00:00:00 Steffi

Experiences can just be felt where I’m no longer the author, I’m no longer the owner of that experience. My daughter went to a forest school, and the forest school teacher, I was a city girl, in a very simple way, just asked us to sit for half an hour blindfolded with a particular tree and to notice what happens in our body. And then she played the flute and we were asked to not take our blindfolds off. And there were 12 of us. And when we came back together, out of 12 of us, 8 had this sense of there were tears flowing. And we had all sorts of psychological explanations as… that we attached to these tears. This is because…. But when she inquired further, like I felt personally, there were tears flowing and I wasn’t really sad. And I couldn’t quite understand that kind of phenomenological experience. I had to put it in relation to the others. And when I heard that the same experience happened to 8 out of 12, she reminded us that it was April and that what we didn’t know is that we were all with birch. And at that time in April, the sap is rising incredibly quickly in birch trees. And that instead of describing this as tears because of whatever, it might also have been possible that our nervous system is actually being deeply attuned to the system of the tree and that we were mirroring the tree. And for me, that was a really important experience.

00:01:57 Rosemary

This is the Gifts of Trauma Podcast. Stories of transformation and healing through compassionate inquiry. 

Welcome to the Gifts of Trauma podcast by Compassionate Inquiry. I’m Rosemary Davies-Janes and today my co host, Kevin Young and I, have the pleasure of speaking with Steffi Bednarek about the grief associated with the destruction of our natural environment, climate change and land loss through conflict, economic or political displacement or immigration. Steffi, thank you so much for joining us today.

00:02:42 Steffi

Thank you for inviting me. Real pleasure to be here with you two.

00:02:47 Rosemary

It’s our pleasure completely. In Compassionate Inquiry. Before we start a conversation, we tend to set an intention, which is the focus for our conversation. And Kevin, I would invite you, what’s your intention for this conversation today?

00:03:02 Kevin

Well, thank you, Rosemary, and hello, Steffi. I’m really excited to speak to you. Setting an intention. It’s interesting. I have been noticing over the last few days an existential crisis may be going on for myself in relation to what’s going on in the world, what’s happening, Looking at people and watching them, some people watching them tear themselves limb from limb, the devastation and the destruction. And that makes me really sad. That makes me really sad. And as I read a little bit about you, Steffi, I felt my intention is to listen to this woman and to learn. So, yeah, I may be here… and this is. It’s all about me, with me, Steffi. It’s all about me, with me. And I’m just here. Not just here. That’s unfair. I am here to really dig into your work and to see how that helps me manage what’s going on for me, you know, in my heart, in my belly, in my mind. Yeah. So that’s my intention. To listen intently and to see what impact that has on me and how I’m engaging with what’s going on in the world right now.

00:04:18 Rosemary

Thank you, Kevin. I’d love to share mine and then invite you, Steffi, if you have an intention you’d like to share. So my intention really is to hold space for an exploratory and perhaps adventurous conversation that might expand our perspectives and offer new lenses through which we can view our relationships with our fellow beings and Mother Earth. Steffi, what would you like to add, If anything?

00:04:47 Steffi

It’s beautiful to hear both of your intentions. I think my intention is to listen to what wants to emerge between us, and not just to focus on the kind of stuff I’ve said before, or that I think. You know, when I zoom in my attention, it’s so easy to get locked on ideas when actually I’m really interested in relationally, to zoom out as well, to notice. Yeah. What wants to emerge in this space and what needs to be spoken for.

00:05:25 Rosemary

It sounds like we will have an adventurous conversation. Thank you, Steffi. Now I’d like to introduce you briefly as a climate psychologist, a systems thinker and trauma therapist who works at the intersection of climate change, complexity thinking and the human psyche. You’re the founder and director of The Center for Climate Psychology and the. If I may say this, the creator and editor of the book Climate Psychology and Change, which was published back in 2024 and has been called, “A work of wisdom and radical ideas.” I love that juxtaposition. May I invite you, Steffi, to tell us a little bit about the woman behind this work and how you came to be engaged in this field? 

00:06:12 Steffi

Yeah. Where to start? As with a lot of my work, there’s so many different strands that come together. I think one. One of the strands is my personal history. I was born in East Germany, and when I was six years old, my mum was a political prisoner in East Germany, and three other family members were, too. And that country that imprisoned members of my family does not even exist anymore as a country. And so, very early on I became interested in how systems, political systems, but generally also wider systems, shape who we are and leave their imprint on us. I studied psychology and I didn’t really find that this is where the focus lay. The focus was very much on the internal and family relationship. So for me that was a search around what theories have we got that combine the inner and the outer, that combine my personal health to community health to the health of the world. And yeah, with climate change it became so obvious that a lot of the theories that, you know, I’m a psychotherapist, I’m a trauma therapist by training, amongst other things… that a lot of the kind of narratives within Western psychotherapy fell short of that interbeing. And so I became interested in that and I think since 2004, this was part of my inquiry. Yeah. And so one thing led to another and yeah, here I am.

