EP111: Don Frick – Ernest Shackleton – Servant Leadership (Part 3)
On the day when he first read Greenleaf’s essay The Servant as Leader in 1986, Don Frick decided to dedicate the rest of his career to understanding and teaching Greenleaf’s ideas about servant leadership. Since then, he has written books and essays about servant leadership—including Greenleaf’s biography—made presentations, conducted workshops, taught graduate seminars, and consulted with corporations on the principles of servant leadership. He is currently working on another book that offers details about how various organizations have implemented servant leadership. Before encountering Greenleaf’s work, Don engaged in multiple careers, including: managing departments at a university and museum of art; university teaching; television, radio, and film writing, production, and performance; trainer; specialist in advertising and marketing for Fortune 500 companies, plus an entrepreneur. His formal education includes a B.S. in Education, Master of Divinity, and PhD in Leadership and Organizational Studies.
Riane Eisler is a social systems scientist, cultural historian, futurist, and attorney whose research, writing, and speaking has transformed the lives of people worldwide. Her newest work,Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape OurBrains, Lives, and Future, co-authored with anthropologist Douglas Fry, shows how to construct a more equitable, sustainable, and less violent world based on Partnership rather than Domination.
Dr. Eisler is president of the Center for Partnership Systems (CPS), dedicated to research and education, Editor-in-Chief of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies, an online peer-reviewed journal at the University of Minnesota that was inspired by her work, keynotes conferences nationally and internationally, has addressed the United Nations General Assembly, the U.S. Department of State, and Congressional briefings, has spoken at corporations and universities worldwide on applications of the partnership model introduced in her work, and is Distinguished Professor at Meridian University, which offers PhDs and Master’s degrees based on Eisler’s Partnership-Domination social scale.
David Loye, Riane Eisler’s beloved husband and partner, died of Covid during the night of January 24, 2022. This was two days after they celebrated their 45th Anniversary. We invite you to join Riane Eisler in honoring and remembering David.
Transcript:
Dr. Eisler 00:07
No ordinary Soviets had to stand in line for toothbrushes. I mean for so we were served caviar. And we were in a very fancy hotel in the four years of our suite was a grand piano. And it was like what is following the same domination economic is the connection between what happens in childhood between gender between family and what happens in the state or tribe. So that he, a couple of years ago, radically reduce the penalties for family violence.
Clay 00:53
Welcome to In Search of the new compassionate male. My name is Clay Boykin, I support this podcast through my coaching practice. I help people visualize and harmonize find direction and meaning or simply get unstuck. Contact me at Clay Boykin calm for a free consultation. Now here’s the latest episode of In Search of the new compassionate male. Hello
Dennis 01:17
World. It’s me Dennis and Welcome to In Search of the new compassionate male. I’m the co host of this particular podcast and I’m here with the founder clay Boykin. Hello clay.
Clay 01:28
Hi, Dennis. I’m thrilled today to have with us Dr. Riane Eisler. Dr. Islur is a cultural historian, attorney, a futurist, a social system scientist and author of I forgot how many books but some of the ones that you may recognize off the top is the chalice in the blade sacred pleasures, the real wealth of nations and the book that came out in 2019, nurturing our humanity, how domination and partnership shaped our brains lives in future. So Dr. Islur welcome.
Dr. Eisler 02:05
Thank you. And thank you Clay for starters, for the wonderful article that is actually on our website, Center for partnership.org. And for all the work that those of you are doing to really help men be human in the full sense of the word because it’s not only women who are challenging the old stereotypes, but men and that is such an important part of what I call the movement from nomination to partnership. So thank you.
Dennis 02:53
You’re You’re You’re so welcome. Because this is what whatever I know that that we’re going to be able to work our way through this. This has to be a partnership, it has to be a collaboration. It has to be synergistic. One plus one is greater than two, and we’ve lived for so long in this zero sum. economic reality and that’s not how economics works as far as I understand it. And you’re talking about the new economy, how we’re going to create this and work in your work in economics and your your thoughts systems about the partnerships. Could you talk a little about this and what’s on your mind and heart?
Dr. Eisler 03:34
Let me start have Seaford may start with, on a more personal note, please. Because I have a great deal of passion for this work. And that passion is actually rooted deeply in my own early life as a child refugee with my parents, Nazi Europe, from Vietnam, where I was born, and very early in my life. And this is really directly now related to your question. I began to ask questions that I think most of us have asked at some point in our lives, does it have to be this way? When we humans have such a tremendous capacity, both women and men or consciousness for caring for creativity? Why has there been so much insensitivity, so much cruelty so much destructive test and start to do my multidisciplinary cross cultural trends historical study? To answer that question until much later, but I as you mentioned, Clay, I’m an assistive person and I’m interested in what kind of society will support our end No, I’m assuming capacity, as I said, we’re carrying the consciousness for creativity, rather than because we obviously also have laws, then we’re insensitivity, cruelty destructive. And in the course of this work, I, of course, look at our past that are present, and most importantly, at the possibilities for our future, including our economic possibilities with this book that came out of this study was the chalice in the blade. And then came sacred pleasure. And then a number of other books. And then I realized that I could not answer the questions of my childhood, by looking through the conventional lenses of capitalist versus socialist, west, north versus south, religious versus secular, etc. And I kept seeing these two configurations, the domination system and the partnerships this. And I then applied the, these two systems configurations, to the study of economics, which goes right to your question was the book called The Real wealth of nations. And something that really struck me is that the mindset that we have inherited, is so strange. It’s really our heritage from earlier more rigid domination times. And it is to the values of most important human work, which is the work of caring, what people are curious, and caring for our natural life support systems. And if you look at those, the work of Smith and Marx, you see that for them, this work was to be done for free by a woman in a male controlled household. Yes. And, you know, when we were supposed to take care of children of the sick, keep a clean and healthy, warm environment, which of course then translates into keeping a clean and healthy planetary environment.
Dr. Eisler 07:41
There is nothing in either capitalist or socialist theory about caring for nature, nature, as far as closeness and marks were concerned, is simply there to be exploited. That’s it. And as I said, the work of caring for people starting in first, that’s women’s work, be done in a male controlled for free, the male controlled household, and they call it reproductive rather than productive. So if you fast forward to GNP, that is what it reflects. It’s an economic ground, that simply excludes the three life sustaining sectors, without which we would not be here, without which there would be no economy, the natural economy, the volunteer community, economy, and the household. So when you’re asked me this question, it’s impossible to add to answer it in terms of the old debate that so many people are still engaged in capitalism versus socialism or communism. Frankly, a colleague of mine calls these old categories weapons of mass destruction. Our consciousness,
Dennis 09:10
yes, and one of the things that I love about what you talked about duck price for was about how the, we measure GDP, and we do not take into account so much that the measurements are way off how and I love that if we were to take if we were to rearrange our rearrange what we measure that would account for taking care of our humanity and raising our children taking care of our planet, doing the volunteerism and have that, that that would very quickly give us an entirely different measure,
Dr. Eisler 09:51
completely studies a recent Australian study of the economic value now And then, you know, let’s talk in those terms of the work done for free, the household of caring for people, including children. But if that were included, it would constitute 50% 50% reported by Australian GDP. But as I said, GDP follows the same very limited approach of both Marx and Smith, even though both actually challenged some elements of what I call domination, economics, because it goes way back, it isn’t just neoliberalism, which is really a replay or trickle down economics, you know, it’s sort of a replay of this futile idea that goes on bottom, should content themselves with the scraps, right, dropping from the opulent tables of clothes on top, to Chinese emperors, into passions and to sheiks and to it really. Yes, I mean, it’s deeply rooted. And it is domination, economics, that we really are addressing this idea of top down, trickle down. Exactly, because
Dennis 11:27
we’re seeing that we’re seeing that so much aren’t we try?
Clay 11:31
Yes. Gosh, I was just watching the news before we got onto this podcast. And they were talking about the huge palace that has been built off the books for Putin, hundreds of some odd 1000 square feet, just incredible place and underground, hockey, you know, field and, and so forth. And it’s speaks to exactly what you’re talking about. Dr. Islur?
Dr. Eisler 12:04
Oh, absolutely. Then, of course, I mean, I remember when I was invited to by Nordic women for peace, to miss them on a march to unlearning God. And they had previously done a peace march on Washington, DC. And the class structure was so clear, you know, ordinary Soviets had to stand in line for toothbrushes, I mean, for soap. But we were served caviar. And we were in a very fancy hotel. In the four years of our suite was a grand piano. It was like what is following the same domination, economic. But it’s interesting. And that really takes me to the configuration of the partnership of domination system. We recognize something that is inherent to the analysis of the systems, or systems analysis of the partnership, domination, social scale, because it’s always a better a good way. Nice the connection between what happens in childhood, between gender between family, and what happens in the state or tribe, so that he, a couple of years ago, radically reduce the penalties for family violence. Oh, I always recognize it. If you look at the Taliban, which is religious, and Eastern, or if you look at ISIS, the same thing or for men is Iran. Or if you look at Hitler’s backseat Germany, work for that matter Salus, former Soviet Union, they were always into strengthening or maintaining the kind of family but it is one of the real foundations are a highly punitive, rigidly male dominated authoritarian. It’s simple once you start looking for it, but we have, especially those of us who aren’t good educated in higher education, right. We’ve been taught, I mean, how I remember one day, sort of waking up, is it from, from what I today call the domination trends, and realizing that in all my years of so called Higher Education, there has hardly been anything by about or for people like me, women, such as for children, where we’ve been somewhere buried in so Domestic course or some family relations course is beginning to change the little bit. But not that much we were taught that the majority of humanity and anything pertaining to it to women and children, is not really important enough to be included in what we are taught is important knowledge and tools.
Dennis 15:27
Were very, this, this is part of our mission. Because we believe we, we understand that we cannot, that this is not sustainable. We know that and so as we are in search for the new compassionate male, we are in search of that within ourselves, then both of us are in a journey of our own awakening through our own conscious and unconscious biases. Because from from our standpoint, from a we know that this is not working clay, you talked about that, that we men, the roles that we are assigned are very, all very often completely at odds with who we think we are, yet we we have to fit into some stereotype to be able to do it. You were talking so much about about trusting men clay, yes, as a Marine, Dr. Islur he was a Marine and went through all of the all of the the high, high concept male archetypes that that you would you would consider coming through this process.
Clay 16:37
You know, thanks, Dennis. There are many things that I learned. You know, one was that leadership is about servant leadership, even on the core. And there’s an undercurrent of compassion. And I didn’t have a name for it until out after I was out of the core, and began to look back and realize how even in situations like that, even in harm’s way that men taking care of men range taking care of Marines. John 1513, Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend. That’s all compassion. And what genocide are the past couple of years? We believe that there’s an undercurrent, it’s men, compassionate man out there. And I would like to believe that that that momentum is growing, is rising. And I don’t see it out there on the news or anything, but when I’m talking with men and white men circle and so forth. It’s there. And, you know, my hope is that it’s able to really surface.
Dr. Eisler 18:07
and this can only surface if enough of us including men, like you and Dennis, that help men to give up the sport domination. Yes, real masculinity of not being like a woman. Because as long as we have the stereotype, that being like a woman is to be compassionate to be caring to be really gone violent. When you have this this problem that men face, I think that we are at a time when this very rigidly binary stereotype stereotypical which is necessary for domination systems because yes, later, but if you don’t have these rigid stereotypes, how can you rank code masculinity? Over femininity? Yes, men over women. But this said, Men, Judo here we’re talking about with thinks nothing of sending his, you know, his his soldiers to be killed. I mean, for millenia. Men in Domination systems that had to give nothing less than their lives because some guy on top like Putin wanted more in real estate.
