Tami Simon: This Program Is Brought to You by SoundsTrue.com. at SoundTrue.com You Can Find Hundreds of Downloadable Audio Learning programs, Plus books, music, Videos and Online Courses and events. at SoundsTrue.com, We Think of Ourselves

MW:Well, I can speak personally because they arise every single day. I have new levels of rage about the destruction that's going on for the people and places and causes I care about in this country. And it's to recognize that I do not choose to stay or act—react—from those feelings. So when I go into fear, I understand that I am really making a choice to be afraid. I would rather just see the situation clearly so I would know what would be right action at this moment. And then I've developed, from working with my mind for many years—it's part of the training but we don't ... There's a great statement that if you don't know fear, you can't be fearless. So we're not talking about accepting everything or just sitting there with a beneficent smile on our face at what's going on. It's actually working, expecting these deep dark emotions including grief, and the sense that despair for all that's being lost, and fear, outright fear.

It's being able to work with them, and not from a purely reactive basis. Much more becomes possible when we are afraid, if we can actually honor that emotion—"I am scared shitless at this moment."—and just sit with it for a moment. Then from a calmer, more centered place really decide, "So what would be right action here?" And that's when it becomes fearless, because you've gone through the fear. You never deny these things. And I have to say, I'm just watching in my own life how intense my feelings of anger are daily. And it's not always satisfying to not react, and sometimes I do in terms of cursing, just blowing off, doing a rant. I think the core—I'm glad you brought this up Tami—because the core of how we train, how any of us need to train, is we need to honor and acknowledge these very strong emotions we're now in on a daily basis, which I would say is anger that becomes rage, grief that becomes an overwhelming sense of loss, powerlessness.

And for people who have been active in the world and been influential in the world, what do we do with those feelings? And I think that's the major question for your listeners that you actually started this with. We're now encountering such strong emotions that are justified. In fact, it would be a real shame if we didn't notice that we're in these very strong, dark emotions frequently. But then the real need is, what do I do with them? What do I do with them? That's why so many people are getting ill, they don't know what to do with their grief or anger. So finding right work from that is essential. Because otherwise we're just eaten alive by these very strong emotions.

TS: You're saying finding "right work," meaning not coming from a reactive place, but choosing to then respond with some meaningful contribution of some kind.

MW: That's correct.

TS: OK. I wanted to also talk to you about this idea of seeing things as they are. I use the phrase, "direct perception." And I notice, even as you're talking and I am feeling challenged to see the state of the world as it really is, I feel like I don't know where to get the right information to even come to the right assessments and conclusions. What news do I trust? I mean, how do I actually engage in clear perception about the world's situation?

MW: Yes, this is a double-edged sword, because the more you tune to what's going on in the world, the more it's devastating. Many of my friends, and myself, we talk about how we give ourselves rest weeks, where we just don't watch any news or don't read any news even, just to sort of come back to some form of feeling grounded again. But just two days ago I picked up a quote from one of my great mentors as a young woman, Hannah Arendt, who said that when everything is lies, it's not that people believe the lie, they start to not believe anything at all. And I think that is the danger of this time, when we throw up our hands and say, "I can't believe anything."

I don't think that's true. I think it requires a commitment to seek out good reporting—there's a lot of good reporting going on right now—and to be disciplined about reading about things in detail. It's interesting because we're all, even the press now just bullet points the key points in an article. Every week The Guardian from the UK, puts out something they call the "Long Read." I would call that old fashioned journalism, but it's where you have to sit and read several pages that gives you a full picture, a complex picture, of what's going on. So I think this is ... and I'm getting clearer about this. I've just been out in the world all fall, meeting a lot of people in Australia and Europe, where I've been a lot in my life. But I think so many people are just saying, "Well, I can't trust anything." I think that's irresponsible because we are thoughtful, caring people, so we need to find the sources of information that are reliable. And then you can counter poise them, one against the other.

