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Transcript

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Pema: So I lived in Portland, Oregon. My dad reached out to say, what is going on with these riots on the ground in Portland? And I said, oh my gosh, I’m so happy that you’re asking me that question. When does my dad ever ask me a question where he wants my opinion like that? And so I said, well, here is what I’m seeing.

Here’s what I’m reading. These all vary a little bit, but I, I’m really appreciating hearing people’s voices from the ground. In fact, I live nearby. I can hear it from my house. And so I shared with much earnestness, like, here’s what I’m hearing, here’s what I’m seeing. And a couple days later, my dad put out this like well thought out essay that completely dashed all of my experiences and, uh, had a hard hitting opinion.

Dismissing all those, all those, um, not protesters, but all those rioters.

Tania: I think that’s so important to think about what happens when somebody doesn’t validate, but not only doesn’t validate ’cause you’re talking about a step beyond that. Like, you shared a perspective and then your dad put out there something that just dismissed your perspective, it sounds like.

Pema: Yeah. Yeah. That’s what happened in that scenario.

Tania: Welcome to, Ready To Be Strong. I’m Tania Israel.

Pema: I’m Pema Rocker. Together, we’re broadening our minds, opening our hearts.

Tania: And strengthening connections in a politically charged election season and beyond.

Pema: We want you to feel informed, empowered, and optimistic.

Tania: We want you to feel ready to be strong. In this episode, we’re talking about broadening our minds. I. If we let in somebody else’s perspective, sometimes it can feel like it threatens our stance that we are trying to take about something. So I’m wondering, like your dad might have felt like, okay, you shared all this stuff and he like, for him to integrate all of that into his understanding of it, he probably wouldn’t have been able to write as clear an essay, you know about it. So it complicates things. It sometimes makes it harder for us to sort of put out there. We’ve got this clear narrative about that, like what happens if there’s another clear narrative.

What do we do with that other way of thinking about it? And so often what we do is just think, oh, well we’re right and we have to diminish this other way of thinking. And I guess what I have been trying to practice is saying, okay, I have this way of thinking. Let me really, really try to understand this other way of thinking and hold space for it but, still hold space for my view of things. You know, that it, that it doesn’t have to be that one of us is right and the other is wrong. It can be that here are two different perspectives on this. Here’s two different takes on it. And for me to understand only my own perspective, that that’s actually not useful.

It’s not empowering it, it might help to protect me. But only because I am holding off all of the other possibilities. And I, I tend to think it takes some energy for us to do that, you know, to, to hold off all the other ways of thinking and to, to diminish all the other ways of thinking. But I’ve been sort of enjoying thinking about those other ways of thinking as enhancing my understanding rather than threatening it.

Pema: I grew up a queer kid in a conservative Christian community. When you tell me I need to broaden my mind and listen to others’ perspectives, I think I have a lifetime of experience in doing that, but that I am exhausted by it and I have a deep need for others to listen to me finally, at least a little bit.

And yet as I read the material, I think my mind is not broad at all. So what do we do when it feels like this is a responsibility that we’ve been carrying a long time?

Tania: Oh, Pema, thank you for sharing that. I, um, am guessing you’re not the only one who feels that way. Who feels like, really? Do I have to broaden my mind? Because it sounds like you’re feeling invalidated.

Pema: Yeah, I feel like I’ve had a, a long, uh, experience in getting invalidated, feeling invalidated, dismissed, closeted, oppressed. I’ve spent a long time thinking about how others feel so that I can feel safe in their presence. I’ve spent a long time broadening my mind and trying to get on the other side from the way that I actually feel so that I can be in the same tribe, and I have since spent a lot of time broadening my mind.

It’s simply to be in conversation and a relationship.

Tania: Yeah, so it sounds like you feel like you’ve had to tuck away your views in order to accommodate, and so you’ve been spending a lot of time trying to understand where other people are coming from just for your own safety and maintaining connections.

Pema: Yeah, definitely. I love my family and community. It’s not that I don’t want to hear where other people are coming from. There’s just something missing in, in feeling, hey, can you understand for a second how, where I’m coming from and my experience and how that adds to the picture? Before we then skip into, let me broaden my mind and listen to you some more.

Tania: Yeah, so maybe that’s where this process, being an internal one rather than an interactive one is important to think about. I think often when we are feeling vulnerable, either within our family systems or because of our marginalized identities, it makes it very hard for us to acknowledge that there might be another perspective that would be helpful for us to hear because we are staking our identities and our security on validating our rightness, that we have to believe that our way of viewing things is valid.

