 Good morning, and welcome to the moment. Good morning, Tom. How are you? It's my viewers. Hi. Thanks for being on for, you know, tuning into moments with Melinda. And you know who I am. I'm Melinda. So today my guest is Tom Verner. How are you doing, Tom? I'm fine. I'm fine. Well, thank you for being here. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you for inviting me very much. Oh, I'm so thrilled. I have so much. I have pages and pages about you that I want to share. But we only have a half a half an hour. So we're going to jump right in. Let me tell my viewers a little bit about you, Tom. Tom is practicing psychotherapist and professional magician. And was a professor of psychology at Burlington college for 30, 35 years, right? 36 years. He is the founder along with his wife, Janet Frederick's of magicians without borders. And he lives in Lincoln, Vermont. So I'm so glad that you're with me today. So let's start where we should Tom at the beginning, talk to us about your early years growing up and what your childhood was like. I grew up in a small Irish, Catholic coal mining town in Western Pennsylvania, sort of outside of Pittsburgh between Pittsburgh and Wheeling, West Virginia. And it was a very, very traditional town in many ways, a wonderful town to grow up in. The church and the parochial school was sort of the center and heart of the town. And I was a very serious altar boy. And at 13, I left home and went away and lived in a monastery for seven years. There were only two legitimate ways to get out of town. One was to join the military. And the same year I went to a monastery, my brother went to the Marine Corps. So we both got the blessing of the town to leave. So that's in a nutshell my very early years. What kind of monastery was it? It was a Christian Catholic cloistered monastery. I actually lived in three of, it was a religious order. And I lived in Dunkirk, New York on Lake Erie for four years and in Hartford, Connecticut for a couple of years in a monastery there. And then my final year was actually back in Pittsburgh in a very old monastery up on a hill overlooking the city of Pittsburgh. Fascinating. Well, I'm from Allentown, so I can relate to that. Allentown, sure. The other end of the state. The other end of the state. So what brought you to Vermont? What brought me to Vermont was actually a job. I had the person who was running what is called a transpersonal psychology program at Burlington College. I met at a conference in New York state and she was leaving. And she told me about the program and it very much interested me. I was, I had just finished my PhD in clinical psychology with a focus on Jung, Carl Jung and dreams. And so I was very interested. I applied, they hired me and I moved to Vermont in 1979. Wow. So, so Tom, who would you say was your greatest inspiration in your life to follow the life, the footsteps that you've taken in your life? The first name that popped into my head was my mom in many ways. And I was blessed to have a very good mom who encouraged me to have a big adventure as a life. Yeah. Well, your life has been an adventure and we're going to get into that. So you talk for 35 years at Burlington College and of course, the college no longer exists. So how do you feel about that? Well, I feel it. It's a real loss in many ways and was unfortunate that it ended. I was no longer there. I had been gone for a number of years doing magicians without borders and traveling around the world. We'll get into that. But when I first started at Burlington College, my first class, the average age of the freshmen at Burlington College was 31 years old. So it was filled with Vietnam vets who kind of came out of the woodwork and were coming back to or beginning college or returning to college. Women who had raised their families and maybe had started college 15, 20 years earlier and came back and finished. There were people who brought to the classroom an incredible amount of life experience. Someone a recovered alcoholic who was now in AA and had gotten their life back on track and now wanted to go to college. I mean, it was filled with amazing, amazing students. Well, a lot of those people are still here in Vermont doing great work. So let's move into some of your dream studies. You wrote an article, Dream Studies Portal and then you published, Simon and Schuster published your book, The Transformational Power of Dreaming, Discovering the Wishes of the Soul. So talk to us about your deep dive into dreaming. Well, I mentioned that I was interested in Carl Jung, who was probably the greatest, debatably for sure, the greatest student of dreams. His first book on dreams, he says he had worked on 67,000 dreams, his own and those of his patients before he wrote his first book on dreams. And he very much inspired me and I wrote my PhD, a big piece that was on dreams and a big part of the perspective on dreams in my dissertation was on something called dream incubation where you actually ask your dreams before you go to sleep. A question that you're struggling with or an issue or a problem or something that you would like to have a dream about to give you some guidance about the issue or problem or whatever. And my wife and I, Janet, while I was teaching at Berlin College, and that's actually where she met, she was teaching art there and I was teaching psychology and one semester I took one of her art classes and she took one of my psychology classes. So I like to say I fell in love with my student and my teacher. So that's an ethical wash. Anyhow, she and I for 15 years, anyhow, had