Welcome to the art of conscious living. I’m so very pleased today to be able to sit with Peter Van Dyke. He’s a program educator for the peace program. He’s worked in San Quentin for the last couple of decades, and now he’s retired. But, I’m very, very pleased to sit here today and chat with him about all his wonderful work, A Men of Tears.

Welcome, Peter. How are you today? Thank you. I’m good. A little nervous, I guess, but otherwise, I’m well.

Alright. Nervous? Nervous of what? Oh, just being on TV show. You know, I don’t do this very often.

So Well, you’re gonna find this a very organic process. It’s just one on one, you and I. And we’ll be talking about your very important work of men of tears and how men are disassociated with their feelings and how they’re cut off in their feelings. The days of the decades of the John Wayne, you know, true grit, Those days where men were men and you really didn’t, show your feelings. So you’ve come to a very important understanding that the healing and the essence of life sits there when you’re connecting to your tears, whether it’s tears of joy or whether it’s tears of pain.br>

Yeah. And it actually goes back thousands of years. The patriarchy on the planet has really corrupted all gender roles and all gender relationships. So and what I found and what other men have found is that a man’s relationship to his tears, how he learns to relate to tears, some of the earliest things are, you know, they don’t cry, be a man, grow up, I’ll give you something to cry about, and so men actually lose contact with their ability to cry and to still be a man. So our human design is that we have all these emotions, but the male role design, what our role is as men, is we’re supposed to eliminate some of these emotions, and we’re supposed to eliminate tears.

You know, if you see there’s a lot of stuff on Obama, when Obama cries, it’s headlines across the world. And when John Boehmer cried, the leader speaker of the House of Representatives, you know, it was like because it gets so much attention. And it may seem like we’ve gone through a golden age of men softening and men being, you know, I call them the yogi, veggie, organic kind of guys that are into all the feminine kind of stuff, but the truth is men still kill each other, men still kill themselves at three to one, the rates of women, and so violence, and it’s all related to tears. Well, let’s start from the very beginning. When did you first start to recognize how important this was?

And you’ve been an educator in San Quentin prison for the last eighteen years, and now you’re retired. And you brought the PEACE program there. So what was that all about? And where were feelings and crying and connecting to their pain? Where does that play into all of that?

Well, my education, my background is in psychology and education, educational psychology, which is basically how do people learn. And in about 1986 or ’87, I got involved with what they call a batterer’s intervention program, which is men that have been arrested for domestic violence or men that have made, that have come there on their own free will, men that are having problems with their relationship with their partner, their intimate partner, and I started working for a program in the context of a facilitator. And within two years of working there, one of the men, one of the directors of the program said, why don’t we do something in San Quentin and why don’t we expand it from just being about domestic violence, but being about all violence, being about what’s it like to be a man and why is violence so ordinary for men. You know, in the statistics, I mean, you know, we live in a very violent country, We just had the Newtown shooting and a lot of sensitivity around guns and violence, and it’s really a gender issue. If we had the same level of If men were doing the same level of violence as women do in this country, it wouldn’t be an issue at all.

. But because men are so attached to violence as part of their identity, and what we started doing in the program was when you peel back a man, you start going to what was he like as a boy, and where did he get the operating instructions about how to be a boy and how to be a man. And yeah, there’s genetic differences between men and women, but the cultural differences, how boys are trained, We used to say that boys are trained to live in a box, and they’re disassociated, they’re supposed to disassociate from certain feelings. Sadness, real extreme joys of happiness, you know? It’s supposed to be based on other external things, not intrinsic processes.

Well, Peter, when you say there’s genetic differences between men and women, is it so much that perhaps it is a behavioral thing where what we’re talking about and we’re thinking it’s genetics, it’s basically behavior where men are taught as young boys, no, you don’t cry, you don’t show those feelings, you’re strong, you’re a you’re a boy. And girls are able to tap into that and live from that energy and they’re expressing it. So I’m thinking that if men are able to tap into that, I don’t think there’s any difference. It’s a natural organic process, whether we’re a man or a woman, it’s the same for all of us. We’re all sharing the same human feelings.

Absolutely. And for this is where with the spiritual, you know, like when the spiritual spirituality, a lot of spiritual teachers say if you take the mask off, if you take the veils off, all of us are human beings. And the problem though is that over thousands and thousands of years of conditioning and cultural influences, our culture actually influences our genetic makeup. So the males that are selected to breed with the females are selected by how well are they fitting into the culture, how successful are they. And if a thousand years ago, a man that could that had learned to prevent his tears was considered more attractive as a partner, he produced more offspring.

