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episode 1. Transformation
132 Plays7 months ago
Welcome to With Heart - a Concord Institute podcast.
In this inaugural episode, we embark on a deep dive into the transformative journey of mind, body, and spirit. Host Laura Vincent is joined by Greg Johnson, the director of Concord Institute and a visionary leader in the macrobiotic and transformational movement.
Together, they trace the fascinating origins of macrobiotics, exploring how it evolved from a dietary practice into a powerful tool for healing and personal growth. Greg shares his experiences from the early days of the natural food movement, reflecting on the pivotal moments that shaped his journey and the global rise of whole foods.
As they discuss the integration of consciousness, being, and food, you'll discover how true transformation goes beyond just what we eat—it's about aligning our biology with a deeper sense of purpose and connection. This episode offers profound insights into the potential for holistic transformation when we nourish not only our bodies but also our minds and souls.
Tune in for an inspiring conversation on how macrobiotics and transformational practices can unlock a life of balance, awareness, and wholeness.
Produced by Raygun Music Sound Radio
A Concord Institute Podcast
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Concord Institute
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to With Heart, a Concord Institute podcast. In this episode, we are offering an introduction to the Concord Institute and a discussion about transformation and the transformative work that is on offer.
Transformation: Ending and Beginning a Life Chapter
00:00:31
Speaker
This section will be led by Greg Johnson, Director and Facilitator at Concord Institute. That's what transformation is. You end one chapter of your life and you open another door. There will also be voices from the Concord Institute community offering you an insight into their experiences. It's not just about change, it's more that something has evolved and grown.
00:01:02
Speaker
I'm your host, Laura Vincent. Let's begin with a question to Greg.
Foundations: Macrobiotics in Transformation
00:01:07
Speaker
What are the foundations to the Concord Institute? And how does macrobiotics fit in to transformation? Yeah, you have to understand a little bit of the history here. That we started out as a macrobiotic organization.
00:01:32
Speaker
with a strong emphasis on diet, food, whole food. And we were promoting a macro-robotic approach to diet and nutrition, in effect, trying to transform ourselves at the most biological level.
00:01:56
Speaker
And now choosing of foods, trying to stay within the harmony of the seasons as the seasons change are just and determining which foods are most appropriate for human consumption. When we look really closely, we see that whole cereal grains are by far the most appropriate principle food or recommended food. These are whole living foods.
00:02:21
Speaker
you could take a grain of brown rice, short grain, you could plant that, it would grow. So not only is it the end product of a plant, the fruit, it's also the seed, it's also the beginning. So you have both the beginning and the end, the yin and the yang together. And so most cereal grains, with the exception of buckwheat and a few other grains, have that quality or characteristic.
00:02:49
Speaker
And then from there, we choose, that includes pulses as well. And then we add, we supplement that with seasonal vegetables, sea vegetables, seeds, nuts, fruits, into a limited amount of animal food, preferably seafood.
00:03:13
Speaker
But we try to encompass the whole food spectrum, but just reprioritizing the selection of foods. Rather than setting with meat and potatoes, we start more toward the center. We find that a grain-based diet is easy to balance.
00:03:28
Speaker
It's less than the extremes. When you're eating foods in extremes, the teeter-tottering effect is quite strong. When you're eating cereal grains, then you're easily more centered in how you're being. Over time, it creates an integrity, a biological integrity, where all the organs and systems are working together harmoniously for the good of the whole.
The Rise of the Macrobiotic Movement
00:03:53
Speaker
When you're not paying attention,
00:03:54
Speaker
then that integrity is compromised or breached at some point, and that's when well-being issues start to occur. And so that movement, literally starting in the late 60s, early 70s, revolutionized consciousness around food. And starting in the United States, micro-robotics became popular.
00:04:19
Speaker
and initiated and started the whole food movement, which is now rampant. You can now, in the States and here in the UK, you can now find supermarkets, where I worked in little Mom and Todd natural food stores. Well, they weren't that small. We had 22 employees. But I worked in the very first natural food stores in Boston called Erewhon.