Clay 19:39
Yes. Young men fighting old men’s wars. Yeah. You know, the one thing that came up on a podcast just last year, we were talking about in terms of solar and lunar energy, and it was Howard Tyson. He said, you know, play Think about it this way, you know, we all have this energy, we all have the solar and the lunar, we all have the male and the female aspects to ourselves. Think about it like this. The lunar leads in the solar executes. And I thought to myself, no, wait a second. But then I thought back and back to the core. This is where leadership comes from. And so if we men are out there, thinking we can leave just from the head, cut off it and not acknowledge the essence of who we totally are, then we’re really making a big mistake. And so to me, it’s this integration of head and art, it’s not one or the other. It’s the integration that that is a must.
Dr. Eisler 20:52
Well, I think that this is a good starting point. Because you are of course, still talking about domination archetypes here. The veil is equated with reason, I think of how reasonable our leaders Thank you for saying that. I so appreciate you saying that, please. It’s no young does this use was a mess when it came to gender stereotypes. I mean, his UNIMIN analysts? Yes. I’m the mus is active is Bula, you know, protagonist, and what is the Anima? It’s either man’s inspiration or nemesis. Right? Completely relational. And the truth is that we’re all relational to each other. And then one of the problems that men in Domination systems have had is that their models for masculinity have been that you have to excel you have to accomplish, you have to, and really, you know, I hear people talking about the problem is ego ism. And I have to laugh because women weren’t supposed to have an ego.
Dennis 22:16
Oh, not the women. I know. I know, some pretty powerful women that goodness.
Dr. Eisler 22:23
Now you do. But you know, the old stereotype women were not protagonist.
Dennis 22:31
How did you how did you as a young teen, as powerful as you are doctor as I mean, I because I feel it your your, your intellect, and your heart and your drive and is so strong? How did you as a as a teenager, and how did you react to the world? How did that? How did that what was that experience like?
Dr. Eisler 23:00
This night? No transformation is possible because I have, I have experienced, okay, I was kind of a mess as a teen. I mean, I wanted desperately to belong, because I’ve, I’ve been an outsider all my life. And, you know, I was obviously cast out from as an outsider. Before I was born, I was an outsider growing up in the industrial slums of nirvana. I was an outsider here in the United States. When I came, I even pledged a sorority, which I then disaffiliated from, but I had no gender consciousness. I mean, I, I have to tell you, and that lasted into my 30s. Okay. I when I graduated UCLA law school, I was looking for a part time job with a entertainment law firm. That’s where my head was. It wasn’t, by the way. I mean, what it’s about is massaging people’s egos and counting, helping them count their money, or increase their money, but the head of the firm called me in one day to compliment me on some work I had done. And you know what he said to me, and he meant it as a compliment. But what’s much worse is I took it as a compliment. You don’t even great job to don’t think like a woman. And I took it as a compliment. But this is the kind of thinking of being socialized, you bet. And so it wasn’t really until I sort of woke up. List domination trends My 30s that went along with 1000s of other women.
Dennis 25:07
Yes, yeah. And What years were these?
Dr. Eisler 25:10
What years were about the 60s, the 60. So this was during Exactly. So this, this was when we first began in the Women’s Liberation Movement here in the United States when it wouldn’t when it was, I mean, it had begun. And of course, it was earlier than that. But when we began to get some momentum and going toward that, and getting the era started to started to be passed,
Dr. Eisler 25:34
well, and I wrote the only last paper where on the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, it’s called the equal rights handbook was published by A, but it’s still available online. And unfortunately, it’s still relevant. But I really want to return now to the the intimate partnership aspects of my life, please, my second word for the love of my life. My husband, David Loy. We’re together for 45 years, and who recently died, and I will be left without him. But he was a caring man that he worked with me on the equal rights handled this way to Africa, to the Robie conference UN Conference on Women in writing a deep dive. And caring is not a human characteristic for goodness sake. And the fact that it’s been so, so suppressed in our culture, especially in men, but also in some women, we all know that no caring men and we know women who are not caring. And we know that people who are stuck in these gender stereotypes. And by the way, the study that I cite, in nurturing our humanity is very interesting. People who voted for Trump, the US election, one thing they had in common was not economic hardship. I mean, that was okay. But two things were the very interesting around which fit was the configuration, which I really have to tell you about at this summit. was one thing was a horror of women who stepped outside the domination stereotype of femininity. In other words, people like Hillary Clinton, people, you know, women who were assertive. Yes. But the other thing, which is fascinating, and it’s so much with the configuration of the combination of partnership systems, is that in times in terms of what they were trying to teach their children and help their children realize, wasn’t curiosity wasn’t empathy. It was really more obedience, conformity. And of course, it makes sense, doesn’t it? And women have become many women. I mean, look at 70 million people voted for Mr. Trump. Yes, many of them were female. They have internalized this, which takes me to the configuration which I do want to share at some point, because
Dennis 28:53
I want to I know that it broke my heart, Doctor eyes or when because I, I had I believed that Hillary Clinton was going to be that every every woman would secretly who was who was outwardly Republican would secretly go into the, into the ballot box and, and it was the it was the 20th anniversary of my what my wife and I that night, November the eighth, and we and we had our celebration all set, and my heart was broken. I mean, I couldn’t believe that women would not stand up. And then I said, I must, I must not have this right. There must be there. There’s something I’m missing.
Dr. Eisler 29:40
Well, I think that it just shows that what we’re talking about is not an issue of women against men or men against women. It really is an issue of changing the underlying worldview. And was it our economic system Family Systems, you know, I’ve mentioned already, I mean, the trend towards for example, authoritative, non violent rather than authoritarian and violent parent thing is very important partnership trends. The trend towards non binary, flexible, fluid gender roles. That’s the trend. We have to recognize this. And it’s very hard for people because if you look at the modern social movements, they’ve altered actually, the progressive social movements have all challenged the same thing, a tradition of domination, you know, whether it is a movement against the so called divinely ordained, right of kings to or of men, divinely ordained, right? Again, men to rule over women and children are of a quote superior divinely ordained that your your superior is to rule over inferior was all the way to the environmental movement. Challenging are ones hallowed conquest, and domination of nature. But they focus on trying to dismantle the top of the combination of politics and economics is conventional. And pretty much a secondary to women’s movements with children’s rights, movement, spirituality, movement, etc. All of which are there, you know, the foundations, and they were domination systems that kept rebuilding themselves, like in Russia, that authoritarian, punitive, rigidly male dominated family is still the ideal No. Really change
Dennis 31:59
where you are going to talk doctor about the configuration in the reconfiguration? Could you bring that to us?
Dr. Eisler 32:05
I’d like to do that. Because as Einstein said, we cannot solve problems with the same consciousness that created Thank you. And language is a very, very important that linguistic psychologists have long told us that the categories provided by a language. And this is particularly true of social categories. They channel our thinking. So it’s almost impossible to see a culture. So if you look at the conventional categories, for one thing, is kind of silly, that people don’t seem to notice when they start arguing about religious versus secular, Eastern versus Western or capitalist versus socialist, that there have been repressive violence regressive cultures in all these categories, and continue to be and they also don’t notice that these categories either marginalize or ignore or say they should be subservient, nothing less than the majority of humanity, women and children. Yes, now, we cannot have whole systems change, without taking into account these foundational relations, which Neuroscience tells us that what children observe or experience in their early years, shapes, nothing less than the architecture of art. So I’m proposing that we need to change our language about societies and start talking about shifting our cultures not from capitalism to socialism or from socialism to capitalism or not left to right or from right to left or whatever. But of shifting from domination to partnership, and there are four core components of these systems of figuration. One is a top down also rich area, structure in both the family and the state or tribe, the economics, etc. Okay. The second part of the figuration is something that is marginalized or ignored gender relations, and this is where you both come in, because we domination oriented societies invariably rank one form of humanity. male form over the female. Yes, and that is a template for you. equating difference beginning with this fundamental difference in form in our species with either superiority or inferiority, dominating or being dominated, being served or serving. So it’s a template for indoor versus outdoor thinking and you move to the partnership side, and you can see it in much of our prehistory. I wrote extensively about that in many of my blocks, because the evidence is overwhelming that for most of our human cultural evolution for 1000s of years, we oriented more to the partnership side and that the domination system shift occurred in the mainstream of culture will be about 5000 years ago,
Dennis 35:58
yes, with the with the creation of private property with a concept.
Dr. Eisler 36:04
Not necessarily there are many, many theories about certainly technology, including agriculture. So, they turn towards the domination side, at a certain point, but the early agrarian societies, like shfm, Jolla, for example, in Turkey, in the plains of Turkey, which is the largest Neolithic site ever excavated, was more egalitarian, by the size of the houses by the types of grave was more gender balance. Ian Hodder with the archaeologists, who excavated most recently there has an article in Scientific American about really being born male or female, did not affect your status in life. And of course, there are no signs of distractions through warfare, or over a spy was yours.
Clay 37:16
Help me Dr. Eisler. What What was the timeframe that he was excavating? What what timeframe in the history was
Dr. Eisler 37:26
about? From about? I think about 6000. Before the Common Era, okay. Onward. But these were very early farming settlements. This was a huge town in the back exactly.
Dennis 37:44
The way it was. It was a it was an amazing economy, wasn’t it? I mean, it was very.
Dr. Eisler 37:51
It was an amazing economy. I mean, we’ve been told so many false stories, stories that work, this notion that there are only two possibilities for us, we either dominate or were dominated. Think of the categories that are gender specific. matriarchy, patriarchy. I mean, yeah. Either women rule or men rule. The fathers or mothers. There is no partnership alternative.
Dennis 38:21
Is there any word for it? Well,
Dr. Eisler 38:24
I coined the word guy, let me say it again. Di Lundy, Dinah, for a woman under a strong man and L in English for linking. wonder, why don’t you go back to me reading the chalice and the blade let me continue with the configuration because the amount of abuse and violence is very, very different in the Domination and the partnership system and to actually see the art changing radically. I mean, art is a symbolic language, you know? And if you It’s fascinating but if you really leave behind you know the conventional thinking of the linear evolution No. Evolution like everything else wasn’t even there. But anyway, domination systems require a high degree of abuse and violence all the way the wife and child breeding grounds, lynchings warfare, to maintain themselves because how else you maintain these rankings with men over man man or woman, race, civil race, religion, religion, etc. Partnership side yeah, there is some violence people lose it sometimes. But it isn’t built into this. And that makes a huge difference and of course, the forest part store Are we are we I mean, we’ve inherited the story that well, whether it’s selfish genes or original sin, the same story is that, yes, they fight each other. But with simply the same story, we’re bad, we have to be controlled.
Clay 40:26
So I’m just testing my understanding, you’re talking about the four being the family in childhood relations,
Dr. Eisler 40:34
then I’m talking about structure, structure. And I’m making the, the connection immediately between the structure in the family and the structure in this later drive. And I can give you a contemporary example, the countries that today ranked highest in the happiness reports, as well as very high in the world. Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness reports, etc, are nations that have moved more to the partnership side are the European nations like Norway, Finland, Sweden. And they have, I mean, let’s look at the partnership structure here for a moment, because it’s not only in the family, but also in the Slater tribe. That is where democratic, they’re not socialists, they have more caring policies, because of the second component, because the status of women has risen, so that half approximately, of their national legislature is female. And as the Status of Women rises, men will no longer feel that this is an integral connection between changing male masculine stereotypes, and the devaluation, the hidden system of gendered values that we’ve been living with, and are trying to leave behind. Because as the Status of Women rises, men no longer feel it’s such a threat to their identities, to their status to their masculinity, to also embrace caring policies. So these nations at universal health care, very good quality, childcare, accessible, well paid, government supported. They have very generous paid parental leave for both mothers and fathers. And that’s precisely why we have such a successful business sector. You know, I, it makes me wonder, where, where’s the what flips the switch? What would cause them to begin to make this change? There’s many theories about it. One is the agriculture theory. And private property, which I certainly in some places, maybe it happened that way. But in Europe, in the area surrounding the Mediterranean, there is mounting evidence, including DNA studies showing that it was through armed invasion from the fringe areas of our globe, where as a matter of fact, the shift from gathering hunting was not to agriculture with to birdie. And herding, as we know from problem with cattle today is not a sustainable way of really, technologically speaking, it’s a lousy technology, because it depletes without giving back. But in these societies, for a number of reasons, and I deal with that in some detail, in my book sake with pleasure, which is kind of a heresies with it, there’s a message behind that. Well, you have it, of course I have it. Like you remember, I mean, like the bonobos, which are one, you know, one, one chapter in there. Yes. Our closest primate relatives, in difference is the common Chimp, but they’re much more partnership oriented and they share leisure. Yes, food, they share sex. I mean, it’s a completely different social organization. And we have that capacity As shown by these millennia. So we have to change our stories
Dennis 45:09
are when you look at your grandchildren, Dr. Eisler for do you have? Does this bring you hope? Do you see a difference in their consciousness? And and what is going on with them? What what is your sense about what’s going on in the, in the race mind consciousness of humanity as you look out through the eyes of your grandchildren?