And so the genetic process gets corrupted by the cultural process. . And that’s what we’re finding now as we start to undo this. Well, let’s speak let’s go back to the beginning when you were in San Quentin. You must have seen a lot of men and a lot of pain, a lot of anger, a lot of denial, a lot of shutdown numbness.

Absolutely not in touch with their feelings. And what was that experience like to see so much of that? Well, you know, it I wanna say that people have this concept and this idea about prison. And basically, prison is very similar to the outside world. And it’s its own little community and its own little culture, there’s hierarchical things that take place just like out here.

And most of the men, I mean the men that I worked with in San Quentin were self motivated. They didn’t have to come to my class or my program, they didn’t have to do anything outside. Our society doesn’t really care if you rehabilitate yourself or not. I mean we lock somebody up and it costs $45,000 to $50,000 a year to keep them locked up and the state does absolutely nothing to help the process of rehabilitation. And so the men that would come to our classes, to my class, were really self motivated.

They had been numb long enough and they had sat, like most of them in San Quentin, they have to earn their way to get to San Quentin, and most of the lifers had been locked up ten, fifteen years before I ever met them. So a lot of their crustiness had been kind of worn down by just kind of some kind of ecological process where they’re seeking their own humanity. And when a man is seeking his own humanity, you better get out of his way, because he’s got this drive that he really wants to know himself, you know, that whole thing, know thyself. So most of the men that came through my program, they were really they really were, self motivated and really were curious about what had happened to them. You know?

They were ready to let go and to be in the presence. Yes. And you know Wondering and being curious of what actually was going on. That’s beautiful. We actually called it fascination.

We did the process that the very first thing you have to have is that when you kinda wake up is you kinda have to be fascinated with like, how did I get here? You know, if you’ve ever been really asleep and you wake up in the morning and you Okay. You forget where you are and then you’re like, oh, she’s next to me, and this is my house, and this is where I am. Where a lot of guys, when they wake up in prison, they wake up and they go, who am I? How did I get here?

And so the first thing that we would do, the first thing I would do with the guys is I would say, you know, this is what was done to you. You were given operating instructions. You were given a box of this is how you were supposed to behave. This is, you know, did you ever see this TV show called Dragnet, where it was like, just give me the facts, ma’am. I don’t want any personal opinions.

I don’t want any of your, you know, biases. Just give me the facts. And we used to say the facts were that when you when you were a little boy, you were taught how to feel, you were taught how to act, you were taught how to communicate, you were taught how to even think, and you were taught how to think about sex, and you were taught differently than your sister was. You were taught differently, and maybe you were, you know, like if you were an Afro American man, you were taught a little differently than I was. But because my father was in the military and your father was also taught by other grandparents and stuff, we had pretty similar backgrounds.

99% of the men that I worked with in San Quentin, when I asked them their first thing that they knew about tears, what was the very first thing you heard about tears? And it was, I’ll give you something to cry for. Stop crying, be a man. And it didn’t matter if they were black, Hispanic, Asian or white. If you grew up in America and you were a little boy, your tears were inconvenient and uncomfortable and mother, father, older brothers, siblings would try to limit your tears.

And so that disconnect would happen. That’s why when I retired and started working out on the street, they call it, I did a group called Men of Tears. And it was amazing to see the men that would come through there, college professors, doctors, lawyers, some inmates that had been released from San Quentin would show up, and they were all similar, they weren’t that different. And they were connecting to their terrorist, probably, for the first time in their entire life. Yeah.

There was there were men that would say things like, I haven’t cried since I was eight. And then, you know, so, you know, you kind of probe and you ask, so you’ve never had any bad things happen to you, you’ve never had any disappointment, so, oh, my mom died and my son got killed in a car accident and I lost my job and you never cried? No, no, no, why would I cry? And the other men in the group would be like And then after a while, when you know, once you get permission, once you feel safe to really talk about your relationship with tears and you see that it’s gonna be accepted, then tears would start to flow and men would start to be, you know, like, the layers would come off, and it’d be a really genuine kinda, process. I’m thinking the safety that you’re speaking about would be that you’re allowing yourself to be very vulnerable and you’re allowing others to see you and it’s a sense that whatever happens is okay.

There’s no judgment there. And it’s also where if a man is shut down and locked down from his own feelings and he can’t connect to his own pain, then he wants to stop it in his mate. So in his woman friend, when she starts to get emotional, it’s about, wow, what can I do? What can I do to stop this? How can I stop her from crying?

If he can’t handle his own crying and his own pain, then he can’t handle anybody else’s. So the idea is to be of a superior man is, is to ground yourself and connect with your feelings and be there and know that there’s nothing to fix up. There’s nothing to do. You’re basically just witnessing the energy of what is happening with your mate as she is in her emotional moments and she’s connected to her pain. You just let her see that you’re there and you’re there for her.

