creating there? Yeah, it's what we call a homestead, which is a bit of an American term, but it's a place in the Yarra Valley, east of Melbourne or Naam. And we're trying to form community here, a community that's really about, that's held together through four pillars, which are really just practices of
00:30:25
Speaker
being togetherness. So we talk about the need to work, to eat, to play, and to pray together. And by pray we mean we value the spiritual, the sacred, the holy here at Anamkara. And we think that that's an intrinsic aspect of being human. And that humans really just get a lot of joy out of collective activity together. And so we wanna
00:30:53
Speaker
I have a place where people are welcome to come and try it out for a bit or stay for longer. We're open to more people living here. And, you know, we just do this homesteading sort of stuff, growing vegetables. We want to get some animals and, yeah, we're trying to become more self-sufficient in terms of meeting our needs very locally. And we have a sort of an unusual,
00:31:22
Speaker
fusion of traditions at Anamkara. So Anamkara is a term from Irish Gaelic that means soul, friend. And that's the sense of the place is meant to be a deepening of kinship. We're very big on kinship and relationality. So we mix a kind of Gaelic traditions, Celtic traditions with indigenous perspectives.
00:31:47
Speaker
and practices and also with Vedic practices and perspectives from Southern India in the Karmic and the Tantric kind of yogic traditions. So it's a bit probably quite unique in that way, in that mix of three things. Yeah, I love the core practices. And when you mentioned prayer, I was listening to a conversation yesterday with Merlin Sheldrake
00:32:16
Speaker
the entangled life guy. And he was talking about, I think it was David Abrams, to put a quote within a quote. He was saying that his version of prayer is just addressing the world directly, a direct address to the more than human world, rather than talking about
00:32:38
Speaker
it, talking about what we know about nature and keeping it in the third person. So I wonder what you mean when you talk about prayer. It's a combination of ritual and ceremony where we connect with gratitude and reverence and grace and awe at the wonderment of the world. And so it is a
00:33:07
Speaker
seeking of direct connection with the many beings and entities and spirits and so forth that creatures as well that live with us that are our kin and that allow us to be and to continue to exist and also that we are in a relationship of gift-giving with with them and they are with us and Yeah, it's very much a
00:33:37
Speaker
direct, embodied, kind of tangible sense of connecting with the material world as a spiritual dimension of life. Yeah, in a lot of indigenous traditions, we're what's philosophically called non-dual. We don't feel like there's mind and matter or there's spirits and substance. It's all enmeshed and entangled together.
00:34:07
Speaker
So country is a vast spiritual, many faceted spiritual being. And our traditions of fire ceremonies and giving thanks of various sorts and asking permission and having conversations with
00:34:26
Speaker
many living beings around us as we go about our day is really about that coming back to a sense of home, the home of the human species as just a part of the web of life, not somehow severed from our birthright. If you're really busy and you're harvesting a salad, do you ask the rocket
00:34:54
Speaker
if it's okay to take some or are there times you're just too busy to engage in that consent gaining phase? Yeah, definitely. I still suffer from the kind of squeezed sense of time that is characteristic of modernity. So it's a lot of the stuff we do at Anna Mikara is very aspirational. We're on a journey of getting better at stuff and
00:35:24
Speaker
We make plenty of mistakes and forget to do things along the way. How many people can you host at one time? Well, we've only had a half dozen or so at once but we've only been here.
00:35:38
Speaker
a couple of months. But we could have 12 or somewhat more and that's our vision is to have a smallish community of maybe 12 to 15 people, most of whom are kind of living here on an ongoing basis and a certain amount of flow in and out as well is really good for communities of visitors staying for shortish amounts of time. Yeah. Yeah, cool.
00:36:05
Speaker
I was really interested to read about the steps involved in becoming a resident and the quote that you expressed on your website being that heaven can quickly become hell in terms of communal living and that is definitely a trope in intentional communities that they're dysfunctional and descend into chaos and ultimately fail. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about at least the steps in the process that you have
00:36:35
Speaker
in terms of people coming in. And then maybe we can talk more about the way you make decisions as well. Another quote I saw recently from another community was, living with others closely in communal settings is the best and the worst thing about this place.