Dr. Eisler 45:33
Well, I think my grandchildren are very aware of them, that we need new thinking. I mean, they’re looking for it. But it’s really interesting because, you know, I used to be even I still occasionally still do, or give a lot of keynotes to major conferences. Yes. And people buy into this, when they hear me, pulled back by the culture. So it’s our job. And really, we owe it to our children and generations to come to start using the terms, partnership system domination. Because if we don’t, people will say, Well, what do you mean by that? Or what do you mean by a caring economics of partners? People will ask, but it’s up to the, to those of us who are agents of cultural change like you to, to start using different tools, and to start helping people to see connections that are made invisible by the domination chance.
Dennis 46:52
I’m so glad to hear you say that because one of my quests in this life is to ask people and to really understand what is enough? Have you set that number by will ask a person have you set a number that you would know at least when you hit it when some economic or or or other marker would be hit you ago? Okay. Yeah, I’ve got it I’ve got because I don’t hear it being asked, and I don’t. And that’s just the mindset.
Dr. Eisler 47:24
Well, you know, in nurturing our humanity, there are studies showing that in societies where there is a lot of accumulation of the top, which by the way, domination economics creates artificial scarcity. I siphoning resources to top five cleaning services into Parliament’s weapons wars, and also by failing to invest in caring for people starting at service. I mean, children, especially for our post industrial knowledge, service economy, our most important assets for goodness sakes,
Dennis 48:06
I love that doctor because when, when we talk, when I talk to friends of mine who describe themselves as conservative, I go, What a great word to conserve you, you don’t drive your car and never take it into the into the mechanic and put oil and take care of it. We take care. What is this wonderful word conservative? Why don’t what our what are we going to conserve and nurture and support?
Dr. Eisler 48:35
Well, but for the, quote, conservative mind, and there are studies in virtually our humanity showing that actually are very structure of our brains. People who consider themselves very conservative, have very rigid brains based on denial. And it’s related to the development of part of the brain that is not as well developed, as in people who are less quote, conservative, conservative and liberal, are pointless words for me. Just make us fight each other. Dr. Islur. While you’re talking about the brain, you made the point in a recent podcast that the pleasure centers light up in our brain when we care and share more than more than when we dominate. So so when I go win the football game, and I’m spiking, the football app feels great. But test not as great as feeling that I would my pleasure centers would light up when I’m caring and sharing is that that is EPS salutely True. And you know, many studies have shown that people are happier when they give. That’s what makes us feel good. But, but this empathy, this hearing has to be either suppressed or compartmentalized. So it only applies to the in group. In Domination systems, whether that in group, right, it’s the in group of code mankind, female, other or divided states, whether it’s whites versus blacks in the Middle East, whether it’s Shia versus Sunni, or Sunni versus Shia, it doesn’t really matter. And other rising, right. Yeah. Other right. And that’s really with that very basic model. Yeah. It’s not coincidental what I spoke about earlier, the correlation between wanting to either maintain or impose this is the punitive widget vo dominated authoritarian family, and what kind of regime?
Clay 51:16
Dennis, remember when we talked with Dr. Doty the other week, and one of the key points that was made was that compassion, empathy and compassion is, is innate, it’s part of our DNA, and it’s got to be nurtured. It has to be nurtured. And that’s, of course, the whole point of I mean, if there is a central point, and there are many points in nurturing our humanity, it is that it isn’t a question of genes. This is a question of gene expression. And that happens to action with our environment, especially in the first years, we can change. I mean, people can do did
Dennis 52:02
a good doctor, I mean, you look at your evolution.
Dr. Eisler 52:06
I had a whole evolution. And David was really part of that evolution. And part of my journey. I can I can honestly say that, on a personal level partnership is just so wonderful is so pleasure.
Dennis 52:27
Doctor, thank you for sharing David with us and bring him along in this. It’s very, he’s very palpable to me just in how you how you have shared how he is part of you today. And as as strong as as he is sitting right, sitting right within you.
Dr. Eisler 52:49
Well, they did some very important work. Because he wrote me tons of poetry, which I think is very good. I published a book called 100 days of love, this 100 days that we were together for a day. Oh, that’s another story. But he wrote he thought it was a pioneer in retelling the story of Darwin’s evolution, because at Davis word, Darwin has been used by the domination system is this 800 pound gorilla, to say, hey, what matters is, you know, the survival of the fittest was the fittest defined as the meanest right? And in his book on human evolution, Descent of Man, Darwin explicitly said, at the level of human evolution, random selection, and all these other mechanisms may fade in importance. What is important now is culture and love. He wrote so many times about love, and he actually apologized that for using the term survival of the fittest, which wasn’t history, it was a term. But anyway, so I highly recommend David’s book, Darwin’s last theory,
Dennis 54:20
Doctor, thank you so much for giving us this opportunity just to spend some time with you. And to know the I guess, before I want to go if you if you could just tell me some of the VISTAs some of the things that curiosities that you’re going to be exploring in the near future,
Dr. Eisler 54:39
and I will continue to do my teaching. And by the way, on a center for partnership.org you can find a way to really take a self paced course called Changing our story, changing our lives and up Do it for groups and then you get to own the for videos and to use them yourself in your presentations as well as all of the resources on my list that I am now working on giving background to David’s extensive poetry in a book that I calling tentatively called for what was the title of one of his times, which is yet love remains.
Dennis 55:31
God is how precious thank you for giving us this time today for spending your time here on this planet with us what we do, clay has Shepard this over 100 podcasts and when he said that we were going to have you it was like this was the ice this was the cherry on the ice cream sundae of our of our time to be able to be able to spend time with you and the grace that you brought to us and that you brought to the planet Dr. Eyes for thank you so much for your time.
Dr. Eisler 56:04
Thank you goes with a very very good for being you.
Dennis 56:13
Thank you world and thank you everyone and we will see you next time on in search of the new compassionate mayor.
56:21
Check out the latest episode of In Search of the new compassionate mail on your favorite podcast Station.
Scientist, psychophysiologist, executive vice president and director of research at HeartMath Institute, member of the Global Coherence Steering committee and project coordinator of GCI’s Global Coherence Monitoring System.
Rollin McCraty, Ph.D., director of research at the HeartMath Institute, is a professor at Florida Atlantic University. McCraty is a psychophysiologist whose interests include the physiology of emotion. One of his primary areas of focus is the mechanisms by which emotions influence cognitive processes, behavior, health and the global interconnectivity between people and Earth’s energetic systems. He has been with HeartMath Institute since its founding in 1991 by Doc Childre. He has worked closely with Childre to develop HMI’s research goals and has been instrumental in researching and developing the HeartMath System of tools and technology.
McCraty and the members of his research team have worked in joint partnership with research groups at Stanford University, Claremont Graduate University, Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Prince Sultan Cardiac Center in Saudi Arabia and the University of Lithuania among many others.
He has been interviewed for many feature articles in publications that include Prevention, Natural Health, Men’s Fitness and American Health magazines, and has appeared in television segments for CNN Headline News, ABC World News Tonight, ABC’s Good Morning America, NBC’s Today Show, PBS’s Body & Soul and the Discovery Channel. He has been featured in many documentary films, including I Am, The Truth, The Joy of Sox, The Power of the Heart, Solar Revolution, and The Living Matrix among others.
McCraty’s critical research on heart rate variability and heart-rhythm coherence has gained international attention in the scientific community and is helping to change long-held perceptions about the heart’s role in health, behavior, performance and quality of life.
He is one of the primary creators of the Global Coherence Initiative and the principal designer of the Global Coherence Monitoring System and its international network of magnetic field sensor sites. Related to this, McCraty heads up HMI and GCI researchers investigating the relationship between human and geomagnetic field environments and the interconnectedness of and communication among all living systems. They also investigate how these fields act as central synchronizing signals within the body, carry emotional information and serve as key mediators of energetic interactions between people and living systems.
McCraty is a member of the American Autonomic Society, Pavlovian Society, National Association for Psychological Science, Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback and Society for Scientific Exploration.
His studies, research and extensive professional articles have appeared in numerous journals, including the American Journal of Cardiology, Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Stress Medicine and Biological Psychology. He contributes periodically to the Global Advances in Health and Medicine journal.
Transcript:
Rollin McCraty 0:05
Well, as it turns out, whenever you’re the heartbeat, you have the current flows in the body. They also radiate magnetic fields, I mean, produce magnetic fields, which easily radiate right through the skin and out into the environment around us. Now, how do I know that? Well, let’s take a different device called a magnetometer.
Rollin McCraty 0:24
Which measures magnetic fields out here in space in front of the body and measure the hearts magnetic field. Yeah, and I think relevant to what you guys are talking about on your interviews and shows a lot is to also through those same years is when a lot of our natural kindness and compassion and stuff kind of gets beat out of us. So I just kind of use that as a backdrop or an analogy for what I mean, to where, you know, we start evolving to where it makes more sense, even for our own. Many, many studies bear out what I’m about to say here, that it’s really collaborate collaborating with others and being kind and compassionate is the best for our own careers, and certainly for our relationships. That was just enough for you even invited me this. I was just reading something that what women want most in men is kindness.
Clay Boykin 1:16
Hello, my name is Clay Boykin, and I am in search of the new compassionate male. I believe in the midst of these incredible times of change. A new compassionate male is emerging. As the new archetype in this podcast is intended to give voice to both men and women on the overarching topic of compassion consciousness in men.
Dennis Tardan 1:41
Hello, world it’s me Dennis and Welcome to In Search of the new compassionate male. I’m the co host and I’m here with the founder and my partner, Clay Boykin Hello, Clay. Hey, Dennis, how you doing? Great. Good. Today we have and I’m thrilled to say Dr. Roland McCrady. Dr. McCrady is the director of research for the Heart Math Institute, an organization that I knew many, many years ago lost track of, and I’m anxious to hear what he’s got to share with us today. He’s also a professor at Florida Atlantic University. And he is a psycho physiologist. And he studies and he studies the physiology of emotion.
Rollin McCraty 2:26
Oh, welcome, Roland, thank you for joining us today. Oh, it’s great to be here. It was right there. Great to rediscover clay. I think we probably met. I don’t know. 1820 years ago, maybe something? So I think so. I was with Motorola at the time. In Austin. I think y’all were doing some work with Motorola. Maybe in Florida, and work for a few places actually a few places during that era. Yeah. And I had the occasion to fly out and, and spend a little time and, and then come back. And I always remember that. Yeah. You know, I’m an ex Motorola, my person myself. That’s right. And were you in Phoenix? No, I was a communications engineer. So I was a field engineer. I was I went out and fix the stuff, you know, for police fire departments when the locals couldn’t, you know, I was that guy that. Got it? Well, I’m a little semiconductor guy. So I put the stuff in the stuff that you fixed. Yeah.
