Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Another World is still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose and now it has gone- and it's never coming back.
We have the power of gods to destroy our home. But we also have the chance to become something we cannot yet imagine,
and by doing so, lay the foundations for a future we would be proud to leave to the generations yet unborn.
What happens if we commit to a world based on generative values: compassion, courage, integrity?
What happens if we let go of the race for meaningless money and commit instead to the things that matter: clean air, clean water, clean soil - and clean, clear, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves (so we have to do the inner work of healing individually and collectively), between ourselves and each other (so we have to do the outer work of relearning how to build generative communities) and between ourselves and the Web of Life (so we have to reclaim our birthright as conscious nodes in the web of life)?
We can do this - and every week on Accidental Gods we speak with the people who are living this world into being. We have all the answers, we just (so far) lack the visions and collective will to weave them into a future that works. We can make this happen. We will. Join us.
Accidental Gods is a podcast and membership program devoted to exploring the ways we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations yet to come.
If we're going to emerge into a just, equitable - and above all regenerative - future, we need to get to know the people who are already living, working, thinking and believing at the leading edge of inter-becoming transformation.
Accidental Gods exists to bring these voices to the world so that we can work together to lay the foundations of a world we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.
Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.
Find the membership and the podcast pages here: https://accidentalgods.life
Find Manda's Thrutopian novel, Any Human Power here: https://mandascott.co.uk
Find Manda on BlueSky @mandascott.bsky.social
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandascottauthor/
On FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/MandaScottAuthor
Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would all be proud to leave behind. I'm Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And this week we're speaking with someone whose life is a thrutopian artwork; Sylvie Barbier has written the Manifesto for the Second Renaissance, and she says: 'we are a collective of artists making art to bring forth the Second Renaissance. We are alchemists. We create a new world through our work. We are the bridge between the dying past and the future unborn. Art is an expression of our consciousness and humanity; this is our path of transformation: life as an art'. And a little bit further down, she says: 'Our work is to create a space to be with all of it, to be with the joy, the darkness, the hope, the sadness, the unknown. Our work is to inquire about what would a world that works for everyone look like?' So you can see why we wanted to bring her onto the podcast. Sylvie Barbier is a French-Taiwanese performance artist whose work is some of the most powerfully raw, wild and beautiful I have ever encountered. She's an entrepreneur, an educator, and one of the two co-founders of Life Itself, which is a community and a website and a hub and many other things designed to build a wiser future through culture, space, and community.
Manda: The Life Itself website says 'we are pragmatic utopians, committed to practical action for a radically wiser, weller world. We create Conscious co-living hubs, start businesses, do research and engage in activism to pioneer a wiser culture and plant the seeds of a second renaissance.' And so the Second Renaissance is an initiative of Life Itself. And it acknowledges that we live in a moment of potential crisis and of collective rebirth. It offers a home to a growing community of people who are working to make this rebirth happen. Sylvie is an artist of extraordinary scope and depth, and so the role of art in the rebirth that we're speaking about is the focus of this episode. But we ranged far and deep into the nature of healing our shadows so that we can heal the ancestral and the descendant lines, whether of blood or of spirit, so that we can become the ancestors our descendants will be proud of. We explored the nature of ritual in building new beginnings and helping endings. And as we did with Brother Phap Linh from the nearby Plum Village, we explored the nature of life and death, and how we can each meet our own deaths with grace and joy and hope. And threaded through all of this, Sylvie and I explored how we can fall in love with living with life itself, so that we can each lay the strong foundations for genuine transformation in our world, our culture, our entire way of being as a species. And we do keep acknowledging that this is not easy. Doing the inner work is hard. It requires that sense of the inner warrior stepping forward, stepping up.
Manda: And so just before we leap into our conversation, I want to remind you that there's an Accidental Gods online gathering called Walking the Path of the Inner Warrior on Sunday the 28th of June 2026, which is this coming Sunday, if you're listening to us on launch day. It's 4:00 till 8:00 UK time on Zoom, and we will be exploring many of the things that we talk about in this episode, but anchoring them in your own life's experience, endeavouring to help you find the ways that you can evoke and invoke your own inner warrior to be able to do the inner work that we keep talking about. If you've been before, then you know that we did talk about How to fall in love with life. And before that, we had a gathering on Honouring fear as your mentor. If you've been to these, then this one is following in a sequence. But if you haven't, please still come along. We're not going to assume that you've done all of the work from everything that we've done before. We will make everything as clean and clear and grounded as we can. So if you have the time and the interest, we look forward to seeing you there and then. And in the meantime, for a deeply moving and inspiring conversation, people of the podcast, please do welcome Sylvie Barbier of Life Itself and the Second Renaissance.
Manda: Sylvie Barbier, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this really quite delightful summer's day?
Sylvie: So I am well, very excited to be here. And I'm in the southwest of France, near Bergerac and Plum Village.
Manda: Yes, you guys are five minutes from Plum Village. I am so envious. And I need to ask, did you go there because Plum Village was already there and it's a good thing to build up a critical mass of community in the area? Or is it just so beautiful that everyone goes there anyway?
Sylvie: Yeah, it is a little bit about your first point, which is building a critical mass, because we believe that to kind of create a cultural change, you need pockets, you need little places that have critical mass of differences to help you maintain faith. Especially when things are so hard, or the outside world has such different views or values. So Plum Village already had so much alignment with some of our vision and values, and there are already some people who had moved around the area. And so we thought, instead of being isolated in the middle of the countryside with no critical mass of differences, it already has a couple of seeds here to play.
Manda: Okay. Let's just stay on this thread for a moment, we'll come to everything else. But you're part French, part Taiwanese. Did you grow up in France and were you in the Bergerac area when you grew up? Did you know it already?