There’s nothing to do. And in saying that’s where the safety is coming from for him to start to express that to her. Yeah. And there’s a beautiful exchange. There’s a beautiful dance, like harmony in that where no longer he has to be the strong man, the very masculine man, because in accepting his pain, that’s where truly he’s masculine.

I would I would think. Truly, it’s about being a man. It’s about being open to your own feelings, your own energy, and knowing what to do with them and honoring them. Well, an intimacy comes from when you can see the differences and the similarities between human beings and genders, so that as a man, if you’ve been totally disconnected, like a lot of the men that I’ve worked with would be bewildered by, what is she crying about? I don’t get it.

And then because they when tears would be flowing in them when they were boys, it would be like, oh, if it was physical if it was a physical tear, then that was a bad tear, You know, be man, be strong, be tough. If it was an emotional tier, well, that’s a bad tier too because, you know, be apathetic and don’t let yourself feel this, you know. It’s more important for you to get the job done than it is for you to go through the process. And so, the distance between a man and a woman, even when they’re close and they’re lovers and they’re, you know, have kids together and everything like that, if there’s not some kind of communication process, some kind of bridge where they can actually where a man can actually freeze. And what you said about judgment, the very first thing that we had to teach was judgment release, no judgment, there isn’t a right or a wrong.

There’s a great poem by Rumi and he goes: you know, out in the field beyond right and wrong and good and bad, I’ll be waiting for you. And that’s when a man gets to that place, then the trust with other men and with intimate partners, women and his children can really start to flow. You mentioned about connecting and knowing that as a child, there’s a lot of conditioning going on. It’s about letting the story fall away and recognizing that a story was told to us and a story was given to us. So we no longer have to buy into that story.

And who are we on a natural organic human being? Who are we? And allow those feelings just to flow through us in a very natural way. And the feelings can be of great joy, of tears of great joy, and they could be tears of great pain because in the pain, I understand that it’s a lot of wisdom in there. It’s the greatest gift when you go through a lot of pain and people who are blocking that pain are blocking all of that knowledge, all of that experience.

Life is trying to talk to you and show you that there’s something there, and if you don’t wanna look there, then it’s just gonna turn into much more trouble down the way. Oh, you know, what you’re talking about, the narration, the story that we have, when we’re boys, when we’re little beings on this planet, you know, we have a voice inside of us, but the people where we’re getting our story from about who we’re supposed to be are usually our parents and the bigger, stronger people that we’re really dependent on. So a lot of the co dependency and a lot of the work around that, there’s a lot of people now that will do like freeze frame, and who’s telling you this story? What part of yourself? You know, the parts work about yourself, the inner dialogue and stuff.

Because we get these parts where I wanna be a pleaser, you know, I want you to like me, and I also wanna be true to myself. So when conflict comes in, there’s this narration, and the scary thing for most of us is that we were so dependent on believing the older, bigger, wiser people that were feeding us and that we needed for love, and they told us a story, and we kind of accepted it. You know, on the way over here I saw a bumper sticker and it said don’t believe everything you think. Well, when I was little, I mean, if I didn’t believe everything my mom told me or everything that my dad told me or my big brother and my big sister, who was I gonna believe, you know, because my voice was still kind of a quiet little silent voice that I didn’t really trust, you know. And so I gave my power away to other people and to their narrative, to their story.

And so coming back to that place where you where you talk about organic and natural, really is like coming home. But sometimes it’s coming home to a place that you haven’t really developed, that you haven’t really hung out a lot in. Right. So when you come home, the first few times when you come home, it’s lonely. It’s, it doesn’t feel quite as busy and as safe as not coming home.

Do you ever come home to a house where it’s dark and now we have all these lights that come on by sensors and everything? But when I was a little kid, I’d come home sometimes and the house would be totally dark, and the very first thing I would do is turn on the light. And when you’re when you’ve been stripped of yourself and you don’t know how to turn on the light, and you come home and it’s totally dark. So when you say about releasing the judgment, releasing the judgment of loneliness, releasing the fear of not being good enough, of not knowing what to do, is usually the first place that men have to get to. And that’s to me, that’s why drugs and alcohol are so alluring, you know.

It’s like you come home and there’s nobody there, and you go, well, I can have a beer, or I can turn on the TV, or I can fill up this space, this emptiness somehow. And then when you sit with the emptiness and you find out, wow, I have a kind, loving, friendly voice that’s kind of been waiting for me to even recognize it, then it then it kinda allows you to connect with other people. I’d also like to add that it must be unsettling to sort of disconnect yourself, the feeling of disconnecting from the consciousness of the collective consciousness of others. That you are starting to connect to yourself where before you were connecting with other people, the great majority of the people. And this is what the greater majority of the people did.

