Cecelia Baum Mandryk (00:02.296)
Hey, and welcome to Calmer Conversations. I’m Cecilia, your host. Today, I wanna talk about what’s happening in the world and how this work fits into what’s happening in the world. But first, before we dive into that pretty juicy topic, let’s take a moment to center to ground. No matter what you have been doing or are in the middle of doing or need to do today, you might just take the next 60 seconds or so.
You might close your eyes or soften your gaze. Don’t close your eyes if you’re driving or walking, but maybe feel your sits bones in your seat or your feet on the ground. Maybe take a few intentional breaths. First, making a sigh or sound for the exhale and then moving to breathing through your nose and taking a few more breaths there. Seeing if you can notice your physical body. Seeing if you can notice what thoughts are present or emotions.
And see if you can become aware of these things or notice these things without judgment, without needing to make anything happen, without making yourself or them wrong.
Moving into that space of being a gentle observer of yourself and of your experience.
Maybe even offering some love and gratitude to yourself for taking time to do something like this, to give yourself something.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (01:28.812)
And then as you feel ready, coming back to yourself in your location. Maybe blinking your eyes, moving fingers and toes, maybe stretching. Hey, welcome. Okay. I occasionally will get messages about this on Instagram and I think it’s a pretty interesting topic. And it’s also something that came up in our group coaching space pretty recently. So I run this, this group coaching space and it’s really a community. It’s called the Life Lab and
There are Q &A’s each week and there are somatic sessions each week and there are coaching sessions each week. And within these coaching sessions, you can bring anything up, right? You can bring up really what we might consider small or trivial things. You can bring up enormous life events and they’re all welcome there because this is part of life, right? We are humans living the human experience. And as also came up in a recent session, you don’t get to escape the human experience, right? No amount of this work will
allow you to escape being human and experiencing human emotions. This work in fact helps you navigate the human experience differently, perhaps with more ease, but you don’t get to excuse yourself from it. And in the same way, we don’t get to excuse ourselves from what’s happening around us. And let’s be honest, there’s maybe some, I mean, I don’t even know what word to use because it doesn’t feel like any word I use could capture the enormity of some of what’s happening.
some of the devastation that’s happening both on a humanitarian level, on an environmental level, some of the changes that are being made. And I will also be very honest and say that I do not follow the closely, I do not closely follow the news. And before you hate on me for that, I wanna do, I wanna explain that a little bit and then explain how I think this work fits into what’s happening. I am…
think it is important to know what’s going on in the world around us because the world around, this is where we live, right? We’re living in this physical reality. And I think that a lot of times when we do something like follow the news, we can get really wrapped up in what’s happening in the latest click bait. So please don’t take my, don’t follow the news for I don’t stay abreast of current events because those are two pretty different things, right?
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (03:47.008)
I try to stay aware of what’s happening in the larger world as I can, because I think it’s perhaps part of my duty as a citizen, as an aware human being, as a person with an enormous amount of privilege in the world to do that. And I do not follow clickbait news. I do not watch the news because it’s a distraction from my life. It’s a distraction from this work. It in many ways is the same as watching
like funny cat videos or shopping online or drinking. And then it keeps me in a cycle of dopamine hits. It keeps me in a cycle of being aghast at what’s happening. And when I am aghast at what’s happening and in moral outrage with all of my friends who agree with me largely, I am not actually doing any of this work. And from my perspective and from what I can see, when we are doing that and when we are in outrage and we’re in this cycle,
we are actually adding to the problem, not solving it. And this is a pretty big jump from what most people think, because most people think, how nice to be able to sit back and engage in self care or do things like coaching or mental health work. Like, what a privilege for you to be able to excuse yourself from the outrage that’s happening, right? From these kinds of circles and conversations. But I want you to think about, if you do this or you know someone who does this, I want you to think about how you feel
after you’ve done this, right? After you’ve been engaged in one of these cycles. And I’m gonna give a pretty personal example. So my, I don’t really know my parents’ political stances when I grew up. I do know that my dad listened, excuse me. I do know that my dad listened to a lot of NPR and PBS. And then some point, maybe when I was in high school, maybe college, so some time ago, right, I’m 40, he,
started listening a little bit more to Fox News. And at this one point, took a trip, I was probably in my 30s at this point, I took a trip to go see my grandmother with my father and it involved a lot of driving. We drove from Virginia to Florida over essentially a long weekend because we really wanted to see her. She wasn’t doing that well. And for some period of time, we listened to Fox News on the radio. And my dad, who’s like usually a pretty funny, easygoing guy, he’s fun to have conversations with, was really
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (06:12.574)
outraged. He got really angry. And while I wouldn’t say that he never got angry when I was growing up, it wasn’t a state he spent a lot of time in. And I watched him, while he listened to this, get really, really angry. And he then wanted to talk about it he wanted to spiral about it and he wanted to go on and on about it. And so he kind of, I made a rule in the car that we weren’t allowed to listen to talk radio anymore, that we had to listen to music if we were going to listen to anything at all or just talk to ourselves. And this was my first
experience of really watching somebody that I know be engaged in something like the click baiting news cycle and get angry. Now I am not saying that there are not things that are worthy of being angry about. There are things that are going on in the world that are very worthy of being angry about, of really being aware of and watching them. That’s not what I’m saying at all. But what I am saying is that when you get in the cycle of just clicking on the
just watching, just getting the sound bites, just following the social media, being in that place, talking to all your friends about the latest thing. What you do to yourself is you take yourself to a different energetic space. Instead of being grounded within yourself and seeing the world through a lens of love, you start seeing the lens through a binary, the world through a binary lens, right? Us versus them. They’re wrong, I’m right. How dare they? All these things and
Ultimately, what I think that does is it creates more divisiveness. It creates divisiveness within yourself, within your own brain. It creates divisiveness in how you see other people and how you communicate with them and how you are in your life. Right? If you just think about if you spend an hour reading the news in the morning, how you might feel going about your day versus if you spent a half an hour meditating or even like looking at flowers or listening to the birds or like reading a fun novel, you feel very different going about your day.