00:04:44
Speaker
named after a book that Samuel Butler had written. Aeron Trading Company was probably the first legitimate authentic natural food store. We had barrels of grain and buckets of miso and organic. We were the first people to have organic vegetables in big displays. So I had the privilege to work and then eventually manage the store, built another store.
00:05:10
Speaker
So my training was really in the natural food, whole food and macrobotic area for a good part of my development, personal development.
00:05:31
Speaker
And then, macrobiotics developed a reputation for healing. There are several very well-known people who healed their cells of cancer with simply the macrobiotic approach. And so, when a book was written and it became, you know, what did they say on YouTube? It became viral. So, they didn't have that word back then, but it went
Limitations of Macrobiotics in Healing
00:05:53
Speaker
viral.
00:05:54
Speaker
Well, it was a celebrated case. There was a doctor, and his name was Anthony Satalaro. So this case was covered in Life magazine. His first book was recalled by Life. That sold like crazy. And one of the books was The Cancer Prevention. A Macrobatic Approach to Breast Cancer. I researched it and thought, well, this sounds real promising. So people were queuing up, people with cancer and serious illness were queuing up around macrobatic centers. I was in Japan at the time, so I wasn't directly involved with that.
00:06:22
Speaker
But that was what happened to the macrobiotics. But what we find out in the end is that the macrobiotic approach to healing, like cancer or diabetes or some of the severe degenerative illnesses, it has its limitations.
00:06:37
Speaker
And so it doesn't work for everybody. It's plain and simple. So that led to some problems. And so macro body's got a reputation. So it was no longer trying to harmonize with the natural cycles of life. It became a healing modality.
00:06:55
Speaker
I had been taking seminars myself in workshops from the early 70s, transformational workshops.
Greg Johnson's Transformative Journey
00:07:03
Speaker
But while in Japan in 1985, I got a phone call from a friend who said there is this woman who leads transformational programs, a Japanese woman who had been studying in the States. She wants to come to Japan and do the very first transformational program in Japan. And so I said, okay, yeah, I'll come up. Maybe it'll help my business out.
00:07:25
Speaker
Unbeknownst to me, I was about to get my life transformed. It was a setup. And so it was a two-weekend program. You know, I had an opportunity to just share, really take a deep dive into the struggles and difficulties I was having and certain, addressing certain patterns that weren't particularly helpful in raising a family. So I kind of put all, pull it all out on the table, shared that openly in this program. And by the end of the program,
00:07:55
Speaker
I underwent a transformation.
Personal Transformation: Shedding Identity
00:07:56
Speaker
I have no other way to say that. Some aspect of myself perished, died in that program, or just ran out of life. And something new, a new expression, something began to emerge. And the old, whoever I thought I was, began to fade away, and something new began to replace it, so to speak. And that's what's been living my life ever since. And I've kind of lost touch with whoever used to live my life.
00:08:24
Speaker
That's what transformation is. You end one chapter of your life and you open another door and it's like shedding a skin or a cocoon or shedding a cocoon. One stage of life ends and a new one begins.
00:08:53
Speaker
you
00:08:57
Speaker
So I wrote out this program, and we launched it in the spring of 1994. 25 people took this program on the top floor of 188 Old Street, the former St. Luke's School on Old Street. And that was the beginning of a new era. It was the first time Macrobats had included a transformational element which deals with consciousness and being.
00:09:24
Speaker
Rather than just biology, we were dealing with being and consciousness. It was an unfamiliar area for the macro-robotic world. So that was the premise and the basis for this organization. So its education was committed to that yin-yang approach to diet and nutrition.
00:09:54
Speaker
And then there was the effects it would also have on our emotional life, on our thinking quality and so forth. So it had upstream effects as well.
00:10:14
Speaker
In transformation, we acquire a new awareness, a new way of being in the world, but it needs a foundation. And our physicality is the foundation. So we're...
00:10:27
Speaker
Yeah, our training now is geared towards the next stage of awareness or the evolution of consciousness. And our programs now are more and more designed to address that, speak to that, and give people an opportunity to participate and experience what that's like, what it's like to have one's life transformed.
