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Indigenous Wisdom is about opening yourself up and getting to know yourself better as a Human being on this Earth. In this podcast, Julia shares messages, channeled wisdom, and more to support your wisdom journey.
Julia Carmen (00:05):
Allah, beautiful beans. This is Julia Cardman. Welcome to a new episode of the Indigenous Wisdom Podcast. Today, I'm so honored to welcome my good friend Todd, to the show Taught is an artist, and check this out, turns his creative mind to everything he touches for reels. Today we talk about curiosity and resilience, spirituality and what it means to be human wellness and wonder. I think you're really going to love this episode, so why not? Let's just dive in right now. Well, Todd, tell us who you be.
Todd Thomas Brown (00:49):
Well, I work as an independent artist across disciplines. So I have a painting practice, but I also have done work across music, performance, dance, and I also work as a cultural strategist. You could say what could be called social practice in the arts, which is organizing different spaces or festivals or encounters, what I think of as spaces of encounter that bring people together from different cultural backgrounds, bring people together from different generations. It's really, really driven by a passion to bring people together, essentially into a space of exchange and in intimacy, you could say, because intimacy is something we tend to associate with our private personal lives, and it's beautiful when we can actually feel intimacy among strangers. So I think of that as being a central part of my social practice.
Julia Carmen (02:00):
Wow, that's beautiful.
Todd Thomas Brown (02:03):
And I'm from Vermont. I still consider myself a small town boy. I grew up in a small town in Vermont, and I always consider that home. I lived in San Francisco 20 years, then I moved to Italy for the last seven years, and now I'm temporary relocated to Istanbul, so I'm getting around a bit.
Julia Carmen (02:30):
I love that. I do. I love that. You know what, Todd? I was texting with one of my granddaughters, Malia, she's in South Korea right now. I text her and I said, yeah, I got to go now. Now she's going like yourself probably. She was getting ready to go get her rest for the evening, for the night, and I said, yeah, I'm getting ready to do a podcast. And it's a friend of mine that I've known a long time, and he lives in Italy, but he's in Istanbul. And I said, I have the most amazing friends. It's so true. I consider you myo friend, brother. I love what you said, intimacy. Yeah, right. Most people look at intimacy as like a sexual thing. I'm going to be intimate with this person and I'm just going to say it. Okay. Be intimate. I've seen people's eyes get like, Ooh, what are you talking about? But it's not like that, the intimacy of being vulnerable to be with someone, and you definitely are a person that brings people together. When I first met you, do you remember the year, Todd? I was trying to figure it out and I couldn't, it wasn't the early, late nineties maybe or early 2000.
Todd Thomas Brown (03:54):
I want to say it was around 99.
Julia Carmen (03:57):
Yes.
Todd Thomas Brown (03:58):
Or 2000.
Julia Carmen (04:00):
Hey, do you remember how we met?
Todd Thomas Brown (04:01):
Okay. On this show, you're not going to be calling on my memory a lot. I've made a lot of space for creativity in my life, and it seems to have taken over the real estate that memory used to occupy. That's how I look at it. You're funny. I love it. I just remember the conversation with you. It wasn't our first meeting, but when there was a conversation when you were very enthusiastic and saying, we got to get you to come before, after that, we had connected somehow through the three principal health realization scene in California, but I don't remember specifically what it was.
Julia Carmen (04:43):
Yeah, you know what? I don't either. Either. Either.
(04:48):
We must have gone to a training or something, and this is my story. This is my reality. Right. And I was handing out cards, and those of you that do not know what before the after is that was what I called my business way back before I turned it into a nonprofit, which was Angelina Family Wellness Center. So anyways, I guess I put the cards out and we met in Visitation Valley for lunch because you called me and you said, Hey, I got this card and it fell out. And so I thought I'd give you a call. And we went to this little cafe there on Leland and we'd started talking story, and I just got this hit from you that, wow, this young man, this person here in front of me has something, something. And I didn't know quite what it was, but I knew that something was important to the work I was doing in the Station Valley. And at that time, were you doing work in the jails?
Todd Thomas Brown (05:55):
I was around that time. There was a couple of different workshop series that I did in the San Joaquin County Jail, and then in the San Francisco, San Francisco Jail Maximum Security Ward.
