← Contemplify
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- [00:06]
A
Welcome to Contemplify, where we seek to kindle the examined life for contemplatives of the world. I'm your host, Paul Swanson. Today I welcome author and empowerment pioneer Gail Straub to talk about her latest book, Home Inside the Embracing Our Human Family. This is Gale's second time on Contemplify, and like our previous conversation, we find the heart in the flow of presence in the sacred. The writing of Gaelstrop inspires me to draw from the currents of our shared humanity, to witness and to honor the profound connections that transcend all borders. Her travels and her reflections on those travels bear witness to the journey of transformation. I think listening to this conversation and reading her book will do the same for you. As always, you can visit cadepify.com for the show notes on this episode and learn more about gail straub@gailstrup.com that's G A L S T R A U B.com now join me in raising a glass to my guest today, Gail Straub. Gail, just by one thing, thanks again for being here. I'm so thrilled to be in conversation with you. And as a way to recognize that we're people in places, I would love to ask you, where am I finding you today? Where are you in the world right now?
- [01:46]
B
I'm at home, Paul. First, it's great to be back. I'm so glad to be in conversation with you again. So I'm in the Hudson Valley in Woodstock, New York, where in my little tiny house in the mountains where I've lived for 44 years.
- [02:04]
A
That's beautiful. I've only been that way one time. And next time I'll have to be sure to drop you a line. Cause I would love to see your A frame and that storied place. That's pretty incredible.
- [02:18]
B
I'd love to have you. Come on. Come on out.
- [02:24]
A
So I was kind of blown away when I realized that it's been seven years since we last spoke about your work. The Ashokin Way Landscapes Path into Consciousness, which is a beautiful and marvelous book. And my wife has this practice of whenever she hasn't seen a friend or spoken to a friend in a while, she likes to ask this question of what has become clearer in your life since we last spoke.
- [02:53]
B
Oh, wow.
- [02:54]
A
So gay. I'm wondering what has become clearer for you since we last spoke in 2018.
- [03:00]
B
Oh, wow. Oh, I love this. Give me a moment because that's really profound and important question, I would say. Paul, you could tell your wife I love this question. What has Become, I want to say more clear in the interval since we spoke, is how incredibly short life is and how ephemeral and how precious and how our spiritual practice, in my case a Buddhist meditation practice, teaches me everything I need to know about living as much as I can in the moment and following my breath. And that if I had to put it in a succinct nutshell, it would be what I've learned more clearly is everything I need and long for is in the present moment.
- [04:21]
A
That's beautiful. I'm just gonna let that hang for a second because it's one of those easy to miss plumb lines of accuracy of meaning. I feel like everything you need is available right now in the present. That's beautiful.
- [04:41]
B
I think, of course, it's. I'm 76 years young, and so, of course, the proximity of death is death on the shoulder. As a friend, as an advisor, is much closer than seven years ago, but in a good sense. And so I think this more acute knowing of, or I could say yearning to live more in the present moment, that's part of the reason.
- [05:17]
A
Yeah, that's marvelous. That resonates. I'm just gonna hold that in here as this, I feel like, ties into my next question. Well, of. You know, when I read your work and been gifted to be in conversation with you, and it connects to this podcast, which is really trying to kindle the examined life for contemplatives in the world. So I'm curious, Gail, when you hear the word contemplative, how does that relate to you and your work, if you think it does at all?
- [05:52]
B
When I sense, feel into the word contemplative, it's interesting. You're correct, Paul. It's very related to the first question and my answer to that. When I think of contemplative, I think of a slower life, a more interior life, a less distracted life, a life where I'm learning more from the natural world and in my case, from my meditation practice and my prayer practice, of course. But in my case as a writer, I'm deepening my craft as a writer. I think, for me, anyway, I can't speak for other writers, but writing is a contemplative practice. And one of the things I love so much about writing is if my husband were here, David, he'd say, Gail is the speediest, fastest person you've ever met. Except there are a few places where she's not fast. And they are the things I've just mentioned. Writing, being in the natural world, in prayer or meditation. And As I age, I realize that everything I need to learn is in these slow, contemplative realms. Honestly, this might sound a bit audacious, Paul, but probably not to you. I don't think I can learn anything more by being fast and distracted and busy. I've been that for some decades, and I don't regret that. I feel those years were appropriate and productive, and they were fertile for my age. And a lot of that stuff is in the book, when I was very, very, very out and very engaged in the world. And so this beautiful word. I also feel sadly. I'm sure you know more about this than me. I want to say I hope the word is not an endangered species. I hope the word will find its way in the younger generation and not just for those of us who are later in life, but that this word can be reinvigorated and rediscovered. And I would like a renaissance with the word and the realm. Contemplative.
