 Greetings, everybody. Namaskaram. Namaste. Welcome to this inaugural education webinar on compassion cannot choose health care disparities from the Sadhguru Center for a Conscious Planet, Enhancing Consciousness, Cognition and Compassion. Recently established at Beth Israel Technus Medical Center, a teaching clinical and research affiliate of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Inspired by the scientific discoveries that happens almost at a everyday basis in Harvard and also from the spiritual and humanitarian work by one of the foremost authorities of ancient yogic sciences, Sadhguru, this center was started. Both components, I think, are essential for us, both spiritual as well as scientific component, the incremental scientific approach and the clarity and attention from the spiritual approach that I get is invaluable. Namaskaram, Sadhguru. Good morning to all of you. Thank you, Sadhguru. Thank you for joining. It's my fortunate privilege to have Sadhguru Ayogi, Mystic and Visionary and stellar group of compassionate speakers from diverse group of their professional interests. We have Dr. Nancy Oriel. She is an associate faculty associate dean at Harvard Medical School. Welcome, Nancy. Good morning, ma'am. We have Dr. James O'Connell. He is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and is importantly president of the Boston Healthcare for the Homeless Program. Namaskaram, James. You have Tio Kassan, Ghost Horse, who is an indigenous elder. Welcome, Tio Kassan. Tio Kassan. And we have Victor Lopez, Anthony Carmen. He's from Harvard Medical School. He's also a Native American. Welcome, Victor. Namaskaram, too. And thank you all for joining us and thank you, Sadhguru. Can I go ahead? Please. So we'll start with Dr. Nancy Oriel and she's my senior colleague and I've known her for almost 20 years. I think she's one of the most compassionate person I've ever seen. The common theme for today is compassion, I think. And all of you are in one way or the other have contributed to the society. Nancy Oriel, she's a faculty associate dean and she is mostly involved in integrating learning into the Harvard Medical School curriculum, providing pragmatic, immersive learning experiences for students while meeting the societal needs of the local community and fostering mutual respect, understanding and benefit. I hear that this is a favorite rotation for medical students and they really go ahead and do it. An educator, she's a mentor and connector, she creates a curriculum and advises students as they gain skills towards becoming future providers who apply knowledge of how societal differences and racial equity affect health. This is an important lesson that many of us don't learn. Her community-based work began 30 years ago when in partnership with Boston communities, she created the family van. Like we saw in that short video of Mobile Health Clinic, she had started a similar van in Boston 30 years ago. This program continues today and her research on this model of care showing that it builds trust, saves lives and saves money, has prompted widespread national adoption. She graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1979. She completed residency at my hospital and she was the first one in almost 80s, I think, to invent walking epidural that is giving pain relief to women in labor but also they were walking. They're not just bound to the bed. It was really revolutionizing then and it's adapted by many, many hospitals now. She's an innovator. She invented two medical devices, Neovac, meconium suction catheter and also to identify when the fetus is in distress by using their heart rates. From 1997 to 2016 as Dean for Students at Harvard Medical School, one of her educational innovations was introducing mannequin stimulation. This is an inspiring field that she does. It's called the HMS Med Science program and she inspires the high school students towards the biology courses and it's a very innovative way of learning. Let's just look at a video of the family van for Nancy Oriel, please. The family van is a godsend. Since the family van been around Boston, I am with them and I will never give them up. The family van is a mobile clinic that serves a number of different neighborhoods around Boston. We're reaching people who otherwise might not come into the traditional healthcare system. The healthcare comes to them. We believe that healthcare starts on the street where you live, work, learn and pray and that's why we're there. For the family van to be on the street corner on any given day, it's an opportunity for us to just sit there and listen and be the ears and the eyes and the hands that can make a difference in somebody's life for that day. That's a warmth. There's a human understanding that tells you that you are important. I feel at home when I go to the family van. You never know what somebody is going through, so our job is to make sure that they leave better than when they came in. I would not be cancer-free today had it not been for the advice that was given to me at the family van over seven years ago. I've been going to the family van for five years and I recommend the van to anyone and I'm not just saying that it's true. There are resources to be shared. There's knowledge to be shared and there's just an openness that is needed. The family van is a community of trust. Wonderful. That's impressive Nancy. Thank you for doing this and I wanted to start off with you. As an anesthesiologist, you look at one patient at a time. What inspired you to take to this almost three decades ago? Well, thank you for that introduction. Thank you for bringing us together. That's a great question. People often ask why, you know, as an anesthesiologist, why did I start focusing on the streets? To be quite honest, there was a moment where I was compelled to do it. I was an obstetric anesthesiologist and on one particular day, I was called to the operating room to do a stat caesarean section on a woman who was rushed in. She was unconscious and her baby was in severe distress. You know, the surgery went well. The baby survived. The mother survived and afterwards I wanted to go and meet the mother to find out what had happened. So, you know, after she regained consciousness, I went to see her and she was from a local community in Boston. She was from, you know, what you call working poor family. She had health insurance and she had prenatal care. But when she started having a headache, she didn't know that that was a dangerous sign for pregnant women and she didn't want to bother her doctor with something so trivial and she didn't want to feel stupid. So, she stayed home, you know, developed toxemia and had a seizure. As I was talking to her, I realized, you know, it was knowledge and self-confidence that had almost caused her baby's death. So, I partnered with a medical student, a third year medical student, because I didn't know what the answer was. I didn't know how to solve that problem. I knew the issue with self-confidence and knowledge and access to resources, but I didn't know how to solve that. So, and not being trained in public health, I went to the people who I wanted to serve and basically spent two years with Cheryl Dorsey going to barbershops and churches and mosques and grocery stores and sitting on the corner and just asking people how to solve this problem and out of that the family van was born. Well, the family van has now been on the streets for 29 years and we actually, we thought that it was going to bring resources to the community. We thought that it was about sharing knowledge and, you know, helping people access care and we've proven that we do that. In fact, we have proof that it does, you know, we have outcome data that shows that it saves lives, saves money, but we have found it is so much more than that. So, let me tell you another family van story. So, in our early days, we were actually part of the Beth Israel Hospital and the nurses on the labor and delivery actually on the postpartum floor used to collect money to give to the family van so we could, you know, share with the, you know, with our community and one time they collected a little, you know, some money and they gave it to us and said, asked us to sort of have gifts to some children. So, we had heard a radio report that morning about a daycare center in Boston for children whose mothers had HIV and in those days, HIV was not treatable at all and so we thought, great, well, you know, we'll call the daycare center, we'll ask them if we can bring some gifts over for the children and when we called the director of the daycare center, she said, she thanked us and she said, that's really very kind but our children know their mothers are dying and they'd rather give their mothers a gift instead. So, we as mothers ourselves thought about, what gift can we give children that they can give to their mothers and we realized the one thing that we had always gotten was little pictures of our children at the daycare center. So, we decided to take our little Polaroid and go to the daycare center and take pictures of the and have them turn it into cards for their mothers. Well, the word, we told the nurses and the word passed around the hospital and then everyone started calling us because they wanted to join. The director of media production said he was going to set up a formal portrait studio