Join host Martha Williams as she talks with Sara, M. Div, Director of Sequoia Samanvaya and a cultural innovator, healer, and teacher about the power of origin story and its role in finding lasting solutions to climate change.
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Check out Sara’s reMembering for Life class HERE , starting the week of Oct. 26, 2020
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Martha Williams:
Dear Culture Shifters. I'm Martha Williams, your host today. Thank you for joining us at the Culture Shift Podcast where we work to shift the conversation to inspire a more balanced, peaceful, compassionate, and collaborative world. We believe culture shifts come from a profound change in how we relate to self others and our planet. For most of us, it never dawned on us to question the concept of self. After all, of course, we know who we are. And for many of us self reflection, self-discovery, self-exploration through our work, and all of our relationships is part of life. And we're all growing, learning new things about ourselves, even reinventing ourselves, but all the focus is on our present and future selves. Of course, in cases like therapy, we're concerned with our childhood and family, but what about our past selves pre-childhood pre-current-family going back generations across lands oceans times into deep history, known and unknown.
Martha Williams:
We all assume our personal past is the past and it can't be changed, but what if it could be changed? Our next guest is a speaker, writer, artist healer, and deep thinker, Reverend Sara Jolena. She believes that by reexamining our past, digging deeper, going beyond the stories passed down to us by the elders in our family and in our society - engaging in a process she calls remembering - we open ourselves to rediscovering rich story, deep history, and the fuller spectrum of who we are and where we come from. We remember those stories of the past that for one reason or another intentionally or unintentionally have been forgotten or dismembered from our past. Her travels brought her in contact with numerous cultures, many of which were indigenous, with very different ideas than those that dominate our Western narrative. Her quest brought her to a unique understanding of climate change, but also to the importance of the origin story of climate change.
Martha Williams:
And from there, the importance of the origin story for all of us, as we navigate through our current social climate, she proposes how we address climate change or any other societal issue. Depends on how we understand the origins of the issue. Sara believes our past our "origin story" is our birthright. That is our full past and all its torrid details, glorious and not so glorious. And that by knowing our past in both light and shadow, that we can start to understand and realign our inner framework and come into a more aligned, healthy, healed Relationship with ourselves, those around us, and our planet. Welcome, Sara.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
Thank you. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here,
Martha Williams:
Sara, the more I dig into your work and grapple with the deep questions you pose, the more tendrils and threads I find. In fact, your work has reinvigorated a quest to dig into my family past and remember it, as you term it, my own origin story and implications are profound. So before we talk about your work with remembering origin stories, can you just tell us briefly about yourself and how you arrived at your work, through your research and reMembering the origin story of climate change?
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
Yeah, absolutely. So I think one of the first things I always say about origin stories is that there are so many origins and that part of the thing we want to get away from is a sort of singular origin point. Just like we want to get away from a singular dominant narrative and one perspective of any given story. There's often multiple origins points. And so I can originate, my story with my birth. I can originate it with how my parents met and I can also say which I usually do that, what I am doing now. And the path that I am on now is the ripples of a circle that was cast generations upon generations ago. And I say that with the humility of knowing that it's entirely possible, that what I am working on now might dramatically change as, as our world changes. And there is always a possibility for continual revelation, but for today I thought I would, what if we start not that long ago in like say 10 years ago when I was working in international sustainable development, I was working at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex in England, where I had gone to get my masters.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
And I was quickly swept up into this very large cross-cultural like 30 country re-imagining development project. And then the Institute of Development Studies does and continues to do to this day, like really amazing work, very progressive. One of the main professors there, his name is Robert Chambers is the founder of participatory development, which is all about asking the people about what they want and designing a development program around, you know, that the voices of the people and not just like what the experts say, right? So it has this sort of like bottoms-up perspective. And, even so like I kept feeling like that..