- [09:08]
A
A contemplative renaissance. I'm in for that. That sounds exactly what the world needs right now.
- [09:14]
B
Yeah.
- [09:15]
A
Thank you for sharing that. I'm curious about your meditation practice. Can you share a bit more about how long you've been practicing and what that looks like for you and maybe how it's even changed for you as you've deepened in practice?
- [09:31]
B
Yeah, I started. I was taught. This is kind of fun because it's also in the new book. So I was 23. That's a long time ago. And I was crossing the Sahara, and it was the first time it was an American I heard the word. I had just been in the Peace Corps in West Africa for two years. It was the first time I heard the word meditation. So 1973. And this person told me a little bit. And I didn't start my practice right away, but I think it planted a seed. And then to make a long story short, I landed in Cambridge in Massachusetts after Africa. And there, the insight community, Jon Kabat Zinn and Sharon Saltzberg and. And then Ram Dass was still there. And it was the beginning of that. And I started a practice. And like all of us, over many, many decades have had starts and stops and starts and stops. And I basically use a vipassana practice. I follow my breath. And what's interesting now, what's changed? I used to meditate in the morning. I meditate in the evening now. And a lot of people say, don't you fall asleep? And stuff, but actually it's the opposite. I experience it. So I don't fall asleep. I experience it As a. A cleansing. I want to say bath at the end of the day, where everything falls away. And as an older person, you know, we have trouble sleeping. And this helps me sleep so much. It's. I become quiet. The veil is more thin, of course, and all the. Everything that happens to us during the day just falls away. And that's my meditation. And then I pray when I walk. I'm a bit of a Buddhist, Christian, maybe. I was raised Catholic, and I have a very close relationship with the Mother Mary. I'm not a Catholic, but I retained my love of Mary. So I meditate. That's one part. And then I pray every day, pray the rosary. But it's when I'm in the natural world. So prayer and the natural world are inseparable to me.
- [12:45]
A
Yes. Yes. It all rings true from what your. How your book brings your life together. And I'm excited to dive into it because it holds so many pieces of this, your incredible life. And even as you talk about one small piece right there about your walk and your practice and about how you kind of hold. I don't know if you've heard that new term of the Budeo Christian, you hold the Buddhist, and then you have the Christian prayer practice as well. And that deep relationship with Mary, there's this unfolding depth to it all.
- [13:25]
B
Well, like so many people, and I imagine you talk to so many of your guests about this. I love everything about the meditation practice in that it truly helps me cultivate living in the present moment and not clinging to what I want and pushing away what I don't want. But what I missed from that was the intimacy of the rosary and the Mother Mary. I think many people feel that for me, the meditation practice is a bit of the archetypal masculine, and the prayer is the archetypal feminine. And there's a story in the book with John o', Donoghue, the great Christian mystic. And I tell the story that I tell John. He's still a Catholic priest. It's before he left the priesthood. He really always was and is, I think, still on the other side, a druid. So I'm with him there in Connemara, and I'm telling him I'm not sure what I am. I have this Buddhist thing, but I love Mary, and I get a lot of my spirituality from my activism or sitting there in Connemara in the mountains. And John says, and of course, my maternal roots are Irish. So we're in the. And my mother was very devout. She was a devout Irish Catholic. The whole Nine yards. And so in there was John o', Donohue, still a priest druid. And he says, gail, I don't want to make light of it. It's a great story, but it also was a kind of seminal moment for me. He says, gail, you're in the land of your matriarchal roots. You're in Ireland. You've fallen in love with the Celtic worldview. This is a beautiful time. Embrace the aspects of your Catholicism that feel true and authentic to you, I. E. Mary and prayer, and let the rest go. And then we ate our picnic in our chocolate bars, and something shifted for me in that moment.
- [16:20]
A
Yeah, I love the way you tell that story. I never got the chance to meet John o', Donaghy, but you bring everything I know about him to life in that story. His laughter, his command of poetic words, and even the way you. It almost felt like you were confiding in him of this deep, wellspring connection you have to Celtic cosmology. And he just absorbed it, beared witness to it, and then mirrored back to you about what a gift that was.
- [16:49]
B
It was like I was saying confession in the Catholic sense of the word. To this druid priest, mind you, the church was the cathedral of the Cashels, and once he was kind of booted out of the church, left the church, he used to say Mass up in the Cashels, and hundreds of people would come there. So it had a lot of very profound symbolism.
- [17:24]
A
Yeah, I love that sense of the natural cathedral, which I know is something that you're. You really picked up from your father as well, that this natural landscape was the cathedral that you could also be worshiped in, walked on, pilgrimage through. And John kind of touched on that so much in your story as well.
