Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Welcome to the Healing Our Politics Podcast!
Join Our Community and Receive Free Tools + How to Guides:
Join “The Leader’s Handbook” newsletter https://leadershandbook.substack.com/about
· Always free
· Once per month email
· Curated selection of tools, techniques, and practices discussed on this podcast
· Delivered in simple to follow how-to-guides
· To try and test in your life, and teach your teams.
Guest:
Paul Anderson is a writer, historian, and humanitarian with a jaw-dropping 40+ years of experience. He’s written thousands of news columns, authored 17 books, and even scripted over a dozen movies and IMAX films. But Paul’s story doesn’t stop there. He’s a changemaker. He founded 'Nature and Society,' a groundbreaking seminar at the Aspen Institute, and 'Huts for Vets,' a nonprofit offering transformative wilderness experiences for veterans in the stunning 10th Mountain Division hut system near Aspen, Colorado. Inducted into the Aspen Hall of Fame just last year, Paul is a force of nature who’s always aiming higher—whether it’s growing 'Huts for Vets' or living by his mantra to give 'meaning to every interaction.' If you’re looking for a masterclass in creativity, resilience, and purpose-driven leadership, you’re in the right place.
About the Episode:
In this episode, we explore the profound connection between nature, philosophy, and healing. Discover the Japanese practice of Shinrin-yoku, or 'forest bathing,' and how immersing yourself in nature can help you reconnect, rejuvenate, and boost performance. We challenge the label of PTSD as a 'disorder,' reframing it as PTS—the body's natural response to life-or-death trauma—to reduce stigma and support healing. We delve into the overlooked issue of sexual trauma in the military and uncover lessons civilians can learn. Our conversation takes us into the world of classic philosophy, examining the links between disconnection—from others, from purpose, and from something greater, and self —and mental health. We unpack the 'Aspen Idea,' exploring the “three-legged stool” of mind, body, and spirit, and share practical ways to cultivate balance in your life. We discuss the transformative power of a “solo”, the ways we shape and are shaped by our environments, and the enduring impact of history and service. Finally, Paul shares his extraordinary journey to founding Huts for Vets, a nonprofit that has touched countless lives.I hope you enjoy this soulful, wide-ranging, and thought-provoking conversation with Paul Andersen.
**Content Advisory: Suicide and SA are discussed in this episode.
Key Topics Discussed:
· [00:02:00] Episode/guest intro
· [00:05:35] What is ‘Huts for Vets?’
· [00:06:25] The 10th Mountain Division Huts System
· [00:07:03] Why this cause?
· [00:08:27] The “Choice” of War for the Solider: The Unavoidable Repercussions
· [00:11:03] Huts for Vets origin story
· [00:11:53] Authentic, selfless motivation speaks volumes
· [00:16:52] What is the Process?
· [00:17:30] What is the Aspen Idea?
· [00:19:52] The Aspen Idea as a Tripod: Balance
· [00:22:03] The Methodology at Huts for Vets
· [00:22:45] Shinrin-yoku
· [00:26:36] Military Unit as the Family Unit
· [00:27:18] It's a ME world, not a WE world.
· [00:29:10] What is The Aspen Institute?
· [00:30:39] “No man is an island”
· [00:32:34] “Thank you for your service"
· [00:33:35] What can we do?
· [00:38:05] Huts for Vets in Ukraine
· [00:39:02] The Science of Spirit
· [00:44:35] Self-realization and the power of a Solo
· [00:47:57] Soldiers, Civilians and Enemies all need Healing
· [00:48:40] Some Aspen History
· [00:49:45] Founders from both sides of the Civil War
· [00:50:58] A population primed for violence
· [00:53:26] The History of Trauma
· [00:54:40] The many names of PTS(D) or Moral Injury
· [01:59:55] From Convincing to Waitlisting
· [01:02:22] Women in Military Service
· [01:03:53] SA prevalence in Military Service
· [01:04:55] Offering Tools through a Dialogue
· [01:05:48] Other Tools for Coping
· [01:06:44] Funding and Facilities
· [01:08:35] Can Huts for Vets Expand to Other Wilds?
· [01:09:38] How can Leaders use the Huts for Vets Methodology?
· [01:10:44] The Power of 20 minutes in Nature
· [01:12:50] Transcendence in Nature marks the Leaders of 3 Major Religions
· [01:14:18] Your Inner Voice
· [01:16:24] Converting “Matter into Spirit”
· [01:18:49] Living your Values
· [01:22:40] “Let us not live trivial lives”
· [01:25:05] “The Leader’s Handbook” (https://www.healingourpolitics.com/#newsletter) Newsletter
· [01:26:06] Sponsor: ELC; Coaching for Public Servants (https://www.electedleaderscollective.com)
Key References and Resources Mentioned:
· [00:22:45] Shinrin-yoku
· [00:59:12] Aspen Chapel
· [01:25:05] “The Leader’s Handbook” Newsletter
Where to Find Paul Andersen:
Where to Find Host Skippy Mesirow:
- Receive Support at the Elected Leaders Collective ElectedLeadersCollective.com
- Follow on Instagram www.instagam.com/skippymesirow
- Book a free Clarity Call https://calendly.com/skippymesirow/elc-clarity-call to see if coaching is right for you
Episode Sponsor:
Helping You Heal Our Politics
The Elected Leaders Collective (ELC) organization is the leading US-based provider of mental well-being training for public servants, conducted by public servants and the world's best mental health and human optimization professionals. With ELC Training, you will learn to rise above and become the political healer you were meant to be, improving your well-being in the process.
Contact the HOP Team:
Do you have an episode idea?
Want to suggest a guest?
Can you provide critical feedback?
We'd love to hear from you!
Contact our team at jesse@healingourpolitics.com
Your input helps us create content that matters.
Creators and Guests
Host
Skippy Mesirow
Skippy Mesirow is a prominent leader, certified Master Coach, and founder of the Elected Leaders Collective (ELC) and ELC Foundation. ELC leads the US in mental health and well-being training for public servants, recognized in The Apolitical Foundation's Mere Mortals report, and named as one of 26 worldwide political well-being "Trailblazer Organizations." A transformational leader in political innovation and wellness, Skippy serves on Gov. Polis’s Natural Medicine Advisory. Skippy’s work has been featured in numerous podcasts and publications, as well as main-stage speaking engagements for organizations NLC, YEO, CML, MT2030, Bridging Divides, and Fulcrum, highlighting his significant contributions to mental health, community, and policy reform. Alongside his professional achievements, Skippy lives in Aspen, CO. with his partner Jamie where he enjoys running ultra-marathons, road biking, motorcycling, international travel, culinary arts, Burning Man, and lifelong learning.
Producer
Aaron Calafato
Aaron’s stories are currently heard by millions around the globe on his award-winning Podcast 7 Minute Stories and on YouTube. Aaron is a co-host of Glassdoor's new podcast (The Lonely Office) and serves as a podcast consultant for some of the fastest-growing companies in the world.
Editor
Jesse Link
Jesse is a strategy, research and partnership consultant and podcast enthusiast. A 2x founder, former Goldman Sachs Vice President and advisor to 25+ businesses, Jesse brings a unique and diverse background to HoP, helping to elevate the range, depth and perspective of HoP's conversations and strategy.
What is Civic Courage Lab?
Hello,
I’m Skippy Mesirow, host of “Civic Courage Lab”, the show that shows you, the heart-centered public servants and political leaders, how to heal our politics by starting with the human in the mirror.
Civic Courage Lab, “CCL,” is a first-of-its-kind show that provides tools and practices for mental well-being, health, and balance, specifically for public servants so we can do good by feeling good and safe in our jobs.
CCL brings together experts, scientists, doctors, thought leaders, healers, and coaches to share their insights in practical, tactical, actionable ways specifically tailored to the public service experience for you to test and implement with yourself and your teams. Episodes feature intimate conversations with global leaders about their self-care practices and personal challenges, providing insights for a more holistic, connected approach to leadership. Whether you're a Mayor, teacher, police officer, or staffer, this podcast will guide you to be the best version of yourself in service to yourself and the world!