Julia Carmen (06:10):
Tell us a little bit about that, if you don't mind.
Todd Thomas Brown (06:15):
Yeah. It was at a time, kind of a transitional period when I had arrived to San Francisco a couple years after Beverly Wilson, Beverly Jean Wilson, Hayes, Beverly. She was someone I met in the early nineties and really became a dear friend and a very special kind of mentor to me, you could say a spiritual mentor. And when I came out to California, I called her up because met her at a conference and back then you could call information. I literally called information and they gave me the number, her landline number to call her. And I called her up, said, I don't know if you remember me, Beverly, but I met you at this conference and I would really like to meet with you. And it was a situation where I just really, I didn't know why exactly, but I knew I wanted to talk to her. And we met, and that sparked a friendship.
(07:17):
And then I started to go to her trainings, her workshops that she was giving out in Stockton, for instance, and in Visitation Valley, San Francisco. And it was through, honestly, I don't remember exactly how I got started on these things, but it was through attending the workshops that Beverly was doing in different communities and doing a community recovery houses out in Stockton, out in Stockton, because she would put me on the spot. She's like, I'm curious what Mr. Brown has to say about this. And so she would kind of invite me into a minor facilitator role, you might say. And she described it as sharpening my pencil, just kind of getting some grounding, getting my ability to share with people and to listen to people. And I think it was through her encouragement. Oh gosh. I'm like, how in the world did I approach the San Joaquin County jail system when it was nothing I was involved in, but somehow I did it back then. And so I would go and do a weekly group.
(08:33):
And then I proposed at the San Francisco County Jail, I think it was an eight week series to do this eight week week series centered on what's now called the three Principles Health Realization. Basically something that's about the intrinsic health of human beings, our natural inborn resilience. And somehow they agreed to it. And so I was going to the maximum security board and I'd be in a cell with, I don't know if it was maybe eight or nine guys. And of course, that was something tremendously formative because here I was somebody who had so little shared background with the men that were in that cell.
(09:36):
I think there might have only been one white guy. It was mostly African-American Latino. So the only thing that I could succeed at doing was just being myself, because it was very clear with them that they're looking at me and I can't imagine what they would guess. But I think what I got from those experiences was that fundamentally, if you can really be yourself, that people come to trust you in some way. They might be like, I don't know why you're here, what you're doing, but there's something I like about you seem like a good person. And that's kind of how the beginning of a rapport happens, and the rapport is the exchange of being able to listen to each other.
(10:40):
And so those experiences were very much a kind of schooling for me. There was this one guy in the San Francisco Jail that would really, he would have fun with me, I think, trying to poke at me in different ways and almost with a sense of humor. And I think we grew to each other, but I enjoyed his manner of doing that because it was putting me on the spot to just be authentic. It's like, who am I to be there talking to them with what they're facing in their lives? So yeah, I'd first started in, earlier my earlier twenties, throughout my twenties, I did a lot of, my professional work was with youth, youth that were in states custody that I worked with one-on-one. So I was first coming from that kind of a background in terms of doing something along the lines of social work, even though I did not go and get a degree in that profession because I was a bit of an outlier, you could say in that regard.
Julia Carmen (12:07):
Do you remember when you started working with the men and the treatment program was batter's intervention program, working with men that had been violent, usually with family, was a family situation where they got a domestic violence case and you started working with these men in gang territory. I think you knew that, right?
Todd Thomas Brown (12:37):
Gang territory in terms of
Julia Carmen (12:39):
Yeah, you were working right there in Visitation Valley, which was actually right by Sunnydale and Hunters Point. So Visitation Valley was the kind of the safe zone, so nobody could go. So you're working with, see, I didn't understand it back then. Pretty much. I mean, I grew up in that area. I grew up in Visitation Valley, but back then, hunters Point and Sunnydale, nobody really came into that area. It was prevalently Italian. Most of the people that were Italian folks, but not a whole lot of persons of color or black or brown. We were one of maybe five families in Visitation Valley that were Latinos or Latinas.
