But part of the purpose of my book is to tell people, if you make a commitment larger than your own life, that commitment will come back and shape you into who you need to be to fulfill it. It’s really powerful. We often think that Gandhi was born a genius and then he found a way to express it, yeah maybe. But maybe he was born and then he made a big commitment and it came back and shaped him into who he needed to be to fulfill that commitment. I say that’s really the way it works. You make a commitment to run a marathon and it comes back and makes you someone who has the courage and the resolve to get through the days you don’t want to run. And then you have that new strength, and then you have that new resolve. So I’m suggesting that I made a big commitment, ending world hunger, and it made me into a kind of person who could be in those circumstances and tolerate that.
But if your commitment is to be the best friend you can possibly be and make a difference in people’s lives who move into your field, then you’ll find a way to be with the people you care about in their darkest moments and be there for them. So it really depends on what your commitment is. I think all of us want to be of service, want to be of use, want to make a difference with our life. I think we want that almost more than anything, that’s my ground of being. I can’t prove that that’s true, but that’s been my experience. So I invite people to know that when your heart is breaking and people come into your field and hold you, that’s something that you’ve been doing all your life too, and that you’ll do more and more and more of it. If you have a commitment larger than your own life, you’ll have those opportunities. And when you step up to them and step into them, it expands your capacity for everything, not just to be with suffering but to be with this world and who you are.
TS: Now Lynne, you have had several commitments that you’ve made in your life to purposes that are bigger than anything personal. After your commitment, for two decades, to end world hunger, a new commitment emerged in your life that I learned surprised you. You weren’t expecting it. And the story of how that happened is, dare I say, mind blowing. I wonder if you can share it with our listeners.
LT: I would love to, thank you. Well, I was very, very deeply engaged and committed to the Hunger Project and had a role as the chief fundraiser for the entire world. So I managed fundraising operations in 53 countries and I also was very engaged in Sub-Saharan Africa. All the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Senegal, Zambia, Zimbabwe, places like that, Namibia, and also the subcontinent of Asia: India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka. I had responsibility for hundreds of thousands of volunteers. I mean they didn’t directly report to me, but I was in charge of our volunteer network, which was hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people, and then raising hundreds of millions of dollars. So I was very, very, very busy, I had my hands full and I had three kids and my plate was overflowing. So I thought I’d do that for the rest of my life, there wasn’t a free second. And then a large donor and friend of mine—and his name is Bob—had a project in Guatemala. We at the Hunger Project weren’t working in Guatemala or South America at all. We were working in Asia and Africa at the time.
He said, “I have a pet project, an organization I started in Guatemala and we love the way the Hunger Project fundraising is designed and it’s so heartful and not manipulative. I want you to train my development director. I want you to come to Guatemala and, with some of our donors, train my development director. You could take a two-week break, a little bit of a leave. I’ll make sure all your targets are met, my financial targets.” Which was a little bit of a bribe, but I accepted it willingly. OK, yay. So he made a very large contribution. So I went to Guatemala. I went with John Perkins, and I don’t know if you’ve interviewed John. John’s an extraordinary guy who was in the Peace Corps in the 60s and got very involved with Indigenous people in Ecuador, the Ecuadorian Amazon with the Shuar people, and he became a trained shaman himself.
So we are in Guatemala, John and I coleading a group of donors for our mutual friend Bob, and we realized there’s a shaman involved in these Mayan projects. But the shaman is not part of any of our meetings and we don’t know who he is, and people kind of won’t talk about the shaman isn’t part of this. So John, whose instincts were, let’s see if we can have a meeting with this guy. Eventually we—through a lot of very magical things that I’ll skip—we ended up with 12 of us on a mesa in the mountains of Guatemala with this remarkable Mayan shaman named Roberto Pose. I’ll never forget this, man. And John Perkins, my dear friend, knew a lot about shamanism and he spoke Spanish fluently and a little bit of Mayan, enough to kind of translate for the shaman Roberto Pose, who spoke only Mayan. So the shaman asked us to meet him at midnight—that’s when we were starting the ceremony, at midnight—on this mesa of this mountaintop in near Totonicapán, Chichicastenango area of Guatemala, for people who’ve been there.
