Lynne Twist has been a recognized global visionary committed to alleviating poverty, ending world hunger, and supporting social justice and sustainability for more than forty years. She is also the cofounder of the Pachamama Alliance and founder of the Soul of Money Institute.

In today’s episode Lynn and Marc explore the power of commitment – on many levels, personal, relationships, work, and most of all the power of living a committed life, working toward something larger than ourselves. Lynne talks about how she arrived at the work of environmental education and her commitment to end the climate crises.

 

 

ABOUT MARC’S GUEST

Lynne Twist is the founder of the Soul of Money Institute and author of the best-selling book The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life, and her newest book, Living a Committed Life: Finding Freedom and Fulfillment in a Purpose Larger Than Yourself.

Over the past 40 years Lynne has worked with over 100,000 people in 50 countries. Her clients include: Microsoft, Proctor & Gamble, the International Unity Church, Charles Schwab, United Way, The National Black theater of Harlem, Harvard University and others.

She has been a featured speaker for the United Nations Beijing Women’s Conference, State of the World Forum, and Synthesis Dialogues with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, among others. Lynne is the recipient of the prestigious “Woman of Distinction” award from the United Nations.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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[00:00:02] Marc Lesser: Welcome to Zen Bones: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times. This is Marc Lesser. Why Zen Bones? Our world is in crisis and ever-shifting, and now more than ever, more wisdom, clarity, and courage are essential, especially in the world of work, business, and leadership.

Lynne Twist has been recognized as a global visionary committed to alleviating poverty, ending world hunger, and supporting social justice and sustainability for more than 40 years. She’s the co-founder of the Pachamama Alliance and founder of the Soul of Money Institute. In today’s episode, we explore the power of commitment, on many levels, the personal and relationships in our work, and most of all, the power of living a committed life, working towards something larger than ourselves. Lynne talks about how she arrived at the work of environmental education and healing and her deep commitment to ending the climate crisis.

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Lynne, it’s really a pleasure to be with you. It’s been a while and always I’m really happy to see you.

[00:01:22] Lynne Twist: Happy to see you too, Marc. Thank you for inviting me to be on your podcast. I’m delighted to have a conversation with you.

[00:01:30] Marc: I love the topic of both of your books are topics that are, I think, close to my heart and also, I think, immensely important in today’s world about money and the right use of money, the soul of money, and your latest book about living a committed life. It’s interesting, in a language that’s sometimes used, and I’m curious as to what you think of this, in the Zen world, they sometimes say living a life of vow and that one way that a big shift in our way of being is from living from habit energy to more freedom, more a life of vow.

As I’ve been reading your book about it’s interesting the relationship between commitment and freedom, that somehow, once we’re committed, we’re more free. How does that strike you, the language of vow and freedom and commitment?

[00:02:39] Lynne: Oh, interesting. I’ve never heard the life of vow. Is that a Buddhist term?

[00:02:43] Marc: It comes from the Buddhist world. There’s a book that was written by a Buddhist Zen teacher, the book is called Living by Vow. It has parallels, of course, with your book. Yes, it’s an emphasis, I think, on the inner journey. What I love about your book is that it’s the inner journey and the outer journey as well. Actually, the connection between our vow and taking action in the world.

[00:03:16] Lynne: Yes. Wow. That’s so interesting to hear that word vow. It sounds different to me and more religious than commitment, more secular, but also can be obviously very, very deeply rooted to people’s faith, whatever it is. The word vow just brings up all kinds of different images for me when I think about it. Maybe because I was raised a Catholic and priests and nuns were part of my childhood. I always thought, “Oh God, you’re supposed to do that.” That’s what you’re supposed to do. [chuckles]

[00:03:54] Marc: Commitment. It will stay with commitment.

[00:03:57] Lynne: I love the word vow. That’s beautiful. My experience, really, which I write about, my own experience and the experience that I’m having in the observing or knowing or engaging with or collaborating with people that I deeply respect is that they, and hopefully me, are living what I call a committed life, which is that we’re not governed by the whims of our desires or the negative/positive thoughts that run around your brain so much as we are by a deep and profound commitment or calling.