00:36:56
Speaker
Yeah, and I get what they're saying. And the dysfunctionality of communities is really just an intensified version of the dysfunctionality of modern societies. It's just that modern societies are very separate and people don't live very close in with each other. We have nuclear families and even a lot of single people households and this whole business of
00:37:26
Speaker
living in separate houses in very small numbers is very new for humans and quite strange. It doesn't really work that well for us. It's one of the reasons we have an epidemic of loneliness in our society. So around here at Anamkara, we're keen to kind of cultivate a sense of
00:37:52
Speaker
vulnerability really with each other and authenticity and we build the trust that's needed to make that safe enough for people to lean into. We want to hear how people actually feel. We don't want, we want to get beneath layers of I guess some self-presentation and fear of saying the wrong thing and of not being able to be
00:38:18
Speaker
expressive of your own moods and desires and longings and undulations of emotion through a day. So it's a context to cultivate that sense. And we have circles, sharing circles regularly every day, a small one and a larger one every week where people can really just
00:38:43
Speaker
feel heard and listened to in a way that is not just about that moment, it carries through to other parts where we really want to have a lot of care and kindness for where people are at and to give people a chance to, I guess, breathe a little more deeply than we get to in modernity in and out
00:39:13
Speaker
are beings being shared through that breath in one place. And so we intermingle and we create kin with each other and we want to have a place where people can be themselves and to become more aware of where they're at and to become more able to perceive the impacts we have on each other as we go through these struggles of coming to terms with
00:39:41
Speaker
Wounds and shadow and trauma and yeah, it's a process of building containers and collectively and learning to mature together and enter that place of eldering that I mentioned before. I mean, there's obviously going to be times, if not already, where people aren't a fit for Anamkara
00:40:10
Speaker
what kind of person wouldn't be appropriate in your kinship group and community? Well, we're really just interested in people who want to be brave enough and courageous enough to be real. And we're not a sort of a peace and light
00:40:35
Speaker
24-7, oming sort of place. You know, you come here, you can scream, you can get angry, you can be grumpy, you can get upset, you can lose your shit. And the point is, we come back. We come back into relation, we come back into kinship. We talk, we give space, we do the kind of
00:40:54
Speaker
caring, indirect, sort of holding. We have people's backs rather than backing each other up. And that means we allow ourselves to be wrong, we allow others to be wrong, and we come back in. I guess it's the opposite of the antithesis of cancel culture is what we have here. So if people are unable to lean into authenticity and vulnerability and realness over time, not straight away,
00:41:24
Speaker
then they probably won't be a good fit. And that's OK. We understand that's a really difficult thing to do and not something that's encouraged by modernity, which is more about your fake surface level, fake surface level veneers of humanity. Yeah, you mentioned a few other things that you look for.
00:41:45
Speaker
in prospective residents being willingness to delve into shadow which you kind of touched on there and also a commitment to embodying the principles and practices of decolonisation and indigenous perspectives. So the shadow is kind of the one word for the kind of wounds we receive in modernity through the living out of our living in ways that don't fit with our
00:42:15
Speaker
our natural tendencies as humans. You know, humans are a species among others. And, you know, if you're a dog, you live in a certain way. If you're an octopus or an elephant, you live in a certain way. Humans have that too. We have a lot of capacity and flexibility, but there are ways that are healthy for us. And so, you know, the way that we may have been parented or been affected by institutions like schooling and so forth, that wounds us, you know, and we get these,
00:42:44
Speaker
these traumas that live in the body. And so we're keen to help people metabolize and process and compost those triggers and traumas that really constrain us being able to be our fullest selves, I guess, I would say. I kind of, they're like ropes
00:43:14
Speaker
around our vastness that distort us in different ways. So, you know, we want people to lean into those things and over time, you know, it's a slow process and start to recognize when we are triggered by things that are more about our past than our present and how we can basically come more fully into the present moment instead of having to be constantly dragged into the past. So that's the shadow stuff.
