The recent Awakin Talks had Bhumika open with Sangachhadhwam, the closing Shloka from the Rig Veda that inspires us to walk together, think together and share together.

Here are some nuggets from the call with Vinod Sreedhar, a Goa-based social entrepreneur and environmental educator working in the realm of Systems Thinking.

The call started with Jignasha and Vinod recalling a 2000 year old Juniper tree from a sacred grove in a Ladakhi village in India which has greenery even when the rest of Ladakh looks barren.



Growing up:

• I was in school in Oman briefly when my father was working there. And, every month, he gave me some money and he would drop me off at a bookstore in the city. And, I would be left alone to pick up whatever I wanted. And going forward, that's the spirit that has informed my life.
• By the time I was 15, I was reading a lot of books and questioning everything around me. Coming from a Tamil family, going to temples was the normal thing to do. But I refused to participate when I could not reason it out.
• I'm very grateful to have family members who have supported this change, have supported this journey and these explorations.

Evolution of Identity

• In college, I was unhappy with the way I was learning science and switched to commerce stream which left me with a lot of free time. And I could play my keyboard for 8 to 10 hours a day.
• Bumping into people like Leslie introduced the world of ecology to me and I started immersing myself into it.
• Many years ago, when I was working for AYFBI (Association of Youth for Better India), I had the opportunity to interact and learn from many Kashmiri boys I was angered by the non India sentiments that some of them shared. Later, I realized that my anger came from my strong identity of being an Indian. And none of my many identities need to take precedence over my life. I learnt to listen deeply as a fellow being, setting aside all other identities. And just that little space opening up allowed me to have very beautiful conversations with those people and they transformed into connections that sustain even now.
• I feel deeply connected to Nisargadatta Maharaj’s I Am That and the "One Source of Everything" that he talks about. We are drawn away by multitudes every moment. For any kind of duality to exist there has to be a unity that contains them. If two of us are having a conversation in a room, the room holds both of us and the conversation. I'd rather be connected to that unity.
• While my eyes might deceive me and tell me that there's so much going on, I must remember that underneath all this multiplicity of things, all the myriad things that are happening, there's always going to be something, you know, which holds all of that.

Jignasha shared a video from Vinod’s cousin Ajay touching on how Vinod’s presence was a gift that helped him navigate life better.

Question – You indulge in learning and thinking about concepts and deep conversations on one hand and immerse yourself hands on in music, photography and wood work as well. How do these inform your way of being?

• I do read about politics, history, ecology and science. Music, woodwork, photography are things that take me out of my thinking mind for a bit and enable me to just be, to be present to the moment. This is active meditation for me.
• With art forms, you need to be precise. There's a lot of mechanical movement when you're practicing your scales and things like that. You're paying a hundred percent attention to it and bringing your attention inward.
• A lot of times I realize that it's not my thinking that gives rise to new ideas or solutions or ways forward. It's the silence. It's the time that I spent in doing these other things, where these ideas are turning around in their own way, and then lateral connections are formed on their own. And really they pop up in my mind, as a piece or as a silly song, And I know I'm not responsible for it. It's not something I've created. It's something that I may be a medium through which that particular idea is expressed. And, it has happened to me so many times that I no longer can claim credit for some of these ideas.

Question – Honoring diversity being so important in your journeys. When you take people with you, they're introduced to a lot of different cultures and indigenous communities, indigenous cultures, What are some of the challenges of diversity?

• As somebody who's very deeply interested in ecology, I feel like diversity is absolutely right. without that we wouldn't have stability on the planet know. So diversity is the bedrock of stability in the sense that it's not a stagnant kind of stability. It is a very dynamic kind of stability. So I would liken it to a dance with like a hundred people dancing together, but everybody's holding hands and it's like a very, you know, like a group of people that are holding hands and like dancing, not in a circle, but in, in all sorts of ways that hands and limbs are intertwined and that dance is what's going on.
• I think a lot of the work that I've been doing is to try and balance that sense of autonomy and the sense of stability or diversity. On the one hand you want to live, you want to have the freedom to live your life, the way you want to live, but that can only happen if you actually support other people find their own ways of living and their own freedom.
• To hold that contradiction in your mind that my life, my way of life is right for me. And I cannot impose it on other people, whether it's other cultures or nature, right. And to be able to move past that and help them live the best life they can.
• It's always this constant kind of flowing between autonomy and diversity that informs the life I live and the way I work as well.
• In Journeys with Meaning, we try to bridge the different disconnects. The disconnect between urban humans and nature, disconnect between different human cultures, the disconnect between head and heart and the disconnect between our actions and the consequences. Understanding the big picture is what caring about diversity is.