00:08:10 Kevin

Yeah. The first question that arose for me, Steffi, when you chatted. This idea of how political systems and other systems shape how we are, what did you find out?

00:08:22 Steffi

Well, first of all that I lacked guidance. I turned to my tutors. So these questions arose already when I studied psychology in my early 20s and then later when I studied psychotherapy. So the first thing I found out is how impoverished the landscape was in terms of maps. Also how very quickly, like the definition that we see as professional within the profession of psychotherapy… When I inquired around what… How do we notice what is so difficult to name?  The kind of stuff, the systems that we absorb and adapt to, but that we can hardly name, either end up in an ideology, a sociological ideology or theory. But in some indigenous mythologies and practices, which it’s slightly different now, but at the time when I inquired, were very much seen as unprofessional; This is like not evidence based practice. And so I found out something about where are the boundaries of the Western lens? And I found out about it by bumping into them, because nobody sat me down and said, as a psychologist, this is how you need to think about the individual and about what’s professional and what’s not professional. It’s by inquiring that I found out where there were awkward silences, or where I just had this feeling of, ‘Oooh, this is. This starts to be risky territory.’ So one of the people I was just deeply grateful for, and I never once met him in person, but he was never my actual teacher in person. But I learned an enormous amount from James Hillman, who wrote this book. We’ve Had A Hundred Years Of Psychotherapy And The World Is Getting Worse. He took over from Jung after Jung died, so he took over the Jung Institute. He largely widened the Western lens and criticized the Western psychotherapeutic lens for looking for something in an individual which can only be found at the intersection between world and individual. And we need to have this ability to system-sense. So to not just have the introspection of noticing what’s happening in my own nervous system, but to also be able to widen that, and to sense what’s around me, to sense, sense the system and I can send that out. So where I place that boundary from that perspective is relatively arbitrary. So I can feel myself as a continuation of the cosmos and the stars when I look up at a moonlit night. And I can feel this is me, all of this encompasses me. And I can feel myself as a skin encapsulated being. So where I place that boundary gives me different information, but the boundary is not just the skin boundary.

00:11:56 Kevin

And Steffi, I was joking with a friend recently and there’s something that I love to hate, which is an interesting term, love to mock playfully. I read things that ‘psychologists have discovered’ or ‘science has discovered,’ and then they realize this thing that… when I look at the teachers that you’re mentioning, Plum Village and Tif Nhat Hanh and Richard Schwartz and Janina Fisher, et cetera, et cetera, Francis Weller. So scientists have discovered. And they’ll be at this thing that are in the Vedas or the Sutras or things that are around for two and a half thousand years or 3,000 years or 4,000 years. And I hear you as you chat just now, moving into that sort of place of, ‘What is self? Where do I end? Where does everybody else begin? Where do I end? Where does the world begin? Where do we come from? Where do we go to?’ So these are big spiritual questions you’re asking. Talk to me a little bit more about that. Then talk to me a little bit more about your interest in Buddhism, in spirituality, in the idea of. Dick Schwartz talks about the self and maybe caveating that with. I know that for a professional, someone who’s working in professional psychotherapy or professional therapy, these can be taboo subjects to talk about and to lean into. Would you be happy to lean into your thoughts on that?

00:13:20 Steffi

Yeah, and also, please do join me.

00:13:22 Kevin

Oh, I will. Thank you for that. 

