More Excerpts From Meetings With Mentors

From interview with Joan Halifax:

Joan Halifax: For the last year I've lived in this house in Santa Fe, but before this, I lived in a teepee and a Mongolian yurt for about eleven years. Going into the wilderness is an extraordinary way to enter a world where our sense of self-the identity box we put ourselves in-starts to expand so we understand that we are one small creation which is also a part of nature.

Soren: And that sense of belonging is often most strongly felt while in the wilderness?

Joan Halifax: Yes. And I feel it is very important for my generation to do everything we can to protect and restore nature. Not only for ourselves but for all other species. We need a complex group of species around for us to survive.

From interview with Richard Strozzi Heckler:

Soren: It is often difficult to move towards those unpleasant areas, but that may be a part of the warrior's spirit?

Richard Strozzi Heckler: Yes, we have a practice in aikido called "Irimi". "Irimi" means entering, moving towards. If someone is attacking you, you move towards the attack. That's very difficult to do. People usually want to move right, left, or back away. In this practice, as someone is coming at you, you move towards them. You may turn at the last minute, but the analog is that the solution to the problem may be in the problem itself. So as we open the body, we move towards or move into that which frightens us, into our contractions.

From interview with Chellis Glendinning:

Chellis Glendinning: To come back to the issue of young people and vision, for some of us the job is to enter a corporation and learn about hierarchy and power and computers and all that. How else are we going to get from here to there? Every single level has to be addressed. One person's participation in the unfolding may be to learn computers and work in a corporation; what that person is challenged with is to keep the vision.

Soren:, Then the question of how to keep the vision. How do we keep the vision when it is not being supported in the world around us?

Chellis Glendinning:, That's where we come back to affinity groups or communities.

From interview with Malidoma Some:

Malidoma Some: So in working with young people, watch what they do, watch the kind of things they get interested in. They may start putting something together into a pyramid, they may climb trees, or they may do something with rocks in the stream. All these can be clues for initiatory rituals. These are the icons to gather and then take home and look at as a type of code you need to decipher. Keep checking to see what works. We need to give them a great deal of attention, which is something few young people get in this culture. Be at their school; don't let them believe they are at your school. They can be at your school after you have learned from them.

From interview with Arnold Mindell:

Soren: What have you found by exploring conflict? In The Leader as Martial Artist you wrote, "The tolerance of chaos is the best preparation for the future." For many of us, we don't see the usefulness of chaos and conflict.

Arnold Mindell: ....When I say that chaos is the best preparation for learning how to do this work, I mean that it's important to tolerate situations that in the beginning you don't understand, instead of trying to stop them. Soren, that is a real crucial thing.

Soren: And seeing that the situation may call us to go through internal changes, as well as external changes?

Arnold Mindell: That's right. Knowing that the difficulty we are in the middle of is calling for internal changes, and the relationship between the internal and external. In other words, you change inside and through that change you behave differently. This is a very big thing, and actually the internal changes will be the crucial ones in stopping the external things.