(13:35):
So it was very different. And so when I started working there, it was like, whoa, okay. The geographics changed a bit. Not a problem. Just like, okay, things are different. So we had folks coming in from Hunter's Point and Sunnydale, you were the one that worked with the guys facilitated. I'm curious to know, I mean from hearing what you shared about your work in the prisons and jails and so on, and your interaction with the folks there, was there a big difference or were you comfortable working with these guys? Sometimes we had what, 10 guys in a group and you were there. I mean, I was in the room in the classroom for whatever for a while. And then, yeah. How was that for you?
Todd Thomas Brown (14:32):
I recall most of my time was actually at the Pacifica site.
(14:38):
I had been in Visitation Valley for some groups, and then I went and I subbed over in Hunters Point. I remember one time, but that wasn't my main gig, you could say at that time, before the after. And I also remember back then, that's also when Roger Mills had something happening in Visitation Valley, and also Beverly was involved in that. And I met some of the local trainers there that were from that community. But the bulk of it that I remember where the bulk of my time was at the visitation, sorry, not the visitation rally, but in your Pacifica center, right?
Julia Carmen (15:21):
Yes.
Todd Thomas Brown (15:23):
And as I recall, I felt comfortable. I mean, it could be somewhat due to my naivete. I don't know when I say I'm like a small town white boy. But then when I went to college, you could say I was kind of radicalized through the fortune of meeting so many wonderful professors
(15:53):
And all of those things. And you could say my upbringing was very privileged and protected. And that kind of education kind of cracked open my skull to begin to feel sense, just begin to understand a very different reality and a very different telling of history and a very different telling of the current social political dynamics that are at play. So going into being in the room with men that grew up in such radically different worlds than me, pretty much in historically marginalized communities, you could say I felt somewhat prepared in the sense of having some background. The prepared me on one side from what I got from those teachers and mentors in my college days, and then also through very personal relationships, friends and past lovers coming from the Caribbean, coming from Latin America. And I was just continually learning and expanding, you could say, my awareness and being humbled in the process. And so being in a facilitator role in that kind of a situation is humbling. You have to be humble, right? Because if you have,
(17:22):
Especially for someone that looks like me, coming from a background that I come from, which is like a middle class white neighborhood in Vermont, Vermont's one of the whitest states in the country. And so you could say I had the combination of having some preparation through those courses and training in college. And then you combine that with what from say the health model, which is a very simple understanding of some principles that help point us back to our core of health. And in fact, I'll just share what, since you say we're talking stories, I'll tell you one story.
Julia Carmen (18:11):
Sure.
Todd Thomas Brown (18:11):
That kind of stands out. And this is actually in Stockton, when I got invited to facilitate a group actually at a women's house, recovery house of all things. And they had experienced me in the workshops in the groups with Beverly and then requested that I need a group for them. And there was one woman in that group who had, of course, a horrible story of having been raped and having a child, I believe it was maybe by a family member and this child, she gave birth, but the child was given over to another family, and the child would never know who his mother was, but she knew where the child was, and she knew that the child was okay, and she was living with the pain of not being able to contact
(19:16):
Her child, who she knows however many towns over is there in the telling of say, this simple understanding that points us to recognize that our core of health and wellbeing lives in us in the same way that the resilient intelligence of our immune system lives in us, even when we're sick. Now, even when things are going wrong with our body, there's still so much that's going right, or we would just drop dead. And it's not that I was sharing anything extraordinary, but somehow in that moment, the way I shared the simple idea that there was within her, this core of wellness, resilience that is built into us that can ever be destroyed again, or we would just come apart, we would just go back into the soil. However I said it, she'd never heard it, and I could see it in her eyes. She started to tear up and kind of break down, not in a negative way, but in a feeling when she had experienced herself as being such a horrible person.
(20:46):
And she said she never ever thought that inside of her, that such a thing is this core of, I don't even know what the right word is for it. I think you can feel what I'm saying. Oh yeah. It's life. It's the life energy. It's the light life energy. And so here I was, this guy in his late twenties from Vermont talking with this Latina mom in her situation. And our worlds are totally, totally different. And yet somehow through this sharing and through the connection, we felt something very, very powerful was exchanged. And I shared the story because let's say in a moment like that, it just helps it, you could say maybe it gave me the confidence to realize that despite the very dramatic differences in our life experiences, in our present context, that we can still be of help to one another, that we can still find that we can find a shared bridge of feeling to remind each other of this power inside of us.