They were disconnected from their feelings. So you are disconnecting from your feelings and now you’re not doing that. So therefore there’s a certain sense that, woah, I’m leaving the herd. Am I supposed to do this? Can I do this?

Am I brave enough to do this on my own? There must be so much to that. Oh, this that that’s part of the story again. And this is what this is what they find with gangs. You know, like because gangs are actually running the inner cities and they have been for about twenty years in this country, twenty five years.

And if you ever really look at like in Chicago, Five Zero Six murders. And of those five zero six murders last year, probably 80% of them somehow gang related. And leaving the gang is like being naked in front of a public speech class when you’re 14 years old and that horror of like, man. And in most prisons right now, they’re really trying to figure out how can we replace the status, that a guy gets from being in a gang by being not in a gang. And being an individual.

And being an individual. And honoring yourself as an individual. And what is that all about of being an individual in a society that has only honored the collectiveness of all of it? Yeah. Yeah.

So it’s, there’s a lot here. There’s a lot to talk about and a lot to, to rethink. And particularly in this times where school violence and teens and it’s all a common story today, a common occurrence where it was years ago, it was occasional. And now in a month, we can have six different shootings in a month across the country. Yeah.

And what is this all about? Yeah. Do you have your ideas on Oh. Basically, I like to talk about the video, the violent video games. Well, I think the violent video games are a reflection of what our society I mean, our society lives violently.

And my ideas I mean, when they say, like I had to do this whole profile kind of thing, like what are you an expert in? And the two things I’m expert in is violence and gender. And when you see how these two go together, I mean, the violence that our nation has become and how we’ve allowed that to happen, you know, it is so mind boggling and it’s, most people have no understanding. Something like Newtown happens or the shooting in Columbine or Aurora, and it gets a lot of attention. But every day in this country, like 10 people are killed.

And more than that, I think it’s like, I think last time I saw it was fourteen thousand people a year murdered in this country. And this is happening because? This is happening because of fear. The violence most people think violence is connected to anger and losing control, and the opposite is actually the truth. Violence is a way of maintaining control and it’s a fear of being out of control.

If you think of control as If I’ve been given the blueprint as to how to be a boy and how to be a man, You know, I just saw this thing where they said, oh, this kid got killed over tennis shoes. Well, no, it wasn’t over tennis shoes. It was because of his relationship to tennis shoes. It was because of his relationship to who he thought he was if somebody was gonna take his tennis shoes or who somebody else thought he would be if he could get his tennis shoes. So it’s all about empowering oneself.

It it’s all about the empowering and it’s all about the blueprint you’ve been given. You know, why we’ve ignored violence in our society so much, and this is a sensitive issue and people don’t like to talk about it particularly in Marin, is because it’s been black on black violence, and it’s been mostly black young guys killing other black young guys, and it’s a form of suicide. And it’s like, as long as they kill each other, we don’t really wanna spend a whole lot of money, a whole lot of time, or do any programs to stop it. Now, when something happens in an elementary school, or when something happens at a white high school in Colorado, then because our society has a hierarchical basis, and we value white children in Connecticut more than we value the kids growing up in South Central LA or the kids that are growing up in Chicago or Philadelphia or in Oakland, you know. And there’s a place for them.

This is where And I don’t wanna get too political, but the idea that we have a black president, and that he was a community organizer, and that in the black communities in our nation, we are at war with each other, and we’re allowing these young men to kill each other day after day. And, you know, then I just saw a young girl got killed in Chicago, Fifteen years old or 16, and she had been at President Obama’s inauguration, and it got a lot of play. And it’s like, it’s tragic that a 16 year old young woman from Chicago got killed. But how we And are we not seeing the tip of the iceberg? Perhaps in the next ten years, what we’re seeing now is a very, very little bit of what we will be seeing in the future.

In ten years from now, it would be an unbelievable explosion of violence. Well, you know, in our society, we can’t even have a discussion about taking guns away. We can’t have a discussion about taking guns away that have clips of 30 clips and our assault rifles that we use in war scenes, right, and the fact that we can’t even have a discussion about that without the NRA or some conservative people come up. And if you look how the what do they call it? The marketing.