It takes responsibility. It takes a commitment. "I'm going to seek out information about this." But there's good reporting going on. I think we're being brainwashed to say, "Well, you can't trust the media," as one big whitewash. There's a lot of good reporting going on, but it's a commitment to not be overwhelmed, and then to notice that even when I take an accurate full picture of something, I will be overwhelmed and therefore I need to maybe give myself a few days off or just go away and do something else to relax the mind. Because it is quite overwhelming, what's going on. But to withdraw on that basis, I think, is completely irresponsible.

TS: Makes sense to me. OK, now the third point you made: knowing what works and using our talents. And this is a quote that I pulled from your book, Who Do We Choose To Be? It's a question that you ask leaders, "Are you willing to use whatever power and influence you have to create islands of sanity, that evoke and rely on your best human qualities to create, relate and persevere?" And I love this idea of creating in our own lives "islands of sanity" and I wonder if you can talk more about that, what you mean by that?

MW: Yes, I did not mean it as personal. I meant it as organizational or community-based, that we use our own leadership or our own commitment to a cause or an issue to gather people together and then to intentionally— I'm not talking about these as places of transformation, I'm talking about them as places of transcendence—where we're willing to transcend the current dynamics that are so prevalent in organizations and policy making, of greed, self-interest, just making a decision to make a decision. And we create places where the human spirit can flourish, where people can remember the great pleasure of working well together, taking time to think. I mean these are revolutionary changes now that I always feel somewhat foolish having to name. That creating a place, a workplace or a community effort where people are thinking together is a revolutionary act these days, rather than just reacting, rather than just doing an immediate action.

So an island of sanity … I define sane leadership as a leader's unshakable faith that people can be creative, generous and kind. And the operative phrase there is "can be," because we can also be self-interested, narcissistic, brutal, even savage with one another. So this takes work, and it's a great, courageous act on the part of leaders to say, "I'm not going to go along with the general mainstream. I am going to create this as an island. I'm going to create a sense of specialness, a sense of, "I know what we're doing and we're going to keep out the negative pressures"—some of which are bureaucratic, some of which are more personal attacks—but we're going to create a boundary, not to keep ourselves protected, but to keep ourselves so we can do good work.

And I'm getting a lot of positive response from that. And it is my take on the quote from Teddy Roosevelt, "Do what you can with what you have, where you are." Let's just, whatever your sphere of influence, let's think of that as a sanctuary, as an island of sanity where we're going to work well together. And it is an act of transcendence these days. I'm quite sure of that.

TS: Can you help me understand your use of the word "transcendence"? That you said it's transcendence, not transformation. I didn't understand that.

MW: Transformation ... Yes, it's meaningful to me in that when you transcend something you rise above it. Whereas transformation, which was the core of so many of us in our change work, is we were going to change the system and we were going to not only personally transform but we were going to transform the workplace, or how we were together in community. So that was taking the present shape and form of things—the system—and working to change it. And when I talk about the island mentality, it's really about, "That is what it is. We're not going to change it. We will rise above it and create something new that's based on different values and different practices."

TS: OK, there's another quote from, Who Do We Choose To Be? "You can identify Warriors for the Human Spirit by their compassionate presence and by their cheerfulness." And I noticed I was with you when you said, "By their compassionate presence," I thought, well that's intuitively obvious, but "by their cheerfulness"? I thought, "Huh, really?" Help me understand that.

MW: That's one of those ... I love finding words that stop us—"What do you mean?" Well, we're not Little Miss Sunshine figures of optimism and positivity, the cheerfulness another way of thinking about it, is confidence, uprightness. But I do experience it as cheerfulness in sort of the older sense of the word. When I'm with a group of people and we're really working together, I feel cheerful. And I make note of it to people like, "Isn't it good that we're together?" This is the joy of being together in work, no matter how hard the work is. It's cause for really feeling grateful and cheerful. We're not cheerful about outcomes, expectations. It's just the joy of being in work together where we're not at each other, where we're really in a deeper sense of connectedness. That's what cheerfulness means.