So we’re in a very rural [area], no lights anywhere around us, and we arrive at this place on the map that he drew for us. There’s a big fire and a very, very brilliant starlit sky. I mean a million stars, it was so clear and gorgeous, it was just breathtaking. You could practically read from the stars, and there was no moon. There’s this fire, and the shaman asks us to lie down around the fire with our feet towards the fire. So we made a kind of wagon wheel around this fire, and he told us to lie down. This is all through John’s kind of rough translation. And so we do, and John and the shaman begin to chant and drum. John had the drum and the shaman starts chanting and this drum and this whistling and chanting, and this guy had the most mesmerizing voice, I mean just incredible, and his whistling. It was transporting. He told us to journey, and I had no idea what he meant by that.
But I kind of thought that meant go to sleep and have a dream because it was midnight, why not? But it didn’t happen like that. His voice and the drum and the whistling and the chanting and the night air and the crackling fire and the incredible experience of the stars overhead was just hypnotic, and I started to have a quiver in my right arm. It started to tremble, and I had this experience that I absolutely had to extend my right arm and it started shaking and it became so much larger and felt like this giant wing. Then my left arm started to quiver and I couldn’t have held it close to my body for one more second, and I had to extend that. And then this sort of strange hard thing started growing on my face, which I realized was a beak. And then I had to fly. I could not lay there for one more second.
I had to lift my body up in slow motion with these huge amazing wings that had grown on my body. I started to lift myself up to the starry sky that was so glorious, I flew up toward the stars. At a certain point I looked down and there I was, down below still with all the other people around the fire and the shaman’s voice, his whistling and the drumming was still very, very present right in my ear. I wasn’t somehow far away from that, but I was way up in the sky and I was in a state of enormous bliss. And then, at a certain point, I looked down. Because it started to dawn and I looked down and I was flying in slow motion, this beautiful experience of flight over a vast unending forest of green that went forever and ever and ever and ever. It was magnificent and beautiful and breathtaking. As I’m flying over this vast forest, I look down and I have this amazing, acute vision.
I can see all the way down to the forest floor if I focus. I can see little critters, but if I lift up my head and look ahead I can see very, very far. So I’m having this experience of absolute nirvana, some amazing peace and bliss. Then these disembodied faces of men with orange geometric face paint on their faces started floating with yellow, red, and black feather crowns on their heads. These disembodied faces of men started floating up from the forest floor through the canopy up to the bird, to me, calling in a strange tongue, like a plaintive kind of call, beautiful and also hypnotic. Then they disappeared down into the forest and I just kept flying and then, maybe a minute later… There was no time. So just then it would happen again. They would come up, float up and call to the bird, the disembodied faces of men with their headdresses, and then they would fall down into the forest again and again. So it was in a language I didn’t understand, but it was beautiful and it was magical and mystical, but it was real.
This really was what was so—and then there was this loud bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, drumbeat, really loud. It startled me. I remember sitting up and opening my eyes and realized that I didn’t have wings, I didn’t have a beak, I was just me and this was this shaman, what he had produced or what he had made possible. And I looked across the circle and the fire was all gone. It was in embers. So it was very, very hard to see him, his face, he had face paint on too. And there was no medicine in any of this, just his voice and the drum and John. So then he asked for what happened, and we went around the circle and every single person shared that they become an animal, including me. And then, at the end of the ritual, he completed it and everybody left on the little minibus. But he asked John and I to stay.
John had had very much the same vision. Even though he was part of the ceremony, he also had a vision very similar. And so the shaman said, “You need to go to these people. This was not a vision, this was a communication. You’re being called and you need to go to these people.”
And I didn’t know what he was talking about and John knew immediately. He said, “Lynne, I know who they are, I know where they are. I recognize the face paint, I recognize the crowns. It’s the Achuar in Ecuador. I was just with the Shuar. The Achuar came into our camp, they’re seeking first contact. They’ve been dreaming, they’re trying to dream people to them. That’s how they communicate. They want to bring some people from the modern world to them for first contact, they want to initiate contact. This is that.”
