Gabriel Kram: Healing with the art and science of connection (ep316)
How does the dominant western society privilege certain ways of knowing over others—that may be critical to guiding our path to collective healing? How might we better understand the role of “safety” through the lens of connection phenomenology?
In this episode, we're joined by Gabriel Kram, a connection phenomenologist, the Convener of the Restorative Practices Alliance, and the Co-Founder of the Academy of Applied Social Medicine. Gabriel is also the author of Restorative Practices of Wellbeing.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Annalie Wilson
“We say the eyes are the windows to the soul, right? We have this languaging around a house being a framework for how we think about ourselves. If we look at other kinds of dwelling structures in other places, they’re much more permeable between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. What does it mean to open up, to allow to become more permeable, these boundaries between things? ”
If you feel inspired by this episode, please consider donating a gift of support of any amount today!
Transcript
Note: *The values and opinions of our diverse guests do not necessarily reflect those of Green Dreamer. Our episodes are minimally edited, and we encourage further inquiry, seeing our dialogues as invitations to dive deeper into each topic and perspective. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Kamea Chayne: The immediate thing that stands out to me is your role as a "connection phenomenologist". This is the first time I have heard of this term. So I'm curious to get a glimpse into your background in the various fields that led you to ultimately embody this role, and also just an introduction to what connection phenomenology is all about.
Gabriel Kram: It was a term that I first learned about three years ago from a nature awareness mentor. I believe it speaks to the study of the art and science of connection. At the time, I had been working for twenty-three years, across six disciplinary areas. My formal training at university was in neuroscience. Afterward, I became very interested in mindful awareness, and then in trauma healing, and then in both social justice and deep nature connection, and Indigenous lifeways. And then I became very interested in the language that we use to describe our experience. (English is a very technical language, and not a very useful map for speaking about things that are internal or relational.)
When I heard the phrase "connection phenomenology", I realized that's actually a description of what I've been attempting to do through these disciplinary areas all this time. I was trying to weave together a story of how do we connect with ourselves, how do we connect with others, how do we connect with the living world—or perhaps I should say reconnect—and then how do we remove the things that get in the way? So it was kind of a dawning recognition for me.
I was never able to find a university or a program of study that put all of those things together. So, at that point, three years ago, I had compiled a group of probably thirty mentors in twenty disciplines of wellbeing and realized that... This is what we're about.
Kamea Chayne: In regards to your personal learning and transformation, you went to Stanford and Yale University, which are well known as elite formal educational institutions. But you say that you've learned more sitting in teepees and circles than in classrooms, learning from mentors, from many different cultures around the world. So what was it about formal institutions that made you feel limited? And having studied with various scholars and teachers across different cultures, what has it shown you in regards to how our dominant society might privilege certain ways of knowing and knowledge over others, that have been marginalized and overlooked?
Gabriel Kram: So I had a fairly unusual experience growing up, for a white person. I am of Jewish origin. But I grew up here in the United States. When I was very little, I lived in a community that was an intentional community. My parents were young people at Wesleyan University in the late sixties. They moved to a little town in New Hampshire, and they had a community of friends, and they were very deeply interconnected. So I grew up with—what I much later learned was called allomothering—a second mother. I had this experience for the first seven years of my life of being part of this tribe. And then in 1982, the economy collapsed. My dad lost his job and my parents moved back to suburban St. Louis, which is where both of them were from. And I got ripped out of this really deep matrix of connection. And at some level, I think the story of my life and my work has been about finding my way back home.
At an individual level, the way that I dealt with that trauma of being ripped out of my place, and my community was by going into my thinking. So I spent a lot of my early years, in cognition. I was able to excel in thinking, enough to be accepted into Yale University. I got there, and amidst my friends who were passionate about things they were pursuing, I realized I couldn't feel my own heart and, at that point, I dropped out. I then embarked on a 25-year journey that's really been about reclaiming my connection to myself, to place, and to others. And I found that a lot of the things that helped me the most were not ever touched upon in the pedagogy of the academic contexts.