And the thing I’ll say about broadening our minds is it’s not about invalidating our own perspective, it’s about recognizing the validity and the convictions that we have, and at the same time recognizing that if that’s the only thing that we can understand, then it actually disempowers us.

Pema: It’s like taking a little spoonful of medicine, like, okay, I absolutely get that and let’s swallow it and let me learn what it’s gonna do for me and the people I care about.

Tania: Well, let me ask, rather than just swallowing a pill, that’s medicine. This sounds terrible. Let’s try bringing those feelings into our conversation. This is a conversation about broadening our minds, but perhaps we can’t do that if we’re not also attending to the feelings that we’re having around it. So I’m just gonna invite us this episode and beyond, to be honest and be vulnerable in this conversation and to bring in all of that challenge, that internal turmoil and resistance that we might be feeling to this.

Pema: Your invitation feels like medicine in a different way. It feels like a balm.

Tania: I feel like you know, having just talked about resilience, a lot of what I say about resilience has to do with, you know, how we understand where these emotions come from. I talk about tribal politics and this is how our brains developed and the evolutionary legacy of some of how we see other people as threatening and how we are protective of ourselves and our people.

That knowledge doesn’t necessarily serve as a, as a salve for, you know, people’s emotional pain that they’re feeling around all of this. And reactivity is not only something to be gotten rid of. Like, I don’t know that the feelings, you know, that, that the best approach to conflict is a dispassionate stance.

So, I mean, I think it’s worth, and, and, you know, in a Meyers-Briggs way,  I’m a thinker, Pema, I’m guessing you’re a feeler. Just a guess.

Pema: With bells on.

Tania: So I think it’s useful to sort of say, how do you not only understand what’s going on and have tools and strategies, but how do you feel your way through, uh, this division in our society?

Pema: I notice I keep talking about feelings, but also I say it like that. We’re gonna talk about feelings as if it’s any less than talking about thinking or understanding our way through, and it, it feels like our reactivity comes from feeling maybe as much as it does from thinking.

Tania: This is the big debate in psychology. I mean, I don’t know if it’s still the big debate, but uh, you know, does the way we think about things direct how we feel about them? Or do we have these feelings first and then our thoughts are just making sense of the feelings? So.

Pema: And I, I, I appreciate that question. And also it, it only goes so far, you know, like we do all live together and we do have predominant thinkers and predominant feelers. It doesn’t negate, you know, my feeling doesn’t negate your thinking and vice versa. But as I say that, I realize, oh. I kind of want it to sometimes, and arguments that I hear on a political level kind of want that too sometimes.

Also, having said that, it makes me think about being a teenager and how, yeah, my feelings really should matter here. You might be being a protective parent, but I have feelings that you’re not recognizing.

Tania: Yeah. Yeah. And you wanna have your feelings validated. And, and all I’m doing in this, in everything we’ve done so far, is to be like, well, I know that there are these feelings, but here’s where they come from evolutionarily, and they’re not particularly adaptive, and they’re not helping you to achieve your goals. But yeah, I can see where that’s, that, that’s, that’s not gonna land for everybody. You know? Like it’s not, it’s not just all about like, oh, well if that’s not gonna achieve my goals as an ally and advocate, then I will just change my feelings.

Pema: Tania, sometimes I think of you and me like the Indigo girls, um, because Emily’s music is like really, um, pretty, and it’s like, uh, you can see it and feel it in this really pretty kind of way. And then Amy is just like hard driving and really like deep.

Tania: Fierce.

Pema: Yes. Yeah. So I’d be like, yeah, Tania’s really got this, like driving thinking and I’ve got this like, oh, but what about if we feel like this?

Tania: And,

Pema: Um, yeah.

Tania: I saw the Indigo Girls two days ago. Uh, they were here in Santa Barbara on Saturday night. I think that that’s an amazing metaphor for what we’re talking about, which is that the beauty of the Indigo Girls is that combination of the like, like deep kind of strong undertone that Amy brings, and then Emily’s, you know, her lightness and her and her flowiness. Yeah, I think that that is important that we have the brain and the heart in this.

Pema: You know, I had a book release party. It’s, it was really much quainter than it sounds. There were just a handful of us, and the book is about grief and it came from a really deep place. And so when it came out, I, when it, you know, arrived, I was so excited to share it and celebrate that it’s finally here, but there felt like there was something missing.

Like I can’t just be like, hoorah everybody. This book is here and it’ grief and how do we, um, experience it individually and collectively, like, oh, so at this gathering, I invited people to come celebrate with me that the book is here and to honor the book itself, like. Wow, this is its own entity. There are, there’s my voice in it.