00:13:24 Steffi

I find it relatively bizarre. So psychotherapy is an incredibly young profession. We’re just slightly over a hundred years old. And for a profession that started with psychoanalytic thinking, it is absolutely bizarre that we speak as though there was nothing before Freud. So to look back at, ‘Where does that thinking come from? What’s the lineage? And of course it doesn’t just come out of nowhere. First of all, the birth of psychotherapy was contextually situated at a time that was the height of Empire and grew up through a Capitalist, first of all Industrial System and then Capitalist System and Neoliberal System. So we’re not decontextualized. And I find it bizarre that psychotherapy in a sort of analytical way, looks back at origins as part of what one does, but doesn’t do that in terms of its own birth, its own upbringing, its own cultural influences. So that’s the first thing that I find very strange. And part of the inquiry isn’t just Buddhism and older traditions, but it came from a rigor from within the profession as well, but applying it to the profession itself. And of course, when we look at, ‘What does it mean to be human?’ Then there are, as you said, much older traditions. And isn’t it strange that we have decided that because they’re not evidence based, or that there’s no randomized controlled trials, that we decide that we just arrogantly discard that knowledge. So I became interested in what would I think of a client that walks into a consulting room that is so confident that their own perspective is the only one that is valid. And so there’s a sort of, possibly an inbuilt narcissism already, in that kind of self referential system that discards everything else, isn’t relational anymore to the world, and doesn’t invite the world into what we deem worthy of our inquiry. And so everything becomes mine. It’s almost… like a way of ownership. It’s my trauma, it’s my depression, is it? And so I needed to step outside of the profession in order to find, ‘How have humans related to this interspace between me and the world?’ And that’s where yes, I have really deeply appreciated the teachings of Thich Nhat Han. Also, shamanism is an experiential way of experiencing a different kind of engagement and a shift in consciousness. And lately as well, in Internal Family Systems. Dick Schwartz has described the interspace between when we are really in self puts us in touch with something bigger than sort of small selves. The me and experiences can just be felt where I’m no longer the author, I’m no longer the owner of that experience. And so I’ve had… also my daughter went to a forest school and the forest school teacher (I was a… kind of city girl) in a very simple way, just asked us to sit for half an hour. We were blindfolded with a particular tree and to notice what happens in our body. And then she played the flute and we were asked to not take our blindfolds off. And there were 12 of us. And when we came back together, we, out of 12 of us eight, had this sense of there were tears flowing. And we had all sorts of psychological explanations as… that we attached to these tears. This is because….. But when she inquired further, it felt like. Like I felt personally… there were tears flowing and I wasn’t really sad. And I couldn’t quite understand that kind of phenomenological experience. I had to put it in relation to the others. And whenever the same experience happened to 8 out of 12, she reminded us that it was April and that what we didn’t know is that we were all with birch. And at that time in April, the sap is rising incredibly quickly in birch trees. And that instead of describing this as tears because of whatever… it might also have been possible that our nervous system is actually being deeply attuned to the system of the tree and that we were mirroring the tree. And for me, that was a really important experience where I realized that other than human life might deeply influence what happens with me and my body, but that I only have a psychological map for certain. And how I may misinterpret a lot of what is going on. And so I needed to go to other maps.

00:19:22 Rosemary

That makes perfect sense. If I may jump in. I was listening to another podcast that you were interviewed on, and you described the distinction between cognitive understanding and the understanding that we can get through lived experience and relationships. And what you just shared. I’m hoping…. I’m definitely going to try it. I’m going to go out with a blindfold and sit with some trees. I have lots of choice. And just that’s… It’s so simple, and yet it sounds like it was highly profound. 

You described reading about climate change as engaging our cognition. Again, it’s one of those neat, concise, clinical explanations of what’s happening, but it’s also a channel that does not allow us to actually create change, because that’s not the part of our brain that evolves and creates and grows. That we really do need to facilitate change through lived experience and relationships. And you’ve just spoken about that. I wonder, could you say a little bit more, maybe even a second example that illustrates the difference?

00:20:32 Steffi

Would you mind saying the question again so that I can definitely hear what you’re asking?

00:20:37 Rosemary

Yes, absolutely. It’s really just to offer our listeners a contrast between how we are impacted by what we take in cognitively, left brain, and what we experience, in our right brain and how. And this goes back to the old axiom, knowledge is not power, but experience can be. These days there is so much information available and we could attempt to absorb it all day, every day for the next 50 years and there’d still be more to take in. But that’s not what is going to make a difference in the world. That’s not going to create change. So I wondered if you could just amplify that contrast a little bit more.