…we were still caught in our Western way of thinking something was really missing. And my heart, I think, knew that it had to do with spirituality beyond that, beyond saying that spirituality is important and we have to get to the source of our sustainability.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
We have to, I got to go kind of like deeper than sort of the conversations that we're having. Most of the conferences that I was attending beyond that I didn't quite know what I was trying to say. And then opportunity landed for me to do work in India with the world bank. I was doing an evaluation project on water, integrated water management systems. And upon landing, I met this incredible group of Indians, some South India, a network of people who are doing work. It was so creative and so powerful. And I could see it was making a huge difference in the way that some pretty old fashioned bureaucracies were engaging. I was like so curious…
…because if you can change a bureaucracy, you can change anything.
Like bureaucracies are really hard to change and I wanted to learn more about them. So I ended up moving to India and to kind of learn and live with this network of people of sustainable change makers.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
And then I had my own sort of personal crisis. I was in this place that I loved very, very far from home living with a bunch of guys working on an organic farm, sleeping on the rooftop, looking at the stars. And the man that I loved had told me that he was not going to marry me and he was going to marry someone else. And I was just, I was just so devastated. And I was in a cultural context where I couldn't - like there wasn't anyone I could like hug and you don't hug men. Women don't hug men in South India. That's not a thing. And I didn't have that many girlfriends at that time. I was pretty new to my time there. And I just like reached like my spirit reached to the stars one night and I was just crying and my soul for help. And I suddenly found myself singing to myself.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
I was able to sing myself out of a place of incredibly deep despair. And a few days later, I was kind of following some friends around to the work that they were doing with some human rights organizations. And we went to the home of a very, very impoverished family who had been the victims of systematic abuse throughout their lives. They were telling me their stories and showing me their scars and show me where they have been hit and hurt and cut open by their neighbors in their village. And it was just these horrific, horrific, horrific stories. You can just tell in their voice like this person has never felt listened to. Even though they've told this story before, and I just started singing to them and I made up a song, I turned this story into a song. By the time I was done singing my song, the entire tenor of the room had changed.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
And this little old woman from the back of this dark hut came forward. I hadn't really noticed her before and she didn't say anything and she hadn't understood a word I said, ‘cause it's all in English. And she just laid her old hands on top of my head and she just nodded her head. And then she turned around and went back to the darkness and I started to cry and everyone was just in such a space of presence because it was as if like I have been able to touch something and them, and that touched something in me and suddenly everyone felt held. And so that's when I was kind of like, Oh my gosh, there's something in the song. There's something in the song and the music and the touch that is so much more powerful than any program that could be designed. And that led me to become a traveling singer and songwriter.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
I traveled all over India as a singer-songwriter, listening to people's stories and singing them back to them in song.
Martha Williams:
That sounds like a completely transformative experience. And I'm so curious, you know, where did it lead you?
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
I realized that culture is that which sustains…
that music and dance spirituality and ritual, faith and tradition, innovation, creativity, the way in which people marry and fall in love and, and have babies and, and fall out of love and move their bodies and be with the earth and plant their seeds. And all of that is bound in dance in a village. Part of how you learned to plant was, was in the songs and in the dances. And I was like, Oh, like this thing called knowledge transmission, it's being done through culture. And that probably some of the most important dimensions of what it means to create anything that resembles sustainability much less regeneration is going to only happen if we have a cultural shift and I felt it, I didn't just know it intellectually.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
I was living it as a singer and not particularly a great singer mind you, I'm not a really great singer, but as someone who was singing from my heart and whose heart was touching other people's hearts and who was letting myself be touched in return, like that opened me to this much, much, much bigger world of Hindu and Buddhism spirituality and, and complexity of another culture and other traditions, multiple, multiple intersecting traditions, all there in the same time, in the same place and multiple histories to this thing that I'm looking for. This thing that I've been searching for is called. I think that the easiest way of calling it is culture, but it just meant so much more. It was so much richer, so much more diverse and so more fun, so much more joyful than any of the sort of programmatic or developmental stuff that I have been part of before.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
That's why I wanted to continue working in this thing called culture, but I wanted to do it from a spiritual place and not as an academic, I wanted to do it as someone who was going to help to create new cultures. And in order to do that, I knew I wanted more training, particularly in the spiritual-religious dimensions. What was working in India for me was sort of this musical artistic play that was intersecting with a kind of traditional development work and faith using their religious, spiritual, cultural frameworks to be the source from which the strategy came instead of the strategy being like enacted through culture. And that to me was like, there was like this aha like that's how you want to put culture at the center.
