Dayna Taus recommended Shanti to participate here. I had heard of Shanti and even attended a presentation of hers a couple of years ago, but I couldn't quite remember the context and I know we hadn't met, so I was looking forward to meeting her today. I spent the last week in Maine, visiting my family, exploring my old stomping grounds, and generally not thinking too much about this project and really couldn't have asked for a more pleasant reentry than this warm and encouraging and honest conversation. I am so glad to be able to introduce Shanti to you here and hope that you'll find our chat to be inspiring and motivating.
If you choose to listen, be prepared for the super abrasive and shocking noise of a weed-whacker near the end of the recording. And if you read instead, please feel free to blame the interruption of Shanti's final thought on that, too.
SO: Well, I try not to describe myself in general, honestly, because I feel like there's so much that's lost in words, but I guess for this sake... my name is Shanti O'Connor. And I am, first of all, a mom. It feels like that's sort of the thread of everything I do. That's who I am. I am a wife, an athlete. I am a curious individual. I'm just this really interesting, weird person.
ACT: What concerns you about the state of the world and humanity? And what about it affects you personally?
SO: I think what concerns me the most — and it's personal, but it's also collective — is relationships and how people treat other people. But specifically, what I'm super concerned about is how parents are treating and raising children. My concern about that is personal because I was raised with a drug addict who was really violent and we were homeless and my life was very unpredictable and scary all the time. And so, it's a heightened awareness that I have in our community and the collective and it concerns me because there are a lot of children being raised and being hurt.
And, as we know, how you were raised has a direct impact on how you feel and how you show up in community and what you're able to do and your health and your longevity and the relationships that you have. It affects everything. And so, on the very simplest level, how we birth our children matters and how we raise our children matters.
ACT: What can you or do you do about it?
SO: I work with a lot of moms. I did this Birth Awareness Week and I try to educate individuals on the ways to birth that are more safe — safe in terms of emotionally safe, physically safe, spiritually safe — than the choices we're making. And also in my work with moms, it's a lot of helping them unwind their own trauma so that they can show up more fully in their life — with their children, with their partners, whatever they're doing. So, my work is more on the individual and those individuals have the ripple effect that impact the larger community.
ACT: What do people mean to you, individual to individual?
SO: People mean connection. People mean transformation. People mean growth. People mean love. So, for me, when I see people, I am just so instantly curious. Who is this person? What is their story? So, maybe just a lot of curiosity when it comes to people.
ACT: If community is our relationships with each other and the world we live in and our relationships are what matter most to us, why are we having such a difficult time considering everybody's needs and differences and equality and equity and embracing compassion and empathy?
SO: Well, I'll share personally. Like I mentioned, I come from high trauma. If you look at this thing called Adverse Childhood Experiences — it's a scale of 1 to 10 and the higher you go up on the scale, 10 being the highest, you have a harder time having healthy relationships; you have a harder time just existing in a healthy way in society; you're more likely to be sick, to be a drug addict, to go to jail, prostitute; all of the things that you don't want to have happen in life, you have a really high chance. And I'll share personally, I'm a 10 out of 10 on that scale. And what I can say for me growing up in high trauma is I didn't know how to have safe relationships. For me, because I was so traumatized, I was so scared of people. The nicer you were, the more I questioned it; the more I would run away from that and have a negative response to that. But the more unhealthy somebody was, I would go towards that. My guidance system was off. And that was what I knew. I had a lot of unhealthy relationships. Now, I still had compassion and I still wasn't judging... I still had this layer of empathy and compassion.
How we are raised directly impacts how we're able to show up in community; how we're able to have relationships. But it even goes back further than that. What we know about being in utero is that your mom's trauma, your grandma's trauma, your great grandma's trauma is all being sent down and you are adopting the trauma of the matrilineal line — not the masculine, but the feminine line. We're being born and some of us have high anxiety, depression. A lot of it's not ours. It's probably our great grandma's, who was in a war. So, collectively, we are seeing that everywhere. People are so disconnected from their self. And they are so scared. What I know to be true just in the little work that I do, the majority of people are highly anxious, are really scared, and don't know how to make any change or impact in their life. If we look at that collectively, you can see that.
I know for sure that the problem is trauma. The problem is what's happening generation after generation; it's building up. And so, our baseline of normal has moved up ten notches to fear, stress, anxiety. We're not even born with a baseline of normal. Some of us are. Some of us are so blessed and we do. And I also know from my own experience that we can learn. We can heal. And we can learn how to be with ourselves. And we can learn how to be in relationship that's healthy. It can take a long time. It took me a good twenty years to get there, but I feel like I'm arriving. And how I show up now in community is profoundly different. I feel a comfortableness. I feel a worthiness. For a long time I didn't feel worthy of any sort of goodness. I didn't feel worthy of anything. And so now I feel worthy. Now I feel like I can allow myself to be heard, to be seen. I was invisible for so long in my life. Like, literally, people would run into me all the time. I felt invisible and it seemed like I was invisible. From my personal perspective, that's a huge part of it right there.