Sylvie: No, not at all. So I'm actually half French, half Taiwanese, as you say. I was born in Taiwan and I grew up in the northern suburbs of Paris. What kind of seen with high immigration, a bit of like the Parisian ghettos, where a lot of past French colonies or refugees would arrive. So I grew up where white people were at times a minority in my high school. And so I say there's many different Frances, you know, depending on which area, which region you go. So I had no links to the Dordogne area, but it is a very beautiful, rich area.
Manda: Okay. And finally, one last question. We talked to Brother Spirit, brother Phap Linh from Plum Village probably about six episodes ago and I'm really curious to know, now you've got Plum Village, you've got you building a hub of how to build community, we'll get to that later; what what second Renaissance and life itself is actually doing. Are you seeing ripples out? There are many Frances as I'm sure there are many Britains, many Americas, many everywhere around the world. But is this area becoming different? Can you feel an energetic shift I suppose is what I'm asking?
Sylvie: I think so, it's very little and gradual, but you know. So my partner Rufus Pollock and brother Spirit were university friends.
Manda: Oh were they?
Sylvie: Yes. That was also a key thing of us choosing to move there. And 15 years ago everybody would talk about moving close to Plum Village, but maybe very few people would enact on it. And I think the possibility that digital work has offered has allowed maybe gradually more people to be able to move around. And I think the realisation of the reality of the climate crisis has also made people really want to make a move. So there's maybe first a kind of like, yes, we'd like to live differently and it takes some time, years to integrate that. And it's always more encouraging when you gradually see people of your own generation who think similarly making that move. And we've seen this community grow over the past, uh, we've been here now for about six years.
Manda: Right. Beautiful. Okay, so we may come back to that, but in the meantime, you are part of Life Itself and the Second Renaissance, and you've written a manifesto and an essay for the Art of the Second Renaissance, which we could just read the whole manifesto to be honest, it would make a podcast in itself. It's beautiful and it's inspiring, and it speaks to a lot of thrutopian thinking, I would say. And early in the introduction, you say: Throughout history art participates in envisioning and birthing new worlds. Amid societal, ecological, and spiritual crisis, as globalised modern civilisation dies, artists are called to embrace their responsibility to help society navigate a turbulent transition; the darkness before the dawn. To connect with soul, explore and communicate meaning and heal the rift between the worlds in pursuit of a second renaissance. This is the artist's call'. And that really, really struck me. That this is our responsibility as humans. Because we all create our own lives even if we don't label ourselves artists. That we're in the turbulent transition and the darkness before the dawn, and we can heal the rift between the worlds. So let's go deeper into that. Tell us a little bit, before we start, to anchor people and give them a sense of perspective; how the Second Renaissance arose as a concept and your involvement in the creation of it?
Sylvie: Well, I think first, I use this term Second Renaissance but many great thinkers and doers in the world are feeling the same feeling. Like with you with thrutopia. That sense of maybe something is dying, something is not working, and also something wants to be born and wants to emerge. For me, I have in my background of artistic sensibility, you know, the Renaissance was such a flourishing moment in terms of art and defining moment in terms of art. And also there's in the terminology, in the semiotics, Renaissance is a rebirth. And I think I've really felt this moment of like death and rebirth. It's something that I feel that I carry as an artist of being a liminal artist, of in-between times, belonging in-between worlds between the East and the West. And maybe contrary to the first Renaissance, that has brought many wonderful things in terms of like a freedom from feudalism, a discovery of science, wonderful values that helped us move forward. And maybe this one, there's also a rediscovery of ancient tradition, of ancient wisdom, a rediscovery therefore of eastern tradition and the global South. So it's also Renaissance, but it's a different one. And I also particularly had lived in Florence, which is the birthplace of the first Renaissance, for two years.
Sylvie: And as I was navigating through a great period of depression and despair, that really started hitting around 2019 to 2020 was actually also from receiving a prophecy from Rupert Read that you had on a podcast not so long ago because he described what would climate collapse really look like? What would a climate crisis really look like? And I was just holding my newborn baby boy, and he was declaring there would be wars. And a very few months after these wars started happening, and I'm holding this innocent boy. And wars usually mean boys being sent to war. And so I had to really look into what is this future I have to give to this child and how to navigate that? And then actually I really believe in ancestral work, which is to look at the ancestors, to look at history. And history tells us it's not the first time we've been through something of a drastic change. It's not the first time that there's been civilizational crisis and renewal. So if my ancestor had been able to navigate those turbulent times, we can too. And my aim is maybe not just to have my child just to survive, but to have the innate sense, to practice in himself the faith of being able to deal with whatever life throws at him.
Sylvie: And so I really was like, okay, archetype ancestors have gone through that. We are no frail little thing. We've come from billions of years of transmission, of spiritual transmission, of genetic transmission to be standing there and facing this great challenge. And I can either be crumbled by it or I can rise to it. And for this rise, there needs to be a death of how things were, allowing a letting go, because this new generation is asking us to let go of certain things. And therefore a rebirth and a birth of what it means to be human being. And my role, I feel as an artist, I have a certain sensibility and talent, and it's to put that sensibility at service of that vision of a second renaissance. Of that movement for a second renaissance that would put at its core valuing wisdom, interbeing, dealing with complexity, looking at how to go beyond capitalism. And it's not saying we have this aspiration, we don't have all the recipe, but we artists can come together and experiment for our art, you know?
Manda: Yes, yes. Oh my goodness, Sylvie, we could just spend the next hour exploring just that bit. But let's go deeper into you. Were you always an artist? Is this what you have always done and how you've always identified? Or is it something that came to you with motherhood? Or how long does this go back in your own personal history?
Sylvie: I think I have been blessed and maybe cursed as an artist that from a very early age, I knew that art was my calling. There was a painting of Picasso and a painting of Matisse, and I thought I want to be the artist and I want to be the muse.
Manda: Okay!
Sylvie: I love the women in those paintings that inspired people, that inspired the artists. And I also loved The maker. There was a dual love for me, and I think that's also what led me to want to do performance art, because I also loved dance and embodied art, that if you weren't there seeing it, it was gone. You had to be in the present moment.