in the daycare center. The nurses collected more money so that we could we could bring and give the children gifts and the print shop gave us bills so they could make cards for their mothers. And so, we went to the daycare center, took two days, you know, and we set up really a formal portrait studio in the daycare center and there was a moment where I stepped back and I just looked at the scene and there were these little children lined up proudly and quietly waiting to have their portrait taken. There was the family van team sort of helping to, you know, move everything along and the director of the media services taking portraits. And as I watched that, I realized the family van was more than just bringing services to the community. It was a circle of giving and it was that everybody who became part of it both gave and received gifts and that is what we could become. And what's interesting, data matters, we actually have done a qualitative analysis of why people come to the van and one of the themes that comes out is this generosity narrative that being part of this world makes you want to give it forward and so our community feels that we are a gift and they want to be part of our giving circle. But it's more than that and the title of this talk is compassion cannot choose. Compassion finds a way and so I need to tell you how compassion is the power behind the family van. So one of the places we used to park was what was called the outdoor drug fair. There was a woman who'd come on the van, she was pregnant, she was obviously addicted to drugs and she'd get on the van and she'd sort of say ask us to help her get into drug treatment. And we'd say absolutely and we'd talk with her and we offered a call drug treatment center for her but every time she'd get scared and she'd run away and she'd say no, no, no, I need help now and she'd run away. Just fear, just fear for herself, fear for a baby. And that went on sort of intermittently for for a little while. One time she stayed long enough for us to actually make the appointment at the drug treatment center and she left promising to go. Well we didn't see her again for for many months and then she returned and she had with her this beautiful healthy baby and she had a newspaper and she opened up the newspaper and in the middle of the newspaper was this big advertisement of a beautiful baby and the head was healthy new beginnings in our new obstetric suite and she gave us the newspaper and she said this was her baby, this was our baby, this was a family van baby. Compassion finds a way and that is what powers the family van. Thank you. Great stories Nancy, this is unbelievable. Sadhguru, you talk about compassion and you know, can you please tell us your views on compassion? Namaskaram to all of you, good morning once again. Well, I must tell you this phrase or this title as compassion cannot choose came up about fifteen years ago when we started a movement to help the HIV positive patients. When we conducted large events for them, hundreds of them came, the unfortunate thing is even six-year-olds, seven-year-old children were HIV positive because their mothers and fathers were positive, whatever. So I was looking at what to do and I brought them to the center and I was seeing how to help them out. This time I noticed that people who are around me, people who are closely working with me, they all started resisting. They said, Sadhguru, you cannot bring these people here. I said, see, they're not going to spread HIV in the air, all right? There is a certain way that's not going to happen to us. But they said, no, we are… we don't like it, our children are here, our women are here, we don't want such people coming here. Then I said, see, this is… if there is compassion in your heart, compassion doesn't have a choice. What is needed it will do. If you're going to choose, you must understand there's nothing in your heart. You're doing what's popular, that's not compassion. Compassion is a passion towards everything. Or maybe just before 8.30, I just sat down and penned this poem. I don't know if it may make any sense to you, let me read this. It's called Life Affair, not a love affair, life affair. A passion with you, you and you unbridled, passion for all and everything. An unconstipated life and love, making life a love affair beyond needs and desires that make life a breeze or a scream as you wish. Will you ride the phenomena of life or wear yourself down with endless longing? So essentially, everybody has… everybody has passion for something. Passion is a wonderful thing by itself. But passion runs out of fuel because it's usually focused towards one or two objects of passion. Compassion means it's a… all-encompassing passion. Your passion is non-discriminatory. You're equally passionate about everything. Once you are like this, in your life, you will do everything that you can do. This is one thing everyone must understand. If we do not do what we cannot do, there is no problem. But if we do not do what we can do, we are a disaster. So essentially, compassion cannot choose or compassion essentially means that you do not become such a disaster. In your life, all that you can do will happen out of you. This is very important for every human being. So compassion is just an all-inclusive passion for life around you. When your passion becomes indiscriminate, you're compassionate. Thank you, Sadhguru. It's a great segue for our next speaker, Dr. James O'Connell. And he's the president of Boston Healthcare for Homeless People, started almost forty years ago. And he began his full-time clinical work with homeless individuals as a founding physician for them. He must do something for me also because I am also homeless. He serves more than eleven thousand homeless persons in almost two hospital-based clinics in more than forty-five shelters and outreach sites in Boston. So even here, these people are there and these shelters exist. For last forty years, sir, I've lived without a home all the time traveling, living out of a suitcase because of the virus I am now homebound. Yeah. So Dr. O'Connell graduated from the summer cum lot from the University of Notre Dame in 1970 and received his master's in theology from Cambridge University in 72. After graduating from Harvard Medical School in 82, he completed residence in internal medicine at Mass General Hospital. And he served as a national program director for the Homeless Families program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. He's also the editor for Healthcare for Homeless Persons, a manual of communicable diseases. He's been published widely. He's also featured in ABC's Nightline and in a feature-length documentary called Give Me a Shot of Anything. I wanted to ask you about this a little later on, Dr. O'Connell. His first book, Stories from the Shadows, Reflections of a Street Doctor, was published in 2015, and his feature on NPR's National Public Radio's Fresh Air with Terry Gross. He has received numerous awards, including the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Award in 2012, the Trustees Medal at the Bicentennial Celebration of MGH in 2011. Can we have his video of his work, please? I came my last job as a resident was to be the medical senior in charge of the intensive care unit. So that was June, and July 1st I'm at a clinic, sort of a makeshift clinic in the shelter. I kept saying, you know, how tough can this be? I've handled the ICU. You'd be careful of those things when they come up because it never is true. But I walked in and it's my first job. I'm late 30s now. I finally have a job. And I'm walking in as a doctor and I'm thinking they want me. And if you know the nurses, are you kidding? So they said the first thing I had to do was I ran into Barbara McGinnis was the name of the nurse who really was the spokesperson for the nurses. And they explained to me that we had been trained all wrong, that in residency, you know, you have to go very fast. You're working all the time. You'll see three or four or five people in an hour and you've got to get their, you know, get their chief complaint diagnosed and get the treatment going and move on. And if you don't do that, somebody's knocking on the door to say, can we do anything to help you move along? And they said that's never going to work with homeless people. You have to learn how to slow down. And so they, I never forget Barbara doing this. She took my stethoscope and put it in the drawer. She took everything I had that was medical and put it away. And she said what we do around here is soak feet. And I was aghast because when you walk into the clinic at Pine Street, around the periphery would be these really hardened street guys all sitting in these kind of chair, you know, the desks that used to have the arms like this over them and have, and the nurses were soaking their feet. And it was kind of magic. And as Barbara pointed out to me, you had to take, I said, these are tough people. They're not going to trust you until they know you're, until you know, you're going to stick around to the, you know, that you will listen to them and that you're not here for your own agenda, that you're here to take care of them. Thank you, Dr. O'Connor for doing this service. And you have been doing this for 40 years. What keeps you going at it? Well, first of all, wonderful to see you all. And I don't know if I