dream retreats out here in Lincoln where six, eight, 10 people would come and spend a week here working on their dreams. And we have a little, tiny little house on our property that's dedicated to what's called dream incubation. So every night one of the dream retreats would sleep in that dream hut and ask for a dream. And it was amazing what came up out of those. So for all of my viewers out there, we're talking to Tom Werner, you know, try to remember your dreams. Write them down and there's some power in that in understanding your dreams. So let's talk a little bit. So I wanted to ask you this question. In your psychology practice, have you ever considered psilocybin therapy in your practice because I'm a big supporter of using fungi to heal the mind? Yeah, I, that sort of came a little later when I really stopped having a very active psychotherapy practice. I still have a very, very small little practice right now, dreams. But I'm, I feel psilocybin is an amazing substance. And I've said, and this is probably not something I should say out loud. But I think a child could take psilocybin. It is such a friendly drug and meets everyone right where they are. And it's not anything like LSD or something that. Or Ritalin. Or Ritalin. Or some of these anxiety drugs they have these children on, which are literally dead in them. You know, these hyperactive children who were in our day, you know, my parents said, she's just a spirited child. Yeah. Let her be at the end of the day. Today, 40% of children are on some kind of a drug. And it's, it's, it's, it's deadening their souls. So I agree with you that. I agree with you that fungi might be a better solution. Yeah, but I've never, I've, I've taken psilocybin myself and. I take those kind of substances very seriously and not. On any kind of regular basis, you know, maybe once a year or something when I really need to like. Step aside and say, what's going on right now and kind of look at my life and it's a visionary vegetable as far as I'm concerned. And you know, I haven't had a drink in 20 years because I just don't like what alcohol does. But so when I go to a party, I might take a tiny little bit and it's, I just feel like I'm a lot healthier in the morning than my husband after a couple of beers. But anyway, so we're going to move on from psilocybin, but I honor you in that and thank you for that. So you and your wife Janet Frederick started magicians without borders in 2003. Your mission is to entertain, educate and empower. And you use magic to create a just world full of possibility in communities around the world. Talk to us a little bit about this organization. So just the kind of statistics over these 20 years or so, we have traveled to 47 different countries, mostly war-torn countries, often war-torn countries. We've been to Ukraine four times since the war began and we can talk a little bit about that. And by UN estimates, we've performed for about a million and a half refugee and orphan kids at this point. We perform mainly for refugees and orphan children. And as you said, the mission is to entertain, educate and empower. Just to give two little short stories about the entertainment piece of our mission. We were performing in a number of refugee camps in South Sudan, actually on the South Sudan Ethiopia border. And that night, we were staying in the refugee camp. And that night we were having dinner and an elder, a Dinka elder, one of the tribal groups in South Sudan, said to us, he said, that was amazing what you did today. And I thought he was talking about the magic, you know, and that it would amaze him, the magic we did. But that wasn't what he was talking about. He said, in refugee camps, often groups who were enemies back in Sudan end up living together in the camp. And in that particular camp, there were Dinka tribes people who are pastoralists and there were Arawak people who were agriculturalists. And they were traditional enemies back in Sudan, but they were living together. And he said to me, he said, you know, we laugh in our tukels, in our huts, and with our friends and family. He said, but today, for the first time, and I've been in this refugee camp for 20 years, he said, for the first time we laughed together as a community. Arawak and Dinka people were together laughing. And he said that never happens. So I never would have known that if that man had not told me that, that the magic besides, you know, amusing and amazing people in that case actually created a sense of community in a way that didn't usually happen in that refugee camp. Another quick story is we were in Iran on the Iran-Afghan border perform. We were going to perform in a refugee camp there. We came into the camp. We were met by this wonderful Afghan elder. And we sat down for our traditional first cup of tea. And in the course of the conversation, he said, where would you like to perform? And I said, well, if you have an inside space, that would be best for focus and whatever. He said, but we, I said, we can perform anywhere. And he got this kind of little puzzled look on his face. And he said, well, our only inside space is the mosque. We'd be honored to have you perform in the mosque. So we did two shows. They brought in 500 girls. We did a show for them. Then that show ended. They brought in 500 boys. Afterwards, we were sitting with this same elder having another cup of tea. And he said, I've been here in this camp for 17 years. And just a little aside, before magicians without borders, I used to think people went to refugee camps for three months or six months or something. And