- [17:49]
B
Yeah, thank you. I'm so glad you brought that forward, because my mother gave me the connection to Mary, and she was a bit of a mystic, really. And my father, who I talk a lot about in the chapter on the Himalayas, he had a very tragic childhood. And it's all written there in the book where during the Great Depression, his father, my grandfather, shot himself. And my father witnessed that. He was about 12 years old. And what's interesting, but not unusual in family stories is that, quote, secret was only spoken of once in my entire childhood, in my family, before, until he died. However, that one time informed my life, I would say, an inexplicable and seminal way. And so I talk about how. Well, first I. As it happens, which I tell in the book, by some serendipity, my Husband David and I are trekking the Annapurna circuit just weeks after his death. My mother dies and I go into the Sahara and my father dies and I go into the Himalayas, two of the most mystical places on the earth. But your point, Paul, about the mountains and, and John. And my father's church was the natural world, even though my mother was a devout Catholic and my father kind of went along with it to make my mom happy. It wasn't after she died, he never went back to mass, but his understanding of the natural world as a cathedral was imprinted on me and my sister in the early childhood in Maine. And he taught us how to hike. And using that hiking as a metaphor for life, going up, keeping in the present moment, ascent, descent, et cetera. And so when he died and I went into the Himalayas, it was as if he became the Himalayas and the Himalayas, my father's spirit were teaching me. And the mountains, these mystical mountains allowed me a portal into my father that I. I don't know if I would have understood my father if I hadn't gone into those mountains. Who can say? But I understood. And this is true of, I think, many of us with our parents. I both knew my father and I didn't know him. I knew he loved me. That's a different thing. But I realized, and it's partly he was a man of his generation and that sort of thing, but there was a healing in the taking that Annapurna circuit, which was, as I tell in the book, really hard for me. There were moments I didn't know if I could make it. I was with two Sherpas who were fit at a level as only Nepalese Sherpas. And then my husband David, an ultra marathoner. I was a marathon runner, so I wasn't a slouch, but that's a pretty rigorous months long climb. And so in the moments where I wanted to give up because it was just too hard, I would feel my father's spirit and David, all the masculine, the masculine shoring me up. Porba and Tule, our incredible comrade Sherpas. And I made it okay. And of course, back to our original point. I was surrounded by high Buddhism, prayer wheels and prayer flags and everything, Stupas. It was so mystical, Paul. I describe it as best I can in the book, but I'm not sure you can describe it.
- [23:12]
A
Yeah, I've never seen the Himalayas in person, but they do seem indescribable. And in that way, I was even touched by the way you describe how indescribable they are when you talk about how your journal entries become sparse because the enormity of presence begins to kind of sing. And you even had. There's this quote where you say, my overriding experience of Nepal is as a place of physicality, where words are rendered secondary.
- [23:44]
B
Yes.
- [23:45]
A
Ed. Holding that. That trek that you did is. I was like. The way you describe it, the way that you read, I was receiving as, like, this mysterious mandala expressed through the Himalayans. The wordlessness, Buddhism and your father. And of course, your relationship with David and the Sherpas are just like the endurance of that trek. Is that a fair way to express. Like, it has a mandala, like, holding together these desperate things, but there's some connective tissue that's speaking throughout that.
- [24:17]
B
It was beautiful. I love that. Thank you for that. It's exactly what it was like, a mandala. And what was striking and revealing in the writing, I think one of the most pleasurable parts, for me, anyway, being a writer, is the incredible surprises that are revealed about important things when we start to write deeply. I would say to you, the Himalayan chapter, I'm so glad we've kind of perched there, landed there, was one of the hardest chapters, because my editor, the brilliant Ned Leffitt, he kept saying, gail, your descriptions of the Himalayas are beautiful. You're doing okay there. But there's much more about your father. And he kept encouraging me and encouraging me and a little bit pushing me. And that's when I made the discovery. And it surprised me that these mountains were so similar to my father, Paul. Silent, physical, mysterious. My father was a man of few words. The words were meaningful, but he wasn't a gregarious person, and he was very comfortable with silence, and he was very comfortable in his body. So this place of, as you said it so beautifully, of deep physicality and deep silence and then the grandeur rendered words not very useful.
- [26:24]
A
I love it. I. I'm so grateful that your editor. It was encouraging to keep digging because it was one of those chapters that I. I certainly resonated with.
- [26:35]
B
I'll tell him. I'll tell him.
- [26:37]
A
Please, please. Do you know, you are such a gifted writer. And I know that the last time that we spoke, I relished your opening line and a shocking way. Ed, I. You've done it again. I love opening lines of books because I feel like it's welcoming you. It sets the tone of what's about to happen.
- [27:00]
B
You're right.
