Peter talks to Dana Klisanin who is a psychologist, and futurist. She is the founder of ReWilding: Lab and pioneer of ReWilding Leadership™, an innovative approach that reconnects leaders with the wisdom of the natural world to foster creativity, resilience, and sustainability.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
References
Website: www.danaklisanin.com
Business: www.rewildinglab.co
Book: https://www.danaklisanin.com/chroniclesofgaia
Future Hack: https://a.co/d/8qxLdfa
Norbu’s Secret https://a.co/d/fb2547o
Greening Education Partnership https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000390028
Transcript
Peter Hayward: Madonna did sing that we are living in a material world but is that now the only ground for our imagintion and consciousness development? Is there a wilder option available to most of us?
Dana Klisanin: That's yes, rewilding the psyche or rewilding the imagination is another way I've been thinking about it. But yes, just We, in the rewilding movement proper, the conservation movement to rewild is to take a, an area that has been denatured and return it to its original state, whether that's a forest or a wetland or a prairie.
And I got to thinking about it in terms of what. In our own psyche, inside of the human being, what do we need to return? What do we need to put back? And what has been taken away, in other words, that we need to restore? And so that's where the rewilding, rewilding the human imagination comes in.
What do we need to do to make that happen? And of course, there's a laundry list. But the first and foremost is get back out in nature.
Peter Hayward: That is my guest today on FuturePod, Dana Klisanen a psychologist and futurist who is the founder of ReWilding: Lab and is the pioneer of ReWilding Leadership™, an innovative approach that reconnects leaders with the wisdom of the natural world to foster creativity, resilience, and sustainability.
Peter Hayward: Welcome to FuturePod, Dana.
Dana Klisanin: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here, Peter.
Peter Hayward: So what's the Dana Klisanin story? How did you get tied up with the Futures and Foresight community?
Dana Klisanin: It has been a fascinating journey to get tied up with the Futures community. I began in psychology, and I found that my interests gravitated towards towards information and communication technologies, and I had the good fortune to wander into a seminar being led by a futurist and educator, Béla Bánáthy, who taught evolutionary systems design, and he – what he was teaching – inspired me. At the time, I decided I'm going to apply his evolutionary systems design to information and communication technologies. And it was that movement or that moment, or that research that brought me into the futures field because I was suddenly looking at how could we use media and technologies to facilitate or promote planetary consciousness.
And I was very interested in Ken Wilber's work and after I applied Banathy's work to create kind of a theory I started applying Ken's work to the same theory and it expanded and got even larger. And that's what brought me into futures was this a sort of a passion for expanding human consciousness to, to the level of, care and concern for others and for the natural world.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, as soon as I hear the phrase expanding human consciousness, I remember, going to a seminar that Barbara Marks Hubbard presented, and Barbara was one of our great, thinkers in this space. Before then, when I was studying, yeah, when I was studying, I bumped into the words the work of people like Willis Harman and Teilhard de Chardin.
There's something, I'm going to say romantic and I don't mean that as a pejorative, but there is some notion that, human consciousness has not got limits on it, and we lean into it. I wonder also, Dana, whether that's recognizing that We're creating problems at our current level of thinking that our current level of thinking, maybe it is not equipped to find solutions for.
Dana Klisanin: That's very true. I agree. I think the thing that was interesting to me, or one of the things that I came out of humanistic psychology. So humanistic psychology, of course, was looking at the most functioning or high functioning instead of this disease model. And then that movement led to the transpersonal movement where we were looking at expanded states of consciousness. And so I do think though that we are capable of expanding our consciousness to look at some of these challenges from an altered perspective, from a different mindset. I think we have to make an effort to put ourselves into those mindsets.
And, however it is a, it's a romantic notion in the sense that if we look at the reality on the ground. as Ken would say, or has said, the largest percentage of the world is still in warring and tribalism mentality, right? It's hard to put these kind of expanded states and notions out there when you're dealing with almost like a fundamentalist mentality around the world in multiple places.
Peter Hayward: Yes. One of the things Ken said was that every human being's level of personal development starts at zero. In other words, we spend our life from zero, whereas technology starts at the latest technology. So the kids born now are born into this network, plugged in digital persona. But in terms of their internal development, who am I? What is good? What is wrong? Everybody starts at zero. There is no fast tracking for development, consciousness development, and moral development.
Dana Klisanin: Yes, well said. That's absolutely startlingly correct.
