I’m pleased to introduce Dr. Dawna Markova. Dawna is an internationally renowned thought leader and personal growth expert. She has lived many incarnations in the past seven decades as an author, teacher, psychotherapist, researcher and executive advisor. One of the creators of the best-selling Random Acts of Kindness series, Dawna is the author of many other inspirational books. Today, we’ll be talking about her latest book, Living a Loved Life: Awakening Wisdom through Stories of Inspiration, Challenge and Possibility, which invites us to do whatever is necessary to create a life we can love and to love the life we have.
Living a Loved Life
You can listen to the full conversation by clicking ‘play’ above, or on the following podcast platforms:
The following is a taste of my conversation with Dawna.
Q: “The co-author of this book is a ghost.” This is such a great line. Please tell our listeners about your precious co-author and how and when you decided to write this book together.
Dawna: It’s a great question. My co-author is my grandmother who passed away when I was 14 years old.
Q: How have you learned to accept the gift of your wounds, not in retrospect, but in the very moment of your woundedness?
Dawna: When my body had cancer the first time, I had to stop, and what it brought me to and what every challenge has brought me to ultimately is to find my own way to love the world.
Q: In your new book, you quote Thomas Berry at the very beginning saying that our old story sustained us, and it provided a context. And now we are between stories. This seems particularly meaningful at this moment in June of 2020. What are the challenges of being between stories right now and what are we called to do?
Dawna: So where we are as a culture right now is that we are in that space where the shell is around our seed Law and order are the shell, protecting us. A choke hold is a very interesting thing. It’s like a shell, but it chokes out the life-force. If that shell does not break open, the life-force can’t allow us to grow.
When asked if there’s one last thing they’d like our listeners to hear, Dawna says, “Ask that question and then wonder, “What am I longing for?” That’s the gift that I would offer to you and I would offer to anyone who is listening to this conversation.”
About Dawna:
Dawna Markova followed her precious grandmother’s footsteps to become a midwife, but rather than babies, she helps birth possibilities within and between people. She has lived many incarnations in the past seven decades as an author, teacher, psychotherapist, researcher, executive advisor, and organizational fairy godmother. One of the creators of the best-selling Random Acts of Kindness series, Dawna is the author of many other inspirational books, including: I Will Not Die an Unlived Life: Reclaiming Purpose and Passion, Reconcilable Differences: Connecting In a Disconnected World, Collaborative Intelligence: Thinking With People Who Think Differently, and A Spot of Grace: Remarkable Stories of How You DO Make a Difference. This interview focuses on her lastest book, Living A Loved Life: Awakening Wisdom Through Stories of Inspiration, Challenge and Possibility.
Find Dawna on Social Media:
https://www.dawnamarkova.com/ (Website)
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/180600.Dawna_Markova (GoodReads)
https://www.facebook.com/dawna.markova.9 (Facebook)
https://twitter.com/dawnamarkova (Twitter)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dawna-markova-ph-d-29281a7 (LinkedIn)
https://www.instagram.com/dawnamarkova/ (Instagram)
Dawna’s Book:
Living A Loved Life: Awakening Wisdom Through Stories of Inspiration, Challenge and Possibility
Book Mentioned in the Interview:
Nothing Bad Between Us: A Mennonite Missionary’s Daughter Finds Healing in Her Brokenness, by Marlena Fiol, which is now available for pre-order on Amazon.
About Marlena Fiol:
Marlena Fiol, PhD, is a globally recognized author, scholar and speaker. She is a spiritual seeker whose work explores the depths of who we are and what’s possible in our lives. Her significant body of publications on the topic, coupled with her own raw identity-changing experiences, makes her uniquely qualified to write about personal transformational change. She is also a certified tai chi instructor and freelance writer whose most recent work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and newsletters.
Find Marlena Fiol on Social Media:
Facebook
Twitter
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LinkedIn
Podcast Transcript:
Marlena: Dawna, welcome. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.
Dawna: Aloha, it’s my pleasure.
Marlena: You begin your beautiful book “Living a Loved Life” with the words, “The co-author of this book is a ghost.” It’s such a great line. Please tell our listeners about your precious co-author and how and when you decided to write this book together.
Dawna: It’s a great question. My co-author is my grandmother who passed away when I was 14 years old. However, she taught me that in our essence we are, in fact, love, which she believed was an intelligence. And she said that it’s really impossible, those who love you stand behind you, and they connect with you through a river. She spoke in metaphor a great deal, which to a child is just fine. And she said, “The river is all their prayers, such as maybe someday may there be one who can go to school who can read.” My grandmother never put a foot in school a single day in her life. “Someday may there be one who is never hungry.” My grandmother lived in the potato fields in Russia.