Sign up for our once-per-month Leader’s Handbook newsletter to receive an actionable toolkit of how-to guides on topics discussed on the podcast that month to test and implement in your life and with your team: https://leadershandbook.substack.com/
Hello. My name is Skippy Mesereau, coach, former elected official, and lifetime public servant. Welcome to Healing Our Politics, the show that shows you, the heart centered public servant and political leader, how to heal our politics by starting with the human in the mirror. It is my job to sit down or stand up with the best experts public service experience, providing you actionable, practical, tactical tools that you can test out today in your life and with your teams. I will also talk to leaders across the globe with a self care practice, getting to know them at a deeply human and personal level so that you can learn from their challenges and journey.
Speaker 1:Warning. This is a post partisan space. Yes. I have a bias. You have a bias.
Speaker 1:We all have a bias. Everybody gets a bias, and I will be stripping out all of the unconscious cues of bias from this space. No politics, partisanship, or policy here because well-being belongs to all of us, and we will all be better served if every human in leadership, regardless of party, ideology, race, or geography, are happier, healthier, and more connected. This show is about resourcing you, the human doing leadership, and trusting you to make up your own damn mind about what to do with it and what's best for your community. So as always, with love, here we go.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the Healing Our Politics podcast, the show that shows you, the heart centered leader, how to heal our politics by starting with that human you see every day in the mirror. In today's episode, I sit down with expert in veteran rehabilitation and renowned historian, Paul Anderson, and Paul is amazing. Paul has been a writer and journalist for over forty years, more years than I have been on this planet. He has penned literally thousands of news columns. He has written 15 books and over a dozen movie and IMAX film scripts.
Speaker 1:Paul created Nature and Society, an executive seminar at the fabled Aspen Institute, and in 2013, after observations on the institute campus, founded Huts for Vets. Huts for Vets is a nonprofit dedicated to offering healing experiences for veterans in the wilderness of Aspen, Colorado using the tenth Mountain Division HUT system. Huts for Vets incorporates the principles of the Aspen idea at the center of its programming, which focuses on a convergence of philosophical readings, physical activity, and connection to peers, nature, and spirit. By doing so, it provides a space for psychosocial, emotional healing, processing of trauma, post traumatic stress, traumatic brain injury, and military sexual trauma. In this episode, we dive into so much.
Speaker 1:The power of nature and philosophy to heal, the Aspen idea. What is it? How does it work? And how can you use it as a guide for your own life and service? Shinroku or the art and practice of Japanese forest bathing.
Speaker 1:The science of nature exposure, the power of connection and disconnection on our mental health, the history of PTSD and moral injury, the power of a solo, transcendence as understood to the world's major religions, and how history and environment shape our experience, ourselves, and so, so much more. So I hope you enjoyed this grounded, connected, and soulful conversation with Paul Anderson. I'm so excited to talk to you about so many different things. I had no idea how prolific you are writing for the paper since '77, is that right, in Crested Butte?
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:So thousands of columns over the years.
Speaker 2:Columns, feature articles, news coverage. I was a one man show in Crested Butte, was the editor of the paper there, so I did everything.
Speaker 1:15 books?
Speaker 2:15 books. Yeah. Screenplays, treatments for feature films. In fact, I was just in Hollywood Two Weeks ago to walk the red carpet at Grauman's Chinese Theatre for a global premiere of a film I wrote the treatment for twenty three years ago. Wow.
Speaker 2:Television scripts, poetry, songs, you name it, I've written it.
Speaker 1:Wow. And you have also concurrently lived a life in two places that I know a decent bit about Crested Butte, later Aspen, places that just had an explosion of community and vitality and intellect. And from my perspective, you got a front row, highly concentrated seat into what community is and isn't, how it shifts. And then you go on later in life to found Huts4Vets, a, maybe you should describe what Huts4Vets does.
Speaker 2:Huts4Vets is a nonprofit founded in Colorado in 2013. And so eleven years ago, I read a statistic that alarmed me. The suicide rate among US Veterans was eighteen per day, and that seemed to be an indictment on our whole system of defense, governance, that these men and women were being abandoned by the system that they serve, by the society that they served. These service members, men and women, were being abandoned by the very society that they defended. And I took it upon myself to create a program based on the Aspen Institute seminar experience where there's a notebook of readings and discussions to bring veterans into the wilderness to the tenth Mountain Hut system for healing opportunities, for trauma, traumatic brain injury.
Speaker 2:Moral injury is probably the most predominant crisis that a lot of veterans face. So taking veterans into nature, nature based therapy, the place where I love to go and sharing my love of that place with them.
Speaker 1:And there's like this beautiful integration that I see amongst all of these parts of your life. You had undoubtedly heard any number of troubling and horrific things in your time studying, working at the Institute, teaching seminars. Why did this cause stand out amongst the others?
Speaker 2:When I came of age, when I graduated high school in 1969 in a suburb of Chicago, I was prime draft bait for the Vietnam War. It was only a student deferment that allowed me not to go to Vietnam. That's what brought me to Colorado to live initially in 1969. And I felt a need to pay back. I didn't serve, but others did and friends of mine.
Speaker 2:Two particular friends of mine, both were infantry in Vietnam. And so I always felt a little bit uneasy about not having served, and yet there's no way I would have served in that war because I found it completely unjust and indefensible. So I did the right thing in my opinion, but how could I serve? The way I could serve is by sharing my love of nature, my love of solitude, of wild places. And that's what I did with Hots four Vets is just bring people into my world who could reorient and gain a new perspective on their lives by associating with something much bigger than themselves, much bigger than human society even, the whole of creation, if you will.
Speaker 2:And really a cosmic view is what we ultimately provide at HUTS for Vets.
Speaker 1:Certainly I hear a lot of stories now around people who protested the war, chose not to go, whether they were students or had some medical reason, at least in the common conversation, it's really the first war with mass refusal to participate. Did that feel true at the time?
Speaker 2:Definitely. I would call myself a hippie in those days. I had long hair. I believed in peace and love more than I believed in war, that's for sure. Never been a violent person.
Speaker 2:I see peace in myself and radiate that wherever I can. But those who get caught up in the military dynamic, those who are forced for one reason or another to do things and see things that violate their deepest moral precepts, I feel sympathy for those people. And a lot of them really had maybe little choice in the matter. Some were drafted and had to go, or face a jail sentence. Some felt obligated by a social contract.
Speaker 2:Others came from legacy military families, and it was the right thing to do for their family. So the choice was not necessarily there for a lot of people who suffered inordinately from their contact with violence. And that's what military action is. It's organized, orchestrated violence on a grand scale that we're still seeing today. And unfortunately we will for some time to come, I'm afraid.
Speaker 1:Later in life, you have sort of this recognition of the tragedy of war on the back end and because you haven't served, there's part of you that feels like now is your opportunity to give back to those who made a different choice from you maybe back in the day or between then and now.
Speaker 2:Right. I have a strong motivation for social justice. I abhor unfairness, and I see it in the world almost in every sector of life. And when I recognized what these veterans were enduring and coping with, and many of them failing to because of the high suicide rate, which by the way now is twenty to twenty two per day, which is still just an it's a shameful statistic for the for our country. I feel the need to do whatever I can to help people in dire straits.
Speaker 2:Those people had just happened to kind of jump out at me with my approach to nature in a an emotional and intellectual, a physical and spiritual context, which came over my whole lifespan, really, developing that that, affiliation with the natural world. And I knew the power of nature for myself and and thought this is a perfect demographic to share that with. I approached two veterans in the valley, both Vietnam Veterans, and it was tough for me to approach them because I hadn't served and they had and they would know that. But I was honest with them and told them my plight that I wanted to offer a program that might help their peers. And they said, well, let's do it.
Speaker 2:How are you gonna pay for it? And I said, I'll raise the money for it. These veterans should not have to pay a cent for healing opportunities on public lands. So I went to a a couple of friends who could make a contribution, and that's what started the journey with huts for vets to the tenth mountain hut system and to the absolute beauty and sublime comfort of our wilderness here.
Speaker 1:What is it that you think they saw in you to jump on board in that, like you said, you know, you're not a veteran. In fact, you avoided the war, legally and above board, but chose that path, self described hippie. At that time, you know, don't have any, maybe you do, but I don't think you have any professional experience in like trauma work or, mental health. So what do you think they saw in you that had them so quickly say, Yeah, we're in?