TS:And there's another quote from this same section that I thought was curious. It's a chapter you call "The Joy of Interbeing." You write, "The experience of joy often feels the same as sadness." And I think that's very interesting, especially in the light of this conversation we're having, where I notice I feel a certain heaviness in my heart having this conversation with you, but I also feel a joy of getting to connect with you. I don't know if I would say they feel the same, I kind of feel both of them so—

MW: Heaviness is not the same, is not what I'm describing as sadness. For me joy and sadness are one, in that they're full-body experiences, when you're really in a period where your whole being just seems engaged with this feeling. I find it, and others describe it the same way, it's difficult to put a name to it. So we have to get beyond "what is sadness," but that's different than heaviness. But whatever joy you may be feeling right now is the kind of joy that is usually experienced when people have gone through … it could be natural disaster recovery efforts, where they're saving people and animals and delivering medical supplies and people are dying around them. But they always recount those experiences as joyful. I've worked in that area for many years and I've finally understood, "Oh, you're speaking about an experience of human communion of really transcending the self, of just being there for each other." And that is a joyful experience.

It also has this quality of sadness because the experience that we were in had great grief and loss in it. And I think all of these are ... We have these names—joy and sadness or happiness or many different descriptors—they're all too limiting. And so when I say "joy and sadness are one," which is a scriptural quote, it's really about feeling throughout your being-ness, that this is just right, this is a big yes, this experience. And I can feel that when I'm in places of deep grief. I can feel it because I'm together with other people. It's a completely non-Western focused, non-material basis of just what's available when ... I quote the Bible all the time, "Whenever two or more are gathered there will I be also." So it's truly an experience of the sacred, and I don't know how to describe that even with the words joy or sadness, but it's the deepest, profound sensation.

TS: Now Meg, I'm imagining people listening who are feeling resonant with this idea of being a Warrior for the Human Spirit, but they may not identify necessarily in their life as being a leader. I know you've done a lot of work with leadership. Do you think if someone's a Warrior for the Human Spirit by necessity, they're a leader?

MW: They are. I used a definition of a leader as anyone willing to help. I used that for many years. So it's still a woman who goes to bat for her child in the school system. It's the person who sees something going on in the community and just won't let it pass by. It's someone whose heart opens to a cause just by looking at a photo in a newspaper. So if a leader is anyone willing to help, we need to pay attention to what are the causes or situations that call us forward, that call us to want to help and to serve. And the world is filled with leaders, because there are so many people with their hearts open who really desire to make a difference. And what I'm doing in my own work right now is relying on that same dynamic of being called to serve, and then giving it a name: Warrior for the Human Spirit.

TS: Now finally, Meg, I read in the news section on your website that in January you will be going on a 60-day silent solo retreat. And I thought that was so interesting that you are willing and that you see it as part of your work to take time like this, to go on a two month retreat and be "out of the action" in a certain sense, the action of the world, the outer world, for that period of time. And I wonder if you can just talk about that decision at this point in your life to spend that much time in retreat?

MW:Well, this is my eighth year of doing, minimally, 60 days of retreat and it is of such benefit to me that I couldn't not do it at this point. It allows me the ability to just watch my mind come back alive—no distractions, nothing to do except to be with my mind, whether in meditation or in study, or just be on my own, so that I really see more clearly and I really develop a sense of that equanimity that lasts until about November. And then I realize I'm getting much more reactive again. This has been part of my practice. As I said, this is the eighth long retreat I'm doing. I've had incredible guidance from my teacher, Pema Chödrön. It's just, for me, it gives me the basis to do my work, to take in the suffering of the world, and to not be undone by my own very strong reactions and dark emotion. So, it's my way of truly nourishing and re-centering and preparing and tuning in to what's next.

TS: Meg Wheatley, I want to thank you so much for this conversation. You really inspire me. Thank you so much.

MW: Well I would just say that for you and all the listeners, the conflicting emotions, the feelings of "I'm not going to let things in because it's too despairing"— it's all part of the process. And really, the gift of coming to terms with facing "what is," is the gift of finding one's right work, and therefore that's an unshakable motivation for going forward.

TS: I've been speaking with Margaret Wheatley. She's the bestselling author of Leadership and the New Science and a new book, Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity. Meg, thank you so much for being on Insights at the Edge.Thank you.

MW: I'm very grateful for this time Tami, thank you.

TS: SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey.