Episode 90 - Brant Secunda (Huichol Shaman and Healer) and Mark Allen (Six-Time Ironman Triathlon Champion) guests: Part 1 Fit Soul – Fit Body: 9 Keys to a Healthier, Happier You

Transcript

“Duncan Campbell, I heard about your podcast a few months ago, and have been deeply listening to all the dialogues with your fantastic friends/guests. Your words, ideas, and wisdom are truly inspirational. You have evoked a new appetite for knowledge in me that I hope to share with a starving younger generation. Thank you for doing what you do, and creating a unique space, void of boundaries and classification. A breath of fresh air! Much love and respect.” – Amit Kapadiya

In furtherance of creating and maintaining the planetary dialogues now required in the 21st century, I featured a special series of dialogues with myself and other elders in the weeks leading up to and including the 2008 Olympics hosted by China and the U.S. 2008 elections. Those dialogues can be listened to separately on this site or as gathered as a series on my website www.livingdialogues.com under the collective title “Engaged Elder Wisdom Dialogues”. They address various specific political aspects of our planetary crisis, with its dangers and opportunities for creating and sustaining a visionary and evolutionary shift. (We remember that the Chinese character for “crisis” is often described as meaning both “danger” when visioned from a fear perspective, and “opportunity” when visioned from a wisdom perspective.)

In all my Living Dialogues from their inception I talk in various ways about the call to generate dialogues across generational, ethnic, gender, religious, and national boundaries -- building bridges of understanding and wisdom in the cooperative spirit and reaching out -- required by our 21st century realities, and the essential roles that we all are called to play in our evolution for it to take place.

This is the time for renewed dialogue, for visionary and inspiring discourse producing practical and innovative ways of living and sharing together, to engage the deep spirit and spirituality of our own elder wisdom and youthful inspiration, and in so doing to experience and exemplify that “Dialogue is the Language of Evolutionary Transformation”™.

And that is what we all do, in our mutual roles as host, deep listeners, and guests, when we gather together here from all parts of the globe in Living Dialogues.

SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM. TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STEVE MCINTOSH, FRANCES MOORE LAPPE, STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART, ECKHART TOLLE, MICHAEL MEADE, ANGELES ARRIEN, SOBONFU SOME. TED SORENSEN, ROBERT THURMAN, DAVID MARANISS, DAVID BOREN, GEORGE LAKOFF, TOM HAYDEN, JAY INSLEE, BRACKEN HENDRICKS, BOB GOUGH, VAN JONES, BARBARA MARX HUBBARD, LESTER BROWN, DAVID MENDELL, DEBORAH TANNEN, JOHN GRAY, ARI BERK, SUSAN JACOBY, JOSEPH M. MARSHALL III, JOHN O’DONOHUE, AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

The best way to reach me is through my website: www.livingdialogues.com. Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program.

All the best, Duncan.

P.S. As a way of further acknowledging and appreciating your part in these dialogues, and since I cannot personally answer all of them, I have begun to publish from time to time in these pages some of the appreciations received from you.

Announcer:  This program is brought to you by PersonalLifeMedia.com.

Brant Secunda:  Hi, I'm Brant Secunda, and I'm really happy to be here with Living Dialogues, and I think that it's so valuable for us to come together in dialogue, and to speak together, and to communicate about these things which are so important, and we think that the book Fit Soul, Fit Body helps to bring alive these valuable ideas that are important for us all, and so, by being here with Living Dialogues, I feel it's really helpful, also for myself.  Thank you.

Mark Allen:  I'm Mark Allen, co-author of Fit Soul, Fit Body with Brant Secunda.  Living Dialogues with Duncan is a true, beautiful experience to be with somebody who talks from the heart, and gets people to talk from their heart as well.  And through that, we're all touched deep in the soul; not just in our minds, but deep in our soul, deep in our bodies.  It touches the genetics of who we are as human beings, as two-leggeds on this planet, and this is a rare opportunity to have a dialogue with another human being on that level.

Duncan Campbell:  From time immemorial, beginning with indigenous councils and ancient wisdom traditions, through the work of western visionaries such as Plato, Galileo and quantum physicist David Bohm, mutually participatory dialogue has been seen as the key to evolving and transforming consciousness.  Evoking a flow of meaning; a dia (flow) of logos, meaning beyond what any one individual can bring through alone.  So join us now, as together with you, the active deep listener, we evoke and engage in Living Dialogues.