00:21:21 Kevin

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00:22:19 Steffi

So I’d like to go back to that experience that I talked about with the tree. Because the second time she took us with a blindfold into the woods, she took us to a different tree. And because of that quite significant experience, I sat with that tree, which was, I could feel it, it was much wider. And I thought, I’m not crying, there’s something, I’m doing something wrong. And I was like… I was trying to make myself cry. And it took about 20 minutes where I had negative self-talk. Oh, I’m not attuned today…. And it took that long until I realized I’m with a different form of life here. And so there was an enormous amount of noise that was actually keeping me from engaging with what was. And it was only at the end that I became curious. What is actually happening? Not what is not happening, but what is happening. And I suddenly had this feeling of… that there was something majestic in me, a sort of rootedness and quiet strength. And so this time around, we then later found out that we were oak. And this whole exercise that she took us through was to say that very likely our ancestors did not find the medicinal properties of plants through trying to eat them and dying, but through engaging with these plants and watching how something resonates in our bodies and seeing them as alive and for us to be in communication with this ‘other-than-human’ lens. And so it’s that kind of notion, how paying attention and I think internal family systems that’s helped me enormously to notice when my cognitive part, as this lens would say, is trying to put a fragmented narrative onto the possibility for actually experiencing something to be present. And so that for me is really important because my entire education, and I don’t think just me, has been around having names for things, having explanations, going into statistics, having certainty about certain properties and being interested in that. And so the teaching for which I am deeply grateful was also that we were never to ask, ‘What’s the name of that plant and what properties does it have?’ Because that’s the first thing that we usually ask. So it was first, what’s my experience like? And then later I can add the name, the scientific name and the properties that I described in the book, and how I would describe like the… Or how I would inquire in a similar way with climate change is we are so bombarded with information. And in that line of work the information is deeply traumatizing if I allow it to really sink in and it is too much. So I know that you had Matthew Green on the podcast who also talked about trauma and journalism. We are constantly bombarded with overwhelming information and the assumption is that, almost like in a machine like way, that we will, we treat human beings as rational machines that will respond to rational information in rational ways. So noticing how something impacts is really important. And I talked about a shift of consciousness. We also speak as though it’s only human ingenuity that will be able to show us what to do. And we are of course all socialized into the very death-bringing-system that has created this crisis.me I felt like I needed to explore the kind of questions and tools that helped me to recognize that, that helped me to recognize when I am very blended with a part that has adapted to this really death-bringing-mindset. And in IFS, that is called going into self energy. So that’s a shift into right brain, right hemisphere perception where I can perceive something larger. And with that what we notice is I also start to be in touch with something that feels really selective, sacred, you know?

00:28:07 Rosemary

Thank you. May I interrupt just for a moment? Because, you know, you talked about us being bombarded by information about climate change. We’re also being bombarded by propaganda, misinformation. I’m just reflecting as I listen to you speak, to go with the guidance we get from nature, seems so much simpler than trying to sort out, is this related to colonialism? Is this related to capitalism? Is this the industrial capitalist machine directing my thinking. Is it misinformation that’s put out there intentionally? We could try to sort all that information out. We could get a robot, an AI robot on-side, and try to sift through it, or we could just cultivate this connection that you’ve spoken of. And as I listen to you speak, I just felt so much relief at that possibility, that we don’t have to rely on cognition. There is another path.

00:29:12 Steffi

I would totally agree with you. And I think that there’s two ands… One of them is, I actually tried to sum up the courage to say this in a meeting at Westminster Hall, where I was invited to be in a prep meeting for cop. I can’t even remember which COP it was. I’ve written about this in a short article. I often talk about…. We don’t have rituals and ceremonies anymore that actually help us connect with our innate capacity to sense, to send systems, and to sense what else is out there. Martin Shaw talks about the thousand shivering secrets that are on the edge of my vision. So for me to even be able to consider that what we call solutions might come to me in a dream, or might come to me on a walk, which might be an idea that is generated by the forest rather than by me, or the spirit of the land is so alien in these contexts where decisions are made about our collective future. And so it is very difficult to even speak to that, because you immediately exile yourself. So it is such a dilemma. And I described this meeting. So we came into Westminster Hall and the conversation was lively. People were talking about funny things, what they’ve done. Somebody talked about a parent that was ill. And we were relating. Then we entered and we were in this historic building that already choreographed how our bodies move through space, and what felt appropriate to say, and what didn’t feel appropriate to say. And then we got into this really imposing, beautiful meeting room where we sat around a table with microphones, and it became more and more difficult to say the things I’ve just said to you. I decided that I would try and find the moment to speak to that. And it is just so easy to just roll the eyes and go, ‘Oh, there’s this crazy lady. Let’s just nod politely and then get back to the real business.’ And so we do have rituals. We have rituals that are performed in agendas and meeting protocols. And all of that takes the life out of us. So for me, that is trauma. It’s a traumatizing ritual. And how can we actually tend to life or try and find the right conditions to keep nurturing life so that future generations have got the conditions they need, to live and to thrive? How can we do that when everything we tend to are death-bringing-rituals? And when we don’t acknowledge the power that these rituals, that… even the chairs, the way the chairs are arranged, the place where we meet, how that imposes on us. So that’s what I would say to also right hemisphere. How do I plan a meeting so that right hemisphere perception is even something that is possible to be said, to be talked about.

