Gratitude Blooming Podcast
Inspired by nature, art and gratitude, the Gratitude Blooming co-hosts Belinda Liu and Omar Brownson bring fresh and diverse perspectives to well-being. For us, heartfulness is the new mindfulness. Gratitude Blooming was inspired by the artist Arlene Kim Suda and her 100 Days of Blooming Love art project. Hear from culture keepers, creators, healers, leaders and so many others who share their emergent practices to build the beautiful world our hearts know is possible. Please rate, review and subscribe. New conversations each week. We want to hear what you're grateful for. Learn more at www.gratitudeblooming.com
Gratitude Blooming Podcast
The Garden of Joy: Exploring Coherence
What if you could harness the power of sound and nature to experience true coherence in your life? Join us as we celebrate the release of our new album, The Garden of Joy, and discuss our unique collaboration with the Japanese American National Museum and the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy. We share our journey from spring to summer, exploring adaptive leadership, building team culture, trust, vulnerability, and even touching on a tea ceremony in the Bay Area.
In this season of renewal, discover the importance of creating space for coherence and community. Learn how connecting with nature and others can help you develop a practice of non-attachment and find your groove. Get inspired by an upcoming art exhibit that fosters deeper connections with nature, and hear about the power of creating objects that embody the human touch.
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Hello Belinda, hi Omar, i'm excited for this new season that is all about. the plant is present and poetic coherence is this new theme that we're exploring and there's so much going on right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we are so on time with nature because today, as we are recording Omar and Arlene, we are on the day of summer solstice in this hemisphere, which is the day of the longest light. So I'm really feeling that that energy of just a lot coming through. and how do we bring coherence to everything that is blooming right now?
Speaker 1:And, you know, one good way to bring coherence is through sound, and we're releasing today the second album, the Garden of Joy, and it's just this beautiful collaboration that we have with the musician, composer, ariel Lowe and his window seat brand cover I'm not sure what you call it And so we have a new album, and this is following the Garden of Healing, which was a beautiful album, and just getting to hear and if you caught the podcast before him doing this live practice with this awesome sort of I don't know piano that's like too octave short but has this great, funky, clunky sound to it.
Speaker 2:I love that he looked for something that was quote unquote, imperfect and old, and it was a delight, when I was previewing the album, to hear him starting with the piano. And so you really feel this through line, this journey of gratitude blooming through the seasons and going now from the spring to the summer, and what does that feel like? I feel like it's so helpful to have sound be a part of this experience.
Speaker 1:You know, as we were just prepping and talking about this being the third season, the first one was all about emergence. We didn't know, kind of what was going to happen and we just sort of dove into the 39 cards, the plants, the themes, the etymology. Second season, we invited a bunch of guests and it was around this idea of collective acceleration. And now really about what's the coherence like? how do we bring together these different elements? and it is timely because we're really embarking on this, a new collaboration. Not only do we have the candle collaboration, we have the music collaboration. Now we're collaborating with the museum, you know, the Japanese and American National Museum and the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, where we're going to be doing a live podcast series as well as a pop-up art installation. And this is going to be a new opportunity, arlene, to kind of take these plants to another level. How's that feeling?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, i also love that, when we were talking about this episode, that we were like. I was like what does coherence, what's the meaning of coherence? and we both looked it up and the etymology is that it's to stick together, right, and I just thought that it's such a beautiful concept that we're going to stick together and now we have, you know, all these partners. So it's exciting collaborating on an art project with the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy. We're in the very early stages and it's a very we've got a very short timeline for the first event, so I'm kind of seeing it as doing little experiments as we build bigger and bigger over the course of the year.
Speaker 1:And I think the keyword experiment is so important because we sometimes forget, like, democracy is an experiment, it's not something that is sort of like, oh, it's a fact, this is like physics, this is like the law of the universe. Like, no, this is a human experiment of like, how do we stick together, how do we find common ground? how do we, you know, bring things together in a way that, you know this, the sum is greater than the parts. Right, like that's really what we're trying to sort of bring together here and you know, it's happening in all these different ways. Like, last week, i facilitated a two-day retreat for Effie Saunders, who was a guest and she's head of an external affairs team, civic engagement team at USC University of Southern California, and it was really around adaptive leadership.