00:43:44
Speaker
And when we say we want people to be open and embody decolonization and indigenous perspectives, that's kind of what we're talking about. We're just talking about recognizing that there is a lot of toxicity in modern cultures, once again over time, becoming more aware of those and understanding that there are other ways to do things that don't involve intense competition, very close guarded
00:44:11
Speaker
and standoffishness that don't involve shame and blame and guilt and criticism and judgment and condemnation. There are ways to live communally that are more nourishing, that places where flourishing can happen for humans. And as I said, where we can just kind of
00:44:35
Speaker
ground and lean in and be supported by others who are going through the same journey together. And so it's not some sort of abstract idea of you must sign a contract about your commitment to decolonization. It's just an understanding that we are trying to do things in different ways that are more in alignment with the way our indigenous ancestors from our different lineages would have lived life and
00:45:04
Speaker
We think that those ways of living are healthier and create more thriving than a lot of stuff that happens in modernity. We don't have any of those. People keep asking me about how long the policy manual is going to be and the
00:45:23
Speaker
and the sort of agreements that people have to sign. We don't do any of that stuff because we're very hard and gut based and we want to come from those places of intuition and attunement and sensing into each other and to allow that kind of emergent culture to be guided by inspiration from our ancestors essentially.
00:45:53
Speaker
Yeah, I'm thinking about the Eldering piece and this process you're describing is something that takes a lot more maturity and makes me feel like I've got to really go down pretty deeply to access a well of wisdom that I haven't obviously been gifted by my
00:46:16
Speaker
by the current culture. So how does Eldering play a role at Anamkara? And also too, I think you mentioned that in tandem with the sociocracy model of decision making. Which one kind of has more weight or is there a hierarchy there? How do things get done and agreed upon? Yeah, yeah. Well, it gets harder as more and more people arrive. So we're starting easy, which is good.
00:46:45
Speaker
Sociocracy is really just a model of, more of an anarchist model of decision making where people make decisions kind of collectively and in a kind of consensus-based model, but they talk a bit more about what they call consent in sociology. Essentially, it's important to explain
00:47:13
Speaker
what consensus means in these kind of more anarchist models and it's often more about not necessarily the enthusiastic yes that we hear somewhat about these days but more about can you live with that decision or do you have strong objections to it and the reason for that is because you know otherwise one person could stop a decision among a hundred if you don't have a sense of that maturity to go look I don't really like this idea very much but I don't feel that it's going to be
00:47:43
Speaker
particularly dangerous or damaging. So I'll just go, yeah, fine. I'm not going to block that. That's the sort of idea that Socioxury comes up with. And in bigger organizations, there's sort of semi-autonomous circles of decision making that have overlapping members. And so people get on with stuff in a certain focused on particular themes or topics that means that things can happen faster without everybody making decisions about everything. And sometimes there's a sense of
00:48:13
Speaker
people make decisions about things to the extent that it affects them. So you let things happen which don't affect you as much and you weigh in on others that do. So we like that idea of consensus consent, decision making that affects you type of stuff. But we also think that elders are really important. And in indigenous cultures, elders are not people that you,
00:48:42
Speaker
take orders from, but who it's good to take advice and listen to. And so elders are people who offer a sort of compass to others. They serve without needing to be sort of recognized or celebrated for that. And they're just good at channeling wise responses from the cosmos, more or less.
00:49:10
Speaker
and familiarity with the complexity of life and the kind of ripple effects that can happen from decisions, not just the immediate effects of those. So we say that we have a sort of a sociocracy model with Aldering because sometimes it just makes sense to recognize the wisdom in others and not have this
00:49:37
Speaker
modern tendency to want to equalize everything. So to give you an example, I've been going through recently in the last, I seem to have emerged, but in recent weeks I've been going through some pretty intense kind of shadow processing work. Trauma has arisen and has made itself known and has affected the way that I flow through the world and I've had to deal with it. But in that process,
00:50:05
Speaker
I've deferred to my partner Victoria and her wisdom about how to do things and how to make decisions about things and ways of doing things because I didn't feel like I was in a good place to contribute. And because of the place I was in, I felt resistance and resentment towards that kind of relinquishment of power at the same time as knowing that was the best thing to do for those weeks.
00:50:35
Speaker
And so that is the sense of Eldering that we're trying to get at. Elders are people that you can trust to make good decisions and do things well without allowing their ego to get the better of them in what they do. So it's not necessarily tethered to their numerical age?
00:51:01
Speaker
No, no. Eldering is something that usually takes some time to do but can occur in people who are very young and more often in people who are middle aged to older than middle aged. So being on a homestead, there's a lot of work that needs to be done to keep that ship sailing. And you also offer an exchange program where people can labour in exchange for their accommodation.