Dennis Tardan 3:24
Yeah. How wonderful. And I’m a consumer. So Motorola has happened to be in as I pick this right out. This is a Motorola phone. So I’m a consumer I this is this is the great great grandchild of all the work that you guys have done. Well, unfortunately, wow. Maybe not, unfortunately. But Motorola is now owned by a Chinese company, I think, ah, well see, as so much of what we’re doing, what a time to be alive. Roland, I, you know, when we’re when we talk about, there’s so much so much, really learning and relearning and rediscovering. And so what I want to start is I want to start about what psycho physiology? Could you please? How do you say that at a cocktail party? What do you how do you how do you describe your field?
Rollin McCraty 4:16
Well, it’s really understanding the I guess I could say it this way, the interface between how we feel how we think and feel, and what goes on in the activity in our bodies. You know, that’s the psycho part. Right? Right feelings, behaviors and physiology. You could say the underlying activity in our brain and nervous system and hormonal system. But, you know, our research is really saying that you can’t quite look at it that way, because it’s just as much as what’s going on in our thoughts, feelings, intuitions, yes, that are really driving the activity in our body and our nervous system and our hormonal system. So it’s kind of a different way of thinking of it, but that’s really What I would say the data really, really suggests it’s really what’s going on I, I don’t know how wide your audience is here, but I tend to call these are energetic systems. Yeah, you know, the vibrations, because they’re actually they are, you just can’t put an emotion or a thought or an intuition under a microscope.
Dennis 5:17
Right. But when when we, you know, when we talk about string theory, and we talk about the work that everything is a vibration that if matter and energy can, can be interchanged, then the vibrations there are what creates whatever we, you know, look upon it collapses. So, how could they not be interchanged? Well, right.
Rollin McCraty 5:38
Yep. Lot. Yeah, in the modern world, but there’s still a lot of people that kind of the blinders on?
Dennis 5:43
Well, yeah, there were a lot of people that had the blinders on with Copernicus or with I mean, this is these are all the things that we’re learning. One of the things that clay and I talk about is that, that radio waves existed before an instrument happen to detect
Rollin McCraty 6:01
blood. Absolutely. Right. I mean, and so much of what we know, from my perspective, what we discover and and there’s certainly great advances going on in material science and technology and all that no question. But you know, our fundamental, really understandings of how the universe and life especially life works, there hasn’t been any significant advance in over 100 years.
Dennis 6:24
That’s exciting. So what impelled you, what impelled you to go in the direction of this from being a motorway engineer, here, you are a motorized roller engineer, you’re, you’re out there, you’re out there working. But there was an impelling to get you in this direction?
Rollin McCraty 6:47
Well, that’s a long story. But I think even before most of my engineering, you know, times, I was military and in the university, Nebraska, and then Motorola. And there was always something in me. Even back to high school, I was a kid who was building Heathkit, radios and transmitters. And you know, in Junior High in high school through that era, and I kind of grew up. My grandfather was a small town mechanic, right? So I from a very early age grew up in that kind of world. And so I was always asking questions, like, well, what is a magnetic field anyway? And nobody could ever answer that. I mean, they give you formulas, and which I’ve forgotten most of now, to be honest. But yeah, but describing the behavior of them. And we’re really good at that. And we can make radio waves carry information, and like we didn’t Motorola still do. But the point I was gonna, well, there’s two questions that I think you’re addressing there. One is what we discover and a lot of things is really mimicking what we biology already does. If that makes sense. It’s we’re talking about radio waves. Well, as it turns out, in some of our work shows that we are broadcasting, radio waves and those waves, not radio waves, but electromagnetic waves, and that those waves carry information, just like we would use on a cell phone. So a lot of what we discover is really, why nature is already figured out and doing much more efficiently than than the technology we invent to try and mimic what’s already going on. So that would
Clay Boykin 8:25
say that there’s a field around us.
Rollin McCraty 8:28
Well, there is.
Clay Boykin 8:29
I want to explain that to me. I mean, I can’t touch it.
Rollin McCraty 8:33
Yeah, well, I’ll do that. But to finish your other question. So I was I had a good time at Motorola don’t get me wrong, but there was always a deeper something right? And I wasn’t quite, I guess wired to care enough to play the the male I guess you could say game especially for this and the corporator thing. So I actually left that world. When I first I went to Miami still working for Motorola. In another context, I supposed to oversee the installation of a country wide communication system in Colombia. And that fell through actually found out many years later why that fell through after I’d already been hired to do shop. But that’s another story. And after that, I, you know, my interests read, I found a book that was talking that was actually about the field called radionics, which is a kind of a more different perspective on biological fields and wet Ray waves and stuff. And that got me intrigued. And that’s kind of what got me into the study of consciousness. And so I moved I packed up my stuff and moved to California to get a degree in consciousness studies, one of the first degrees and the first universities that gave degrees in at a small accredited university actually ended up being here in Boulder Creek, California. And then that got me into you know, meditation, that kind of things and I won’t go through the whole story. But then let’s just say while I get through that, that that crowd of people was part of the group that introduced spirulina to the world. You may have heard of that. But it’s a Super Bowl.
Dennis 10:12
Yes, it’s a superfood, isn’t it? Yeah, you
Rollin McCraty 10:14
can actually live on it. And that got proven many times. And so this, this kind of opened my heart a little bit, I think you could say to what yours were these sort of in the 1970s? Late 70s. Okay, good. All right. And the early 80s was the spirulina thing. And, and as life unfolded, actually, National Enquirer did a cover story on spirulina. And anyway, we went from a company selling about 100 150,000 a month and this stuff through the health food stores and consumers. And thanks to I think I personally wrote about $20 million dollars in business in the next two weeks. So it was a, you know, just way, huge jump. That’s its own story. I don’t want I don’t want to go into all that how we pull that off. But the point of the reason I wanted to share this, the history was we took the profits of that. And because we really were a motive to feed the world’s hungry populations, why we were doing this because I could care less about it otherwise, frankly. So we took the profits of that and went to Southern California, out in the middle of the desert, and proved you could actually grow spirulina and in the middle of a desert and feed the world’s hungry populations, you can set these up locally and problem solved, right? Way ahead of our time. I mean, we had these giant solar powered spray dryers and things to process it, it was all there, it all worked. And that went absolutely nowhere. In terms of solving hunger problems. In hindsight, you know, I talked about that when my idealism bubble got popped, you know, here we are, you know, I mean that because I even through, you know, my other studies and practices, you know, they probably need to see here, I was grounded enough in my electrical engineering side of things that I never got too far into the wacky stuff. Right? If that makes sense. Yeah, I was, I was always pretty grounded through it. But anyway, what I, through that era, you know, we talked about consciousness, you know, it’s really all about consciousness and done and on and on. And so after that experience, that became a felt knowingness, if I could say it that way more than a concept. And so basically, after that experience, and realizing how it was blocked, it was really consciousness problems. It was people, you know, leaders of countries and things. I basically said, well, heck with this humanitarian stuff, I’m gonna go make money again. My dad, so I started a company in electrostatics, and kind of went into that field and, and we grew to a multimillion dollar company, and just a very short time, two or three years. And that was a fun ride to I had a great time through that. And, but there was still that deeper, yearning, you know, of kind of think what I incarnated with more, probably more likely, you know, looking back, even into my childhood, that I really wanted to do something, you know, better, better the world, not just my own life. And so another sports car in a driveway wasn’t kind of doing it. And so, then I met duck children. Well, I kind of vowed to myself that I’m not going to get really involved in this humanitarian type things or, you know, doing good for the world. Unless it’s something that can really shift consciousness, you know, it people in a mass scale, because otherwise, I might as well go have a good life and make lots of money. And
Dennis 13:48
exactly, I mean, when you talk about shifting consciousness, let’s take this smartphone, no, no. Technology has ever been adopted as quickly. As as the smartphone has from from not being there to how quickly people are. So that was a shift in consciousness. Right? So a shift in consciousness from from a mechanical standpoint.
Rollin McCraty 14:14
No, that’s not how I mean it. I’m talking about something quite different. Let me let me give you another example. Please. I used to say not that many years ago that I’d read this you know, in some papers and things that with 10% of the world’s military budget that every every human being on planet Earth, could be fed, have clean water educated and have housing at least basic all their basic needs met exactly 10% of what we spend on more and bombs and that kind of nonsense, right? The bucket could never find the reference until about three years ago when I met cilia Silla elsewhere, they he was actually been nominated for three but three Nobel Peace Prizes. And in fact, I’ve got her book laid out here this business plan for peace. She’s going to be a speaker at one of our upcoming events here. Wonderful. And but what that was really neat, because she did the actual the hardcore math and work on it. And I was when I was saying 10%, I was wrong. It’s far less than 10%. Wow, is this not a problem in consciousness? So it’s not technology. We don’t need another iPhone, or smartphone, or we have everything right now and have had for years that would solve these problems. That is clearly a problem in human consciousness. So it makes sense. Does that help give you what I’m talking about?
Dennis 15:41
Absolutely. It absolutely does. Because Because if this is wonderful, all right, continue, continue. Okay.
Rollin McCraty 15:50
So anyway, it’s, you know, our own growth and how we are able to self regulate, and really be more inclusive and compassionate and kind. And
Dennis 16:00
that’s why we’re in search of right fi.
Clay Boykin 16:03
It absolutely is, you know, we’ve been, for the past two years, we’ve been talking to men and women all over the world. And, you know, that’s why we call it in search of the new compassionate male. I may be an idealist. But I think that and I believe that underneath all of the negative things that we’re seeing out in the world, that there’s an undercurrent of compassion, and that there’s a shift that’s coming in, we’re in the midst of where combat compassion, consciousness is going to going to rise up. And that’s why I was particularly interested in talking with you to compare notes on which what you think about that?
Rollin McCraty 16:47
Well, we have an annual event that we do on one of our projects called the Global coherence initiative. And the title of it is the rise of collective compassion. That’s in March, three days, three, half days, march 18 19th. And 20th, I believe, but
Dennis 17:02
both virtually and on site.
Rollin McCraty 17:04
Yeah, we’re having to do we used to do these as big gatherings. We used to go to Vida buddy to Cancun, and they were great events that we had down there just be about our eight years, but the last year, and this year, we’re having to virtually because of the obviously the current pandemic era here right now.
Clay Boykin 17:21
Wow. So HeartMath Institute, orchestrates and puts that on globally. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my goodness.
Rollin McCraty 17:28
So which is part of our mentioned global coherence initiative, which is one of our projects. I don’t know how wide you guys want to get here. But I
Clay Boykin 17:38
think I want to I think I want to go there. Yeah. Somewhere along the line, I want to look
Rollin McCraty 17:42
at let me let me tie this back in now to your question. You asked me a few minutes ago. Clay. You know, when you asked me about we radiate fields. Absolutely. So it’s, sometimes people push back on this. And it’s just the absolute Craziest thing. One of the books on my bookshelf back here is a book on by electromagnetism. And there’s a drawing in it from 1863, where people had actually externally measured the fields of the body and had it right. So it’s not like this is something I invented, right? I mean, every hospital has equipment to measure what’s called mcg? Well, let me let me back up. We put electrodes across the body to measure your heartbeat electrocardiogram or on your head to measure brainwaves or the EEG, what those devices are literally measuring its current flow. Right there differential amplifiers, I probably you know what I mean, by that?
Clay Boykin 18:39
Well, I was in marketing, so maybe not
Rollin McCraty 18:44
an electronics background, but
Dennis 18:47
just just just nod when Yes, yes, of course. Of course. I know. differential amplifiers all the time, of course.