can you hear me okay? Yes. Okay, good. You know, I have, I've been, first of all, let me say I'm so honored to be here and I'm so honored to meet a guru and to be just a part of this. And as you probably can surmise from listening to Nancy, she's been a hero of mine for 35 years, almost 40 years. So this is a real treat and an honor. But you know, I had never seen that clip before. So I don't, I had never, don't remember saying all of that. So I apologize for that. But an answer to the question like what keeps us going, you know, especially at this end of my career now, you know, I think it's exactly what I've been hearing from all this morning. And that's it. It's the, you know, we're at first, I can remember when I first started taking care of homeless people. I was incensed by the societal tragedy. I convinced my job was to change this. People should not be homeless. And it took me a while to realize I was just a doctor. And then while I can advocate for all that, I had no ability to change the bigger picture. But I was invited into the lives of people who had suffered from the exclusion, from the poverty, you know, from the limited choices that they would give it in this world. And they invited us into their lives. And as we got to know them over time, just as Barbara McGinnis, the nurse after whom, by the way, we named our program, just that she had said, and it was somehow the relationships and the ability to help in small ways, sometimes larger ways to alleviate suffering and to just be invited into the lives of everybody, I think is what has sustained certainly me. And I would argue most of the doctors and nurses in our program would say that about you. We rage about the fact that homelessness as a problem is worse now than when we started in 1985. So we have not been very successful at turning that arc. But I think we have learned to deliver better and better health care to people who are still struggling with homelessness at the same time we've been invited into their lives. And much as Nancy described about the family van, I think our community, unfortunately, doesn't have churches and mosques and barbershops. They have park benches and alleyways and places that they live. But we've been invited into that world, spend most of our time visiting people there. And as people slowly begin to get homes with these low sort of low threshold housing programs, we've also realized we now spend a lot of our time doing visits to people at home. So there's been a sort of a full, you know, panoply of things we've been able to do that kind of keep us going. That's fantastic. And thank you for what you're doing for keeping these people healthy. So talk about health care disparities, right? And it's great that who's funding this program and how do you get support to do this? You know, there's a long story to that and I will be very quick. So initially, we were given a grant by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. And this is in the early 80s. I just wanted to share this a little bit. So it was a grant given because the foundation, which is a healthcare philanthropy and a national, not international, had been responding to complaints by emergency rooms around the country that there was a new wave of people, these homeless people coming to emergency rooms. And the thought was why aren't we out there giving care to them, preventing them from coming to the emergency room? So the foundation gave four year grants to cities around the country to try to become catalysts for improving the care of homeless people and trying to integrate that care into the mainstream. And to do that, the foundation required a coalition of stakeholders. And I say this because it's become really critical in our lives, much I think is the way Nancy described the event. So in 1984, homeless people in Boston gathered together and they had a law firm sign a document with chiefs of medicine and the people doing it and the mayor. And they decided they wanted, I saved it in 1984, they wanted our program to be one of social justice. I was coming out of medical school and I don't think I had thought or talked about social justice since I was a philosophy student back in the sixties. But what they did not want was really interesting to me was they said there are certain things they want, they want a continuity of care. They wanted the same team to take care of them consistently, not to be a team on Monday that changes on another day that comes Sunday on a different place. They wanted us to be integrated into the mainstream and be consistent. And that kind of shocked me because I had taken this job in full disclosure because in residency I became absolutely in love with end of life care, palliative care and I was going to go on and do an oncology fellowship. But when the city got this grant, the homeless people demanded a full-time doctor and they couldn't find one. So my chief of medicine who is my beloved mentor and to whom I can never say no said he would delay my fellowship per year if I would do this for a year. And so I thought as many of us would this is my chance to give back, to do something good before I go on and do my career. And so when I got to the shelters, not only did I spend two months soaking feet and not doing anything medical to learn about the things were, but they also invited me into this world where they didn't like people like me. I was coming to do good. I was going to do it for a few months or a year, get people to open up to me, share their lives, and then I was going to pack up and go do my career somewhere else. And that was a kind of fragmentation and loss that they were petrified about because that marked everything in their lives, everything was lost. And so they were challenging us to say, how do you make a career out of this? And as you can, as you all know, back in those days, there was no path. You had to like, find a grant here or there or suffer. And I can remember them saying your job is to figure out how to get get doctors and nurses to want to do this as a career, not as a just as a six weeks or two years of good work. And so that's been a challenge for us all along. But what they also said was, in order to do that, they wouldn't let us use a volunteer. And I struggled with this a long time. So they would, for five years, we were not allowed to use volunteers. And I live breed volunteers. And I think that's what we are all made of. We should be giving back. But they saw it. So the people we were serving saw it as charity. And they said, we want social justice. We don't want charity. And so they wouldn't let us get away with that. And I had every friend I knew I had gotten to volunteer, you know, cardiology friends and pulmonary. We were all going to, we had it knocked. We knew what we were going to do. But they simply said no. And we also couldn't use students which shocked me. I didn't know any of this when I took the job. Because they had seen students coming to learn on them, to learn their physical exam, learn their stuff. And then they would often did their career somewhere else. So they felt like guinea pigs. That's exactly the word they all used to us. And then they demanded, so we couldn't do that. We couldn't use students. So all the things that I were used to in my medical training were stripped away. And we had to learn how to just be consistent and be present. And what they were looking for were people who were going to stand with them in the light or in the darkness. And I think that set the tone for our program. And once you sort of fall into that view, as much as I thought it was wrong, it is was brilliant. And it was exactly what our program has learned to thrive and grow. And the homeless people that we serve are part of, you know, they design and help us implement the program. And they sit on our board of directors. And they are actually the people that hire and fire us. There's a very different experience I've had working in the hospital and other places. But let me stop there because I'm being, I could give you stories after stories. And if I've got time, I'll share those with you. We have a conviction now that if you try to go out and take care of, it's certainly an American society who out and try to take care of a group of homeless people. They will teach you the weaknesses in the healthcare system long before you realize it yourself. And I can give you decades of experience of that. So we always pay close attention to what's going on with the homeless because that often teaches us what to do the rest. But the disparities are quite striking. I'll give you one example. I have a, I often show a picture that one of our patients gave us. It was a picture she took with a throwaway camera. It was a woman who lived under a bridge, not far from Mass General, which is my home hospital. And it shows 12 of her street friends sitting on park benches in a little park. And it's her cherished picture. It's all her friends. And she gave me that to hold about five years after the picture was taken. I had never seen it. She was going in for surgery and she asked me to hold on to her things. We have a big issue when people come into the hospital and have surgery. Most homeless people have to carry everything they own with them so they don't want to come in unless someone's going to protect their stuff. So that was, I was being the protector of her stuff. But I