How, you know, like this whole idea about, who’s making money off of it. You know, during Watergate they always said follow the money, and if you follow the money about how easy it would be to stop the gun violence in this country, and the suicides, I mean, people, you know, we don’t even have an understanding about how many suicides there are in this country and how guns make suicide, you know, the statistics are that if a woman or a young teenage girl is going to do suicide, she usually does pills or alcohol or, you know, and a kid, a young boy, picks up a gun. And a lot of times, the young girl can survive because she doesn’t take enough or she wakes up or somebody comes home, but the kid that puts a gun in his head or in his mouth or next to his temple and pulls it, he doesn’t survive. And that is a gender issue of how to kill yourself, and that kind of stuff. I mean, if we had a healthy relationship with tears, we may be able to have a healthy relationship with guns, but we don’t.

That’s very powerful. And violence, you know, this is the thing that to me, it goes back to the Lord’s prayer, where it says, you know, forgive me my trespasses as I forgive those who trespass against me. And violence is actually a violation. Murder, suicide, you know, what the young man did in Newtown, there’s no going back from that. And if you think about the pain and the fear that somebody must be living with to give himself permission to kill somebody else, to kill 20 young children, and I know we don’t wanna spend a lot of time on, you know, we as a society, we don’t wanna spend a lot of time on what was that young man going through?

Well, how did how did that thought pop up in his head? Like, yeah, you know, maybe go kill yourself or maybe go but go to a school and kill 20 innocent children. How does that even get planted in your consciousness? Perhaps from the video games that he has been watching since he’s a young child. Yeah.

And for two decades, he’s been sitting five hours a day watching these incredibly graphic violent, and he’s desensitized now. And he’s in incredible pain and his pain is spilling over to others. And when he goes to the school to kill these young children, these young innocent children. This is his way of wanting to go out in all the glory that he thinks he can go. Instead of going downstairs in the basement and doing it quietly and committing suicide, he’s there to make a statement for himself.

And see, I think it’s a cry for help. It’s definitely, it’s definitely a cry for help. And I think we miss pain and great suffering. So this is the dialogue. This is the discussion that I’d like to have with you.

And this is the discussion that I think society would like to be happening, but they’re not happening. We’re talking about gun control. We’re talking about pharmaceuticals of sedation, but we’re not really talking about what’s going on before all of that is happening. And it’s about what you mentioned earlier about honoring that child. Men of tears is a very powerful program because when they are allowed to be in touch with their feelings and own those feelings and own their own energy and own their life and take responsibility and be proactive with all of this, then the whole thing is turned around.

The whole thing is absolutely in a natural state of being, but there’s so much disorder when you have to be in a violent way. You have to act in a violent way. You have to shut down with your feelings. That is a prescription for a lot more disasters to happen. Well, and I totally agree, you know, and what we’ve had in our nation for a long time is, you know, we’ve had these ideas like no child left behind, and you know, we’ve had these concepts, and yet we haven’t put our money where successful programs really are, you know.

And I wanna say about the video games, I mean, right now, if you go into a high school and you talk to the kids, you know what they’re curious about? They’re curious about the drones. They’re curious about the fact that there was a drone above Osama bin Laden’s compound that could actually hear the conversation and that drones can come and drop bombs on people that are being operated from a thousand miles away, and we have all these little secret things. So the video games have come to real life as part of our defense and our war machine. And don’t think the kids haven’t you know, so it’s not just the video games where they go and shoot them up anymore now.

Now the kids our relationship to violence as a country has now said to the kids that you can do violence in a disconnected way and not even feel it, not even be a part of it, you know? You can send the drone 3,000 miles away and kill a supposed terrorist and then go home and have dinner with your wife as if as if nothing happened. And henceforth, it’s validating to be desensitized from your own feelings. Exactly, exactly. And you know, when we start to unravel violence, you know, when I’m talking about the Lord’s Prayer and it says, forgive me my trespasses, and then you think about where is the process of forgiveness, you know, where is the process of restorative justice, where is the process of I used to do this concept now when I work privately a lot, like when I work with a family, and my whole thing will be like, where’s the peace, love and the understanding in this family?

Because usually I’m called in and there’s a boy that’s in trouble, or there’s a girl, an adolescent girl, and mom and dad are like, you gotta come in and help us with them. And to me, it’s like, well, let’s look at the whole, let’s look at the whole circle of intimacy in the family. Let’s look at how, why this young man’s acting out. Let’s establish some boundaries about what peace looks like, what love actually looks like, and let’s start to understand, let’s unravel, that if you’ve got a teenage boy in your home and he’s acting out, what’s happening at dinner? And I’ll do this and the families will go, Well, we don’t eat dinner, we eat dinner once a week together.

Well, what about breakfast? Oh, no. No. No. He’s off, and we’re off.

And so you don’t eat dinner. You don’t eat breakfast together. You check-in with each other on text each other or you email each other. You know, there’s a lot of families now that email each other more than they talk to each other. And I go, stop, stop.