Rollin McCraty 18:55
Basically, you’re measuring the flow of electricity, right. That’s really what it that’s why it’s called the electrocardiogram or electroencephalograph for measuring brainwaves. So when I were there, this is physics 101. I mean, whenever you have a flow of electrical current, you create a magnetic field. Right? So and the heartbeat is by far the largest source of rhythmic electrical, magnetic magnetic energy in the body. So we measure the heartbeat and millivolts and you measure brainwaves in micro volts in order magnitude. Wow, later, right. So I let’s use our cell phone analogy. If you held Joseph’s I’ll hold mine up here. We got one, two. So cell phones work indoors, right?
Clay 19:37
Yes.
Rollin McCraty 19:39
Well, those invisible waves are going through the wall. Well, it’s the magnetic component that’s going through the wall. Right, that’s what we’re using to carry your voice or the pitcher, you know, whatever. We’re modulating that signal. Someone I know a little bit about from my old days, right and my original career Well, as it turns out, whenever you’re the heartbeat You have the current flows in the body. Do they also radiate magnetic fields, I mean, produce magnetic fields which easily radiate right through the skin and out into the environment around us. Now, how do I know that? Well, let’s take a different device called a magnetometer which measured magnetic fields out here in space in front of the body and measure the hearts magnetic field. Now, every most large hospitals have devices called MC G’s, Magneto cardiogram, where you can, you don’t have, you don’t touch the body with anything physical, you’ve measured the field of the body. Now, I’m not going to go into why that’s better for certain why hospitals have them. But just, I don’t think it’d be that interesting right now. But point is, every time the heart beats, we radiate a magnetic field, and you can back up that magnetometer about three feet before you lose the capacity to detect the Hartsfield, you take the same sensor you back up about it, you can measure also brainwaves externally without touching, you back up about an inch before you lose. Right, the capacity to detect that signal. So clearly the hearts the big player here, it wasn’t this guy just goes back into the 90s. In our research here at the Heart Math Institute, using about the same techniques I would have used back in my Motorola days to decode or demodulate the information being carried by in this case, a radio wave to carry the signal, he has them the same thing, just applied those to the heart signal. And lo and behold, you can demodulate and see the information patterns carried by the field. And only that you can actually hook yourself up and get the right equipment and watch this, these frequency patterns change in real time as we change our emotional state.
Clay Boykin 21:42
Now, now, is that is that anything like biofeedback?
Rollin McCraty 21:47
Well, it’s we can take that we actually develop the first commercial consumer level biofeedback. So yes, yes and no. Right. So biofeedback is big is a kind of a term, right, measuring something and feeding back the result. So looking in a mirror and smiling as a form of biofeedback, you know, so what underlies that infer those information being patterns that we are literally broadcasting that we are radiating to the field into our we can call it your personal field environment has to do with the what’s called heart rate variability. And so what that is, is and you would remember this about we taught probably back when you were here many years ago, clay but in a healthy person, our heart rate changes with every heartbeat. So most people know what heart rate is right to simply how many times is the heartbeat in a minute. But in reality, our heart rate changing with each and every heartbeat. So the time drill always vary in time between each consecutive pair of heartbeats. And that actually is a way that that physiology encodes information is the space between things.
Clay 23:02
So there’s really no such thing as a steady heartbeat, not not
Rollin McCraty 23:05
in a healthy person. In fact, if you if your heart rate becomes metronomic, like that is one of the strongest indicators of serious future health problems. Wow. And that predicts things like cancer, heart, sudden cardiac death, metabolic, a whole list of things, this is not a good thing. And so physiologically speaking, it’s a you can think of it as a simple form of Morse code. Of course, physiology is a lot more complex than, you know Long’s and shorts, but it’s the same one same process. And that, so that heart rhythm, this is what underlies our heart rhythm, the patterns of that this is going back to our earlier work in the 90s, again, is the most reflective of a person’s emotional state. So our heart rhythm pattern becomes very chaotic looking when we’re feeling anxious or frustrated or impatient. Not compassionate, right? Whereas it what was really surprising in a way back again, going back to the early 90s, in our work was that the our bodies and our physiology literally shifts into a completely different functional or operational mode. When we’re feeling heartfelt feelings, I use that word that’s thinking doesn’t work. You can think appreciation, you know, thank you for opening the door for me. But when you feel it, it’s a very, that’s what drives physiology is the emotion of it the feeling. But when we feel things like appreciation, or compassion, which are all part of the love spectrum and my way of thinking that shifted the physiology in a completely different mode that we actually figured out what to call it took us a few years, we ended up calling coherence which has become a term all over the place now in terms of physiological functioning. And so when we’re, as it turns out, we actually have what is called A resonant frequency our bodies do. Right. And when we’re operating in it, that actually ends up being the same pattern that we were seeing when people are feeling things like compassion and appreciation and so on. We switch modes into a highly opera into a highly efficient functional state. So then that also mirrors the frequency literal frequencies, we’re broadcasting and radiating out into the environment. There’s a mathematical relationship between the rhythms of the heart and the information in the field. I hope that made sense.
Clay Boykin 25:32
Okay. I think I’m with you. A coherence. First thing I think of is, oh, my heart rate slowed down and it’s you know, and I’m calm and collected. But that’s, it’s more than that.
Rollin McCraty 25:47
And you’re talking about relaxation, relaxation, okay? Alright, so let’s talk about the word coherence, you know, you look it up in the dictionary, the first definition usually has to do with like, now we’re having a conversation. And I’m hopefully I’m putting my words together in a string and in a way that conveys a meaning past all the individual words, in other words as a coherent argument, or a coherent statement, and if I had a little bit too much to drink to this morning, and I muttering nonsense, that you would say, I am not coherent, I’m incoherent, right and go here, exactly. But that’s, that’s kind of the common people level of it. But it’s really similar in fit science and physics and coherence as a concept use pretty universally in science and physics now. And, in general, we use the word coherence when we’re talking about complex systems, like us, like EA, or even a cell is a compact system living system. So within the physics and science context, coherence has a lot of related meanings that are kind of umbrella, it means that the parts of a system have to be in communication. So it implies connectedness and correlation among the parts, right, because they have to somehow talk to each other to be working together in a harmonious way to give rise to a function that’s beyond the sum of the parts. And it also implies energy efficiency in a coherent. So we use coherence if we’re talking about the cosmos, you know, that’s a common term right? Or, certainly, if we’re talking about our physiology, so to have it to be in a coherent physiological state or heart rate, heart rhythm, coherence, as we now call it, that means a lot is going on in our bodies, that we’ve actually shifted into a more efficient functional state. So we’re also now vibrating if you will oscillate in or at our natural resonant frequency. So in other words, the heart long brain blood, blood pressure rhythms are all synchronizing synchronous, doing less work to get more done.
Dennis 28:00
Got in some bats where and
Rollin McCraty 28:02
the heart and brain come into synchrony as well, the activity of the
Dennis 28:05
heart and rink and that’s where your instruments and the work that you’re doing at the Heart Math Institute, are designed to do?
Rollin McCraty 28:13
What? Yes, so that was early, all the stuff I’m talking about now goes back into the 90s, in our work, so that once we really understood the physiology in this new functional state, I mean, that was what we have. It’s always been there. Sure. I mean, we’re always can we heard incoherent and people been in the states all along? That we were just to kind of the first look at it more deeply and say, wow, look what happens, you know, and by the way, I’m kind of rambling here, but at that time, when you search the medical literature, I think I could find three papers that had to do with what we would think of as positive emotions. Why 1000s on things like stress, anxiety, depression, right? Three
Dennis 28:51
on what a waste
Rollin McCraty 28:54
on positive now that’s changed. You know, there’s a whole new movement called positive psychology and all this going on out there.
Dennis 29:00
If we study if we study why people keep keep saying, that is so valuable. Yeah.
Rollin McCraty 29:08
Alright, so anyway, the point is not very few researchers that actually looked at what’s going on when we feel good. It was all focused on the negative side, right. Anyway, once we identified the state, and it was so clear that we naturally go into this ops dysfunctional mode called coherence is optimal state. When we feel good, you know, you walk out you may not say this, but you walk out the door to yourself, in other words, in the morning, and it’s one of those days, you know, the blue skies and the perfect disco Hakata What a beautiful day. You’re feeling appreciation of how I mean, you may not think that and you’re naturally going into this more coherent state.
Clay 29:55
That kind of like being in the zone. Well, it would be what underlies
Rollin McCraty 29:59
Right. Is that makes it that makes sense clay?
Clay Boykin 30:05
It does it does. I just, every once in a while I hit a straight golf ball, it feels so good.
Rollin McCraty 30:13
Because you’re a golfer you retake up your cones, parents practices, because it’s huge a lot of golfers have find if they get coherent before they take the shot. You know, there’s there’s over 400 studies now and people when they learn how to get independent of us that have followed up on our research, that we feel better and we perform better whether it’s golf or Olympic athletes. You know, whatever tennis I mean, the list goes on a lot of professional athletes use it now as well.
Dennis 30:41
Rollin I want to go back to this, this idea that it takes less if that we could solve so much of the world’s problems with less than 10% of the debt, the defense budgets? What is between that, that solution and where we are now? And how can what you’re doing and the things that that we’re doing the science get us to that that very, very same place,
Rollin McCraty 31:12
and evolution of consciousness. And so from my perspective, consciousness is evolving,
Dennis 31:18
right? So we are if we are going through, are we because it feels to me that we’re that whatever the imperative was to go from the chimpanzee in the bonobo to the hominid to the something is happening now that there is an evolutionary imperative. Something is going on that we’re going into. And it is an evolution in consciousness. And that’s where it where it’s happening.
Rollin McCraty 31:44
Yeah, and if that word is kind of strange or unfamiliar, consciousness, colored awareness, you know, or maturity, right? Yes. Because they’re all kind of interchangeable in a way.
Dennis 31:58
So we’re in we’re in our, in our human species. We’re at like, like, like, I don’t know, where you would be? Are we in the teens? Are we’re in our teens as a species? Are we are we evolving, that we can evolve into?
Rollin McCraty 32:15
We’re probably not quite to our teens yet. You know, I’ve never used this analogy for a bit. Think about it when we are cute little kids. So I grew up in the Midwest at a time, you know, that’s very different than I think these days, you know, and there was a period I come from or how old I was that the backyard was our boundary. Right. And then we as we matured, and we developed a certain level of self regulation. Right, like, be home by dark. It’d be literally exactly right, then the block became the boundaries, you know, an off playing with the other kids in their places. And Matt and, and then there was the next boundary with the next level of maturity and capacity to self regulate was now, you know, you look before you cross the street, so you don’t get ran over and, you know, kind of basic stuff, but it really was maturing, you know, and awareness. Then, in my days, the town became the next boundary. Certainly, right. Probably same for you guys, your
Dennis 33:19
neighbors looking out for one another. If I did something, and that was reported back, it was well, yeah,
Rollin McCraty 33:25
that that too. But the point is, I’m making we are evolved, or our awareness was evolving. Absolutely. Right. And for a lot of people we get we graduate high school, or we great college that kind of stops. Right? If you get my where I’m going with that?
Clay Boykin 33:41
Yeah, it’s like going back to high school reunion 40 years later, and pick up right where you left off.
Rollin McCraty 33:48
Yeah, and I think relevant to what you guys are talking about on your interviews and shows a lot. It’s also obviously those same years is when a lot of our natural kindness, and compassion and stuff kind of gets beat out of us. Yes. If you will, you know, and especially later in that development process. So I just kind of use that as a backdrop or an analogy for what I mean, to where, you know, we start evolving to where it makes more sense, even for our own. Many, many studies bear out what I’m about to say here, that it’s really collaborate collaborating with others and being kind. And compassionate is the best for our own careers. And certainly for our relationships. I’m just in for you even invited me this. I was just reading something. What Women Want most in men is kindness.
