So I thought about it because Ro and I went to see Ani DiFranco appearing live in Brooklyn this week. And if you know Roey, my Gracious Badger partner, you have heard her quote Ani DiFranco lyrics because it’s all she does. No, not really. No, she has her own voice, but boy does she love the Ani. 

And who could not when you start seeing this laser intellect and this joyful dance that is Ani DiFranco’s music. It’s wha! And I’ve always really liked her, but after this concert I told Ro, “I think I’m going to have to join your religion after all” because she was incandescent, was Ani DiFranco, and she was radiant and not in a lit up on the stage kind of way. I mean that, too, but I’ve gone to a couple of things with her in it, with her there before, and each time I see her, she seems more luminous. I thought at first it was just the lights on her, but then she came down from the stage and talked to us in a dark place and she was still luminous and incandescent and I thought, “What’s going on with that?” She’s starting to shine almost visibly.

And this is not something I’ve only noticed with Ani DiFranco. I’m noticing it in our Wilder Community, in the people that show up there to gather and feed each other’s energy and love each other. I’ve noticed it among old friends who come back around and they’re suddenly 10 sizes bigger and a thousand watts brighter. 

And in the middle of the concert, Ani stopped and she said—you know, she writes, for those of you who don’t know, she’s a folk singer and an activist and she writes a lot of incredible songs, but a lot of them are protest songs that are about things that are politically or geopolitically terrible about systems that are broken and need to be fixed, about how we make positive change. So there’s kind of always been this “things are bad” and I thought, “Boy oh boy, is she going to be in fine voice tonight” because things have never been quite this bad in the US and all of y’all around the world know it. And what’s happening here is punitive to the whole—to most of the countries that you’re coming to us from and to the earth, which is our home. So it’s brutal. It’s brutal.

But in the middle of the concert, Ani stopped singing and talked for a few minutes, just a few minutes, and she said, “I know it’s weird out there, I know it’s bad, but you know what I feel? Hopeful.” She said, “It doesn’t make any sense, but I feel hopeful and I feel joyful and I feel like wonderful things are happening.” And I thought, “Oh, then she is one of us!” Because as horrifying as things are right now, it is a time to tear down, and a time to build will follow it. It is a time for things to be uprooted and new things to be planted. It’s a time of frightening, frightening changes, destructive-looking changes. And yet paradoxically in all of this madness, I feel such, such incredible, massive amounts of love, gratitude, and hope.

It’s getting so bad that sometimes I wake up in the night and I am just humming with it and I can’t go back to sleep because my body is so full of love and I don’t even know what it’s for, but it just feels like rawwwr. And it’s been all my life, but it has ramped up. I don’t know if you’re feeling it too, but I think maybe Ani DiFranco does, and that’s awesome!

So I was watching the crowd, and I kept bursting into tears because there was a resonance to the music that was shaking things up inside me. And this love that has sort of infested me lately was getting fed just huge amounts of amplitude, not just by Ani but by all the people in this huge venue in Brooklyn. It was like it used to be a steel plant or something, a steel-making plant. 

And we were off to the side because Roey, in her inimitable way, of course this was a standing concert. Everybody just went into a big room in front of a stage and stood there while the opening act came on and we waited and then Ani came and then we all stood there. But I wasn’t standing, I was sitting because of how Roey do. She’s like, “Could I get a chair for my decrepit partner? Do you not see that she is old and frail?” And I was like, “No! Don’t do this.” She got a chair too. We both got a chair. Ha ha! So who’s all frail now there, Gracious Badger?

Anyway, there were just a few people sitting down and we were on this raised dais, and I was looking out at this huge crowd of people. There must have been, I don’t know, two or 3,000 people. It is a lot. That’s a lot. You say a thousand, and you don’t realize how many that really is. It was packed. And as she’s singing and the guitar is going and the zither is going and the bass and the drums, everyone’s dancing.

It’s so packed in, they can’t do dramatic dances, but you could just see all these heads bubbling and moving, and everybody was just rocking out there in the dark looking at this shining woman. And it was like watching water boil just, and then I looked at the mezzanine level, there was a mezzanine around the back of the room and there was a railing there, and the mezzanines weren’t bubbling. 