Manda: Right in the moment. Yes. Because then there's a co-creation that can't happen if you're not there in the present moment.
Sylvie: Yes. You know, when I was a kid, I would dance on the table and my father thought she'd be a dancer, and then he put me on classical dance. But really what I was inspired by was those dances that makes you enter certain forms of trance. Very rhythmic. And I think that has actually been a thread in my work where I'm looking at certain practices that help you open doors of consciousness and doors of how one can perceive reality without taking psychotropics, without taking psychedelics. Because I think actually on a personal level, I am cyclothymic. So it's a form of cousin related to bipolar. And my father was. And so because the mood swings are so intense, if I take psychotropics, it's just like even more than a regular person. So I want to enter those states, but in a much more free embodied practice. So the descent may be a bit lower, slower, but you can attain also altered ness of consciousness through dance, music, also painting. There certain artistic practices that help you touch similar states. Not exactly the same, but similar states that I think certain, I would say divine substances. For me, these substances are meant to be divine, are meant to open one's consciousness and occurrence of reality.
Manda: Yes. And you mentioned somewhere in the manifesto the cave art at the place that I will never pronounce correctly in France. And one thing that struck me about that, or strikes me always, is that that civilisation was stable, apparently for 25000 years. From the early paintings to the late paintings, they didn't change that much. And people were going into those caves, which are a long way in. You don't go in by accident and creating beautiful art that clearly had great, great meaning. And there is room there to sing, perhaps to dance, to engage in ritual. And it seems to me looking at your work and we will definitely put a link to this in the show notes, that you are standing at the liminal thresholds where art and dance and everything that you just described is also ritualistic, and you are then encouraging the people who are in the space with you to engage in that ritual. And this clearly is intentional. So talk to me about how you see ritual in the 21st century, because it's become one of those things that if you walk into the local town and talk to people about rituals, they'll either look at you blankly or they'll start hallucinating about, I don't know, witchcraft or something. Something that to them is so flaky it's off the edge of existence. Whereas it seems to me it's part of being human for all of human evolution, except a tiny fraction right at the end, we have Undertaken movement and dance and singing and meaning making together with our tribe, whoever our tribe is. And what you're doing here I'm sure it's amazing and powerful to see it in person, but I've only seen the website and it's still amazing and powerful. So you're creating a liminal space that extends beyond the time and the moment you do it. But talk to me about how you step into ritual, what it means, and where it takes you.
Sylvie: I can give a clear example also. So first, I think ritual is there's a sense of rhythm.
Manda: Yes. Okay.
Sylvie: And we live on a planet and there are seasons and rhythms. Even like of the sun, there are rhythms of like birth, death, rites of passage. And now we relate to ritual more as tradition and sometimes emptied, disconnected. They always actually have soul but we forgot our connection to the soul of those ritual. When we get married, when someone dies, a christening, a solstice. And I do think that gradually people are reconnecting to the power of collective ritual. Also, at the end of a great war, we celebrate the end of wars. We celebrate certain rites, the individual ritual. Maybe for women, the first time you have your period. Moments like that. And there's collective rituals that help us collectively process what we're experiencing collectively. And actually, a long time ago, I've written this poem about a funeral for modernity, and there's this book called Hospicing Modernity. In a way, we collectively need to come together and through our body and through art. You know, recognise that we're living this important moment together. And I think that ritual is saying there is a moment that is important; this is sacred, and we're naming it. And it can feel very like, oh, witch making; but so what?
Manda: Yeah, yeah, true.
Sylvie: Prayer is also making the mystical not such a big deal, you know, also. So that it can attain everyday life. And I think that's the role of art. Also, beauty. It's like you have a cup of tea and it was handmade by someone's craft. You can feel their hand touch and it makes your everyday life a bit more sacred, of honouring it. Sacredness is a posture, it's how you approach life. It's a posture to be able to receive life. And so art can help us to gain that posture, feel that posture and concretely in terms of ritual. Recently it's been a lot of work for me in terms of ancestral lineage and actually I want to talk maybe about the cave. So I had promised my father that I would take him to those Lascaux cave for his 70th birthday, and he passed away right before. And so at that point, two weeks later, I got pregnant. And two weeks later I received almost this kind of dream or vision that I should go to a cave and cover my pregnant belly with his ashes.
Manda: Wow.
Sylvie: And so then I organised to go to this cave that feels almost like a cervix and brought my father's ashes. And it was just a very simple action of covering my belly with his ashes and letting him go. And I think that's, to the opening to everybody, is if we let ourselves connect to the love we have, the pain we have, how we want to grieve or mourn, how we want to birth. It's a powerful action if we let ourselves feel the pain, also. Feel the pain of the grief, and feel the pain of birthing. And so that was a ritual, for example, because I'm particularly interested in this ancestral healing because I feel a lot of the crisis we're going through, you know, the ancestors are definitely mixed in it. And as I've become a mother, I myself am an ancestor. And I realised that even if I didn't have children, I would still be an ancestor, because I'm giving something to the next generation. And so I have a job to do. I build on the shoulder of my ancestor. They've given me a dream and they've given me all they could, and that was actually a lot. But some of them are dead and they can't do the healing. So if I have the ability, it's for me to do the healing. And when I heal, I heal all the ancestors with me. It's like, you know, in the Lord of the Rings, there's this moment where he released those haunted pirates who had forsaken him. And once he released them, they're all gone, and they're all at peace. I feel like this is a strong image because it's like, oh, if you can release that in yourself, you heal all this lineage with you.
Manda: Totally.
Sylvie: Yes.
Manda: Oh, again, there's a whole podcast on this Sylvie. I really want to go into this. Let's go back into the cave with your father's ashes and there's the grief and you're pregnant and you know that you're pregnant. And if this isn't too personal, I'm really interested in the liminal space of that and the energetics of it. And in the shamanic world one of the roles of a contemporary shamanic practitioner, and we're not pretending we are shamans because we're in a Western society. It's not a thing. But we can still use the tools of shamanic practice. And one of the key roles is as a psychopomp, which is to help those who have newly stepped over the threshold of life into death, to head where they need to go, instead of hanging around and frankly, becoming quite problematic for the living. Because our culture is not taught how to die.
Sylvie: Yes!
Manda: We basically ignore the fact that death is coming for a very long time until it's right there. Sometimes even then. And then we have no idea what we're doing, which is a little shortsighted. And I'm wondering, your family may be different, first, and it sounds as if your father was really switched on. Did it feel to you as if that ritual that you enacted helped him to move on? And at the same time, helped your child to come into being? Your daughter. Because she was born November 24th, I think.
Sylvie: She was born on the 2nd of November, which is the day of the dead in Mexico. And I was in labour during that.
Manda: Interesting.
Sylvie: Yeah, she was definitely a day of the dead girl. I think definitely I would agree that our culture is very scared of death and make it a taboo. And actually there is even more suffering from that. I think my mother has always been healthier at least than many people. For example, when I was a child, there was no problem for me to see the body of a dead aunt. Or to go see old people, just seeing old people who are, you know, closer to death. For me, there's no shame, there's no taboo, it's a natural thing. Actually, our body knows how to die if we let it. Our body at some point wants to die, because we need to make space for the next generation. My daughter's birth I think, could only happen if my father died. Because he was ill for seven years and I had to take care of him. And it took a lot of energy. And in his letting go and resting, it also created a space. And I had to do a lot of mourning, but I understood that that one will be my turn at some point. And it's not a bad thing, because that means I make room for another human being, for something else to come, to then make their mark, to then build. And I hope I can transmit whatever life force or what I think is really important that I hope they can carry through. But that's also a very important question. If there's only three things or few things you would want the next generation to take, what is it?
Manda: Right. And what is it?
Sylvie: I think for me, it's like, I did a whole blessing ritual for my daughter also when I was pregnant. I painted a red line on myself, which is the meridian line, the belonging line. And I was like, this generation needs all the blessing they can take, because they're going to have so much problems, crises coming at them. They need all the ancestors force so they can have the strength to face whatever is going to come their way. And I want them to know that we have their back. If I can give you one thing, it's to know we have your back and you can do this. Like you can be creative, you can face whatever life throws at you. I love you, I have faith in you.
Manda: Gosh, imagine a world where every child has that as their baseline. Wouldn't that be so powerful?
Sylvie: And I think as adults, we need that!
Manda: Yeah. Of course, yes, but we may need to create it for ourselves.
Sylvie: Yes, yes.
Manda: And I'm looking at two things. First off, I just did a basic birth chart for your daughter, who has her sun, as far as I can tell, at ten degrees of Scorpio. And a lot of very interesting things; and Scorpio and Day of the dead, it strikes me as that's a potentially incredibly powerful start! And, still talking about ancestors, that those alive now, what really struck me is that you are echoing a realisation that has come to me probably in the last six, nine months, which is the work of now for everybody alive on the planet is to do the healing. That some of the trauma that we carry is 10,000 years old, in our culture, the white, Western, educated, industrial rich, democratic. And a lot of the damage done to the rest of the world is us projecting the unhealed wounds. And we didn't necessarily have a mother as switched on as you who understood that offering to the next generation that level of 'I've got your back; you have the strength'. We didn't have that. But we need to somehow do the healing so that we can step into the world as that. And I'm looking at your work The Spiritual Warrior, where you've got a white line and a mask and you say: 'I am a mother, I am chaos, I am the transmission of life. I and she are one.' And it's so powerful. And again, I didn't see the enactment of it, but I'm seeing the pictures. And it raises hairs everywhere in my body and just it feels so alive and so savage in a way that breaks open the shields of modernity that we've built around ourselves because we're afraid of the reality of life and death. And you're offering this spiritual warrior power and raw, wild, ferocious, savage wonder. And I just want you to just tell me about that. I have so many questions, but I don't want to narrow you in with a question.
Sylvie: Yeah, I think for a woman, I have a very strong also yang energy in me or warrior energy in me. But I'm also trying to give a lot of space for my yin, or what is wise. I'm constantly sitting with what is wise? Sometimes it's like, maybe don't repress that warrior Energy. And that's something I've learned to be like there is this warrior in me. And you know what? Lots of women and female are, because to protect your cub, to make sure they survive you kind of have to make sure there's a bit of that. And don't make it wrong, you know? And there's the mother that you are. But in this one, I'm particularly interested in terms of the spiritual warrior path for me, in the shadow work. Because as I keep looking, I see that a lot of the trauma is maybe at the moment there's a sense of things are not working and suddenly we have to face the amount of suffering that is there. But it is also a blessing because that means we are well enough to start looking. Because sometimes when you're so in survival and you just have to get by, you can't even afford to look, you just have to keep going. So the fact that we're in a place where like, oh, now we're looking, and we have time to look and capacity to look, is actually a healthy sign. It Can be very overwhelming and so we have to be gentle with ourselves. And in my own path, like sometime there has been this reconciling with moments where I felt hurt or harmed.
Sylvie: But then also looking at those stories of like, I'm a victim. People did that to me. I mean, long story short, if I can say, for example, as a child, I was mixed and I was bullied for being Asian. And the shadow work would be like, okay, I need to look at that suffering in myself. But if I really look, when I was a little girl I also did not like that bully. I liked her power, I wanted to be her. And there is a part of me that envied that. And where have I been a bully in my life? And so I think in terms of the healing, it's important to give space for the victim in us to come out, but also we need to have space for the oppressor in us to come out and to also ask forgiveness. Because currently I'm very confronted because I see that in France, there's lots of cases that are coming out about paedophilia, and that's really horrific. But we have to look, we have to look, and we have to start taking responsibility, and we have to start being able to look at the oppressor in us, because in each of us there's a victim and oppressor, and we have to have two sides. And I think the spiritual warrior in me is that I will look at the demon in me.