00:33:02 Rosemary

Excellent observations. Thank you. You’ve painted a very vivid picture. I think I was sitting in that imposing meeting room as I listened. I think Kevin has some questions, several.

00:33:13 Kevin

But I’ll try to focus my mind. It’s really interesting. Steffi, as I hear you talk, I read on your website one of the teachers that you name is Francis Weller. And I’ve just finished in the Absence of the Ordinary and recently read his book on grief, which.

00:33:29 Steffi

The Wild Edge of Sorrow.

00:33:30 Kevin

The very one. Thank you for rescuing me. Yeah, Steffi, I appreciate it. And when I hear you talk. Funny, someone that you haven’t mentioned on your website, but when I hear you talk, I hear a lot of Dan Siegel as well. Just in that idea of interrelatedness and interrelated nervous systems and interrelated neurobiology and the relationship between. I was speaking earlier today and I was saying that it’s the duality that is the illusion. That there is no difference between me and you and us and the land and us and whatever we call divinity or consciousness. It’s the duality that is the illusion. I also hear you talk, and it’s absolutely because of the lens that I’m looking through. I hear a lot of John O’Donoghue, who is one of my favorite authors, and he’s Irish, and I’m not at all biased, Steffi, I promise. And he talks beautifully about that relationship with land and with mountains and with fields and sunlight and clouds and rivers and. And then we enter this idea of grief and the lack of ritual in The Absence Of The Ordinary that Francis Weller talked about in that book. And I’d love you to talk a little bit more about that. And I don’t know whether we. And I’d love to get your thoughts on it. Are we disconnected because of the absence of the ritual and the absence of our connectedness to the land and to spirituality? For using a very broad word. Are we grieving because of that or are we grieving… Maybe we’re not even grieving because we don’t have that.

00:35:00 Steffi

I was just going to say that.

00:35:01 Kevin

Is that what’s happening? So what’s going on? That’s a big question, Steffi. What’s going on? Why are we damaging the world the way it is? The world is grieving, but is it?  Does it need to? Or…?

00:35:16 Steffi

Yeah, Beautiful. Beautiful. I like listening to just what you said. Yeah. So Francis is a very dear friend, and he was my mentor for seven years. So I’m also not biased at all. I love his work. And, yeah, I would say we’re not registering that grief, and we don’t the maps to be able to register that grief. So earth grief is something that isn’t much on the map because we’re so focused on the personal. And that’s why I don’t practice too much psychotherapy anymore, because it makes it so difficult in that frame, to have these conversations, to notice. And Francis, in The Wild Edge of Sorrow, he talks about 5 gates in grief. And one of the gates is the grief for what I expected and did not receive. And part of that is that we are born, as he says, as Stone Age Children. We have a nervous system that is so much more sophisticated, and practically from birth, with our beautiful rooms that we create for the baby to come home from hospital. So already the hospital environment. But we practice that separation. When kids go to school, they learn to fragment life into its component parts. So we go to school and we study life in geography and history and psychology and mathematics, biology, but we never learn how to put it all back together again. And so I think that we get educated into a traumatizing worldview that becomes normal. So that kind of separation and fragmentation and also the numbing that comes with that, it’s a violence. It’s a violence to life. This is not what makes life thrive, but it becomes normalized. And that’s why I’m interested in, when we talk about trauma, we often talk about my trauma. And then I have to be able to pin it down to an event or to a particular narrative. So we often don’t even have the maps to have a narrative where I say it’s all of these micro aggressions to the fabric of life that is trauma, deeply traumatizing. Or the fact that most European languages don’t have words anymore that connect me to the world. It’s either me or the world. So where we have an objectifying language and it’s impossible to use words for certain things. So I think art is so powerful because it can connect the senses in ways that make sense to most people. But when we have to describe it into words, we’re immediately within left hemisphere perception. And so I can dance, maybe my experience to a majestic mountain, or I can sing. But if I have to say why I like that mountain, I often kill the kind of depth, relational depth and majesty of… that I can feel that is real because I can feel it. But there’s already that separation in the way that modern Western languages have evolved.