Speaker 1:Like, when we don't have the technical authority to do things, how do we be agile? how do we build team culture? how do we go both within ourselves, how do we create a safe space for us to sort of trust each other and build vulnerability, which is so important? right, talked about the story of self, the story of us, the story of now, like so much. Sometimes we're like, oh, crisis, crisis, urgent, urgent, but you can't really deal with urgency effectively if you don't know each other right and Can't really know each other until you kind of know yourself right. And so really taking this team through this journey of like, okay, we all have this negative bias right, this biological, this amygdala, this little almond-sized thing in our brain That's 500 million years, dating back to dinosaurs And we have to disrupt this negative bias and really sort of practice like how do we find common ground? and then, belinda, you were holding a tea ceremony in the Bay Area.
Speaker 2:I was with another guest from season two I love how we're kind of weaving and building coherence even among the seasons and With the Dr Paul Wong, chinese Medicine doctor, kung Fu master, and we were holding space for the retreat community That people that live in the Bay Area just you know how do we connect into the earth on the land in Mount Shasta, but then, you know, come back to our city life and remember some of these principles from nature.
Speaker 2:And it was fascinating.
Speaker 2:We started the, the circle of 20 people Using the new note cards I guess I should stop saying new because they're not so new anymore, but it was every time. I'm always curious how are people going to receive these messages from the plants? and so we literally passed around the cards in a container and I invited people to Find the one that really spoke to them or just go random, and it was interesting how every person had something very like personal to share about What was going on in there, in there in their life based on the plants, and it was almost an invitation to kind of share about some of the challenges and the, the feeling that we all are having right now, which is just there's a lot of change and it feels even more accelerated and It was really beautiful to have nature sort of validate that and make it normal like it's not a big deal. Okay, let's, let's, let's just talk about it. You know what's uncomfortable and Somehow you just feel better when there's a room full of people acknowledging this change. That's in the air.
Speaker 1:That noticing and naming it comes up in so many different ways. Right, just acknowledging what is happening. And that's really for this season 3, the first part, you know, in I did a Koro Leadership program and it was called we go what is going on, and so part of it is each week We're gonna have a little bit of a we go what is going on. We're gonna pull a couple grad, two blooming cards and just reflect in real time What is happening. And that's all these practices are trying to do is like, how do we disrupt that negative bias? right, practice is anything that disrupts these habits, and It's this little bit of a pause That allows us to, i think, really build greater coherence.
Speaker 2:So Are we gonna get to pull a card now and and see we are, and before we do that, i'm so curious What is our collective question? So, our listeners and viewers, you are literally real time with us trying to figure out what we are. What are we doing for the collective? So, arlene or Omar, is there a question that comes to mind as we're thinking about? you know, july 15th? We're holding space in a museum, talking about democracy, bringing in the plants. Is there a question that we might have for that? That's a new experiment.
Speaker 1:I would say for me really about like, how do we create space for coherence?
Speaker 2:Let's start with that. That's a beautiful question. I can't wait to hear from nature. So, omar, you know the drill here. We've done hundreds of circles. at this point, is there a number that comes to mind, or do you want me to scroll to the?
Speaker 1:card. I'm filling five, two, so go down to row five and then column two. I think is it the second to last. Is that it Okay?
Speaker 2:Yep, this one.
Speaker 1:Oh, number 13,. Redwood, representing the theme of strength. Imagine yourself grounded like a great, strong tree. How does it feel?
Speaker 1:And so, just zooming in on the art itself, you know, i think of coherence as I look at this redwood tree. Coherence is both what we see and what we don't see. So, like, what we're looking at is the super tall and one of the tallest trees in the world, but its strength is actually what we don't see. It's in its root systems. And so, as I think about coherence, how do we create space for what we're not seeing? Right Like, so often we're biased by like oh, this is the information in front of me And we try to make decisions based on that information. And it's like, how do we actually acknowledge what we don't know and really create space for that inquiry? And I've just really been sitting with the importance of curiosity. So I really think of curiosity as a strength, right Like in the face of like, and particularly when we're stressed out and there's fear, we tend to like even narrow our imagination like what is possible.
Speaker 1:And just to give like a real time example, on Saturday my brain was kind of freaking out because I was supposed to get nominated, or I was nominated to this board of an organization called Common Wheel, which their mission is healing hearts, healing the planet, and I shared with someone that like hey, i got nominated to this board, the board meeting was on Thursday and Friday and I hadn't heard anything.
