— Inner Mastery, Outer Impact —
Master Your Inner Core with our 9-day Reflection Journey
Lynne Twist is a globally recognized humanitarian, author, and visionary who has spent more than forty years working to end hunger, empower women and girls, advance social justice, and protect the Amazon rainforest. As a senior leader and global fundraiser for The Hunger Project, she worked in more than 50 countries—from Mother Teresa’s mission in Calcutta to refugee camps in Ethiopia—gaining profound, firsthand insight into the human experience of scarcity and sufficiency. She later co-founded The Pachamama Alliance at the invitation of the Achuar people of the Amazon, forming a unique partnership that safeguards rainforest ecosystems, supports Indigenous sovereignty, and offers global education programs that cultivate ecological awareness, spiritual responsibility, and collective action. She is also the founder of the Soul of Money Institute, which has worked with over 100,000 people to transform their relationship with money and align financial resources with purpose and integrity. Her best-selling book The Soul of Money is considered a classic in conscious leadership, and her newest book, Living a Committed Life, distills her decades of activism into a guide for finding freedom and fulfillment in service of a larger purpose.
What can one little individual do that could positively impact all of humanity? What mindset has silently shaped, distorted, and even destabilized our institutions, our economies, and even our sense of self? What is our relationship with money—and how can we align it with the deepest longing of our souls? Are we living inside an inherited story that no longer serves us—and if so, what would it take to author a new one? And in a time of collective fracture, could the real revolution be ontological—a shift not in what we have, but in who we are?
Find out from Lynne Twist, exclusively in conversation with Dr. Hitendra Wadhwa on Intersections Podcast.
This episode offers key insights on:
Greetings everyone, and a warm welcome back to Intersections. Our aspiration here is always to dissolve boundaries, to be able to expand into the full vistas of our capacities and our potential and our identity as humanity, as individuals, as a collective. Today, we have with us a guest that will dissolve one of these very fundamental boundaries that we all encounter, whether we know it or not, in life, which is that between, in a sense, the material and the spiritual, in particular between money and the soul. It is a joy for me to have with us, Lynne Twist.
Lynne is a globally recognized humanitarian, an author and a visionary, who spent more than 40 years working to end hunger and empower women, girls, advance social justice, and protect the Amazon rainforest. She's been a senior leader and a global fundraiser for The Hunger Project, where she's worked in more than 50 countries, from Mother Teresa's mission in Calcutta to refugee camps in Ethiopia, gaining very profound firsthand insights into the human experience of scarcity and of sufficiency. She later went on to co-found the Pachamama Alliance at the invitation of the Achuar people of the Amazon, forming a very unique partnership that safeguards the rainforest ecosystems, supports the indigenous sovereignty of the people, and offers global education programs to cultivate ecological awareness and spiritual responsibility and collective action.
She's also been the founder of the Soul of Money Institute, which has worked with over 100,000 people to transform their relationship with money and align financial resources with purpose and with integrity. She is the bestselling author of The Soul of Money, which is considered a classic in conscious leadership, and another book more recently is "Living a Committed Life", where she distills her decades of activism into a guide for finding freedom and fulfillment in service of a much larger purpose.
What a joy to have Lynne with us today. Let's welcome her into our midst. Lynne, thank you for joining us today.
It's a joy to be here and I'm looking forward to our conversation. Thank you so much for including me and inviting me.
Beautiful. I see the Soul of Money behind you, and that's going to be a major part of our conversation. In fact, just to kind of launch into it, I just want to share a couple of quick little stories with you and then get you to share your thinking on this, because I know you've done so much of very innovative, creative work on it.
A while back, I met a friend who's deeply inspired by the desire to want to matter and do purposeful work in the world. And he said, "Hitendra, I love what you're doing, what others are doing. But I'm really struggling because I can't leave my job." And I was like, "You know, there's a lot of good other vocational paths for somebody of your talent if you want to do good things in the world. So tell me more about what's kind of got you so locked into your job." And he says, "I need to earn money." I was like, "Yes, of course we all do. And I'm sure you'll find your way to being able to afford whatever life it is that you want to pursue with more meaning." And he said, "No, but I need this, I need that." I was like, "Okay, well, if you like, I made that journey. Let's talk it through." So the next day he brings a spreadsheet and he has his story of his life. It is him and his wife. They decided not to have kids a long time back. So it's just the two of them, now in their middle to older years. They've got this club membership, they've got this mortgage, they've got this travel need that they have every year. They've got this, they've got that. And by the time you add it all up, it's about $950,000 a year and he can afford to earn that from his current job. But he's like, "Hitendra, I can't take a job without $950,000." Meanwhile, his soul is hungering for something. So that's one story.
Now, here's the quick other story. About 20 years ago, I saw a movie called The Philosopher Kings. It's a documentary, Lynne. It's a documentary so thoughtfully and beautifully made about the lives of six custodians in different universities around America. These are janitors. And it's incredible, the beautiful depictions of their native soul-wisdom. And so, one of them is this gentleman, Joseph, who's from Haiti originally, an immigrant. He's earning money here as a custodian. And then he's sending it back to support his family, his wife and four kids, and then his brother dies, and then he just adopts that family too. So now he's got a family of nine that he's supporting, not just the original four or five. And then in the middle of the documentary, they show a moment where he's flying back to Haiti, and he's a celebrity of course, within his family, because he's the breadwinner for all of them through his janitorial salary. But in addition to that, he goes over to the village from where he was born and he's in tears as he's talking about how when he was growing up, they didn't have drinkable water, healthy water. Except that you had to walk an hour away in this very mountainous terrain. And so he has this vision, that he's going to build this supply pipe that is going to supply fresh water to the village, and it's going to cost the princely sum of $5,000. Over the course of the next two to four years, he's going to be able to save that much money. And so, slowly but surely he's going to get this village to the point they'll have the water they need without having to go through inclement weather for hours away. And my gosh, I have to tell you that watching his story changed my understanding of philanthropy, as opposed to something where you got to first make so much money that you can forever make sure that you and at least your kids are going to be safe under every and all eventuality, for all the kinds of lifestyle needs that you have, and etc. and then perhaps you can start tucking a little bit of money away. It's the luxury of the billionaires. As opposed to that, obviously you can imagine how humbling and beautiful and mind-opening it was for me to see somebody like Joseph's story unfold right in front of me, like, "I got to do it now. It has to happen now."
Anyway, Lynne, you've had a realization like this very early in your career and life. And this became in some ways, one of the sole purposes of your life. It is so beautiful, and this is a conversation so critically necessary in the world today. I'm so grateful for who you are, what you do and what will unfold for our audience today. Thank you. Thank you for making time. Tell me a little bit more about your ideas, about what we get wrong about money.
Well, first of all, thank you for telling me about that film Philosopher Kings, right? I want to see that.
Well, your two stories, so beautifully illustrate, really the gifts that I have been given in my life. Pretty early on, I knew Buckminster Fuller. Buckminster Fuller was a wonderful teacher for me. For those who don't know who Buckminster Fuller was, he was affectionately called Bucky. He invented the geodesic dome. He was an architect and an engineer. But more than that, many people called him the grandfather of the future, way back in the 70s and 80s. He lived into his 80s. His whole life was an experiment of what could one little individual do that would impact all of humanity? He decided to turn his life over to that experiment. He invented an electric car in 1949. He saw the coming of the end of the fossil fuel era. He was an amazing human being. So I had an affinity for him, just as he was kind of a wonderful old grandpa looking guy and lovable. Everything he did came from his absolute and total profound love for the universe and the intellectual integrity of the universe. I went to see him speak in 1976. That was so long ago. And some people listening probably weren't even born.