(22:16):
Because even if I'm sharing it to her and she's seeing it, I'm seeing her seeing it, and then it's coming back to me reminding me that it's inside myself. I don't pretend to be somebody that walks around in a state of wellbeing all the time, or that I'm aware of whatever I go through. I've had a pretty rollercoaster of an internal life, so I need that reflected back to me as well. And so that's where I look in the teaching process or facilitating process. It's really just being on level with people and working to enter into this mutual, this kind of rapport of mutual exchange that's pointed in the right direction of our health and wellbeing.
Julia Carmen (23:13):
So true, Miha. So true. Yeah. Not like it's, oh, Todd's going to go in there and teach you something, right? Yeah. It's not about teaching. I know we use that word teaching, even facilitate. Yeah. Or whatever. And with the folks that I quote teach, they'll say something like, oh, Julia, blah, blah, blah. I said, no, they're pointing towards I, because we look out, so then we see what's in front of us. So that gets kind of muddled up. So you see a person sees and then they have a thought, and that kind of creates all this stuff if you're just working from that brain of the human self. So I'll go, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not teaching anything. It's a remembrance. It's truth, not my truth. My truth can, yeah. Anyways, so what you shared right there is that which is truth, not Todd's truth or her truth of what happened to her that happened, and that's painful, and that's a human, whoa, no bueno, right? But it sounds like from what you shared, you shared with her truth about all of us. And so when we share from that space, then there is no separation. Yeah.
(24:46):
Yeah. It's actually quite amazing. I find, and I with you, Miho every day I go, oh, Chi Julia, where are you going now with that thought? Where you going down with that? Whatever that is. And I laugh. I laugh a lot because I think being a human is very, very interesting and funny at times. Yeah. So you know what I remember about you, Todd? Yeah. You worked in the Invis Valley for a little bit, and then you just reminded me that we did go to a treatment program in Burlingame. I think it was Burlingame, but there was something I want to share with everyone, because every now and then I'll think about you and I'll giggle because of this. So when the center was called before, after my whole thinking was, the reason I opened up the center was because I heard these three principles and I thought, oh, my whole being, my whole soul said, this is the way. And I kind, okay, let's do this without a lot of training. My trainer was Mavis Kern. I love that woman. I like, okay, she speaks my lingo. Don't ever, as I tell folks, don't mix the message with the messenger.
(26:10):
Yeah, yeah.
(26:11):
But it's really cool when you can find a messenger you really, really connect with. And that's what you did with Beverly Beverly's. Amazing. Yeah. I missed the info that you shared there, and I'm looking forward to listening to that. I really enjoyed visiting with her when I did. Yeah. So yeah, when I was training you folks, my whole thinking was if everyone teaches from that space of their knowing within with their pureness of self, then they could do anything in class within reason. As long as they followed all the things that the probation said we had to follow. And do you remember this, Todd? You did that dance thing, lead and follow. Do you remember that?
Todd Thomas Brown (27:05):
Yeah, yeah. Kind of the guided exercise where people partner up and one person closes their eyes and the other person guides them, beats them around the space, and everybody does the whole room, does it simultaneously. And to music, I usually put some relaxed, mellow music on for it, put people into their senses.
Julia Carmen (27:31):
Well, you asked me, you probably don't remember. You said, Hey Julie, I'd like to try da da. And I said, sure, go for it. And back then, I dunno, I think we had 10, maybe 15 groups going on. Pacifica had quite a few. And then Palo Alto, east, Palo Alto in San Francisco. So the purse clients, they needed to get in one session, one two hour session a week for 52 weeks. So I was fine with them bouncing around as long as they made their session in. So sometimes the guys from the city from San Francisco, and we had a Saturday group in Pacifica, two of them, and then you did the night one, and they would go, can we go to Pacifica? I said, sure, Meha, not a problem. Tell the guys, tell Carmen my daughters, it's all good. And I remember one guy calling and everybody talks story amongst each other, and the guy called up and he said, I want to go to such and such class, which was your class, Todd. And
(28:45):
Then he said, but I don't want to dance. I heard they be dancing over there. I was busted. I said, and I thought, shit, if probation heard about that, we were dancing in class. Oh, shucks. So actually, yeah, I did tell him. I said, no, you could sit it out and I'll make sure Todd knows. He didn't sit it out. He joined in. So I remember one time I went in, those guys were big guys. Sometimes you had them, Samoan and Tongan guys, you had the Polynesian guys In.