Speaker 2:My motivation was not self aggrandizing. It was to serve others. And I think if you can project that authentically, which I did to these two men, Colonel Dick Merritt is one. That's a good man. And Dan Glidden is another one.
Speaker 2:I told them I wanted to do this because I thought it was the right thing to do. It's a moral and ethical obligation for me. They recognize that in me and they saw that the cause was good. It was needed and no one had done it like we did it. So, yeah, let's try it.
Speaker 2:Let's experiment and see how it goes. And after that first trip in 2013, we recognize something in the participants that was enduring. It was a transformation that took place because once someone is brought up to an experience that changes the way they see the world, they, I don't think ever quite go back to the way they were before. There's a beautiful saying by Oliver Wendell Holmes, once a man's mind is stretched beyond its original dimensions, it never goes back to that same dimension. So stretching someone with, first of all, a rigorous hike in the outdoors, almost 10 miles up to the hut at 2,700 vertical feet up to the Margies Hut, and that physical rigor set the stage for then a coming intellectual and emotional and spiritual rigor through discussions with peer groups of qualified listeners, so to speak.
Speaker 2:When I saw the results, in the gratitude that these veterans showed to us, I knew something important was happening, but mainly hearing their laughter at the hut over dinner, talking, joking, and having a sense of joy and pleasure. And for a lot of these veterans, this was a rare outbreak for them. But to know that they could still become happy, regenerated people gave them something I think to base the rest of their lives on.
Speaker 1:I found this quote when doing some background research that I think maybe describes what you're talking about, that expansion. I've never seen the Milky Way the way I did on that mountain. I both surrendered myself and found a version of myself that I had long forgotten about. I'd lost my wild, quote, unquote, but the trees and forest returned it to me. The mountains have a way of stripping from us what we no longer need and gifting us a chance to explore beyond the ridgeline, disconnected from the rest of the world, left with only the sound of our voice for comfort.
Speaker 2:And what's that trim, Skippy? Can you tell me? Not right off.
Speaker 1:I found a number of quotes in going back through both your writing and some of the writing of people that have graduated the program. And I've noticed that there is a seemingly high number of individuals who had no, at least traceable online writing presence, who following Hunts for Vets, begin writing, blogging, and sharing. I actually really wondered about that.
Speaker 2:That quote you just read, I mean, I couldn't say it any better. That's a beautiful statement of, I think, an awakening. And what it reveals is that once you get a philosophical concept going and the invitation to speak and think philosophically, veterans become the ultimate philosophers. They fronted the big questions, life, death, and the meaning of existence. And that accommodates them with a philosophical bearing that I think is very unusual in today's culture where contemplative thought, quiet reflection is so buffered by devices and constant inputs.
Speaker 2:But after a three day wilderness experience with no devices because we're offline the whole time, once the conversation gets going, they take off. And you hear them on the trail, you hear them at the hut around the campfire. They are engaged suddenly in reflective thought. And that's probably the biggest gift we offer. The
Speaker 1:I don't know if you'd call it program methodology that you guys use. There's the physical aspect. There's the nature aspect. There's also an intellectual aspect, and I would hazard to say a spiritual aspect. Can you kind of share a bit more about what someone is doing on one of these retreats?
Speaker 1:And if my assumption about the activation of the Aspen idea is correct, maybe describe for people what that is and how it shows up in these programs.
Speaker 2:Hudson Vets was inspired by my work at the Aspen Institute, where I created a seminar program called Nature in Society. And the idea was to take thought leaders, corporate executives, educators into nature with a context of a notebook of readings, discussing those readings and engaging the intellect. So what is the Aspen idea? It's the cultivation of the whole person, body, mind and spirit. And if you look at it like the three legs of a tripod, the human being is supported when those three legs are given equal measure.
Speaker 2:Without equal measure, we become imbalanced. So to attempt to cultivate the body mind spirit experience for veterans, first again, by a rigorous hike in the mountains that takes a level of fitness and determination, intellectual rigor by reading and discussing text and thinking about text and sharing ideas with one another. And then the spiritual experience, I would call it, of being in a natural setting that is sublime and beautiful. And as that reading stated, to see the Milky Way in a night sky at 11,300 feet is a transformative experience. It's something that Thoreau recognized as a transcendent.
Speaker 2:So accommodating veterans with those kinds of inputs, trying to balance their tripod of what it means to be a human being. That's the ultimate goal of the program. And sometimes it takes them months or even years to understand that they had received those inputs. Sometimes a veteran would leave the program and I thought, you know, we did not reach that person. We failed with that person.
Speaker 2:Months later, sometimes years later, I would get a call or an email and the veteran would say, Paul, I've been thinking about the program a lot, and I'd like to come back for a refresher. I realized maybe I didn't quite open myself enough to it, but I would like to now again. So bringing veterans back on a return trip to act as mentors for new veterans on the program, veterans serving veterans ends up being one of the most healing opportunities there is for these people.
Speaker 1:The Aspen idea is something that has deep importance to me in my life has been a grounding principle for how I've thought about my life. In fact, in my intentions every morning, I, I read it, or a piece of it every day, and I've never heard it described as a stool. And I think that's really interesting because it gives me such a clear visual about the importance of balance, even if all three things are well tended to. And so we can imagine that as the legs being long, if we are over index on one, we're just gonna fall off the stool. I've never thought about it that way.
Speaker 1:And I wonder how would you describe the importance of balance?
Speaker 2:Balance, or I would call it equilibrium, is what grounds us to a stability that I think reduces stress. When we're in balance, we find a sort of harmony with gravity and that harmony is essential to, I think, being a calm, well reasoned, thoughtful, caring individual. It allows us to weigh our life experiences against these three aspects of our being. And taking the time to do that, to focus on that, to realize the importance of it is a first step to actually cultivate it and achieve it is a lifelong ambition.
Speaker 1:And I think about my own journey and the way I've arrived at the moment I'm in, which I think is probably the first period of my life where I've really been in balance. And my path really was body first, dealing with my own issues with weight and fitness and kind of building that leg. And then into maybe my 20s, sort of built the intellectual leg. And then when I was around 30, something felt very missing and it was clear that it was no longer external, it was internal, and that's when the spiritual leg really began began to grow. And I've, I think, just recently come into balance that way.
Speaker 1:But when you're working with veterans or if you're just speaking to leaders on the other end of this podcast, do you feel as though the path to balance, the sequence to balance is important? Is it better to try to work all three things simultaneously? You know what I'm getting at? Is there have you seen things that are more or less effective?
Speaker 2:The methodology at Hutts for Vets is a notebook of readings that I curated. The syllabus is a progression. It begins with a quote by Henry David Thoreau. He said, I went to the woods because I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and to see if I could not learn what it has to teach and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not lived. That's the start of our hike.
Speaker 2:From there, we walk into the wilderness, and our introduction is first to the physical and our physical relationship to nature. One of the mantras of Hutz Ravets is shinrin yoku. You got
Speaker 1:there first. I was so curious about this.
Speaker 2:A Japanese expression that translates literally to forest bathing. This is a medical prescription in Japan. We're probably the most overstressed industrial workforce in the world and needs therapeutic experiences in nature. And so they're assigned shinrin yoku by a physician. They go to an old growth forest that's designated for that, and they go there to just be, not to do, to be.
Speaker 2:We're human beings, not human doings. So the first leg, if you will, of huts for vets is to walk in the woods with our sensory systems opening, and that takes time. There's a three day effect to wilderness that we find. The first day, it's almost hard to break through the barriers of our industrial information based lives and really find our rhythm in the natural world. The second day is more of an adjustment to that.
Speaker 2:By the third day, I think most people can be at peace and find the the conduits are open between them and the natural world. So this is a progression that goes throughout the whole program, but then the program, the readings delve into more intellectually based readings to challenge the mind and engage the mind and to do so with intervals while we're walking gives this beautiful mix a balance of physical, intellectual, physical, intellectual and it goes on from there. The final pieces that we read and discuss are very spiritually based. Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning. Some of the selections that I have from there talk about Frankl's recognition that even in the most difficult circumstances, spirit can be awakened.