- [27:02]
A
I would love to read the first line and the second line from the prologue from your book where you say, throughout time, myths from every corner of the world have told that at the moment of incarnation, our calling is set before us. During the course of a lifetime, we must choose to heed the call or not. That is page one, folks. Like any origin story or creation myth, what were you trying to communicate with that opening line to readers?
- [27:39]
B
Oh, you have the best questions, Paul. That harkens back to a little bit what I just said. I wrote the prologue, not at the very beginning. It took about eight years, this book, in different iterations, but that's not that long. I know I have friends where it's like 17 years or something like that. So I wrote it early on, to be really honest, without knowing what that meant. And then I finished the book. And you know what, Paul? As I've gone out and about in the world and talked to people, and now I have the pleasure of people reading it and talking like I'm talking to you, so many people ask me about the calling. They say your book, in a certain way, is about how you followed your calling. How did you follow your calling? When was it the most difficult? And what could you tell me about following my own calling? So you know what I think, Paul, that this is where we, as writers or creators of anything, really, we know that something larger is quite. Call it a muse, call it whatever we want to call it. Something larger is speaking through us. And at first, my editor, that prologue that you've referred to, it's a little bit different than the voice of the book. It's a little archetypal. It's a little Jungian. And first Netseda. I don't know if this is going to fit, Gail. But then we realized, and I'm happy we did, that it does fit. And then I tell after the line you read, that I got born and I almost died. And this little glimmering. I couldn't drink my mother's milk, and they tried formula and all kinds of things. And then I was given goat's milk, and I teetered, but I came in. And so then the sort of magical realism, if we could use that word in the prologue, is about how in that shuttling between life and death, this little mite of a creature who barely had entered the earth plane, she. She has this glimmering globe come and visit her. And the glimmering globe gives her a little glimpse, I think the Sufis say, that there's this great room, and before we incarnate, we have a little, shall we say, preview of what might be in store for us. And I think the prologue was my version of the Sufis. Great room was a little preview. This glimmering globe was saying, if you stay around, this is what you might get to see.
- [31:29]
A
I love that as a connection to your book, that little preview. The prologue is so archetypal in that way. And even, you know, I was thinking about the goat's milk being kind of the nourishing milk that you needed. Anytime a goat was brought up throughout the book. I'm just thinking, you're eating goat cheese with John o'. Donohue. It hearkened back to me, that goat's milk, that was like the sustainer of life. I don't know if that was intentional, but it certainly played throughout for me.
- [31:59]
B
Well, that was another surprise. And then a reader the other day, this. I hadn't connected. And the reader said they were talking about the goat's milk, which allowed me to survive. They said, your close encounter where you were almost raped. I escaped. But that was in going in to see baby goats in Morocco. The farmer had. I hadn't connected that, Paul. And the reader said, it shows, again, your strength. Because I was visiting the goats, I couldn't resist. And then I had a very difficult. But I completely escaped unharmed, unlike thousands and millions of other women. But the reader said to me, maybe you have the strength of the goats.
- [32:59]
A
I like that. Again, the archetypal, the mythic just plays throughout. Even if the tone or the voice is different. The first, the prologue really sets you up so beautifully, even throughout the hardships, as you've mentioned, that. Yeah, what a ride. And I also wanna say, you know, you've been so many places, you've connected with so many communities and people that for all those listening, we're not even scratching the surface. There's gonna be more than we can talk about. And so I encourage all those listening to pick up Gail's book, Home Inside the Globe. Embracing Our Human Family. It's a treat. And one thing I appreciate about the structure of the book, Gail, is there is a. A fluid linearity to the book.
- [33:44]
B
Yes.
- [33:45]
A
Because there's so many layers of depth in it. Was it your intention always to have it be more like a layer cake than a sheet cake, if that makes sense. Like, to always have so many stacks rather than just one.
- [34:01]
B
This is a great question and a great metaphor. That was very hard, wrestling to the ground the form. The truth be told, I mean, writers always have a story like this. It started out as a series of travel essays, and an early editor, not Ned Levitt, said Gail this isn't going to cut it as travel essays. I'm really sorry, but this is a memoir. This is a heroine's journey. And that's, of course, much harder than a series of travel essays, as valuable as travel essays are. And so getting the form, girl. So it took me many years to wrestle to the ground the structure. Girl being formed, woman taking form. Krone passing on the form. And your listeners will like this. I was really. Ned was saying, we haven't wrestled the form to the ground. The writing is getting there, but how does it hang together as a coherent story? And one morning, like many of us, about 3am when the veil is very thin, I sometimes wake up then, like a lot of people.
- [35:36]
A
Me too.
- [35:38]
B
You do? I'm not surprised. And I sometimes ask for guidance then because I know guidance is available. And I tell you, Paul, so I ask. I said, I got to get. Wrestled this thing to the ground and through the veil. I'm not kidding. Very simple. Girl being form, woman taking form, Crone passing on the form. Emailed Ned the next morning. He said, we got it. We got it. Spirit gave me that. The great mystery gave me that. And then the multiple layers. Once we had the three layers of the cake, if I may refer to it that way.