I can relate very specific moments of having the undeserved good fortune of sitting in a teepee ceremony for the first time... The kind of learnings that touch us in the most deeply human ways are generally not classroom learning.
A lot of the modes of knowing that are privileged in this culture are domination modes. They are power-over, not power-with, they emerge from and are coexistent with impulses to hierarchy, control and power. And those are not modes of relationality that bring us into a reciprocal relationship with anything. And we're at this moment in the history of "modern civilization", when the limits of this destructive power-over, this hierarchizing impulse, are really clear, in the breakdown of the environment.
Modernity, along with these modes of oppression, this disconnection from our embodied experience, these are all modes that engender death, not life. So our ongoing quest and inquiry is how do we uplift the ways of knowing that bring us into real relationships?
One of the profound wellsprings of that kind of knowledge—embodied awareness and wisdom—is Aboriginal cultures, and more traditional ancestral cultures that have, for hundreds of thousands of years, been working in relationship with all that is. So part of my learning has been an active unlearning of a lot of the things I was taught in school, the narratives that were handed down to me as a young person that I just received, but that turned out to not have been true.
Kamea Chayne: This conversation is really giving me flashbacks with a lot of our amazing recent conversations. For example, the one with Daniel Lim, where he spoke about the differences between liberatory power (power-with, as you mentioned), and supremest power (what our dominant culture recognizes and values, which is power-over).
And as we talk about education, it also reminds me of the episode with Dr Mark Rifkin, where we talked about kinship organizing, as a way of native governance. Which is where the family is not separated from how you organize yourselves socially; but in this dominant Western society, the government is only recognized as something that is outside, on top of, and external, that really separates the binary of the private life, which is with your nuclear family, and the public life, which is governed by this separate formal institution. So this is also parallel to education, in that education in this system is really only valued when it comes from this external formal institution, rather than really recognizing that there's so much value in the learning that we can receive in our day to day lives, that are integrated into our communities.
Gabriel Kram: What you're saying evokes in me a couple of levels of response.
I was thinking about the origin of private property, or rather the conception of property, which emerges in the European narrative sometime between 1100 and 1400 in the U.K. and Great Britain, with the enclosure of common lands. Where you start to see this impulse to take what was the commons, that which belonged to everyone, and enclose, privatize, and constrain.
And I was thinking about that in terms of how we build houses. We have the good fortune now to be stewarding an eco-reserve, so I'm spending a lot of time in the forest. And I was out there thinking about why do we build houses? So here in Northern California, ten months of the year, (with the exception of the winter where it's cold and wet, and the wildfire season) you can pretty much live outside. So why do we build these structures that segregate the inside from the outside? Why is that our habit of building?
Our dwellings become a metaphor for our psyche. We say the eyes are the windows to the soul, right? We have this languaging around a house being a framework for how we think about ourselves. And if we look at other kinds of dwelling structures, and other places, they're much more permeable between the inside and outside. So what does it mean to open up, to allow to become more permeable, these boundaries between things? And as you're pointing out, one of the things about this Western framing, is that it's very much a hierarchizing impulse, power-over, separation of the personal from the governance, of the familial from the sphere of governance. But if we look at other models that are more based on the circle, on processes of life, we see that these areas do influence each other.
I think this is also important in our conversation about wellness, because you see that same segregating impulse in Western medicine and mental health, where, as our mentor Mary Watkins' says, it decontextualizes suffering out of the context of community and ecology. And it focuses on this individual experience without regard to the fact that our lived experiences exist within the context of community, and the living world.
Kamea Chayne: And as you spoke to how we've built houses, what comes to mind is that our conception of security in the dominant society is to put up walls. So if you look at people that are really wealthy financially, they'll put up a lot of walls and gates to isolate themselves even further, which is understandable given how our society is currently designed. I almost wonder if security shouldn't be about putting up walls to further disconnection, but rather about building greater relationships with community so that we can, as social creatures, watch out for each other and take care of each other, open doors, and foster deeper connections.