I heard him talk about how we were caught in a mindset of scarcity and that our cultural story is about that there's not enough to go around, and somewhere someone is always going to be left out. And if you actually believe that, even if you unconsciously believe that, then you need to be like the guy who earns $950,000 and it's not enough. You have to get so much more than you need to make sure you're not one of the people who got left out. Because if you believe that there's not enough to go around and someone, somewhere is always going to be left out, then it's almost responsible and accountable and morally right to take more than you need. In fact, way more than you need to make sure that you and yours, whoever you consider that to be, are taken care of. And then you'll take care of those other people when you have way more than you need, and then you'll become charitable. But that original mindset that there's not enough to go around and someone, somewhere is always going to be left out is the false mindset that we're trapped in. People who are raised in meager and maybe not so many means, they can't buy into that. So they recognize that there's enough for everyone everywhere. So they behave as if there's enough for everyone everywhere.
I'm telling you that story because when I first heard Bucky speak, what he said was that we were all caught in a false mindset of scarcity. Yet, we live in a world where there's enough for everyone, everywhere, to have a healthy and productive life. And he talked about how this you-or-me scarcity mentality was at the root of every institution. Clearly the economic model we're living in, that it's based on the mindset of scarcity, but also education and governance. And he even said religion actually. And that was probably shocking to people. He said it would take 50 years for our institutions, that are all rooted in scarcity to become so dysfunctional, that they'll eventually collapse, and we will need to recreate all of our institutions from a new paradigm, a you-and-me paradigm, a paradigm, or what I call the radical, surprising truths of sufficiency, that there is enough for everyone to make it. We don't need to compete the way we're competing. We don't need to accumulate the way we're accumulating. We can all be totally, radically satisfied with enough. I'm telling you this because, that talk that Buckminster Fuller gave in 1976 started to redefine my whole understanding, the sense-making I had at that time, for the world. And I started to live in what I call the radical context of sufficiency. Sufficiency isn't an amount of anything, actually. It's a state of being. It's a way of perceiving, the way of walking in the world, that there's enough. I'm enough. It's enough. You're enough. We're enough. It's the state of being rather than an amount of anything.
I attribute so much of my life and my work to Buckminster Fuller, who was in many ways one of the co-founders of The Hunger Project. When the Hunger Project began with Buckminster Fuller's guidance, I began working on ending world hunger, which when you work on something that big, that deep and that profound, you have to really grapple with the truth and integrity of life itself and really look at your own humanity and the humanity of every single living person. I was so fortunate to have that show up in my path. So that's at least the beginning of the answer to your question.
Truly just the beginning but a rich and important story for you to share. I love it. A few things get sparked. One is, you're talking about how you said fifty years later, institutions will really start to struggle and see the endpoint, the limits of this way of living. Well, if we do the math, we are in 2026. And so, I think we are seeing that around us, at this point, humbling in some ways, right? People in positions of power and privilege, institutions, the mass, people and community as well. Everybody is starting to realize, "My gosh! This is not working. Something's not working here." So I want to come back and have that conversation with you a little bit later in our dialog today. So let's hold back on that. The need for evolution and changemaking in the world and what today's condition signify?
There's something else in what you said, which really stuck with me, which is for any or all of our listeners. Just look at this man, Buckminster Fuller, without necessarily having all the answers tactically to all the struggles and issues, had a framework, had a model, had a core belief system, spoke from a certain place of clarity and conviction that really had a lasting impact on you, and look at what a world changer you have become. I wonder if each of us has that awareness of how much impact we might be having with impressionable young people, who come and listen to us, whether it's in our homes, in our communities, or on major platforms that we might have or whatever it might be, and that in the next 20, 30, 40 or 50 years, how the arc of the life might be shaped by some idea or some breaking out of the box that we give them.
That's so beautiful to just hear from you about how pivotal that that experience was of listening to him, tuning into that and really making that in some ways a major foundation for your own sort of core beliefs. I thought that was beautiful. You mentioned Buckminster Fuller. Do you know Amy Edmondson at Harvard?
No, I don't.
She's a dear soul, and in some ways, so kindred. She's at the business school at Harvard. She was his chief engineer at some point. She's this business school professor and has really carved a special name for herself in the thought leader community, in business, around her work, in particular on how do you create a culture of innovation, healthy kind of failure versus unhealthy failure, smart and dumb failure, and then what you call psychological safety, that has become deeply rooted now in the business community. How do you open people up to being able to contribute and share and offer contrarian ideas and not be shut down by the system, in a healthy way? So that's been a key part of her work. She was not just his chief engineer for a while. She ended up being so inspired by him as well that she wrote a book about him, I think she calls it something like the synergetic geometry of Buckminster Fuller.
Oh, really?
Yeah, I remember meeting and when I was talking to her and how just devotedly and fondly she was talking also about him, as a philosopher and a guide, beyond just being the scientist that he was. And I'm also thinking, what a beautiful example of someone sitting at the intersection between the deeply philosophical, spiritual, humanitarian on the one side and the very analytical and logical and engineering and kind of material kind of invested on the other side.
I think one of the things that's true about Buckminster Fuller and maybe about all of us is that early in his life, he lost a child. His child died and he had a longing to take his life. He was going to commit suicide. He called himself a worthless human being. The terms at least he used when I heard him speak was that he was a "throwaway." And once he was clear, at least at that moment, in his trauma, and he thought that he was a throwaway, that's when he decided, he said, "Well, I'm going to take this throwaway life and see if one ordinary, average human being can make a difference that can impact all humanity." What an amazing experiment. I think he was 27 when he made that choice. Then everything he did from then on, was to use the life that he realized he had been given, rather than he owned, how he would give it in a way that would impact all of humanity. And he coined the phrase, "a little individual can make a difference." And that became a meme in our culture, the phrase "making a difference."
He had a huge influence on me, but I think to millions and millions of people, many of whom don't even know they were influenced. So I know we all have that capacity. We all know people who were touched by a teacher in second grade or a coach or something. We all have the capacity to impact people and to make that kind of difference with our lives. I was so grateful to learn that about life as early as I did in my wonderful relationship with him. I'm sure that's what you do on this podcast.
Yeah, I'm so grateful that you shared that story. It's very resonant with me. I can't even imagine the sense of loss and grief someone goes through when they lose a four year old child of theirs. And then him becoming suicidal, and the dark night of the soul moment thing any or all of us can relate to that in some aspect of our life or the other. Today, we are in an era where people are more comfortable talking about trauma and honoring the human condition that really grapples with those struggles, some more than others in terms of the lives they've gone through. And yet sometimes I hunger when I hear some of those conversations happen in society as to the untapped potential for redemptive growth, purpose and all of that soul-elevating capacities that, even pain and loss and grief and trauma can unleash on us. And so there it is in your story about Buckminster Fuller. He reached that nadir in life to the point that he just wanted to take his life, but then, from there emerges this incredibly committed soul to make a difference. And it reminds me of a quote from Mother Teresa who I know you've been blessed to have spent some time with. She said, "May God break my heart so completely that the entire world falls in." Perhaps you know that.
Yeah. What a wonderful quote. Beautiful. And another one from her. "The unadulterated love of one person can nullify the hatred of millions." She didn't talk a lot, as you probably know. But when she said something, it was pretty darn good.
Beautiful. So he was, of course, a key influence in helping you shift into this notion of sufficiency and what kind of a new model of a world that might look like that takes us away from this competitive, each one for themselves mode of being. Tell us more about that time you and your husband, Bill, started to feel like we are not living the right life. And that led to some soul searching and then a pivot.