So, my grandmother is very much alive in me, and I have many conversations with her. And it seemed to me that I needed her guidance. She was a midwife, and in her definition of midwife, that meant also a healer and one who…she would sit with people when they were giving birth with women, but she would sit with people, men and women when they died, when they passed. So she midwife people both ways as it were. And nobody even ever said her first name. She was Michael’s wife or MA or grandma. So even her name was lost, and it was really important to me that she not be lost, and particularly that her wisdom not be lost. My father brought me to her. Every Friday she insisted on it. She lived in “Hell’s Kitchen” and my father in New York, and my father brought me to her first thing in the morning. And I spent the entire day with her, and then my parents went to her house for a big Sabbath dinner. And she had usually…
She had 11 children in this country. So there were a lot of people that came and helped her make bread. And that was really special because we made this braided bread, and we spent the whole day making the bread. And then she would look around as people would take the first slice, you know, of warm bread with melted butter on it, and her eyes just glistened because, as she made the bread, she braided it and she braided prayers into it. So she would take one hank of dough and say, “Willie is so smart, but Sammy is not so smart, and he sleeps in his car. He has no place to live. Willie’s smartness helped Sammy find a place to live.” And then she would cross one hank of the bread over another. So she braided prayers into the bread, and when people ate her bread and took the first bite in her mind they were eating her prayers.
Marlena: That’s beautiful.
Dawna: In many ways, this book is her…it certainly is an homage to her in some ways. It’s a carrying on of her wisdom. And that’s why I wrote it.
Marlena: In fact, numerous times in the book you invoke those who came before you, not only your grandmother, and those who are beside you and those who will follow. Would you say more about that generational chain and what it means to you?
Dawna: Well, the word that comes in my mind when you ask the question is belonging and belonging has so many different meanings. But in my mind when I say it now, it’s to belong. It’s to have the intelligence that is love, which is my grandmother’s definition of love because I didn’t ask her a lot. And she spoke of intelligence as a light, and she spoke of intelligence and love interchangeably. So the message I got was that to be smart meant to belong in this love that came to me, that comes to me, that will go from me and continue in those who come after me. And so I never felt lonely because I couldn’t even imagine what loneliness would be because, although I was one body walking around, I could in an instant feel those who came before me who had prayed that someday there would be one such as I and who could see out through my eyes, who could hear through my ears, who could feel through my skin. I was…those who stand next to me who can help me and those who will follow me.
Marlena: Yeah. Yeah. You write, “It’s all a question of a story, long ribbons of stories.” In another part of the book you write, “In sharing stories, you unlearn to not speak.” What is it about stories that makes them so powerful from your point of view?
Dawna: Well, I have different point of views about it, but one point, I was trained as a cognitive neuroscientist. Believe it or not, it is a long way from grandma. So, we have different ways of perceiving the world, and I’ll put it in common language because…although it is not neurologically correct. But we have a left hemisphere, and our belief system exists in our left hemisphere. That’s where we think rationally and linearly. We also have a right hemisphere, and we think in images, symbols, stories, songs in the right hemisphere. Now, the interesting thing that I learned is that the fibers in the left hemisphere are vertical. So if you think of your belief system as being on top of a ladder, a new experience comes along, and it has to go up that ladder. But if it hits a belief that’s contrary, it’s like the top of the ladder kicks it off. The brain doesn’t record it and it doesn’t file it. And so the person would say, “Yeah but. Yeah but. Yeah but. Well, yeah, but I don’t think that.”
However, the magic thing is the fibers as far as we understand it on the brain hemisphere are horizontal. And so if you have an experience, that experience has a chance to be assimilated by the brain to be digested, and the right hemisphere’s way of thinking is relational. How does one thing relate to another, relate to another, relate to another? And a story is a relational way of thinking. A story goes into that right hemisphere, goes across those fibers, and it has a way of being assimilated. And that makes sense if you think about it because we want to be able to connect with one another in order to survive. Some creatures hide in burrows or logs in order to survive, but human beings have to connect in order to survive. And the connective relational aspect of the brain is the right hemisphere, and so consequently, stories are the ways that we have of connecting one another, connecting with our past, and connecting in the future.
Marlena: Yeah. Great. I love the ladder metaphor. Yeah. It works. You suggest three reasons why so many people feel like their lives don’t matter, and so much of your book is about the importance of living a life that matters. The reasons you give for people feeling like their lives don’t matter is, number one, dismissal and dishonoring of elders. You talk about educational and cultural systems that focus on what doesn’t work and a respect for domination rather than collaboration. Would you say more about why these are preventing people from living lives that don’t matter and how they undermine people living lives that matter?
Dawna: Yeah. They don’t matter if the person believes they don’t matter.
Marlena: Yes. Good correction. That’s exactly what it is, yes.
Dawna: So the reason that honoring elders is so significant is that elders carry wisdom. They carry the lessons learned from experiences, and they can go, “Oh, no, wait a minute.” You know, my grandmother could say, “There were pogroms when I lived in Russia, and these Cossack soldiers would come on their horses into the potato fields looking for Jewish people and kill them all, thinking they were higher than anyone else. And we had to escape.” So that’s a piece of wisdom that was metabolized by her life that she could pass on to me. If we dishonor our elders or if we lose our elders as we are doing in this culture and particularly in this time, we lose that wisdom that humanity has been needing and yeasting from one generation to the next to the next.
The second one is that there are two different lenses as you will that you could put on a camera. One is a deficit focused one of domination where what that means is you’ve got 14 wrong on the spelling test. And I’m smarter than you. I’m older than you. I’m whatever. And so I will dominate you and tell you, “You’re stupid” or tell you, “You have to do this, or I’m better than you because I know more.” The other is an asset focus. An asset focus says to a human being, “This is what there is about you that is unique that’s a gift to the rest of the world.” And it’s your responsibility to take that gift, that asset, and apply it to challenges. So, decades ago, I used to teach kids in school, and I would always mark how many they got right on the spelling test. And then I would ask them, “How did you know how to spell cat?” The kid would say, “Well, I just spelled it in my hand.” And I’d say, “So, how would you…so let’s try that. Let’s put the letters of the word dog in your hand.”
So that’s as far as I can tell from all my studies of cognitive mastery, the brain that’s working really well in the way it’s designed to work focuses on partnership in every domain. So one way is partnering what you do know and what your assets are and what you have learned and what you do well with the challenges, what you don’t know, what’s difficult for you. And that is a totally different thinking strategy than a dominating thinking strategy. And right now we in our time we are going through this war, I’ll use that word not lightly, between domination and partnership. And there’s a wonderful woman named Riane Eisler who wrote a book called “The Chalice and the Blade” that is all about this and traces it through history.
And the third one is what I talked about just now, which is domination versus collaboration. And we have all these structures that are based on the thinking strategy of domination. People talk sometimes about patriarchy. That’s very unusable as far as I’m concerned because patriarchy is a thinking strategy, and it is the thinking strategy of domination, whereas collaboration is a different thinking strategy. It’s what we are wired and designed to do. A vast amount of our brain is dedicated to collaborating, to social thinking, to thinking with. That’s a very long answer. I’m sorry my answer is so long this time but…
Marlena: No, no, no, no. It’s great. It’s exactly what I was asking about. It’s so interesting that you talk about your ancestors fleeing from Russia. My ancestors are Mennonite rather than Jewish, and they fled from Russia in the late 1800s because of religious persecution, so interesting how our rivers intersect.
Dawna: Oh, yes, and the same pogroms and the same Cossacks could have been, you know, after your ancestors as they were after my ancestors.
Marlena: Dawna, in different ways throughout your book, you remind us that our greatest difficulties can help us realize how we do matter and that we can grow from our wounds, actually create beauty like the Japanese art form Katsushika that creates and even celebrates the cracks and creates beauty in the cracks. So I couldn’t agree more. In fact, it’s the theme of my new book “Nothing Bad Between Us: A Mennonite Missionary’s Daughter Finds Healing in Her Brokenness.” I found healing in truly the vulnerable broken places of myself. But here’s the thing. I didn’t know that at the time. It felt horrible. So it’s really only in retrospect that I understand the healing that came from hitting rock bottom really. So my question is how have you learned to accept the gift of your wounds, not in retrospect, but in the very moment of your woundedness?
Dawna: In the moment of my woundedness. Well, I’ll just riff off of your question. I won’t necessarily answer it. So, when I think of woundedness, I think of challenge, and the first thing that comes to mind is cancer because my body has had cancer six times. In a certain way, I learned everything, everything, everything. I was such a smart girl before I had cancer. I rushed through school. My father was illiterate. So I was the first one in my family to go to college, and then I went and got a Ph.D., and then I went and got another Ph.D. I was going so quickly, but I was going away from things.
When my body had cancer the first time, I had to stop, and what it brought me to and what every challenge has brought me to ultimately is to find my own way to love the world. And when you are anybody who’s gone through a life-threatening disease or anybody who’s been abused because I also was an abused “wife,” that’s the real digging that has to happen before you can plant yourself in this world. You have to find out how you love the world and what is your way of loving the world. I mean, love is a verb. It’s not a noun. And so when I say those challenges helped me love the world, I mean that literally. I mean, “Okay. So that’s the question that I wake up with every morning. How am I gonna love the world today?” It’s a very simple question.
