 Hi, Jerry Murkulski again, story threading for Unfinished 21, and if my previous story threading adventures were a little much, this one is going to blow your mind, because Tracy and Erin were fabulous and there was just endless material here to work with. So let's just look around a little bit. Early on they mentioned Inayat Khan, who is a Sufi priest and is sort of the founder of Universal Sufism, the Sufi order of Inayati, and father of Velayat Inayat Khan, that's just a little briefing and passing. They also mentioned Cassius Marcellus Clay, and I didn't realize this, I had this kind of screwed up in my brain. I had Cassius Marcellus Clay in my brain as an abolitionist and an eccentric person, but I kind of had him in a way that looked like he was the father of Cassius Marcellus Clay, who is actually the father of Muhammad Ali, whose birth name was Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., but it turns out that Cassius Marcellus Clay Sr. was named after this politician by his father, Herman Heaton Clay. So Cassius Marcellus Clay, the politician, is white and an abolitionist, but kind of not quite sure, because Muhammad Ali drops his name and takes a Muslim name when he converts to Islam, and feels like his original name is in fact a slaveholder name. So there's a whole digression there for a minute here, but kind of worth going through it, and also this conversation caused me to go fix things that weren't actually quite right in my brain. Early on, they talk about Thich Nhat Hanh, who is a personal hero of mine. I never got to meet him, but several friends of mine went to Plum Village and spent time on retreat there, and one of my favorite, favorite, favorite ways of being in the world, which is going to cut in now into some of this narrative, comes from Thich Nhat Hanh, and this is the idea of deep listening and loving speech. It connects up to listening well, but this is a particular way of being in the world, and so I've connected deep listening to common themes across the unfinished 21 sessions, but not so much the other. And Thai also, there's also a lot of other really interesting things and ways in which Thai was connected into this session. Let's go back to Tracy and Aaron, here we go. And in fact, Tracy, let me go and actually talk about Tracy and Aaron separately, as I'm doing each time. So Tracy has his own agency, is a practicing Buddhist, and is married to Cecile Berenzma, who is a literary agent and comes up in the session early because she was Thai's literary agent, which is really interesting. So there's sort of loops upon loops here. Then Aaron, who is also known as Brotherful Filment, is a kind of retired Buddhist monk, who is now a Dharma teacher, and here's his Twitter account at Brotherful Filment. Tracy also mentioned Vipassana Sitt, and Vipassana was already in my brain. I have never done a Vipassana Sitt, but it's been on my to-do list for a long time. He also mentioned S.N. Golinka, who is kind of the fellow who recorded the original meditations that are part of the Vipassana process and started this whole thing. You can actually go do Vipassana for free at a Vipassana center around the world. You just need to find a schedule and go to it. And then Tracy also mentioned a kind of meditation called Shikantaza, which I had never heard of. I knew about Sokto, which is the school that it comes from in Japanese Buddhism, but I didn't realize that Shikantaza was sort of like sitting Zen or Zazen in Buddhism. These are kind of different versions of similar sorts of things, but in Shikantaza you don't have an object you just sit and meditate in emptiness, which was really interesting. I put that, oh, and you'll see that I also put Shikantaza under Types of Meditation. This may entertain some people. Here's Hugging Meditation, Insight Meditation, Kamantana, which comes from the Thai forest tradition, which is interesting in and of itself as part of Theravada Buddhism. And here are some practitioners of the Thai forest tradition. And I don't know, I couldn't tell you a thing about Ajansau Kantathilo, but that he's in my brain and we can go back and look around. But Types of Meditation is also under Meditation, of course, which is broadly about, it's a psychotechnology and relaxation technique. It's a discipline that gives you a height in the state of awareness and so on and so forth. This is all about meditation, but also you may be amused to know that at some point years ago I realized I had many, many types of thoughts. So I created a meta-thought called just Types. And so here's Types of Advertising, Types of Addiction, Types of Activism. So if I go to Types of Addiction, for example, there should be process and substance addictions. And then under Substance Addictions, you should find drug addictions and alcohol and all those kinds of things. But if I go back to Types, you will note that these are alphabetic. And I'm just going here, well, Types of starts most