Peter Hayward: I think Ken also said there, therein lies the importance of culture, that culture can structure and support faster development. Everybody doesn't have to go through every psychological crisis in order to build a healthy functioning psychology. We can actually have a culture that actually makes it so that we can move quickly through those stages. And, back to your point, if we build our cultures and our societies on this notion of what builds a healthy functioning, functioning. Human being, then, maybe we can start to. Push the ceiling of consciousness development.
Dana Klisanin: Yes. And I think that is exactly whatever inspired me to think about applying these ideas to media and technology, because I thought if we can create that's the thing that informs culture, informs education around the world.
Put some of these ideas into it, then you might help a child develop more quickly as you were saying. However, over the time that I've been working on this, there's been great changes in the way that we receive and interface with technology. It's not just a small number of channels that we get our information from, we have more and more people – the bulk of people around the world are getting their information from social media. And inside of silos, so that if you want to have a certain kind of impact it's actually become more difficult.
Peter Hayward: Yeah let's go in a bit deeper. So in terms of your work. As you were learning and then being exposed to these big theories. What's the kind of core of your theory of how we best build from a wholeness possibility, the best functioning, the most growth in human consciousness?
Dana Klisanin: If you would have asked me that 10 years ago, I would have had a different answer. But today where I'm at is a return to nature, which is again, another romantic idea, but I do believe that to counterbalance our highly interconnected technological framework and society that we need to bring in the grounded, wild, natural understanding of our interconnectivity in a much more real and holistic way throughout every aspect of our education system.
And that through that we have a chance to empower ourselves and others with a relationship with nature that has more capacity to expand awareness, I believe, than what I might have thought in years past.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. I think you've coined a phrase rewilding the psych. Is that kind of the thing that you've painted as of the moment?
Dana Klisanin: That's yes, rewilding the psyche or rewilding the imagination is another way I've been thinking about it. But yes, just we, in the rewilding movement proper, the conservation movement, to rewild is to take a, an area that has been denatured and return it to its original state, whether that's a forest or a wetland or a prairie.
And I got to thinking about it in terms of wha, in our own psyche, inside of the human being, what do we need to return? What do we need to put back? And what has been taken away, in other words, that we need to restore? And so that's where the rewilding, rewilding the human imagination comes in.
What do we need to do to make that happen? And, of course, there's a laundry list. But the first and foremost is to get back out in nature.
Peter Hayward: There was a, there was an article yesterday in the Australian media about how they're arguing that for young people's health to reintroduce the notion of risky playtime. Rather than having very safe and managed play spaces, to actually create play spaces that were quite random, creative. Some would say dangerous in the sense that, people, things could happen. They may do things, they may fall over, they may, you know, and the notion that it’s better to have a broken arm and a healthy psyche than actually the other way around kind of thing.
So absolutely. So this is not new. This, these ideas of letting things get a bit wilder are not radically new ideas right at the moment, are they?
Dana Klisanin: No, they're not. In fact around the world, there are many forest schools for young children and also a lot of schools now have brought gardening into the schools, at least as some way to get children's hands actually in the dirt if they can't be out in a forest or whatnot, that they can at least learn about the process of growing things. And so it is a spreading movement and obviously in some places more well known than in others.
Peter Hayward: You're not saying, of course, that adults themselves can't benefit from the same things, but particularly with young people, this is really important in their early stages of development.
Dana Klisanin: I think so, because I think it goes back to what you were saying and Ken says about, everybody being born at this blank slate and that when we, our ancestors were born, they grew up with a much closer relationship with the natural world. And so today's youth are not growing up with that same closeness to the natural world. So certainly, to get our youth started on a healthy trajectory of development, getting them out in nature earlier on is ideal, but definitely, for us, for adults of any age, there's just an increasing amount of research showing that just simply something like going for a walk for 60 minutes outside can lower your anxiety, reduce stress, there's research related to bird songs, just all kinds of environmental psychology research, showing how beneficial the natural world is. Yes, any age, but certainly starting off young is a very healthy approach.
Peter Hayward: Why is it so beneficial? I can imagine reasons why, but why do you think this is so beneficial?
Dana Klisanin: I think it's beneficial because it's part of who we are and that it's just, we human beings like to separate ourselves out, and say, it's us and them and that, whether that's a different cultural group or we definitely like to do it with animals, we're human, you're animal. And we like to not think of ourselves as animal. And we think of nature as outside versus inside. We have this inside space and that outside space. But in fact, as I often like to start off when I'm speaking is to just have people, take a deep breath and hold it and, to see how long they can hold their breath. And all of us, it's a very short time frame that we can hold our breath no matter how long it is.