Welcome to the program.  I'm your host, Duncan Campbell, and I'm delighted to welcome as my guests Mark Allen and Brant Secunda.  Mark Allen is six time Ironman Triathlon Champion, and Brant Secunda, his great friend and mentor for twenty years, is Huichol shaman and healer for the last three decades, and so, I want to welcome you both to the program, Mark and Brant.

Brant Secunda: 

Duncan

, we're happy to be here.

Mark Allen:  Thank you Duncan, great to hear your voice again.

Duncan Campbell:  Yes, we had such a great initial program, and so there is something happening in the air, now.  There is a zeitgeist blowing, of bringing together and reactivating the indigenous and deep primal understanding of what really makes us happy and sustainable in our lives, with the modern mind's sense of achievement and ingenuity in even a healthy kind of competitiveness.  And we can bring those two things together in real emotional balance and enlightenment, and have a real, joyous life.  I think that will be the theme, now; let's make that our theme as we go forward into the second part of this program. 

So with that, I'd like now, in our second part of the program, to talk about the theme of laughter, and the theme of community.  And perhaps, let's start with laughter.  Brant, you have a wonderful story that you tell on yourself here, about how as a young twenty year old, early on in your apprenticeship with Don Jose, you were going to take a walk with other people in the village, that was a fairly long walk, I forget how many hours, or whether it was more than a day.  But in a traditional, conventional, American consumer way, you loaded up your pack with eighty pounds of goods that you thought you might need, that turned out, of course, to be not necessary, and as you put it, perfectly useless.  And then you had quite an experience of being teased about that as you took your walk.  So, tell that story.

Brant Secunda:  Yeah, that's a nice story.  And here I was, with my giant backpack, and I really don't know what I had in there, but like you said, it was a lot of things in there, that I thought I had to have for that one day hike, which we were going to camp for the night, just off the trail.  And, there I was with my giant pack, and there was a bunch of Huichol, numerous Huichols were with me with a little bag that they had, with a blanket over it, for their luggage.  And so, at one point, I just couldn't go any more; I was tired, and I chose not to keep going, and I said, “Oh, I have to rest”.  And I put my pack down on the side, and this lady, who was about sixty at the time, came by and said, “Here, let me help you”.  Grabbed my pack, goes running off, and I thought, “Uh oh, I'd better go now, if I want to follow my pack”.  And so, she carried my pack for a little while, and they kept up with that story every time for years and years, and even now, sometimes, someone will be with me when we pass that spot, and will go, “Oh, you need some help with your pack?”, and they just love to tease, and to joke.  And it's their way, really; it's showing love for one another, to tease each other, to joyfully tease, and to laugh. 

And they use laughter really as a tool of transformation, just to go along with what we've been speaking about all morning, here, and how laughter really opens the heart, and helps make our body, as well as our souls feel happy.  And that's one of the things we talk about in the book, Fit Soul, Fit Body, is how laughter and joy can really just open us up, and the Huichols use that; they're teasing and laughing all day with one another.  Carrying on, it's beautiful, to be a part of that.  And in also community, it's within the context of a community.  Most villages have a few hundred people, and so, there's this idea of community holding the person together, which I think.  You live in Boulder, that's also a beautiful community, and I think that for the Huichols, it's such a part of their tradition, to be a part of a community, where people are practicing, these same, timeless traditions, and ancient ways of being, and they laugh together, they pray together, they celebrate life together, with different ceremonies for the seasons, or for the rain, or for the harvest, and it's just a beautiful way of being on this altar of Mother Earth.

Duncan Campbell:  Oh, so well said.  I have to just join in, and not only just celebrate with you, that experience in how you've described it, but also to share, as I mentioned before, my own experience of being in the jungle with Don Lupe, the shaman that I worked with, the Huichol shaman and his wife, and it happened to be my birthday...

Brant Secunda:  Uh huh.

Duncan Campbell:  ...and this was about fifteen years ago, and all of a sudden, this shaman's wife said, “Oh, es el cumpleanos del gordo”; (laughter) it's the birthday of the fat one, right?  So gordo means fat, and of course, I was overweight at the time, and really quite sensitive about it, and it was said with such love, because she then started calling me gordito, a sort of affectionate term for 'the little fat one', you know?

Brant Secunda:  Mm hmm.

For full transcript, please contact Duncan Campbell