- [36:30]
A
Yeah.
- [36:32]
B
Then the next part about to say what you say, that each layer of the cake, girl, woman, crone, is quite rich unto itself there. I had to discern the essence of what I had learned from each culture and what I wanted to impart to the reader. I think that's the tastiness that you're referring to. I hope so. And that wasn't so easy. The essence of Russia is very different than the essence of China or Bali or Ireland or India or Jordan. And I wanted so much, Paul. My spiritual mantra was to show my love and respect for each of these cultures. And I hope that I did that.
- [37:48]
A
I think you did so in spades. I think each visitation of a chapter to particular places. I had been to some of those places and the smells and the textures were coming back to me and those that I hadn't. I could feel the. The various essences throughout. And that. That's a stunning thing to be able to pass on to a reader. So I. I think you can rest easy on accomplishing that one because that's.
- [38:17]
B
I'll rest easy.
- [38:18]
A
That's a tough hurdle. We talked about your dad and his passing. I was also very much taken with your mother's passing and then also you taking the crossing the Saharan desert.
- [38:38]
B
Yeah.
- [38:39]
A
You're 23 years old, right at the time.
- [38:42]
B
23, yes. My mom died when she was 55, and I was 23. For a lot of people, that's the most impactful chapter. And I think that's for several reasons. First, we all have a mother and we lose a mother. We are mothers, et cetera. And so we resonate deeply with the death of a mother. Just for your listeners. My mother, she had rheumatic heart fever as a child. So this is in 40s before they had antibiotics. So that, as anyone who had that, then that caused damage to her heart. And she suffered from that her whole life. And then she was so brave. She did experimental open heart surgery. This was 1972. And I went home after from Africa, and I went home after the surgery, and that was pretty traumatic. But she made it and we hoped she would heal. I think this is important. Her last words to me, which are in the book I'd always In all my adventures. This was long before computers or anything. I'd written letters to my parents, and they loved these letters. Letters were basically travel logs. Pretty young and silly, but still they loved them. So all during the years in Africa, I wrote them letters, and she would take them to work and read them to her colleagues. And so she says to me in the last visit, I, of course, didn't know it would be my last visit physically with her. She said, okay, you keep having your adventures and I'll keep getting better. Well, she died, but I did keep having my adventures. It was a kind of, if you think of the final words, as a kind of mandate. And so then she died. I went back for the funeral and came back. And as it turned out, my Peace Corps time was almost over. And I had been planning this trip across the Sahara. It wasn't something that all Peace Corps volunteers did, but. And any number of us. And so I asked my dad after the funeral, I said, I want to come back home. I'm going to. Canceled the trip. He said, no way. He said, you must take that trip. That's incredible. And again, to try and encapsulate, it's about a couple months to prepare and then get there. And I cross in a camel caravan with the Traureg nomads, and they changed my life forever. That's not an overstatement. So I think that chapter is a kind of love letter to indigenous people all over the world, because the traumag wisdom is similar to wisdom of indigenous people in every corner of our world. There they, as I described me as a Westerner, I'm outside the natural world. Looking in as an indigenous person, my teacher, Takama, there was no separation. She was an intrinsic part of the desert and the plants. And these women, this is 1973. They had intricate herbal formulas for birth control. They had intricate wisdom in trance dances to ward off the normal hardships of life, heartbreak, disease. They used poetry, music, painting to sustain themselves during starvation and drought and death. And so she taught me all this, Paul, this young, heartbroken lost soul, this young American, a lost soul. I think my mother was in cahoots with Takama. My mother, the mystic and this high priestess indigenous teacher. And she taught me, she says, as traureg, we believe death is another kind of birth. So your mother is reborn on the other side. I think about this now, and I get very choked up, because how blessed could I be that after the death of my mother, I have someone who teaches me, your mother isn't really gone. It's true she's not in a physical body, but she's available to you. I say at the end of that chapter, it took me my whole life. This is not an exaggeration. So I was 23. Now I'm 76. It took me my whole life to complete, not even yet, to more and more fully appreciate what those people were teaching me and giving me.
- [45:12]
A
What a gift. In that season of deep sadness and grief. Your mother was in cahoots, as you said, with Takama. That is. You couldn't have planned it if you tried, right? Like, that's the mystery of the unfolding that. I'm so grateful for your story in that.
- [45:31]
B
Paul, you're going to love this story. I wanted to share this. So when I was recording the audiobook, because it's in my own voice, okay. So I was recording the Sahara chapter. I was recording the parts about Takama. And this is in a. I'm in Woodstock. So there are all kinds of recording studios because it's a haven for musicians. And they'll. The moment I start talking about Takama, the power goes off. There's no lightning storms, there's no wind. And I don't know, we all thought that was Takama.