My husband Bill was a business school guy, and started his career with a company that was at that time the first company to get to a billion dollars. It was called Itel. There were all these young, cocky MBA guys that were full of themselves as the company got more and more successful. And as his wife, I thought, my job was to wear designer clothes and to learn about wine and art, and to make sure that we got in the right country clubs and that we drove the right car. When I actually look back on it, I'm embarrassed. But that became almost like my mission. I had to look a certain way. I had to be slender. I had to wear a certain kind of clothing. We were both raised, not in enormous wealth, but we were both raised in families that were comfortable but not ostentatious. You wouldn't call us coming from families of the ultra-rich at that time. But we were comfortable. We knew that game, but we got caught in it in a way that was just soul sucking. And I thought I was doing the right thing.
And then, fortunately, I took a course, like when you found Yogananda, you were ten. It took me a while. I was in my twenties when I took the EST training, which was not a spiritual training, but an ontological training that now is called the Landmark Education Corporation. It still exists or the lineage exists. It was very intense and harsh. It was in the 70s, there was a lot of yelling, and it was pretty intense, hit over by 2x4 to wake up from the trance we were in, of consumerism and more and more, we the culture, but also me, this person. I was never going to actually make it the way in whatever the "it" I was looking for. It really woke me up big time. And I'm so grateful for that. That was one incident.
And then Bill took this EST training and we both discovered that we were caught, that we were in a trance, that we were almost hypnotized by this race for more status and more wealth, more of whatever that is to be the cool kids. And we realized, we started the foundation with the money rather than use it for all that stuff, and started to get involved in making a difference in philanthropy. We weren't huge philanthropists, but then The Hunger Project was born, and that's with Buckminster Fuller and Werner Erhard. They were very seminal. Werner was really the founder, and he was the founder of EST. After there were enough people who'd been through the EST training, there was a hunger from those people, which at that time was about 50 to 75,000 people in the United States, to do something more with their own lives. And that's when he and Buckminster Fuller really looked deeply at what is the most fundamental breakdown in the human condition that, if resolved through ontology, through transformation, going to the depths of who we are, would transform the human condition. And at that time, in the 1970s, they identified the most fundamental breakdown of the human family was hunger. Millions at that time, fifteen to twenty million people were starving to death every single year in a world with awash food. That that was an integrity issue, obviously, distribution, food, all that stuff, but no one was working on the fact that it was an integrity issue that we would allow our brothers and sisters, and mostly children under five to die of starvation, in a world awash with food, that it was so shocking, but we were in some sort of a trance because we thought it was inevitable, and that there wasn't enough to go around and that some people were always going to die. And that mindset, the mindset of scarcity actually, and inevitability, was something that they said needed to be transformed.
When I heard about The Hunger Project, when I first heard Werner Erhard speak of his commitment to end world hunger, I had a Kundalini thing. I started to vibrate. I started to cry. I was in the room when he made that commitment. I knew somehow in a way that I couldn't explain that that's why I was born. Whatever that was, I was going to be a part of. That makes me cry right now. It was that calling that reaches past your mind, your wants, your desires and what you think your needs and it gets right into your core and you realize, "Yikes, this is who I am." That became not only the focus of my life, but I became completely and totally dedicated to ending world hunger and got my husband, my kids and everybody I knew involved.
That was the work of the Hunger Project and I'm so grateful for it because I went right into what most people would call the darkness, the refugee camps, war situations, Mozambique after the war, I was in Ethiopia during the 1984-1985 famine. I saw the most horrible dimensions of what human beings can do to each other. There, is where I found the beauty and unleashing of extraordinary resilience of the human spirit. In the same space, I saw the unquenchable, incredible power of the human spirit that cannot be denied and cannot ever be crushed. I was almost transformed but also cleansed of this mindset of scarcity, because I saw that that belief was killing and it was having us kill each other and killing our capacity to love. I feel so fortunate. And here we were, Bill and I, with a lot of money, and now we had a reason for it, a purpose for it.
So it really was such a big game changer. And then, to go on a little bit, then we lost it, which was also fortunate. Not all of it, but there was a whole stock market thing that we were caught in and like many people and the immense wealth that we had was heavily tempered, I'll say. I remember watching the television in Starkville, we were sitting in our television room, the value of our stock that we were holding, that was the big one, going down, down, down, down. We lost 3 million, 6 million, 12 million. We looked at each other and we felt we're just the same. We never really had that anyway. When we started to realize that this transformational work on ending world hunger had really shown us who we were, in a way, we had the opportunity to live a life of meaning and much more authenticity. So that's the story of my journey with money and that's in my book, The Soul of Money.
But really, it was eclipsing our soul. The money was blocking us from the longing of our own soul. But when you put soul and money together, you could do wonders for this world. It nourishes you and nourishes the soul of who you are.
I just love how you so organically blend these two ideas, soul and money. I want to come back and talk a little bit more about the soul. But thank you for sharing that story. I want to go back to one of the earlier junctures in the story you just shared around how there was that moment when The Hunger Project was kicked off and how it really spoke to you. You talked about how it was almost like a Kundalini moment. And for those of us amongst our guests and correct me if I'm wrong in the way I'm describing this, who don't have much prior exposure to the Kundalini. This is this notion in yoga, around how there's a life force, there's a prana, there's a chi, there's a certain energetic quality to who we are at the very core of our being. It flows through our spine and ultimately through our senses gets us to engage with the world. But if we get very materially locked into it, then it just kind of keeps us at a certain level of consciousness. If we can awaken to that force and source within us, make it rise to a higher consciousness level, then suddenly we start experiencing some forms of transcendence and universality, of connection, love and joy and maybe a greater sense of attunement and purpose, and everything becomes so much more integrated in life. Is that a fair way of describing that?
Yeah, absolutely. That was wonderful.
So I wanted to highlight that for a moment because you walked into that and you said you almost were in tears, even right now, just reflecting on it. I think many of us perhaps have moments like that where the universe is whispering to us, our soul is whispering to us, but we keep walking on and we don't really pause, pay attention and act upon it at times or register it at times. I think maybe Churchill said, "So many people might stumble into the truth, but most people just lift themselves up and keep walking."
I never heard that. That's a good one.
So you actually paid attention to what was making you stumble and what message it had for you, which was powerful and beautiful. It's lovely to also see how much it became like a shared quest for your husband and you. Sometimes we can't have the luxury of bringing along a loved one on that same journey at the same time, at least. But in this case, it does seem like you were able to hold hands and walk the path together.
Well, I must say that I got completely and totally involved and engaged and dedicated to the Hunger Project work. And he continued to be a business guy, and did very well. But then he had a much deeper and more meaningful reason to be doing that. So he was a board member. He ran the US board. He helped us with all the financial needs that we had, not just philanthropically, but also in kind of managing the financial resources, and I became the fund raiser. So he was the financial guy, a CFO-ish kind of guy, as a volunteer and I was the fundraiser and he continued to be an earner. But then in this last chapter of our life, working in the Amazon, he became the CEO of Pachamama Alliance and this is another chapter. I'm modest compared to what he could earn.
It's interesting. We've been married for 59 years, and I think it is why we've been married for so long or why our marriage has been so strong, is that it's never been about our marriage. It's been about being engaged in something way larger than ourselves and that's what I put in the book, Living a Committed Life. When you have a commitment larger than your own life starring you, your life becomes completely transformed by that, and you become that which you need to be to fulfill the commitment you have, that's larger than your own life. If your life is about your life starring you, that's where we get hypnotized by our wants and our desires, we lose our way. We may become financially super successful, and that's a wonderful thing to do. But if it's not in service of something larger than our own needs or our own desires or what we want to accumulate, then it can be toxic to some people, and that's one of the things that I've learned in my fundraising path, and also working with some of the wealthiest families who are wonderful people, who almost any dysfunction in the family gets exacerbated by the financial wealth rather than resolved by it, sometimes exaggerates it.