There are many other people’s voices in it who also experienced grief and tell the stories, and I asked people to come and if they were willing to share, uh, at, at the point where we like gathered to tell stories, willing to share something they’re celebrating and something they’re grieving. And that conversation made us kind of brought to the surface like, oh look, you experience grief in that way.

I experience it in this way. Another person on the couch over there experiences it in this different way. And hearing it all told together in this one evening makes me recognize that all the ways we experience grief are helpful to understand. It kind of makes a whole that I didn’t have a few hours before, you know, a whole A-W-H-O-L-E, a whole experience of other people’s experiences.

Tania: I, I love that. You know, and you’re so good at drawing out stories because I think you know, the thing about all the stuff we’re talking about is, it’s really complex and just kind of a single dimension approach to it. You know, and I talk in the book about like resistance to, uh, to intellectual humility and resist, you know, ’cause people do resist doing all these things that I so logically lay out and very convincingly say, these are the steps that we need.

Like, you’re feeling distressed. Great. Like, here’s all the answers. And so then I think, well, why would people not just wanna do those? But probably the, the greatest thing that I learned in, like in the first book that I did and all the conversations I had with people about like, why they’re not using these great dialogue skills that I, um, articulated for them, is that people have— people are complicated. They have more than one want. Like they might want to maintain a relationship, but they also want to have their feelings validated. You know, they might want to persuade somebody, but they also like wanna lose their cool sometimes and not keep a lid on it. And so those feelings want expression and want validation. So I think it’s a great question of how do we then make a place for those feelings and, and allow them, and not necessarily let them lead us to places that we, that we don’t wanna go.

Pema: So, make me go to values that I don’t uphold. I remember in a story party that I had one time, a woman shared her experience of the years that she spent living in a country outside the US that has a culture of having servants. She’s like, whoa, this is a different experience for me. And I was here for a number of years and I learned the way that this works,

It’s just a, a matter of that’s what this culture is and this is what you gotta respect. And I am in a position of having servants. And then therefore, what’s that relationship like between me and the people who work in my house and everyone listening to the story, you could hear a pin drop. Everyone was agog, and you could watch on people’s faces, the opinions we all had about her as this story continued, she was open and vulnerable. She talked about the way that she made mistakes. She saw her power change, like the way she expressed her power change over time. And we were all just like, are you kidding me? That’s who you were. And then the story came to an end with us understanding like, oh my gosh, that’s, that’s the way your behavior changed over time.

And we ended in an understanding of her experience, but the experience of the listening crowd as she shared vulnerably in this experience that wasn’t gonna be any other way until she learned about herself and about herself in this culture. It was humbling to feel in ourselves, our own judgments coming out as she was talking and then to reckon with them when it was over it, it brought us together, it brought the room together.

It was remarkable.

Tania: That’s so beautiful. Thank you so much, Pema, that there’s so much there. You know, the, the piece about this woman sharing her experience and being able to do it within the context of storytelling. If you just had everyone go around and say like, oh, like say whether or not you’ve ever had servants, you know, and all you knew about her is that she was like, yes, I had servants.

Then like there’s all kinds of things that people put on that. But then when she was able to give that whole context and share that from her own experience and like what she puts on it and and hear more about the nuance and depth to it, then I’m guessing people’s reactions, the feelings that people were having toward her and about that might have changed, might have softened.

That’s part of what perspective taking is, you know, perspective taking is really about, okay, here’s, here’s somebody else, like maybe I know, like this small slice of something about them that I’m reacting to. What if I try to deepen that and complexify that into a full human experience? Then how do I feel about it?

Like if I really try to get into their experience and into their shoes, how, how might that change my reaction?

Pema: You know, taking into consideration that storyteller in the party who talked about servants and was so available to sharing with us, it helps me to process what you’re positing like, Okay? Yep. Okay. I’ve had this experience where her story did not threaten me. It threatened some things that, like some beliefs that I had that I didn’t even know that I had, that I was carrying around, but those stakes weren’t high.

What about when the stakes feel really high?

Tania: Yeah, I mean, I feel like the place where I’m feeling that the most these days is around Israel, Gaza. There’s an extraordinary episode of A Braver Way, which is a podcast put out by Braver Angels. I, I love this podcast. Monica Guzman’s doing an incredible job, helping to bridge divides through it. But she had an interview with a college student who had sort of accidentally started a kind of texting hotline where people could ask their questions about Israel and Gaza, and people have so many questions.