Marlena: Ah but profound.
Dawna: And not easy and not answerable because it isn’t like whipped cream over garbage. It means, you know, anybody who’s ever been in pain or any woman who’s ever given birth or any, you know, man who’s ever had to struggle from oppression. We all know how do people protesting in the streets, how do they love the world in that minute. And they can say, yes, they do, but how are you loving it? Well, I’m loving it because I’m out here shouting and screaming for, you know, myself and other people. So, loving the world is a verb. The challenge is that I have and continue to metabolize each challenges, “Oh, this is going to widen and deepen my capacity to live in that question.” You can’t answer it. You cannot answer it. And any answer you give is too glib. You have to literally live in that question.
Marlena: Yeah. You say about that moment when you were first diagnosed with terminal cancer. You said, “I found myself at the very edge of what it means to be a human being, vulnerable, fragile, and impermanent.”
Dawna: Correct.
Marlena: Yeah. Dr. Ira Byock who’s another guest on this podcast, he writes in his seminal book “Dying Well” that the dying stage of life holds amazing possibilities. He says, “It holds moments of profound meaning and even growth.” And so when you say that that moment helped you find your way to love the world, was that the opening of possibilities for growth in that moment or how would you describe that?
Dawna: Well, it was that moment, I think, I feel, I believe, I remember of learning that what I was really doing was gardening in the dark, and that’s what all human beings do. But when you face a challenge of your life dissolving, disappearing, ending, even more so I think you realize that many of the seeds you are planting you don’t know if they’re gonna sprout. You don’t know what’s gonna happen. The doctors told me the first time that there was no cure for what I had or for what had me. So I had three months left to live.
Marlena: And tell our listeners how many decades ago that was.
Dawna: Oh, it’s lovely that I can’t remember. That was when I was in my let’s say 20. I’m gonna say 20, and I’m 78 now. So that was 68 years ago.
Marlena: Exactly. Amazing.
Dawna: No, 58 years ago. My math is not so good, never has been, but nonetheless, it was…is a lot of years.
Marlena: A lot of years.
Dawna: A lot of decades ago. And I remember walking around. As bizarre as it sounds, my son was four at the time, and I remember walking around with an empty hypodermic needle in my purse because somehow I believed that if things got really bad, I could inject an air bubble, and it would kill me. I still don’t know if that’s true. I’ve never asked. But the hypodermic needle gave me the illusion of security that I could choose when my life would end and when it would not. And the interesting thing that happened was that I became what most people would call depressed. I became very sad and very dark. And at first, I thought it was because, “Oh, this is the last time I’m gonna kiss my son’s cheek or what if, you know.” It wasn’t that. It was the absence of the mystery, the capacity to garden in the dark to say, “I don’t know what’s gonna happen.” And if I killed myself, I would lose that, and if I lost that, then how could I love my life? I mean, there’d be no wisdom for me to pass on.
So when I threw the hypodermic needle away, then every time I kissed my son’s cheek and that little golden peach fuzz that used to be there, I cherished that kiss because I knew it might be the last one. What if he goes to school and he comes back and I’m dead, you know. So then there were things I had to do to make sure somebody would be on the school bus if I couldn’t be on the school bus. That deliciousness of loving that moment and the feel of his cheek was only there when I didn’t know when death was going to come.
Marlena: Yeah. Yeah. This takes me to something you write about in the book that has to do with safety and risk-taking. Your co-author grandma said, “We need to make both choices to stay safe and to take risks if we’re going to love our lives and grow.” And later in the book, you take us through what you learned in a workshop, and I found it fascinating, and I had not heard this before, about how folding your hands habitually felt more comfortable and it felt safer. But in reality, folding them…and I’m doing it right now as I speak. Folding them in a non-habitual way was actually safer because the hands were more alive. Would you describe this hand-folding experience to our listeners and then suggest what does it teach us about risk and safety in our lives?
Dawna: What a gorgeous, sweet gift that is to bring me that. I totally forgot that. So a teacher of mine, his name was Moshe Feldenkrais, and he was and he’s really physicist and black belt judo expert who came to this country in probably the ’80’s. That date could be wrong. Forget that date. But it came when I was in my late 20’s. That date is correct. A friend of mine said, “There’s this workshop with this wild Israeli guy, Moshe Feldenkrais, who’s brilliant doing psychophysical re-education.” All I knew I liked the psycho part. I love the psycho part. I was compelled by that, but the physical part, not so much ever. My nickname used to be Clara klutz.