looked at the picture and realized I knew every single one of those people. I spend most of my clinical life taking care of the people living on the streets who don't come into the shelters. And we knew them all. And in the picture, there were 11 of them. They were all in their thirties. And they're sitting having, you know, smiling, looking like a really wonderful community in a little park, which is literally on the grounds of Mass General Hospital. And because this is Massachusetts, they all have insurance. They're all on Medicaid. I was looking at the picture and say, so a fully insured group of street people sitting on the grounds of my hospital, you know, 50 yards from the emergency room. And when I was looking at that picture five years later, it was one person still alive. And, you know, the realizing that that here we are with sitting in maybe the medical mecca of the world with all of our 12 academic teaching centers and, you know, we have 24 community health centers. You know, we have 12 academic medical centers, three medical schools. And the mortality rate of people living in the shadows of us was higher than any African country I could find. And so that disparity I think has haunted us ever since. The leading cause of death was cancer. It was not like what you might think. The second leading cause was heart disease. So these are things they were dying of things that we should be helping people with. And what we learned, as everyone knows, as well, that the, you know, the causes of all these things, what these folks have lived through has been, had happened just as a guru is pointing out. It's the education that failed them, the social services that failed them, growing up in poverty with limited choices, with awful racial issues going on. All of that ends up with people becoming homeless and living on our streets with so few options. Thank you, Jim. Now we are, especially now, we are sensitized to racial disparities and I have a question to Sadhguru. We have healthcare disparities, we have racial disparities and so on and so forth. So I wanted to ask a group, what do you think is the reason for a disparity, any disparities Well, the roots of ethnic and racial disparities is elsewhere, as everybody knows, that's a different matter. But largely these healthcare disparities are a consequence of economic disparity, which inevitably happens in every society. It is just that those who are able to ride the economic wave and those who get crushed by the same economic process, how do we take care of them in a given society is in a way that's what we are looking at here in terms of health because health is vital for one's life. When you really look at this, because economics are the basis of how much healthcare we can deliver to somebody. See, one important thing is, we are always looking at healthcare as a kind of a treatment process, which is very important part of health, I'm not saying no, but creating a culture of health in a given society is very important. I think that is where most societies, affluent societies have failed because there is no culture of health. Eat badly, live badly and spend three trillion dollars in healthcare, we think that is a formula. The whole world is trying to follow United States in this context. So let's say in India also in urban centers, the same culture is coming, eat badly, live badly, but you don't have three trillion dollars, that's the whole problem, all right? If you look at it as a global thing. So right now, the biggest industry on the planet is actually healthcare with a budget of 7.8 trillion dollars, US dollars. Next is the insurance, which is 5.3 trillion dollars. Agriculture and food is 5.1 trillion dollars. I feel if you slice it off the healthcare and insurance and if you ensure that there is good food for the people, healthy proper food for the people, because these people that he was talking about on the street side, the biggest problem with them is they are eating the worst kind of food that you can consume generally because that's cheap and that is available to them. Instead of spending so much on healthcare and insurance, if we ensure that the right kind of food is given to every citizen and certain quality of agriculture is done so that what we consume is not working against us, what we consume is working for us. Then teaching them ways of being healthy, this has to become part of the social life. After that, in spite of that if somebody falls sick, then of course treatment. Now, this treatment is as expensive as it has become simply because of... I know this... I'm not speaking against something, but I'm saying the causes are that technologically we are going in a certain direction that every investigation becomes super expensive. Fifty years ago, what a doctor would examine personally and find out what is wrong with the patient. Today there are slew of tests which cost so much. Actually diagnosis usually costs more than treatment, at least in India it is true and I'm sure it is so in United States also. So it's very important that we look at these things that as people innovate, technological innovations keep happening, we keep coming up with more machines and more machines as hospitals invest heavy amount of money into these things, their charges keep going up because they've made an investment. So it is important that we equip our healthcare people, professionals, doctors and nurses and everybody that more human touch is needed than simply machine way of doing things because this will usually bring down the costs and also a whole lot of people will get well simply with that human touch itself. So this is what both of them said in a way their work is about, you know, a certain kind of human touch, people get well simply because they see somebody cares for them. That itself will transform their health situation quite significantly. There are serious ailments which need treatment, which need technology, I understand that, but I think we are bit overdoing the technology part in when it comes to health care. If we can identify those areas where technology can go down and more human touch can come in, particularly with diagnosis, I feel there could be, you know, much lower cost of health care, this insurance cost would come down and it could be available to more people, that money that is going into health care and insurance, if it is brought into right kind of natural farming and right kind of food being available to people, particularly those segments of society that you are serving who cannot afford good food, they just eat the cheapest possible food, which should not be eaten by anybody, that kind of food they're eating. I think if we transform this, some correction would happen. I'm not saying all problems will be fixed, but it is always about pushing the solution versus the problem. Thank you, Sadhguru. It's a great segue for us to go to the next segment of this webinar, which is on Native Americans. In the month of May 2020, actually Harvard School of Public Health organized a webinar on COVID in Native Americans and there was an eye-opener for me and that was followed by Sadhguru's tour that I saw. He almost went to 40 reservations in 37 days of motorcycle trip. I actually wanted to contextualize that before we start this segment by playing that video of his trip there. So he has witnessed these reservations in person and it'll be an eye-opener for us. Can you play that video please? This is an exploration of the American heart. What was beating in their hearts, what drove them to do what they did in their lives. Much of it, factually we can never find, but in spirit we can touch these dimensions. The world awaits. Sadguru's next move and ladies and gentlemen, he's off and he's gone. Sadguru, ladies and gentlemen, Sadguru, Sadguru. We are so honored and so humbled to have you here present on our soil. Welcome to Turtle Island. There is a lot that modern societies need to pick up from ancient societies. They existed here not as exploiters of land, but as land itself. Beautiful words. Touch my heart. Thank you very much. Meeting, conversing, understanding and above all projecting the image of Native American people in a positive and relevant way to the rest of the world. This is the mission. I love that you're bringing the wisdom of the Native American people into the public eye because connecting to the earth right now and connecting back to nature seems more important than ever. It's a gift that I'm going to present to my friends. It's not coming from me, it's coming from this mountain, from the Creator. These are the most sacred to us. We can see the spirit. Very strong. People are talking about ecology as a science. That way it'll never work. Equality should become our heart as it was with the indigenous people here. Their heart was land. That is one dimension that we really want to present to the world. That's the reason why I'm meeting Native American leaders, medicine men and others so that they express themselves clearly and their message is not of the past. It is most relevant for the future. I wish our leaders thought like you, man. I love that. I commend you, Seth Guru, for thinking like that. I love that oneness mentality. We need more of that. Thank you, Seth Guru, for that exciting trip. Wish I was part of it. This sets it on for the next segment and we have Victor Anthony Lopez-Karman, a Harvard Medical