00:51:31
Speaker
and all the other gifts that they would have access to at Anamkara. And you also mentioned too the joy of human endeavour together. So I want to ask you about work and see if you can explode our assumptions about work as well, because I know that you take some cues from the Findhorn intentional community in Scotland and one of their core principles or practices is around
00:52:01
Speaker
think work is an act of love. And I've been thinking a lot about this lately in terms of karma yoga and devoting myself to the task at hand. Like this morning I was just raking for hours, raking leaves for fire hazard reduction. But I was thinking about that concept of karma yoga and why we have this definition of work as this necessary evil to be completed as quickly as possible and then fly to Bali to recharge.
00:52:30
Speaker
How would you reframe our ideas around work? Well yes, in Primal or Indigenous cultures work is not really a thing that people do separately from life. Work-life balance doesn't make sense because work is just folded into life and obviously you live
00:52:51
Speaker
Not so much you don't live to work, you work to live. But that work is a very sociable enterprise that only takes up a few hours of the day. And so we're very much into that. We want to do kind of work of pleasant intensity together mostly.
00:53:14
Speaker
that you need to run a homestead, but to do that in a way that is really more about the collective joy of shared space together. And activities are really great for that. So that's what we call the work part of being together. And we have the praying or the spiritual stuff. And playing is also playing games or swimming together in the dam or what have you.
00:53:45
Speaker
is an important part of that. So a typical day would be some yoga, some meditation practice, a circling, a bit of work, and then some morning tea, a bit more work, then some lunch, and then a bit more work and some afternoon tea, and then after that, a bit more work and some dinner. So it's kind of like a lot of breaking up, and meals are really important. So when we say one of the pillars is eating together, that's because
00:54:13
Speaker
Of that need to it's another communal activity we can do together Apparently we have some noise in the background now. Can you hear that? Yeah, that's nice. It's a little Cruisy little soundtrack happening. That's all good I had a big rant last week at the opening in the opening part of the episode about how
00:54:35
Speaker
lengths we go to to try and scrub our audio clean from any trappings of you know the location it was recorded or the people who were around and but then I was like oh shit sometimes my audio is too too quiet there's not enough happening so bring on the the background noise I say good yeah a bit of background noise is good but does that does that answer your question that you asked yeah the the work I love that idea of it being
00:55:03
Speaker
unfolded into the everything of living. I think that's a really beautiful way of putting it. I mean, I still do think, yeah, but then so many of us have to go to these jobs and how do we find the meaning and the joy and any semblance of sacredness in these bullshit jobs? Yeah, yeah, it's hard. And that's the balance that we're trying to find at Anamkara is, you know, we want people to mostly be here, but we understand that this
00:55:32
Speaker
work in the outside world that's required as well for financial purposes. And yeah, we call the work around here karma yoga, which is sort of means love in action in another way of putting it. And yeah, and that includes all of that stuff. So drawing from the Finhorn Foundation approach, if people, when we talk about work at the beginning of days,
00:56:02
Speaker
We talk about intentions, I intend to do this or that. And we say that because if you change your mind, that's fine. One of the ways of being primal is to be in touch with your needs and your desires and where you're being pulled by the cosmos during a typical day, you're being invited. And if you're sick for a day, that's your karma yoga too. That's your love and action is to care for yourself and rest.