- [46:19]
A
Wow.
- [46:20]
B
And then it was okay. But it was a period of about. The engineer was called Danny Bloom. And I was reading it out loud, and it only lasted about five minutes. And he comes out and he says, gail, this is Takama. So there you have it, Paul.
- [46:43]
A
There you have it. I love the recognition by somebody whose. Their job is to help produce it. And they pick up on what's happened there thank you for sharing that story. It's great to know that this is also available in audiobook. I know that's often a way a lot of people sink into stories these days.
- [47:05]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [47:08]
A
I feel like we can't have a conversation where I don't invoke the name of David Gershon, your husband. It was so fun to hear about the complimentary skill sets and gifts that you both have and how they really do kind of pair so well together. And I thought a great example of this was David's big idea of the first Earth run. Could you share a little bit how the two of you, where that came from and how that came to be? I know that's. That's a big story, but I just feel like it. It evokes so much of at least how I've read the distinct people that you each are, but also how the shared love and passion that comes together through this work.
- [47:56]
B
Well, you nailed my husband. He will be so, so thrilled that you chose this very thing to represent his essence. I mean, you totally got him. So for your listeners, my husband and I met in 1980. We got married in 1981. And within 10 days, we got married on October 3rd in this little house we still live in. Very intimate little wedding. And then 10 days later, we offered our first empowerment workshop that would become the marriage as a husband and wife and the marriage of Dharma. Our Dharma was and is empowerment. And that simple, innocent offering created on yellow pads at our kitchen table would eventually go all over the world to some of the most difficult. The slums of Nairobi and into the brothels in India and so forth, and into Afghanistan. But anyway, back to the present. So we had this almost immediately, two marriages as a husband and wife and as business owners and as this path of Dharma. And so we'd been married for about three years. And David comes to me one day. This is the story Paul wants me to tell. And he says, so things are going. We were young and naive and going by the seat of our pants and so forth. And so David comes to me. He says, geli, sit down. I have this idea. And so I figured he's going to put in a new idea for the empowerment workshop. So I was all ears. And I should say before I say the next part, when I just had met him, he had been the director of the Olympic torch relay for the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics. He was the one who went to Greece and did the torch and all that. So people should know that. So then he sits me down and he says, you already know that I. I was the director of the Lake Placid Olympics, and that the torch has a profound symbolism for me. For him, it means the unity of the human family, the capacity to live together. It's very archetypal for him. It's our possibility. It's the light. So I said, yeah, that's so great, honey. And then he says to me, well, Gali, I would like to take the torch around the world, symbolizing world cooperation. And so he had told me to sit down. So I was sitting down, and I say to him, well, how are you going to do this, and who's going to pay for it? I'm a Capricorn. Virgo. And he says, I don't know, but we'll figure it out. And that is, as Paul, so perceptive with such perception. That's the essence of my husband, the visionary. And so he meant it. He's a visionary. And we spent the next three years of our life figuring this out. And then we partnered with UNICEF, and we went to over 45 countries and, I don't know, 30 heads of state, and we raised several million dollars for the children of unicef. And it was pretty great, but it was our initiation. So we'd only been married for a few years, and there's one story that I think is very important. So things were coming along. We partnered with unicef, but we still didn't really have the funding. And we thought we had this funding, and then it fell through, and it was really close. This was to be launched on International Peace Day, September 21, 1986. And so David's a person who rarely gets discouraged. But that day, he was like, we both were at the bottom. And we go back, we have a little tiny walk up in New York in Chelsea, near enough to unicef, and we both pray, and we just, you know, we're at the bottom. Should we go on what to do? And so we both get quiet and we pray, and then we share what we receive in the prayer. And we both receive that we need to trust that our intention is very pure. We're very young. We're naive. We wouldn't do this now, or you couldn't do it now. And we also know that there are a lot of people around the world, people we've come to respect with every bone in our body, who believe in this, who want it, who feel this could make a contribution to the world. So we decide to go forward. And that I, in the book, was a kind of moment where there's certain we've been married now 44 years. But there's certain moments where the marriage is put to its ultimate test. And that was one of the moments for us. And then, as you see from the chapter in the book, this thing was called the First Earth One. About less than a week later, Jim Grant, the iconic director of unicef, who was a man who inspired us beyond anything, he called us in and he said he was a runner and this was a tort relay about running. And he used to wear his Nikes into the UNICEF office. And when we were both runners, David was a champion marathon runner. And he sets us down and he said, I'm going to have UNICEF fund this. And what was very powerful about that poll is not everyone in UNICEF thought this was a good idea. He was a visionary. David was a visionary. He felt he was sensing as a visionary that it could be an incredible branding opportunity for UNICEF and it could raise a lot of money, which it did. But not everyone thought that Jim Grant was making any sense. So I don't know if I answered your question, but David's completely calm and big picture, and I'm incredibly high strung, but very gifted at details. And as trainers, he would lead from the mind and I would lead from the heart. We are still complete opposites, but somehow it seemed to work. Okay.