I said, “No way, John. I mean, it’s not that I don’t believe you. I can’t go to the Amazon, I don’t know anything about the Amazon. I don’t speak Spanish. I’m ending world hunger, I have a meeting in Ghana next week. You go, I bless you. Go, thank God. But I can’t do that, that’s not my work.”
He said, “They won’t leave you alone till you come.” Like a warning, and I kind of got mad at him. I thought this is just too much for me, so I left. It was amazing and really inspiring. But I finished the trip and I went to Ghana for a board meeting for the Ghanaian Hunger Project. And I’m in the Novotel in Accra, Ghana, on the ground floor in the small meeting room with five men and three women, five men and three women in the conference room. And the Ghanaian people have very blue-black skin. It’s so dark, it’s almost blue-black, beautiful, beautiful people. And they were having their Ghanaian Hunger Project board meeting and I was sitting in from the global office, so I wasn’t leading the meeting. So this meeting’s happening, it’s very powerful dialogue, and at a certain point the men, only the men, started having orange geometric face paint appear on their blue-black faces, and no one says anything about it. So I think I must be hallucinating.
So I excuse myself and go to the ladies’ room, like us ladies do whenever possible. When you don’t know what to do, you go to the ladies’ room. I splashed water on my face. Then I went back and sat down again and everybody was normal and they’re still talking. Then five minutes, 10 minutes later, it happened again. Orange geometric face paint just appeared on the faces of the men. I burst into tears and everybody, including the men, you know, “What’s wrong?” And I realized nobody else saw this but me. So I said, “Well, I’m feeling very, very ill. I’m so sorry I can’t stay, please just keep going on with your meeting. I’m going to go up to my room, pack my bag and go straight to the airport. I’ve been in too many time zones, too much travel, I can’t stay. I was going to stay for five days, but I’m too sick I’m going to go home.” And they all were very worried, but I made them stay there and I went up packed my bag, went to the Accra airport, got the first plane to Europe.
Which was to Frankfurt, New York, New York, San Francisco, and finally got home and the whole way, whether my eyes were open or shut, the faces just kept coming. So when I got home, I was just frantic and a mess and a wreck, actually. I told Bill I was having these weird dreams and I didn’t tell him like I’m telling you, because I thought there was something wrong with me. I was embarrassed. Then I tried to reach John Perkins and he was back in the Amazon, so I couldn’t reach him. So I sent him a million faxes, that’s what we could do, and voicemails. That’s all we could do, this is 1994. Eventually he came back and he called me right away and he said, “They’re waiting for us, Lynne. We have to go. We need to take 10 other people, 12 of us altogether. It’s an incredible privilege to be first contact. It almost never happens. We have to go.” So I took another leave, I invited Bill, my husband, he didn’t want to go. He had sailing regattas and business deals and everything.
I made him come and he came and we went down to Quito, down the valley volcanoes over the eastern side of the Andes. The 12 of us took small planes, one, three at a time, into the Achuar territory, which is roadless and pristine. Eventually we all were there, and they came out of the forest with their orange geometric face paint, their yellow, red, and feather crowns and spears, loaded us and our gear into canoes, and took us to a clearing where we camped. And we began our relationship with the Achuar people of Ecuador, which became the beginning of the Pachamama Alliance. Pachamama meaning Mother Earth, and Alliance between the Indigenous people of the Amazon. Now 30 indigenous groups and conscious, committed people in the modern world, like all the listeners of Sound True, for the sustainability of life. And just one more brief thing. I was still in charge of all this stuff at the Hunger Project and then, now we had this thing happening in the Amazon, and it really became a partnership like nothing I’d ever known before in my life.
So I tried to do Pachamama Alliance and the Hunger Project and then thank God… I don’t recommend this, but I got malaria from Ethiopia actually and India. I got two strains at the same time and it just felled me. It took me down for nine months. So I couldn’t do anything for anyone, and that was my quiet time to realize that God, the universe, the natural world, the mother, the greater, the divine, wanted me to… I had a second chapter in my life, I was 50 years old, something new was calling me. So the Hunger Project, in nine months of my illness, was able to replace me and Bill, and I started the Pachamama Alliance. That’s long, but that’s it.