Manda: Okay. Yeah.
Sylvie: It's not just to slay the demon out there, it's too where am I being bigoted? Where am I being racist? Because I have internalised racism in me, where, for example, most of my life I thought a beautiful woman was blonde with blue eyes. And it took me a decade to suddenly be like, actually a black woman, an Asian woman, a Latina woman can be even more beautiful. Like it's very culturally ingrained. And then how do I show up in my conversation that I'm not even realising that I'm causing suffering? And I think this is an uncomfortable work because it asks us to take responsibility without being a blame game.
Manda: Exactly. Yes. Without self judging, because that can become a very fast downward spiral.
Sylvie: Yes. But that's why I think in most religious spiritual tradition, there's the work of asking forgiveness, of atonement, ritual moments in the year where we can safely come out, come out from our darkness, and cleanse ourselves. Because if there's no time for doing that, it just accumulates. If you cannot come out and say, I have those urges, you know? Because it's important to have absolute compassion and empathy for the children. But also, how do we come out of a system that has paedophilia? We need to be able to heal and look at the root. And so we need to have places for these, mostly its men, to come out, to be treated, to be healed. I think Germany, for example, is doing like a free line where people can call and say, I feel those urges, I need support etc. and is trying to destigmatize these things so that they don't pass to the action. And it's very controversial because some people feel like, no, it needs to be punished. And I can understand that.
Manda: But it's not going to heal anyone.
Sylvie: Yes. How do you do justice and healing together? It's a deep, deep question. And actually, most of the questions from the climate crisis, the oppressing of indigenous community, touches these two things: healing and justice, because they go together. And in my view, it starts with the courage of looking straight and deep listening. Most victims, the first step they need for their healing journey is the willingness to have their voice and their story heard and gotten. And I think before reparation, that's a great reparation to just say, I see you, I hear you.
Manda: I get you. Yeah. There's a brilliant embodied therapist in Canada, Sarah Slaughter. And she says: being seen, feeling felt and getting gotten is the baseline that everybody needs. And I remember reading a report, an academic paper, and I cannot remember who by or where, but this academic person had gone into prisons across the United States, which has the highest incarceration rate of anywhere in the world, and pretty much every single person there who wasn't there for trivial state related reasons was there because they desired to be respected. And what they had done, whatever they had done, had been in an effort to garner respect. And how do we exactly close that loop? Because we're not going to achieve the healing at scale that we need to do if we don't see and feel and get the wounding in ourselves. And one thing I find quite powerful in the thought experiments that we sometimes do within Accidental Gods is just thinking back in our own ancestral lineage. And without question, we have ancestors who were rapists and ancestors who were raped. It cannot be otherwise. You know, by the time you've multiplied up the generational lines to hundreds and thousands, that is going to be the case. And those ancestors did what they did, and we are the end result. And there's also an ancestral lineage that goes all the way back to we were hydrogen boiling in the sun.
Manda: But it is much, much longer than that. And trying to find that sense of perspective and send the healing rippling up the ancestral lines. And it feels to me, I'm not sure where I'm going with this as a question, but I did some some personal work recently. I was just down in the yard, brushing the yard, and I felt an inner judging voice that my yard is never tidy enough, partly because there are animals walking all over it all the time and. But the judging voice wants it perfectly clean and tidy and neat and looking pristine. And this is, I mean it's trivial in the scale of things we're talking about, but I was talking to that part and said, you know what? You could just step back for a bit and just relax, it would be okay. And I felt it relax and I felt the ripple cascade back up the ancestral line. And it was a really tangible thing and completely unexpected. I was literally brushing the yard. I wasn't expecting big personal work to be happening. And that part has never felt the need to comment since. It's still there, but it feels much more fluid, much more open. And it feels to me and I would like to check, this is where I'm heading now, I realise, is check with you.
Manda: It feels to me that when we do these little tiny bits of work, it wasn't big, deep trauma that I've been working with for decades. There's plenty of that. It loosens something in my system, and it feels to me that it loosens something in the whole energetics of the world, and that if each of us could do the little bits to begin with that don't feel overwhelming, that don't feel like it's just too big I can't manage it. The little bits that allow the thawing and the free flow of feeling and the greater creativity create the space where the bigger stuff doesn't feel so hard. And looking at your art, looking at your work, looking at the rituals that you're doing, it feels to me as if you're doing that on much orders of magnitude bigger scale. You're creating the energetic space where the healing can ripple up the ancestral lines. And therefore, as you said, we're all, whether we're blood lineage ancestors, we are all spirit lineage ancestors of the generations yet to be born, not yet born. That we can then ripple that energy down and offer that as our gift to the generations who are waiting to arrive. And I wonder if that's conscious on your part and how it lands for you, basically.
Sylvie: Oh absolutely. It's definitely conscious; it's part of the manifesto of healing the link between past and future. Because I see it between the boomers and millennials and Gen Z, this rift; the pain especially between the boomers and the millennials, like, you know, you've effed it up and now what? And there needs to be a healing of that. And so that has been very intentional in my work. Also inspired from the work around Plum Village that also works a lot for the sense of lineage. I think the other thing you said of sitting with maybe there's this judgement voice, and we do sense we're very morally, ethically, naturally we want to aspire to, and yet maybe sometime we might not have the capacity, you know. And I think one key thing, at Life Itself we also have those hubs and we offer residencies. And of saying, okay, we want to give birth and start changing civilisation and it starts by us living together and relearning how to live together. And you have to see all these archetype and these tension that we might want to change the world outside, but we are filled with that world inside of us.
Manda: Right?
