 Welcome to another Deep Adaptation Q&A with me, Jim Bendell, and our guest this month, Skeena Rathor. Now, Skeena I met a couple of years ago. She is a founding member of the Climate and Ecological Campaign Organization Extinction Rebellion, within which she's a founder of their guardianship and visioning circle and has played a key role at the heart of Extinction Rebellion since it started, since it was being formed, and even before through her personal connections and work previously with the people involved in rising up. So, Skeena, thank you very much for joining a Deep Adaptation Q&A. Thank you for inviting me, Jim. So, I think what would be really, really good just for people who don't know too much about Extinction Rebellion, believe it or not there might be some, but also yourself and what really kind of motivates people to not just participate loosely but actually participate fully, full time at the heart of things like you've done now for two years, what motivates you. So, could you say something about how you got involved in Extinction Rebellion? What motivated you? What were the key moments perhaps? Yes, I can say lots, and I've tried not to say lots. You called us, by the way, you said we were a campaign but we're a movement. A movement, okay. I would like to emphasise a movement in the greatest scheme of things, right, in terms of we're moving into and with something quite spectacular, I think. How did I come about? Well, I think you know what happened, Jim, and what we want to share it is that, so my life was dedicated to really, to social justice issues as well as my professional work as a body, mind, heart teacher, and I arrived at your doorstep in Cumbria with an idea about writing, rewriting a leadership syllabus for the Labour Party, for women in leadership in the Labour Party, and the title of your 3-day event was the Poetics of Leadership, so there I was, ready to learn more about the Poetics of Stories of Leadership, and you dropped a bomb, right? Well, that's how it felt for me, and instead what happened for me was this huge emotional, physical experience, intellectual experience as well, in understanding where the climate science was in its reality and what that meant for my work as a campaigner, because I was involved with Rising Up and Compassionate Stroud, the Grandmothership, as a rebel maybe, or as an activist. It changed everything, changed everything. I've described it to people, like the day after I woke up after having my first child, and you wake up that first morning as a new mother, and you know nothing is ever going to be the same again, that you are in a completely new dawn, and that's how it felt listening to what you shared, and my friends Simon Bramwell and Gail Bradbrook, I knew were right at the edge of this, and I knew I had been avoiding conversation with them, because I had literally been canceling meeting them, and so then I came straight home to Stroud, and there I was in Gail's living room, saying what do we do, and she said what we know what to do, and we went forward from there, we went forward from there. Yeah. Yeah, so the emotions, if you take yourself back to years, the emotions were what, that what, when you were sitting there with Gail in the- shock, horror, I actually felt, you know, my belief system starting to crumble and collapse, despair, for I did a despair didn't last week at that point, I fall into it now, sometimes again, with the waves of despair, but it was shock, I was in deep shock, I was shaking for days, and I as a trauma therapist, I knew what that meant, I knew what to do with it, and that's, I sat with it, and transformed it, and I'm still transforming it, we all are, I know we are, yeah. So you had the benefit of knowing people who are close to you, who have a history in environmental activism, political activism. Such a privileged place, you know, and there are people in Stroud, the green movement in Stroud is so huge, enormous, very strong, I had been involved in transitions, I was a Green Party member before I became a Labour Party member, and so it was very easy for me to access empathy for what I was experiencing and what I was learning, and so a huge place of privilege. So did Gail and Simon try and calm you down with stories of we can fix this, and what was the response? Most certainly not, most certainly not, Gail, Gail was overjoyed, maybe that's the wrong word. At your shock. Well, in one sense she was, right, because she felt people weren't listening, and partly that Stroud had shut down to some of what she and Simon were saying, and she had been praying for, you know, connection, bridging, all of those things, and she felt that something had shifted with me turning up at her door is how she described it. Yeah, wow. So from all that experience, you bring that into your own personal experience, that emotional journey, how have you taken that experience forward so that both your own emotional journey, how you protest it, but also how you were held in that by Gail and Simon and others, how have you taken that into what you do in Extinction Rebellion, because there must have been so many times of really painful conversations within the mood. Really great question, and I feel it's a great question because actually it is about taking ourselves, isn't it, into truth and our pain and our