They don’t feel like they can ask them anywhere. ‘Cause to even ask a question, people feel like they don’t know the language to ask the question. People feel like asking a question even shows some level of ignorance that it’s like we’re not supposed to have, we’re supposed to have like learned all of this and know all of these things.

S,. I love that there was an anonymous way, then, for people to be able to ask their questions. Anyway, I encourage everybody to go listen to it. We’ll make sure we put the link in the show notes, but I, I think that it really speaks to, again, we’re not necessarily going to benefit from dialogue initially around this.

I, I feel like throughout this, um, podcast so far, I keep sort of holding us off from talking about dialogue. You know, it’s like, yes, there’s new stuff, but no, we’re not gonna talk about talking to people who have different news sources. We’re not gonna talk about, um, you know, uh, how we interact with people who we have these prejudices, these cognitive biases against.

And part of that is because we are not strong yet. We’re ready to be strong. We have work to do to fortify ourselves to be able to skillfully and courageously navigate the challenges of living in a divided nation. But we do not have all of that yet.

Pema: I feel like a pause is, um, needed in order to take all of that in and to, to be with what’s here right now in this conversation. But also, uh, the, the global scale and, and in the Middle East.

Tania: People have been asking me like, oh, are you, you know, what are you doing around the Israel Gaza stuff? Like, I do all this work on bridging divides, and I, I didn’t wanna touch it for. While, like, I was like, I don’t feel like, um, I know what to do here and, and doing anything feels too hard. Um, and, and not sufficient.

And I finally, you know, eight months into, you know, eight months after October 7th was, you know, other campuses were asking me to do things and I was like, okay, I have an idea for what to do. So what I’ve done a couple of times now is to offer a program that really centers intellectual humility, um, in terms of the Israel, Gaza, um, war.

And I call it, What Am I Missing? And I start by identifying the things that narrow our view. I. It’s a lot of things that you and I have talked about. You know, it’s, it’s the media that we’re consuming. It’s how we’re engaging with social media. It’s the cognitive biases that we have, recognizing the ways that our view may be limited, and then how do we broaden our view and how do we bring in curiosity and the question that I’ve been putting out there is, what am I missing? So rather than putting our ideas out there to say, here are my ideas, here’s why you should believe this, or, here are my ideas. This justifies my actions or my perspective to say, here are my ideas. These are the limitations of my understanding of this. What am I missing? Like, what can you tell me that’s not within that understanding, And I actually decided this was not a time for dialogue. Um, I know that that’s where I started my work on bridging divides, and that’s what a lot of us are doing. But I thought, you know, we’re not in a place to do dialogue with this issue.

Um, because in order to do dialogue, we have to come in with curiosity, with an interest in understanding where someone else is coming from, and there’s some foundation that we need to lay before we can do that around this issue. So I’ve done this. A number of times, and what I found is that when the very, very neutral description of the program goes out, there is reaction to it.

Um, that when people see any written statement, even if it’s to say we’re inviting people in to a conversation or to a program, but. It’s not gonna use words that everybody agrees on. It’s, you know, if it’s very, very neutral. It’s too neutral for some, and so there’s pushback and there’s reaction. And then I’ve gone ahead and done the program anyway.

And in the program, people like, have an experience where they can recognize where they’re limited and start to put their ideas out there. But then in the way of saying, what am I missing? Like, here’s the way I’ve been thinking about it. Like, what, what else is there? And then to not have somebody answer that.

But to have somebody else then say, here’s the way I’ve been thinking about it, and what am I missing? And to not try to fill in those gaps for each other, but to try to create a sense of wanting to know, and that’s as far as you can get in a 90 minute program, I think. But then, and I think people then have to sit with that and work with that individually, probably before we’re ready to have dialogue.

Pema: I mean, uh, what comes to mind now is what if we move from these beautiful points with simply the question, what am I missing? And let it stay there until our next conversation where we’re discussing more of this material.

Tania: Yeah,.

Pema: I dunno, that feels really poetic.

Tania: I love the idea of leaving. listeners and ourselves with this question of what am I missing? And to try it on and see how that might just be with us, in this coming week.

I’m Tania Israel, professor, psychologist, and author of Facing the Fracture.

Pema: I’m Pema Rocker, creative coach and author of Ash and Spirit.

Tania: Make your choice.

Pema: Are you ready to be strong?

Pema: Ready To Be Strong was created by me, Tania Israel,

Tania: And me, Pema Rocker.

Tania: And edited by Haley Gray. Our theme music is by Jeff Mercel at Premium Beat. 

Pema: Bring this conversation into your circles. Rate and review the show wherever you’re listening. And most importantly, share this episode with a friend.