Zoe's Transformation Story
00:10:58
Speaker
Now we're going to hear from two guests for this episode. First we welcome Zoe, who is a member of the Concord community. Zoe, can you tell us a bit about your experience of the Concord Institute and what the programmes have been like for you in your life? If I were to look over the last 10 years and think about what has transformed in my life, I would say
00:11:22
Speaker
It's been a case of transforming my relationship to myself, my relationship to people within my family, my relationship to my work. And I think it's not just about change, it's more that something has evolved and grown, so it's altered in some way, but it's grown and manifested into something
00:11:47
Speaker
something that's more whole or has more nourishment to it for my thinking about relationships, for example. So something transform for me relationships, some relationships have transformed from
00:12:02
Speaker
It alters the state or the space that something exists within. Something wasn't what it once was, but it's kind of transformed into something of its own essence. Something that was already there has been allowed space to be seen. That's kind of, for me, what transformation has been about. It's like discovering something that was already there, but it was kind of hidden beneath the surface of maybe some murky water or something.
00:12:35
Speaker
If you're open and you see something is possible for your life, you're already on a trajectory or you have something in mind but there's some energy or power, you need to reach it, then this is a space. The work of transformation, whole foods, energetic bodywork, all of that, it's like a booster to kind of boost you into your own possibility.
00:13:02
Speaker
Thank you, Zoe. And now, Nick, would you like to introduce yourself and tell everyone a bit about your Concord Institute experiences and what transformation means to you?
Nick's Perspective on Transformation
00:13:15
Speaker
My name is Nicholas Allen and I am
00:13:21
Speaker
A cook, I run a cafe, mostly organic, whole foods vegetarian, pescatarian, cafe in Stroud, almost 20 years. And I'm also a trustee here at the Concord Institute and have been for about 10 years, I suppose, something like that. Meat transformation
00:13:43
Speaker
is when experience is imbued with a deep, deep emotion, usually of sadness, but it's not sadness like, oh, I'm sad. It's like experiencing the being of human being in a way that we don't access.
00:14:08
Speaker
hardly at all in our lives. And I've experienced that here so many times that I... It's given me a depth of experience in my life that I didn't have access to. Like a listening for humanity and a trust in something else beyond what my head tells me.
00:14:41
Speaker
you
00:15:11
Speaker
Unfortunately, we're not in the fixing business. That's not what we're here to do. We're in the human being business. If you bring a relationship problem, if you bring those in as problems, we're not gonna treat them as problems, but we are gonna look into those problems, so to speak, at to see who's having those problems. See, we're interested in who is having those problems.
00:15:39
Speaker
And so our attention would go there as in, who are you? And why are you having those particular problems? What's the kind of being, what happened early in life that this problem is an expression of? And does this problem have any earlier similar situations? Is there a pattern there?
00:16:03
Speaker
And we find out human beings are trapped in a certain patternistic existence, a certain pattern. And at the center of that pattern is a central concern, our fear, that holds that pattern together.
00:16:21
Speaker
So we're trying to give people the opportunity here to experience themselves in that larger paradigm, that larger picture of reality. Most people are just lost in their daily lives, the demands, the need to survive, pay the rent. Some people are trying to have success missions of one kind or another. People are taken up with that and are really locked into that.
00:16:50
Speaker
So we like to be able to provide for people to step out of that for a while and maybe ask some basic questions about why they're here on this earth, who they are, who am I, and just really ask the fundamental questions.
Exploring Fundamental Life Questions
00:17:07
Speaker
That's all we're here to do. And then see if we can provide some tools to make some sense out of one's time on this earth.
00:17:17
Speaker
and maybe even empower them in their health and well-being and their spiritual outlook. So my name is Rafaela and I'm a retail consultant.
00:17:36
Speaker
I've always thought of transformation as something new and actually I think it's more about using what you have your best. So sometimes I find myself looking for new things to aspire and to achieve whilst I have come to
00:18:05
Speaker
and understanding or a realisation is more about integrating things. That's what transformation is to make.
00:18:16
Speaker
Sometimes I found through the transformation a space I can relate to, like a space in between situation, myself and the reaction. So that's what I think was deeply transforming for me.