grief and our sense of shock and despair and challenge and also what we dream of. I feel like that's exactly where this time is, what's calling us is to be our most authentic reality and share that with each other. So I think what I did and leaned into was at first creating ceremony and space for reflection, space for connecting with a more whole body, a more vast intelligence maybe, and I say that and it sounds like I hear myself saying that and implied in there some kind of something bigger or more important or expanded or better. And that isn't what I mean, what I mean is how, where we are, there's a dehumanizing aspect to what we bring in terms of our whole intelligence that has contributed or actually for me has been, is a root cause as to why we are in breakdown, while we are in multiple crisis and multiple collapse scenarios all over the world. And so my focus, my passion has been about creating space for new discovery, vision, vision articulation, the story of who we are and story of a becoming that we are longing for. And my way to then, well that's been my way of reckoning with the gruelling and horrific reality for our children and the children of all species, that they lost the grief, the trauma. Nevertheless with this outlook, you have worked full time in a movement which is about seeking to get societies to reduce carbon emissions, draw down carbon. So it's very much for you that, could you say why that's important and also where you can find a way of working on the other aspects of your truth which is the kind of the breakdowns that you anticipate or that you're seeing around you. So you, I think you said something about us being part of a movement that is, is being asking or talking about solutions and drawing down carbon and aspects of the truth. And you see, I don't, I don't, I don't see that so much if I'm honest. I don't, I see extinction rebellion saying to people there's this most enormous of emergencies. There's an existential threat to life on earth, including our own. And there are ways, there are things that need to be done urgently. But we think that, that's the solutions, the, the fix it nature of our paradigm is best left to a sentence assembly, left to making more democracy, left to reinventing a pillar of society around democracy. I don't think we've, we have spoken so much about what that looks like. I think we're operating, I'm personally operating in, in, in much trust around people as a part of a movement of movements discovering what's, what's needed and what's necessary together. I also think it's that that takes us down a well worn and threadbare track because I want much more from this. And I believe we need much more than solutions that, that draw down carbon, carbon sequestration or, you know, technological solutions or mitigation possibilities. I think there's something here around what I call our, our heart set, instead of a mindset that needs to transform itself. It's like, you know, when, when people are given a end of life diagnosis and or, or have a near death experience. And suddenly, the whole sense of what's, what it is to be alive is different. I think that's what we're in. I think we're, we're moving from the exoteric and this is an initiation into the esoteric and, and nothing for me, nothing less is going to do and it's not in a policy or a particular style of politicking or an economic restart. It's in shifting something much deeper in the human psyche. But is that, is that then why you are very interested in what's called decolonization? Does that connect then? Absolutely. I think the Enlightenment project, the, the colonial project, the project that the, the patriarchy over 5,000 years ago, birthed into being or what I call an obsessive patriarchy is, is, is where the conversation really needs to go or the inquiry really needs to go. And, and otherwise I think we're tweaking and fixing around systems and a culture that will take us to its death, regardless. And has that been clear in Extinction Rebellion until now, the depth of the critique that we are in this predicament because of these thousand years of, of the dominant culture of patriarchy? So I think we're really scared of talking about it. I know I have, I know in the face of our theory of change, our dominant theory of change, because actually we have an ecology of theories of change. I know in the face of, of the theory of change and the literature and the research that we have extrapolated and shared with the world that what I'm saying, doesn't really speak to that. And in some ways challenges that. And I know there hasn't been much space for looking beyond the, the strategy that we've employed in using Erica Chenoweth's work and Paul Ender's work and scientific research again. We're looking, you know, we've been looking for a formula. We, Gail and Roger talks, talk about codes for social change. Yeah. It's, it's again, in that, for me personally, it sits in the paradigm that we know to say that we think we, we, we know what social change is going to involve. And it's, it's the, the set of numbers and these set of numbers and these set of figures and this, this, this tactic and this strategy. And so it's, it's very difficult, but I'm ready. I'm ready not to be scared. I feel I'm, I'm personally in a place of self annihilation in terms of my old being. And