And nobody in our area with the chairs—well yeah, we were sort of bubbling on the chairs—but I figured out after a few minutes of watching that anyone who had been given something to lean against, like the banister or the chair I had, they weren’t dancing, they were leaning. They probably were aware of their tired feet. All the people on the mezzanine had their elbows or their hands on the railing, and they weren’t moving at all.

And I thought maybe that’s why everything is being ripped apart so that we won’t have anything to lean on anymore. Because when you have nothing to lean on, the way you stay in there, the way you handle it, is you dance.

The people who were dancing didn’t look tired. They didn’t look like their feet hurt. They were alive with this electric joy, and she was dancing on the stage and the guy playing the zither who had something to lean on, he wasn’t able to really get into it. And I thought, this is—rip away our supports, go ahead, do it. Because we’re here in the music, and if we’re looking at the music and at the light that is coming in and we’ve got nothing else to lean on, we dance.

And it wasn’t a laborious dance. It wasn’t a painful, oh I gotta, like, junior high school sock hop dance. It was a physical expression of incandescent joy. And that room was so full of hope because there’s nothing for us to lean against, most of us.

So every one of us has losses, and most of us have had losses recently. They could be small things. I mean we’re losing our place of residence, and we haven’t found another place to move to yet. So there’s a time to buy a house and there’s a time to sell. And the time to sell is not now. Houses are not selling. It’s okay, we just walk forward anyway. But it means losing a lot of the familiar and beautiful things around us.

We’re all aging, we’re all watching as our youth leaves us with nothing to lean on. Many people all over this country are losing faith and all over the world are losing faith in the whole world order that ripples out of all this destruction in my country.

And these losses are terrible. Make no mistake. It is horrible to have been leaning on something, a job, a system, a way of doing things, a belief in decorum or the way people should treat each other. And to have that to see it destroyed in front of you. I don’t want anyone to deny the anguish of that. And there’s nothing right about what is happening there. There’s nothing right that deliberately hurts people. Or what do they call it in the law? Indifference. Something indifference like intense indifference, like ruthless indifference or something. I’ll remember it in a minute, but things are being destroyed deliberately and they’re being destroyed by people who just don’t care. That is not okay, all right? That is not okay.

But we can all stand together. Those of us who want to go to a place where art becomes a way of channeling our anger and our joy and our beauty, where poetry and togetherness and community come to catch us and hold us together. The shared joy in a certain song, the beauty of standing on your aching little feet for five hours at a time so that someone can come in and move the whole crowd into dance—except for those who still have something to lean against—I thought, “Okay, okay, then I’ll walk into the unknown with nothing to lean on and I’ll find a way to dance.”

And sometimes that way to dance is to curl up and sob. And sometimes the way to dance is to jump up and down and wave your fists and say, “F the patriarchy!” or whatever is your jam. And sometimes it’s just to throw your arms around someone you love and tell a good joke and laugh together. Sometimes it’s listening to music, sometimes it’s making music, sometimes it’s searching. 

“There’s a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak.” And there’s always a way that we can turn that into a joyful community, connecting, expressing what is still absolutely, obdurately the hope in our hearts.

One thing autocrats hate is beauty. And a community that loves beauty in any form—oooh, that is sedition. That is the one thing historically that is most toxic to an autocracy. Just sayin’. Not all of you are living in autocracies. I want us to be prepared.

And certainly the world will take things from you, and when it does and you’ve got nothing to lean on, find people who will gather with you and dance. There is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn, says Ecclesiastes, and a time to dance.

This is a time to mourn. This is a time, some people are writing about what they’re going through. And I will pray for you now, those of you who are writing in, and I will go straight from this broadcast and figure out something I can do. That’s part of the dance as well, that we find the people who need us and we become part of the force that heals.

So this is an insane divine optimism operating in a dark place and shining a bright light on hope and inviting you to the dance.

Now, I was going to do some questions now. We’re going to do the Stillness, Silence, and Space meditation, and then I’ll answer some questions as is our usual practice.

All right. What I’d like you to do is imagine yourself in a dark empty room like a big cave or a huge steel factory that has been emptied out and you’re there in the dark by yourself and you can feel the echoes around you. And you can’t see your hand in front of your face, it is so dark and so cold.