- [56:42]
A
That'S exactly. Thank you for sharing that story. I feel like it just exudes the partnership and the trust and the reciprocity of gifts between one another. So I really appreciate you sharing that. There's that last section of your book, and this is something that, you know, we've talked about the structure and I think talking about being a wisdom keeper, an elder in this way, and that transition to it is something that we need more and more of. And I know for myself and my generation, one of the questions that often gets asked is, how do you find an elder? Or how do you find kind of a wisdom figure in life? I almost think the question that I would love to ask you in light of what you've written here too, is what do you look for in younger generations that inspires your full presence and your participation as a wisdom elder?
- [57:48]
B
Wow, That's a book. That question you just asked me, maybe you should write that book for your listeners. The last part of the book is Crone Passing on the form. Yeah. So the chapters in Krone are the cultures are India, Jordan and Morocco. And I'm going to answer Paul's beautiful question. So in those years from we were around 65 going in, ending the book around 10 years later, something like that. And our work at that point, our empowerment dharma had. We never expected this, Paul. When we created this work at our kitchen table, we thought if we were really blessed, it would touch people in the Western world, perhaps in Europe. And then there's a whole thing on Russia. And the final part of our dharma was in the global South. And what became began to happen somewhere around 2005, something like that. We held our certification program in Rhinebeck, New York, here in the Hudson Valley. And people from Afghanistan and India and Africa started to come and we were thrilled. They were the leaders of the top non governmental NGOs in doing the most inspiring work I had ever encountered. I'm getting to your question. And so long story short, at first we thought, what do we have to offer them? And then they came to us. And in particular an Indian woman who was. Was also a professor at Johns Hopkins. She said, gail and David, you have this vehicle, this four day workshop called the Empowerment Workshop. We written books, we had a certification. She said, you don't know this, but what it delivers is something called agency. I had never heard the word in 2010 or something. She said, in my work in India and Africa and all over the world, we have economic empowerment. We give money, we give education, we give wells and books and so forth. A lot of what I'd experienced in the Peace Corps, however, we do not give interior agency, what you and I would call introspection, the spiritual life, economic development totally leaves that out. So what happens to very disenfranchised people in Afghanistan, in Kabul, in Nairobi, in the refugee camps in Jordan is they have money and things, but their sense of self and their capacity to believe that they can affect change in their lives is very weak. Your little workshop that you created when you were in your 30s at your kitchen table on yellow pads, guess what? That can deliver this. So then we did a pilot, very serious. With her guidance, I wrote this white paper on agency and what began to happen. And now I'm getting close to your question. Paul is first. David and I then began to believe that this was something valuable. These leaders kept coming and saying to us, I am using this work with women born into sex work, and I am finding that it gives them agency. I am using this work with the poorest of the poor in Nigeria. I am using this work in my work with violence against women. Anyway, so then those leaders became our teachers. We were the students. So this is how I want to answer your question. I believe we're true wisdom keepers. When the paradigm has completely turned Upside down again. When we're passing forward our wisdom, we were giving away everything we'd Learned in about 35 years. It was translated into Swahili and Arabic and Hindi and so forth. And for the many people now who couldn't read, it was translated into pictures, visual images. And as the last part of the book describes, Paul, these people became our teachers. We had given them something valuable as wisdom keepers. And yet this work, this empowerment, dharma, could no longer grow with us. It had hit a ceiling. And the women in the brothels brought the work, the women and the men in the refugee camps and in Afghanistan and on and on. So what I look for when I want to pass forward my wisdom is the things I learned from my teachers in these countries. I look for humility. I look for a passionate desire to make the life of the people around them better. To not only be on a path of self improvement, self empowerment, but in a way, the only reason, in my view, we become more conscious people so we can share that with others. And they taught me all this. They taught me. So a quick story from the Jordan chapter. I was in Jordan in the refugee camps with the Syrian refugees. And in this case, it was the women's camps. Of course, there were men's camps, too. And the women had been using our empowerment were taught by our Jordanian trainers. It was translated into Arabic. And so I was over in Jordan, and they wanted to meet me. And I go way out of Amman, almost on the Syrian border in the middle of nowhere. Very haunting landscape. And I get to this little house hidden by the trees. And I walk up to the third floor, and there are 40 Bedouin women sitting in a circle. 40 Syrian refugees, all veiled and beautifully dressed. And the translator starts and we talk, and they want to know about the work. And that's nice. But then there's a woman who. A very distinguished woman who spoke fluent English. She starts to speak to me directly in English. And the translator then is translating her English back into Arabic. She says, listen, Gail. She said, most of us have been raped, many of us herself included. She said, I watched my parents being shot in front of me. We know that's still happening, Paul, in many places in our world. At the very moment you and I are talking. Yes, she said, the women in this circle have experienced the unspeakable. But what I want you to tell your people when you go back to New York is the following. I want you to tell them that we will never lose our human dignity. I want you to tell them that though we've experienced evil. The indomitable light of the human spirit is what shines in these camps. I was weeping, I'm almost weeping telling you the story. And she said, they can take away everything, but they can't take away our dignity. And I felt it as a moment like one of those moments I described was Takama, my trauma teacher. A seminal moment when I was so blessed to have a teacher like that. And recently I was asked to do a talk about how do you get through these hard times we're living in? And they're hard. We know that. And I told her story and I said we must draw on the strengths of the people, the human family around the world who have been through harder things than we have. And they have reminded us that the human spirit is endowment. So teachers are everywhere. If we're paying attention, I think, yes.