I mean a pretty fearless state right now. And I want to talk about this much more. So a lot of people, when they hear this, like environmentalism relates to decolonization and anti-oppression or patriarchy. It can sound like a lot of big words to some people. Could you say very clearly, how does anti-patriarchy, anti-racism relate to the climate crisis and activism? So, so, so, I think the issue, Gem, is that it's not, it's not anti, it's not, it's not being in an anti science, like even rebellion, okay, I understand it's what puts people off is that it's still a reactive space. You're, you're in your resistance and in your no to something, which is really important, but it's only half of the story. And I think the reason, I think we are getting stuck again and again in the d-bit that the unseating and the unlearning, the disentangling, the deconstruction that is decolonization or anti-racism or anti-oppression work. And what I'm really excited and inspired by is that we move into speaking about what we want and describing and articulating in, in words, in, in our body, in our expressions of, of how we, we show up as humans. What, what the dream and the possibility that is the yes, that is what I call the co-liberation work right now, within extinction, but that's what, what we're calling it. It's, it's describing, there is that place of unlearning, but it's describing what, what the new learning might look like, where we, where do we begin to step into our powerfulness and a freedom from our oppression, our traumatized ways of operating, behaving, speaking, creating strategy, creating, you know, our plans that we do. How do we step into something that speaks to the most free, most beautiful, most true place in us and describes that. So what, what will co-liberation look like as a project or activity or message within extinction rebellion and from it? So the idea of co-liberation is that the fundamental understanding or I'd say the essence of, of the co-liberation peak, that the understanding that liberation can't be done individually and that individual solutions like me going on a decolonizing training or that individualizes the issue is, is so limited. The co-liberation understands that your safety depends on mine and mine on yours as does my flourishing. The liberation is never only one way or one group. It can't be done like that. And, and what the project is, is trying to grow and co-create is, well, our systemic agreements, the systemic commitments and systemic inquiry into, into liberation. So, so we would, we would do this, we would do the thing that's made self, the self-development, the self-care, the self, you know, all this, the, the attribution that we, we give to the self in the project that is humanity is, is, is shifted into a state of co-mutuality and a coexistence and interconnectedness. And one, I can give you examples. So, one example that we're trying to birth into within Extinction Rebellion is to say, in every team we would have a co-liberation tracker that sits us alongside the facilitator and is, is tracking the power dynamics in that group, where powerlessness and power meet in any group setting, where, where our trauma and both are, well, our trauma, our oppression plays out in power over and in power under, right, behaviors. And, and how is it that when we, we know we all want to expand our power as a group and as individually, how, how do we sit within that together? How do we become true to that? I like the emphasis on liberation because environment in previous decades in the west hasn't really talked like that. So, the first question is from Matt Osmond. Oh, hi Matt. Hi, Skina. Hi. And firstly, thanks. And as I said, I'd like to meet you here. And I, I think my first most powerfully connected with XR, when I met you at St Ethelburgers some time ago, and it was an event there called Sacred Rebellion. But what you really introduced us to was deep adaptation. And, and that was a real eye-opener for me. I'd already read deep adaptation and it had affected me, but how close it was to the birth of the movement. And ever since then, I felt like there's been this question. And if it's okay, I want to ask it in my way and then tell you how I heard it from someone else in this forum that really helped me. The question for me that was really encapsulated in what you presented that day was this dilemma about a movement that maybe with a kind of momentum, an unintended momentum keeps returning to an or else language. We've got 12 years left to save the world or else. And it's the same mold or else language. And it's like it's ringing more and more brittle. And, and I wonder how many people I know who really think, who really do sincerely believe and bless them if they do that we're going to turn the taps off and stop climate change, you know, that that is going to happen in time. This was such a personal question. And I'm really nervous in answering it because I'm concerned for GEM's feelings in my response and other people's feelings. I think the issue is that we, we herald scientific truth as the number, the priority truth as this as the truth that has a supremacy about it. And that's how I entered this, this field. So I get very confused about this because I was able to access this reality because I heard GEM presents some science. But I think