(29:27):
Yeah. Yeah. And can you share a little bit about that, if you remember, because you said it's bringing them back into their senses, into their body. And if you've hurt someone, which they Have
(29:39):
Usually means they've been hurt some point. So share with us what that experience was.
Todd Thomas Brown (29:46):
Yeah, I can talk generally about that exercise. I've used it so much across so many years, and I love hearing about it. Now, I actually haven't used it much in a while. And I really wish I could remember what it was proposing this to this group of men, because you have to put your arm around the guy and hold his hand, one of his hands, his eyes are going to be closed, and you have to protect. You can't let 'em walk into a chair or a wall or something. But maybe just for the listeners on this podcast to explain just kind of how it works, basically I have everyone partner up with someone. The person leading has their eyes open, the person following has their eyes closed, I put on some music. It's not dance music. It's very, very a tempo. Maybe. It may not even have rhythm. The point is creating a feeling and atmosphere or tone in the room helps people. It's like you're going to go in for a massage or something. You're going to go into yoga, you're going to go into something. It's a soundscape to slow you down.
(31:08):
And so I have they all move at the same time, and the pieces may be five minutes long. And I can tell you, having done this in so many different contexts with so many different groups, and it's such a simple exercise, the remarkable thing is that when your eyes are closed and you have to follow somebody, your thinking doesn't help you at all, right? You can't think about where you're going. And in order to be led, you have to let go and follow. So your thinking, it just kind of quietly, automatically quiets down. I think if I tried to have everybody sit down and meditate, it would be far less successful. You could sit there quietly, but your mind will be spinning. So in this context, and the thing is, you can see it on people's faces. This is what I love, is that the thing that I witnessed time and time again is the literal change of expression on the faces of the people in the room. Because the people following, when you stop, it's not that you stop thinking, it's just thinking stops happening so much. You come into the moment, you come in, you're feeling the lead of your partner who's guiding you, and they're guiding you with their body. And so you're having to listen with your body.
(32:45):
And I see people's faces, their expression over the course of five minutes just begins to relax more and more. And it opens up more and more. You can picture, I always use example picture somebody with a furrowed brow when they're thinking really hard compared to someone who's surprised or someone who's really curious and their eyebrows lift in the open. And then along with that, the feeling shifts because you have a room full of people who now are altogether not thinking and being present with this soundscape of music. And this lightness comes in. And that right there is perhaps the best, one of the best teaching examples because in this case, it's like I'm not teaching something. Their own feeling is the teacher. It's an example. It's proof in a way. It's like somebody said, I could say, okay, hey, how wellness and beauty and goodness, and there's a natural resilience inside of you.
(33:58):
And it could be, prove it to me. I can't prove it to them. But with this example, everyone can see how their feeling of wellbeing to some degree bubbled up. Some degree of lightness happened, some degree of anxiousness or anger or heavy thinking dissipated. And it was visible and it was tangible. And so that was something I could point to and say, now look at that. That's the point of what we're talking about really. And it makes me think about Dick and venture way back when I was like 21 or 22, and him first explaining in his way to me about how human, I like to call it, say resilience. It's like the thrust of life. It's life energy. Life power. It's like a beach fall in us. And when you push a beach ball underwater, you have to hold it underwater with your hands. And he said, that's what our thinking does. We start taking our thoughts so seriously,
(35:10):
We might have a very serious situation, but the point is not the situation. The point is what's happening in our thinking that our thinking gets very dense and it starts to push under that life energy. But when for whatever reason, through whatever process or technique or whatever, or by accident or surprise, when thinking clears out of the way, the beach comes back up. So in this exercise was kind of for me, my way of sharing that because you could see that feeling, that life, feeling resilience, rise back up to the surface in these men in a very short amount of time.