When you’re rooted in a deep and profound commitment or calling, you have the courage and wherewithal and through line, you could say, to use a normal word, to not be seduced as easily. It’s not that you don’t get seduced from time to time. I love French fries and I love sleeping in and I love all kinds of things. You don’t get seduced as easily by the powers that push us around in the culture, patriarchy, colonialism, powers that have framed life for so long.

We’re all struggling with those things. They’re huge, huge systems and structures of thinking that we’re all caught in. I was just on a call about that. That’s why it’s coming up for me. Also, habits like interrupting people and not listening to them fully because you’re in a hurry and you want to get your thing in, you want to say what you want to say, or being grumpy and taking it out on other people and blaming them.

All these things that are so human, I do them regularly, like we all do, but I don’t find them as seductive if I’m rooted in my own commitment, my commitment to a world that works for everyone with no one and nothing left out, a commitment to give and receive love in every interaction, a commitment to, from the Pachamama Alliance, an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, socially just human presence on this planet. I find myself realizing that I’ve been so fortunate in my life to take on or to be given and then receive big commitments that put my petty concerns about myself in the background and my commitment in the foreground.

That’s what I call freedom when I say freedom. Because when I’m not in touch with my bigger commitments, my commitments larger than my own life starring me, I do get bombarded and pushed around and manipulated by, does she like me? Did I say the right thing? Am I too fat? Am I getting too old? Thoughts that debilitate and hamper and obstruct and obfuscate your relationship with the beauty and joy of the world. When I’m in my calling, in my this is why I’m alive, this is what I came here to contribute to, this is who I am, I feel free to express myself. I feel trustworthy and so then I trust myself. I stop doubting and questioning and worrying, and I’m in action.

It’s often like I say, worry is a form of negative prayer. Have you ever heard that phrase that comes from Michael Beckwith? I love that. When I realized when I’m worried about my kids, worried about whether or not I’m going to be able to raise the money that I need for my target, and I put the worry in the background and I just get into action, I don’t have time to worry. I’m in action raising the money. I’m in action talking to my kids about the things that I need to tell them. I’m making the world work, whether it’s on a small scale or a large scale.

I’m suggesting in my book, and I’m suggesting, maybe this isn’t true for everyone, but I found it to be so useful for myself and some of the many, many thousands of people I’ve worked with, that having a big commitment that calls to your soul, that makes your heart sing, brings you close to tears, rather than something to be afraid of because you’ll get stuck in something and your options will shut down.

When we try to keep our options open, we’re going sideways. Which option should I entertain? Which option should I keep open? It’s almost like going sideways. You find yourself free to flow into the future toward what you’re committed to. Then suddenly everything is clear and the choices are obvious. It’s not should I or shouldn’t I, it’s I am. That’s the long answer to a short question.

[00:09:17] Marc: I can’t help but think about the various levels that commitment operates on. There’s committed to myself or committed to my own growth and character building. There’s committed to my relationships in a marriage or any important relationship. It’s interesting, as you were saying, how different it is when we’re committed versus looking around for other options. The work that I do these days working inside of companies and with executives, it’s amazing the difference between someone who’s fully committed to the workplace, their particular team, their particular organization. Then you’re talking about, what you were aiming at I think was more our life energy, our life commitment.

I want to just say just a couple of words, people who are listening, some may, some may not know about one of the major projects that is a big part of your life, the Pachamama Alliance, and what I think of it as the commitment toward both helping these Indigenous people in Ecuador, and then out of that, training people in environmental education as a way of shifting the consciousness and actions of the world in terms of making some real traction in the climate emergency that we’re facing, and beautiful, the stories and your life, the way that you’ve been for so many years committed and taking action in this realm on a very large and important scale.

[00:11:08] Lynne: Thank you. It’s been a privilege to be able to really declare that I’ve been called to the Amazon. It wasn’t something I had on my agenda, so it’s a beautiful example of what I’m saying. Because I was working on hunger and poverty and I really dedicated myself to ending world hunger, that was a call for me, still is, but there was a whole series of events that I think I’ve told you about of mystical signs that I received and dreams and visions that came from the Amazon rainforest where I’d never been.