00:39:06 Rosemary

Thank you. May I just jump in for one moment, Kevin? I’d like to drop in a Francis Weller quote that seems to fit here, because as you’ve spoken about the fragmentation, the categorization, the analysis, I had a picture in my mind, everyone putting things in neat little boxes, like little IKEA boxes, all labeled. However, Frances Weller said, “Grief is alive, wild, untamed, and cannot be domesticated. It resists the demands to remain passive, and still we move in jangled, unsettled, and riotous ways. And when grief takes hold of us, it’s truly an emotion that rises from the soul.” And given everything that you’ve shared, Steffi, I can’t help but think that experiencing that sort of emotion is very uncomfortable for most human beings. And that’s why we move away from grief. That’s why we push it away. That’s why we numb it, why we repress it. So I’ll just… I’ll share that and then I’ll hand you back to Kev.

00:40:10 Steffi

I totally agree, of course, with Frances, but I would like to add that grief is not the only wild emotion. Like, the same quote could be probably read for exuberance. Like everything that is wild, that isn’t within this neat, calm, composed way of relating is exiled. And so that’s my one question around Internal Family Systems. For instance, the way that in IFS we describe self, of being in self, energy is calm, is one of the eight Cs or seven… eight Cs. And so there’s a question about, is that also part of this ideal Western mindset that we need to be calm? So grief, for instance, I think is a really Undermining power. Like, can I be in self energy and be loud or be extremely challenging and actually talk from a deeply empowered way where I am in touch with self energy, but I might not behave in a way that is comfortable from Western sensitivities. And I think when we go to, for instance, African kind of rituals, there’s something enacted that is, sometimes even scary, that. That is very different from grief as a sort of quiet flowing of tears in the psychologist’s office. And often even our offices are constructed in a way where we can’t really express that wild grief because there’s the neighbors, there’s an office downstairs. And it’s this oppressive self consciousness, that grief gets expressed in a sort of very polite tear. But it’s anything that is loud that is challenging, that is exuberant and big… being in our. In our bigness.

00:42:20 Kevin

Steffi, I’m really enjoying our conversation so far. I want to champion another two Irish things for you. And again, I promise I’m not biased.

00:42:27 Steffi

Yeah, sure, bring them on.

00:42:30 Kevin

This is just popping up now, the first one as you chat. And John o’ Donoghue talks about it often. And I know Francis. I was delighted to see that Francis wrote a little bit about John o’ Donoghue in the. In The Absence Of The Ordinary. But a thing that we’re losing. But what we have here is a thing called keening. And are you familiar with that? These are women who are brought along to induce. Induce grief, to help birth it, to. To almost midwife it out of a community, which I really love the idea of. And these songs are thumped onto the ground by these witchy women that punch the ground and wheel and that expressiveness. And there’s another man, he died. He died just last year. And he was very young. His name was Mangan Manchin. And he wrote a book. And the book was called. He wrote a few books, but his last one was called Forty Words for Field. [Editing note: The actual title is,Thirty-Two Words for Field.] Because in the Irish language, in English we say a field. And we probably have a big field, a small field and a medium field. But in the Irish language, there is a separate name for whether that field has a hill, two hills, long grass, short grass, faces south, faces north, has a slope, is bobbly, is flat. None of these… we don’t say a bumpy field and a smooth field. A bumpy field and a smooth field would have two different words. And both John O’Donoghue and Mangan Manchin, in that aspect, really use the Irish language to connect us to nature, to what it is to be part of nature. And the other thing, before I ask a question of you, and it might be a little bit of a curveball question, so I’ll let you brace yourself for it, Steffi. My partner was reading a book. I can’t. Was it The Evolved Nest? Something recently anyway. And in it someone was asking, they were Amazonian tribes, about the idea of being in nature. And that the tribes said, what do you mean? And they said, going out into nature. And they’re like, what is this nature? And they didn’t even have a word in their vocabulary to describe this thing that’s out there. Because there is no thing out there. That they didn’t need a word for it. You know what, you know, we are. They couldn’t. They just couldn’t understand. Why would I describe that as another word apart from me? And I find that really fascinating. Just wanted to drop in that in and get your thoughts. And this is the curveball question, Steffi, you are welcome to refuse to answer, and we can remove the question. What about psychedelics and grief? Where do you sit with that? What’s your thoughts on that?