So I went to his workshop, and the first thing he had us do, we sat in a circle, and he asked us, as you said, to fold our hands the way we always had. And, of course, I could do that. As a smart girl, I knew how to fold my hands. And then he said, “I want you to unfold your hands, unlace them, and let them just rest there with the heels of your hands against each other. And now fold your hands in the opposite way.” And a lot of us kind of looked, “What does he mean by the opposite way?” He said, “Okay. Go back and fold your hands. Now bring awareness, bring awareness, bring attention to how you are folding your hands,” which, of course, for me, I didn’t know what that was. So I looked. Oh, the right was in front of the left. I had never noticed that. I had had those hands for decades, but he never noticed that. “Okay. Now unfold your hands.” So, I sat there with my hands unfolded and the heels and my hands together, and that was a weird kind of, “What is this openness?”
“Now refold your hands in the opposite way. Refold your hands non-habitually.” So I began to do that, and it felt really weird. It felt backward. It felt strange. And he said, “Now go back and forth and I’m gonna ask you some questions.” And I loved questions. I was a smart girl. I knew I’d figure out the answer. But these I had to figure out from my experience. So he said, “Which way feels safer and more comfortable?” And that was easy, habitually. And he said, “Which way feels the weirdest?” And I said, “Open,” but most people said, “Non-habitually.” And, yeah, I could get that. That was weird. They both were. Open was weird to me and non-habitual was weird to me. And he said, “Which way do your fingers feel more alive to you, meaning, which way are you more aware of the spaces between your fingers and your knuckles?” And there was no denying it. I think there were 80 of us. Everybody in the room said, “Non-habitually.”
And I to this day you’re bringing me that. I’m doing it now. It was a reminder to me of two things. One, it was a reminder of that non-habitually is the pathway to being more alive, and since I thought I was gonna be dead very soon, very soon, then I wanted as much aliveness in my moments left as I could possibly have. And the other lesson was that the pathway there is through this open wandering place, this place in the middle between either and or where we don’t know. And in the Western world, we are totally uncomfortable with that, and so in this moment now in our world, everything is either or, either or. Either it’s Democrat or Republican. Either is Trump or anti-Trump. Either it’s this or it’s that. Either you’re sick or you’re not. Either you wear a mask, or you don’t wear a mask.
But there is no time, no space given. Individually, “I finished this. Now, what do I do? Either I do this or I do this.” There is no time and no space given even in prayer to wandering, to asking a question, and neurologically, what happens when you wonder is your brainwave slow down. They slow down. Your periphery widens. There’s more input that can come in. You begin to be aware when you’re wondering of, “Oh, my right foot is firmer on the ground than my left foot. Oh, there’s a bird that just flew past the window. I didn’t even notice it.” So, more life experience can come in.
Marlena: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. The space between either and or reminds me of I think it’s at the very beginning of your book, you talk about the between stories. For our listeners, this book was published last year in 2019 before the pandemic changed life as we knew it. But last year in the book, you quote Thomas Berry at the very beginning saying that our old story sustained us, and it provided a context. And now we are between stories. This seems particularly meaningful at this moment in June of 2020. What are the challenges of being between stories right now and what are we called to do?
Dawna: Oh, another gorgeous question. Well, there are stories as you and I have been talking about. There are stories that when you are in this in-between state of wonder, there are stories that your mind will begin to weave, but there’s also habitual stories. So we go back to folding your hands in the habitual way, and there are habitual stories of, “Well, I’m a woman, therefore, I’m the one who or I’m a man so, therefore, or I’m poor because I don’t have a lot of money.” But these stories become almost like the shell around the seed. You know, if you think of a lima bean, it has a shell around it. And the problem is that if that shell…that shell does a lot. The old stories do a lot for us. They help us be in a state of what we think of comfort of habit, which is very comfortable to the brain. It loves habit. That’s why it creates habits because you don’t have to think about it.
Marlena: Right. That’s the hands folded in a habitual pattern.
Dawna: Very comfortable. However, just like the hands, in order for there to be growth, that shell has to crack. Remember in school kids would soak lima beans on a piece of damp paper towel, and the shell would crack. And when the shell cracks, then the seed inside that shell, which is there to protect it, that seed can sprout. And there is a struggle which I imagine. I’ve never been a lima bean that I know of, but when the swelling happens and the sprouting happens, “But we have to keep you safe. Don’t make me crack open. How am I gonna protect you? If you get all big and without me, you’ll be broad.”
So where we are is a culture right now as a world right now, but particularly as our culture is that we are in that space where the shell around our seed, the known has broken open. What one force is saying is “Make yourself smaller. Law and order are a shell. And who’s gonna protect you?” I will protect you. I know what you want. I know what’s best for you. We know what’s best for you.” And, you know, a choke hold is a very interesting thing. It’s like a shell, but it chokes out the life-force. If that shell does not break open, the life-force can’t allow us to grow.