After my first child was born, I started this mom's group. I decided I just wanted to be around people like me. And it was great because they validated all the choices I was making. But what it started to create in me was judgment around anyone not making similar choices. I wasn't allowing myself to be exposed to other perspectives and other stories and other needs. I was only creating this tight bubble of what it means to be a mom and raise a kid. And it started to feel icky; it didn't feel right.
And so, after my second child, I created another mom's group, but this time I put it out to the community, Hey, I'm doing this. This is my intention. I really want a loving community of moms who care about their children and care about community and will show up for each other no matter what. And I got all of these women to show up that I would have never met because they were making parenting choices, they were making life choices, very different than mine. They didn't look like my people. But, it turns out, they are my people.
I really saw the whole system instead of just one little part of that whole system. And I think that can happen a lot in the collective. It's really easy and safe to be in these really isolated communities. And it is wonderful —there are some beautiful things that happen out of that. But the down side that could happen is that we don't get to hear the other stories and perspectives. Once we hear them, we realize, Oh, actually, you are really just like me. You don't look like me. You don't sound like me. But you are so similar to me. I can relate to that feeling; I can relate to that situation. So, if I look at the micro, I think it's the same for the macro.
ACT: There's this idea that people are doing the best they can with the level of awareness that they have. I'm not sure I agree with that because I often don't the best I can despite having the awareness. Raising awareness, though, does seem like a good start. How do we do that in a broader, more on-trend, fashionable, Instagram-able, and farther-reaching way?
SO: I don't know how to make it more Instagram-able and popular, but what I'll speak to is we need to start having more uncomfortable conversations. Not only you holding yourself accountable in that way and saying, Hey, what's that about for me?, but also with our relationships and going up the scale to collectively. For me, I have a lot of awareness about birth and raising children. And so, questioning — in a very understanding, compassionate way — but questioning choices that we're making… it starts with that on a maybe more simple and fundamental level. And also being really open to having these uncomfortable conversations. I don't know the bigger answer to this question, but I do know that that's part of the solution. And getting our ego out of the way of these conversations. Just being really curious and open and not see it as an attack. Sometimes it can feel defensive and attacking, but other times, if we just try and sit with whatever's being asked or said, we might find something out.
We haven't learned those communications skills of how to say those things. Non-violent communication kind of helps. How do we learn to even have those really simple, charged conversations without making it personal. But, that's the way. True community… we have to expose to our shadow. We have to talk about our shadow. We have to let our shadow be seen. It is one of the most important things community has to do. Because through that chaos is liberation and real connection.
ACT: We hope for change, but it's really just up to us to take responsibility and make it happen. Will we do that? Will we begin to make the future we want?
SO: Yeah... I think it's gonna happen slower than maybe you or I would prefer. You and I and a lot of people in this community are ready for quick, radical change because I think we've done enough work that we know it, we see it. We will welcome it because we know what it will bring. But, on a bigger scale, it's either gonna happen slowly, which means there's just gonna continue to be these crises that will wake people up. Honestly, I wish I had a more optimistic view, but I don't see it happening unless it's through crisis — whether it's natural disasters, another invasion, whatever it is. I think we're too comfortable. I think we're too complacent. I think our life is too easy. And it's too scary. Change is scary. Change scares me. It does. But I've had enough change throughout my whole life that Ive learned how to be scared and still go towards change. I'm not quite sure how it will change otherwise, honestly.
ACT: Do you have a sense of purpose?
SO: Yeah, I do. I think that's why I'm one of the very few with my background who is living a somewhat normal life… I don't know if how we live is normal. I think part of it is because I always knew that I was meant for something. I didn't know what that was. And I'm still not quite sure I know what that is, but there's this energy that drives me because I know I have a purpose. I know that who I am is needed and unique enough in this world that no matter what I'm doing it's taking me down this line of destiny/purpose/whatever.
I feel like on a very general level my purpose is to help people, more specifically women — just because women are more drawn to work with me than men — to really heal themselves and teaching them how to find their truth, how to speak their truth, how to live their truth, and how to really find who they really are. That's something that really lights me up. And I think my purpose is to just do what I can to make community stronger and more loving.
And it happens on these very small levels of helping these people heal. And then it happens on these bigger levels of the community that I'm actively creating that's very nurturing and honoring and loving. And it's not about competition. I recognize and I create a space where we all recognize that everyone is so unique and has amazing gifts to offer that it doesn't necessarily diminish anybody else's gifts. It really makes the whole community shine when we're all in our gifts. I feel like all of that is sort of my purpose. Ask me in a year and it might change. But, yeah, that's the constant thread in my life.
And a lot of it is because of my own personal background. So, that sort of fueled my work. Because of how I lived — living homeless, going to twenty different schools — I never had community. Never. The longest place I'd ever lived somewhere was maybe two years and so, by the time I landed here — and I've been here 15 years — I got to really understand what community is and it scared the shit out of me. So, from my personal experience and story, creating really strong community is important. And a lot of it is because I didn't have it. So, I'm really curious about what that looks like and what that means and what that feels like and my part in creating that.