You know, let’s just establish a way of connecting with each other in your with heart connection, you know. Peter, I bet that a lot of times you come across teens that think that peace, love, and understanding is showing weakness. They’re thought to be weak if they do that. Yeah. Where my idea is that it takes great strength to live the life of somebody who is of purity, of kindness, and of connecting to their own natural emotions and feelings.

That is an incredible, warrior of great liberation and great freedom is known and it creates, it takes great, great courage to do that. Where in society we have it backwards now. The young people or even older people, a lot of people are thinking that perhaps to show these feelings is I’m weak because as soon as they get a sense, as we spoke earlier about being vulnerable, then I can’t be that. I can’t show that I can’t be weak like that. But little do they know that in doing that, embracing that, they are ever so much more powerful.

And they have to really have a sense of it and a taste of it. So when you go into their homes and start deconstructing everything and showing you, showing the people how much chaos is going on there, then all the possibilities are put on the table for the first time probably. Well, I just wanna say that’s exactly what’s happening, you know. There’s when we look at our young or when we look at our elders, I’m elderly, retired man, right, and you see how incongruent it is. Like the fact that, you know, we our young are a reflection of ourselves, and if we don’t give them a voice, if they are kind of, you know, there’s no kind of place for them at the table.

There’s no there’s no real voice for them. And it’s the same thing with old people. I mean, I have to count myself as an old person, but, you know, when you get in your sixties now, there’s kind of this kind of like you’re kind of shoved off to the side. And all this stuff about greed and relationship, you know, there was a big Occupy Movement, and I was living up in Sonoma County outside of Sebastopol for a while, and it was so amazing to see the 1% versus the 99%, and then you go, wait a minute, we’re all Americans. We all wanna be taken care of.

We all want peace, love, and understanding. Some of us are more vulnerable. Some of us aren’t. And if we can’t make a room for a table for the people in our country that are hungry, if we can’t make a room at the table for the kids that don’t have any meaning and don’t have any kind of place where their heart really feels safe, then we’re gonna have violence. We’re gonna have school town shooting or Newtown shootings, and we’re gonna have theater shootings, and we’re gonna have kids killing themselves.

And, you know, and we’re gonna have, you know, just this disconnected society. I would think that self reliance is an incredible answer where the teens can feel that they have connection to themselves. They’re able to express themselves. They’re able to be, as you say, something valuable. If they feel valued and they feel they have something to offer, then that’s that natural organic process that is happening.

And there’s no disconnect. And the disconnect of violence happens when they’re completely lost. They’re disconnected, they’re lost to themselves. They haven’t connected to themselves. They don’t know how to connect to themselves.

So therefore the easiest way is to be the big macho, the big man, the big violent, person that is only saying that I am so powerful. Like if you roar like the lion in the jungle, you may seem like you’re more powerful. One of the directors of the program that I worked with in San Quentin used to say that men were so afraid of being asked to be held or surrendering to being held, that they created a situation where we hold them in prison, and we give them these boundaries, and we say this, and we watch them very closely, and we do all that because on the outside, they couldn’t be held. They couldn’t let somebody get close to them. They couldn’t be vulnerable.

Like what you were saying, it’s this disconnect. It’s this very powerful disconnect that we have, that we know who we are. You know, our design, I wanna say as American, you know, born and raised American, military family for the first my father’s thirty years in the service. We used to be a country that cared about people. We’ve gone through a lot in the last fifty years.

You know, we’ve had the women’s movement, we’ve had Martin Luther King Jr. Trying to really eliminate racism. We’ve gone through a lot of issues that have come up, and we’ve got a long way to go. And where are we at right now? Well, I think we’re just at step one, you know.

We’re kinda like, you know, what did he say, Martin Luther King Junior used to say that there’s a large arc of, that leads to freedom and justice and peace, and, you know, we’re getting there. And, you know, the I have a dream and all that kind of stuff, but, you know, like, the amount of money that we spend on war and the amount of greed, I have a friend who said the other day, if we had just kept the same tax rate that we had in 1960, which we were a pretty healthy country then, You know, we were out of World War II, we hadn’t really gotten into Vietnam yet, and we were having a big middle class, we were building roads, we were doing all kinds of things, and now we’ve got this hierarchy of the richest of the rich really own Congress, and so that and that’s violent. That’s a really violent form of paranoia and a really violent form of control, and if they loosen that and if the and I say this, and it makes me sad, but, you know, if the children that are growing up in the ghetto, we don’t even call it the ghetto anymore, they call it the hood, but, if they had money spent on them, if they had a place for them that said, hey, you know, your college education isn’t gonna get you in the hole and gonna cost you $200,000 and you’re gonna be in debt forever when you get out, if you’re if there even is a place for you to go to college, if we said, no, you know, college was gonna be provided for you, and we as a society was going to limit our amount of money that we spent on war, and we spent on violence, and we spent on prisons, and we were going to spend that, we were going to front load it, you know, they call it, we’re going to load it up on the early end, you know, we were going to make every child in this country valuable and worthy, and damn the cost.