00:56:31
Speaker
And so it's an openness to agility and flexibility and what work, and a broad definition of what work is. Our discussions that we have about Indigenous perspectives of an evening, that's work as well. Brain food, food for the brain. Yeah, I asked Dave last week, a couple of weeks ago about what he
00:56:57
Speaker
What his response to someone in a setting like this where we are very much reliant on our bodies and our physical capacity to turn the compost pile, to take the goats out, to hoe the weeds. What happens when we don't have our physical ability if we get sick for a long time? You know, what then? Well, we just have to have enough people around to
00:57:26
Speaker
do the work that does need that sort of physicality as part of it. And there's many other things people can do, of course. But it is a balance, a communal level balance of capacities along with responsibilities for
00:57:48
Speaker
provisioning people's needs. And so it's one of those bridging medicines again, and it's going to be tricky because we have been very much impacted by modern ways of living. They've diminished our capacities. We're sicker and more feeble and less able, less fit, less
00:58:13
Speaker
strength even in our muscles than primal peoples had. And at the same time we don't have those skills to sustain ourselves either. So it's going to be hard. These bridging medicines, these bridging times, these transition periods are
00:58:33
Speaker
the tough times of trying to balance those metamorphosis sizing of ourselves as long with our society as it also changes quite rapidly. So there's no easy answer to that question. But all I can say is that people do better in community. And the kinship that comes from actually
00:59:00
Speaker
intermingling and caring for others more intensively in a place. And being in relation to country is all part of that. They're more than human communities, is what I'm saying, that I'm speaking of, yeah. Yeah. And yeah, that question is in no way loaded with the idea that people who don't
00:59:28
Speaker
who aren't strong, aren't able to contribute. It's more just that reality of when you are in closer contact with your life support systems and tending them using your arms and legs and your muscles. How does that then
00:59:45
Speaker
Yeah. What is that kind of redistribution and re-neashing of people? And I really love, I don't know if you've come across Sophie Strand and her work. Yeah. And how she draws these remarkable examples from nature around entities, organisms that actually kind of take
01:00:03
Speaker
seemingly take without giving something back, which because we're really into this idea of reciprocity at the moment, which is still this kind of equalizing force, this give and take, this horizontal kind of way of relating. But yeah, she highlights those examples where a mushroom is just kind of seemingly being fed a bunch of sugars and not really giving anything back. And it draws attention to, yeah, those times that we might just need to be someone to chew our food for us.
01:00:32
Speaker
Yeah. Without shame. I know Sophie's work. It's wonderful. And I think that there is a problem with the reciprocity kind of paradigm. And people talk about give and take or give and receive. But I think probably better is to talk about gifting and borrowing. Because we're never taking these things to keep for very long. Even our own bodies will be composted and will become the home of worms soon enough.
01:01:02
Speaker
That really changes things when I think of my body as a borrowed being. I really hope there's not a large fee, like a library fee for a late return. It's a different sort of borrowing to the capitalist idea, yeah. Something I really love that you shared recently, I wanted to
01:01:28
Speaker
to bring to this conversation and see if you might be able to speak a little bit more on it because
01:01:34
Speaker
It encapsulates a few things that I've heard from you over the years that I just I just love as phrases and words to kind of plant into our consciousness. But you said that modernity does not entail an excess, but a lack of soft fascination, appreciation or eroticism, sensuality, intensity, desire and pleasure, including pleasurable restraint. And I think that is so beautiful. And there's so much in that and
01:02:02
Speaker
I'd love to hear you talk a little bit more about that. Yeah, I guess there's a sort of impression in some circles that there's been too much in modernity, too much of, I guess you could say hedonism or excess or a sense of partying, like some people have described petro modernity, modernity of the fossil fuels as a kind of a
01:02:31
Speaker
and all you can eat banquet or an orgy that's gone on for too long. And I think that's misleading because I feel like there's a sense that we're having such a wonderful time and using up our resources faster than they can be renewed, when in fact we're having an absolute shit time by and large whilst also using up all the resources that can't be renewed at that pace. Perhaps a very small number of people are having a lovely time,
01:03:01
Speaker
It's not actually, modernity is not a place of pleasure and collective joy. How often do people feast and go to fancy dress parties and put on impromptu kind of improv
01:03:21
Speaker
improvise theater or sing together or dance together or do ceremonies and rituals together. It's rare. So it's not actually, it's a place of generally a place of immiseration. And that's why I talk about the difference between privilege and benefit. I feel there's a lot of people
01:03:46
Speaker
who understand the notion that some elements of our society are privileged, they're billionaires, they have the super yachts and so forth, and that super yachts are probably fun. I don't know, I've never been on one. But I don't think anybody actually benefits from modernity in the sense that their lives would be more nourishing, more vivid, more vital, more visceral, more thriving if we lived as primal peoples have lived. And that includes everybody up to the most powerful.
01:04:14
Speaker
the richest, they're still not actually having that much fun. And the pleasure of life is something that's best experienced in those more close-knit kind of relational kinship contexts where it becomes about kind of the eros of loving
01:04:43
Speaker
the world in a kind of sensual erotic way. That's not the hyper-focused sense of sexual pleasure. That's the most celebrated in modernity. And so that's what I mean when I talk about, let's get real about what modernity is. It's not actually that wonderful anyway. It's not like we've found something wonderful and then just have to wrap ourselves on the knuckle and say, that's enough of that now. You've gone partied for too long.