Speaker 1:I was like, oh, maybe they delayed the board vote or maybe now. I was like, oh, now I'm gonna have to go tell this other person that it didn't happen, and it was like social shame And I could feel the brain kind of getting all amped up And I was like doing these grounding, somatic practices, like literally, just like touching the fingerprints so you can feel like the ridges on your fingertips as just a way to like be present. And then, sure enough, when I opened my email, they're like congratulations, you got on the board. And so there's so many things that can disrupt our curiosity and look at it from a negative point of view, and so I just I can't emphasize how important these little pauses are.
Speaker 2:Omar, say one more time the question again, because I love the question and I wanna remember those words.
Speaker 1:How do we create space for coherence? How do we create space for coherence?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's kind of bringing me back to season one with this episode with the redwood and how we talked about. You know, it's like, even though the roots of this tree are not that deep, not as deep as it is tall, it's all about the community, and so I literally am reflecting on this experience I had last night. There was a friend of mine in Mount Shasta who had a birthday and we gathered 20 people in our yurt, our 30 foot mama yurt, and it was really interesting because it was mostly a local community people that live in the Mount Shasta area. Oftentimes we host so many people from outside of Mount Shasta and this time it was actually a local community gathering for someone that we all cared about. And I learned that several of the people were also at land stewards in Mount Shasta And what was really neat was recently I've been looking up at the trees and I've been noticing the same trees are all dying And we thought it was a Douglas fir tree.
Speaker 2:But we and so I asked these other land stewards in the circle like hey, are you noticing your trees also having a hard time, like these specific ones?
Speaker 2:And they all said like they had acknowledged that and seen it, and that started a conversation about, well, what do you do? And you know, besides, just you know, saying goodbye to the tree, you know what are the ways, and I literally was starting to water them, hoping that they would, you know, come back to life, and someone was saying, no, actually there's a problem in the ecosystem, like literally they're not getting enough microbes. And these are the trees that become the most vulnerable in drought situations. So, you know, we could say, yes, there's some things wrong with the drought, but I think the drought is actually highlighting the weakness of the ecosystem, like why aren't they getting enough nutrients to fend off the stabilization from the drought? So it was just a really rich conversation that happened because of community, and so, yeah, it's like how do we actually put it out there? What are the things we're curious about or struggling with to be able to get support and coherence around it?
Speaker 3:Both of those are such amazing stories. I can't even believe that, belinda, that's like incredible that you know that you are attuned to nature but then you're with other people that are noticing the same thing, you know. that's just. I can't help but think that trees would feel good knowing that. And then, omar, what I wanted to say about your story is I think your story is such a good example of why it's important to have non-expectation right. Like a lot of times, you know, like I feel, like I've talked about in my art practice, trying to build a practice of not being attached or not having an expectation, And sometimes people are like, well, if you don't expect something, is it that you don't care? And I think your example is such a good example of you care deeply, but like it's also good to you know not have that expectation that you know prevents you from that, disrupts you from you know, being in your groove right. So it's just such.
Speaker 1:I find both of these stories just really insightful And I think you know, as you've heard me talk about moving from dreaming, believing and achieving to really dreaming, believing and receiving, and you know, just being in this space of receiving, then it's just sort of like you're open, you know, and then also it's just this idea of gratitude is giving is receiving. So it's like what can I give as opposed to what can I take. I'd be curious, arlene, if there's anything with this question of space for coherence and the redwood tree that comes to you.
Speaker 3:Well, immediately, it's kind of amazing because I don't actually do this practice a lot, picking the cards, you know, in part because you know I feel like they're my, you know they're just, i'm so close to them. But doing the practice, the first thing that came up to me was the grounded part. I really think to build coherence you have to be grounded right. Like, if you're not grounded, how are you going to, you know, be able to partner and you know, collaborate with others or build the community right? So I don't know. That just is the one thing that really came up for me about the question around coherence is it really requires us to be grounded like a great strong tree.
Speaker 2:It's one of the few and look of the prompts where it's like a practice more than it is an inquiry, which I love. Arlene, what comes up for you when you think about your art getting expressed in a new form with the exhibit that's coming up? Do you? you know, do you want to share a little bit about that, or how?
Speaker 1:you're seeing this in action.
Speaker 2:How does it feel?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, you know it's, when you pose the question, omar, today, about, like, how you know, the question for the cards, about how do we build coherence, i was thinking. I was thinking, like, how do we build coherence with nature? And I think that's a little bit of the question that we're going to try to tackle with the art. You know it's going to be a pop up art exhibit, you know, in July. So you know, we don't have a lot of time to do stuff.