Marlena: Right. But it’s very appealing in the face of fear.
Dawna: Right. Right. It just deadens life.
Marlena: Yeah. Yeah. So your book is about loving your life. You say that our only job is to love the life we are living and live a life we can love. I think that’s great, and I also imagine that some of our listeners might be thinking, “Yeah, but isn’t that pretty circular.” If I live a life I can love, I will, of course, love my life. But what do I do if I don’t love my life?
Dawna: Well, one thing we haven’t spoken a lot about is how do you ask yourself questions that evoke that open space of wonder in the brain. In part, it’s the tone of the question and the intent of the question. So there’s a certain tone and intent where your brain will track into its habit of what’s the right answer, what’s the wrong answer. Is 2+2 really 4? Yes, it is. Smart girl. Okay. That’s a certain tone. The question, you get a certain response. You get habitual. You get familiar.
But there’s another tone, which was the tone my grandmother used with me or when someone falls in love with you, they ask this, “How do I?” Two and two, well, they could make five because, if the two and two make love, they sometimes make a baby, and that makes five, you know.” So it takes your brain immediately into wonder. And how you ask that question is everything. So today for this day, how can I love the world today? How can I? And then no answer will come because then you’re in that open space of wonder, and you just sit there and you wonder. Well, nobody that I’ve met has lost the capacity to wonder, nobody. It’s essential to the human brain to do it. It’s like metabolizing food. The brain metabolizes questions and data. That’s what it’s meant to do.
So wonder is the state of swallowing your food and letting it be turned around in your stomach. Wonder is the way you digest a question and let it be turned around. I asked that question and have asked that question, “How can I love the world before my feet ever touched the ground?” And then I lie with it. I let the question embrace me and hold me. The last time my feet touched the ground before they go in the bed, the question becomes, “How did I love the world today?” And that’s a gorgeous question to wonder with because it’s like a gardener planting seeds in the dark, which is what we’re doing right now. But then the gardener needs to step back and notice what his or her hands have accomplished in that day.
Marlena: Is this what the Jamaican angel at the hospital meant when she said to you, “As is…” I don’t have the lovely accent but “As is darling as is.”
Dawna: “As is darling as is.” That’s gorgeous. I never made that connection before but that’s what as is, is about wonder. That’s exactly what it said. It’s wonder when we ask the question. It’s wonder when we take in the data, “How did I love the world today or how did I love my life today?” It didn’t frame in any way that feels right for you, but then you must wonder, “Oh, not at all. I didn’t do anything. What did I do? Nothing. If I had a bigger house, I could have loved the…” But that’s just the habitual stories. That’s just the old way. “But I wonder. How did I…? Oh, wait. There was that minute. There was that minute when I was walking, and this big white egret flew over my head. And my heart opened up and, wow, it was beautiful. I loved the world in that moment.”
Marlena: Yeah. The sense of wonder is in many places in the book, but one that I think about now as you’re speaking is there’s this great scene in the book where you’re working with an estranged family. And you have them collectively build a sculpture of the family using debris along the beach. And you write something, and I don’t have it right in front of me, but something about that they were all part of the problem becoming a solution. And here’s the part I really remember that no one had to say a word to make that happen. In my new book, I described my journey toward reconciliation with my father, and it happened very gradually over the years, and we never spoke about it. My question is this how do you respond to people who say that a serious interpersonal problem or any other issue between people cannot really be fully resolved without hashing it out, talking it through? I knew you’d have some thoughts about this.
Dawna: I’m going to announce to myself that this is going to be a brief response because this has been my life work. One of the ways I described the promise of my life is to help all who are different know that they belong. And so as a neuroscientist, what I began to develop and discover in a lot of my books about this is that different brains process information in different ways. And the bouillon cube, in French they say the essence of that, is that we all take an experience, and the brain stores it in visual pieces, auditory pieces or verbal pieces, and kinesthetic pieces, kinesthetic being touching and feeling and moving. However, in school, we are taught to believe that the answers have to be verbal auditory, and there’s huge emphasis put on visual. Kinesthetic is kind of discarded for a gym, and it’s not considered part of learning, which is even as I say it it’s absurd.
Marlena: And visual was put aside for art.