And I want you to acknowledge that that is what is happening to this body you’re in right now. Even though it’s not, we’re imagining it, but keep imagining it. And then, imagine that somehow, even though you can’t see or hear anything, there are other presences moving into the space, appearing beside you, all around you, hundreds, thousands, filling the spaces. 

And there in the dark you can know for certain without any physical evidence that you are surrounded by something, someones who love you and who are right in it with you. They are right in it with you. They do not look away from your suffering. Not for one iota, not for one millisecond. They are right there. And they are saying, “You are a hero to walk into the dark at a time like this, to be born and alive in a time like this.”

But you are not alone. There are other humans and there are things not human. There are things physical and there are things metaphysical. There is a time to feel the walls holding you up. And there is a time to feel that spirit is holding you up.

Drop into that and ask yourself the trigger question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Can I imagine the distance between the top of my head and my sitting bones, my pelvis? Can I move my attention slightly away from the tiny bits of matter in those atoms and into the space which fills the atoms, most of them, the vast bulk of the space inside my body? Can I imagine the space inside my body? Can I imagine that space connecting me with hundreds, thousands, millions of others who are also in the dark place but can feel you, feel me, here?

And let’s breathe for one another as we ask ourselves: Can I imagine the stillness in which all of this is occurring and the silence through which sound travels? And can I shift the focus of my attention for these few minutes away from the physical and into the space, the silence, and the stillness alive and loving me, unperturbed by my anguish and deeply, deeply empathetic to it and sure that I’ll be okay? Can I imagine it? Can I imagine the others listening now?

Space, silence, stillness. And as T.S. Elliot said, there would be nothing without the still point. There would be no dance without the still point. And the dance is everything.

So feel your energy willing to dance through the worst things you can imagine. And find out who you are in space, silence and stillness. It’s much more real than the physical body you may think of as yourself.

Question: “Why is it so difficult to leave hope and optimism and go to cynicism? I know negative things grab our attention and feed the good wolf, it’s just confounding sometimes to feel despair.”

It’s not actually confounding to feel despair, sweetheart. It is absolutely understandable, inevitable that we will sometimes feel despair, that we will slide into cynicism because we don’t have physical proof that we’ll be okay going forward. We only have physical proof that everybody seems to die, and that will probably include us. And we don’t have any proof that death is not a catastrophe. So I believe we came into this condition for the express purpose of having nothing to lean on because physical life looks so real to a person living in a physical body.

So what I would say is don’t judge your despair. Don’t try to keep it at arm’s length or minimize it or not talk about it. Let it be spoken. It is the absolute clear voice of defiance and anguish and depression and despair that is as luminous as a bouncy happy song. 

I was talking to my daughter and said, “I think I may have to join your religion with the Ani DiFranco stuff.” And she goes, “Yeah, nobody has written a song that so beautifully expresses depression as Ani DiFranco’s song ‘Gray.'” She said, “I love it, but I can’t listen to it because every single time it triggers deep depression.” It is such a vivid, vivid description of that not-vivid state. So all of us get to sing out, scream out, dance out whatever we’re feeling, and the despair is the fuel for its opposite. Despair when it’s metabolized by spirit turns into unshakable hope.

The fetal child curled in the corner when he or she can open up, or they, and scream their pain and beg for help in the space of the divine, that is what calls forward the things that come to heal us. There is a time to mourn, and there is a time to dance. Never leave your mourning out of the equation. That’s just soul murder.

Okay, question: “How might I apply your work of Steering by Starlight and The Way of Integrity, dreaming, and the star charts manifesting to help stay guided? Tips from Whole Brain Living?”

This is a person clearly familiar with a great body of work and some of you might not know what that’s all about. The Whole Brain Living is Jill Bolte Taylor’s wonderful book that came out a couple of years ago, and Steering by Starlight and The Way of Integrity are books that I wrote. And the essence of I think all of that work, the one thing that all those books of mine and Jill’s have in common is that all of those say the despair is not the end point. The despair is not the perspective that tells the true story. The perspective that tells the true story has its anchor in parts of the brain and the psyche that interconnect with spirit that see through the veil that hides the metaphysical from our perception. And without that, we are really wrecked. 