then the war ended or whatever. And people went back. It's not like that. People are in these camps for 10, 15, 20 years. So he said, I've been here for 17 years. And you are the first entertainers to ever come to this camp. He said, the international refugees relief services take very good care of us. They give us security, food, shelter, clothing. But he said, and I mean, no offense by this, he said, I think they imagine we're only bodies. He said, today you fed the minds and imaginations of those children, and they will be talking about this show for months and months. So God bless you. Please come again. So we again thought we were just entertaining, but what was also going on was something much deeper. So that's the entertainment part of the midget. Do you have any thoughts or questions? Well, I'm thinking about, I just want to let my viewers know that, you know, that you and your wife created magicians without borders, and you've reached over a million people in the short span since, you know, 2003. And I want to also send my viewers to your website, which is magicianswithoutborders.com, very simple. And you can learn all about this organization. You have a fabulous advisory group. You can go to all the countries where they've performed, where they've brought joy and hope to these. And there's a wonderful, wonderful little six minute video on there called Jadu, which means magic in Hindi. And it'll give you a really good sense of, put pictures to all the words I'm saying here. Right. And the other thing too is there is a donate button. So for all of my viewers who, who want to help support Tom and Janet's work, there is a donate button and we all totally, totally supported by individual donations. We have no big corporate grants or anything like that. Government grants, nothing. So individuals. So magicianswithoutborders.com. And I'm going to, I wanted to ask you about your magic, but I'm going to move to, um, to, uh, Ezra. Um, this is a young boy who you, you have, you teach magic, you have magic courses for children. And you helped Ezra develop confidence through his magic. Um, so share a little bit about that. And also about Houdini and his working with folks in difficult situations, opening hope, uh, and sharing that the impossible is possible. How are you using magic to teach these young folks to find themselves? I guess that's my question. Let me just, just go back to the very beginning. Um, uh, I was on my way actually to a retreat. Being held inside the concentration camp at Auschwitz, Birkenau, led by the great Buddhist teacher, Bernie Glassman. And we spent a week inside the camp meditating on that unbelievable selection site there. But on the way there, I had a week before I needed to, I had two weeks off before I got to the camp. I had a week and I ended up in Kosovo. And, uh, very first time I was ever in a refugee camp. And when I went in there, this little girl Fatima, six years old, was appointed as my guide and they referred to her as the mayor of Moment Potok, which was the name of this Roma that was filled with mainly Roma people, 2000 Roma people. Um, so she took me around, uh, and we did three shows. And she was fabulous. She didn't speak English. I didn't speak Roma, but she just knew if I needed something, certainly a glass of water, um, a little table which is hard to find in a refugee camp and certainly volunteers because Fatima knew everybody in the camp. So I finished up the third show was getting time to leave and Fatima was standing beside me, just this delightful child. And I was talking to some Roma women and I said goodbye and I turned to say goodbye to Fatima and she wasn't there. And I said, do you know where Fatima was? And the Roma women said, no, um, I thought she was with you. I said, well, I feel badly. I'm not going to get to say goodbye to her. Please say goodbye to her. So I walk over to the car and I open the door and there is Fatima lying on the floor in the back hiding wanting to escape for a moment, run away with the circus. So the Roma women came over. They talked to her. She is a great Roma kid. She took her best shot. It didn't work. Um, she waved us down the road. We come to a little town and our driver, uh, a town called Schutka and our driver says this is not really a refugee camp, but it's swollen with refugees and life is terrible in Schutka. They need some magic in Schutka. So we go into, he says, let's do a show for these people. So I said, okay, so we drive into the town square, set up some cardboard boxes, actually put a little tablecloth I had over top of it. And within a few minutes there were like 350 people. And so I do a show and the show ends went and went well. And this Roma woman comes up to me. And she, um, let me see if I can demonstrate something here for you. Um, no, I don't have it, but anyhow, this Roma woman comes up to me and she has a five denner Macedonian gold coin and she drops it in my hand and somehow I knew it wasn't a tip and she had seen me multiply sponge balls, flowers, all kinds. She points to it. She says make more money. Uh, so there were four Roma men standing beside me. So I take her little coin, I throw it into my hand and I squeeze it. This is what I was hoping was in my pocket, but it's not. Um, I open my hand and there is a chunk of what looks like gold to actually pie right, which is fools gold. And I offer it to this woman who has just this wild head wrap. All her teeth are gold. She has mirrors all over her dress. And she looks at that gold and she's mildly amused, but she shakes her heads as money, more money. So I