I didn’t speak Spanish. I wasn’t even thinking about the Amazon. The Indigenous people from the Amazons, almost all the tribes, I think probably 100% of them in the Amazon are what are called dream cultures. The way they communicate is through dreams, both dreams that we have at night, and they dream people to them. I was lucky enough, fortunate enough, blessed enough, I don’t know how to phrase it, but to be dreamed to the Achuar people in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

That was so life-changing for me and also my husband, Bill, that we did what we needed to do to disengage from what we were doing and completed in a way that we didn’t leave it in the lurch and begin to take on this request, invitation, partnership with the Achuar people of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Out of that engagement, out of that collaboration, we now work with 30 Indigenous groups in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon. 30 nations actually, that straddle Ecuador and Peru, in an area called the Sacred Headwaters of the Amazon rainforest.

Sacred Headwaters, meaning this is the place at the base of the vast Andes mountain range on the western side of the continent where the waters come out of those mountains, many of which are active volcanoes, snow-capped active volcanoes, dynamic waters that flow out of those mountains that have actually begun and source the entire Amazon rainforest and river system that stretches all the way across the South American continent. It’s larger than the United States. It spans nine countries. Is a giant part of our ecosystem and ends up being the source of that ecosystem, which is the source of our climate system.

We feel so grateful. Really, almost makes me tear up telling you this. I’ve said this a million times, I think we’ve been called to work at the source of life, to preserve the long-term sustainability of life on this planet by preserving the Sacred Headwaters of the Amazon, which source the Amazon system, which sources our climate along the oceans. I feel deeply, deeply called to that work, and had no idea how to do it. No clue. How do you save the Amazon rainforest? How do you preserve it? How do you get the world to wake up to the way we’re living that’s destroying the very life support system on which we depend?

Not knowing how to do it is actually useful because then your own agenda doesn’t get in the way because you have to surrender to what I’ll call source, what I’ll call the commitment. Once that commitment is made, as the famous Murray quote, all manner of things start to show up to support you in fulfilling your commitment. It’s like a magic wand gets waved over your head and suddenly the right people appear and circumstances start to shift and things start to show up that guide you, particularly when you don’t know what you’re doing, which is the case for me.

It’s miraculous. I don’t mean it’s without its challenges, there’s plenty of them, but challenges that you know you can meet, or that you feel you will meet with some measure of humility.

[00:15:44] Marc: The power. I’ve experienced several times the power of commitment. I started a calendar greeting card company called Brush Dance, and I completely threw my heart and soul into that. Investors showed up and executives showed up to help me run it. The same was true back in the beginning of starting Search Inside Yourself. Amazing how the power– People I think feel it and are drawn. You’re describing, I think there’s maybe a mystical element but also a very practical element. I think that the energy of commitment is almost contagious.

[00:16:34] Lynne: Yes, I agree. I’d love to hear your story about Search Inside Yourself. I’m sure people have heard it from your podcast, but it’s amazing that you were at the very heart of that. My God, and the beast. [unintelligible 00:16:50] the beast.

[00:16:51] Marc: From the outside, sometimes we look like, “Oh, we’re just a training company. We’re doing mindfulness and emotional intelligence trainings in the corporate world.” The deeper commitment was around scaling meditation. What if we could really get millions or billions of people around the world to live a more sacred life, a more mindful life through the practice of meditation?

Again, it’s I think very similar to the work that you’re doing, but from a slightly different vantage point. I think we need people doing the work that you’re doing, protecting the Amazon, working with Indigenous people, and scaling environmental awareness and environmental education. Your trainings very much include the inner work, that inner shift. Part of that is alignment and helping people feel their own commitment toward the planet, toward our environment. There’s something about stepping outside of our day-to-day concerns and working towards something larger.