Speaker 2:Spirit can grow. He discovered that in Auschwitz. If he could discover that at Auschwitz, we can discover that with veterans after their service in our beautiful public lands. So by the time the program ends, we have touched on all three with the idea of developing all three and melding them together for this cohesive experience that is what Hots for Vets is about and why it's still going eleven years later.
Speaker 1:Spirit can be found in hard situations. I would go farther, which is say spirit is often the result of hard situations. And I don't know if you would agree with this. I'm I'm curious, but the way I understand it, mental illness, and of course, there are some things that are biologically precept, but most of them are the result of experience. And I view many forms of mental challenges as different presentations of the same core condition of disconnection and isolation.
Speaker 1:And I often think that veterans have this especially high prevalence to these conditions because they were in such tough situations in the field. And because of that, their sense of connection and spirit was so strong. And then to come back into a world that doesn't understand what they've been through and is on our devices and so disconnected, the delta between what they felt and what they now experience is so much greater. And we learn in contrast. Is that what you find?
Speaker 2:Junger wrote a book called Tribe where he describes military units as being an extension of family. And, I mean, this goes all the way back to Plato. The the foundation of any state, any society is the family. The military unit becomes a family for veterans who maybe didn't have a strong familial experience in their youth. They find it in the military where they're trained to rely on one another.
Speaker 2:The self is absorbed by the group. Isolation after service is what takes lives. One percent of The US population serves in the military. One percent. When they're finished with their service, they're given a pat on the back, good luck, and sent out into a me world instead of a we world.
Speaker 2:And they don't know how to react to that shift. In fact, they're inadequate to it because they have so valued the connectivity of a unit as opposed to the individuation of society, especially a capitalist society. So they come out of the service alone, and they often don't have the opportunity to be brought into groups of veterans. So they mire in loneliness and a sense of helplessness from a lack of purpose and a lack of meaning. And that just leads them to despair and that ends up taking a lot of their lives.
Speaker 1:I mean, in so many ways, if you think about the things that are most required for just the survival of society let alone the thriving or the joy of it but it's eating and drinking, it's shelter and just defense, right? Those are the three things that you really can't live without as a society and they're ugly businesses in many ways. I mean, it can be beautiful, you can have an organic farm, whatever, but they're hard work and in so many ways, modern industrial society has very intentionally created systems so we don't have to do or relate to those things. We don't have to know how the cow was slaughtered. We don't have to know how our country's borders are being protected.
Speaker 1:We don't have to know how our water is being treated. And while that's a great convenience, it's actually a huge cultural, emotional, communal deficit in so many ways.
Speaker 2:Again, Plato. So philosophy, I became interested in philosophy through the Aspen Institute. Can we
Speaker 1:just say what the Aspen Institute is for someone who doesn't know?
Speaker 2:So the Aspen Institute is a nonprofit founded in Aspen in 1950. And the idea is to cultivate enlightened leadership through a study of philosophical ideas. So the Great Books of Western Civilization became the canon for the Aspen Institute at the very beginning that was published by Britannica. It's a 48 volume set that goes from Homer to Freud. And the idea is to read philosophy and discuss it with others.
Speaker 2:I mean, you can struggle to read Plato fifteen times to try to understand what he meant, or you can have 15 different people read Plato and share their ideas. So there's a synthesis that becomes very enlivened in a seminar room where the discussions are facilitated by inquiry, not lectures. It's inquiry, a good moderator elicits the salient ideas of any given text through questioning. That means that the participants have to dig deep into their own thoughts to answer those questions. That's how HUDs for Vets is based.
Speaker 2:The idea of society beginning with the individual, but the linkage to the family and then to groups of families, a village, the individual and the family are the building blocks of the whole social structure that we live in today. Today. John Donne, the British poet, wrote a poem, No Man is an Island. And that was the idea that he got to in that poem was that we're all interdependent, whether we like it or not. We can distance ourselves from each other to protect ourselves or for whatever reason, but we are social beings and that social connection is essential to our well-being.
Speaker 1:If we as leaders or just humans don't want our veterans to suffer as they are, if we are uncomfortable with the level of suffering, I mean, just to put a finer point on it, like you said, twenty two veteran suicides a day, There will be multiple veteran suicides during the time you listen to this interview. Just let that sink in. I read, tell me if this is true, but the the wall that you go to in DC, the Vietnam Memorial, that there are now more than three times as many veterans who have taken their own lives and there are names on that wall.
Speaker 2:Right. The Vietnam Veterans had a much rougher time, returning from their service because it was, first of all, regarded as as criminal by a lot of people who protested that war. And, unfortunately, the veterans carried the burden of a lot of that and with extreme guilt. And, yeah, the number of Vietnam Veterans to have taken their lives since the end of that war, over a 50,000. And, yeah, three times the number of names on that memorial in the Washington Mall.
Speaker 2:And it's stunning to consider that the effects of war are so dire, and yet we keep launching more and more. That is, to me, the most absurd notion that I live with today is trying to understand how that continues to pass muster among the population at large. But then a lot of the population has never served or understood veterans. One of the catch phrases that civilians are taught by society to tell a veteran is thank you for your service. It's a very simple sort of a platitude, but a lot of veterans bristle at that because they regard it as just a dismissal of who they are.
Speaker 2:And they will say, you don't know what my service was. You don't know what I did. You don't know what I saw. How can you thank me for something of which you have no understanding? Veterans have to soften their approach as well as civilians do.
Speaker 2:They have to understand that civilians don't know how to speak to veterans. So how do you address a veteran? I think just by simply talking, caring on a very human level, asking them what branch of the service they're in, did they deploy, what's been their experience, more open ended questions than a dismissive gratitude. That would, I think, start the conversation.
Speaker 1:What else could we do as leaders or citizens to really love and include and welcome our veterans, whether we agree with the theater they were in and their mission or not. If we don't wanna see these outcomes of despair and suicide, what can we do actively as humans to help repair and love?
Speaker 2:Number one would be to wage peace so that we don't have any more war veterans, reduce the number of veterans who are in theaters of war, otherwise to care about a veteran. When I would contact a veteran for Hutts for Vets and invite them to the program, the first thing they would say is thank you for caring. They feel often uncared for and unrecognized, in fact, invisible. To make them visible by acknowledging who they are, just acknowledging that they are human beings on the planet is a step in that direction.
Speaker 1:I would imagine that there are people who would want to do that, but may have some fear around that because they could think, gosh, am I gonna be basically telling this veteran that I think there's something wrong with them or something that needs to be fixed?
Speaker 2:Often they just need to talk. They just need to be listened to, if not by civilians, then by other veterans. And that's what Hutster Vets does, is to bring small groups of veterans, no more than 12, together so that they can convene. And what happens is a story will be told around the campfire, around the table, in in the hut, and another veteran will raise his hand and say, me too. That that happened to me too.
Speaker 2:And suddenly, they're not alone. They have qualified listeners to understand their experience, and there's a huge sense of comfort for feeling like you have company, and you are not alone.
Speaker 1:And now a quick break from our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. The Healing Hour Politics podcast is brought to you by the Elected Leaders Collective, the first leading and most highly recognized name in mental health, well-being, and performance coaching for elected leaders and public servants designed specifically for you. Now don't be fooled by the name. The Elected Leaders Collective is not just for elected leaders. It is for all public servants.
Speaker 1:Staffers, volunteers, government, nonprofit, whole organizations, this is for you. If you are filled with passion for improving your community and world but are tired as I am of the anger, stress, and vitriol, if you find yourself banging your head against that same wall, struggling with the incoming criticism and threats, arguing with colleagues who are supposed to be on your team, and questioning if it's even worth it anymore than the elected leaders collective programming is specifically for you. With the elected leaders collective, you will learn to become a hash political healer, building the authentic, unshakable confidence and courage to stay true to yourself through the anger and pressure while cultivating the open, empathetic mind to meet others with the curiosity, compassion, and kindness necessary to respond to threats, improve challenging relationships, deescalate conflict, and bring people in your community together to solve real problems and get shit done. You'll reduce stress, anxiety, and overwhelm and become a more effective leader while having time for your family, yourself, your health, and your wealth, sleeping well at night, and showing others they can too. Now that's leadership.