take the gold, I throw it into my hand, I squeeze it and there is a 50 denner Macedonian gold coin. I happen to be staying in Skopje, Macedonia. So I had this money in my pocket. So, um, it's only 80 cents. But she's amazed. It's just multiplied 10 fold. So I drop it at her hand, big smile. She walks away instantly. Two of these Roma men say simultaneously, make us visas to America. And I laughed. And I looked at them and they were completely serious. They had just seen money multiplied right in front of them. 10 fold. Certainly I could reach into the air and Condoleezza rice would make a visa up here. And I said, I can't do that. And so I went home that night to, to, um, Skopje, Macedonia back across the border. And I'm writing in my journal. This is the first time I was ever in a refugee camp. This is the inspiration for magicians without borders happened that day. And I'm thinking, what happened? First thing I realized was none of those people or 99% of them did not speak English, but they all spoke magic. And I realized magic was a universal language. I had been doing magic for 25 years and that thought had never occurred to me magic. Magicians make things appear, disappear and change, whether they're Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, whatever. And then I thought of a refugee named Eric vice, who came to America with his rabbi father and mother and two siblings from Hungary in the late 19th century. We know him, this refugee as Harry Houdini. And Houdini once said, he said, when I do magic for people in four situations, it not only amazes and amuses them, but it awakens hope that the impossible is possible. And I thought, oh my God, that's what I saw today. Fatima saw magic. She thought I can escape from moment potog. Those Roman men saw magic, they said, oh my God, we can go to America and realize our hopes and dreams. So those two things, magic is a universal language and it can awaken hope are the two cornerstones of magicians without borders. And you get into the sacred scriptures of the world about bread and suffering and beauty, and you have a magic event where you tear paper into little pieces and you put it in your mouth. And it indicates that children's homes, that their homes have been lost, but there's hope. Yeah, magic trick. I'm assuming that you put the pieces in your mouth and then it comes out whole and it helps these children understand that their lives. Your lives come out as 45 feet of rainbow paper. So the point is that magic is deeply rooted in shamanic notions of death and rebirth. And you take a rope and you cut it in half and you put it back together again. That is an image of healing and hope. And so when we're not preaching this, where I would say as a psychologist, we're seeding the unconscious with images of hope. And also opening up these children to understand that all of a sudden they're laughing and one mother said to you, this is the happiest I have seen our children in months. So our government certainly has this battle against immigrants to the south and the funding for Ukraine has stalled. Where are you on all that? Well, yesterday, my wife Janet read me something that came into her inbox about an extraordinary man named Ruben Garcia who has an organization called Anunciation House in El Paso. And we've been to the border a number of times doing magic in Juarez on the other side of the, also in El Paso, but mainly over in Juarez. And Ruben just helps thousands of refugees coming across the border. They get arrested by ICE, then they're processed and dumped onto the street. And Ruben takes these people, finds out if they have friends or family in the United States and figures out ways to get those people into some kind of settled situation. And he's now by that, I almost cursed here, the attorney general who was just on trial for his own corruption is accusing Ruben of trafficking children. And it's just extraordinary. Some of the right wing, he's an extremist and he does not want these refugees to be treated, I don't think with dignity and hope the way Ruben and Anunciation House works with them. Anyhow, Janet and I have had amazing, powerful experiences performing for asylum seekers during the Trump administration when they were not allowed to cross the border and they were being held living in factory, abandoned factories. They were taking their babies. They were scaling their baby. They still don't know where some of those children are. Do you want to talk about in 50 years? No, I don't want to talk about that. But if the world wants to talk in 50 years what this is going to look like to future generations. But let's move a little closer to where we live. And as you know, there is suffering right here in Vermont with so much. Starting with Ezra, we can get back to Ezra. Well, Ezra is sweetheart. I'm so sorry about that. But right here in Vermont we have mental illness, homelessness, addiction. There are 10 cities cropping up in our cities and the despair here in Vermont is real. And then we had the pandemic and it really did affect humanity. Sort of a wake-up call. So thoughts about Vermont and sort of where we are. I think you should say that, Linda, that over these 20 years, rightly so, people have said to us, you know, you go to all these countries and you do good for the children there. We have lots of problems here at home. So Janet and I have decided over this last year to bring magicians with our borders home. And as you just said, COVID has certainly exposed and exacerbated some of the emotional and mental illness problems we have in our schools. And