[00:18:17] Lynne: It’s very healthy, it feels good, and it creates a field, a field for participation. It’s almost like a magnet. I once had a mentor, she’s still my mentor in many ways, Joan Holmes, who was the CEO and president of The Hunger Project. She used to use this wonderful metaphor. She said, “If there’s a bunch of iron filings on a table, if you can imagine, little iron filings just scattered all around the table. Then you go get a magnet and you put it at one end of the table, the little iron filings start to line up with the direction of the magnet. That’s when the vibration is pure and sourceful. There’s a field, and things start to line up with that field.”

I learned that from The Hunger Project because Werner Erhard, who created The Hunger Project and really invented it with Buckminster Fuller and John Denver and some others, but Werner’s special genius and Bucky’s special genius really created that if we made a commitment to end world hunger, if the worldwide community could commit to it, we would start working on it so differently. We wouldn’t be feeling sorry for hungry people and being sentimental about it and doing the best we can and pitting them, we would realize they’re on the front lines of something that we can all participate in.

That a billion people are hungry all the time, most of them children, is an indictment of the human family. What’s wrong? What is off about the way we’re living that we would allow that? If we commit to ending it, we’ll start to work on it in a way that’s effective and powerful. It’s true, once that commitment was made, first by The Hunger Project, but we can’t take credit for it exactly, there was a field, and then CARE, UNICEF, Save the Children, the big giant organizations with billions of dollars and millions of people started to speak and work in a different way.

Now, when I started working at The Hunger Project in 1977, the deaths were 44,000 a day on a planet with just over 4.3 billion people. Now we have eight billion people and the deaths are almost twice as many. The deaths of hunger and starvation are down from 44,000 people a day, most of them children under 5, to 12,000. That was not predictable. Not predictable. 12,000 is still way too many every day. Oh my God, on a planet that’s twice as populated. It’s incredible.

Now, I’m not saying The Hunger Project produced that result, I wouldn’t ever presume that, but we were in the business, you could say, of generating a worldwide commitment out of which new kinds of thinking and action and participation would begin to emerge. It did. It’s incredible.

[00:21:46] Marc: I love how you told the story of the metal filings and then you illustrated it with the real-world commitment toward hunger and how all these energy organizations, money, like those filings all came together and produced some– I hadn’t heard those statistics. As you say, it’s sad, why is anyone going hungry today, and amazing the progress that’s been made over the years.

[00:22:17] Lynne: It’s so important in today’s world to acknowledge progress because our world is in such disarray with so many breakdowns. When we acknowledge progress and we really see the magnitude of the progress, it creates the strength and courage to deal with the magnitude of the challenges.

[00:22:40] Marc: Yes. It’s one of the things that I appreciate about your book around commitment, the talking about, not ignoring the pains and challenges, but also not ignoring the progress and the possibilities and the hope. Those might seem obvious, but I think they’re enormous, I think. Because it’s hard to really feel the pain, to really feel it, to really see it, whether it’s hunger, the racial divides that are still with us. The article I just read in today’s New York Times about how there’s plastic in our bodies, there’s just micro– It’s like, “Oh man, it’s horrible,” yet we keep finding solutions and possibilities for the big, big problems and phenomenal possibility and solution.

[00:23:40] Lynne: There’s lots of work to do. We’re not going to be bored. [laughs]

[00:23:51] Marc: I wonder, Lynne, of all of the things that are happening, what is one thing that gives you hope right now? What gives you some sense of possibility and gives you a sense of hope in your life or this world?

[00:24:08] Lynne: Well, I’m standing for ending the climate crisis. Ending it, not mitigating it, not doing the best we can, not figuring out how to adapt. All of those things are included, but I think that like ending world hunger, ending the climate crisis, really saying so, we can do it since we created it. We really did create it. It’s a human-caused problem. We can not only reverse it, but we can restore this planet to a livable, thriving, pre-industrial-level thriving world. I think that’s what I want to commit my life to now. It inspires me to even think that thought.

I’m in my senior chapter. When I look at that opportunity to work at that depth of what’s possible and generate that possibility, I want to generate that not only for myself but for people younger than myself. I’m lucky enough to have connections and opportunities, as you do, with my own children and grandchildren, but also with large organizations that are populated by people in their 20s, 30s, 40s who are in the prime of their productivity.