Martha Williams:
And I love how you define culture as that, which sustains you. So how did you go deeper with this?
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
So to go deeper into that, I went to Union Theological Seminary. I had the opportunity to meet with a bunch of indigenous people. And I had worked with indigenous communities in many different parts of the world. And I had not worked with indigenous people in my own country, in the United States. I met them at a climate justice conference and I said, what, how can we help you? And how can I help you? And how can this organization, that I'm representing help you? And they said, well, we want the same thing we've always wanted. And I was expecting them to tell me that they wanted to clean up the Lake because they come from the Onondaga Lake, which is one of the most polluted lakes in the nation. And they said we want to rescind the Doctrine of Discovery. And I kind of paused. And I'm like, what the hell are you talking about?
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
Like in my mind, like that doesn't make any sense to me. But my experience in India and other parts of the world had taught me that if the person most impacted by the problem, this case, climate change tells you something and you don't understand what they're talking about. Then it is your job as the person who's trying to be helpful to, you had to correct your own thinking. Like the problem is with me, not with them. So that led me down this rabbit hole to understand what were the connections between climate change and the Doctrine of Discovery, which led me into history and origin. And then I wrote a whole thesis, sort of re-originating the story of climate change into the Doctrine of Discovery and the beginning of colonization.
I came to realize that how we talk about history as a part of culture, right? History as part of culture is absolutely essential to how to create new cultures.
Martha Williams:
So tell us more then about the Doctrine of Discovery or better yet tell us about the Triangle of Terror you something you touched on in your thesis and how they relate to climate change.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
I think one of the questions for cultural change-makers that I think we should always ask is why are we choosing a particular beginning point? And I think the answer to that should include because it's useful for our current times, we want to make a point with a story we're trying to do. We're trying to trying to show something. So if I began the story and what I call the Triangle of Terror, it helps us. I'll tell you the why and then I'll tell you the, what. The why I do this is because it helps us connect climate change, ecological destruction racial violence, gender, inequity, poverty, and like sexual inequalities and our relationship to nature and to health and to wellbeing and to women's knowledge, like all of these things become part of a cohesive coherent narrative. And it's relatively easy to connect issues in our society have been dismembered and disconnected from each other.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
So I just want to invite you to kind of like take your mind back to those times in the 1400s, which was a time when historically they usually say that Europe is emerging from the Middle Ages. And it's just on the edge of what is subsequently often described as the Age of Discovery and Constantinople is, is on the edge of falling. So the crusades are almost over and there's sort of these three points that happen within a 50 year time period, one King Alfonzo his uncle, Prince Henry the navigator has gone sail down the coast of West Africa and recognizes that there's a tremendous profit to be made through trade. And in order to do that, they need the authority to do that. And he doesn't want to just have the profit. He wants to have profit through ownership. And so a Papal Bull is written, which is to say that if the Pope at the time writes a document that is signed with the Papal Seal, which is why it's called a Papal Bull.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
And that document has an authority that today, that those documents absolutely do not have, which is to say it has legal, theological, moral-political authority within Europe. It would be totally unrecognizable in Africa, but it definitely had this authority in Europe. So they vote one Bull, which enabled first the destruction of the, of Africa and the African slave trade. And then the second Bull that's usually connected with the Doctrine of Discovery was in 1493 after Columbus comes back from Turtle Island, which we now call the Americas. And that second Bull in 1493 gives Europe though, "right" in their own mind to colonize the Americas and essentially split the world in half. So that Portugal gets one half, and Spain gets the other. And that had to do with the ruling monarchs at the time. And this was something that subsequently significantly shapes the future of colonization.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
The Bull explicitly says, you can have ownership over these lands and peoples that you have the no one, no one in Europe has ever seen and has no one knows how much territory there is. No one knows how much land there is. No one knows how much ocean there is. No one knows how many people there are and how many languages there are already being spoken, all these different places. And they simply say, you have ownership over them and you can subdue the people in the land for eternity, for all of their children and their children's children.