Gabriel Kram: I want to bring in some of the words of one of our mentors. His name is Dr. Stephen Porges. In our work, he's the head of neurophysiology. He developed a body of work called the polyvagal theory. I want to kind of introduce a conceptual framework here, starting with this observation that you've made, that the more affluent people are, the more they tend to think of security in terms of putting up barriers and walls. There's this trope in the United States of the gated community, which is a very strong example of that.
Dr. Porges says that the absence of threat is not the same as a felt sense of safety. Our conception of security is very much about trying to keep a threat away, which is actually very different, at a physiological and embodied level from feeling safe.
I think this is an important theme for us because when we think about well-being, we think about this connection phenomenology framework. There's a conversation that's happening in the United States, and in many places, about trauma. There's more and more awareness of the degree to which modern people are traumatized. And I would say that even now, our maps of trauma are very inadequate because the formal diagnostic categories don't include social traumas such as racism, sexism, discrimination around gender and gender orientation. They also don't even conceptualize alienation from the living world because the baseline of modern civilization is alienated from the living world, so that just seems normal. But even within that framing of trauma in an expanded way, that's still not the same as turning on connection, as finding our resources of relationship, of connection with one another within community and with the living world.
And I will propose to you again, as the circumstances of humanity's moment become more intensified on the planet, we will find more and more that our wealth is in our relationships. If there is a wildfire, it doesn't matter how expensive my house is, or how high the gates are, I need help. What we haven't, as a civilization, understood very well is that help is developed reciprocally through trust and relationship. This brings us back to the Aboriginal framework—great wealth in more traditional societies had to do with what you give away; it had to do with the quality of relationships and who you're taking care of.
Kamea Chayne: One of the most powerful elements of your work for me is that it situates itself within a historical context of colonization and sees that recognition as critical to healing, not just for historically harmed peoples, but also people whose ancestors may have been the ones carrying out the acts of colonizing and genocide. How might this awareness and recognition help us to better understand our senses of disconnection today, especially from others and the living world? Disconnection that might really be rooted in earlier collective displacements of cultures?
Gabriel Kram: When I think about our work, I think about it as a culture repair engine, because its purpose is to reweave fabrics of connection. And then within that, there's a multicultural component, which is about how you weave fabrics of connection across cultures, and across the harms that have been done. There's a harm that was perpetrated by colonizing people. There are harms that are perpetrated, often by men, through the patriarchal structures. There are harms of white supremacy. There's work that we do together across lines of difference, and then there is also work focused on specific restorative practices for different communities.
The kind of harms that exist in the psyches of white people who are unaware of the degree to which they're perpetrating violence against others and themselves, which are different harms than the harms perpetrated upon African-American communities that were enslaved, Indigenous communities... We're dealing with these different xenophobic facets of white supremacy, and there are different harms. There's no one set of tools or practices.
But I think the deeper conversation that you're pointing at is connected to what Mary Watkins is saying, which is that there's a historicity to all of these things. There's a historicity of disconnection in the European project—a colonial project.
My family was uprooted for political reasons from Poland about one hundred years ago. They were Jews, they emigrated to St. Louis and established some degree of rootedness there. But because they were Jews, they were white-passing but culturally different. At some point, they learned to crack the assimilation code of the United States, accommodating to whiteness, which involved divesting from their language and cultures of origin. So Yiddish was lost in my family, and it was so lost in my family that I didn't even know until I was in my thirties that my lineage had spoken Yiddish. So part of my own healing has been to begin to reclaim that awareness and connection. I will say also that my own healing and wellness as a white person became very connected to doing anti-racist work.
And I didn't set out to do anti-racist work for my own wellbeing. I was asked to work with African-American high school students in Oakland in 2016, and I had to grapple with the question of what I would possibly have to offer them that would be of value, given my own lack of awareness about my own whiteness. At that point I was brought to study with a mindfulness and diversity trainer based in Berkeley, California, and I recovered huge parts of my own soul through that process.