there, there is the, is, is the challenge because if we do this because of, of the scientism, which I think is where we've, we've got stuck in humanity, if we do this, because GEM and others have said, look at the climate science. I don't think we'll do much that could enable humanity to become the, the most beautiful, force, most regenerative presence in the community of life that it can be. So I'm saying, I kind of agree with you that it can't be about saving and it can't be about mitigation or, or, or else and because we're terrified and we're going to die and our children are going to die and it has to come from somewhere else. And the, but the place I have huge trust in human hearts and the morality and the, and the love that emanates from human heartedness. So my, my wish would be to lift other truths up, to stand with the truth of the science and actually to give them more voice, more space and a chance to reckon with, with, with the paradigm that is, and, and let's, you know, again, I can bring this back to in the enlightenment project and the colonial project and, you know, everything that's emanated from there is, has been in this, in the mirror image, right? Of what's taken humanity off track, what's taken us into control and fixed behaviors and, and behaviors where we think we know what, what science is, we know because science is saying so. But what about what we know from all the other ways that we know as human beings? What about a much deeper knowing? What about the truth that is the immorality that there's more food waste than, than there are hungry people in this world? What about the fact that we, the so-called most civilized nation in the world, the USA, is where children can get shot in their school classrooms? Yeah. What about the fact that depression is about to become the number one illness in the world, according to the World Health Organization by 2040. Yeah. These are truths and, but they're not located in a, in a deft or definite science. There's something that shows the dehumanizing, the, the de-spiritualizing of who we are in those truths. And, and that's, I think, what we need to talk about. And I need to think, I think we need to talk much less about climate science and much less. And, and that's what I would be appealing to everybody for. Yeah. Really clear. Thank you, Skeena. Louis, you have a question on this too. Hi. Hi, Skeena. I think you've basically kind of done a lot of answering my question, which is to, to link back to what you said about obsessive patriarchy, the Enlightenment Project. For me, I'm sorry, I can see that capitalism, racism, colonialism, for me, my understanding is new, that it's part of the same thing. I think my question is about how much is XR too narrow? I mean, I think you're saying XR needs to get much bigger. Oh, we are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think like everything, and, and, you know, Gem and Gail and Roger know this, that there's, there's a credibility, there's a way to access mass consciousness. And sadly, perhaps one of the most available ways is through science. Although I think I'm here to, I'm ready to say that's actually why we haven't cut through, because you're still accessing, you're still, you're still using the mind to make meaning. And it's not working. You know, I don't see, I don't see the kind of waking up that we talk about the, you know, the four hours of relinquishment and restoration and all those things that we know are part of, of the challenge. I don't, I don't see people really able to hear them. And so, because I think we're talking to the frontal lobes, we're talking to people frontal lobes, and that's huge, hugely limited, right? And we know all this. I know, Gem, you know all this. So, so for us, it's, the question is what you're saying is, how do we make meaning that people, that matters to people's hearts, where, where they can, they can find a relatedness to, to the reality that we, we are living in, in, through the deep adaptation forum. Graham. Hello. Skeena, I recently read a paper from a right-wing think tank in America. And let me assure everybody that is not my usual reading material. But sometimes it's interesting to see what other people with different views are thinking. And this was postulating that the right-wing party, particularly the Republicans post-Trump, could co-opt the climate agenda, could suddenly wake up, recognize that there's very little time left to do anything, and be very aggressively, very aggressively pursue that, that climate agenda, not bothering to be awake, not bothering about ideas like truth or justice or anything like that. And maybe that will get things to happen quickly. We already know the Chinese government and another dictatorial governments can make things happen quickly. Question for you is would you welcome such a move if it got action? Or do we have to wait until everybody is awake? All these problems you've spoken about that have been there since forever and not got solved. We have to wait till all those are solved. And then the change is introduced by the right people, correct people I should say, rather than the right people, right in two senses. I just want to make sure I understand your question. Are you asking me if it doesn't matter who makes the change? No, I'm asking you if people make the change