Martha Williams:
Wow. This is incredible. I mean, the audacity to say anyplace, anything, any person they happen to "discover" is theirs.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
Right? So all the people immediately become slaves of Europeans, like just in one fell swoop in their own mind. And in the middle of these two Bulls, what I realized and the research that I was doing, another Papal Bull assigned, and that is frequently known as the witch bowl. And that happened 1484. And that gives these two Dominican priests, the right to engage in the European witch hunts, and the priests - these two Dominican priests - put this Bull in the front of a book that was called Malleus Maleficarum, which is translated as the hammer of the witches. And that becomes the witch-hunting book that is subsequently translated and published throughout Europe. And it becomes the second most widely published book after the Bible. And it details in excruciatingly painful, it's like probably one of the most misogynistic sexually deformed sexists, like it cannot say enough negative words about this book because it's detailing how you first break up a community so that people will call each other witches, and then second, how you torture women physically violently abuse them in ways that they subsequently betrayed their fellow women.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
And then what I was able to show, was that what would happen when these women are killed and destroyed and not even if they were killed, but just accused, and the fear of being accused and watching women burned in public in the fires in towns and villages throughout Europe, is that they were killing their own healers. And they were killing the, the elders who knew the knowledge of the plants and the animals. And they were destroying their own capacity for their own healing and their own connection to their own bio culture. That is exactly also what was happening with the same images, the same words, the same language was often being used from the witch hunts. It was being used in throughout South America and the Amazon and in Mexico. And it was also being used in Africa and patterns of destruction and patterns of torture were literally being, going back and forth and images and objects were going back and forth the oceans between these three, as I call them points of terror. And it was from that the scientific revolution emerges the enlightenment emerges, the colonization, as we know it capitalism, as we know, it all arise from this period of time when this exceptionally violent, violent action is being taken against women's bodies and against people, you know, black and brown bodies all across Africa, particularly West Africa, also going into central Africa and Europe and the Americas. And it was all happening more or less simultaneously for a couple of centuries.
Martha Williams:
How does the profundity of what you just explained to us make a difference in how we relate to climate change? Versus if we think of climate change as starting with the industrial revolution,
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
If you say that the climate change origin dates from the industrial revolution, then the solutions that you come up with because your solution always depends upon how you define your problem. So if you define the problem as coming from too much carbon in the atmosphere, which is the industrial revolution argument, then you will try to reduce carbon in the atmosphere. If, and that's, I would say a relatively limited thing, which we may have noticed has utterly failed. It's not that difficult in some ways you just change how you do it, you know what your energy sources are and we have been totally unable as a society to do that.
If you recognize the climate change stems from colonization, then you recognize that you're dealing with a mental system, a cultural dynamic in which exploitation is the only form, the only way in which you can have safety and prosperity.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
And I'm going slow over those words because it's not just wealth, it is the only way in which a group of people have understood how they can have their own social standing, because people really care about social standing, right? And it's the only way they know how to have comfort is to the domination of others. So colonization enables you to perpetuate a pattern of relationships with nature and the earth. And if you recognize that the actual creation of race is deeply intertwined with a displacement from place and the disconnection from place of both white and black bodies and all the colors in between all the ethnicities in between, it perpetuates a pattern of disconnection from the earth and with one another and within our own families, if you recognize those connections, then you begin to realize that you can not address climate change as a carbon issue. You have to address it as a cultural issue and that cultural issue, you know, we can talk about that as a cultural domination. That's absolutely part of it, but it's, it's a very particular kind of domination. It's not just any dominations of a particular shape and flavor of domination,
Martha Williams:
Right? And if you would ask bell hooks, what kind of domination we live in. And she would say, we live in an imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy,
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
And all those things come from the same place. They all come from the same moment in time. They're all part of the same cultural pattern that these things are like they're intersecting today. And they're deciding today because they come from the same place. It's like, once you can kind of say like, Oh, all these things come from the same place and they stop becoming different things. And you don't create a program to deal with equity on one hand and deal with climate change on the other hand. Those people never talk to each other, which is what a lot of organizations do. It has practical implications for strategy. And then the other piece of, I may just say this kinda quickly is that like we have been dismembered from one another. We have been dismembered from our histories and we have to engage with these histories and engage with ourselves in a way that has a somatic cultural component. You cannot simply address us through the mind. You cannot simply create a series of documents that are going to - PowerPoints that are going to display this information.