TS: It’s such a dramatic story, Lynne, of this being called and then answering the call and then having the breakdown you had with the malaria illness that allowed for the breakthrough of you to commit to the work of the Pachamama Alliance. I’m wondering for someone right now who’s listening who says, I’ve never felt a call with that kind of drama and, kind of, it’s indisputable. I’ve never felt like the Earth or a group was interfering with my visions, I’ve never had that kind of thing. How would you suggest they hear the call in their life? Because it seems like you believe everyone does have a call.
LT: Yes. Well in retrospect, it all sounds so almost like a movie or something, but it was so confusing and it wasn’t so obvious to me then, and it sounds so wonderful. So it is the stuff of a book my life. At the same time, I want to say that it’s my view, as you said, that everybody who’s born today has a role to play. I really believe that. I can’t prove it, but it’s such an epic time in human history. I mean it’s epic, everything’s epic. All the breakdowns are epic, the challenges are epic, the darkness is epic. The possibility is also epic though. So I feel that it’s one of the reasons I wrote this book, is that if you really think about it there’s a through line in your life. Not just you, Tami Simon, which I know you’re probably very aware of. Everyone is, because we love you and Sounds True so much and you make so much available. I want to say a lot about that.
But there’s a through line, we look back at when we were little, and if you were the person who, on the kickball team, chose the best player first, you’re one kind of person. If you picked the person who was the worst player first, then maybe that’s a sign that you’re all about justice and social justice and making sure everybody has a chance. Maybe that’s your commitment and that’s a calling and you’ve always kind of been that like that, and then you kind of formalize it by making a commitment to live the rest of your life with more emphasis on that. Or maybe you’ve always been someone, since you were little, who was drawn to trees, to sit under them, to protect them, to know about them. Then maybe you got involved in forestry and then you realize that you want to be involved in protecting the forest. People if they look at their life, who are your heroes and heroines all the way through your life? Those things give you clues to what’s yours to do, and I say that we all have a role to play.
When I say that it’s not a big role or a small role, it’s just your role and if you play it, your life will have a kind of meaning and freedom and fulfillment that you’ve dreamed of. It takes just being conscious and paying attention to things. One way, when I’m working with people directly on this, I sometimes ask them what breaks your heart? That’s a clue. What breaks your heart? Not just touches your heart, breaks your heart. And then what calls to you, that you’re drawn to, that you feel it has to do with this part of our anatomy. It has to do with being more than doing. But usually there’s a through line and lots of times it’s many things. Maybe it’s just being a unconditionally loving kindergarten teacher that every child that comes into your kindergarten, you have a commitment to see and really mirror back to them their own magnificence in a way that they never forget that for the rest of their life. It doesn’t need to be ending world hunger.
I tell the story about a bus driver that really impacted my husband when he was in business school. He always wanted to get on this guy’s bus because this guy was committed to having everybody on his bus have a good day. If you took the 39 from this place or wherever you were to the end of the line or anywhere along the way, you got Joe the bus driver and it was a good day for you because you got on his bus. It’s available to all of us. And there’s clues in your life and only you can see them if you awaken yourself to see, yes there’s something that I’m here for and I’m going to find out what it is and I’m going to do it with all my heart.
TS: Lynne, as we come to a conclusion I’m just going to make a circle back to where we began about your superpower of being a possibilitarian. You write, “The greatest threat to creating the future we want is fear, discouragement, and cynicism. It’s easy to be cynical, it’s easy and cheap because it asks nothing of us. Cynicism is like a disease, an infection, and it’s cowardly. What takes courage is to hold a vision and live into it.” I’m coming back to this note because I think sometimes people think cynicism is a form of intelligence, something like that. Look, I read the news, I’m aware, I’m intelligent, of course I’m cynical. And the statement of yours, “It’s easy and cheap because it asks nothing of us.” I found that quite searing, and I wonder if you can make a comment about that here at the end.