I don't want to say that white folks should do anti-racist work to help themselves because we should all be doing anti-racist work because it's necessary and it's ethically correct. But it contributed to my own wellbeing, because in order to do that work, I had to dismantle the dissociative impulses that I had been trained into by the dominant culture. White folks are socialized into a certain kind of dissociative trance…
And for me it was only when that was confronted that I had to deal with it. I was very frightened, and it brought up a lot of things in myself that I didn't want to look at because they were very unappealing. But so far, it's brought me back into places in my own heart that I had been trained out of. And so I can only speak as a white person, but nobody ever said to me, "Gabriel, if you want to be mentally healthy, you need to do anti-racist work". And yet, I believe pretty firmly at this point that that's absolutely true.
Kamea Chayne: While we're on the subject of wellness and healing, you share that inequities of safety should be viewed as a public health issue and as a human rights issue. People often conceptualize things like wellness, healing, safety, threat, violence and security, as we mentioned earlier, in very individualistic and direct ways, which is important. But fixating on that alone can allow for a dismissal of systemic forms of safety and security and the historical context. So while most of what your collective teaches are restorative practices for individuals, I wonder what you feel about their limitations in the face of more systemic threats of deprivation, and how you see individual healing being tied to collective transformations.
Gabriel Kram: Why do we say that inequities of safety are both unacknowledged and undergirding these other forms of structural oppression? Part of our lens on wellness, and part of our project, is to facilitate and catalyze the development of an integrated mind-body medicine that centralizes autonomic physiology (the study of the stress response and the stress physiology) within medicine.
What's happened in modern allopathic medicine is that the system emerged from a mind-body split, and therefore it segregates the treatment of the body from the treatment of the mind. If it's a body problem, you see one of an increasingly specialized set of practitioners. If it's an emotional or mental problem, you go see mental health, psychiatry.
And yet, ironically, four out of five visits to primary care in the United States are stress-related. Any issue that's stress-related is an issue of dysregulation of the autonomic physiology. Meaning, if we want to understand wellbeing, we have to look very deeply at stress. Within this awareness of stress and within this work of the polyvagal theory, Dr. Stephen Porges, he coined the term is neuroception, the moment-to-moment, felt, embodied detection of safety or threat. It's a background process that's happening all the time in our awareness—it's not a perception, nor a cognition, it's an ebodied, moment-to-moment detection. It's not something that we can cognitively tell them to do, they have to self-assess safety. [This concept] provides us the opportunity to turn on the connection system, which I would propose is really the foundation of wellbeing. And most ancestral and traditional culture is really bringing that system online, and stabilizing it. When we don't feel safe, our physiology surfaces different kinds of threat platforms. There's the fight or flight platform, which are high-energy stress responses. There's the dorsal vagal platform, which involves shutting down, immobilizing.
We're realizing that a felt sense of safety is a prerequisite for wellbeing. And our civilization has structurally deprived entire groups of a felt sense of safety.
If I'm in a neighborhood where I'm afraid that if I walk out my door, I might get shot, it's very difficult for me to experience the drivers of safety and connection required to be well. That's an extreme example. But I will say, if I am a person of color and I walk out the door in a white supremacist society, that same danger exists. One of the tremendous potential benefits of the pandemic—and I want to be careful about how I say this, because, it's been a very painful experience for many humans—is that that experience of walking out your door and feeling like you might be in danger [is something we all, to some extent, experience now]. A colleague, who's an African-American woman, said to me, "if you think that walking out my door and feeling unsafe arrived with the pandemic, you haven't been paying attention". So this is not a novel experience.
We can see the extremely detrimental effects that a year of having that experience has had on the mental health of human beings at large. So what does it mean that we're in a society that allows people at a systematic level to be deprived of that safety? It's a public health emergency and a human rights violation.
