I'd like to begin here by offering a tremendous thank you to Shanti O'Connor for connecting me to Becky. We came so close to missing this incredible conversation due to some electronic mail complications, but we managed to recover and I'd say we are all better for it — all, in this case, being you and me and Becky, too. I met Becky at her home in Sisters and she intercepted me outside as I approached her driveway. We immediately went for a short walk to the Wychus Creek, which winds it way through the trees at the end of her street. We talked at length on its bank and chatted about the creek and its eddies as a metaphor for life.
I don't fully understand — or maybe it's just that I don't have the most efficient language for it — but there is an almost immediate connection when I meet certain people. And that connection allows for vulnerability and sincerity in a unique and rare way — a way that I don't witness all that often in my daily routines. Perhaps it's a recognition of openness or a spirit-to-spirit (whatever that means to you) vibration. I suppose we all may have different words for it. At any rate, whatever it is and whatever you call it, it was there with Becky.
We carried our conversation back to her home and we sat in her kitchen over a cup of delicious and nourishing tea while we prepared to record. I am so happy to offer you that portion of our time together here, but I wish that you could have witnessed our entire exchange. It was full — full of sharing and learning and some laughing and crying. Times like this one continue to amaze me. This connection continues to inspire me. Our capacity for relationship and listening actually maybe be the only thing that inspires me. Our connection with another is the most powerful thing I've encountered and the joy I experience from any other thing doesn't come close to touching it. Thank you so much, Becky, from the bottom of my heart, for meeting me, seeing me, hearing me, and sharing with me.
BC: On a conventional level, I'm Becky Conner. I'm a somatic psychotherapist, a rolfer, a trauma-integration specialist — very connected to Earth-based spirituality and contemplative practices. And on a spiritual level, I'm none of that.
ACT: What concerns you about the state of the world and humanity right now?
BC: My main concern is collective-field trauma. Growing up and then professionally and psychologically and spiritually, my whole life has been dedicated to trauma and unwinding trauma. I grew up in different countries in the world and different parts of the United States and grew up in a very traumatizing family unit. And then I've spent my whole life seeking forms and knowledges and systems and cultures to unwind trauma, both within myself and looking at social paradigms.
Walking on this soil in Central Oregon — all the collective trauma of the Native Americans that have been decimated under our feet and the basic frozen encapsulation of that. And the trauma of inequality and denial. On one level, denial is a very important function, but on another level, we need to move through it. And I feel living in Central Oregon with the enormous level of inequality here and lack of understanding of why it is all white — the racist history of Bend, the racist history of Oregon. There are people alive today in Warm Springs that were taken from their families and put in schools and had their hair cut and had their language stripped from them and raped — that's just in recent times. So, I just feel like all of that needs to be addressed in compassionate containers, but [without being] afraid to face all the shadow emotions as well as the download of the collective wisdom that holds us. So, I'm very passionate. It's my vocation. Everything about me is towards that and for that, both within me and around me.
ACT: Do you have a sense of why or where that came from — how that became such a part of you?
BC: Yeah, just surviving in my family of origin from the get-go. And then growing up in all different cultures at the same time experiencing my family's total abusive craziness, basically. And they were fed with the understanding of their paradigm of increasing wealth. It was fed by a lot of different things, but it's also tied in with the birth of this country and their family lineages and what was expected of their family lineages — my heritage — to take over this country. Land grab at the expense of people that still translates in terms of money and growth at the expense of people and human dignity. But I had also the good fortune of living and breathing in Asia — growing up through that and different parts of this country, like in the South when Martin Luther King was shot. I got to go to school during integration, during the riots, so I felt my little nervous system as a kid was wired also to observing the social, feeling the social trauma. Then being in Asia while Cambodia was being carpet-bombed by me, by my American roots. Being in that field growing up. So, I was born into it, I guess.
ACT: What do you people mean to you?
BC: You, sitting here — if you don't mind I'm going to actually join our bodies [here Becky reaches her foot to touch mine] — and us being able to speak at this level is grounding. And I don't feel alone and I don't feel as isolated. And the honor that you can actually feel what I'm feeling is neurologically the we — the neurobiology of we. Our nervous systems are sharing this moment, speaking, and these fractions of belonging that have occurred through us and our humanity. You, as a human that I have just met, are holding together... we are holding these difficult subjects. I couldn't do it without you in this moment. But it's also that you're so available. Your eyes are soft. You're feeling the collective pain. And this vulnerability is what it takes to unwind the fractures. If we can do this for each other a lot more it will begin to open these hard shells that have wounded our sense of belonging. And we can really create true belonging.
ACT: I've defined community as our relationships to one another and the world we live in. And most people I speak with place their relationships as paramount. Considering that, why are we struggling so much with equality, equity, racism, the phobias, greed, selfishness, etc.?
BC: Community is not just people-centered. It's also non-people, like the air, the trees, the food, our ancestors' voices, all the beings that have gone before us, the beings that haven't yet — both human and non-human, plant and animal. This is the community. And I feel that sometimes when we're so wrapped in fear — we don't know it's fear, but there's an emptiness inside — there's a grasping into another human that just sort of placates that anxiety. In one way, yeah, I feel better that I'm joined in with all these humans and we're experiencing community. But there's also a longing for a deeper connection in which life comes from and informs us. And I feel like there's a lot of fear in people to acknowledge the full depth and breadth of what we are actually related to. Because it would mean surrendering our rational understandings and our control. And there might be painful things that emerge.