00:44:52 Steffi

Okay, that. Yeah, we decide what we want to leave in, generally. I’d like to…. Before I say something about that, I’d love to say something about keening. I’m so glad you brought that in. In my late 20s, I did a two year training, so my accent is German. In Germany with somebody, a Greek man called Jorgos Canacakis. And in Germany he was very well known and it was a training in grief transformation, he called it. And part of that was that he noticed that in Greek culture, as well, there was… there were keening women, but it was very similar. And what I found really striking is so they had song and dance and touch to create an atmosphere that took people down. And there’s also, I think some Gregorian chants do that as well. There’s music that is written to take people down, and to take people into… again a different form of consciousness, and that descent. So these were mostly women who were very knowledgeable about this territory and who knew the gestures and the sounds and the movements that as humans we need to make collectively to enter that place where we’re in between the worlds. And that’s when they encourage the grieving. So it was grieving into a communal space. This was not something that was meant to happen alone. But what they also knew, and I think that’s really important, is they could recognize when somebody got lost there and they also knew how to bring them back. It’s like you’re meant in that space to feel both your aliveness and your connectedness to the group container. We’re doing this together and we have each other’s backs, and we go down into the underworld and lament. And so it’s this dual capacity that was really important, so to not lose that thread, to not go off on your own into this kind of darkness and get lost there. And so they were also very trained at like, touching people. And so suddenly when somebody felt like they were dissociating, they brought community around and the singing started to be for them, and everybody was needed. So it’s like everybody matters in this. We all need to grieve together. And we can’t afford to lose each other in this. So there’s also looking out for each other, which I think is very beautiful. And that brings me then to psychedelics as well. So I personally decided not to engage on that journey and I find it really interesting. And one of my supervisors for a while with David Nutt, who in the UK is an expert in that field. So I’m really fascinated, but I’m really interested in. So I work with a person called Jonathan Horowitz, who introduced with Michael Hahner called shamanism and then very quickly split from Michael. And at Schumacher College in Devon I was so interested in these questions around what other maps are there other than psychological maps. So I wanted to find a serious, like, training. So I trusted Schumacher College and Jonathan has taught there for 15 years. And I found it really interesting. So in. In the same way as I explained about the keening women, like Jonathan explained the kind of shamanic tradition for Westerners, as a similar journey. You leave into a different realm and you need to know how to get there and you need to know how to get back. And there’s a certain etiquette. For him, one of the etiquettes is that I don’t just go there for curiosity or for the kick. I go with deep respect and humility. I ask for permission, and I go with an intention. So my intention is the vehicle because the impressions I get, and the sensations and images that come, so I enter the… I don’t know what to call it. Some might call it like the imaginal realm. And it for me doesn’t really matter what I’m touching how I describe that, the experience is very real, but it’s differs so much from the map of this consensus reality. And there needs to be a skill on how to read the experience. And so why I decided not to embark on the psychedelic journey is because I was steeped in the community where there was this ayahuasca tourism into, kind of, South America. And I felt it became a trend and that it… there was something a bit colonial extractive around it. And it was like collecting kicks. And there’s so many ways in… Into that realm. So many, sort of, European mystical traditions as well. For me, the avenue into that realm doesn’t really matter. It’s a personal choice. But the question is, who are the reliable teachers that can teach the Western mind? Because, maybe I don’t know, I’m not the right person necessarily to ask. But I suspect that if you know, and I know plenty of people who, like, then felt the need to go more and more into it needs to be into a really untouched kind of tribe where I want to take ayahuasca and I want to experience their culture and their traditions. So for me, it felt important to have somebody who’s really experienced in the extractiveness of the Western mind to help me understand my own tendency to want the kick, and to bring me back to a place of humility and… Yeah, and so there’s something really humble in connecting to nettle. Let’s find this space in the imaginal… by entering this imaginal well in my back garden, that I have just found the right way for me. Something about this land, something that is close to my home that may have a lot to teach me and tell me and to find out what are the means that I can… In the same way I learn how to interact with my dog. How can I interact with all the life and beings that are in my back garden? I don’t know if… What you make of that. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

00:52:35 Kevin

It’s really beautiful to hear you chat. Steffi. I have a good friend that says that the answer is never too far from the question. And I kind of think the same around the grief work and work that we’re doing. And I really. I totally agree with you… that the ayahuasca tourism. And there’s something about learning to grieve from the land that you’re on, beneath the mountain, beneath that field, with the people, with your community. And they may well have a way of grieving that isn’t the same as Ireland, won’t be the same as Scotland or… And Scotland won’t be the same as Italy, and Italy won’t be the same as Germany. And I think it’s important for people to understand the land that they’re of, and not want to go 600 miles into the Amazon to find a tribe that have never been met before. So I really like the idea of people doing it with their people. And that doesn’t mean we can’t interrelate and share the people doing it with their people. I have one question before maybe I hand you back to Rosemary. It’s sitting, chatting to you, Steffi, I’m fascinated by you and by your work. And then as I’m chatting to you and I’m thinking, I wonder how this goes down, this conversation goes down with Estee Lauder companies or the Saint Breeze Families Charity, or… these different conversations you will be having in different spaces when we talk about grief and land and keening and wailing and crying because the tree was creating sap and sitting by an oak. Would those sorts of conversations be welcomed in those cases?