I just know that the struggle we all have with money in our culture is such a deep and challenging part of life. There's no easy answers really, because money has become like a religion in our culture. It's hypnotic. I have a lot of compassion for all of us who are struggling. What is an economic system that's fair and what is a circular economy? How can we get out of this extreme divisiveness, from those who have and those who don't? It's a time of real soul searching, I think. I read something the other day by Otto Scharmer from MIT that we're in a collective trauma where we know what's going on isn't right, we know we're off course, we know that it's really not working. And we've lost agency. We don't really know what to do about it. And I think that's healthy to say we don't know what to do instead of keep trying the old. And maybe we're in a death-rebirth moment here. I often say that COVID was morning sickness for a species that's actually pregnant with a new kind of human being. We thought we were sick. But actually we're pregnant with something that wants to come through, that's waiting to be born, but some things need to die first and it's painful. I'm sure you're looking at these kinds of things yourself.
Wonderful. I'm going to just quote you because these are such beautiful words for the benefit of our audience. You talked about that journey with your husband, Bill, and then at some point, you said, "We came to know ourselves not for what we had or owned, but for what we gave, not for what we accumulated, but for what we allocated, and ultimately money itself took on a new and soulful meaning, no longer a measure of worth, but an instrument of purpose. For each of us, money became more and more a way to express the longing and fulfillment of the soul." How beautiful.
I want to come to the soul very soon. There's one other piece I wanted to unpack with you just about the notion of money before we get to the soul. Lynne, you've put a lot of heart in this last comment that you've shared with me about the state of the world and how we need to come together, what the full significance of COVID might be, let's come back to that.
But before we get there, one other thing about the world of money. You talked about the work that you've done at times with high net worth people and philanthropy and you also talked about how philanthropy has to be done with the right spirit. It can't be something where you feel there are the haves and the have-nots, and there's this dynamic of being there to help people who are somewhat weaker than you or something. Can you talk a little bit about that? What has been your learning around the importance of bringing the right spirit in psychology to these philanthropic contexts?
Well, when I was fortunate enough to work for The Hunger Project, it took me all over this world. I spent time in Ethiopia, Ghana, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Burkina Faso, India, your country, and Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. What I discovered was that there are no poor people. This label, someone is poor is completely inaccurate, people that we used to call or most people or I used to call poor, there's nothing poor about them. They are resilient. They are courageous. They are innovative. Their relationships are deeply valuable to them. They have a spiritual connection that we take workshops and read books for, and they exhibit more courage to live through a day than we will need in our lifetime. What's poor is their circumstances, not them. And when we label people by their circumstances, it demeans those of us who would do that and dehumanizes them, and it also confuses them. What's poor is their circumstances, not them. In fact, those circumstances, as you illustrated in your story at the very beginning of that film, produce and actually forge a kind of spiritual and moral core that is so strong that they can withstand almost anything in their relationships. It becomes their currency, their wealth, their source of their well-being.
And so I learned from people that I used to call poor, that not only are they not poor, they're whole and complete people living in circumstances that are poor, yes, but that have in many ways forged this strength of their character. And then I also learned that the people that we call rich, that demeans them as well. They're whole and complete people living in the ebb and flow and often the tyranny of excess resources. But when we label people by their resources, we dehumanize everyone, including ourselves. And so the way the world has labeled, rich and poor and there's no have and have-nots.
I learned in Ethiopia from women who lost every one of their children to starvation, who I met with what was called a grief ritual. One woman had lost 11 children to starvation, and somehow she was still alive. I saw this incredible strength, and power of her, and there were other seven women in this circle, committed to take the rest of her life, given that she was still alive and do everything she could to not have another mother go through what she went through. How strong she was, how deep her belief in the sanctity of life from losing her children. Obviously we were in this horrendous grief moment, but when we came out of it, they had fully wailed and cleaned and screamed and cried for days and days and days about the loss of their children. That's when they started to rebuild their own lives. I just feel like when we name people by their circumstances, it confuses our sense of our own humanity, divides us in ways that have horrible consequences, but mostly the consequences of the heart. So I think that's what you were asking me, is that right? Is that what you wanted me to talk about?
I'm thinking of a moment recently in my life, close to your neck of the woods. About four years ago, I was contacted by this gentleman, Jason Bryant, and his friend, Ken Oliver. Both of them were looking for a partner to work with to bring a form of life and leadership skills to formerly incarcerated citizens. They started a nonprofit, and the California government had given them some money to do that. And then I started to hear their own story. Each of them has spent over 20 years in prison, and then Governor Newsom accelerated their parole. They got out at some point because of some incredible work that they were doing in prison.
Jason, in particular, was involved in a movement while he was in prison, after all the contrition, personal soul searching, education and work on just reform and growth that he'd gone through. He and another friend of his and others came together, and they formed a movement to take this very puny, ten to twelve cents an hour kind of salary that they get for work in the prison system, which is a travesty unto itself. And of course, the state might argue that. We have to support them. We have to afford to give them living quarters and food and all of that. From that salary, they ended up creating a movement with about 2,000 prisoners over two years, donating a little bit and cumulatively raising $30,000 and then asking them, "Do we want to do something for the community? Because the community does for us. They send these high schoolers to come and do literacy and reading and all that with us. Should we go a mile wide and an inch deep and buy backpacks for students in the best communities around us?" And they said, "No, you know what? Let's do the opposite. Let's go a mile deep and an inch wide. Let's find one deserving student in the community whose life could be transformed with this." And then, sure enough, they found that student who had been coming over to help them with leprosy. But then his own circumstances had changed because his father had a heart attack, couldn't earn any more for the family, and now he needed money to get through high school and college. So they gave him a $30,000 check.
They did it? Oh my gosh.
Isn't that special? And so fast forward four years, and now I'm invested with them in building a program, not actually for the formerly incarcerated, but for the incarcerated. Initially the thinking was, "Well, let's do it for those who might be getting paroled soon because it's a logical thing to prepare them for the world." And I was like, "Yeah, but what about those who may need to be in prison for a much longer period of time? How can we leave them out, and how can we make them feel that the only point of this kind of work is when you're out there in the world, not when you're in here, because it's still the same world and they're still as special to God? I mean, we have to find a way to kind of do this work everywhere and anywhere to anyone." And so, we resisted that and we said, "No, let's go for a broader sweep." And so we did. And then I was warned, "These people will think of you as very different from them because your life circumstances are so different, what you've gone through in life." And now it's like, "No, no, no. We're all the same brothers and sisters." I got to kind of have that mindset, got to help them get into that mindset.
So I walk in there and I have the conversations with them about how there's outer prison, but there's inner prison. I share the story about this friend who is stuck in a $950,000 a year lifestyle, even though his soul is hungering for something much more meaning-rich. But I said, "Brothers, isn't that prison? Isn't that prison? He's locked into a prison. Attachments, addictions, constrictive beliefs and all of that." And then I give them a metaphor of the monastic life. I said, "I always wanted to be monastic. These people leave the world. They leave their families. They get into a simple space where they have very predictable daily, routines and rituals. And it's the same people that you keep seeing day upon day. Isn't that a little bit like your life?"
And I said, "In theory, you have an opportunity here which people outside don't." As Mandela once observed to his wife, Winnie Mandela, when he was spending his 27 years in prison. He said, "When you're outside, you're chasing ambition, constantly busy with things. But here in prison, you have all the time in the world to work on your character." I said, "My students really struggle with discipline, practice and work every day. They're flying about here and there, so the learning group also just can't stay together. But you are here and nobody's flying anywhere. And you have all the time in the world." And so it became like this very liberating realization that ultimately we're all the same. Each of us has special environmental conditions. Some of them are really good in some ways and constrictive in other ways, and any or all of that, and it's about unlocking ourselves from the inner prison. That's the most important first thing in life. And then, of course, we want to create as free a world as we can.