If you aren't learning this in an embodied way, then you're not learning it. And if you're not creating a culture, if you're not like
The act of learning needs to be an act of shifting culture, otherwise, you're perpetuating the problem. Right?
Martha Williams:
If history was taught to me the way you just laid it out. I think I would have maybe become a historian.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
And that is, I think part of history is so boring for so many people. Like it's not reflecting a knowing or a story or I did not want to do history. I wanted to go off and sing, right? Like so much of the way I've learned has been through engaging with people and with listening to incredible storytellers, tell stories in different ways.
Martha Williams:
I have to say, I hear a lot of young people who are resentful towards baby boomers saying, you know, what about them? Why couldn't they have done something?
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
I don't want to dismiss that anger. I don't want him to say like, Oh, that anger is not important, cause I think there is a lot there. That's like, I look at the baby boomers and I'm kind of like you guys so lucky, like you just kinda got like this cream of milk. Like our generation and below is going to have to deal with a lot of the shit underneath that cream. I don't want to like let them off the hook. Cause there are absolutely things that that generation did not do for sure. And like what they're working with, what they got handed, they did not get handed the tools to do a lot of the work that needs to get done. They didn't know how to do it.
Martha Williams:
How has your work given us the tools to make more significant change?
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
So when I started teaching my first remembering for life course, and I had two students. I'd never done anything like that before. I had incorporated my family history and it was so influential for me. And I saw this about re-originating climate change. Like I, it was, to me, the focus of the whole course was about climate change and particularly climate change and racism, and connecting those two. That's what I thought the purpose was. And then in teaching the first-class, one of my students like both of them really, but particularly one of them, she had just had her first child. And the question that was on her mind as a young mother was how do I tell my children, my child, about where we come from? How do I narrate for my child, the history of where this moment comes from in a way that he can understand that enables him to love his ancestors and also to be able to hold the tension of the terrible things that they did. And so that question as a young mother was just on her mind all the time.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
And then in the course, like everything that I was giving her, that enabled her to like, that gave her more tools for her toolbox and answering that question. Like it was so clearly powerful. And by the end of the class, she decided she wanted to write a children's story for her son about where their family came from. And that it was just such a brilliant idea. And she started, she's an artist and she started drawing out some different images of what that might look like. And we started talking about it and very quickly I saw that the family history and that's what we kind of became ecological family histories. And then from there, it wasn't of a far jump to realize it's actually talking about origin stories themselves as a mythological dynamic, and as something that we can reshape this mythological component because when you're working with children's stories, you're working with a world of enchantment, right?
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
You're working with, children's literature has so much myth in it. It has so much magic in it. So you're immediately invited into that. But of course, what I could see so clearly in working with her was like, of course, as not something that's only useful for children like to re-engage the mythical imagination is something for all of us. And like this work of reinventing world, like that work is so paramount to everything else that we want to do, like knowing what your source is and connecting with your sense of where you come from on a mythological dimension, like shapes who you are. That just makes so much sense. And what about you tell us how you've been reinvented. So there's, there's so many moments when, on my journey of remembering, I have experienced myself being reinvented, where I have been able to delve into the mythical magic of what it means to be alive in seemingly serendipitous encounters, which feel like later, I feel like destiny met the descendants of those who my ancestors sat with in sacred ceremony, seven or eight generations ago.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
And I'm now direct friends and colleagues and co-conspirators with those people, with native people, and with African American people. And I know our ancestors knew each other and there are times when that relationship was beautiful. And there were times when that relationship that our ancestors had together was absolutely horrific. And today we can do something together that has not been able to be done for generations upon generations, upon generations. And we can have relationships and conversations and create new cultures together that we've never been able to create before. I have been able to experience moments where, and this is very embodied, right? I mean the same conversations, but I'm really talking about the moment of sitting quietly with someone whom I know whom I know if I had been caught sitting quietly with them, someone would've killed me or them or both. And to now be able to sit in ceremony with them and to have people call me up, you know, to have they call me up or whatever, just to have that deep friendship is something that I treasure. And then I have had all these moments of being able to retell mythologies and old stories and new ways and help people re-imagine who they are. And by imagine, I mean, embody who they are differently, and it is profound because to work with the human soul is profound.