Julia Carmen (35:58):
Todd, you actually came in and did some trainings. We ended up doing trainings also for licensed therapists and other providers that needed to get their CCE U in. And I dunno if this was a time you were there, but you did do it with those folks. Now you talk about busy mind. No offense to all my friends that are therapists. They're big time because they have to and evaluating and judging the folks in front of them, and maybe C, maybe. No, I don't know. But maybe it was the way I, because you're actually explaining it quite well. But one time I said, okay, we're going to do this exercise. Pretty sure you were there. And then it went well. And then we said, okay, now switch. And they all started laughing. And I go, okay. They both closed their eyes.
Todd Thomas Brown (37:01):
Oh, right, you were there, right? I think so. I remember that happening at one point, because then I made a point, I would emphasize, listen, one of you needs to have your eyes open. Okay, yeah, I think you were there. But there was another group I did where we intentionally paired two people up. They had their eyes closed and we paired them up and each one thought the other one was leading them. And then we created a safe circle around them as they kind of just meandered around the room. It was so cool. That was really funny. It was funny because, and of course the fun, I mean the fun, the funny, the laughter. I mean, that is also another thing that gets, pulls people out of their thinking, pulls them into the moment, brings a lightness, and then just trying to point out that lightness when it's authentic, not something forced, not something put on or as they say, kind of spiritual bypassing type of thing. But when the thinking clears, that's actually where we can get the deeper insights we need without very serious things happening in our lives.
Julia Carmen (38:30):
For the longest time, Todd years, that people would bring that up, because we had a room full, the room was, I used to call it the big room, but it wasn't that big, large or whatever. Nobody bumped into anyone. No one. And everybody had their eyes closed right then at the drug and alcohol treatment center where there were all these women. We didn't know how we were going to do that. And of course, a lot of them there were looking at you with desire. So it was really, I don't know if you remember that. And the director, I was
Todd Thomas Brown (39:16):
Often oblivious to that kind of stuff, believe it or not.
Julia Carmen (39:19):
Yeah. Well, the director actually, maybe you don't know this. The director, when she saw you, she says, oh, these women are, they don't have good boundaries, and do you think he could handle it? And I'm like, well, yes. I ain't saying now that to Todd, maybe he's already experienced this, but the women were having a challenging time because again, they're recovering addicts and no boundaries. And when we decided to do this exercise, it was a really small room, and there was a lot of women in there, and no one bumped into anyone. It was like the director there went, whoa, because of everything we just shared about how that exercise is dropping all thought. But from the story you shared about Stockton that really dropping into that witch, letting go of all the busy mind, here's this eye candy. I remember their eyes go, whoa, who is this guy?
(40:27):
Because I guess maybe you do know this, and you looked like a young Brad Pitt. So here comes this young guy that looks like Brad Pitt, and there's all these women in there. That's kind of how it was Todd. And so you got that busy mind going, all their senses of body sensations, so much was taught that day. You're talking about intimacy, you're talking about all of that. Whoa. Then to do that exercise in that room with all those females and you leading them, there was a quiet stillness in there because I taught my stick is the listening, the four, I call 'em four vibrations, the four frequencies of listening. And I shared that with the licensed therapists there. And when I shared with them that I was going to bring someone in to do X, Y, and Z, they all said it wouldn't work. And I said, well, let me do this. Just let me do this. And when we were pal and I visited with them later, the director says, that was amazing, Julia.
(41:45):
And again, like yourself, Todd, I would just go do my thing. I really didn't know, or I did, but I didn't. So in the moment, I did my thing, and then I would leave and go onto the next thing. At that time, I was working anywhere from six to seven days a week just trying to get the message out. And it was really ramped up, not ramped up in a negative way, just really high off the work. And I have still do. I thought, wow, this is great. This is going to bring everybody back home to the self and recognize that there isn't anything outside of them that's going to fix them. All the drugs in the world, all the sex in the world, all the food in the world, all the work in the world, which I was working a lot, is not going to bring that satisfaction that a lot of humans are looking for you.