So it's a journey that we've begun now. It is a few months into the making. It's an incredibly inspiring group of incarcerated citizens there in Solano Prison in Northern California. I'm honored and excited about the opportunity to work in collaboration with them to create a model, something that I hope that we can then proliferate into other prisons. So that story was coming to my mind as you were talking about the work that you have done in going to India, Bangladesh and Ethiopia and many of these other nations, on the one hand, serve and support materially, but then you discover the spiritual richness and wealth of the natives there.
Really incredible. I love your story. My gosh. The Solano prison. Do you know the program Alternative to Violence? I think it's in that prison. That's just amazing. I've also been very inspired by the Enneagram Prison Project in San Quentin and the Green Circle in Santa, which I participated in a little bit. It's incredible when you really get into the heart and soul of the prison system. The system is really brutal and terrible, but when you meet these human beings who've made maybe in thirty seconds a horrible mistake, and then they're in prison for 30 years. The kind of mistake that deserves some punishment, but it's what we do to people. It's just unbelievable. And then to find that when you get inside of a prison and really have a chance to talk to people and discover their humanity mirrored back to them. It's miraculous. It's so moving. I just love your story. Thank you for sharing that.
I completely agree with you. I saw so much more passion, commitment, enthusiasm, joy, a childlike curiosity and interest in wanting to grow themselves. They read my book, hummed every page and took notes. If I could get that zest from my executive MBA students who are so busy with all the pressures of Wall Street and everything else they're holding responsibility over, it would be such a joy for me.
I love the idea that you've mentioned that we have to see people for the soul of their being, and not as much for these labels we put on them and these quick little ways of describing them as the haves and the have-nots and whatever it is, because those are so limiting and constrictive. And in some ways, let's call them the 20th century, and we should honorably put to rest, some of the mindsets of the century. Much as there are incredible things that happened there, such as the 1976 moment between you and Buckminster Fuller that we should carry into its full potential in this century.
I used to say that the 20th century was when we really went deep into this thing called charity, which is a wonderful thing. But the 21st century is about solidarity. We need to be in partnership, not feel sorry for each other, that's so demeaning.
I love it. I love what you're saying because I think if I were to step back from what just happened here, you are alerting us to the unconscious way in which language locks us into certain ideas, and then our capacity to think bigger gets restricted because we are locked into that language. But if we can truly come to the language of the soul, then we might find that we need to invent a new word, or we need to challenge the meaning or connotation of this word or something like that, and you just got it for charity. Another thing I find from the 20th century is that we used to celebrate this notion of "religious tolerance." We used to talk about "tolerance." What a basic, most limiting idea that we should be tolerating each other, right? Should it not be about celebration? Should it not be about connection and harmony or something like that? And then another word, "stranger." We talk about "stranger." The word strange is part of stranger.
I call those sentences "prison sentences." Sometimes people grow up with a prison sentence in their head like, "You're no good or you'll never make it or you're worthless." The language is so powerful and it carries so much of our culture.
So, let's talk about the soul. You use that word so comfortably and freely. Coming from the business world, I have to tell you that in years past, as I was striving to bring some measure of the human spirit and the divine and the transcendent and all of that into my teaching. At times, somebody would caution me, "Hitendra, don't talk about the soul. That's a little bit too out there for the formally suited and booted version of business." More and more, I'm seeing that a space is opening up for us to create an invitation to people, to recognize what many of them have been intuitively feeling, even if they don't have the formal permission of structures through which to actually explore and develop those capacities. You are certainly an individual who has allowed herself to lean into those moments and experiences and ultimately find a form and a way to invite others into that journey, like the Soul of Money, very freely. And I really admire you for that. It gives me a lot more encouragement.
I think I recently shared with you my charter for the soul, as an expression of the same pull I'm feeling towards to create some sacred commons where we can all come together and meet in community, in education, in parenting and organizational life and beyond, to honor some of these magical, still to be fully understood, discovered and fathomed, inner journeys and connection with the richness of something that lies at the very core of a being. So thank you again for how you have been an inspiration to me and to so many in honoring that and providing a language in a way through which to model how we can go there and sharing stories of your own life about it. So let's talk a little bit about the soul.
Well, let's see what to say about that. I feel our culture right now is pretty soul-less. It's like we've lost our soul and we've dedicated it to the almighty dollar. The concentration of wealth and power is so intense now, and that seems to be the goal. How can people get in there where they can be part of the concentration of wealth and power, that's in fewer and fewer hands? That life or that pursuit is so soul-less. I think we're in such trouble right now, and I feel that I don't really know how to talk about it, but for me, the disconnection with the natural world, which is so serious that the climate crisis is upon us. Our Divine Mother, is speaking very loudly to us to return to her, to realize that she is the soul and the soil of where we came from and where we will return. The natural world and the entire community of life, we've forgotten that we're part of that. We think we're in charge of it. We've gotten caught in what we say at the Pachamama Alliance, this misunderstanding of human supremacy and this human supremacy and misunderstanding, indigenous people would say is human supremacy. And this misunderstanding that we're at the top, that we're the apex predator on this planet, and that we have somehow unholy right to take, destroy and distract anything and everything for ourselves.
One of the most beautiful things in this part of my life where I work with indigenous people, they don't really talk about soul. They don't have a word for it, but they never bought into human supremacy. They never went there. The giant otter is their brother. The kapok tree is their grandfather. They live in the spirit world. The material world is secondary for them. They're deeply engaged in what they call the spirit world. Their dreams, the messages they receive through the elders, the messages from the plants and the animals, the sun, the stars and the Pleiades. It's just amazing working with them.
They wouldn't use the word soul, exactly. The inquiry into the soul of life has been expanded dramatically in my work with indigenous people. Part of what's cut us off from our own soul is this disconnect from the natural world and the community of life. We say at Pachamama Alliance, my organization, we're looking at what will create and catalyze an evolutionary leap to transform from human supremacy to human responsibility or stewardship and sacred reciprocity. Sacred reciprocity with the Earth and each other in the community of life, that Nature is constantly reciprocal, give and take. Not just take, but give and take. Just like our body. You can't keep breathing in. You have to breathe out. You have to give after you take in equal measure, it's called Ayni, in the of Quechua people in the Andes.
I learned a lot of spiritual truths and principles from Mother Teresa and from working with people living in conditions of hunger and poverty, and also the spiritual work in India that you've been so deeply engaged in. In Africa, that's where I really learned about what I'll call soul. This is all kind of the same stuff, but the soulfulness of African women, the dancing, the lusciousness of their bodies, their relationship with the heartbeat of the rhythm of life. They're so embodied there. And then, in the Amazon, it's really this divine presence of the mother. So it's all kind of in the same neighborhood, let's say the same domain.
Thank you for sharing all of that. I love the example you gave of the Amazon and the relationship with the divine in the form of a mother. This is something that has always been very deeply resonant with me. From a very young age, the notion of a Divine Mother, as being this force that we can just fall in the lap of from time to time and just seek love, protection, kinship, understanding, forgiveness, any or all of those things, that's just always been so powerful for me as a component of spirituality in India. I consider India's greatest gift to me is the Divine Mother, and the relationship with it. So I love the idea that out there in the Amazon also, they've been celebrating that.