School student. He's also a Native American and he has been active member of his community since receiving his traditional name and baptism on the Pasquayaki Reservation. He's an indigenous youth mental health researcher, contributor at Teen Vogue, an editor for global indigenous youth through their eyes, the first book on the global experiences of indigenous youth. He's a Martin Luther King, Udall, Bourne, and Fulbright scholar as well as a recipient of the 2018 Native American 40 under 40 award. And currently he's co-chair of the UN Global Indigenous Youth Caucus and an MD candidate at Harvard Medical School where he serves as the co-president of the Native American Health Organization. He has a TED talk so I thought I'll show a clip of that. Can you play a clip of Victor, please? Hello, everyone. I stand before you as a son of two Native American nations. On my mother's side I'm Pasquayaki from Arizona and on my father's side I'm from the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe in South Dakota. Now when I was young my elders would tell me stories like many indigenous elders do. So one day my father pulled me aside and he taught me about a principle that span time and space. He called it the seventh generation ethic. The seventh generation ethic is a social and spiritual contract. It says that we must know our past but that in our actions we must consider the impacts upon future generations upon those who will follow us seven generations from now. Now this principle has allowed my tribe and my people to thrive since time immemorial. It has profoundly impacted the way I live my own life. Has the power to influence yours and can guide our world today. Thank you, Victor. So we all know that especially from that webinar that I attended Native Americans there is a huge healthcare disparity. Their age is their longevity is about five or six years less than the other US population put together. They have wherever they live 80 percent of roads are unpaved. There is a little amount of medical care that is available. They have twice or four times the risk for any heart disease or anything else like diabetes, hypertension, alcohol, liver disease, etc. So we know that. I talked to Victor a week ago and Victor was so excited to converse with you, so I want to leave him free-wheeling. I know that you have done youth and truth programs all over the world where you allow the youth to ask any questions they want. So go ahead Victor, you ask anything you want. Wonderful. Victor, to see you here. It's really an honor to be here with everyone. It warms my heart to see the video of Sadhguru visiting Indigenous nations and including some of my own and thank you for taking the time to really meet with us in our territory. I think that really means a lot and not a lot of people get that experience. I think a lot of people forget that we are nations in their own backyard and even looking at global health I don't often hear Native American nations mentioned when it comes to global health in the United States. I think people forget that Native American nations are so diverse and we're basically different countries. We speak different languages. We have different spiritualities and we've been practicing them since time immemorial. So I think it's really important that you visited so many and yeah it's really beautiful. As a Native American youth myself I grew up experiencing and witnessing a lot of the disparities that were previously mentioned but I also grew up experiencing the tremendous beauty of our people and it was kind of this dynamic where growing up I saw the ancient wisdom that my elders offered going to ceremonies, going to a sweat lodge, going to Sundance, with both of my tribes and when I got sick my parents would take me to the traditional healer on the reservation before they took me to a western physician and so I got to see this beauty and it just made me feel like I was at home but at the same time I got to see the alcoholism, the poverty and in my mind it confused me when I was a kid. I didn't understand why this was happening. I didn't understand why such beauty and such power could be in the same place as such dread and just terrible outcomes that I would see all around me and that's one of the reasons why I was inspired to go into healthcare because I saw that as a way that I could contribute to my community as a way that I could do my part in loving future generations and loving my descendants who would come seven generations after myself like I had been taught and looking at the US healthcare system right now I want to try to understand where we're heading when it comes to Native American health and where these disparities are heading. When I look around I see that for instance most medicals I think 43% of medical schools in the US have zero Native American medical students and we make up 0.1% of medical school faculty 20 times less over 20 times less than our US population and I want to try to understand what the US medical system what message is it sending to future generations of Native American youth. We always say to move forward we have to understand the past but we we can't change the past but we can do things that will help what happened and make life better for future generations of everyone on this planet but when particularly like thinking of Native American youth I would like to ask said guru what he thinks after his tour and his time with Native Americans what he thinks the medical system can do to really show that it cares about future generations with a particular reference to indigenous peoples. Well you know we I decided to set up our Asia Institute of Inner Sciences at the head of Trail of Tears in the Cherokee land because almost 18 19 years ago I had a profound experience a kind of an encounter with a Native American being or a spirit after that I couldn't take my mind off that and I decided to set up this center there so we have a large center there now since then I've been thinking of connecting with the Native American people but my schedules wouldn't allow me this kind of time it is in a way unfortunately it's thanks to virus that all my schedules got cancelled so I could plan a 40-day trip which I which I could have never done otherwise they wouldn't allow me to travel like this and because generally a Native American culture their spirituality their knowledge and their wisdom is not written down it is always passed on from generation to generation and that system has been seriously disrupted and generally it is in the lore of the Native American people that wisdom and knowledge is blowing in the wind so I thought if it's blowing in the wind the best way to encounter that is to be on a motorcycle and that's what took me I definitely went to the Sue Sue country you your father from there wonderful and well I I thought I knew plenty about the Native American culture but I was just surprised at various things that I discovered on this trip I can't go into the whole thing but essentially there were over 500 nations within the present United States is something incredible they all largely had their own independent languages and as you said their own spirituality their own traditions living so close together still they maintained their individual cultures for thousands of years because it's estimated somewhere between twelve to forty thousand years they've been here it's really amazing and incredible and above all their health their well-being their their wisdom everything is a kind of a connection with the land what I felt is for Native American people there is they don't live on the land they are the land they live like the land which I feel is phenomenally important for this generation and the next generations across the globe to absorb that we live here like the land not some kind of alien creatures who destroy the land but we are the land most people realize this only when you bury them but even when we are here we are the land this very soil that we walk upon is us in many ways so in terms of health and medical care in the native american societies uh it was uh you know heart-wrenching to see some of the situations there particularly the condition of the women the number of women in a whole lot of reservations has come down significantly either because they have left because the conditions are bad or they some people were complaining there's a whole lot of trafficking that they're being forcefully taken away and also so many deaths in childbirth and those kind of things because as Bala was pointing out there are distances to cover there's no proper medical care system I feel one important thing is all the major reservations in the country a private institution like there are major institutions which have the necessary endowments I mean due to lack of you know my knowledge about all the foundations like let's say the Ford Foundation or even Harvard Medical School or whoever else who has the necessary means must set up at least a basic care if not specializations at least life-saving kind of small hospitals in every reservation this a must many small reservations don't have any kind of medical care this needs to happen if you have to save those lives especially young women dying at childbirth these things stopped all over the world quite some ago decades ago but unfortunately it's happening in pockets of present day United States this must stop