00:54:10 Steffi

Yes, so very much not. Which is strange as well, because obviously podcasts are out there and it’s like you then think about does that kind of then turn me into the crazy lady that is unsafe to talk to? Which I did have, funnily enough and I didn’t even talk about half of the stuff that I mentioned here. I was invited to facilitate, even in the psychotherapy field, a study day. And I just talked literally about interbeing. And a few months later there was a seven page article published about me personally, not about when I said, not about climate, about me. A very personal attack and it threatens so many ideas or so many certainties. But ultimately I think we are at a time where this stuff matters. It matters greatly. And I think there are more and more people that feel that the life that we’ve been sold is actually hollowed out. And that start to feel maybe not a grief, but a melancholy. And we are in a time where we’re at sort of, it seems almost we’re in an epidemic of depression and anxiety. And people, at least in the medical sense, look for the answer again in the internal or we treat it almost as a malfunction of the system, that either needs to have some form of talking therapy thrown at it to change it or to fix it. But what if that’s the absence of meaningful relationship to something that is bigger than me? So what if that is actually this fragmentation or this sense of grief, as Francis Weller says, that everything that my nervous system is built for, all the absolutely beautiful capacity to fine tune, if that’s not used, maybe there’s a sort of shrinking and eventually I feel like my life so empty and I long for more. So I think also that in a way we need to have more courage to speak about these experiences because so many people actually have them. It’s just they don’t tell each other in case we cancel each other. So everybody keeps that in a sort of secret cupboard. And it’s not just grief. It’s also being deeply touched by the beauty of something that is just more. Yeah.

00:57:09 Kevin

Yeah. Thank you. As you were chatting there, Steffi, I was just thinking that maybe this, and I have no blind study to prove this, or, but maybe that rise in anxiety and rise in depression and rise in illness, like that is directly proportional to the reduction in the ability to grieve. And maybe those two things. And I’ve completely pulled that out of the air, so I have nothing to back that up at all. But it just seems that depression is the opposite of expression. And to grieve is to express. To be delighted by the wonder of a butterfly or a tree is also to express. And as we lose that ability to express, then maybe that’s the grip of depression. When we just can’t express that love and loss of love and exchange of love and connectedness with each other, our system just shuts down. It gets depressed or it gets anxious. It is a malfunction, but not of the individual. Of the environment that they’re trying to express themselves in or feel that they can’t express themselves in or they’re afraid to get cancelled or afraid to be the weird one or…. Yeah, that thought was just arising for me. Steffi, I have a little tradition on the Gifts of Trauma podcast and you may or may not have heard me ask people this question. I hope you haven’t. I hope it catches you by surprise. And the question is, if you had the ear of humanity and you could whisper something into the ear of humanity, what would you whisper?

00:58:41 Steffi

It does catch me by surprise. And I just spontaneously would think I would want to be silent. I think silence has enormous power and is also quite subversive to feel, and to notice. Be relational rather than do the talking.

00:59:03 Kevin

That’s really beautiful. That actually has touched me, Steffi, to hear that. I just had a mental image of rather than you whispering something into the ear of humanity, just sitting beside it with a cup of tea or something, just sitting, drinking tea, silent. Thank you. That’s really beautiful.

00:59:20 Steffi

And yeah, it’s this co-sensing that doesn’t need words.

00:59:24 Kevin

Beautiful. Steffi Bednarik, I, on behalf of myself, on behalf of Rosemary and J’aime, I want to say thank you for coming to speak to us on the Gifts of Trauma podcast from Compassionate Inquiry. Thank you. I am deeply grateful.

00:59:40 Steffi

Thank you so much for inviting me. I love the conversation.

00:59:44 Rosemary

It’s been wonderful having you here. Thank you. Steffi.

Rosemary:  Did you know that Compassionate Inquiry offers a free public blog library with over a thousand short posts written by our practitioners and facilitators? Each is only a five or six minute read and topics range from connecting with authenticity to overcoming food addictions to understanding epigenetics, rethinking drug use, CI and psychedelics, and much, much more. You can also read excerpts from podcast guests’ interviews. Tap the link in the show notes to access our helpful, enlightening and inspiring blog library. 

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