I call myself someone who hasn’t retired and never will. I keep getting re-fired up by the next thing and the next thing and the next thing and I will probably till I’m in my grave. I’m so inspired by the energy and the power of young people and their command of the use of technology. While I struggle to get myself on the right microphone for this call, it’s just natural, it’s like breathing for them. Our technologies, as scary as they are for someone like me in my age group, they’re so amazing what they can do when you’re conversant with them, when you as you are, because your years with Google, when they’re at your fingertips, they almost extend your capacity to be useful.

With the energy of source, I’ll call it, the energy of, you might call it mindfulness and integrity, what we can do with all this is just astounding. I’m super inspired by that. When I get afraid of AI and ChatGPT and blockchain and all that stuff, I need to pull back and say, “Look, this is here. It’s not going to go away. Let’s love it into being that which we use to transform the world, rather than fear it and try to mitigate its power, keep it away from our little ones.” I have done that. I’ve done both, but it’s here to stay. It’s not going away. It’s not like we can stop it. We can use it. We can harness its beauty, its power. We being particularly people younger than I.

I feel very inspired by, I think as every generation in my age group for eons is always inspired by the youth. That inspires me too. I’ll say that. Then I’ll also say, I’m seeing and hearing from the biggest, most egregious corporate powers a revelation and recognition that they have to totally, with some humility and with some courage, make such enormous changes that it looked impossible to them for so long and now they know they can’t put it off for one more minute. I love that.

I hate that it’s so late, let’s say that, to be honest, but it’s never too late. It’s never too late. No matter what we say the window is, it’s never too late to commit to transforming your business, your life, your way, your consciousness. I’m really inspired by that. The people that used to be the most troublesome for me have become the way through, could be very much the way through, coupled with this enormous surge of power of technology and the enormous surge of commitment and beauty and love for this planet that’s coming from younger generations.

Finally, that we’re all on the playing field together. There’s never been a time in history that I know of where so many generations have been on the playing field, not one turning the baton over to the other, no. Look at you, look at me, we’re not, “Good luck, kids.” No. We’re on the field. That intergenerational power of it looks like you could say four or five generations working together, maybe for the first time in history, is probably what we need and also such a beautiful time to be alive. I’m inspired by all those things.

[00:29:59] Marc: I love the commitment to ending, to solving this climate crisis. I think it was probably many people, but I think of Paul Hawken who said something like, “If you’re not pessimistic, you’re not paying attention, but if you’re not optimistic, you’re not paying attention either.” I don’t know why, but as you were speaking the thought, a book that really has inspired me from years ago is a book about the Wright brothers and this crazy commitment they had to figure out how humans could fly.

People really thought they were insane. Like, “Humans can’t fly.” Now that we take for granted getting in an airplane and flying across the world. Of course, it turns out that flying is a miracle and has its shadow side. It’s part of spewing carbons into the air, but we’re now, I think, committed to solving some of these huge problems. The power of commitment on all levels.

[00:31:15] Lynne: It’s incredible, the power of commitment. Really incredible. It’s really how everything really ultimately evolves, I think, through the power of commitment. Not luck, not even destiny, just being committed and allowing the commitment to move through you in a way that you are an instrument of something greater than yourself.

[00:31:41] Marc: Lynne, I want to thank you for you’re such a shining example of this deep commitment. Because partly, it’s a way of being, living a life of commitment. You’re one of the real shining lights on our planet. Thank you for all of your commitment, action, and hard work, and most of all, your presence. Appreciate it a lot.

[00:32:04] Lynne: Thank you, Marc, and yours. So wonderful to talk to you. I love the field that you are for conversations that matter. You are a presence that has the best of who you interview show up. I’m grateful to be one of those people, so thank you.

[00:32:23] Marc: Thank you, Lynne.

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Listen in each week for interviews, teachings, and guided meditations. You’ll receive supportive tools for creating more meaningful work and mindfulness practices to develop yourself, to influence your organization, and to help change the world. Thank you for listening.

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