You know, that was our priority. And then we were gonna say, oh, we were gonna have every old person feel taken care of. We as America have we as America have strong values. Well, this is happening in other countries. I mean, Europeans do not handle their elders like Americans do.

Yeah. And the Europeans do not handle the children the way that they do here in America. So being that this is a nation now that you mentioned from the fifties, the sixties, and to the present time now, we’re moving more and more away from that, that we put the elders in elder care. So it’s basically a way to just warehouse them.

And the children, basically, we’re in a society that basically we don’t wanna hear from them. They have no voice and they’re not and that doesn’t work anymore. It may have worked back in the forties and the fifties where kids were to be seen but not heard. But today very much so in the information age that we are in, it’s about, they want to be heard. They want to be known.

So we have to look at all of this and, and keep up with the times that we are in and where we will be going. And Peter, I’d like to speak about with you of where what do you see in this America here that where can things start to be done and what areas of health or town center meetings it should be done or in the homes? In the homes, you actually go in there and Yeah. I do home visits now. Yes.

I let go of my office and my you know, when people say to me, where can we meet? I say, let me meet you at your house, and let me see how your house is set up. Let me see the flow and the ebb and everything that’s happening in your home. And it’s so amazing to just when you go to somebody’s house and you see how they prioritize, you know, the TV is the center of the living room, and it’s like, wait a minute, TV isn’t alive. You know, TV may have its place, but it can’t be the center of your living room.

You know, there’s got to be some kind of interactive kind of process going on. But but I wanna say that for me, the main issues in my, evolution, I’m really fond of this guy Picasso, and Picasso said that, you know, he learned to be an artist. Pablo Picasso? Pablo Picasso. He said he learned he went to art school, he learned how to be an artist, and he did that for the first thirty or forty years of his life.

And then he had to remember how to be a child, and as he remembered how to be a child, his art became the most sacred, most powerful art, and there were three principles. You know, of course creativity, you know, if you see a woman with a nose and a guitar and you go through your blue period and you do all this stuff that he went through, and he allowed himself that permission to be creative. All right? And he said, You know, the other thing was generosity. He had to be generous to himself.

He had to have time for himself. He had to create places. He had to be generous to the people that loved him and that he loved. Alright. So creativity, generosity.

And then he said the ultimate freedom for a child was spontaneity. Curiosity. And curiosity. But you know, that whole kind of sense of like there’s a wonder of play. There’s, you know, like if you see four to six year old kids, you know, or even younger, and you watch them, if one of them has a piece of candy, he’ll offer it to the other one, and if one of them puts on a sock over his head and says, I’m a worm, you know, the other one will pick up a coat and play something.

And there’s this spontaneity that actually comes and connects with our spirit. And I think us as a nation, I think we’ve got to start those three principles to me, generosity. What do you have in excess that you can give? If it’s love, give love. If it’s money, give money.

If it’s time, give time. Where does your creative juices flow? You know, if you do TV shows, if you do that, if you write, you know, and how spontaneous can you be? When was the last time you sat down with somebody that was homeless? When was the last time you challenged yourself to do something different than what you normally do?

When is it, as a country, when, you know, now I just saw this thing with Bill Gates, and I think it was on Charlie Rose, and they asked him, you know, what are you doing with all of your money? And he said, well, I really wanna make it for children, you know, we wanna eliminate polio, and we really wanna give a place for children to really be healthy and prosperous. And I thought, how come how come private Bill Gates is doing that? What if that was what we were doing as a country? What if our idea of a country was, we wanna create a world of prosperity for the children, and who cares what color they are?

Who cares if they live in Alabama or live in, South Africa? Who really cares? You know, one of those children may be Nelson Mandela, and one may be Martin Luther King, but if we don’t shift our priorities, we miss out on that. You know, if we can’t be generous, if we can’t be spontaneous, if we can’t be creative, if we can’t return to what it’s like to be a child, what are we telling our children? Oh, when you grow up, you’ll be mean, you’ll be angry, you’ll be violent, and how you’ll settle your differences is you get a big weapon and I’ll get a bigger weapon, and you will beat each other up or kill each other until we agree.

Come on. I mean, there’s a time for me where you just go, all right, enough, you know? Let’s get back to the heart of it. And the heart of it is about love. You know?