01:05:13
Speaker
Just the wrong way to go about the whole shebang. Yeah, yeah, that's so perfect. And so what do you think the future holds for us humans? Well, all humans are pretty much in the same, I won't say the same boat, but we're in the same bay, let's say, the same kind of coastal inlets and
01:05:41
Speaker
Some of us are in super yachts, and some are swimming with weights around their legs. But it's one place. And the place is a changing age, I think. And modernity is coming to an end. And we will go back, not to do exactly how it's ever been, but to similar ways of living that are more relocalized, hopefully,
01:06:07
Speaker
that I can draw from the wisdoms of our ancestors in terms of those ways of living, being, knowing and doing and relating and perceiving that are more conducive to well-being and the transition period will be very difficult and
01:06:27
Speaker
Yeah, it's that ending of world's apocalypse type of stuff. Apocalypse also means to uncover and unveil. So we have a lot to learn from that unveiling of things as they are. And yeah, it's going to be tough. And hopefully on the other side, that more local way of living
01:06:51
Speaker
will be something people can do well in a way that creates that flourishing life for, not just for humans, but for all the other life forms that are inviting us into kinship with them and that we may be able to learn to listen to their invitations as the power of modernity wanes and the system crumbles around us. And what kind of skills do you think we need to get through those rocky times
01:07:22
Speaker
Well, it's great to have practical skills, you know, gardening and hunting and building and tailoring clothes and so forth. Those are good, definitely good skills to have. But I would say those hard skills are actually eclipsed by the soft skills that we need of engagement and attuning and listening and communicating and caring and loving.
01:07:50
Speaker
other other creaturely aspects of the cosmos so to me the soft skills are more important and when you come together in a community where you can hold those complexities of relationships you can you can quickly learn some of the hard skills through sharing with each other so essentially it's about how good it is to how much better it is to kind of have the
01:08:17
Speaker
have groups of people come together and live together and you need those so-called soft skills to make that work. Is there anything that you would point people in the direction of whether that's a book or a workshop or a song or a colour that maybe starts them on
01:08:41
Speaker
the path of understanding some of these concepts that we've added today, something you're particularly loving at the moment. You could always find out some more specific stuff on our NMCurrow website of course, but there are some really good books out there and I think your mention of David Abrams is important and his book
01:09:12
Speaker
Spell of the Sensuous is a great book. One of the things we need to really connect with in these times is our grief. So therefore, it would be good to also read Francis Weller's book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, is a really important book. And if you get through those, drop me a line and I'll send you some more books.
01:09:39
Speaker
What an invitation. And what a conversation. I feel really stoked on everything you've shared today. And I can't wait to listen to it back multiple times. And I'm just really, really grateful that you didn't make me feel silly for some of the questions that I had on the tip of my tongue that feel very naive and just like a starting point.
01:10:06
Speaker
but I also feel self-conscious about that sometimes. So thank you for being really kind in your responses. It's a pleasure to talk to you. And one thing we didn't get to talk about, which I think is very important, and you just mentioned, is the importance of silliness itself.
01:10:33
Speaker
How we need to be silly, not in that way that you mentioned, but that sense of humor, that clowning around, that lightness of being that doesn't take ourselves too seriously. These are the sort of things that help us to move with grace through the world. And yeah, very much drawing from indigenous traditions, that sense of the trickster, the trickster that makes the world.
01:11:02
Speaker
There's another book you could read. I think Trickster Creates the World, something like that. And yeah, it's so important. And one of the other things that we don't do enough of, that uncontrollable, laughing till your sides hurt type of thing. We need more of that in modernity and in whatever bridging societies we're moving towards. In continence medicine.
01:11:32
Speaker
Yeah. Cool. Well, thanks so much, Ian. Thank you, Katie. It's been a pleasure. Thanks to Ian for gifting his time and energy to resilience and definitely get along to his activism and animism events if you're in or around Naam. It's all linked in the show notes and be sure to get in touch if you have any questions or comments or haikus in response to today's episode.
01:12:03
Speaker
Thank you, thank you for those who leave resculience reviews on iTunes and stars on Spotify. It's a really lovely gesture of support and lends a glow of legitimacy to this one-woman show. See you next Monday.