Sylvie: And so we have to bring also a lot of gentleness and compassion. Like I have the oppressor in me. Sometimes I am the one who caused pain to the others without the intention. And it doesn't mean it's a justification, the inherited patriarchal view or racist view etc. but it is there. Or materialistic. For example, I grew up in the suburbs of Paris, quite poor and God did I love the modern consumerist dream. Oh my God, you know, going shopping, yay! And I have to sometime be like, I have to let go of that ancestral dream of eternal progress, you know shopping as a family activity to bond, you know? And be like, okay, gentle. But sometimes gentle Sylvie, sometime it's okay to go shop! If you go from one extreme to another, you're not doing the healing, you're actually from one trauma going into another trauma. It's like food. My father was French. I mean, butter was in every meal and like wanting to go more vegetarian and vegan. But I feel all my grandmother, in Brittany they use butter all the time, all my French ancestors being like, how dare you let go of your inheritance! You know, the butter and the cheese.
Sylvie: And so it's very affectionate, it's very emotional when we're trying to do those habitual cultural change. And so we have to bring gentleness and compassion as we go along. And it doesn't mean that it was for nothing, even if we do several steps, it's still for something. And it doesn't mean that we have to fix it all. We do our part. Next generation will have to do their part. Now, knowing that they have a lot coming over, like we're going to try to raise up to be ancestors who will be honoured. Because in many traditions the figure of the ghost is an ancestor that may be harmed but is not remembered. And so what is the ancestor that hasn't been remembered? It's often an ancestor that might have caused a lot of harm. In Chinese mythology basically, a ghost is an ancestor who's people who are living are not remembering that ancestor. So that means that ancestor you want to do your job. You know, you want to do your job because otherwise you'll be a hungry ghost wandering around.
Manda: Right.
Sylvie: And I think these are great stories, great mythologies. It's like, what is my duty as an ancestor, so I don't end up in the limbo soul haunting the next generation? And vice versa: how do I release the pain, the past that is still with me, the wounds that are still in me, so I cannot just release the ghost, but release my ghost inside of me that is eating me alive. And because those shadows are often the very thing that is in the way of fulfilling on our greatest dream or our greatest hope.
Manda: Wow. So what is your personal practice? Because this feels like we need a well of compassion for all the broken parts inside, for the ancestors. Because I'm guessing, I don't know enough about Chinese mythology, but the ancestors that become hungry Ghosts, I know a bit of Tibetan mythology where there are basically these vast things, but they can only feed through a tiny, tiny straw and they just can never get enough. And it is a living hell. And presumably if one had an ancestor who was really difficult and unpleasant and you remembered them, that's not the kind of remembering we want. We want the ancestors that we honour and respect and are grateful for. Yes? If you had an ancestor that, I don't know, the great great grandfather who was vicious.
Sylvie: I had a grandfather who was a very complex character, who beat my father, who was suspected also of rape and who beat his wife. But it doesn't mean there was not love also in this man. It doesn't mean that he didn't deserve love. Because I think love is not a matter of deserving, because otherwise I think no one would be loved.
Manda: Sure. Yes. And it doesn't run out.
Sylvie: Yes. It doesn't mean we should let people continue to harm. When we love someone, we don't let them harm others either, because that is not an honouring of life. And it's also healing the harm that that person has done, which is being able to see the harm and see that harm has happened. And also possibly to try to understand where does that harm come from in them? Love is understanding and understanding doesn't mean justification, doesn't mean approval. But it's also a healing so that I don't become that man or I don't raise a boy to become that man. Or I can prevent ending up with a man like that. So understanding is an act of love because I don't want that to happen to anyone else. And I don't want you to become like that. Because I don't know, but I think when we are harm and cause harm, it fractures part of our humanity. And so it's an act of love both for the ancestor to see I saw the suffering you caused, I can also see the suffering you probably went through. And I'm going to try to make sure that that doesn't continue forward with your grand grandchildren, that that that doesn't continue forward. So I sit with the question, looking, for example, that a lot of rape comes from male generally, what it is to raise a man of the future; how to do that, how to heal that.
Sylvie: And it's not just in human, it is also in the animal kingdom that this violence happen. And for me, that's the greatest act of love that I can both give to my grandfather and to my son. To be like, I love you, because it is also thanks to you that I am here. Like my hands, my fingers, he had very long fingers. I have a mix of my grandmother Chinese grandmother's fingers and my French grandfather's fingers. And I'm like, you are in me. There's no denying that. So if I start hating you, that means I hate myself. But it's more like, okay, how do I integrate the fact that you had this violence in you? And when I feel the violence in me, it is mine, but it's also yours. And how do I act more wisely? And these are the things I dance with. And I want to talk a bit about mythology because I think those stories really helps us navigate both our past, what to do with those stories, and how to help us project in the future. We need new stories or rediscover old stories.
Manda: I had just written on my pad: mythology. So yes, let's go for it. So, so mythology is clearly really important in all of your work. And you have a magazine called Mythos. So it's huge.
Sylvie: It's the second Renaissance magazine and this issue is on Mythos.
Manda: Yes. And so the people watching on YouTube just got to see it. People who are listening to the audio, we will put it in the show notes. We'll put an image of it in the show notes. And you have Rupert Read and Nathalie Nahai and good people in there. And it has seemed to me for quite a while that we need to generate a new mythology. Partly because from my perspective, which you don't have to share, most of our myths in the Western canon are myths of what I would call the trauma culture. We don't really have myths that go back to our indigenous past that have survived being filtered through the very particular lens of Christian ideology, because almost everything has been passed down with that as a filter. It's clearly different in other cultures, and there may be Chinese myths that have escaped that kind of, I was going to say sanitising, but I think it's more of a corruption. But even so, we are in the 21st century. We are different people. And if we aspire to become all that we could become, which feels to me what both Life Itself and the Second Renaissance is all about. How do we generate myths that will allow us to step into the inter-becoming of the new people that we need to be? Does that make sense as a question?