Martha Williams:
So what are you wanting to accomplish in taking your ideas of origin stories to everyday folks?
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
I think my goal is like when I'm working with people is, well, sometimes I just want them to be more accurate. Y'all are contributing to a bad story and it's hurting people, stop it. Like the way you're describing who you are and where you come from and what your family's done is wrong. It's not wrong. It's like it's inaccurate, you're missing so much. And the things you're missing, what you're missing, it makes a difference. But in these more kind of juicy moments, when, when I'm less concerned about impact, what I'm really listening for is this, like there is a flower within the person that yearns to come out and to bloom, and that cannot happen if they are caught in a colonial framework. The flower can only fully bloom if they can disengage themselves from the structures and the mentalities, the ways of thinking the epistemology, as they say, the ways of moving the ways of understanding of listening to that body, of listening to the earth, by listening to other bodies, only in that process of disentangling so much falseness can that flower of the soul bloom.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
And sometimes that is expressed through ritual. And sometimes that is expressed through song. And sometimes that's expressed through new stories and sometimes that is expressed simply through being able to be with someone they weren't able to be with before. And sometimes it's like designing entire new systems of ways of working together. Like the blooming has so many different variations. I'm less concerned with what that outcome should look like. And that's something that makes my work very different. I don't know where the outcome is going to be because so much of what we think of as being a good outcome comes from a patriarchal mindset of what a good output should be.
Martha Williams:
So your work saddles, the church with a lot of blame for the roots or the sanctioning of colonialism, the slave trade, and in the West, the exploitation and murder of indigenous peoples, you could even say they were laying the roots for modern racism and misogyny, and yet you're a minister. So you work with numerous faith-based organizations. How do you present your thinking in a way that people can hear it?
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
You know, I have always first and foremost served the divine feminine and I come to ministry within a sort of more Judeo Christian context. So when I work with a church, I know that the goodness of the spirit is not constrained in any particular faith, you know, institutional structure, right? It's so much bigger than all of those things. How do I engage with these patriarchal structures? I actually think the people I'm working with do the closer engaging than I do, and that the Christian faith did not always look like one person up top and everyone else sitting in rows. It used to be people sitting in a circle lying down telling stories and singing songs. And that's helpful. It's helpful for me to know that the structure that I'm seeing as a more recent invention. And I also like in that church is where Martin Luther King gave a really beautiful and famous speech and it's where other wonderful, wonderful people, both men, and women have given phenomenal testimonies to the Holy Spirit. And I am not going to deny them their experience of God, right? And even as I acknowledge and honor, and recognize that the church have responsibility for, and is absolutely to blame for so many things, it has also been the source of so much liberation and to hold both.
I feel like the work that I'm trying to do often is to help people hold paradox and to help people strengthen their capacity to look at multiple, sometimes dramatically conflicting variations, simultaneously.
Martha Williams:
Paradox. You know, I really love that I can relate. And when I think about my relationship to Christianity and some of our listeners know this, but I was a preacher's kid and a Christian throughout my childhood, but ultimately I couldn't hold the paradox of the loving spirit and communion. I experienced with the idea that those who didn't believe were somehow going to hell or that all the religions out there had it all wrong. The millions and billions of people who thought differently and believe differently had it wrong. So despite all those things, I had a profoundly loving experience in the church of my childhood that I take with me and integrate into my life today.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
Sometimes I hear people who've really rejected Christianity. And like, I feel like they've rejected it a little bit too harshly, and they've rejected too much of themselves in the process. And it's sometimes there's some healing that needs to be done. I think in order for them to embrace, to fully go into whatever other pathways they have. But given the damages that have been done by all religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, all these major world religions, they all have a lot to answer for.