When Jill Bolte Taylor lost a lot of her left hemisphere to a terrible stroke, she still had in her right brain hemisphere an absolutely clear understanding that she was an energy field in a universe of energy fields connected from the ends of the universe somehow into this tiny physical body. She said it was just bizarre, but it was the right side of her brain that could hold it. And we have a culture that pushes us into the left hemisphere of the brain.This is what my last book was about, Beyond Anxiety.

So we have to get that perspective—the metaphysical, the connected, the creative—that needs to be the headquarters of operations when we go to define our purpose in life. If you want to read Iain McGilchrist’s book The Master and His Emissary, it’s brilliant and it talks about how the part of the brain that experiences meaning, love, connection, creativity, curiosity, courage, all those things, it sends out the anxious left side of the brain to go and get data about words and numbers. And the left side of the brain is supposed to report back while leaving the right hemisphere’s sense of meaning in the seat of prominence to anchor the psyche. And the problem with our culture is it cuts off, it cuts us off from our sense of meaning and pushes us more into despair.

And that is not innate to you. It is something you have been taught to do your whole life to the point where you think this is what it’s like to live, this is what it’s like to think, to feel. It is not! There is a time to grieve that you’ve had to live that way. And when you grieve out loud and then you move to another song, you will find yourself dancing. You will find yourself stronger because you have found a way out of the apparent nightmare into the seat of knowing that is deepest inside your being. And from there, everything is always okay no matter what. Even in spite of the horrors, as they say.

Correction to question one: “Phrased that wrong. Why is it easy to leave hope behind and go to cynicism?” Yeah, I got that. I figured it out.

Question: “I still don’t really believe I can get back there. Please help.”

All right, babies. I felt this today and yesterday and the day before. First of all, don’t think that, I mean there probably are people that never feel despair and cynicism and horror and dread looking at what’s happening in the world. But this I know: You can get back. You can get all the way back to peace. 

So let’s start, and I’m going to use a little mnemonic that I heard from Anita Moorjani, an amazing spiritual teacher who had a radical near-death experience after dying of cancer, riddled with tumors, had a near-death experience, came back into her body, and within nine days, the tumors had all melted and she was cancer free. And she told me, “Here’s how you can get back from despair when you slide into it again.” Even after you’ve had your eyes wide open, even after intense spiritual experiences, it can still happen. We’re still in these bodies and they do that. A time to mourn and a time to dance. 

So this is what she said, “Feel what you’re feeling as horrible.” You can’t feel joy and gratitude in that moment that you’re fully processing it. What you can do is say, this is how I’m feeling in this precise moment. So I do a meditation where I say, with every in breath I say, “I allow this moment to be as it is.” And as I breathe out, I say, “I surrender my resistance to everything in the world being as it is right now.” So we can do that. I call it the Surrender/Allow meditation.

So breathe in: “I allow the universe to be as it is right now.” Breathe out: “I surrender my resistance to everything in the universe being as it is right now.” And then right now is gone. So by accepting it, by allowing it, you didn’t stop yourself from acting, you just found a place in it. So once you can get to that surrendered place where you can accept this moment being as it is, then you can go into peace. From surrender, you can go to peace. “All right, this is horrible and I’m going to sit with it. Yes. I’m meant to live in peace.”

And once you get to peace, you can start to feel gratitude. I felt the tiniest bit of relief: “Oh God, I’m grateful for that. Grateful, grateful.” You can go to gratitude. Once you’re in gratitude, you can go to appreciation. “I’m so grateful for this moment of release. I’m so grateful for this moment looking at the names and little faces of all the wonderful people on this Gathering Room call. I can appreciate this. I can be glad it’s happening to me.” And from there, you can often get to joy. You may have to write a lot of songs to get all the way through it.

Since we’re over time, I’m going to stop doing questions now because I want to just finish the meditation again.

Go back into the dark room where you can stand there just feeling space, silence, and stillness and knowing that there are beings all around you who love you. And then imagine everyone on this call, about 144 people right now, suddenly are there with you in the dark room. You still can’t see anything. 

But then the lights go on, and we’re standing together. And there are people on the stage who are feeling wild with hope and art and beauty. And the music starts and it shakes your sternum and it’s gorgeous. And everyone starts to dance right in the middle of the worst place ever.

Mourn and dance. There’s a time for it. Don’t lean against things. You don’t need them. There is only the dance. I love you. Bye.