for the wrong reasons and from perspectives that you and I might not agree with. Should we welcome that? Because it makes it happen and makes it happen more quickly even if a lot of rights and justice and truths are trampled in the process. Because we have so little time. Or do we have to wait until the right people, the correct people, the people we agree with maybe are in power and they can bring that change. Okay, so I think I'm hearing a binary here, right people, wrong people. And I don't really know how to be with binaries right now. And so I don't feel like I can answer this question eloquently. But I have a tiny go at saying, for me it's about us having communication with all people. And it's about how we would reach out to all political ideologies, all communities. How would we, how do we build deep collaboration? And this has been like at the heart of the visioning teams quest to build what we've termed deep collaboration as the vision for systems change and transformation of all the different kinds that we're seeking. And what we realized, what I realized after a year and a half of cycling constantly around this vision and this dreaming about collaboration is that it feels pretty much impossible when we are so separated in right and wrong, left and right, and, you know, good and bad. That, the divisions that exist right now, the separation story that that is, that's what we need to bring our attention to and our compassion and also our truth and our fierce demand for that separation story to come to its end, to come to its rightful end. And so, yeah, I think we need to go much deeper than who do we work with? And how do we work with them? It's, for me, it's how do we liberate ourselves enough for it to cascade and heal and reconcile, repair the relationships between the tribes that are humanity, in whichever way we've separated into, into tribes. Let's hear a question from Julian in Stroud. Hi, Julian, so nice to see you. Hi, Gina, great to see you too. Thank you for all of this really great stuff. Yeah, I mean, I think you hit it in one with your point about we need to change our heart set. And that clearly is where this has to come from. And, you know, I've been banging on about climate and sustainable development for much of my life. I'm an environmental engineer. And I suppose my big turning point was when the water industry was privatized. I went into environmental engineering as an in-service profession. Well, not a hope in hell. Basically, it's almost impossible to work honestly in that sector. And I would say, you know, I'm rapidly concertinering this point because it's a huge and complex issue. But yeah, I mean, the damage that Margaret Thatcher did to our society through saying greed is good is profound and huge. The question to come to it is really exposing the complete antithesis of that point. And you were good enough to come out of a few months before lockdown to come and look at the concrete fields around Stroud. We've lost all the humus in our fields. And as a water engineer, I assure you, we can account for the vast bulk of all the climate change effects simply through farming practice in the Stroud area in summer months. And that ranges from temperature through to intensification of rainfall through to flood runoff. But my point is regarding the opposite of that. What's your question? Simply this, that there are many good climate exemplars within the sacred, regenerative and true vegan farming movements, where they all universally sequestrate carbon as soil humus, the complete opposite of what you saw around Stroud. And these all broadly work within these principles that the UN are increasingly pushing, the tree Eta Karana principles that come out of Bali, where historically Bali has a sacred agricultural system that again sequestrates carbon. Talking about carts and horses, basically the ethos has to come first. That's where we need to start. And so you're totally correct. It's as much a statement as a question. We need to apply the ethos before we can change this world with all its horrors back into a beautiful, safe world for us all to live in. I'll take that as a statement. What do you say to people that says that say this sounds too much like middle class people getting too self-involved when there's horrendous suffering right now because of the climate and ecological disaster and that this is turning inward when actually we should be mobilizing to try and do something about international suffering? What would I say to those people? I'd firstly say tell me more about that suffering because I don't think I've heard enough. I don't think I could possibly hear enough. I don't think we've heard enough. I think they're actually part of our psychosis and our narcissism. And I agree there's so much naval gazing and turning inwards is part of that. The thing that one of the things I think that has happened in terms of the consumption culture is the ability of the middle classes to switch off from the pain of others and come into a therapising about it and be endlessly lost in the self-therapising and I feel I actually get very frustrated and especially because that's been my work for 20 years when people are in process with their body, mind, heart and they are just circling. They are constantly circling, retraumatizing and circling and actually