Martha Williams:
Do you have an example of how strengthening someone's ability to hold paradox has helped them?
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
I had one, a woman recently whose family was all from Norway and she just had all these terrible experiences, and they kind of couldn't engage with her Norwegian heritage in part, because her parents always told her not to be an artist. Like they were very like practical people and, and they saw being an artist is very impractical. It's a very common story, right? But like she couldn't kind of get over all these sort of experiences that she had with her own parents and grandparents. She couldn't embrace her Norwegian heritage until she started working with me. And it wasn't just her parents, why she had, it was also the school system and her own experiences. And after we did some origin story work together, she was able to find in her, her Norwegian, a place of healing for herself and a source of inspiration. And I say that about a country, but I think that can be true for a lot of different faith traditions.
Martha Williams:
You help people hold paradox, but paradox can feel very uncomfortable and it can also make people feel very unsafe. Can you just talk about that?
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
I think there's one thing I would just say about that kind of quickly, how is it that we deal with feeling unsafe? So this is sort of a question of, you know, like I am a student of polyvagal theory and from a somatic perspective, like there's this nervous system response, which I'm sure you guys know, because everything we're talking about, everything about like historical traumas of various forms and ways in which legacies of slavery and legacies of colonization and like climate change and pain and suffering is like, Oh my God, how do you treat yourself? And how you treat others when you feel unsafe and what are the different things your body does when it feels unsafe? If you're shutting down, how do you respond? And if someone else is shutting down, how do you respond? And that happens all the time happens. All the people shut down all the time.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
And when people are feeling scared and anxious, you know, I think the part of what Trump has tapped into he's tapped into a lot of people who feel scared and anxious, and he's helped to kind of bring them into this fight mode. You've kind of helped to bring them out of a feeling instead of feeling like they can't do anything and they are inept and that no one's listening to them. And that their dreams are not being realized, which has been the experience of, you know, thousands and thousands of poor Americans, poor white Americans. When they feel that their dreams are unable to be realized like he's brought them out of the frozen point and into the fight. And that from a nervous system perspective is a step up like the frozen being the bottom of the reptilian brain and the fight-flight, either one movement is still movement. They feel that they're moving somewhere fighting is still movement. Now the more social dynamic being, you know, this, the social part of the brain, that's the part of the brain that can handle paradox the frozen part, the fight and the fight part can't handle paradox to really hold paradox. Well, you have to be regulated. You have to be self-regulated to be regulated with others as sort of the formal body therapy term for that your nervous system has to breathe.
Martha Williams:
I just want to step back because I'm thinking about the Doctrine of Discovery and the Triangle of Terror as you call it, and how much fear, destruction, and displacement that it created, the amount of suffering that resulted is beyond imagining really, how is it that society let this happen or that a society lets this happen? How could it be possible that has happened? And you could even argue that it continues to happen today.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
So much of what we struggle within any society is how do we define good and evil? What is considered to be good? And what's considered to be evil and like how that is constructed by any particular group of people and in any given society. There's always multiple ways of thinking about that, but it's like the construction of good and evil and in their mind and the mind of the ruling class of England, the Holy Roman Empire of their forefathers, you know, so that the ruling Kings and Queens of Spain and Portugal in the 1400s, they're good. The thing they were aiming for was to be like the Holy Roman Empire of their ancestors. So their conception of good was this glorious time, this glorious moment of empire when they had this level of unification and togetherness and you know, their own projections of what they wanted were projected onto that period of time. That's what they were trying to recreate when they became colonial powers. When they signed those Papal Bulls, they were trying to bring back the Holy Roman empire.
Martha Williams:
Oh, you mean like "Make Europe great again!"