When you were speaking about supremacy and the human species that was so powerful. I love it because we are living in a time when people are really honoring the unspoken, the unrecognized, hunger and desire for justice and equal opportunity for so many communities that have in the past not had their say in modern life. And yet we limit that to just the circle of humanity, as if that's all that matters, right? You're challenging us to go beyond. I know that you're close to Paul Hawken and his work as well. He's somebody I have had on this podcast and greatly admire. I remember there's one thing he said in the podcast about how we should ask ourselves three questions when we do any of the work we do, which is, "Does the action we are doing create more light or reduce it? Does it heal the future or steal the future? Is the activity extractive or is it regenerative?" And I hear that so much from what you're saying.
I love Paul's work. I remember one thing that he said, just changing one word just changes everything. He said, "The climate crisis is not happening to us. It's happening for us. It's the Mother Earth. She's humbling her children, so we find the rightful role in the relationship with her. And it's not happening to us. We're not the victims of it. We created it. We created it through the inaccurate choices we've been making. But the crisis is now upon us. It's happening for us to find our really deep and profound relationship with her, with Mother and with the community of life. Indigenous people really do and we do this also in Pachamama Alliance, listen deeply to the trees, to the mushrooms, to the plants, to the insects, to the community of life that's just teeming around us all. Even cities. And that capacity to listen calls us from the noise of the modern intensity of our fast pacing, accelerating, always faster, and more-and-more culture so that we can be in the presence of the magnificence of life, the unconfrontable beauty that surrounds us in the natural world.
I know we all know when you see a baby born, you realize they're so close to source. It's so moving to see a newborn baby, a tiny child. It's so awe inspiring to stand on the beach and watch the sun set or sun rise. These are moments where we're in touch with the Divine Mother, the Earth. I had this amazing experience. I don't know why I'm telling you this, but just the next thing that's showing up for me, if you don't mind.
I was with one of the great shamans of the Amazon, whose name is Minoru Ushio. He's a zapper man. He's the leader of his people, and they're facing extinction. There's 535 of them left, and they're amazing people. And he's their leader. Very powerful man. Very connected to the spirit world. Lives primarily in the spirit world. He and a delegation of us went to the Arctic to meet the Sami people, which is another indigenous group. They live at what's called the top of the world, very near to the North Pole. And the two of them, the Sami leaders and Minari and his colleagues did what they call rituals or ceremonies to connect the middle of the world to the top of the world. And after working with indigenous people for so many years, I really do think of myself and the Earth as my mother. You say divine mother and that's a very Indian term. Indigenous people might not use the word divine, but the earth is the Mother earth, the Great Mother.
But when I was at the top of the world in this ritual, I realized I live on a planet. The word planet for me is different from the word Earth. Earth is like snow, and sunrise and waterfalls and trees. And when I was at the top of the world and we were on a glacier, there wasn't even any land underneath us because there isn't any land at the North Pole. I was on a planet. It's like the cosmos is suddenly available, the solar system, the Pleiades, the Milky Way, the stars. So, there's so many ways to be in communion with the greater consciousness that we all need to stay connected to, to navigate this very difficult time. That was just a moment. And these two indigenous leaders were deeply working with the spirits. That's what the ceremony was all about. One of them was really connected to the cosmos, the other to the Divine Mother. Just a beautiful coming together of different ways of looking at what you and I are talking about, which another word is soul.
Yeah, I like the levels of scale at which this idea can be explored. It's reminding me of a couple of realizations that have been enriching me in life recently. So a couple of years ago, I had on the podcast, Craig Foster from Cape Town, he made the movie, My Octopus Teacher.
Oh, my God, I love that. Did you interview him? How wonderful for you.
Yeah, I'll send you the interview. He's such a beautiful soul. So you obviously know about the film. And for those of our listeners who don't, he deep dives into this part of the ocean around the coast of Cape Town. And he encounters this octopus, and he is able to get her to be less timid and fearful of this new life that is showing up, as in him, and over the course of repetitive visitations there, in several weeks of time, he's able to get her to start to interact with him a little bit. It's just incredible, the romance between species. He talked about how when we even engage with nature, we tend to want to go into this and see that. And he said, "I encourage you to take the same section of that park that you visit or that piece of your garden and just repeatedly go there, repeatedly go there, and then you'll discover so much that your eyes have passed by and haven't fully visibly looked at and engaged with, and you build this relationship with the magic of that microcosm." And that's what happened with him, as opposed to just keep on diving in the ocean, he just kept going to the same spot. It is through that the breakthrough came of this relationship with that octopus.
I love that.
So that's the micro. And then at the macro, when I was researching my book, I was very intrigued about this idea about how we can demonstrably show that everything connects to everything else. Is there some science on that? I think that's a little bit in that Buckminster Fuller kind of ethos as well. There are some very early stage learnings that science, I think, over time is just going to get smarter on. But even these were kind of special. For example with the moon, you realize it's not just an ornament in the sky, for the romanticists amongst us. But actually, if it wasn't for the moon, the Earth's axis would be very wobbly. And then we would start having these radical extremes in temperature and the human species couldn't survive. So it's because of the moon that the Earth's axis stabilizes, and we have more of a humanly livable range of temperatures on this planet. And then Jupiter, for example, is like a shield, and it's constantly absorbing the shock of many meteorites and asteroids that get caught in its gravitational pull, which otherwise would have hurled towards Earth and at some point would have just destroyed Earth.
I love that. That's great.
And then, these astronomers have been doing all these simulations of these different planets and stuff, and what they find is that if you slightly tweak the weight of a planet, or you take a planet out or you change its orbit or something, basically after X thousand or million years, everything comes crashing down. The solar system loses its stability. It's as if our planet Earth is held in the space of love and protection by everything else that you see out there. It just seems to be randomly out there, but it's not. It's watching out for us.
Oh, I love hearing that. That's so beautiful. It comes down to what's really real is this extraordinary thing that the only word we have for it is love. That's so moving. I have to tell you a cool story. Can I tell another cool story, please?
Please.
I was lucky enough to be, for a while, the co-chair of the board of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, if you know of that organization.
Yes.
It was founded by an astronaut whose name is Edgar Mitchell. Doctor Edgar Mitchell, astrophysicist. He went to the moon and was the sixth man to walk on the moon. When he was coming back from the moon and saw the Earth in space, this extraordinary experience that astronauts and cosmonauts generally share about with great awe, he had huge transmissions, incredible experience of the vast consciousness of the universe. And that's how he founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences. He's often called the sixth man to walk on the moon, how often people refer to him. He's passed away now. He came and stayed at my house before a board meeting. He was staying with us. He stayed with us at the same time as we had an indigenous man from the rainforest who'd never left the rainforest in his life. He'd never seen the ocean, he'd never been out of the rainforest, living traditionally his entire life. His name was Chumpi, and he had been staying with us, with our work with Pachamama Alliance, just for two or three weeks. Doctor Mitchell came to the kitchen from his guest room where he was staying that night. Chumpi, I call him my son, but he's a wonderful Achuar man, this tribal group in Ecuador. And he came down to breakfast and they're sitting at the breakfast table together, this indigenous man living in the ancient traditions of his people. And an astrophysicist. And I introduced them to each other. When I introduced Doctor Mitchell, I introduced him the way most people do. This is Doctor Mitchell, astrophysicist. He was the sixth man to walk on the moon. And the indigenous man, Chumpi, didn't say anything, but his face said, "Walk on the moon?" who for them is a spiritual mother. "Walk on the moon? Why would you do that?" A completely different paradigm, and I'll never forget that moment.
And now Chumpi speaks English and he understands what I was trying to say. He has studied science in the way we perceive what the moon is and who the moon is for them, and who the moon is for us. And then what you just said about the moon, I mean, it's incredible, the different ways we make sense of the universe that we live in and how the world occurs to us determines really how we behave and you can shift the way the world occurs to you, and that shifts your behavior. Anyway, that was just such a moment I wanted to tell you about when those two met.