LT: Well, I don’t want to insult people who think they might be cynical. I just want to invite you to consider giving more of yourself, because it gives you permission to withhold. And I think we’re all needed now. We’re needed to step up, and you called me a possibilitarian. I like that. The possiblelist, I got that from Frankie Lappé, Frances Moore Lappé, she calls herself a possiblelist. I don’t think everybody needs to be like me. I really want to make sure I say that, and there are things that are really dark and I don’t step over them. I’m not Pollyanna. I worked on poverty and hunger, I worked with Mother Theresa. I’ve held lepers in my arms, I’ve held dead babies in my arms. So I know about the darkness and I’m not afraid of it. So I don’t step over that. I want to make sure I say that. I also know that we’re in a time when… There’s another quote I’m going to use from somebody I think you’ve interviewed, Michael Beckwith. He says, “Pain pushes until vision pulls. Pain pushes until vision pulls.”
And pain does push us, but you can’t get out of it without a vision to pull you through. And we all have a role to play, and maybe some people’s role is to point to the pain. Maybe I’m missing something here. I do point to the pain, but I also know where I’m committed because I’m a pro-activist. I call myself a pro-activist, not an activist, because I’m an activist for, not against, and I’m committed to pulling people through the pain into their vision, because that’s where I stand and I know that works. So even the things that many people are against, I see them. I want to hospice their natural death with some respect and dignity. Respect comes from re-see, re-spectate, re-look and they’ll die faster. I don’t attack. I think I have found that to be enormously effective, it takes a lot of patience, generosity, and kindness. But it’s good for me to be that way and it actually is very practical.
So pain pushes until vision pulls and I have a muscle that I’ve developed to help people see the vision, to pull them through the pain, and it’s a privilege to do it and it’s a joy.
TS: Just one final follow up here. Because as part of your vision you mentioned the metaphor of here we are, we’re pregnant. We’re pregnant with a new human, a new way of being together as a species, a new Earth. What is it that we’re pregnant with? What’s the vision, Lynne?
LT: I wish I knew exactly. I mean in the Pachamama Alliance, the organization that came from that big shift in my life, we say our work is to bring forth an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, socially just human presence on this planet. That’s a pretty good definition of a new kind of human being, a new kind of humanity. Environmentally sustainable, environmentally generative, really, socially just and spiritually fulfilled humanity. A humanity that understands its role in the community of life. A humanity that’s committed to ending human supremacy in its ugliness, when it’s domineering and crushing other species and other forms of life. A human family that finds its role, its place in the beauty and unfolding story of the universe. And I have a great trust in that. I know there’s people who think we’re going extinct. I know that we are useful, our species is important on this planet.
We’ve kind of overtaken things, so we’re a little bit way out of line. But we have a contribution to make and we belong here and what is our role now, in the next 100 years? This is the first century of the third millennium. If you think of it that way, what is our species going to establish as our role in the next millennium? Are we going to continue to destroy everything around us? Or are we going to play the kind of role that I think is getting born in us. Which is to be earthlings, you could say, global citizens, universal humans, that are rooted in the power of our humanity and the incredible, infinite power of unconditional love, generosity, kindness, reciprocity, and what I wrote about in my last book, sufficiency. Enoughness. Gandhi, said, “There’s enough for our need but not for our greed.” We need to get ourselves there so we realize that. And I think we’re on our way there, and this is a technical or surround-sound expression of how off we are.
Which is helpful, in its ugly way, to wake us up and get us on track and have us be reborn. So that’s the best I can do right now. Whatever it is we’re pregnant with, I want us to do everything we can to have a beautiful new kind of human being be born out of all this chaos.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Lynne Twist, she’s the author of the new book, Living A Committed Life: Finding Freedom and Fulfillment in a Purpose Larger Than Yourself. If you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in after-the-show Q&A conversations with featured presenters and have the chance to ask your questions, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community that features premium shows, live classes, and community events. Let’s learn and grow together. Come join us at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
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This is so powerful, and has allowed me to have hope in the future beyond our human greed. Thank you for the work you are doing.
Into a new year with confidence, courage and love, but you don’t have to do it Lynne’s way. Your own small effort will be rewarded as well.