(42:38):
So those were the things that I remember about working with you and recognizing. And you used the word humble. And sometimes people, they don't understand the word about humility. Humble or humility means to be teachable. And I think that's what any type of work or being a human, no matter how young or old we are, as long as we hang out there, I feel like I have so much more to learn, not learn, but because write me whole consciousness, not whether you're alive or dead, but the awareness of self being in this world is endless. It's infinity that is like, that's never going to stop. I understand that in all humility. It's just like, shit, whoa. And I'm not talking about learning about you, I'm talking about me, kind of, sort of. It's about me, but it's not. But it is. But really it's not. But you know what it is. But really it's not that kind of thing. So that's kind of how I look at life. I go, okay, this is about me. Huh? I don't think so. Oh yeah, it's no, but maybe it's, yeah, it's kind of deal. Yeah. So around and around,
Todd Thomas Brown (44:14):
Yeah. It makes me think of something that helped me with that quandary starting, I dunno how long ago it was probably even in 2009 when I first, from the art house I had in San Francisco, there was a biologist who started to participate us with running the space. He was from Sri Lanka, I think it was. And right at the same time, another arts leader, Ken Foster, had turned me onto a book called Resilience Thinking. Ken was the head of the Yuba Buena Center for the Arts at that time. And that started me on a path of getting really interested in fascinated with contemporary biology and ecology, at least as best as I can describe it in terms of let's say the forward thinking edges of people coming from those frames. And it was quite a bit later, probably in 2017 or so, that sometimes I'm sitting somewhere and my mind is going, and questions start coming into my head, and I start getting curious. And I became curious about curiosity and thinking of how curiosity as a feeling state to be in a state of curiosity. I was like, now that's got to be a really healthy state of being. And I started to wonder if anyone out there had done research, like scientists, biofeedback, whatever, what it would be like to have a human being hooked up to some monitoring system that can check their brainwaves, the biofeedback, when they're in a state of curiosity.
(46:14):
So I get on Google and I put in the word curiosity and physiology. So I'm looking at, I'm trying to see what will come up with these things. And up popped the title of the book called The Biology of Wonder. I was like, oh my God, the biology, that's exactly it. That's what I'm wondering about. That's what I'm curious about. It's a German biologist, Andreas Weber.
(46:39):
I started to read his work, and he has a second book called Matter and Desire, and it has so much to do with things we're talking about, but bringing a larger lens into it because it brings in the lens of the total biosphere of the earth and the interweave of ecological systems and all life from microbial level up to elephants and redwood trees and whatnot. But in describing through these books, if I do it justice in my description is he talks about how even in a single what's inside the cell is very much the same stuff that's outside the cell, hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, et cetera.
(47:39):
But that this inside the cell, it has a desire to stick together and to be a self. It has a desire to endure and not just survive. We grew up with this idea of survival of the fittest from Darwin, Charles Darwin, to a very narrow vision of understanding life. And so he describes in the book, it's not just simply the desire to survive, but it's a desire to thrive, to grow with more life, to grow into more life. And that's why life is expanding and growing from single cell and multicellular organisms and so on. But what I'm getting to here with what you were saying something about, is it about me? Is it not about me? Is it about me?
Julia Carmen (48:33):
Yeah.
Todd Thomas Brown (48:35):
Is that this cell, in order to be itself, it creates a membrane to separate itself to have an inside. So now with the membrane, you have an inside and then you have an outside, but the membrane is porous because what's inside needs many things that are outside and it needs to enter into the cell. And what's inside the cell needs to be released back out to the outside. And since I was a teenager going into my twenties and going into the arts and having a spiritual kind of yearning or calling, I was always kind of, it may be a bit confused between these two experiences. One on one hand you could say, call it spiritual practices, which you feel that where there's the disillusion of the ego, the moments when you feel a oneness for everything, where suddenly all of your insecurities and thoughts about yourself, all your ideas about yourself, they just kind of dissipate. And you find yourself present With
(49:51):
Everything else, and you feel like totally in the flow, totally in the fluidity of it. All right? So that's one experience. I have that on another side, artistically, being an artist to central core of being an artist is finding your voice, your voice, not imitating somebody else. If you could try to imitate the best artist in the world, and even if you did the highest level job, it would still just be an impersonation. So on that artistic level had to do with who am I? What is my voice? This singular very unique expression and experience. And so when I was reading Weber's work in being told through, as he would describe it as poetics, sort of where poetry enters into scientific language, because scientific language, which is conventionally thought to be objective, lacks the capacity to describe life. And so suddenly I was like, oh, this makes sense. Now there's an inside and there's an outside. And they're not only totally connected, they're not only mutually dependent, but the outside becomes the inside. We breathe in the breath of trees, We
(51:25):
Breathe in the breath of green things. It's called oxygen. And when we eat, we metabolize, which means it's not putting gas into a car, and then it just goes out the exhaust. What we eat, what we drink becomes us literally, and then what we release goes out of the world and becomes part of the world. So that's the oneness, that's the whole link, the whole dynamism of feeling a part of everything. And at the same time being this unique inner, having this inner life that is you. I don't know if that's helpful, but I wanted to share that. I also, I've really, since the years back when we first knew each other so much more, I've become interested, so fascinated by different writers, thinkers that are bringing in this much larger ecological perspective, which say the three principle model, whatever, entirely ignores it. It's very insular in a way, even though it's extraordinarily helpful what Sid banks brought. It's
(52:40):
Like a central core piece to understand, but then it shuts out. It's not interested in anything else.