Speaker 1:Healing our politics listeners receive 10% off all elected leaders collective services using the code hashtag political healer. Use it today and become one of the brave political leaders healing our politics. Use code hashtag political healer by going to www.electedleaderscollective.com and starting today. That's www.electedleaderscollective.com and starting today.
Speaker 2:The Hats Revett's methodology ended up being exported to Ukraine, through a connection I made with the Aspen Institute. One of the participants in a seminar, this was about six years ago, was a higher up in the US Forest Service and the US Forest Service has an international arm, I didn't understand this at the time, but she represented this international outreach to developing countries who are trying to manage their natural resources. The Forest Service ends up offering them guidance and consultation. And the Department of State in The US has been working with Ukraine for a long time and decided to attach itself with the forest service in an effort to work with veterans who had been fighting the Russians on the East before the war broke out to introduce nature based healing, which is the Hats Revets methodology.
Speaker 1:A lot of people will hear nature exposure, reading philosophy, and think of it as soft, squidgy, unhelpful. Certainly had you come to me ten or twenty years ago and used the word spirit, my eyes would have gone so far back into my head that you get lost in my throat, and yet these things work. And so I'm wondering if you can speak to some of the results or the science around the interventions that you use and why an authority as specific and on the hook for, you know, public accreditation as the federal government and forest service would be interested in implementing some of these things.
Speaker 2:Science is showing more and more that exposure to green plants is a calming experience. It reduces the the hormone cortisol. At House for Vets, we decided we had better perform a scientific study because the Department of Defense and the Veterans Affairs folks will not recommend to a program unless there's scientific metrics that show that the program is effective. So we launched a program about five years ago through the University of Southern Maine and did an empirical study of our graduates of the program and then a control group. And it was very clear, overwhelmingly, that those who had come through the program had a much stronger sense of peace and calm than those who did not go through the program.
Speaker 2:It's a very nuanced idea to think that traditional medicine, in other words, medications, may not be as effective as something that they could find it on their own, like being in a natural setting. But, to sit beneath a tree and, I mean, it does sound woo woo. It is finding many advocates now in the medical profession who cannot deny the outcomes that are measured today. In hospital rooms, for example, where patients have a window overlooking a forested area or a grassland or a park or even a a courtyard, they heal faster from the same wounds or injuries that another patient who has no outdoor windows heals from. And these statistics are available and very clearly point out the the positive effects of nature.
Speaker 2:There are certain wounds that no pills can reach, And that's where I think nature comes in in very nuanced, esoteric ways that we need to stretch as a society to offer those as antidotes to the otherwise technological medical treatments that most people are consigned to and maybe don't benefit that much from.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It just reminds me that trauma is not the thing that happened. It's our relationship to it. And while there certainly are cases where we are extremely lucky to have pharmacological intervention and those are the way to go or sometimes they're the bridge to healing without them, there's a contemplative space that those medicines often not only don't allow but often suppress as a means of suppressing symptoms and so you can moderate the effect of the symptom while being stuck with the root cause where something like time and nature exposure and esoteric, like you said, you know, exploration of the mind and relationship have the possibility but not guaranteed to truly heal. I'm curious, when you guys did your studies, what did the control group do?
Speaker 2:The control group was made of veterans who had similar military experiences to the participants that we served. They just simply did not go on the program. They had applied, but some, had a conflict or there was a waiting list and they were unable to attend. So we asked them then to be part of the control group simply by not having done the program.
Speaker 1:They just went about their normal lives? Yep. Right. Got it. And do you have a recollection of the significance of the benefit or the effects?
Speaker 2:The benefits throughout the individual's life experience, I suppose you'd say, a stronger sense of self and I think a stronger sense of the vitality of life, which is, I mean, really what the natural world teaches is that, we're all part of this vital expression of life And to honor that belonging to the biosphere, to Gaia, to a bigger life expression is what it comes down to.
Speaker 1:Do you have a sense so you have these multiple components and, you know, we're doing this interview on a microphone that works beaming things across space to make it happen. So we're very lucky to have had, you know, an epic of reductionist science, but the downside to science is that it can often fail to see networked effects, and so I wonder if you have a sense of the constituent parts in your programming, the philosophical readings, the nature exposure, the kind of intentional cultivation of community or connection or family as you said. In your experience, do they amplify to something more than the sum of their parts through the unification of those modalities?
Speaker 2:The ultimate benefit in my mind and informing the program is self realization. And I'll I'll tell you a quick anecdote. We give our veterans on the program hour long solos. Often, we do it up on a high ridge overlooking a sea of mountain peaks. And, that perspective, 360 degree view of a mountain setting is so grand and amazing that it can inspire.
Speaker 2:But on one program, it was storming, and we were unable to be up high because of lightning. So we we hiked down to a big meadow. It's called Sawmill Park, and it's surrounded by thick trees. So I directed all the veterans to go around the meadow and find a place under a big spruce tree to be. And it was just lightly drizzling, but it was cold and overcast.
Speaker 2:So off they went and went into the trees. And about five minutes later, one of the veterans came out, and his name was Dan. And Dan, a big strapping six three marine corps veteran, he comes out of the woods and moves to the middle of the meadow and just stands there. And I recognized that he was having a problem being alone. I almost went to him to comfort him, but I told myself, no.
Speaker 2:Let him work through the process. He ended up sitting down in the in the meadow, pulling up his hood on his jacket, and lasted out the rest of the solo in quiet, but visible so I could see him. I didn't talk to him about it afterwards. But the next morning when we were ending our trip, we do a round table sharing of what the takeaway will be of the program. And and it came to Dan, and his eyes messed it up and his voice quivered.
Speaker 2:And he said yesterday during the solos, he said it was the most frightened I've ever been in my life. And this is a marine corps veteran of combat. And tears started to roll down his cheeks. And he said yesterday at the solos, I I I just couldn't take it, and I came out of the woods. And there, I sat down, and I felt better because I knew all of you men were around me to protect me.
Speaker 2:And everybody, you know, gave him a nod. And he said, when I was sitting there, I made two decisions, three, actually, that I would get married, that I would have a family, and that I would live in Montana. Those were his three visions of his future. Time went by. A year later, I got a call from Dan, and I said, how are you, man?
Speaker 2:And he said, I am great. Guess where I live? I said, I I where are you? He said, I live in Montana. I'm married.
Speaker 2:We have a daughter. I have a family. I'm doing what I saw that I needed to do on your trip, and thank you. And so I was brought into an international outreach to Ukrainian mental health workers and veterans, and then the war broke out and everything changed. Suddenly, the whole focus of the nation and everybody was on defense of Ukraine, and the healing of veterans had to be put on the back burner.
Speaker 2:It will come to the fore if this war ever stops. There will be a huge need to help not only Ukrainian veterans of war, but the entire civilian population that has been terrorized by Russia. Healing ends up being an enormous social need for many walks of life, but war, especially.
Speaker 1:You know, it's funny as you were saying that, one, being amazed by the work crossing continents, but also thinking about the uncomfortable thing to think about, which is the necessary healing from the soldiers on the aggressor side as well, and the power of being able to even heal and connect with your enemy.
Speaker 2:That happened in Aspen. Aspen's history has been a fascination for me ever since I got here, as a reporter in 1984. The first assignments I received was to interview quote, old timers from Aspen who had lived in part during the mining era or the end of the mining era, or certainly in the Quiet Years era. After the silver crash of eighteen ninety three up through the advent of culture and skiing in about the 1940s, I began to ground myself in Aspen history, which was essential for me to understand Aspen. The further back I looked, I recognized something.
Speaker 2:Aspen's First pioneers came over Independence Pass dragging sledges that weighed 200 pounds. They were in harness, two men per sled. And they would do this at night over the spring snowpack, and they did it at night because at night it gets cold and forms a crust. And that allowed them to reduce the friction on these 200 pound sledges and drag these things over a pass at over 12,000 feet. And you wonder who were these guys?