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
Yeah, absolutely. Like they, they basically, they were losing the crusades, right? Like at that time Constantinople falls, right after that first Papal Bull is signed like this multigenerational battle over the Holy land had more or less been kind of, sort of lost. It's complicated, right? What's lost and what's won in that, in the crusades. That's a really weird question to try to answer from the perspective of Europe, much less from the perspective of, of the Muslim folks in Jerusalem at the time. But like, you know, they wanted, they absolutely wanted more power and they thought that's what God wanted. They thought it's not just that they wanted it. Is it, that's how they saw what God wanted. And this is the tricky thing about God, is our capacity, as meaning-making machines, we are continually capable of remaking God in our own image and in what we want God to be like. This is one of the most dangerous parts of our relationship with the divine is how easy it is to project our temporary image of what is goodness. And assume that that's what God wants.
Martha Williams:
Like you could say, God looks like a tall brunette with a lightning-bolt earring.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
Yeah. Right. And that's exactly what, and there has been a whole series of people, you know, like a lot of feminist theologians have gone and said, Oh, God is a woman. Oh God is a black person, Oh God is an Asian person. And like, there is, there's something in that. That's beautiful. There's something in looking at the image of God and being able to see you reflected in that image and knowing that the source of life and the source of beauty in some way, shape or form reflects you and that you are also Beautiful, right? Like there's a goodness in that basic notion and that basic desire. There's something about that. That's really beautiful. And it's very, very dangerous, especially when we don't recognize it's just an image. And we act as if the image is the real thing.
Martha Williams:
Well, I guess.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
And if you want to increase your capacity for paradox, can you see multiple images of God and see them all as images of God and know that there's something behind all those images, which is not ever depicted.
Martha Williams:
I think what you're pointing to also is that we should always know that there's more to know. Now I want to hear about what it is that you're up to, what ideas you're scaling right now that you're taking out into the world that you think or hope to grow and that you think could have the most impact. So yeah, we'd love to hear about what you're doing next and how people can get involved with you.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
Thank you for asking that question. Sequoia Samanvaya that's the organization I run, I can be loosely translated into coming into harmony with ancient wisdom. And our slogan is connecting the disconnected. And people consistently say, when they work and engage with us, for pretty much anything that we do is that they are able to bring their full selves into the work. And their full self is able to grow. I've been doing this origin story work for at least 10 years. And then in other ways, I just started kind of formally teaching a class on origin stories. So I just did my first pilot run for that. And I'm starting my next one. This coming week, I'm doing more work with origin stories and to help to relook at origin stories differently. It's been so beautiful and we're working with land landcestors and spiritual lineages and bloodlines and bringing those things together.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
And, and in the process rewriting the story of our nation and rewriting the story of, of our history, of where we come from as a people, both within America and outside of America. It's not the structure of this particular class is not as, not only for Americans at all. I'm working with more artists around, I'm praying a greater deeper movement around retelling origin stories and remembering origin stories differently. That's really exciting. There's a reMembering for Life course, which is a course in which I kind of bring people through the history of integrating climate change into colonization and also integrating their own family history into that. And we didn't talk as much about that, but that's a piece for me. And a huge piece of my work that I do is integrating family histories into, into these ecological stories. I talk about those ecological family histories, and it's incredible to see people integrating.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
I do one-on-one healing work and advisory work. Some of that's like spiritual direction for people who are familiar with that. And I do legacy advisory work with wealthier families, engaging with how are they thinking about their legacy using, I would say using a decolonial framework.
Martha Williams:
Sara, I just want to thank you for your work. It takes so much courage to unveil the past and to hold paradox and to look at both the triumph and shame of our histories and our families. And to really question how we think of the present, especially to challenge how we think of climate change as you first posited. So we have great hope for the flourishing of your work and its role in shifting culture. So thank you. So where can people find you? What's your website?
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
Yeah, so, you know, www.sequoiasamanvaya.com. And then I also have my personal website, which is easier to remember, which is www.sarajolena.com.
Martha Williams:
So thank you so much for joining us today, Sara.
Sara Jolena Wolcott:
Oh, it's such a pleasure, such a pleasure to be able to have these conversations with you.
Martha Williams:
Thank you so much for joining us today on the Culture Shifts Podcast, where we dig into critical conversation with those we're shifting culture by defying the status quo, the transcripts, and links related to this podcast, as well as other episodes are available at Culture Shift Agency.
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