Dennis 34:42
It’s It’s amazing. It’s extraordinary what we can do and what I love about that, and what play and I have certainly experienced at all, is that it’s there. It’s an it’s our nature, but it gets I love the way you were saying it was beaten out of us or it was layered over or whatever and it’s De construction that gets it back to our natural state, which is, which is love.
Rollin McCraty 35:06
Yeah, so we have to unlearn a lot of what we lost I I’ve had to, you know
Dennis 35:12
me to that so much of that has been, has been part of that. So where are you now rollin at? Tell me what what your your work is in helping to elevate the consciousness or to or to bring into the coherence?
Rollin McCraty 35:30
Well the reason I got involved 30 Some years ago after infection sold my electrostatics company for way less than it was worth kind of quickly exit and do what I do now was met the founder of HeartMath, Doc Childress, his name. And so I’ve got to tell you the real story here of how it all began, I was he was on the East Coast and North Carolina area, and I was back there doing some work from our company on their research triangle area. And, and I was introduced to some mutual friends through the earlier years, I was talking about the consciousness studies and all that. And this guy sounds, this character sounds interesting, I’ll go pop over spend an hour meet the guy. And three days later, I left true story actually. And through that, he was talking about his history. And we had a lot of similar backgrounds, both, you know, from being in our early years poor, mean race and poor families and farming communities. And that mine was in Missouri, Nebraska, that area, and all the kind of school of hard knocks that we’ve kind of gone through, if you will. And what he had, he had studied very deeply, a lot, a lot of things that was similar to me, it just got a lot deeper than I had. And it was talking about the heart, not just as a metaphor, you know, and through my meditation practices, we know we were meditating with energy to the heart chakra and all this stuff. Yeah. You know, as I was very adept at that to through those practices, but it was never really taking the heart seriously, as in the way I would tend to describe it. Now. We to diverge a little bit here to really answer your question, we have the physical heart, but we also have what we now call the energetic heart. And I’m saying that’s real. And we’ll structure it’s just at the vibrational level, that thing we can’t yet put under the microscope. And that that’s the bridge of the transceiver to use my communications language, to what I hear I just call it the large or larger self that’s vibrating at a higher dimension and literally in a higher dimension. Sure, different dimension of density is the way I really think of it. But But anyway, a lot of people would call it their higher self or their spirit or their soul. Sure. Just saying, I’m here to say that’s real. And the heart is the bridge to that. And I’ll go as far as saying in my own personal experience and our research, that that’s an eye of a needle that you just can’t bypass. Right. And it is that it is really getting the the mind to finally surrender to that other level of intelligence that elevates awareness and consciousness that gets us to rise above our judgments and our biases and our kind of 3d level of consciousness. It’s a long story made really short there but
Dennis 38:34
but compelling to me, because it makes me want to know more. That’s what I because when you talk when you talk about the that the heart having intelligence, and it having it at that there is an intelligence there and that we tap into it. We’ve made then that is real.
Rollin McCraty 38:54
Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, and that is what elevates consciousness is tapping into that flow of information.
Dennis 39:02
So we could could we say that compassion, the when we’re searching for compassion, we’re searching for it both in ourselves and searching for it out because there is value in that search?
Rollin McCraty 39:13
Yeah, so what opens? So I think of this. This new mechanism, or this network, I was just talking about very much like radio systems. I can’t help it. I’m an ex radio guy, right? Yep. But it really is like that, that it’s a signaling system between different dimensions, if you will, I mean, that magnetic fields are all around you right now in the room, you’re in Right. Clay and Dennison, hear all the cell phone conversations? So when we get our phone out, how do we get the information we want, we tune the receiver to be resonant with the frequency of interest. And as soon as we do that, we transfer the energy information and amplify it up and we’re having our phone call. I’m just saying we work the same way between our larger self right And so that level of our own undivided wholeness is another way of saying it is in communication with the through via the energetic heart right down to the DNA level to all the cells. And I mean, how are we talking to anyway, when we go deeper and talk to ourselves inside? Yeah. It’d be good. I’m not talking about mental chatter. Now I’m talking about those deeper core understandings of who we are and what we’re here to be and who we really are. And
Dennis 40:31
I love having these conversations, Roland and clay because the, the, I know that this conversation might not have made a lot of sense to me before, but because of the depth of the learning in the studies that I’m doing, I’m gonna be able to see and I’m trying to think about this conversation in 50 years that would be very prosaic that they would that the people would be really talking about this the normal part of conversation, rather than something rather than something esoteric.
Rollin McCraty 41:05
Yeah. That reminds me I hadn’t thought about this in years that your comment. Before I tell you this story, though, I don’t want to lose the point that it is those heartfelt feelings of appreciation, compassion, kindness, care, love, that opens that channel that I’m talking about. So there, you can’t get through that I have the needle with the just the mind, you know, the judgments and the biases and sorting that the mind wants to do. But the story you just reminded me of, I’m actually an official mad scientist. True story, it’s I’ve got to somewhere. I’ve got it back here a few quite a few years ago, now. Maybe 567 years ago, Wired Magazine selected I think three maybe four what they considered mad scientists. They actually did have the whole senators pics page, they did cartoons. This is the clinic right here. But here’s the point that made your comment reminded me I have to be qualified to be a mad scientist. Because we had to be doing work that was kind of considered far out and kind of wacky. But a generation or two from now it’d be considered common sense. That’s what reminded me of that.
Dennis 42:22
Yeah. And that’s where I see this. And that’s where I see this going. I see that because the opportunity because when we look at something that is mad, and mad is spending less than 10% of the budget of the military that we have of destruction that could end up solving the all of the problems of poverty, that madness. It is, isn’t it? That’s a problem. You’re going to say we’re moving to sanity as opposed to being something outrageous that is that anyone looking at that would go That’s insane. Play you.
Clay 43:01
Yeah, so Okay, so we’ve been talking about the individual pretty much. And okay, so I’ve got a field around me. There’s something bigger going on, that you’re involved with. I want to hear about that.
Rollin McCraty 43:15
Okay. Alright. So I wanted to give that background that absolutely feels because, alright, so I can kind of go into this. So let me just tell you the evolution of our cliff notes version of our research, okay, so we can make your fields out here, we can take the information and see that it’s carrying information, probably about a whole lot more of emotions, but for sure about our emotional state. So what we’re feeling inside doesn’t stop at the scan. It’s we’re broadcasting it. And I think everybody knows that we can feel that from others.
Dennis 43:45
We’ve seen that you’ve walked someone walks into a room and fire the entire roster changes we know that we seen everyone’s experienced Yeah,
Rollin McCraty 43:55
we’ve intuitively we know that and I’ve seen it. So the next I’ll just give you the quick notes to the next step. In our research, you’ll say okay, well, that’s neat. So what does that have measurable effects on other people? And that was an easy question to answer actually, there’s multiple studies people want the hardcore research on all this published. In other words, our physiology is exquisitely tuned to receiving and responding to the the amplitude and frequencies of other biologically generated or fields. As we’re tuned each other or so are not only we radiating, we’re also receiving and miserably affected by others. Okay. You kind of already alluded to that Dennis, so that was probably yes. Alright, so now we’ll take it bigger. So that’s the living room level, right. Then, so then we got into I’m going to skip our intuition research. That’s a whole other topic maybe we can talk about another time. But that answer clays question. We that’s what this is where we get into That’s called the Global coherence Initiative, or GCI. And so we start to, we now have a global network of really ultra sensitive magnetometers that are specifically designed to measure the resonant frequencies of the vibrations in the Earth’s magnetic field. So we have these sites, I wish we didn’t have to do this ourselves. It’s really expensive and a real pain in the rear to do. But we’ve got sites one here in California, northern Canada, Saudi Arabia, Lithuania, New Zealand. I’m probably forgetting some but so this is this global network that we’re able to literally measure the the rhythms of the Earth is what the magnetic field. So let me give a little context here, when we have a proper there’s just too far away from it to reach right now. But think of the earth right, and it got the geomagnetic field, you know, thing, our compass is tuned into sure one pole, the South Pole, we all learned about that back in probably Junior High in our era. And, you know, if you remember back to when we were in grade school, or whatever it was, you got to dump iron filings. Hope you guys got to do that right on a glass plate. Yeah, you put your magnet under it, you move it around, and it was fun to play with it. And it visualizes the shape of the magnetic field. But here’s what I want to go one more level. If you think back, those iron filings lined up in lines. Right, it wasn’t just kind of black blob. They’re all so those are also visualizing not already seeing the shape of the field, depending on whether it’s a bar or a ball or whatever. Those are letting us see what are called magnetic field lines. Okay, or flux lines if we’re using engineering terms. But anyway, the Earth, the Earth’s magnetic field is Big Donut, or toroidal shape around the planet. But it goes out into space many, many 1000s of miles is the same way. Magnetic field lines. Now, here’s what we didn’t learn at least I didn’t back then is that you can pluck magnetic field lines, and they vibrate just like a guitar string. Really? Yeah. And it’s a great analogy. I mean, any stringed instrument abolishes guitar, you change the length of the string, the tension, it changes its vibration, right? It’s frequency, same way with Earth. So they’ve got really long magnetic field lines. So they have a lower frequency. Now what’s plucking these magnetic field lines, and the fact the science term for this is called field line resonances. Okay, so what’s plucking the strings is the solar wind rushing by, which is about a million miles per hour. And meanwhile, Earth is turning and so is the sun, right? In fact, Earth is within the magnetic field of the sun. Right? So there’s all these levels of fields, we live within fields within fields. Right, so the bank, the magnetic field, lights are vibrating. And so when we measured the frequency of these vibrating field lines down here on earth through our global network of magnetometers, the in frequency language, one of the primary resonant frequencies is a frequency called 0.1. Hertz, can answer cycle every 10 seconds. And guess what? The frequency of the human coherent heart rhythm is 0.1 0.1. I’m going to pause a minute, let that soak in. Okay, so part two, think back to Science class when we were back in middle school, or whatever it was. And we got to play with tuning forks, right? Or if you didn’t develop, everybody seen the examples, you’d have two tuning forks, the same tune to the same note, you tap one the other starts to magically vibrate. It’s demonstrating what’s called resonant coupling.
Clay Boykin 48:57
Oh, okay. I had that with my guitars.
Rollin McCraty 49:00
Absolutely. You can do a clocks on a wall guitars you via you can hit one the same note the other starts to vibrate right now. Absolutely resonant coupling. All that is showing is you can transfer energy and information. When systems vibrate at the same frequency. Same back to our cell phones, all those frequencies we tune if you guys are old enough to remember back when you have to turn knobs on radios. Oh, yeah, right, you’re you’re you’re literally moving the plates within a capacitor to change the resonant frequency that wants it, you hit the right frequency boom, you’re listening to your radio station or having your phone call. So that’s just the simple basics of with where our physiology is vibrating, oscillating at the same frequency as the primary frequency of the birth. It’s not a big jump to understand how we can be transferring energy and information from us to the to the to the bigger field. My making sense here you fall Yes, yes. Oh, Are we when we’re radiating our frequencies, love compassion versus, you know, impatience, anger, frustration that we’re feeding are not only feeding our local field that is coupling to the larger field. So all of humanity is now contributing to the larger global field, the information being carried by the larger field.
Clay Boykin 50:22
And so if this large population is vibrating the same, then we’re sending some stuff out. Yeah, well,
Rollin McCraty 50:30
we’re receiving it. And we’re radiating. So that next evolution that we’re talking about in consciousness, kind of one of the scenes here that for GCI, that’s kind of a naturally emerges, please become aware of what what are you feeding the field?
Dennis 50:45
Absolutely. Right. So I absolutely, so one
Rollin McCraty 50:49
of my calls to action, usually, for I get done with most presentations or talks, is, hey, pause real today and just ask yourself that what am I feeding the field is that part two of that is what we feed to feel matters.