Sylvie: Yes. So I guess why I chose Mythos as a second theme for the second Renaissance magazine is that I just see the reality of the fact that most the majority of human beings are story beings, of meaning making human beings. We live by stories, like it or not. And those stories have limitation. The fact that there is a tendency across places following one hero, that it has a beginning and an end. But myths, stories are the way we make sense of the world. Hence why we watch films, telling of Gods on the fire or our ancestors. That's how we build our sense of belonging, identity. So if stories are part of the core ontological dimension of human beings, then we have to embrace it. We can't deny it. And but that also means we can be consciously engaging with it. So that is, we can consciously engage with old myths, old stories, and look at them. And we can also maybe look, oh, how do we edit those stories? Are they serving us? Are they not serving us? Which then touch deep questions, which part of those stories, which part in these stories is sacred and shouldn't be touched.
Manda: Okay. How do we decide that? Because the sacred to us may not be sacred to the people who originated the story or sacred to future generations.
Sylvie: Exactly. But these are all questions, like what stories do we want to carry through? What stories do we want to let go? What new stories we haven't seen that feels that will serve us. And an example from me, I just saw how much the story I was told as a little girl about the perfect princess from Cinderella to snow white.
Manda: Blonde and blue eyes.
Sylvie: Yes, they were all blonde and blue eyes and they were all innocent. And they all waited for their Prince Charming. And I read that if you do that, you'll end up happy and married. But if you want power, if you're a woman who wants power.
Manda: You are the witch.
Sylvie: You are the witch, and you're going to end up dead and alone and unloved. And these are very powerful stories. And it doesn't mean therefore we should completely stop reading those stories, but if I choose to read that story to my daughter, at what age? Do I create a bit more context? How do I describe the girl and what they look like? All these things, these stories. Or the same with little boys that they're going to be fighting the dragon. They go into our subconscious and they tell us what is morally good. And so in the magazine, for me there's an artwork that I did, which is I covered myself in black ink, which was all the negative thoughts. That I was embodying the Eve with wearing the snake, which is the first sinful woman. And I also had my husband cleansing those darkness, because there's also in most human beings story, there's also the love story, the power of being loved with our darkness. Healing our darkness. And so I wanted to do this magazine because I think we need many voices from many different angles. It's not like, oh, I Sylvie have the story or the thing. It's like there's different ways, from poetry to essay writing, from a climate perspective or from a more mythological or sexual perspective. Like we need many stories to kind of start looking how much have these stories shaped us? What new forms of narration do we want? What are maybe also old stories that we have forgotten, but are filled with wisdom and can help us navigate forward? So if we are meaning making creatures, we have to embrace that. And so there is a power therefore, again in the artists, that tell story through visual, tell story through even what we're doing here, you and I, we're telling a story.
Manda: We are, yes.
Sylvie: We're making sense. You're creating a new mythology about what is the future possible. And so we're weaving with our words what is possible in the future.
Manda: Yes. Gosh, Sylvie, every time we move on to a new topic, I think this is an entire other podcast. Because it feels to me in the storytelling world, there's a lot of pushback against the heroic myth, partly because it was originally called The Hero's Journey by Campbell. But even if we degender it and call it the heroic journey, people are saying, no, this is individualism. We can't do it anymore. But it is very deep in us, and we have to meet people where they are. And if we end up offering them stories that don't have any kind of arc that they can recognise, it's going to be very hard for them to hold on to. And so what I heard from you just now was what felt to me a very powerful argument for meeting the ontology of where people exist and then we can move beyond it. And that your ritual work feels to me, what I've seen of it on the website, that you're taking that woman as warrior or woman as creatrix within the water, or all of the things that you do, there is a sense that this is a heroic journey, and yet it's a heroic journey that very explicitly embraces the ancestral line and the descendant line and the elements around us and the gods within and without. And all of the parts that says: I may be on a heroic journey, I am a human being, and my life is my journey, but I'm not taking that path alone.
Sylvie: Yes!
Manda: And we were never meant to be alone. That feels really important to me.
Sylvie: There's lots of people with me in the ancestor in the future, but there's lots of people in the community. And the thing is, I know you interviewed Jamie Bristow here, where we have the Life Guild. It's like you need others on the path with you. Why in my heart I've been longing for creating communities, and therefore created projects such as life itself and the Hubs and residency, because we can't go through that transformational journey alone. I have been very blessed to have my partner. There's no way I would have gone through even a quarter of my journey without his support to kind of like be, you know, yes, you can do this. Go on it. Like, I'm not crazy. I don't think I would have gone so deeply because there would have been so many voices of doubts. Or, you know, my colleagues, who are also wanting to see this world transform and making their contribution and having their bodhisattva vow. Meeting someone like you. And there are many more. What is so exciting is that over the years, I mean, many, many, many more people. And so we're interlinked. You know, the more I create, the more it gives hope to others and the more others create and reinforce that, we are gradually together creating an ecosystem. And there are differences, we have different maybe geographical location, different maybe slightly intake, but in these pockets we get to create experiments and grow. And maybe if I take again, the analogy of churches, you have the Protestant church and there's lots of sects, you know, who have their different flavour.
Manda: Oh, yes.
Sylvie: Exactly. But what I say is we can have a judgement of how old religion functioned. And the same with Buddhism, by the way, or Catholicism. But you can also see, well, that's a human tendency to function this way. It's like you'll have maybe a greater unifying global direction, vision, that gives us a sense of a meaning bigger than ourselves. And human beings need that. Like there's no shying away what modernity and secularity is like it's cut us from receiving the downloads. And we need to plug into that. Now they can be safeguarded, like non-violence, commitment to non-violence, commitment to non dogmatism. We can learn from the failure of the past to help us not end up in an inquisition, to help us not end up with like, you know, human eugenics. And so there can be commitments such as non-violence, non dogmatism, that are very powerful safeguards. But human beings generally, deep down, we know we belong to something bigger than ourselves, than our little ego. And then there's so many different expressions and variety of that. You know, there will be many sects and sometimes it's uncomfortable. Like, well, so we are a bit different, but it's not one size fits all. You know, different people have different sensibility. And so we in the Second Renaissance, are like okay, there's maybe this vision for renewal, for rebirth towards this specific value of wisdom, interbeing beyond capitalism, complexity and others. But first, we need lots of pockets. It can be like three people who come together on an online call and organise a little gathering. It starts little, but you need lots of little pockets who gradually emulate and boil.