I think this doesn't take much investment this doesn't take much effort it can be easily done as Victor was pointing out it is important that at high school identify those children who have the necessary competence and every year whatever is the number that you need that many number of Native American children are taken into medical schools for training which will definitely long-term enhance this healthcare situation in their conditions because all said and done I'm saying without any prejudice it may be little you know the way the reservations are it may not every reservation is the same each one is different some of the reservations the way it was maybe people who don't belong to the car that culture may find it little difficult to work in that place so it's best their own community produces doctors and if producing a full scale doctor which takes eight nine years is too much at least like a paramedic kind of people if you produce which should not take more than four years probably in four years if you produce enough of them basic care emergency care must be set up so that whatever is the population there to serve that what kind of emergency care that you need at least so that they could be transported out for safety that much can easily be done and I'm sure many of you will take it up in future and do it if not the United States government I'm sure many endowments will should be willing to do if your institution present this if necessary from our center if we can push this we must push this but this may be too large a project for us but if we can inspire many endowments in the country to at least set up this kind of thing that there could be paramedics if not specialists who can attend to them immediately and if necessary transport them outside at least handle deliveries and things like that without risk to the woman who are there and above all this unbridled sale of alcohol also has caused severe damage and these days very enterprising drug dealers are there they're all over the place the youth are being taken up by this so I feel if all of them are not in you know they may not be oriented towards a long study I'm not saying everybody Victor is doing wonderfully well but I'm saying many of them may still have that you know tribal spirit that they don't want to get sit in a classroom and study for years and years so if some kind of skilled trainings and small scale industries that they can run themselves within the reservations I'm basically saying youth if they're occupied if they have some pride in what they're doing they won't go into these addictions so much there'll be a better chance of getting them out so this variety of things have to be done if health has to happen I don't believe health will come just out of an hospital and doctors and medicines and stuff like that that is when health goes wrong you go to your doctor you don't go to your doctor to a health I'm sorry if I'm saying anything wrong but I always see that health is individual business everybody should take responsibility for that when it goes wrong for some reason then you go to your doctor for help you go to your doctor and say I've paid my insurance give me health this not going to work like that for anybody particularly in in societies where there is a pride about being a tribal society in those kind of societies it's important that their their way of life is not disturbed that all the time they have to go for monthly medical checkups this that that's not how they live that's not how we live either I still live without live without an insurance myself so I'm perfectly okay with that it's just that more opportunities for youth to engage in variety of activities develop skills for themselves and above all what I saw in many of these tribes is what they have in terms of craft and culture you can make them into tremendous tourist centers where you know they could be a large earnings just because of tourism both for the tribe and for the state and country it could be great attraction because in the rest of the world one reason why I made this trip across the native american nations is because I saw in the rest of the world they become invisible people don't even know they exist so my fundamental goal was to make these people visible people in the world should know there is a people like this there are people like this and still are not just in the wild west movies and the wild west movie image of a native american person he's he comes half naked always hollering on a horse and shoots at whoever comes his way this is the image that the world has that there is no regard and respect for that culture because this is just by seeing a handful of movies they have come to this so it's very very important to make them visible see it's always true for every human being if you become visible you would like to stand up in a dignified way if you're invisible your underground you rule you live your life whichever way if you become visible you want to make yourself you know little shiny so I think that needs to happen to that culture they must become visible they must have skills they must have their own economy going which sustains them it now need not be in power with you know modern economies how they are it must be enough for them to eat nutritious food live a healthy life and if some health care problems come we must have centers which should take care of this this is not very difficult to do if a few endowments take it up thank you sir that was a great take home messages yeah I wanted to invite next to Cassin ghost horse who is an indigenous elder and is also a member of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation South Dakota and he's a host for First Voices Indigenous Radio and is a Nobel Prize nominee in 2016 nominated by the International Institute of Peace Studies in Global Philosophy he's been a radio host and journalist founder executive producer for almost 29 years and he's a survivor of the reign of terror from the 1972 to 1976 on the Pine Ridge Cheyenne River and Roseville Lakota Reservations in South Dakota he was also awarded New York City's 2013 peacemaker of the year for the borough of State and Island was selected for a 2016 native arts and cultural foundation national fellowship in music it was a nominee for a national endowment for the arts national heritage fellowship in 2017 National Native American Hall of Fame nominee 2018-2019 he also was recently nominated for the nominee for the 2020 Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities and 2019 Indigenous Music Award nominee for Best Instrumental Album for From the Continuum so to Cassin you're here we wanted to show a short video to Cassin before we start the conversation I grew up between the Cannonball River and Standing Rock the Grand River and Moro River and the White River and the Cheyenne River and the Missouri River at age of five years old they were giving us iodine pills to counteract the radioactive fallout that was coming from Nevada onto the western part of South Dakota but what really came to play was when I could not drink my own water that I grew up with I could not eat the food the gardens anymore on my reservation so I turned my attention away from me and said this is what it's about it's about mama earth I have to do this because there's something at risk for mother earth thank you to Cassin as you saw just saw as a master musician musician and a teacher of the magical ancient and modern sounds and performs worldwide what I found interesting was he's currently co-authoring Earth Mind a perspective of quantum physics encoded within the Lakota language dear Cassin is a perfectly flawed human being and a sun dancer in the cosmology of the Lakota nation dear Cassin take it away hey thank you thank you for the articulation victor and thank you all it's honored to be here I just like to say I give you my hand shake your hand with a good heart and it's really good for all of us to be here quite honored to be here and all the statements that you said earlier it's like a totally I could say just I'm just one big nod I'm nodding and agreeing with everything so I know that because you know when we talk from the heart it's it's part of that original intuition that original tuition that is remaining unfiltered coming from the heart of the earth coming from who we are as as community and unity and when I hear compassion I talk about I think about the unselfishness and that it's really not about the individual but it's about the earth as we understand as she understands us and I think the biggest lesson is to know that we as humans cannot teach earth a lesson at all because our lessons are continuous all the time the breathing the air the water and you know just the food that grows us instead of us growing the food so you know I think the the connection the health disparities that we suffer if I use that word correctly is the fact that we have lost that connection that intimate relationship with the earth and as you see it played out in the American public and worldwide where peoples are more civilized and having culture we rely too much on technology and you know I know it's good in some cases in being being that understanding you know having the education of the western mind and yet never losing the the intuitive values that we are taught as Akota and understanding when I was young as Bala read the bio somewhat of