Speaker 2:Aspen has three primary cemeteries, each of which has grave markers of civil war veterans. And it led me to think that a lot of the prospectors who were dragging sledgers, who were driving freight teams, horse teams over the past, who really founded Aspen very likely came out of the civil war. The most brutal industrial warfare at that time took place and the the emotional scarring of both armies, north and south. In 1865, when that war ended, over a million soldiers were discharged from the service, and they flocked to the West to reinvent themselves, to distance themselves from the war fields, to seek a piece of the American dream. Ferdinand Hayden, who came through here with the first survey team of the US Geologic Survey in eighteen seventy three, seventy four, had been a field surgeon with the Union Army.
Speaker 2:John Wesley Powell lost his right arm at the Battle of Shiloh and went on to explore the Colorado River. Custer and his entire command were civil war veterans. What the civil war did was to put a population on the American frontier that was honed by war to be brutal and violent against nature, against the native Americans of which genocide was enacted, to decimate the buffalo almost to extinction just for sport. There was a brutal conquest of the American West.
Speaker 1:And just to illustrate the specific, because the word genocide gets thrown around a lot these days and I would argue in a lot of places where it probably doesn't belong, it is the intentional erasure of a particular people, a particular gene set, and the county that our that we live in, Pitkin County, Governor Pitkin, the order was given officially from the governor's office, right, which is to the Indian tribe, the Utes who are here, either leave or face extermination. So when you use that, you're using it in the specific.
Speaker 2:Right. Frederick Pitkin eighteen eighty one issued that decree that these would either be removed to reservations or exterminated. And, of course, later that would have been called the final solution, which we saw in Nazi Germany. But that's the way the thinking went then. In part, that was fueled by the Meeker massacre of eighteen seventy nine where the Utes rose up and said no more to the Indian agent Nathan Meeker who was trying to convert them into farmers.
Speaker 2:They were hunters and gatherers. They would not farm. That was not their nature. Meeker was intent on forcing them into a role that they could simply not agree to. And the final straw that broke the Ute's back was the plowing up of their horse race track into furrows for planting, and that was it.
Speaker 2:They rose up and revolted and killed Meeker and 12 of his agency staff. And then Meeker became this martyr to the cause, and that allowed Pitkin two years later to make that declaration with some kind of legitimacy. The patterns of settlement were changed after the civil war, I'm convinced. Aspen partook in that. There is a monument at the courthouse here in Aspen that is dedicated to service members of the civil war, not just union, but southerners as well.
Speaker 2:It's both sides of that war came together here.
Speaker 1:I get curious about the evolution of trauma, the history of wounds of war going back to ancient times. I'm curious how that has evolved and how we might see it evolve from, you know, back in the day when you were literally eye to eye with somebody to fast forward in history to the sniper scope, to the cockpit of an airplane, and increasingly on a joystick through a screen like a video game. How have you seen that progression affect the experience of veterans post war and how might we expect to see these internal injuries shift and change as a result of that?
Speaker 2:It's a complex thing to look at the history of war and the psycho emotional effects. If you read the Iliad, the Battle of Troy, there is a depiction of post traumatic stress where Ajax, a great warrior, takes his own life because he was unable to endure the moral injury that he took on in those battles. And I call it post traumatic stress. I don't call it post traumatic stress disorder. That's another thing that veterans taught me.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is not a disorder to react this way to violence. It is a natural human reaction.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So post traumatic stress is the word I use. It has occurred, I believe, through all wars and the trickle down of war in every culture, I think, can be plotted by sociologists. So in the civil war, it was called wounded heart, where you've lost the willingness to live. In World War I, it was battle fatigue or shell shock. And then, came more nuanced, descriptions of it.
Speaker 2:But, what's the current vernacular now is moral injury. And a lot of studies have been done on moral injury. How do you heal moral injury? I think by restoring somehow one's moral precepts and, allowing them to walk a moral path and restore their own sense of their personal integrity. The Department of Defense has been a bit remiss in forming ideas on that.
Speaker 2:The military establishment is much quicker to train people to kill than it is to heal soldiers who have done so. So there has to be, on the outtake of military service, an equal emphasis, at least an equal emphasis, on a return to a civilian life and a return to the way of a peaceful warrior. And that's not an easy thing to do, but one thought of mine is that all newly conscripted veterans should be run through a program like Huts for Vets to introduce them to the healing powers of nature before they go into a war zone. Then they might have a grasp on a place that they can go afterwards that can restore them. But without even knowing that such a place exists, I don't think they're equipped to cope with it after they finish.
Speaker 1:I love the reframe of PTSD to just PTS because you're right. I mean, the human organism is smart. And when under life and death situation, the acuity of one's senses, your hypervigilance is what keeps you alive. You learn and embed that pattern after a significant amount of time in combat in harm's way. When you come home, it just doesn't turn off.
Speaker 1:It's not dissimilar from a psychological standpoint, from, you know, any number of normal patterns that you learned as a child to receive approbation and love from your parents. Maybe you learned that you had to be, perfect or the good boy or girl to get love in your family, and that was your survival strategy as a kid. But as an adult, when you're running that program, say, in leadership, well now I've got 50 things on my plate, but I have to do them perfectly or I won't receive that love unconsciously. And now I'm not getting things done and I'm not performing and I'm not showing up in my role. I mean, it's really a similar dynamic but just heightened because of the nature of the heightened experience.
Speaker 1:And so to recognize that there's not something wrong with you, there's something right with you, and our opportunity is to just evolve into a new way of being that reflects the new physical and threat environment that you're now in. Yeah. So valuable. You mentioned that there's no cost to this program, and you had some initial donors that helped. Where does the funding come from now?
Speaker 1:And is it still free for everyone always?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It is. Even transportation. So we fly veterans in from all around the country, even Hawaii and Alaska. The first two funders were the Aspen Institute and the John McBride Family Foundation.
Speaker 2:They got what I was after and were willing to invest in that methodology. Then there's the tenth Mountain Division Foundation that has given. There are a number of them, but, a lot of small donors as well, which in my opinion is really the heart and soul of it. Aspen Chapel, every Valentine's Day, they would give Valentine's to veterans and they would raise money. It wasn't a lot, but it came from a wholehearted community endeavor.
Speaker 2:And that's where community is so important to any healing experience. If you can feel that there's a unified group supporting you, you have a better chance of accepting that with the most value you can give it.
Speaker 1:I would think with a scientifically proven program and enjoyable of challenging experience and a zero cost, is it the case that you have a very long waiting list?
Speaker 2:It's becoming so, yeah. First it was, it was really a challenge to convince veterans that this was something they wanted to do. It's out of the box. No one's done it. No one has done it.
Speaker 2:I mean, there are a lot of outdoor veteran programs or programs that serve veterans. Outward Bound does it. And there are other outdoor experiences, rock climbing, equine therapy, backpacking, things like that. Not many, if any, use any kind of intellectual content. So to have, again, the three legged approach of the body, the mind and the spirit, that's what differentiates Hutts for Vets from the others.
Speaker 2:But to try to tell a veteran that this is gonna be a benefit, a lot of them are askance and they're frightened. Veterans don't wanna commit to something that they don't fully understand. They did that once and they don't wanna do it again. And by that once, I mean, serving in the military. A lot of them didn't know have any idea what they were getting themselves into.
Speaker 2:When they came home, they're different people.
Speaker 1:I also wonder just to interject, you know, a lot of military service and fighting theaters happens in wilderness. And I wonder if there's some fear around that as a potential trigger in some way.
Speaker 2:Not so much in the mountains, but the deserts. So, what we've done then is training programs in the Canyonlands Of Utah and taking veterans who have already been through the mountain program who want to be trip leaders and moderators and support for future huts for vets trips, handpicking a group of those veterans to take them to the desert. And this was something we had to, we had to go through with our first group that we did this with. What is is this gonna trigger you? Being in a desert environment, is this going to trigger you to what it was like in Iraq?
Speaker 2:They actually, I think, found the immersion in the desert to be a really gratifying sort of revisiting of their experience without trauma.
Speaker 1:How long did it take to go from we are actively seeking or convincing veterans to we're filling programs to we have a wait list?
Speaker 2:Critical mass of word-of-mouth referrals. When a veteran comes out of the program and totally enjoyed it, they're gonna tell their fellow veterans. Another thing I should say as the evolution of this program, we started out with only male veterans. This was my ignorance. I just assumed that it was only the male combat veterans who really needed this exposure.