Speaker 3:But I was thinking about doing things, like you know, i feel like, in some ways, creating objects from nature with a human touch on them. In some ways it's symbolically, you know, building a partnership in some ways, you know, and so I'm imagining that we may have, like, found objects with, you know, a little hand, handmade, touch to them, or maybe it can be interactive. But, you know, i find it The more I hold and, belinda, this is a stone I think that I have from you, from Manchester, right, so maybe I'll ask you to bring some stones that we can, you know, craft it by, you know, in some way with our own hands. So, and you know, i don't know, the more I think about it, i feel like it is about building coherence with nature. It's saying you know, here I am, i see, i see you and I want you know I am, i feel you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, really, with all three of our stories, i'm just struck by strength being around curiosity, strength being around community and the ecosystem in which we live in, and then strength being grounded right, like it's something that's so physical that we can like touch, you know, and part of this is, i feel like we're now being called, as gratitude blooming in this phase, to really stretch our poetic imagination right and to stretch it. it's sort of we're stretching at an aspirational level, like what kind of democracy do we want to live in? like how do we want to live together? but we're also sort of stretching into the earth and like this planet and like how do we want to live with this planet? right, and that then requires us to really be open right, both the sort of above and below ourselves and then across right to each other, and so there's this dimensionality to it that I feel like this is the space, right, like that was the question, like how do we create space for coherence? well, it is actually exploring that space, exploring it all around us. That's kind of cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's reminding me of the practice from the wild card with iris on the, you know, centering practice like it's, like all dimensions, we have to bring coherence to Well. As we close, i would love to have continue our ritual of picking a card for our listeners and our community. You know what is the message from nature that is most needed right now for for our community? So I'm going to start from the bottom and I invite you to tell me when to stop.
Speaker 1:You want to pick Arlene?
Speaker 3:Our Belinda looks like. I think Belinda knows.
Speaker 2:Okay, let's go with this third one. Oh, celebration.
Speaker 3:Wow, great, very sweet.
Speaker 1:So it's number 29,. the bouquet representing the theme of celebration And the prompt is take a moment to remember what it feels like to celebrate. How can you celebrate the people, places and things in your life? What do you see when you look at this art, belinda?
Speaker 2:Well, i love that it's an assortment, a diverse assortment, of some of the gratitude blooming flowers the rose, the iris, the delphinium And it is kind of interesting, the spirit of summer solstice is the fullness of light of life almost, and so I love that this is kind of an affirmation from nature to also not forget to enjoy this human experience, even though it can feel kind of hard right now, sometimes, just taking a moment to really enjoy the gifts of the planet and the earth and being here at this time.
Speaker 1:Thank you. How about you, Arlene?
Speaker 3:It's such a wonderful card for the summer solstice. So, yeah, i felt that too, and I feel like this must be in the joy gardens. And now I'm curious about Ariel's music. I mean, i think that to me it was like a prompt to maybe listen to that song, right, but it is a nice reminder. I do feel like things are picking up. It's like the peak of summer And I feel like there's a lot of energy out there, so I feel like it's just a nice reminder to stop and notice it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's just today It's my youngest daughter's birthday, We're dropping this music album, We have this museum collaboration and just so many things happening right now And just the fact that we're transitioning into the third season of the podcast, we're now going to be on YouTube Or we are on YouTube now, And so there's just so many things to celebrate. And I just I think, Belinda, you're talking about assortment Like there's just so many things, It's just this infinite possibility. And how do we break out of again our narrow mindset? And then Arlene, the reminder right, Like, every habit needs a reminder, routine and reward, Like how do we just sort of be specific about those reminders and sort of be like yeah, there's a lot to receive, So I hope that our community receives what they need to celebrate in this moment. And I think that's really. We have an upcoming guest, Charlie, who talks about how do I move from things happening to me to for me, From to me to for?
Speaker 2:me.
Speaker 1:Then all of a sudden he's just like, oh, this is a gift, even if it's a challenging. He lost his job And a lot of that was identity and shame and income, but then he was able to get to a place where like, well, this is something for me, and he was able to invest in himself and in his family in a different way.
Speaker 2:Well, we hope that you take some time today to celebrate outside in nature. Cheers.
Speaker 1:Cheers, wishing you well.