avoiding the pain and the suffering that you've just pointed to, Gem, not to feel it. I want to say to the middle classes, feel that pain, walk into that fire, walk into that fire that is showing itself to you and become debilitated in it, become horrified and despairing and aghast and become helpless in it, in the face of that pain become helpless and until you do, until you are able to sit in the fire of it, there is no, there is just this, there's just what we're in, where people who have the privilege to avoid the suffering constantly avoid the suffering and speak about it and circle with their peers around it. So I would say sorry to those people that you're speaking about. I am so sorry and I am so, my heart aches every day and sometimes I can't get out of bed because my heart is so sore, my chest is so heavy and then sometimes I can and I can activate something. Thank you. Question from Wendy. Hi, Skeena. In relation to what you were just saying actually about the people talking about the suffering and reading the news and knowing that it's a thing as someone who does a lot of work on the Facebook group, do you think there is a way of triggering people to have this realization that you had from James' conversation with you that I had from seeing the icebergs melting and realizing that they weren't coming back in our lifetimes or our grandchildren or great-grandchildren? Do you or the XR movement have a feeling for what it is? And I mean there's many things that I think it's quite personal but do you know of a way to actually push a button with someone? Have you used that on friends or people who you can't get through to this that blockage? So thank you. That's such an important question. So I think there's lots I don't know I think about this about how to press the button that resets something essentially in a human being and I think what happened for me is that I've got witnessed. I got witnessed by Rupert Reed who was there firstly he literally held me and I also got witnessed by Jem who was called out to speak to me and then I got witnessed as soon as I returned home by close friends that I trusted who could tell me I'm not going mad and I'm not shaking for no reason. I'm having an appropriate response. The dysregulation that occurs from receiving shocking news needs human holding. It needs belonging somewhere. People are quite right to avoid it. It's too overwhelming if that is not present in your life. I think human beings ultimately we are here to survive. We are here to allow for thriving and in our genius if we are told shocking information, information that threatens the lives of the ones we love if we don't have witnessing and holding and a community that can be with you in any questions that then need exploring and answering and activating then you know the best thing you can do is shut down. Of course it is so I think what I know is that somehow we have to build many more communities that have the capacity to witness and hold this story and that's what I'm interested in XR doing and becoming to spark and grow communities that can hold trauma and the landscape of emotions that will surface when we are presented with threat. Does that mean below the radar or do you engage the mass media? Because for me I chose not to engage mass media because of what you've just talked about. So for me there's no deliberate policy about engaging anyone, Gem, especially not mass media as a deliberate policy. But the thing, the beautiful thing here is that there are human beings involved in mass media and there are lots of people that we will naturally touch who will touch others and we can trust, I think I would like us to trust that we can reach mass media because we are in relationship with human beings. I didn't mean that Skeena, is this message is this message to go out through mass media to people who are unsupported? I didn't want to do that. So if I remember after my speech with XR Channel 4 news came up and I said no my message is worse than XRs and I don't want that to just land in people's living rooms unsupported. And so I've focused more on those networks of people and helping create the capacities for people to hold each other for when more people wake up to this. And that's been my aim for the last two years rather than the big advocacy piece because of what you've just talked about, how do you hold each other? You're really grateful for all of that work that you have committed to in holding the subtleties here. I completely agree and I stopped talking to the media too. But I don't think there's an absolutism here either. I think we can talk about this in a way that says look we think the most important thing people can do right now is to build community resilience in psychologically and physically and materially and all of the ways that community builds resilience. So I think we can have this conversation in a different way and like I say I'm no longer with the idea that we lead with the science. Okay I'm looking forward to what this means for XR in the future. Both what you've just described and what you've talked about with co-liberation. We've come to the end of the hour. Thank you Skeena and thank you everyone. And thank you Matthew for the time. Thank you to Jem. Thank you for all you're doing. Thank you Skeena. Bye-bye everyone. See you next month.