Question – Many young people face resistance from parents as they are focused on status and financial security. Is there a way one can use the model of journeys with meaning to design one's own life again?

• I come from a family of people who didn't understand the things that I did. in fact, I feel that they still don't understand it to some extent, because it's difficult to describe the work that I do.
• One thing that has helped me to out is to be able to keep talking to parents, keep talking to people around about why you want to do the things. And I think one of the biggest fears that family has is to see you unhappy or to see you making the wrong choices. And to be able to assure them that you will be able to take care of yourself no matter what, and you will be able to also support them in, in some ways, is reassuring. So, one thing I did right from the beginning was to introduce my family to stories of other people taking a different pat because then it wasn't about me.

Experiential Wisdom and Untiring Mind

• Visiting the 2000 year old Juniper tree, is a great way to connect people with a much older part of the earth and older part of themselves. And people before us have taken care of these trees for millennia, forget centuries. You can actually go up to it and hug it and speak to the tree. So to me, that's a very powerful moment. It reminds us of the need for making sure that the way we live our lives is very important
• Many of us, city people, think we know more than others, but these simple villagers of Ladakh decided at one point that they needed to build bridges across the torrential streams. How do you carry, you know, materials from say three kilometers up, down into the valley?They actually came up with the idea that they would plant trees on either side of the river and then let, let it grow. They would put bamboo shoots along the river. And over 30 to 40 years, the bridge would grow. And one day the bamboos would just break apart in fall into the river and the bridge is ready to walk across. And these bridges are the only ones in the world which don’t start deteriorating the day after they're built, they get stronger over time. And I walked over these bridges, which are 200 years old and which can hold 60 people at a time, but does not have a single nail. It's just, the trees growing over the river, that's all there is to it.
• So we are able to see that intelligence can take varying forms, different shapes and forms. And if people are able to solve the very practical problems in a way, which doesn't cause harm to nature, it's absolutely worth learning from.
• We look at the world as being very separate. And we only deal with the fragments. We don't deal with the relationships between those fragments or those elements. The work that I do is really about how everything on this planet is interconnected at a worldly level.
• I feel like what I can do really is to offer people an experience of that interconnectedness. much more than what words can carry. When I take people to these places and get them to experience these things, I realize I don't need to speak as much. The experience, brings something alive in them. All I need to do is be present as a facilitator to help them navigate that journey that they're going through. So that's really the work that I have to do, create a space that people can have these experiences. And I've seen people shifting, I've seen people's minds shifting, their actions shifting.
• I don't get bored by it. I don't get tired of it or exhausted by it because I feel like if we can just find a way to get more people to experience these things, they'll, change on their own. You don't need to police them. You don't need to impose anything on them. So, yeah, so that's how I feel like I'm able to continue with every batch of kids from schools that I take on these journeys. I realized that I just need to plant the seeds and water them a little bit, they will grow up into very strong trees on their own.

Stories of Kindness Received
There are so many stories like the cab driver who was willing to give us his entire earnings from us when we were short of local currency, the strangers in Kashmir who hosted my wife for 9 days when they themselves had very little food for the 6 kids at home, the Ladakhi Jeep driver who made space for more and more passengers so they can reach safety amidst the snow storm that was shutting down roadways, a flip camera just showing up in my life at the right time, the list is very long!

To conclude:

• Ability to be generous is not something that we need to worry about. I think it's natural to all of us, if we can just get past these little other layers that are obscuring our understanding right now.
• There's been so much generosity, I have an unconditional acceptance that I can't be pessimistic about the human race as a whole.