- [69:50]
A
Thank you for sharing that story. I could feel my own breath kind of responding to it in its different rhythms. And it really is a living flame or living placeholder of what I feel like your book exudes this remembrance of our shared humanity and the dignity that gets expressed through connection, through misconnection, through the shared vulnerability of being a human being on this incredible planet and the fragility of who we are in our creatureliness and in our beauty. That story just. Yeah, I could feel the tears welling up behind my eyes as I hear you communicate that. And just. It is so much the through line of your book, I think so much of your work as I understand it, that I'm grateful that folks can hear this conversation and they can pick up your work and explore the work that you and David have done for so long that has this rich living tradition all over the globe. And like I was saying earlier, your book, we've only scratched the surface. There's so many stories left to uncover. There's so many joyful parts. There's hardship, there's. There's places where one cannot help but think about their own life wherever they are in the journey, whether it is in the. The first half of life, the second half of life, or as their entering into the wisdom keeping years I've kept you for too long. But I have one final question I always like to end with. Please, I love talking to you this question. So we always keep it in our own sense of embodiment. Maybe this is the lesson from the Bali chapter for me. But if you were going to pair our conversation with a drink, what would be your drink of choice and why? For this conversation.
- [72:01]
B
Say it again. If I were to Compare our conversation to a drink. Right.
- [72:04]
A
With a drink. What drink would go best that you would choose would go best with our conversation for someone to sip on where they. They delve into a home inside the globe.
- [72:19]
B
Wow. Wow. I love this. Okay, give me a moment. What drink? Wow. Well, when I tuned in, what came to me was an iced chai. Very Indian, of course, but also Nepalese and kind of just. It's so flavorful and the Silk Road and all the spirit spices and so I think a nice tall iced chai, but the real kind of chai.
- [73:00]
A
That'S perfect.
- [73:01]
B
Not Starbucks.
- [73:02]
A
No. This has gotta be the authentic.
- [73:06]
B
Yeah.
- [73:07]
A
Slow brewed chai.
- [73:09]
B
Yeah. Not too.
- [73:10]
A
All the appropriate spices. I love that. What a great combination. Well, again, I can't say it enough. Thank you so much for your time and for your work and your writing. It's a gift to be one of your readers and to bring up stories from your book and I'm excited to pass it along to friends to check out as well. Yeah, thank you. I know as you said, took you seven years, but every second counted, so I appreciate that.
- [73:38]
B
Well, I want to thank you, Paul, because honestly, I'm sure other writers have told you this. There is nothing more meaningful for a writer truly than a feeling that their book has been devoured and understood. But I don't mean understood in a sense. In other words, you revealed the book to me in a way that I couldn't reveal it to myself. That's something very, very special. So thank you very much. I hope I get to write another book before I die so we can have another conversation.
- [74:28]
A
Thank you for listening to this episode of Contemplify Maidster. Conversation with kindred spirits and strangers alike and provide a nourishing morsel of thought for your week. Slip over to contemplify.com to find the show notes for this episode. While you're there, sign up for the monthly Contemplify non required reading list and the weekly contemplative practice. Lo fi and hushed if you're enjoying a cadempa fold rate and review it on your podcast player. The president of the Internet slipped me a note just the other day on a napkin that said, this will help spread the contemplative cheer. The theme song of Contemplify is called Langside by Charles Ends and Darren Hoveus. Fellas, grateful as always and I'm looking forward to bringing you more musings and conversations, conversations with contemplatives in the world here in the near future. Until then, be well.