I've lived in intentional communities. I've been been a big part of communities. But I also feel like the reciprocity of contemplative, intimate connection with the non-human community can inform a deeper part of our soul that then can come on back out into the people relationship and kind of notch it up a bit — notch up the level of consciousness a bit. So that we're not just spiraling on the same frequency of basically anxiety and fear and and then reaching out and grabbing for another to help. That's a good thing — to reach out for another to help us — but I just feel like there's a demand for the next level of consciousness to emerge. And I think part of that is availing our nervous systems to be informed by, like the Native people would say, all of our relations — whether it's past, present, or future, animal, human, or ancestor. We're in a field; we're in a stream — that's available to us. That's community.
ACT: Instead of hoping for a better future, do you think we will accept responsibility and take the necessary actions to work for a better future?
BC: I had the good opportunity to practice with the Dalai Lama for a while. And I've heard other spiritual teachers at Spirit Rock also say this in the Buddhist contemplative practice. I've also heard people in the Catholic contemplative practice — the mystics; all religions have a mystical branch. And I've heard different people say that it only takes fifteen percent of a population group to transform, to send that yeast — that fermentation — through the whole collective. I personally can't imagine a hundred percent of the population taking responsibility for inner work — which I think is necessary for transformation to occur — but there's a part of me that might think maybe there's fifteen percent around the world, especially now with the internet and the dire straits upon us — the pressure. It's almost like the birthing pressure and there might be fifteen percent that would be willing to take a deep dive.
But I am encouraged by people like Charles Eisenstein that are willing to speak against this stream and Thomas Hübl and others that are speaking against the stream and presenting new paradigms of economy and livelihood. So, they give me hope. My teacher and Jared's teacher, Thomas Hübl, also says that we are walking forever. Each one of us here on this planet also has the knowledge of all beings that have ever lived — animal and plant and marine and human. That's a lot of life force that's encoded in our DNA. So, we have all that wisdom and knowledge and all those breaths that have been breathed and exhaled in us. And if we're walking forever, even if this paradigm changes drastically, I do tend to align with Thomas Hübl in thinking that it is a forever commitment. So, what we do even in a conscious sipping of a tea has a hologram effect. For me, it's about invoking wholeness and mind/body synchronicity. And for me, it's a lot of healing my felt-sense trauma and my felt-sense trauma of the collective by actually going through the process of feeling the pain, feeling the anger, feeling the neurological contractions change, bearing witness to other people in their transformation and their courage to face the shadow and the light.
ACT: Fifteen percent is like a billion people.
BC: Maybe it's ten (big laugh).
ACT: Do you have a sense of purpose?
BC: Yeah, my purpose for unwinding trauma — my own and collective — is to be so available to the streaming of the divine. It's not that it's not happening with the trauma in there, it's just that I'd be able to perceive it a lot clearer. I just want to be be this big being of light and love and compassion and able to be with people. So that my container is so big because I've faced myself so strongly that I could be that in the presence of the situation — whatever presents itself. I'd say that is my purpose in a way — being totally infused with the incarnation of the divine. That I can incarnate it within me. It already is here, but in a big way.
ACT: As we talked before, we are able to identify areas that could use some improvement in our culture, society, humanity, and in ourselves. I've been thinking a lot about the idea of awareness and raising awareness. But I get lost with what to do with the judgment. Do you have any thoughts on that?
BC: It's a big struggle in my life. We were speaking earlier about the process of metabolizing. I see emotions as calories — like food calories — and we have to digest them. And we digest them a lot in our stomach. I feel, for me, when a judgment arises — say it's anger or sadness or helplessness or righteousness, all of these things — when I am not fully digesting those within myself, usually I pop it back up into mental and then it becomes blame and pointing. And I feel like it's very important to point out injustices. It's not about suppressing the voice. My problem, currently, is softening my anger around blame and judgment so that I can express it in a way that can be received and also not couch everything in the history of where it's come from and why these things are the way they are now.
I really love Ta-Nehisi Coates and I respect that before he even utters something out in public he spends years researching the facts so that he has the history under his belt. In my view, he's just not coming from his own personal injury, which is huge, but he has the facts behind him that are historical. So that it can actually be fed to the bigger field. And I feel like that's why I'm holding back my voice because I haven't fully digested my own anger and rage. And that comes down to a hologram of my own personal family or origin or being a woman in society or what we were talking about earlier — the injustice of the economics in Bend and the prices of living and jobs, for the people who work here, that don't meet the balance. So, what do you do with that? I'm in the middle of that vortex.
There's also a fear in me to speak out, to point the uncomfortable things out, is a recipe for annihilation and death and isolation and persecution 'cause that also is shown in history that that is true. But at the same time, I feel like we're never gonna proceed forward, both individually and collectively, if we pretend like everything's okay. Systems are broken and we need a global overhaul if we're gonna be able to live as a planet.
ACT: Do you have any closing thoughts?
BC: I really appreciate you, Joshua. I feel that you're doing amazing, heroic work stimulated from an inner impulse. And I feel like isolation is one of the tragedies of our community and you're breaking that. And also you're coming to people. So, it's a humble and amazing thing you're doing and I hope that in your future that much gratitude and abundance comes back to you 'cause you're reweaving the spider web, the dreamcatcher; you're reweaving the broken fragments by doing this. And it's not not noticed.