Quite simply, what you’re saying is connecting to one’s own sensitivity. And once you’re connected to that, you extend that to others. Yeah. You know, when I retired, one of the things that I allowed myself to do was, there’s a Vipassana retreat center up in Lake County, and I did, and it’s ten days of silence, and ten days of no eye contact, and meditation twelve hours a day, and you know, I taught twelve, thirteen classes a week, three hours with 20 to 60 guys in my class, and I can talk, I told you at the beginning, you know, shut me up if you want to, And I thought, man, I can’t I can’t do a silent retreat. You know, what’s what’s gonna happen to me?

And I went there, and for the ten days, it was like, oh my god, what a blessing. So, of course, then I went back and did another ten days. I do them once a month. So I did, like, four in a row of ten day silent retreats, and then I finally got to the point where, you know, I really don’t have anything to say anymore. What was the experience like?

Oh, it was Where you could not speak and you had no eye contact. So you must have had a sense of the feelings were opening up more. You start seeing more and feeling more and getting in touch on a deeper level. It was like it to me, and I don’t have a lot of remembrance of it, but it was like almost being in a womb, you know, because it was like there was no expectation. There wasn’t, you know, like, there wasn’t any contact, any human contact, and they create a vessel where you get fed, you know, you get vegetarian food, and you have volunteers that I actually volunteered in the kitchen after my silent retreat, where they actually present food, but then you eat without looking at anybody, and the food’s kind of bland, but it’s enough, and you are quiet and slow, and it was almost like going back into the womb, where it was like I could begin to hear my own voice, I think, for the very first time.

I could start to hear the stillness of quiet, where there wasn’t movement with quiet. You know, we’re busy, we’re extremely busy, and we have lots of stories going on. Where am I gonna go next? What am I gonna do? Who am I gonna see?

Where am I used to do this with my grandson, you know. Who am I gonna be today? Where am I gonna go? What am I gonna do? What am I gonna know?

And now it’s, to me, it’s like, what am I gonna forget today? You know, can I actively forget that I was taught not to cry? And can you support me in that? Can we support other men to act actively forget that we, you know, we did a wrong blueprint on you. We told you not to cry.

And, yeah, well, you don’t wanna be manipulative with your tears. You don’t wanna use your tears in a psychopathic or sociopathic way, but remember when tears were sweet? Remember when even when you were hurt, you skinned your knee and you cried, and all of a sudden the knee didn’t feel so bad, and mom came over and kissed your cheek, or dad held you. Well, when men start to remember those places and they’re safe enough to do that, that’s what it was like for me being in a silent retreat. It was just like, wow.

Nothing is expected, and I don’t have to perform. There’s probably a sense of witnessing became greater. Yeah. Yeah. It’s almost like an observer Yes.

Where I’m not me anymore. You know, I’ve lived in Marin County for thirty plus years, and I moved away. And, you know, I when I moved away, it was like people didn’t know me in Marin County because I worked in some public programs, and I was pretty, you know, worked with thousands of men in Marin County. If I go out to dinner or go to a movie, somebody would say, oh, there and all of a sudden when you’re not known you know, there’s a place for friends where, you know, everybody knows you and you’re comfortable and safe, but then there’s a place where you’re not known, but you’re just a human being, and that’s enough. And the other person sitting across from you is just a human being too, and that’s enough.

You don’t have to speak the same language. You don’t have to be the same gender. You don’t have to know how much money you have in your pocket, how much education you have, none of that matters. What really basically matters is we’re an experiment of human beings, of being loved and kind and gentle with each other, and that’s a lot. That’s quite fulfilling.

Peter, we have just a few moments left. I’d like to ask you what you would like to share that is very close to your heart for others that is very important to you right now? Well, I think there’s a I think there’s a tenderness that we’re really needing. You know, I go I go back to thinking about, like, President Obama was a community organizer, and the common unity community actually means there’s a common unity. And what I what I what I live for now is the common unity of tenderness.

You know, how tender can we be to each other? How forgiving can we be? How much peace and love and how much understanding can we generate? How generous can we be? How creative?

How spontaneous? You know? Can we act like children and play? You know, I do some work with this group called speaking circles, and we just did a process where it’s like, play is really a high form of spirituality, you know, where you can just play with each other. And it’s like even the tenderness of that concept.

So that’s where I think we need to go. I think we need to go to the tenderness, you know. Peter, it’s been an absolute delight to speak with you. You have a lot of wisdom, and thank you for all your great, great work that you do. Well, thank you for inviting me.

And also I gotta say, you made me feel at home. You know? When you said it was an hour show, I thought, how is that gonna go? But so thank you. We have so much.

We just touched the surface and I’d like to invite you back again. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. And from the art of conscious living, please take care of yourselves and take care of others. Thank you.