my bio is when in 1978 when we were given final finally given religious freedom to worship talk use our language and experience and tell our stories and in a fast forward ahead in 1992 in grad school I decided to understand that we had we had to there was a largest gathering in San Francisco of Native people and this was to think without Native American tag to it it was the Native people North American people who gathered in San Francisco 200,000 of us and we were celebrating 500 years of of of survival and I thought well out of that we need to thrive learn how to thrive like we used to and what we need is a voice so then I started to say well you know I don't have experience with with bringing you know media and I have to learn about radio and I just started a radio program to bring the voice the the visibility at least of our stories of our oral traditions because that that encoded energy within our languages is less objective and less objectified objectifying and actually deals with the energy so to relearn how to describe the energy of our language and and then to describe the motion of what's going on around us the relationship that we have is much more than the rationality that we are coming up with concepts when all these intelligences of the earth the rocks the stone the water the fire the air the plants the animals all those intelligences I was thinking why do we treat them as if they weren't intelligent like they have no consciousness and knowing growing up with with peoples when I was young with the elders who were born in the 1800s and being young four or five six years old and reaching out and touching that transfers transference of energy from that time pre-colonial here because those their parents were here before the westerner arrived into the geographical center of the United States or North America and they still carried that original intuition and when I think about that innocence that is within all of us as native people that we we may be landless but we are not homeless and that's what we're defining the home is how to live with it and not to change the earth in order to adapt it to our needs but to adapt ourselves to the needs of the earth and that's the great balance and the disparity that we we will be successful because I think that consciousness is alive again now and through the experience I've had coming from those times when I was young to now I see something changing but it's still rooted tree roots consciousness with the earth not just the grassroots mentality of applying a program here and there which has brought a lot of mistrust for native people but you know we can see through that and adapt and include all those that have arrived here so we welcome everybody here we welcome everybody here um all we ask is that we lose the thought of possession that this land does not belong to anybody the fact is are we using the energy of this land correctly or not and I like to say it that way and um and just just to the fact that you know when Victor said the seventh generation and this is my individual thought process is that every generation is the seventh generation you know because I've heard that about my generation when I was young and so yes it puts us on an even playing field and that we as a contu or earth men are earth earth beings as a contu we are the ancient future the being from the ancient future now so that we must stay in a present and not get too far ahead or go too far backwards that if we are staying innocent every moment is innocent and and then that that is an understanding of consciousness of what of what all life around us is is actually telling us the lessons of the earth but I think one thing is is to not just go to the earth to listen but we go to the earth to understand how she is listening to us and you will find the greatest compassion of unselfishness that she has and you know regardless of what we do is civilized human beings there is all that culture that is that is springing forth now because of covet that the intelligence of covet is bringing forth people putting seeds in the ground again singing the traditional languages you know the planting the seeds in the corn and and and this is what I understood when I was maybe 14 years ago when the health disparities on my reservation in shine river is that we had to do something and we we we did take an organization we took it home and and now it here it is 13 14 years later and it's through the children the children to be taught that culture once again the language because like as Bala said the the the encoded physics the quantum physics is within the language and this language primarily is a verb it's all verbs and it's less noun laden to describe the continuum that life is always and it will be always moving and so if that's too much and maybe I should stop right there yeah thanks thank you dear Kassan um that's a great uh you know it's a great for the next conversation what I thought I should do at the end of this webinar was to take home some messages already I think that group gave a list of things that could work that could be implemented right away we have uh compassionate minds here Nancy Jim Victor yourself um so I want you all to think together and brainstorm here to see what are the top two or three things that we can do or focus on um for the Native Americans Nancy I'll start with you now let's say that you are being put in this spot that okay you have to go and take care of Native American uh you know but particularly what would you do where would you start well the thing that I've heard from all of us um is and the thing that I learned doing the family man it's it's about listening and joining in people's lives you know or it's not even joining it's like people have to build their lives themselves and if you don't have the resources then as Sagu said you know help bring in the resources but it is listening to the people and having the people design what they need that's sort of on the on a big level my world and Sagu's world of using mobile to get around to people you know the the native lands are are huge so I think there's a place for using mobile and the nice thing about that is you can then design it to fit the people it's serving and one doesn't have to look like the other each one is unique like each people is unique thank you Nancy Jim do you have any thoughts Jim I I do and I I am just uh kind of um in awe of what I've just heard from Victor and Tio Kassen uh I didn't but the thought I had which generating for me and I mentioned this before is a as a student and as a resident I spent a lot of time on the Navajo Reservation in Shiprock working primarily in the hospital but I spent a lot of time with the the public health folks who drove out to the hills so I remember going to two gray hills and many hills and it was my first time ever watching how effective doing care at home can be and how bringing the care into remote homes was so valuable but I also in resonating on what Saguro said is that I also realized the value of the small hospital for when there is there's a problem with a delivery you can avoid infant mortality if you've got the right stuff but if you don't have the hospital women will die and so I realized it was a to me it was a nice blend of you know the the framework was there for how you work as a team and how you do care both in the hospital but out in the thing and I I think that model that I saw in the Navajo Reservation while way under resourced I don't want to pretend it was enough was kind of the model that I think we should have around the country so I think we have much to learn from the elders the most powerful experience I had was going to the home of a Navajo Code Talker who was in his 80s or early 90s and he told me the story of the Navajo Code Talkers during World War II and I was stunned to think that this person had probably saved my father's life who was on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific so I think if I were reflecting on this I am hearing so much about how we need to respect and listen to and be part of the land which I learned a lot about from the the Navajo folks and then I also think that we can bring good health care I love what Victor says is that we definitely need you know we just have not had Native American people training in our medical schools and training in that and you know if we could get physician assistance we can get nurse practitioners to join with Victor and others to go back to the reservation I think the model of care is probably there and they will then teach us what we should be doing in our other places. Thank you Jim. Satguru thank you for giving a list of things that we should focus on but are there any one or two things that you know we as a group can start doing right away with all the influence chill positions these elite group has? See the simplest thing with minimal budget could take off is as Nancy is with you whether you call it a family van or you call it a Sioux van or you call it a Lakota van whatever you want to call it whatever the local people want to call it. I'm saying for specialized things I noticed injuries you know I'm saying these young people have injuries fractures and sometimes bullet injuries and stuff and they're permanently disabled many of them because of these injuries because they don't get themselves properly treated. So one van for injuries in