Manda: Yes.
Sylvie: And then you have a state change. You go from like water to frozen, it's a different state. And it is possible. And so it's been delightful on this journey to be like, oh, it's happening. But I know why I'm passionate about shadow work: it is my greatest fear for this movement that if we do not do shadow work, it will be change and not transformation. We will be eaten alive by the shadow of our ancestor and the trauma will decompose us. Instead of having different sects that collaborate, it will just create more separation, more hidden dead bodies under the carpet. And so that's actually one of my great commitments through my art is to say, okay, yes to meditation, yes to maybe different spiritual practice, but a commitment to look at our shadow as human beings. And what we inherited is a non-negotiable. And that's why my next big work is writing a manifesto around shadow work, because that's what I've seen that has destroyed movement from within, destroy families from within, is being afraid of the demons.
Manda: Yes. Okay. That's our next podcast. When you've written that manifesto, you're going to come back and we're going to talk about that. Because totally, that's exactly where I've got to in the last 6 to 9 months is we have to do the inner work. We have to commit to that as the single most important thing we do. And it's scary and it's frightening and it's hard. And I have people in workshops in tears telling me that it's too hard and we're asking too much. And I completely get that it is hard. But also previous generations have had the luxury of time, and I don't think we have the luxury of time anymore. If we hand all this mess, shadow, down to the next generation, there won't be a generation after. There are biophysical realities that we are hitting, and we will not turn the bus along the edge of the cliff if we haven't done the inner work. You're right. We'll get iterations of the same, because the same arises from the same set of values, and the values arise from the wounds.
Sylvie: And can I add something which leads to one of the first things you said is like we are afraid of death in our society.
Manda: Yeah, yeah, yeah totally.
Sylvie: And we're afraid of our civilizational death. And it's like, oh.
Manda: Yeah. But hey guys, it could be so much better!
Sylvie: I think how I've come to it is, you know, if I look and it's uncomfortable, to say there will probably be a lot of death and there will very likely be a collapse. But so I think the question shouldn't be about survival, but it's how to really live. Because I don't want just more survival. We've done that. We know how to do that. Because we should, to survive, the healing is an opportunity to be liberated from the suffering of being human being. Because I know that sometimes, it's like, I've done it with my father, like, you need to heal your problem with your parents. And there was no way he was wanting to go to do any therapy from me telling him how he had to do that. And it is hard, but when it comes from possibility, what it allows us, what brings us joy, then I think when we stay connected with joy, joy is a true practice. And we have a tendency to forget that cultivating joy every day is extremely important as we go into great darkness, because you need the light to take into the darkness, so you have the strength to go look at that demon. Without the joy, without the possibility of why we're excited to be alive, why we want more human beings to stay alive, why we love humanity and life and the earth. When we go and look at the demons, the light goes off and then we're taken. So I'd love to leave you and others with this: yes, shadow work and joy is totally part of shadow work.
Manda: Yes, yes, yes! If we're in love with the process of being alive, then the shadow work is part of the process of being alive, and we're in love with it. It's fine. Yes. Fantastic. Okay. I wanted to talk to you about the hubs and all of that other stuff, but we can do that. We will be doing another podcast. Because this was fantastic, I loved every moment of it. So write your new manifesto and then we'll come back and do all this again. And then we'll talk about hubs that time. I will put links in the show notes anyway and people can follow it up. But that was amazing. Thank you so much.
Sylvie: Thank you.
Manda: I am so grateful for all that you are and do. And the wonder of your art and the the threads of your ideas and your feeling and the vastness of your compassion. Really so, so happy. And your wisdom. Thank you, thank you. The world is a lucky place that you are there and that you are birthing children who will be able to carry this into the next generation. Thank you so much for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast.
Sylvie: Thank you Manda.
Manda: Well, there we go. That's it for another week. Enormous thanks to Sylvie for all that she is and does, for the astonishing power of her art, for the courage and the vulnerability and the exploration of the edges of who we are. For the deep sense of compassion, the loving of motherhood. I recorded this not so long after I recorded the one with Zineb Mouhyi, and they have the same sense of absolute heart exploding compassion and love, not only for their own children, but for the children of the world, for all of the children of the world. So if this moves you at all, I thoroughly encourage you to go on to the links in the show notes and have a look at all of Sylvie's work. To explore Life Itself and the Second Renaissance, to see if there's any way that you can begin to engage with all that they offer. And definitely when Sylvie has had a chance to write her next manifesto, we will be coming back for another conversation.
Manda: In the meantime, before next week's conversation, thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot, to Alan Lowell's of Airtight Studios for putting in the production before he went on holiday. Thank you, Alan. To Lou Mayor for producing the video and for managing the YouTube channel. To Anne Thomas for the transcripts. To Faith Tilleray for wrestling with the tech, and for all of the conversations that keep us moving forward, even while producing her dissertation for the Masters. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening, for subscribing, for offering reviews. Thank you so much. For those of you who post reviews, they genuinely make my heart sing. And also, to those of you who write in with emails, I do read them, but if I haven't responded I'm really, really sorry. I am trying, but honestly, if I spent all day answering emails, I would get nothing else done. And it's the growing season. Everything's growing very, very, very fast. It's quite busy out there in the farm just now. Anyway, thanks to all of you. If you know of anybody else who wants to engage with Life Itself, with the concept of the Second Renaissance, with all of the joy and the wonder of falling in love with life through art, through ritual, through the edge places of life and death and joy and love and connecting, then please do send them this link. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.