Dennis 51:02
I love that. Because if that means that everything matters, that means that I can sit I can I can make a difference. By changing, I love the word mindful, because it gives me an opportunity to look at it rather than in a binary state, I get to look at it and in along the spectrum, that I can become more mindful, moving toward the one and moving in that direction to become more coherent.
Rollin McCraty 51:36
Yeah, I mean, mindful is a great term, and I back in what would have been 80s. For me, I studied mindfulness and practice that during that era. And you know, and it’s really great, because we’re being mindful, or mindfulness is really becoming more self aware of what we’re thinking and feeling and hopefully more objective about it. And as an observer, but I would also like to suggest, if I may, that, as we evolve a little more, that mindful term will probably fade away, and it’ll become more about being more heartful.
Dennis 52:08
I love that. Because that, really, that that. That brings us around to compassion. And it brings us around to be using this as a power and really to being a being able to to leverage it. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 52:27
well, exactly. So we have a lot more. I mean, you know, there’s so much 30 years of research, it’s hard to shove, cram 30 years of that into an hour here. But
Dennis 52:35
goodness know,
Rollin McCraty 52:38
kind of what it’s really important, I think, to understand that radio knob we were talking about, we have one inside of us. And we have a lot more capacity and power to tune our own dial than we think to align with our larger self and, and really become more energetic responded, energetically responsible for what we’re feeling thinking and what we’re radiating into the field. And there’s a lot of if you don’t want to do it, because you have to care for other people will do it for yourself.
Dennis 53:05
Exactly. But you know, you know, the thing that I find interesting, Roland is that you’re everything that I have studied from any of the any of the Masters in spirituality, any of the scientist says that they are talking about the same thing that you are you you’re you’re bringing this, you are applying the science and applying the science to what all the great teachers that I have, that I have ever studied, will either implying or directly saying,
Rollin McCraty 53:37
Yeah, you know, it’s interesting you say that it’s true. Absolutely. It’s also true in the scientific community. And I’ve had the honor, I’d say to meet a lot of pretty well known scientists over over my career, and we’ve had a lot of them have a visited here and kind of reminds me of a conference we had here on the question that was being discussed was it as our quantum processes involved in brain function and brain activity? So we had, you know, Roger Penrose was here, and Carl pre-boom and about 30, you know, similar names, right. And so they were here for about a week, and we had a lot of time to hang out at night, and you know, around the campfire in some cases and stuff and just talk and get to know each other. And it was so highly, David Bowman already passed away, but his main role was your contributor of his. And for example, in heaven having these kinds of discussions kind of like we’re having now he talked about a larger self that really guides and directs the physiology and all of these guys were, well, of course, it’s that way.
Rollin McCraty 54:51
It’s really true. I mean, you know, the really great minds and thinkers have absolutely no problem of discussion we’re having today. It’s kind of obvious to them You know that it’s really the, oh, I want to be kind here, but the scientists want to be is maybe, you know, you’re kind of climbing the ladder, and you’re really stuck in the dogma and religions. And to me, science has become the new religion and just as dogmatic as religion. Of course. Fortunately, I work in a nonprofit research center here, so I don’t, I don’t have to worry about tenure and don’t really, you know, have to play that game to the same same way. You know, the people who resist this kind of things, you know, they’re still stuck at that lower level, they haven’t really matured enough to their awareness to really understand that, you know, the I, to me, even from childhood, frankly, the idea that a lightning bolt hit a pond of mud, you know, millions of years ago, and we evolved into who we are now, against all the laws of thermodynamics, thermodynamics is just absolutely absurd. Yeah, I could never just never could, you know, and I know, all the models have, or not all but a lot of the models about, you know, self organization and all that. But even that falls apart with a little deeper thinking,
Clay 56:04
you know, I, this whole time, which keeps coming through my head is, you know, I work with men, I’ve got a mentor, if I got a network around the world, you know, how do we take this to action? You know, the guy that’s, you know, you don’t know about all this stuff, but he’s searching, you know, he’s got this hole and inside of them, and he’s trying to figure out, what do I do? How do I get unstuck?
Rollin McCraty 56:28
Well, that’s, that’s, I think you were one of the early adopters in a way. But that’s really why Heart Math exists. The Heart Math Institute is to provide practical research based not that that matters. But it’s a nice add on approaches, tools, techniques that we really can use to to really grow in our capacity to self regulate to have more control over our emotional diet and become more self aware and able to make Icom turnarounds. You know, I wouldn’t what I mean by that clay as a turnaround is somebody does something, you know, that frustrates us. You know, are we there goes that typical, almost automated, unconscious reaction, right? Frustration, impatience, anger, whatever that is. And the analogy I like to use, it’s like the trains leaving the station. You know, the trains pretty good at you know, it’s building up momentum. And I’ve actually had, I’m sure you’d have to the experience of that train gets too far down the track that emotional train I’m talking about. You’re sitting there watching going, Oh, shit. Oh, boy. There it goes. I see it happening. And I know the playout. And it happened. It is still it’s too far down the track. We can’t stop it and turn it around. That reminds
Clay Boykin 57:50
me. I should have pulled it up. It’s sitting away across over there on my bookshelf, is a little book called freeze frame
Rollin McCraty 57:58
is our first book your first book. Yeah, yeah. So but the whole point then when I say turnarounds is it takes a little bit of practice. But once that once that emotion starts building, and this is not about suppressing, that never works. But it’s about turning that energy around. And shifting that same energy, you know, into a neutral or with practice. It can even be appreciation, compassion, care, kindness, but and then that does nothing but benefit us, our immune system, our hormonal system, gets us into that coherent state, we’re able to think better, clearer, make better decisions. So just take some practice that, you know, most people just haven’t been taught.
Clay 58:40
Yeah. Well, hopefully some folks will listen to the podcast. And it’s getting out there. I’ve got, it’s being picked up in several places in Africa now. Wow. Congratulations. Yeah, I’m very, very happy with it. And I know your time is tight. And I want to invite you back, I’d love
Rollin McCraty 59:01
to this, I was fine. This is very different than those types of conversations.
Clay Boykin 59:05
Well, you know, I’m really trying to communicate, communicate, and, you know, probably about as many women watch, this has been. And same with my websites. You know, the stats show that sometimes there are more women on the website than there are men. You know, they’re looking for a resource for their man. And the HeartMath message is a very powerful one. And I’m really grateful that you took some time this afternoon. My pleasure, my pleasure. And please come back.
Rollin McCraty 59:38
Oh, just let me know when you don’t like to and we’ll find a time.
Clay Boykin 59:41
Great. Thank you so much, Roland.
Dennis 59:43
I love that you’re giving me the opportunity to exit the conversation at a higher level than I entered it at a higher level of consciousness. Roland, thank you, thank you for for this for this opportunity to to open my mind and to really to get into To My Heart and really to to explore that to be heartful. And because I can I can I can experience that now I can explore it and work into that place. Thank you. Thank you so much time. Clay thank you for for allowing me to be along this journey in search of the new compassionate male in myself and in you and in you rollin and to be able to see the beautiful examples that we have because we’re going on from here on so thank you everybody. Thank you for listening to podcasts and there will be more coming. So stay tuned. We will see you in search of the new compassionate male next time.
Clay Boykin 1:00:46
Check out the latest episode of In Search of the new compassionate mail on your favorite podcast Station.
EP110: Don Frick – Silence & Servant Leadership (Part 2)
On the day when he first read Greenleaf’s essay The Servant as Leader in 1986, Don Frick decided to dedicate the rest of his career to understanding and teaching Greenleaf’s ideas about servant leadership. Since then, he has written books and essays about servant leadership—including Greenleaf’s biography—made presentations, conducted workshops, taught graduate seminars, and consulted with corporations on the principles of servant leadership. He is currently working on another book that offers details about how various organizations have implemented servant leadership. Before encountering Greenleaf’s work, Don engaged in multiple careers, including: managing departments at a university and museum of art; university teaching; television, radio, and film writing, production, and performance; trainer; specialist in advertising and marketing for Fortune 500 companies, plus an entrepreneur. His formal education includes a B.S. in Education, Master of Divinity, and PhD in Leadership and Organizational Studies.
EP109: Don Frick – Zelensky & Servant Leadership (Part 1)
On the day when he first read Greenleaf’s essay The Servant as Leader in 1986, Don Frick decided to dedicate the rest of his career to understanding and teaching Greenleaf’s ideas about servant leadership. Since then, he has written books and essays about servant leadership—including Greenleaf’s biography—made presentations, conducted workshops, taught graduate seminars, and consulted with corporations on the principles of servant leadership. He is currently working on another book that offers details about how various organizations have implemented servant leadership. Before encountering Greenleaf’s work, Don engaged in multiple careers, including: managing departments at a university and museum of art; university teaching; television, radio, and film writing, production, and performance; trainer; specialist in advertising and marketing for Fortune 500 companies, plus an entrepreneur. His formal education includes a B.S. in Education, Master of Divinity, and PhD in Leadership and Organizational Studies.
Welcome to In Search of the new compassionate male. My name is Clay Boykin, I support this podcast through my coaching practice. I help people visualize and harmonize find direction and meaning or simply get unstuck. Contact me at Clay Boykin calm for a free consultation. Now here’s the latest episode of In Search of the new compassionate male. Don. Ty you doing?
Don 00:33
Well, it’s been interesting. I had a first meeting of my implementing servant leadership class. And that was last Friday. And it’s this time I just in the first the first meeting, I’ve learned to do this. So we just want to hear how you got here. To serve in leadership, tell me this, tell us about your journey in a person was kind of like a resume. And then I read some poems. And after that, the floodgates were open. And I this struck me I never struck me before when someone is especially a lot of people, when that field takes over with a group of people, you know, you’re all participating in the same field of intention and sharing. I’m not gonna say it’s mystical. I think it’s real. I think it’s, there’s a real measurable field probably we just don’t measure yet. But when that’s happening, then everybody is growing together. And it’s a feeling that can’t be manufactured. Facts are necessary. conceptual ideas are necessary. But they are not the only things that make up the full rich expression of what it means to be human, but also what it means to be a compassionate male. Also, there’s a man who named Dr. Tarr T AR, his mother, I met him recently. His mother was announcements. And she was one of the one of the one of the twins part of one of the twins that Dr. Mengele experimented on. Oh my. So she became an advocate. Later, she moved to Terre Haute, Indiana married and became an advocate for forgiveness. So I gave him the biography of Greenleaf because it has an awful lot to do with Terre Haute. And I really appreciate it. I’m going to see him tomorrow night. The State Museum now has an exhibit about her and her message. And they’ve done a documentary on her for public television. So I’m going to see that tomorrow night too. But she stood, she stood in the gates of Alice Fitch and read a letter about forgiveness. And until that moment, she could not get over the terrible effects of what had happened. And she was short with people and she realized that she was screwing herself an uprising
Clay 03:45
that really, it’s really sobering because last Friday, I interviewed Dr. Riane Eisler and her story is that when she was six years old, in Austria, her parents it was the crystal night and you know, these people were being raided and they were being taken away. And her father was taken away. And luckily, the mother was able to do something but get the to get the Gestapo to release the Father. And they evacuated and got to Cuba and survive there until they came over to the US. You know it’s something now, the right people show up at the right time. Especially in these these podcasts. I was talking about Dr. Rian, icecool earlier and per book, nurturing our humanity is a pretty incredible read. I skimmed it. I’ve gone back to take it to heart, read the preface in the first chapter that erased to the back to get to the conclusion. And then I’m going to read the rest of the book. And what is I think, showing me is that? Well, I don’t know what it’s showing me. I don’t know if I can put it into words yet. But I know that leadership for me servant leadership is, is in the present with the people that I’m with. With the network that I connect with. And this whole other side of leadership, the leadership that she’s demonstrated, taking from childhood, the atrocities that she witnessed and persevering through, and a brilliant woman taking all these different aspects and in this macro view of things, to present another way to, for us to live. And that’s another form of leadership. So it is to share, to take the difficulties and the challenges, terrific challenges, and then turn that in to something for the greater good. And she told us early on in the, in our conversation, actually, before we started taping, she she said that she had lost her husband six weeks ago. Yeah, that both of them well up into yours. And yeah, the obituary, said that he died of COVID. They’ve been married for 45 years. And she shared that. In their first 100 days of marriage, he wrote a poem a day to her. And she’s publishing that now. But you know, that’s a generation that’s, that’s fading away. Unfortunately, I think the lessons are also fading away.