every tribe one for deliveries one for small procedures that you could do and diagnostics one or two vans if you leave it like this I think that would be the simplest and quickest remedy before hospitals and before you train Native American youth in you know medical care and stuff like that this kind of things can be easily done and easily manned it need not have specialist super specialist simple medical care on the ground that people should not die of simple things. See this happens in all tribal societies like for example in India now we brought it down significantly in the last ten fifteen years otherwise thousands of children were losing sight because of conjunctivitis not because conjunctivitis will take away vision kids are just scratching their eyeballs out all you had to do is tape their fingers and the ice would be saved but there was no those two drops of antibiotic in their eyes. So I'm saying that and urinary infections were killing thousands of women across India now we've stopped that because the way that traditionally the women are made is they wouldn't go to a male doctor for this kind of things and they would rather die than go to a male doctor that's how they are made. So these are the I'm sure in this tribe tribes I noticed lots of injuries which could have easily been handled by modern medicine unfortunately has caused deformities in people in native american societies where I saw particularly I saw this in some places in the Hopi land where you know small injuries have left them disabled for long term. So these things could be attended to deliveries are very important it could be attended to and small procedures that are needed this and that small things will be there for every human being if these kind of things and diagnostics are handled that itself could make a huge difference to start with. Thank you sir Guru. Teokasin and Victor do you want to round it up? Yeah I totally agree with what everyone says it's so inspiring to hear this as a native american medical student I it's really inspiring and powerful for me I feel like two things one a more serious effort to look at the recruitment of native american youth into medicine as a as the public health response as something that will directly impact the nations that they're coming from for instance I think every native american youth or the great majority have this drive to make we want to help our communities we want to do what we can to contribute but there's so many factors that distract us as youth and for my own personal experience like there were only six people from my high school that went to college and 50 percent of native americans drop out of high school and there needs to be efforts by the medical system to see that as a public health crisis because we are the most likely to return to our communities to help and once we get to that level where we actually can we do for instance like for me being a doctor is I see it as you know being able to help my younger siblings and other native youth from my tribe to become doctors to speak to my patients in our language to invest in community gardens and nutrition that will keep the community healthy to create sobriety programs to go to ceremonies with the community that I care for in the clinic you know to help build sovereign clinics and and health systems that are tribal run and run by our people and designed by our people to bet to most contribute to our people in the best way and native american youth across this country they have similar dreams that they really want to do but they're just it's so hard for native american youth to get to this point there's so many factors in society because of the oppression that we faced for hundreds of years that has created the sense of hopelessness and poverty that we're still we've never given up to try to get past but it makes it hard for native american youth to get to this point and the medical system needs to see this in a more complex way to really invest more upstream and another thing I think the second thing is seeing indigenous health in a nation-based view I think a lot of medical schools across the country are doing this already but I believe it would be a tremendous improvement in indigenous health if every medical school focus found a way to focus and partner with the tribes that are local and state for instance if Harvard Medical School were to partner with Wampanoag in Massachusetts or University of Arizona partnering with the Pasquua Yaqui and to see these partnerships as a way to build that local community between the local tribes and the medical school I think that has so much potential not only in recruitment but to create this sort of goodwill between tribes that will flourish into partnerships that can that can really make a difference going into the future I really love what Saguaro was saying about you know there are over 500 nations and each of us requires a diverse and complex understanding of the issues that are facing us and as long as Native Americans are seen as one race as opposed to many nations who are you know in all essence pretty much different countries that have gone through similar crises I think that that that complexity will be lost and the medical system really prioritizes a specific complex understanding of patients and that should extend to Native American nations as well thank you thank you Victor um dear Cass and I'll give you your final board on this oh hey thank you um so I grew started this out with creating a a a culture of health and again I'll reiterate that you know everything comes from the earth everything is medicine in that way and where is the knowledge where is the intelligence to understand that but through the languages that are still connected and still related with the earth and I think that is the deeper study and understanding and we need to discover rediscover that knowledge that intelligence of the earth because you go into the language it is telling you basically about the creation story and what is what is you know I would go back to the first diabetic on the shine river reservation was in 1968 what happened before that is you know the introduction of alcohol all the time pieces that society would put onto a culture to destroy that culture and I think about that and what happened to those peoples who you know had gardens so I remember I said it before that the gardens contain the intelligence and and if we took care of that we wouldn't have the disparities in disparities in health and so when you go back to our reservation people are beginning to understand that the medicine is beneath their feet you know where is the relationship with that instead my generation was said to go off to reservation to get that education and missed the experience that you were growing up with and had to grow up with and you know now we're interrupted and we want to be continued to be uninterrupted because we are including the American society but you know there's there's certain experiences that that knowledge and information cannot teach so this experience is much more valuable with the earth and again just for just for thought is that the default thinking is not there anymore we have to we default to English we default to the western mind when our hearts are always defaulted within the earth and and when I think about that it's usually the peace with earth rather than a piece on the earth so it's it's learning how to have peace with the earth and I think what we've been trying to have peace on the earth which is a domination form and in the old language of Lakota there is no concept or a word for domination you see and so in your relation relational language you have to relate to all that is and that to me is very complex when it comes to a language that is based on that is now in laden as we're speaking now this language so just just you know a thought process of that is that my default has always been Lakota so I come from that in and I think that it in that relationship we are so inclusive that we have dropped the thought and the feeling and the energy of exclusive so in that way me talk away or yassi means we are all in relationship with everything all at once thank you to you guys and beautifully so it was my privilege to host this educational webinar as part of the Sadhguru Center for Conscious Planet this is our first inaugural education webinar and we are privileged to have his name and to explore the science and spirituality together I think they're seeking the same thing the incremental step taken by science and the experiential holistic knowledge that comes from the spiritual growth I think both are important so thank you so good for giving us a privilege to have your name for the center thank you and it's been most wonderful being with all of you I have the highest regard and empathy for the native american countries we must see how to well we can't recreate the past but how to build a future which is not a process of destroying the past that kind of future I think all forces should come together to recreate that and thank you very much for having me today all of you highly educated people having me an illiterate person like me thank you very much thank you sir guru thank you Nancy thank you Jim thank you to your casting and thank you Victor thank you so much and thanks Isha Foundation for organizing this webinar and uh according to us thank you sir guru