00:18:40
Speaker
So the programmes are a space where any human being who feels called to explore bigger questions or patterns in their life can come and be empowered, try new tools and refresh their outlook. What happens then? Likely, if all goes well, they'll have a transformational experience. They'll find themselves standing in another world, if you will, another energy space.
00:19:07
Speaker
Another state of being, let's say it that way. They're in a completely different state of being. Now how long they stay on that just depends what kind of a foundation they have for it. This is where the body comes in.
00:19:20
Speaker
And if they haven't, then we recommend they take some training. They learn how to cook whole foods. They learn how to take care of their physical body through movement. So learn how to continue the inquiry that was started in the program. So keep yourself in training. And then one day, you can stand on your own two feet. You don't need to depend on an organization for your evolution, for your, you know,
00:19:50
Speaker
well-being. You know, we don't want people addicted to our organization. That said, we have a great community over the years and people really support the work that we do and try to make it available. Our work is organic. We're not out in the streets trying to promote or evangelize this work. We only ask that people who benefit from it share, pass the torch.
00:20:15
Speaker
Share it. There may be people who, you know, evolution has something to say to them. And you'll never know if you don't say anything. So they may hear the call of this work. And it's not for everybody. This work is not for everybody. It's for those who are ready to have an experience like that. All I know is we're here.
00:20:45
Speaker
And our time here is limited time. We're here. What are we doing here? If we're not to submit to the programming that's going on here, if there's something else we're supposed to be here, what is that? Imagine some spaceship just dropped us off here. Just dropped us off here. We would have a mission. What is that mission if you were just dropped off here? What are we doing here?
00:21:17
Speaker
If this was just a way station among way stations, what's the point? That's a question. I don't have a ready answer for that question, but it's a question we need to ask ourselves. What are we doing here? What's the point? And we can get to the pointlessness and meaninglessness, and that's a valuable place to get to. And that may give us an insight in what we're doing here.
00:21:46
Speaker
And by pointless and meaninglessness, I mean just the life that we're supposed to live, given our culture, at the end of the day is pointless and meaninglessness. And when we realize that, then maybe we can see something a little deeper, more profound about our time here on this earth.
Role of Literature and Art in Programs
00:22:50
Speaker
As with all the Concord Institute programs, literature, poetry and art are all included to stir up different levels of our consciousness. So today, we will be finishing with a poem read by Greg. I'd like to invite you all listening in now to take a moment to give this poem your fullest attention and just see where the possibility of being might take you. How about a roka palm?
00:23:19
Speaker
This poem is called Presentiment. It's from The Possibility of Being, which is a selection of poems taken from the Book of Hours written in 1905, almost 120 years ago. I'm like a flag surrounded by distance, divining the coming winds. I must share their existence.
00:23:48
Speaker
Whereof things below reveal no traces yet. Doors still closing softly. Quiet are the fireplaces. Windows not yet shaking. The dust lies heavily, but I can already sense the storm and the surge of the sea and spread myself out and into myself downfall.
00:24:16
Speaker
and hurtle myself away and them all alone in the great storm. Presentiment by Rainer Murray Rilke, written in 1905 in the Book of Hours, a selection of poems from the possibility of being. I'm like a flag surrounded by distance,
00:24:42
Speaker
divining the coming winds. I must share their existence for where of things below reveal yet no traces. The doors are still closing softly. Quiet are the fireplaces, windows not yet shaking, and the dust lies heavily. But I can already sense the storm and the surge of the sea.
00:25:10
Speaker
and spread myself out and into myself downfall and hurtle myself away and am all alone in the great storm.
00:25:22
Speaker
you
00:25:45
Speaker
Thank you so much for tuning in to our podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe to our podcast on your favourite platform to stay updated with our latest episodes. Don't forget to leave us a review and share this episode with your friends and family who might find it valuable. We'd like to invite you to follow the Concord Institute on social media, and we'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences, so please feel free to reach out through our website or social channels.
00:26:16
Speaker
For more information on anything you heard today, please visit concordinstitute.com, where you can explore all the programmes and join the community dedicated to transformation and holistic wellbeing. Thank you for your attention. You have been listening to With Heart, a podcast brought to you by the Concord Institute.
00:26:45
Speaker
you