so Janet and I started at the beginning of the school year, a year-long magic course for children in our local community school here in Lincoln. And they are doing so well and we have nine of these groups around the world. But now we have one here, literally in our hometown. And what we have found is that magic helps develop self-confidence, discipline, focus, an increased sense of self-esteem. And now our students here in Lincoln have just started over the last six weeks performing. And they performed for the final assembly before the holidays at the school. And the principal wrote us the most amazing letter about, she knows all these kids, it's a small school. How the sense of confidence and poise that they had up there. She was just startled by it. And they've performed now five shows. They just performed in Burlington at the first congregational church. And the same thing, a woman said, when I was their age, I would have been terrified to perform in front of 350 people. And they didn't necessarily start out that way back in September, October. So we're doing that. And we're also, I have a phone call this afternoon to the head of the VFW, the local VFW. And I did a tour of 12 VA hospitals in New York State, Connecticut and Massachusetts. And I just thought it would be, and they were very moving, wonderful experiences. Performing for these, you know, disabled vets in these hospitals and even in hospice in VA hospitals. And I just thought it would be so much better if a vet, a veteran who was trained to be a magician would be doing this rather than someone who was arrested for burning my draft card and protesting the Vietnam War, probably be better if a veteran was doing this work. So we're starting a program. And as I said, we're going to start by recruiting at VFW posts called Warrior Wizards. And I'm going to train hopefully veterans and maybe their son or daughter or niece or nephew or grandson with them to be magicians over the next year and see if they can begin to perform in VA hospitals and deployment parties and retirement parties and holiday parties for veterans and their families. So we're trying to bring more of this work home here is what I'm saying. Fascinating, you know, magical. Magical. I don't know why that popped into my brain, but it did. So I want to ask you, as we're coming to the end of the show, I want you to share with me and my viewers your thoughts about our Mother Earth and the sixth extinction, which we as sapiens are causing and now experiencing. Wow. I guess my mind goes to where I am that these extinctions and climate change that's being caused by you know, human activity. There's like 70,000 migrants right now, refugees in camps around the world. In 20 years, there's going to be 250 million of them. And the climate change as we see in Europe and many of the refugees at our own border are being driven here by climate change and floods and their crops are being destroyed and they're coming here to try to find a better life. So there are so many consequences to what we're doing and hopefully we're waking up and maybe we're going to start doing something about it. But without I mean, I think the real magic is the natural world. I mean, it's an unbelievable we were just the other day talking about metamorphosis and what happens to a butterfly, you know, this caterpillar turns into this brown liquid and apparently in there are these what are called imaginal discs inside that brown soup inside the crystal and they all find each other and come together and create a butterfly who then travels 2000 miles sometimes three generations of butterflies dying and being reborn on their way to Mexico and they remember where they were and where they're going. That's magic. Well, you know, people call me a tree hugger, but I'll tell you Tom when I hug a tree, the branches start to move and I'm not kidding you and that, you know if you hug a tree and you really give energy to that tree it will start to move it feels you so I am with you 100% we're coming back. Yeah, go ahead. I'll be back. So again this has been an incredible interview with Tom Werner let me tell you a little bit. Thank you. Oh thank you my friends. You see this. I can I can see there. Yes, I can. Just a little red silk. Okay. And I'm going to put it in my hand right here and you can watch it. This is about as close as you can get here. Okay, we'll just put it right in here. Can you see it? Yes, I can my friend. Yes. Put it right in there. Put it in there. Now watch, we'll just make it very small. It looks like it disappeared. It looks like it's gone but that's the way it is with life sometimes. It looks like it's all gone but it's still there. And it's there in a very beautiful way and you were there in a very beautiful way. So again magicianswithoutborders.com you and your wife Janet Fredericks who was an artist and on the faculty of the MetaEarth Institute you have such a powerful life filled with creativity and joy and you give of yourself selflessly for the betterment of humankind and you bring joy and love and hope to people's lives and I am so honored to have had you and I'm deeply moved to have had you on my show Tom. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for inviting us and we're heading back to Ukraine in six weeks so if anyone specifically the Republicans aren't supporting Ukraine but maybe you guys can by sending us there to perform for those kids and their moms. Absolutely. Alright bless your heart Tom. You take care my friend and I hope to talk to you again soon and be well and have a safe trip. Thank you. Bye bye.