Speaker 1:Why did you think that?
Speaker 2:Because I just forgot that women are also in combat zones. And what I learned later, even in noncombat zones, women are confronted with a lot more egregious traumas, sexual trauma.
Speaker 1:From within the service?
Speaker 2:From their own unit members, rape and sexual abuse. A lot of women have suffered. And one of our board members, Marine Corps veteran, Amber, she said, we've got to open this to women. And she said, look at the statistics, how many women serve and that these women need it too. So we opened it to women and now do both all women trips and co ed trips.
Speaker 2:And the co ed trips are really revealing because a lot of the male veterans have no idea that a woman can be as much of a warrior as they are. And when it gets to talking about the literature that we discuss on these trips, there is a serious warrior mentality that comes out on a lot of these women who served for the same reasons the men did. And it it it brings them together in a very interesting way.
Speaker 1:This is a very strange question in the form of an observation, but with the prevalence of sexual assault or rape against women in the service, first off, I would think that it also happens for men, but probably is just way underreported. Is that true?
Speaker 2:It is true. And some have acknowledged that to me, some men who have been sexually abused.
Speaker 1:So here's the weird part of this observation, which is a big driver of the mental health challenges on the back end of service is going from this very tight knit community to isolation. Now if you have the experience of being sexually assaulted, obviously, you're gonna have trauma associated with that which would need to be addressed in any case, but it would strike me that that experience would keep you more separate from your group. You'd have like less of that intense family dynamic. And in some weird way, is that a partial inoculation against some of the traumas of war?
Speaker 2:It can be. I mean, to to say that veterans come out of our program healed is I I can't say that fully. There are a lot of traumas that simply do not heal, and post traumatic stress or moral injury is probably one of them. It's it becomes instead tools for coping. And I think trying to offer those tools as part of a dialogue is the ultimate challenge of a really good moderator on the on these trips to try to recognize when that opportunity exists between men and women on a co ed program or not on a co ed program, but that this topic comes up or any topic.
Speaker 2:So ask the other veterans, how do you deal with it? How do you cope? What are your mechanisms? And that's another roundtable discussion that can get very energized and then veterans really come alive sharing their pursuits. And a lot of them have found physical activities to be essential to that.
Speaker 2:A good physical purge with a sport like mountain biking or rock climbing or surfing, taking on nature in a way, but pitting yourself against some really challenging physical things is a way to sort of purge some of those things. A lot of them also self medicate with marijuana and now psilocybin, and there's a whole array now of, psychotropic treatments that are coming to the fore for veterans.
Speaker 1:So I let us get a little sidetracked because that's just how my brain works. But coming back to the wait list, at this point, there's a significant number of people waiting. And what's the limiting factor between where you are and getting all the veterans who would like to experience this?
Speaker 2:Funding remains a big challenge. My son, his name is Tate. He's 31 years old. He has been with me since the start of the program. He is now writing grant applications and going after funding that would allow the program to expand to the point where more can be served.
Speaker 2:In fact, this year will be, a growth of the program for probably the first time in since COVID because COVID shut it down completely. So expanding the program through more funding, more venues, these trips could be held anywhere that there's public lands that have facilities. One of our limitations is a base camp. We have a base camp here where we bring veterans after they fly in or drive in. And it's on land given to us by the McBride family.
Speaker 2:And we have a teepee, a big 20 foot teepee that is the meeting place. We also have a food truck that my son built on a trailer, and we serve locally grown organic, mostly vegetarian food. So we support local farmers and support the health of the veterans we serve. We believe that the it should start right at the beginning with a good diet, with a place where there is no cell service, and we can then have a tranquil place to bring these veterans. We would need a bigger facility that could house more and that could accommodate veterans who are so severely wounded that they can't hike up to one of the mountain huts.
Speaker 2:This is possible. We've had amputees on the program before, but it's a challenge. So we would need enough funding to actually acquire a piece of land to do this in Pitkin County, in the Roaring Fork Valley. That's a challenge.
Speaker 1:If there were others who listened to this and felt so inspired, Sierras, is this something that could be taught to others to do in other places?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. They would be trained as moderators, as trip leaders. They would basically have to be outfitters. They'd need vehicles to haul gear and food. They would need places to go that are nature based and that are removed from distractions.
Speaker 2:And that can be a bit of a challenge too. But in the Mountain West, especially where there's so much public land, there are plenty of places to go that can afford that opportunity for solitude that is so needed, so essential to have quiet places to just let people think and be.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. I genuinely hope that there is someone or someone's out there who can help spread this because it's just such a beautiful, beautiful thing that you've built and serves in such a needed way. For those of us who aren't veterans, but who are in positions of leadership that come with their own types of stress, their own isolation, their own field of misunderstanding. What are some of the constituent parts of your programming that somebody could implement or try on their own to bring a bit of what you offer into their own life, a bit of that peace and equilibrium and nature.
Speaker 2:Go out with your friends, go out with your family, take a group out that maybe you normally wouldn't socialize with, but go out with the idea of connecting deeply with the natural world. And you could do that with any number of readings that you could take out. Just a single poem can fuel a conversation that can last all day. But offer opportunities for quiet and reflective time solos are a beautiful thing to do. So offer opportunities for reflection, and I think that most people will be grateful.
Speaker 2:When I take my institute groups out, I don't have all day. I usually only have two or three hours, and I give them solos that are twenty minutes long. It's not much time, but some have a struggle even being quiet without a device for twenty minutes. The ones who can do it and who get it, when I come back to collect them from the solos, they don't want to leave. They want to be there longer.
Speaker 2:So once you open that channel and see how beautiful it is to just be quiet and peaceful. It's habit forming.
Speaker 1:I will say I'm someone who's very fortunate to live blocks from amazing trails and I'm out in wilderness in some way, almost every day but I'm guilty as anyone of having a book in, having a podcast in, being on a run, what's my time and I had this experience at a Hoffman process which is like a process by which you go into familial history. It's relevant to the story but you're in a zone like huts for vets where there's no technology, you don't have phones, you haven't. You've been in deep work with other people and one of the things we did was a, I think it was twenty minutes, maybe thirty, go out into nature, into the trees. You're in, Northern California, kind of Bay Area, so just these beautiful serpentine trees on the bluffs and no noise, right, just try to be as present and observational as you can. I was shocked by the level of connection and transcendence that I found in those twenty minutes simply for having taken out all of the things that would normally be distracting or splitting energy.
Speaker 1:It's really amazing. And I'm and again, I'm I'm someone who does this all the time, so I would imagine for someone who doesn't have access to nature, probably several fold that experience.
Speaker 2:Those transcendent experiences mark the leaders of the big three religions. Jesus Christ, forty days in the desert, withstanding the temptations of the devil alone. Buddha sitting under a tree in solitude, the first shinrin yoku practitioner. Mohammed alone in a cave, meditating and finding the quiet. I mean, Moses did not climb to the top of Mount Sinai for a selfie.
Speaker 2:Moses went to the summit for moral clarity. He came down with a code of behavior. The prophet Elijah went out to the desert to see the face of God and a storm came up. And Elijah thought the voice of God was in the thunder. The face of God was in the lightning.
Speaker 2:The wind was the power of God. And then he realized, no. He was wrong. God came in what he called the still small voice that followed the storm. That still small voice is conscience, and it's consciousness.
Speaker 2:And maybe that's as close to the divine as we can get, but we have to recognize it first and honor it as divine.
Speaker 1:And that so tracks with my experience. So for the subsection of the audience, and there will be some out there who might be allergic to the word god, maybe that's something to look at as well, The inner voice, the inner knowing, that connection to a self that is beyond time, that need no explanation, that you simply know when you know. And if you've never felt that or have never experienced that it's available to you. It's not religious but it's so clear and it's a beautiful thing so give it a shot. Just try it out, see how it feels, treat it as an experiment.
Speaker 1:You may be amazed what, what comes through.
Speaker 2:And, oh, you know, with that thought, reaching beyond the constructs of social life is, I think, a necessity for us to become the individuals that we wanna become. I mentioned earlier that Henry David Thoreau is one of my heroes. So is John Muir, so is Edward Abbey. People who stepped out of their social constructs and began thinking on their own. Original thought, that's what is birthed there is original thought.