Dawna: Right. Or show-and-tell visual, auditory. So, with this family as an example because we…they had been talking and talking and talking for, I forget how many years, 15 years to each other but not with each other. And there were big silences. There were two sisters that didn’t talk to each other, and they had been in a lot of money. They had every way of…every kind of therapy, everything. It didn’t matter. The mother on her deathbed told them not to talk to the father’s mistress. I don’t know. It’s a complicated story but nonetheless. So they didn’t talk to each other. Why was I gonna try there to open the door? That was silly. They had slammed that door a long time ago. Their vacation home where we went to work with them was on an island, and the island as unfortunately many, many shores of many beaches are littered with plastic. And they would have servants come in the morning to throw away the plastic, which seemed to me to be a great place because you can…my grandmother used to kiss her garbage before she threw it away. So I thought about that since talking was impossible.
And we had all the generations. We had the grandkids. We had the father. We had the new girlfriend. We had the sisters. We asked them to be totally silent. So we stopped their auditory linear rational way of thinking, and we asked them to stand around this pile of garbage, which my husband Andy used plastic bottles and put in the center of the circle, and to create a symbol of the family as it was now and then as they wanted it to be. And they had, I forget how long, 35 minutes. I’ll say it was a very long period of time for them to be silent together. So they were connected immediately kinesthetically in a non-habitual way, and the whole family opened up. They created a foundation. They still have that sculpture. They had the sculpture shipped home, put in the center of their company, of their foundation in the lobby because it’s a whole new way of thinking. It’s the same thing as the hands.
Marlena: Wonderful. That’s lovely. During this season, we’ve been talking a lot about service I have with my guests, and one of the things we talk about is this thing we’re calling a savior complex. I was so struck by how you described caring for your sister Joan when she was dying, and I did write that down in front of me because I wanted it to be the exact quote, “I knew I couldn’t help her in ways that would emphasize how helpless she now was.” So one of the issues we’ve been exploring is that sometimes those of us who serve inadvertently become righteous oppressors, somehow accentuate the gap between the served and the servers or in your case between the healthy and the helpless. I would like you to talk to us. Do you have suggestions for ensuring that when we serve others, we really and truly serve for their highest and best good?
Dawna: Oh, I love your questions. I wish you’d come live in my house because [inaudible 00:45:08] such wonderful questions.
Marlena: Well, I just have to say, Dawna, that every one of them comes out of your lovely book.
Dawna: So I’ll talk about my sister and bring her alive again. My grandmother talked about she would make a Mobius loop out of newspaper, and whenever you speak of someone, they come from the inside of the circle to the outside. And so speaking of my sister brings her alive again. My sister was the older sister. She was seven years older than I was, and she hated the moment I was born because I got all the attention for being the baby. The war was over, and she was always the good one, and I was always the brat, which is my license plate. I was always getting in trouble, and she was always being good.
Marlena: Yeah. We share that.
Dawna: At the end of her life, she developed cancer. She had a glioblastoma, my cancers were in different places, which was on the brain. She who was in charge of everything and everyone became helpless, and she could no longer speak. So people would speak in front of her believing that because she couldn’t speak she couldn’t hear and she couldn’t perceive. And even when she was in a coma, she was still there. Her presence was still there. So, I stopped working, and I flew back and forth to Denver where she lived. And I would sit down next to her and tell her stories because I was looking for ways to connect, and it was easy to tell her stories because they were all…I was giving her life back to her. Everybody else was talking about how her life was leaving and how afraid they were and what should they do and la, la, la.
So I would go back in to, “Remember when we were kids and you taught me how to swim, but you let go of me, and I almost drowned. So then I flailed around so then I swam. And ever since then, I have loved gift of buoyancy that you gave me.” So like that. And what I noticed was that she was blinking her eyes at different moments. So I taught her basically how to…I would go through the alphabet letter by letter, and when I would get to a letter that would be in a word she wanted to say, she would blink. And so I would go through the alphabet, A, B, C, D, E, and when she blinked, I said G. And, you know, she would blink again. So the first thing she ever blinked to me was…I said, “Do you have any questions, Joanie, you know, that you need to ask?” And she blinked, “Yes,” and then she blinked, “When will this ugliness be over?” Now that took about an hour, and nobody else would believe that that was a communication.
I knew where the tumor was in her brain and I knew that that part of her brain was still alive and functional. There was a point at which she blinked to me, “It’s time for you to leave. It’s time for me to go.” I knew and she knew. They kept her alive every possible in a human way they could keep her alive in ways that I consider inhuman. Nonetheless, her family needed to do that, and I fully understood why. And my way of serving her up until then had been through this conversation of blinking and remembering stories and telling her stories. And they were afraid that I was gonna tell her that she was going to die because nobody told her she was gonna die. So they put a little baby speaker next to her bed to make sure that I never said, “You’re gonna die.” But she knew. How could she not know?