Wow. That's a great story. It brings my two worlds together in some ways, growing up in India and then moving to the United States. Sometimes when people ask me, "How would you contrast these two experiences?" I try to look for pithy ways to describe some of these very rich issues and topics otherwise. And I say, "Well, here's one way to think about it. The American temperament is when you see a big mountain, you feel like, 'Okay, I'm going to climb it.' When you see a roaring ocean, you feel like, 'Okay, I'm going to swim through this, right?' And if somebody else has claimed it, then 'I'm going to do it without oxygen. Then I'm going to do it free solo.' And in India, when you see a towering mountain or a roaring ocean, the immediate instinct is to get on your knees and just be in a state of awe and worship for attunement to that being a portal to the divine." It's an expression in nature of this awe inspiring beauty and grandeur of something that lies beyond nature that we can only sense through it. And so every mountain and every river in India is named after some aspect of God, is named after some aspect of the transcendent, because that's the idea that this is the dimension of the divine, that this reminds me or this is the dimension of the divine that reminds me of.
I had another experience of that kind of thing with Minari, the man I talked about when I first went to his area, his territory. It's called the Zapper territory. I was walking behind him in the jungle, so he was cutting a trail with his machete, and he was bare chested. He had a sarong, and he was barefoot, and I had high boots, and I was covered with mosquito repellent and my jungle clothes. It was early in my first encounter with the rainforest, and I was afraid of bugs, snakes, thorns and branches and everything was scary to me. He's cutting a trail and I'm right behind him, walking very slowly, and he's barefoot. And at a certain point he stopped and turned to me and he said, "Can you feel them?" And I didn't know what he meant. He was speaking in Spanish. My Spanish wasn't so good, so I wasn't sure if I understood what he meant. I said, "What?" He said, "Shh. Can you feel them?" And I thought, "Oh my God, are we going to be attacked by a Jaguar?" And then the third time, "Can you feel them?" And then he said, "The millions and millions of souls." And for him, we were walking through the millions and millions of souls. Every twig, every branch, every ant, every termite, every leaf, for him was a soul. And the whole forest, teeming with life, went from me to being something I feared to something that I now love. All of it. And in that moment, everything changed for me. Millions of souls. So that's another story to illustrate the way it shows up for us.
That is so beautiful. As we start getting to closure, Lynne, I want to make sure that we capture a couple of very beautiful personal stories from you. One that I would love for you to share with our friends is, one very significant relationship in your life, which is your mother and what she has meant for you, but in particular, as a way to have us get a glimpse of the indomitable beauty of her spirit, if you could share that chapter of her life where she is in those twilight moments where the sun in her life is about to set, and how she was so intentional about it, that would be amazing.
Well, she had cancer and in the last stages of her life, she knew she was dying, but she was conscious and actually very sharp. There's four children and we all took turns taking care of her, and it was my shift and she asked me, "I want you to call some of the people that are really important in my life right now and let them know that I want them to come to my funeral or my memorial service. The lady at the cleaners has been so good to me and always had my things ready on time and was so kind to me these last few years. Her name is Sylvia, and I want you to call her and tell her that I'm probably not going to live past the next few weeks, and I want to make sure she comes to my funeral. And then the delivery boy at the pharmacy, Jimmy, he's been so good to me and the manicurist." She went on and she listed all these people.
It was incredible because she was in her late 80s and a lot of her friends were gone. And these people who had served her in the last part of her life, she wanted them to be with the family. She said, "I like them to sit, either with the family, right behind the family, because they've been so kind to me." And I called them and I said, "Mrs. Tenny is about to pass away and she wants you." And they were just stunned and they came and that was one thing that my mother did before she died, to honor the people who were so important to her at the end of her life, who she had many very deep conversations with, along with others she loved.
And then she did this other thing. She had 13 grandchildren. She said, "I want to give them money now before I go, because I want to communicate with them about how much I love them." So we lit a candle every day, at a certain time when she was not sleeping. And I put a picture of Melanie, her granddaughter, one of the grandchildren and then she would tell me how much she loved Melanie and how special Melanie was. And then I would write that down, and then she would write a beautiful letter to Melanie. "Your sparkle, the light in your eyes, the way you always take care of your brother. I just want you to know how much I love you. And I've enclosed a check for, I think it was ten thousand dollars, just to tell you that this is a little piece of me that I want you to treasure."
And then we went to the next day. We talked about Katie and we lit a candle in the picture of Katie, and then it was Samantha, and then it was Christopher, until we'd done all thirteen grandchildren. And then she would write her check and write her letter and mailed it off. And this was a second thing that I think you might have wanted me to say, which was so special.
And then we looked at all the money that she had raised in her life. She was also a very civic-minded person. She had been a fantastic fundraiser and she harkened back to the very first fundraising campaign she had been part of. It was called something for the Cradle in Evanston, Illinois, which was an adoption center for babies that were given up. She remembered that they had so many children that they needed a new wing built at the cradle building. It was a small place. It was actually a house and they wanted to create another bigger part of the nursery. She raised $26,752. She remember the whole thing. The target was 25,000 and she raised 26,000. And she said to me that the fundraising campaign was how she learned to fund raise. And when she thought about it, she realized that the children, born, raised and adopted from that place, The Cradle, were now grandparents. And the life had been given by her $26,000 was still at work in the world. In other words, when you raise money for something you believe in or give money to something you believe in, that might get spent but the difference it makes goes on and on and on is and is nearly endless. And so she was reflecting on the fact that those babies were now grandparents and hopefully had a beautiful life. So those are the three things that I remember.
Thank you. I'm going to be taking different parts of the podcast for people who might otherwise be time challenged and just kind of create excerpts from it and this is one of those excerpts. Just the way your mother fully embraced that inevitability of the fact that life has a final chapter and leaned into it from a place of such care, devotion, a sense of celebration and integration of all these different aspects and communities of life.
I want to do that and share that because I think as a society, we have such a can-do spirit in America during periods of birth and growth, and then we talk about sustenance. But this notion that in nature everything is cyclical, and there is a moment where something has to move on and make way for the next adventure or generation to come or walk through a portal into the unknown or whatever the next adventure might be for her spirit. Somehow we don't want to talk about that. We don't want to deal with that. We don't like that. We think of that as a defeat. We want to fight against those kinds of things.
And so, what I love about this is if you're in touch with your soul, if I were to guess a little bit what might have been a little bit the inner work that she had been going through and doing, perhaps for decades. But when you're in touch with the soul, you're at peace when that moment comes that this is not a moment for me to fight. This is a moment for me to now peacefully embrace and plan for and walk through. It's so beautiful.
You quote these words from George Bernard Shaw which have been very resonant for me as well, that she was repeating all the time, "I want to be thoroughly used up when I die." What a beautiful idea.
She did. And I love that quote, too. "I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. Life is no brief candle for me. It's a splendid torch I have held up for the moment, and I want to pass it on to future generations." So wonderful.