Kamea Chayne: I wonder, what are the limitations of your collective teaching restorative practices for individuals, when we do have these systemic threats of deprivation? And how you see individual healing being tied to collective transformations?
Gabriel Kram: With COVID, we had a moment where we were like, "are we really just going to have people come and learn about connection in isolation, on their screens, through an online learning platform?" So our work evolved into being a group of people in a circle in the forest. I think for us, it's always really been about community. We're doing the kind of work that's categorized as self-care. And we're saying that the biological reality is that humans don't really do self-care. Our ability to take care of ourselves has to do in part with us having been attended to when we were infants. We were cared for and that's what allowed us to develop an ability to care for ourselves. And so what do you call that? Co-care? Community care? It's reciprocal, and there's a mutuality to it.
So, yes, a lot of the practices that we describe fall into the category of things one can do by oneself. But part of the genesis of our work was realizing that there are also practices of relationship, practices that one would engage in the living world. We saw there were these three legs to the stool: the self, the community and the living world. And there are overlaps: a campfire is a pretty good example of that.
Kamea Chayne: I want to go back to this felt sense of safety. I think there's both the sense of safety that's rooted in reality and circumstances, and there's also the felt sense of safety that is more so rooted in the stories that we tell ourselves or have been taught. The dominant Western society tends to uphold the sense of individualism, with a narrow purview of the self. This is also reflected in how many conceptualize individual freedom as being separate from collective liberation. But I think about whether the individualistic culture might just be a manifestation or a reflection of a deeper culture of fear and lack of connection. In other words, because being in a state of fear and insecurity activates our fight or flight, shut-down behaviors and mindsets, many people being kept in perpetual states of fear or having been indoctrinated to hold world views of scarcity and insecurity, that might actually drive more individualistic thinking, ideologies and behavior, that in reality then will lead to further disconnection.
Gabriel Kram: I think what you just said is correct.
In the present moment, the felt detection of safety or threat that's unfolding shapes what we call a neural platform, which in a way is a set of neurophysiological glasses that you can't take off. That platform structures levels of experience. How it feels in the body in a given moment, your heart rate, your breathing, muscle tension—a physiological and visceral structuring. I would propose that it structures something that's a little bit more existential: how we understand ourselves. It structures what we feel and what we're able to think, and therefore, how we interpret the world around us, and how we behave.
And here's an example. There's a photograph that we'll sometimes hold up, and it has two men, and the larger man has a hand raised. There's no context for the image. Interestingly, within such ambiguity, we interpret that image in ways that are very connected to our own lived experiences, and our own neural platforms. Someone might be convinced that it's a father and a son, and the father is giving the kid a high five. Someone else might be convinced that the child is going to receive a blow from the father. It's an ambiguous stimulus, but our experiences, the shaping of neural platforms inform the way that we hear, see, and interpret. This is really important, because these things tend to be self-reinforcing.
Modernity is premised on a story. A story of scarcity, competition, hierarchy and power. It operates through fear. And when people are afraid, they see threat, so they're in a neural platform that's defensive. And it's self-reinforcing.
So part of our work is to help people experience what it feels like to be in a sense of safety, because when we have that experience in an embodied level, there isn't a need for an other, nor a need for something oppositional. Whereas the moment we move into a defensive platform, our physiology is looking for a threat and it wants to pin that on something. Part of the function of that defensive state is to identify the threat. If we feel safe, there isn't a requirement for that. We can exist in a space of unity. And it gets us into this very deep teaching about the other as self, because what we identify as the other, our Indigenous mentors teach us, are those that we are not in touch with, within ourselves.
Kamea Chayne: I think all of this really offers an expanded way of understanding how we can address our layered injustices, because I don't know if it's enough to simply tell a person who holds a world view of scarcity, that they should hold a world view of abundance. I think that there is a deeper physiological sense that needs to be embodied, that will then drive these perspective shifts.