So I knew that I was gonna leave and I wouldn’t see her anymore because she asked me to go. And I went to the store. It was an Albertsons by her house, and I got her a Maine lobster and a $40 bottle of white wine, which for me was obscenely expensive. And lobster was her favorite food, and my father used to take us if we were both good to Lundy’s in New York to get lobster. So I made this whole lobster. She had a feeding tube, so she couldn’t eat, but she could still taste. And I know that taste is a hidden part of the brain. So, I would dip the lobster meat into melted butter and draw it slowly across her lips so she could taste it. And then I poured the glass of expensive white wine into a beautiful crystal glass, and again, I put a little bit on her lips with my finger.
And then the last part was she was always envious because I was the kid when I got something, and she was very held on tightly to those things that were hers. I took the wine, and I went to the bathroom and poured it very slowly so she could see me doing it into the toilet. So she would know nobody else was gonna taste her bottle of wine, and then I took the lobster and threw it in the garbage and tied the garbage into knot…garbage bag into a knot. Then I left. To me, that was I was serving her, and only could I do that with love. It wasn’t changing diapers. That wasn’t what she wanted. It was that I was serving her. I was serving the love between her. I was expressing my love kinesthetically, which is a way she could still understand.
Marlena: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for describing that beautiful scene. Dawna, you write that each of the people you made into enemies in your life actually represented an exiled aspect of yourself, and this makes sense. We project our unresolved issues on others like you projecting your anger onto your uncle George. But my question is by what process did you actually do the hard work of reframing your wretched uncle George from enemy to a blessed angel who helped you tame your own anger? What was the process by which you did that?
Dawna: Well, the truth is I can’t…I remember only uncle George’s beating my aunt [inaudible 00:52:25], my favorite aunt. So I didn’t do it then. What I do now…okay. I have lots of practice now.
Marlena: What do you do now?
Dawna: So what I do now is I ask myself questions prepared to wonder, “What is it about them that is so repugnant to me? What is it about them that is so repulsive? When do I do that? When don’t I do that?” And I mean really specifically when do I do that. Like last Thursday, when don’t I do that? Well, last Friday, I didn’t do that when I was talking to Andy, but I did it with the dog when I took the dog for a walk. Oh, I remember I did it. You know, I pulled her, I yanked her instead of standing with her and asking her what she wanted. So that’s the first question, “When did I do it? And when don’t I do it specifically?”
And then I ask myself the question that’s a very difficult question, “How does that work for me to do that? How did it work for me to pull the dog along on the leash, this poor little dog, you know, always 30 pounds? How did it work for me?” Well, I was impatient. That’s why but how did it work for me? Because I’ve been thinking about other people and other creatures all day long, and I didn’t have to think about anybody else and their needs. How did it work against me? That’s the partner of the question, “How did it work for me?” Because everything we do works for us in some way. It meets some need. Obviously, some of it works against us. It worked against me because every time I go up to that puppy now she runs away, or she turns her back, or she crouches in fear. So, that’s the practice. That’s the practice.
Marlena: That’s the hard work. Thank you for that. This has been so great, and we’re running out of time. Dawna, I wanna ask one last question. If there were one thing that you’ve not yet talked about that you’d like our listeners to hear, what would it be?
Dawna: Well, since I’m giving so many questions, I’ll give you a question for the listeners, but I’ll give it to you as well. It’s the question that helped me write this book or one of the questions that helped me write this book. And the question is very simple. It’s what are you longing for right now? What are you longing for? And longing is not in your head. Longing is in your cells. It isn’t what do you crave. It’s what are you longing for? And I don’t remember where I learned that question, but that question guided me to write this book because I didn’t wanna write another book. I’m an old lady, you know. But when I asked the question, I could feel in the cells around my heart that there wasn’t longing.
It was very quiet but very palpable to have my grandma come alive, to have the gifts that she gave to me passed on to others, to serve the world in a way that I didn’t even know what effect it would have. I still don’t know what effect. I don’t know if 11 people we can’t even tell from books stories how many of this book is being sold. It’s a big joke, you know. I was longing for my grandmother to come alive on the page and for her to be remembered and her wisdom to be passed on. We talk about people passing on, meaning they died. I wanted her wisdom to be passed on, meaning for her to be alive again. So to ask that question and then wonder, “What am I longing for?” That’s the gift that I would offer to you and I still would offer to anyone who is listening to this conversation.
Marlena: Yes. And it’s a particularly powerful question during this time between stories. So thank you for that. This has been a meaningful conversation, Dawna. Thank you so much for taking the time and for your presence.
Dawna: In Hawaii where I live now we say a hui hou. A hui hou means until our spirits touch.
Marlena: A hui hou.
Dawna: So a hui hou.
Random Acts of Kindness—what a wonderful gift that we need oh so much more of in our world today.