Don 07:58
Look at us now. Yeah. I am so struck by Zelinsky in Ukraine. Here’s a guy who grew up Jewish in southern Ukraine. His father moved to Mongolia for four years. And they came back and live in Kiev. He surprised me. He was, of course a good student. He’s always interested in theater though. And he made it he got a law degree. In six years. He got a law degree and a bachelor’s degree and was licensed to practice law, but went back to theater and was highly successful there. He made his name in a feature film, which you can see in Russian on Netflix right now called servant of the people. Really? Yeah. And it was a take kind of a spoof of the current leadership of Ukraine, because he was anything but a servant of the people whose crooked he stole things. Nobody believed in. The film features Zelinski as a young man who’s still living at home. And he just for the heck of it, jumped into I pick his friends in the film put him in this presidential race. And one day in the morning, there is a knock on the door and he’d won the race and they come to take him down to his office. He was shocked. So anyway, the whole thing was so successful. I went into a series for several years when he then became genuinely interested in politics, He named his party servant of the people. So it took this spoof, and turn it into the world’s most serious name, I think. Wow. And by the way, he also had his own production company. And he was the lead producer, he produced everything on Ukrainian television, he was ultimately responsible for it. So he had also dealt with a lot of people with big budgets for over there. And he had prepared himself without knowing what he was preparing for a president, a wartime President at that. And I really strikes me because you don’t play the I mean, you’re kind of like me, you know, you’ve your Motorola for a long time. But you did a lot of other things to sense created new things. You weren’t preparing for this, when you were 17 years old. by name. You didn’t have a straight line drawn from them to hear. And yet you repair you prepared for it all along the way. Because I suspect, I’d like to hear you talk about this. I suspect you followed what lured you nuts, LVR, Id L U R, E, D, and kind of went with that. And it tended to resolve itself out in an unprepared unexpected ways.
Clay 11:48
Gosh, you’re so right. And I have to say that. And this is not unique to me. And all the the men that I’ve come in contact with and all people interviewed. It’s like, you know, it’s the hero’s journey. For the guys, you know, it’s the we grew up and we leave our heart behind, and we go do what we’re supposed to do. We go climb this ladder, and whatever form it takes. And we know how to be happy. And so many times, there’s just emptiness that guys have. They don’t know what it is, but they know that they’re supposed to climb the ladder. You know, that’s how you achieve happiness. That’s how you provide and so forth. But at some point, it all falls apart. And that’s my story. And my health got me and I fell. And it wasn’t until I came back and found out what was here what what what was this burn it is a keenness that felt empty. That I recognized that that was that was my heart speaking to me, even speaking to me all these years, and I can go back and look at pictures and photographs and things that I did, that were all about heart. But I was pushing that down and going after the career growth. And, you know, I guess that’s okay for a time to get oneself established, if needed. But but it brought me down eventually. And it was only in the 2018, I guess, maybe some leading up to that, that I really decided to follow my heart. I had had a couple of health scares. And finally the last one was this lit. Someone’s calling me to do something different. As soon as I did. The fall of 2018. Everything changed, everything was aligned. And everything took off. And it’s like, well, I don’t know where this is going. But it feels right. It was the first time in my life that I ever really listened to my feelings. This was not intellectual. This was a feelings thing. And the more I did it, the better I felt the more the energy changed around me and hearing
Don 14:43
thank you for that. It resonates with me. i i There are a lot of medical facts I could spew out and say oh, the males have a lot of cholesterol and we all ate grease In fact, I was blocking my heart. And I did quite well with concepts and ideas. But my heart was blocked. Yeah, till it literally was 90% 99% blocked. And they had to put stents in him. After that, I’d already run across certain leadership. But after that, I said, Look, I, I gotta quit what I’m doing here, and only do what I’m told to do. Right? By my heart. It’s got to be cleaned out. The Pathways to it, have to be cleaned out. It’s the Native Americans, you know, the talking stick, and yeah, all that. The fact is that if you don’t stand up and speak from the heart, I’ve been in some men’s groups where we do this kind of exercise. People will kindly nod. But they don’t, they don’t get excited. They don’t have to go pee, because they’re so excited. Because you’re just saying stuff. That means to be human, but also what it means to be a compassionate male. Now, I suspect that Solinsky has, you could probably check off all the boxes for compassionate bail for him. But doesn’t mean he’s not out there in his army fatigues. Doing want to ask to do to pray to protect his people. I’m compassionate. I’m not gonna fight back. No, no, that’s not. That’s not what it means.
Clay 16:58
So true. Ah,
Don 17:03
it’s a hard lesson for some people to learn is like servant leadership. A lot of people think it means being a martyr. And not attending to your own needs. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you don’t attend to your own needs, go in and go down. You’re going to be a poor leader
Clay 17:29
why so many things are running through my mind right now. Our experiences health wise are very close to one another. And yeah, heart being blocked. Call it metaphoric, or call it physical. Know, the blockage. Wow.
Don 17:54
And it’s what’s so ironic is that I blocked my heart to handle my feelings by not facing them directly. I suspect. I say suspect because I know at some level is true. And that very blockage almost gave me a Widowmaker what they call the widow-maker. And the hard docks talk about it about killed me. Yep. So by blocking it. I just about killed myself.
Clay 18:34
Yes. i So get that. And that happened in oh seven. I ended up under the knife, you know. quintuple bypass. And later on. I ended up having to stem because of that very thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there you go. And that’s what I asked myself. You know, I was, I was commuting to New York at the time back and forth in my offices on parking 32nd Street. And I’d sit my office and I look up at the Empire State Building, you know, never been up there. And when I went back after, like, Come bless for my bypass surgery. I thought I’ve never been up there. So I went up. This was a fall of December 22,020 17. No, this was the fall of 2007. I went up there. And I said, you know, metaphorically, I’ve made it to the top. I’m at the top of the Empire State Building. You know, it’s almost killed me. And of course, you know, what came next? Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? You know, I looked at my little office window down there. And I thought what’s is all about. And that’s when the market crashed. And I was let go and wasn’t for two years. For I got my next job. And it was, it was for $9 An hour part time at OfficeMax. You know, so I went from the top, basically the bottom and started over again. And that’s where it was that evolution that really woke me up.
Don 20:34
I’ve wondered, well, I had, oh, probably 10 or 12 careers. I don’t mean jobs, I mean careers. But in several of them, I was in the public, I posted a television show for the museum apart and did the radio series. But I had to start wondering what part hubris was playing. In that because there’s this thing out there, that persona that you can build, you know, just do it in media. I found a lot of wounded people in radio and television, who probably like me, had a hard time uniting their vocation in their application. And who they were and who they wanted to be seen as to another deadly thing, but there’s a kind of hubris there. And boy, just hate to have to admit stuff like that. I’m gonna go, I’ll drive around the block or something before I really get into that. It’s called the shadows. Yeah. And I think that’s where a lot of courage comes in for people. Yeah. Between able to turn and face them.
Clay 22:00
Yeah. What was it that that you really got rolling? With servant leadership. I mean, you. You’re the official biographer, for the late Robert Greenleaf. And you told in a previous podcast, kind of all the evolution of that. But there was a point when all those careers, which you really took off and dedicated yourself to the advancement of servant leadership. Can you talk about that? So?
Don 22:38
Yes, I got green leaves. Original essay, the servant as leader, when they in 1986. And it came in a padded envelopes from my mentor who lived in Dallas and McGee Cooper. So I opened it up, eventually, through blade around a couple of days, and read it and was riveted. And decided after I closed the last page, that I would devote the rest of my career to trying to understand and share these ideas. And that was it. Now, that was not my style, necessarily, to say, oh, okay, I see this, I’ll just change my life. It wasn’t unprecedented. One night in graduate school. I worked late at a radio station came back and there was one light on in the dorm. And the guy was an entry. I was in seminary, first year of seminary, and there was a guy there who I like, he was kind of a draft dodger, I think he was waiting till he turned 26. But he just said, you really need to go to England or Scotland. Next year, for your second year of seminary. I said, why? And he said, Well, I went to England, blah, blah, blah. So I walked out and called my sister and said, I’m going to Scotland next year. Boom, just like that. It sounds foolish. It sounds foolish to change my career, just like that. But I was saying, Yes, I didn’t initiate the request. The request came from somewhere else. And there was a solid rightness about it. You know what, thank God I did. Thank God that I take no responsibility for creating that. Except that I had the doors of perceptions open perception open long enough for it to sneak in and make itself No. And that’s for a lot.
Clay 24:56
I’m sorry. Yeah. Why Scotland?
Don 25:01
I’m one quarter Scottish. Aha. I always wanted to go there. And I wanted to learn a little bit more about my grandmother. And where she came from near Glasgow, but also Scotland. In theology. It’s a pretty big deal place. The University of Scotland had some high end theologians through the years. And I wanted to test myself there too. So I bought a motorcycle and ran around Europe after that, and you know, that all that kind of stuff? I’m glad I did. But how often? Have I been open to all? I’ve asked myself that since that was an awful, a W E, a full moment when this thing crashed into my consciousness. And I wonder if there had been time since that. insights of similar import. Haven’t tried to get in there. And I was too busy.
Clay 26:16
Oh, that’s a real. That’s really something to reflect on. How many times it just right below the surface? Yep. And there’s just enough resistance? No, I can’t do that. Just enough resistance to keep it is just an inch or two below the waterline? And yeah, really, it really is. It really gives me pause, as you’re saying that because that time when I said yes, when I quit my work, you know, I’d had another heart scare, I was okay. I came home. When I said to Laurie, I said, you know, I was in Jamaica in 2007 in the woods, knowing I was going to have a heart attack. And just finding peace. It’s hard to describe, but I knew I was leaning against the veil. I knew I was going to die. And I wasn’t going to go to the hospital air. But I felt got so at peace with all that. How that happened? I don’t know. And when I got back, sure enough. I went in. But I said to her after this latest heart scare in 2018, I said, you know, I was in the woods in Jamaica, doing what was in my heart to do do my little crafts and so forth. And knowing I was going to die. So I would do it was my heart there. And who’s to say, today is not my last day? And am I doing what’s on my heart right now. That’s right. If not now, when am I going to do it? And that’s what sparked me to believe and start this path.
Don 28:16
I think if something odd and irresistible comes to us because it’s on the fringes of not of consensual reality. I mean, it’s a kind of non consensual reality. I think that is a high alert that we should pay attention. And I’m almost glad here the I am glad I’m 75 years old. I don’t have the same passions of making it I making it now is to try to make a difference for other people as much as I can. knowing now that that’s not all out to me. That it is it’s it’s in communion with other people who care I’m supposed to be working with in certain ways, and I’m doing that. So it is mysterious, but it’s real. That’s it something can be mysterious. And still it will be real as dirt it’s holding those two things in our mind simultaneously. That Einstein called genius that we are but it’s very difficult to do especially in this culture.
Clay 29:45
Yeah. Yeah. So binary. Check out the latest episode of In Search of the new compassionate male on your favorite podcast Station.
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EP111: Don Frick – Ernest Shackleton – Servant Leadership (Part 3)
Riane Eisler is a social systems scientist, cultural historian, futurist, and attorney whose research, writing, and speaking has transformed the lives of people worldwide. Her newest work, 