And overall, your body of work at Restorative Practices asks two main questions. How do we turn on, stabilize and instantiate connection and how do we remove what gets in the way. Given all of the systemic roadblocks that we have in the present day, what are some of your words of guidance for us going forward, for how we can better embody connections with ourselves, with people around us and our greater living world?
Gabriel Kram: I had the good fortune to be in conversation with our head of nature and culture, John Stokes. He's a white boy from Ohio, who's worked closely with Jake Swamp of the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy in upstate New York. They have a very beautiful Thanksgiving prayer that's called the Thanksgiving address, it's a prayer of acknowledgment and gratitude, for all of the components of the living world, said before all meetings and gatherings. And John says that he thinks that gratitude is the secret to life.
So to this question, how do we establish connection? How do we bring ourselves into a greater felt sense of safety? Part of it is to identify that which we're connected to and to focus on building those things out. And a very powerful practice for doing that is gratitude. One of the things that we do is to really help people map out their connections. And prior to COVID, maybe people weren't fully aware of the degree to which we were being nourished each day by these little micro-moments of connection. If I go out into the world and I'm standing in line at the grocery store and somebody drops something and I pick it up and they smile at me, I'm being nourished by that connection.
We've had a year on planet Earth where most people couldn't see other people's faces, they couldn't be touched. And so that nutrient of connection that tends to flow between people when they're open to it was something that most of us didn't experience. So how do we fortify the connections in our lives and how do we nourish that?
Because our biology has a tilt toward what's wrong. We're very good at noticing what's not working. And we have a lot less practice bringing into our attention and holding those things that we find to be nourishing, beneficial and beautiful. We need to cultivate a set of practices around attending, dwelling... There's an infinite number of smaller things that we can experience that sense of beauty and connection with. And it also involves whole categories. Are we connected to our sense of ancestry? Do we have a community of others? Do we feel at home in the living world? And then how do we build those connections?
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an uplifting social media account or publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Gabriel Kram: I'm reading recently Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth, because we've been trying to wrap our heads around how to develop an economic model in our work that is in accordance with smaller band, hunter-gatherer gift economies. And it's the first economics book ever written that makes sense to me.
Kamea Chayne: What do you tell yourself to stay motivated and inspired?
Gabriel Kram: I don't have a lot of mental talk with myself, I tend to do certain kinds of awareness practices and work at the level of embodied sensation. And I do a lot of work to stay connected to a sense of the sacred in my heart.
Kamea Chayne: And what makes you most hopeful for our planet and world at the moment?
Gabriel Kram: I'll say two things about this. I had a really beautiful conversation with Tiokasin Ghosthorse, who's a Lakota activist from the Cheyenne River Lakota people. He told me a story about being with a Lakota elder. The very brief version of the story was that they were in Auschwitz and Birkenau in 2013, they had gone as a delegation of Zen peacemakers. And when they arrived there, the site of the concentration camps in Germany, he felt a desire to create a ceremony. And so they spontaneously upheld a Lakota ceremony. When they were calling in the directions, they were in a field, and the deer and the rabbits stopped and looked up, and listened, and the birds stopped singing. And he could feel that everything in the living world was listening. And he was aware that this earth-based language could be understood by all of the creatures. And later, he asked the elder, when the elder asked him to say a few words to the Lakota people, is there a word in Lakota for domination? And the elder said, no word. And so I'm very inspired by this awareness that there are these languages that are languages of relationship and not domination. I think the solutions we need, they're here already. They've been here the whole time. We just haven't had the humility to uplift them.
And the other thing is, I got to participate yesterday in a women-led healing circle. And one of our Indigenous mentors said that until the sacred space of women is acknowledged and reclaimed, we're not going forward. And so I'm very inspired by this uplift of these Indigenous voices, of women's voices and the weave of relationship that's coming out of holding in their proper place these sacred awarenesses.
Kamea Chayne: Gabriel, thank you so much for joining us today. Really appreciated this conversation. What final words of wisdom would you like to leave us with as green dreamers?
Gabriel Kram: Don't give up. We will be victorious.