Speaker 2:And we are all capable of being our own thinkers. I think so often being programmed by social mores, by the past, instead of creating the future through the endless and boundless creative energies that we have as human beings. That's our ultimate responsibility. In 1949, when Albert Schweitzer came to Aspen to address the Goethe Bicentennial, which was the beginning of Aspen's Renaissance as a cultural community. Albert Schweitzer basically channeled the spirit of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, a German dramatist and poet.
Speaker 2:And he talked about not Goethe's life past. He talked about the spirit of Goethe. And he said that our role as human beings is to convert matter into spirit. And I've read those words and I thought about them for years. I wondered, what does he mean by this?
Speaker 2:It's not alchemy. What he's talking about is perception. Can we recognize spirit, the ethereal other in ourselves, in each other, in the living world, and even in the the non animate world? Can we see spirit as essence in the world around us? That I think is the leap that needs to be taken if we're really to push into another evolutionary level of humanity because that is a linkage of spirit that can really become this coherent expression of existence.
Speaker 1:This has been amazing. What I've heard here, and I think will be super valuable for leaders listening to this, is a recognition of first and foremost building balance in one's life, the importance of prioritizing not just the intellect as we're all told we need to, but the body, our physical health, and spirit or connection to something greater than ourselves. And that when we have those things in equal measure or near equal measure that the platform from which we lead is stable. And when we lead from a stable platform, we create stable communities. Stable communities have the safety and opportunity to be self evolving and to be self supportive and to have agency.
Speaker 1:We really empower our citizenry and our communities and that's the place that people build their own internal sense of purpose and worth and agency and connection and so our choice to do our work as leaders, to invest in our own mental well-being through this balance is what sets the table for our communities to do the same, whether they're veterans or otherwise. And that's our responsibility and I just thank you so much for putting this in such clear terms, and taking us on this this journey of this amazing work that you do and I hope that there are others out there who would like to help support what you're working on. I just wanna close with a little bit about you. Before we got on and started recording, you talked about the importance of living your values. From the outside looking in, you're doing that in spades.
Speaker 1:And I wonder if you could just close us out with a thought about that.
Speaker 2:Coming to my own consciousness didn't happen for me until I was about 18 years old. I had grown up in a suburb of Chicago, beautiful tree shaded street that I lived on. Parents were both loving people. I grew up in a loving family, very fortunate for that. And not super affluent, but I mean, by comparison to the world, affluent.
Speaker 2:And then I came west to Colorado to go to college in a town called Gunnison, and the timing was not right for me to be in higher education. I I needed to be out in the world, but I didn't realize that. And in part, I was in school because the draft board was gonna be breathing down my neck if I didn't have a student deferment. I really went to school, stay out of Vietnam. I was in classrooms and struggling, against what really my inner self was telling me that this was not the right timing for me to be in an academic setting.
Speaker 2:And I had an epiphany in a classroom where I felt this cacophony of sound welling up within me. It was like an orchestra tuning and getting louder and faster and louder and faster. It was a crescendo of which I had no control. And I was literally gripping my desk, and sweat was coming out. And I was about to scream, and the bell rang, ending the class.
Speaker 2:I gathered my books. I ran out into the commons where I could stand under a blue sky. And at that moment, I said, that's it. I'm not living for anyone else. I'm not living for any other value set.
Speaker 2:I'm living from my values. I'm not going to function for anybody else's pleasure. I'm gonna function for my own. And not just pleasure, but my own sense of being, sense of self. And that's when I became an an individual with choice.
Speaker 2:Animals live by necessity. Humans have choice. From there on, I became my own agent in how I would operate my life. And I had a foundation in morals and ethics through various educational systems, mainly, I think, through my family. My parents are both liberal people, pacifists.
Speaker 2:My father served in World War II, but was never really a warrior. So I had certain sensibilities that came from my religious upbringing too. I was raised in a Methodist church, but I took those those lessons and applied them to, or tried to, applied them to everything I did. And that translates today to living as much of a non material life as I can in a material culture in fostering peaceful conversation, trying to foster peaceful relations among people, trying to be a a peaceful warrior, I guess. That is what I live up to, and I can't do otherwise because if I don't, then I lose my integrity.
Speaker 2:And without integrity, how can I possibly feel good about myself or the things that I advocate for? That's the rudder by which I direct myself through life. I'm 73 years old and moving into the last years of my life where I really want it to matter. So doing things like huts for vets, the Aspen Institute, any interaction I have is an opportunity for furtherance of growth. And so I take every human interaction as important to me and I don't minimize it with triviality.
Speaker 2:So there's a quote I have and I'll close with this. It's a quote from Goethe. Since we are so miraculously met, let us not lead trivial lives. The idea is to give meaning to every interaction and positive meaning. And I think if that could be a prescript for humanity, think of where we could go.
Speaker 2:We can do a lot better than we're doing now if we can advocate that level of meaning in our lives.
Speaker 1:It's beautiful. It's beautiful. If people want to find Huts for Vets or you or participate or support in any way, how do they find you?
Speaker 2:They can go to huts4vets.org and get a real look at the whole organization. It's a beautiful website. The current executive director, Eric V. Cinar, is an army veteran of both Afghanistan and Iraq. He's the real deal, and his life was changed by the program.
Speaker 2:And so he's now changing other lives, and he's a great guy. So that would be the first outreach would be to, to go to the website and email Eric and talk to him.
Speaker 1:So good. When you're saying that last bit about aligning to your values, I was thinking about in in our coaching practice, the way we think about mental health is being aligned, connected, and safe with self, others, and environment. And that alignment, safety, and connection to self is the first one and many people may project onto that selfishness etcetera but it's actually a prerequisite to being selfless for a long time and I think you have a lifetime of exemplifying that. So I'm not supposed to say it, but thank you for your service.
Speaker 2:And thank you for yours, Skippy. No, thank you very much for having me on the program. I really appreciate it. There's so much to talk about and being with someone like minded is an absolute pleasure.
Speaker 1:Ditto. Thanks for coming. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you wanna put what you've heard here today into practice, sign up for our newsletter, the leader's handbook, where each month you'll receive just one email with a curated selection of the most useful tools and practices discussed on this podcast today and over the course of the last month, delivered in simple how to worksheets, videos, and audio guides.
Speaker 1:So you and your teams can try and test these out in your own life and see what best serves you. And lastly, if you wanna be a vector for healing our politics, if you wanna do your part, take out your phone right now and share this podcast with five colleagues you care about. Send a simple text, drop a line, and leave the ball in their court. Because the truth is, the more those around you do their work, the better it will show up in your life, in your community, and in your world. Have a beautiful day.
Speaker 1:The Healing Our Politics podcast is brought to you by the Elected Leaders Collective, the first leading and most highly recognized name in mental health, well-being, and performance coaching for elected leaders and public servants designed specifically for you. Now don't be fooled by the name. The Elected Leaders Collective is not just for elected leaders. It is for all public servants, staffers, volunteers, government, nonprofit, whole organizations. This is for you.
Speaker 1:If you are filled with passion for improving your community and world but are tired as I am of the anger, stress, and vitriol, if you find yourself banging your head against that same wall, struggling with the incoming criticism and threats, arguing with colleagues who are supposed to be on your team, and questioning if it's even worth it anymore than the Elected Leaders Collective programming is specifically for you. With the Elected Leaders Collective, you will learn to become a political healer, building the authentic, unshakable confidence and courage to stay true to yourself through the anger and pressure while cultivating the open, empathetic mind to meet others with the curiosity, compassion, and kindness necessary to respond to threats, improve challenging relationships, deescalate conflict, and bring people in your community together to solve real problems and get shit done. You'll reduce stress, anxiety, and overwhelm, and become a more effective leader while having time for your family, yourself, your health, and your wealth, sleeping well at night, and showing others they can too. Now that's leadership. Healing our politics listeners receive 10% off all elected leaders collective services using the code hashtag political healer.
Speaker 1:Use it today and become one of the brave political leaders healing our politics. Use code hashtag political healer by going to www.electedleaderscollective.com and starting today. That's www.electedleaderscollective.com and starting today.