And so to circle back around to doing this work, is I actually think one of the biggest benefits of doing this work is that you start the change you wanna see at home. This is gonna be an episode of lots of little tangents, I guess I’m seeing now. One of my kids’ favorite kid bands, and obviously we don’t listen to a lot of kids music, are the Okie Doki Brothers. And if you’ve never heard of the Okie Doki Brothers, even if you do not have kids, please go listen to them. They’re so…
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (08:36.622)
good and it’s almost not fair how their songs can be philosophical and meaningful and also fun at the same time and inspirational. And they have this one song and one of the lines is, if you want change, you got to change. Right? And it goes on and on, like it sings back and forth. If you want a song, you got to sing. If you want change, you got to change. If you want love, you have to love. But if you want change, you have to change.
If you want to see change in the world, if you want a different political environment, if you want different norms within your own community, you have to be the one to do the change. It is so easy to sit, particularly if you have any amount of privilege, and I’m raising my hand, it is so easy to sit and look out and say, they have to do the work. They need to change. This is a problem to fix out there, or I need to fix something for everybody else. And when I fix everything outside of myself, then the world will be…
good, peaceful, just, fair, whatever word you’re looking for. But the truth is, is that all of that work has to start from within ourselves. And it has to start with nervous system regulation, has to start with acknowledgement of what we actually are angry about. And from that place of regulation and from that place of seeing your higher self and the future you want, asking what work do I need to do and what work do I want to see in the world?
And when you start from this place, so when you really do this work, not on an intellectual or a kind of, I’m losing the word right now, but like not in an intellectual space in your brain, right? Not in a kind of on paper, but really doing the work, finding out where you are judgmental within yourself, finding out where you still hate yourself, working with that first, finding the capacity to love and accept yourself on a moment to moment basis and process your own emotions.
extend that out into the world, then you are able to bring about change, right? As the Okie Dokie brothers say, if you want change, you have to change, right? You have to change yourself and then you can change something else. You have to change how you see the world and how you’re operating. You have to stop, this is Pema Chodron, and I’m not sure I’m saying her name right, but Pema Chodron talks about stopping the war within yourself. And that war has to be stopped before you work on anything outside of you.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (10:56.054)
And when you do, and I’m not saying you need to become somebody like Martin Luther King Jr., but if you do, you get to show up in a way that he did, right? In a way where you are present and grounded within yourself and your vision for the future. You have yourself a regulated nervous system so that you can channel universal good and love through your words and actions. And you take really powerful steps. create really powerful words in the world.
And so it is really tempting to just share news things on the internet. is really tempting to just get involved in the self-righteous circling that we do with other people who believe the same things we believe. It is much more challenging to do this work yourself, to work to regulate and acknowledge your own emotions and move from that space. And if you want to see change in the world, I encourage you to do this. And it’s why I see the work that I do and the work that people in my group are doing as deeply world transformational.
and political in many ways, even though we don’t occasionally politics comes up because it’s part of our life and coaching, but it’s it’s not like a goal of this, right? It’s not a political action group. But the work we are doing is deeply like personal family community world changing because it’s changing how people are and how they see themselves and how they see those around them on a very like cellular level, like molecular level. And again, when this happens,
this allows you to show up differently and allows the world to really shift and change. So yes, there are atrocious things going on in the world right now. And I think it’s very important to ask yourself and acknowledge where you are not perhaps doing the work and where perhaps it’s easier to just think about like the larger scale things, right? And again, we had coaching about this in the group really recently where we talked about how
little things can actually make huge differences. We don’t know what the ripple effect is going to be. And so I’m not saying this is not like you have to do this work with me, right? But consider how you actually want to do the work of creating a better world for yourself, for your kids, for your friends, for your dog, for the bees and the birds and start there, right? Instead of trying to force everything outside of you to change first. And then do the work you want to do.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (13:19.558)
And for some people, this is running for office. For other people, it’s cleaning up a road in their town. For other people, it’s starting gender reassignment services within the shop that they run. I saw a sign for that yesterday when we were out. really asking, how do I want to do this work? And do the work that you feel called to do, even if it is as somebody in our group, is greeting everyone who comes into the library with kindness and compassion. And take that as the work you’re doing. And that’s the work that starts to change the world if we’re all
doing it, or even just like some small percentage of us are doing it to be realistic. All right, I’m recording this on the 4th of July, which in the US this is our nation’s birthday, and I think it’s important to do this because I…
I just think that if you believe in the world we can create, that it’s your duty and obligation to work from within yourself first to make those changes. And I know that I’m saying this as a white person in the US, right? And I realize all the privilege I have. Actually, I probably don’t realize all the privilege I have. I don’t think there’s any way to realize all the privilege that each of us have. But I work to understand the position that I’m in. And I work to understand what that means. And I work within myself.
to create a better world, to create more love, to create people who see possibility and view things through a lens of love rather than through a lens of hate and division and divisiveness. Okay, if you wanna start doing this, come to our group, honestly. But also just ask, how do I wanna show it for me? How can I regulate my own system? How can I do this work from that place? I love all of you. This is such important work. It is not trivial. It is not…
a nice to have, think is crucial. I really think it’s crucial for the world to be a better, different place. And thank you for listening, because if you’re listening, then you’re part of it. We like to say it’s part of the revolution that we’re starting within the coaching group. And so now you’re part of the revolution too. Welcome.