I remember one very formative figure in my life as a mother figure, and this is a nun. Her maiden name was Fay Wright, and when she became a nun in Yogananda's Self-Realization Fellowship, she took on the name Daya Mata, like the mother of compassion. In 1955, she ended up becoming the president of the organization. Yogananda had passed away in 1952. He left his body then, and for three years, there was another very saintly soul as president, and then she took on as a very young person in 1955 and was the president of this organization for 55 years until 2010. I had the honor of a couple of moments where I was able to be in her presence. Those were some of my most treasured memories and moments in life. And then she leaves her body, she moves on, she passes away, and in that moment, at that time, my eight year old daughter in India is saying, "How could she leave the world? I hadn't seen her yet. I haven't even seen her. I had her book" Her book is called Only Love. "And I had to meet her. But how could she leave the world?" She said, "We must go. We must go to her memorial service." We were raising her in India at that time. My wife and she and my mother were there. And so she just pulled both of those other ladies from my life, my wife and mother, and said, "We have to go to America to be at her memorial service." And I flew from New York and we were there in Los Angeles for the memorial service. And then after that, her body was in state for a day or two, and so we were able to walk by it. When I saw her body, this is at that point a woman who was in her mid-90s when she passed away. You could literally see that this was somebody who had allowed herself to be thoroughly used up at the time that she died. And so I can sense that and feel that from the way your mother lived her life from what you were saying as well.
She did. And I love that quote, too. "I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. Life is no brief candle for me. It's a splendid torch I have held up for the moment, and I want to pass it on to future generations." So wonderful.
How beautiful. So the last story, you're welcome to share as many, but the one that I had in mind that I would love for you to talk about is going to your other parent, your father, and you spoke about this moment where you lose him unexpectedly and prematurely, early in your life and then some of the soul searching and struggle that you go through, and the Cabrini Center. In the Cabrini Center, there is a moment that you have with Virgin Mary. Perhaps for the benefit of the audience, we might need a little bit of backdrop to that story as to what that experience was of losing your father and then how you were perhaps adrift for a bit, but then that transcendent moment that you had there at the Cabrini Center?
There's four children in my family. My father was a musician. He was a big band leader in the big band era, and he was a wonderful, very gregarious, very charismatic man. And of the four children, I was the one who was most musically inclined. I took piano lessons, ballet, tap and singing and everything. And my father, he hung the moon. I just thought he was the best thing in the world. And when I was thirteen, when a young girl in her early teens, in her puberty, was kind of in love with her own father. And I was in love with my dad. He was just the best. He was a pianist.
When he died, he died very suddenly. He was only 50. I was 13. My mother was 46. There were four kids, and my grandmother lived with us. We all went to bed one night, a Sunday night, and we all woke up the next morning and he didn't. He died in his sleep of a heart attack at age 50, and in the morning my mother didn't even know he was gone. She was in the same bed. He just looked so tired. She let him sleep in. But by the time she went to wake him, he was cold. He died very peacefully, but it was a huge shock to his family because he was a larger-than-life kind of guy, and then he was just gone. No health problems, no warning. My mother was overwhelmed because he was a famous man. So there was a lot of press, and she had no time to really comfort us.
And so I spent a lot of time with a nun. We were Catholic, Sister Benjamin, who really helped me get through the grief. I thought that my father's death, as a child often does when you lose someone close to you, you don't know why. I thought maybe it was my fault because I wasn't practicing my piano very much. That's a silly thing to say, but in the heart of hearts, I didn't consciously think that. But somehow I felt that I was wrong or I was guilty. So I became very religious for the next few years and that's when I developed an inner life actually. So I'm grateful for that.
I started going to mass every day and not telling my friends. I was quite a popular kid in school. I went before the carpool and nobody knew. And then sometimes on the weekends, I would go to a retreat center to pray, this place called the Cabrini House. I would tell my friends that I was going to see my grandparents or something. I actually would lie because I wasn't going to a football game, and I wasn't doing all the fun things that they were doing. One of those weekends when I was at the Cabrini Center, really just thinking about my father and really still in the grieving mode, I was walking in the garden and there was a Madonna statue of the Blessed Mother, the Virgin Mary. She had her hands out like beckoning to the person who was perhaps in front of her. I spoke to her, "Why did he leave? Why did he leave us? What did I do? How can I make up for it?" And I remember this amazing thing happening. I can almost not say it. Her arms rose up and her head rose up to heaven.
I know it seems impossible, but it actually happened. And it's just interesting that you asked me to tell that story. I haven't told it in many years. I think I put it in my book, but I don't talk about it that much. And that's when I knew that I would be okay, and I was forgiven, that it wasn't my fault that my father died, and that really sealed something for me, about God or the universe or source or love, of being what's real. So, is that the story you were thinking about?
Thank you for opening yourself up to reviving memories of that moment and the blessings and transformation it wrought for you and prior to that, the loss that you went through, but also the confusion and the sense of personal responsibility over it. I just want to make sure you're aware that through this, you're bringing a lot of clarity, relief, a sense of possibility to many who are listening to us here because who knows what burdens of perhaps guilt or sense of loss that we are carrying with us and the fact that you have been blessed with that experience, but that you also shared it means that any or all of us can feel connected to the divine through that, and can feel, perhaps through you, the transmission of that same message for our own selves.
Thank you so much for saying that.
No, thank you. Lynne, this has been such a deeply moving experience, to really experience not just your stories, your thoughts, your life journey, but really to sense and feel your spirit. I'm so grateful for what modern technology allows us to do because I do feel that right now, there's a whole family here of listeners who are all feeling and sensing a great sense of kinship with you and through the inspiration from you, with perhaps all of life and the universe. So I'm deeply grateful.
I want to just invite you to share the final thought with us, anything that you feel would be a way to exhort our listeners towards their fullest potential in the service of what humanity is inviting from any or all of us. Today, which I know is very central to your latest book and the quest that you're on to help us find some collective spaces in which something meaningful will manifest to help us turn around, some of the seemingly intractable challenges of today. And so, I invite you to share your final thought.
Before you do that, from my side, I just wanted to close with a quote from your own book, from Frederick Buechner, because I really love that quote. In it I find, in some ways a synthesis of so much of what your life and your teaching is about. So let me just offer it up. And so Frederick says, "Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is in the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness. Touch, taste, smell, your way to the holy and hidden heart of it. Because in the last analysis, all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace." I think that's what your life is a living example of. So beautiful.
And yours. Thank you so much. Well, I'll just say that I believe that each one of us makes a difference, and that the choices we make impact the future of life for the next thousand years really, and that ennobles our lives. It's not a burden. It's a privilege to be alive at a time when that is so evident. One of the greatest acts of love is hospicing the death of old structures and systems that no longer serve us. Not to kill them or attack them, but to let them die their natural death because they're unsustainable. And so they are dying. When someone or something is in hospice, it dies with dignity and respect, and it actually dies faster and more naturally. While we midwife the birth of the new structures and systems that are consistent with the world that we want, that's an act of love and witness. So I think the job is to be hospice workers and midwife workers for what we want to release and let go of and what wants to complete, be midwives and love what wants to be born and love it into existence. Everyone can do that and everyone can live that way, the way Paul Hawken said, "Am I creating life or am I destroying life? Am I healing or am I stealing? Am I regenerating or am I degenerating?" And those questions are so critical right now and one can walk a path of service, and create a life that's dedicated to a purpose larger than yourself and it will shape you into the human being you want to be.
I want to thank you, Hitendra, for your generosity, your heart, your big beautiful soul, and the way that you walk in this world and the intellect that you were so privileged to be given and how you put it in service of your heart rather than the other way around. Thank you for this conversation and for being my friend and my ally. And I'm your friend and your ally, forever and ever. So thank you.
Thank you so much, Lynne. I'm reminded of a quote from Gandhi when Einstein asked him about what does the sign mean? Because he saw some footage of Gandhi holding his hands and the Indian sign of Namaste. And so Gandhi wrote back the explanation of that to him and his best way of thinking, and I want to end with that as a way of thanking you as well. And so Gandhi said, "I honor that place within you where the entire universe resides. That place within you where there is only peace and love and joy and wisdom. I honor the place within you where, when you are in that place and I am in that place, there is only one of us." Thank you so much, Lynne. This has been such a joy and honor.
Yeah. Many blessings.
.svg)