Julia Carmen (52:49):
Exactly. Well, when you shared that with me, I said something, I'm not sure if you heard, and I've been kind of sitting with this. Even when we first met back then, I was not fully, was kind of in the closet about it because I decided, and then I kind of got out a little bit, but because when I was introduced to the three principals, I kind of, huh. And I used to talk to my sisters, my black and brown sisters, and I go and I go, and that piece that what you just shared right now was great. I'm not kidding, but when you shared it, I said, welcome to my world. Because it wasn't safe in that arena. That's why you mentioned Roger in that group of folks, well, I guess what you call purist or purist or whatever. And I mentioned some of my, not using the vernacular that you just used, but basically shared that which you just shared we're all one kind of deal.
(53:56):
And they poo hooed me. And I said, okay, not safe here. And so I just said, I got to find someone not that thinks like I but knows truth. When I hang out with my folks, the Hawaiians and Native American Indians, all of them, we sit and we can talk for hours about that, which you're just talking about for hours. And I love it. There is no separation. There never has. But the over culture, they kind of say, yeah, and if someone like Sydney Banks, no, nothing on Sydney, but when somebody mentioned, I said, yeah, yeah, I see that. Okay, but nobody, and this is what I was told back then, nobody can see what Sydney saw. I said, huh, where did you guys get that from? So again, as a woman of indigenous folks and a, it was really challenging Todd to, but my folks, my guides, my peeps, they all said, just hang in here.
(55:01):
There's some information here you need in order for you to be in this world because you're not dealing with the human realm all that well right now. And I said, yeah, I got you guys there. I'm a little reactive to certain things and there's a lot of shit going on, and how do I deal with it? Yeah, well, you got to stay here. Stay here, stay here, stay here. We're going to help you be a human and be fully present with self. So when my students, sometimes they'll get all at the beginning when somebody works with, they get kind of enamored about that. Part of I and I go, no, no, no, don't do that. Because it is something that I feel blessed in a lot of ways, but we all end up in the same place. And they go, do you mean? I said, well, okay.
(55:50):
So I came in, my ancestors in a lot of us came in knowing the all of one, not understanding the separateness that we are human also. I said, but you know what? So that part of the nonphysical realm is just not awakened to that, which is all, that's what I share with them. So that's my quote unquote job, and to invite you to see that part of self in the way you want to in that nonphysical realm and bring it into the presence. We're all walking both worlds, Todd. That's why when you said, Hey, I want to learn more about curiosity. Same. Same, right? Yeah. And then it showed up, right? So I just say, we're all getting up in the same place. And they go, what do you mean? I said, I'm learning about how to be human, and it sucks sometimes, but I do understand that I'm creating my own reality through thought and that divine thought and divine heart are present with me 24 7. Thanks so much for joining me today. We're going to stop today's episode right here. But Todd and I had such a great conversation. We actually kept going for a while. We check this out. We'll be back in a month or two with the rest of our discussion.
(57:21):
I can't wait. If you enjoyed soul centering conversations like this today, we have a whole archive over on our website in our podcast history. You'll find those when you search for the Indigenous Wisdom Podcast on your favorite platform, like Apple Podcast or Spotify. And be sure to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter, so you're the first to know about upcoming retreats, programs, and more. Sign up today at the school without alt net, and thank you for joining us.