of them. This is just Types of A. This is a scroll bar down here. So all of these are Types, Types of Band, Types of Bird, Types of Break, Types of Doctor, Types of Engine, Types of Knot, Types of Knife, Types of Photography, Types of Pasta. I've just been scrolling things away in this brain for 23 years. And this is what happens. So let's go back to Tracy and Aaron, because they said a lot of super interesting things. And this is all plot spoilers for their conversation. So if you haven't watched the video yet, please watch it before listening to the rest of this. So one of the things that hit me really hard was when Tracy says, toward the end of the session, American black men, our names are really traumatizing. And in particular, he says, I have the name of my great-great-grandmother's rapist. And that's just, I just had to sit with that. That hit me really hard. And I was trying to figure out what that meant in his life and how that goes. He also talked about his vipassana sit. So when he had his first vipassana sit, he left the sit of vegetarian and a tea totaler. And then also, I should connect this over here, because on day four of Tracy's sit, his passed away mother came and sponged away his pain. And he had chronic pain, so let me figure out, here we go. I can connect it to Tracy's athletic pursuits, left him with chronic pain, which I already had there obviously from my notes. But this was a really significant and riveting moment in the story of Tracy's life. And that made me realize that he was an athlete. He did all sorts of sports. He got beat up a lot. He also did rugby, which is particularly punishing sport because it's like football without the pads, only among gentlemen. And it made me realize that his injuries weren't tissue that needed demand, but in much of his body, joints that were holding pain. And so there's this whole notion, here's back to the thought about their conversation. There's this notion that our bodies hold trauma. And the most famous book on this is called The Body Keeps the Score, Brain, Mind, and Body and the Healing of Trauma by Bessel Fanderkulk, who is an expert on trauma. In fact, I have a thought with lots and lots and lots of material called Healing from Trauma, where I have other people who are experts on trauma like Jim Gordon, Irene Lyon, Gabor Mate is here somewhere. Where are you, Gabor? There he is. Kathy Kane, Peter Levine. I have a lot of things on Gabor Mate. So here he is. Here's his son, Aaron Mate. Here are a bunch of videos about Gabor explaining how trauma works. And I recommend, unfortunately, I recommend all of these. One of my favorite experts in trauma died long ago. She was a Swiss psychotherapist named Alice Miller, who wrote a famous book called Drama of the Gifted Child. Here we go, The Drama of the Gifted Child, Das Drama des Begabten Kindes. And a very early girlfriend of mine introduced me to this book and to Alice Miller's thinking. And changed my brain, changed my mind many, many years ago. So end of this little digression. Let's go back to the conversation and pick up another thread. He also talked about the wide awakes. And I had the wide awakes in my brain. In fact, last week, I had a conversation with my friend Aaron Huey, who is a photographer and who spent a bunch of time with the Lakota Sioux up in their reservation and so forth, who has been involved in a wide awakes revival recently. So the question, who would the wide awakes be now, was really, really interesting to me. But the wide awakes were a youth movement way back in the day that helped get Abraham Lincoln elected. They were abolitionists. They wore oil skins and carried lamps, which were kind of distinctive. And this whole thing is really interesting. So here's a New York Times article titled A Civil War Political Movement Reawakens, Complete with Capes. So I was thrilled that the wide awakes were playing a role in this conversation because movements are really important right now. We're busy trying to figure out what should we do next, right? And movements can be pretty negative. Adolf Hitler comes to power because of movements as well and because of a lot of other things that happened before him. But there are a lot of really positive movements happening in the world right now, and I'm thrilled about those. Then there's a fun anecdote about nuns who had been abstaining from sweets and all sorts of things and got buzzed eating ice cream and having the sugar in ice cream. But I think I'll let this conversation sit at this point. There's plenty more about Chi and an artist named Hank Willis Thomas, who I did not have in my brain, but added and went and researched some about him. Here's a video of him talking about how artists should be working in society subconscious. And that is a talk he gave at 99U, and I have a bunch of other 99U talks listed in here. So Jerry Mikulski again, sorry, threading for Unfinished 2021. And happy to be on this journey with you.