And the purpose of that exercise is to say that, that's how connected you are to the natural world. Because that air you're breathing right now inside this room, it wasn't manufactured inside this room. It's manufactured by the trees outside. It's manufactured by the planet itself. And that, it's, like we have this false notion that we exist in this bubble and that nature's out there and that's part of what we have to burst this bubble, and in order to do that, this that's where this idea of rewilding the imagination comes in. And just re educating the way we think about our relationship with the natural world so that we see ourselves as much, much more connected to it than we currently do.
Peter Hayward: In the positive psychology movement that I'm familiar with, particularly the work around hope theory, where people generate this notion of agency and resilience in the face of difficulty and in the work of Seligman in relationship and meaning and agency and achievement in life.
I wonder, I don't want things in a neat bow Dana, but is there a golden thread that runs through these things?
Dana Klisanin: I think it's an interesting point that you make about a golden thread because, I became interested in rewilding the human imagination around the it was right before COVID.
That I had attended a seminar with Paul Kingsnorth, who is a writer, and he did a seminar in, on Sherkin Island in Ireland on rewilding your words. And I write as a hobby –speculative fiction – and I was very interested in taking that workshop. So I did. And I got so much out of it that was beyond writing because it made me start to think about these ideas that I'm sharing now, that it's not just our words that we need to rewild, but our entire imagination that we need to rewild.
And I go back to that to say that it was right before COVID, that happened. And then. when COVID happened, I had been doing some reading and research around antifragility and these things coalesced, and I started to conduct some research on what were the character strengths that people were using to get through COVID.
And so bringing this conversation back to the positive psychology realm, actually, when I did that research. I found several components, the character strengths that people were, one of them was creativity. It always came up. Critical thinking kept coming up. Those two were top. And I think that, maybe if I had to say, I know you're not trying to put a bow on it, however, it seems that, those two things go hand in hand, right? Critical thinking and creativity. You need both of those for most things. I would like to say creativity because the natural world is so creative and regenerative. And, we are so focused now on creating regenerative societies and systems to improve various futures.
So I don't know if that speaks to your question. Or, you want to narrow it down more?
Peter Hayward: back, you've taken creativity and I'm wondering whether the essence of the rewilding of the imagination and the psyche is around the creativity of who I am and who I could be.
I'm not in a box, I'm not in a category. I'm more, I was very drawn to the work of Zygmunt Bauman, the sociologist in his book, Liquid Modernity, when he coined the phrase, and it was a very chilling phrase, of we are all now personally responsible for our identity. Modernity goes out of its way to not give us an identity. It is your burden to produce and be responsible for the one you give yourself. As you described, the freedom of nature, there's a lot of, also the chaos and the messiness and getting your hands dirty. Identity might just be a messy, sloppy, like wandering through nature, not on a manicured path, slogging through the grass and getting the seeds on the legs of your pants. It's this notion of mess, in mess lies creativity and lies the essence of who I am. Critical thinking for me turns on this notion of, but what do I want, what could I be? What do I want the situation to be, to actually be able to choose something different over something else to me is the essence of the critical part that you're talking about.
Dana Klisanin: I, I, yes, the narrative, the ability to frame our own narratives. And that was also one of the outcomes of the COVID research was at that time, people were more flexible and more willing to change their narratives because they couldn't go to work any longer. They had to work from home.
Their children couldn't go to school. There was so many changes around them that it just forced this sort flexibility. Of narratives and we've seen that since that time people have wanted to hold on to the narratives that they've created. Most, or at least a very, a large percentage of people don't necessarily want to work in an office anymore.
They want to have, at least a flexible ability to work from home part-time. And so I think that this ability to choose, to choose your own narrative is really crucial and it's crucial to mental health and wellbeing. And it's also crucial to our ability to imagine possible futures.
Peter Hayward: And again, I wonder whether the young, and this is not a criticism, it's just an observation that when you're young, it's hard to be critical when you haven't learnt enough about the world to understand what the choices are. For me to think critically about what's possible what's the stock of images and narratives and stories that I start from? And if children don't have a rich source of stock of starting narratives, then how do I create something that sounds authentically me, as opposed to something I saw on Instagram or Tik Tok
Dana Klisanin: Absolutely. And that's why we know when you circle back to think about how your narratives are constructed, if your narratives are all constructed from a technological orientation, that's going to be a different narrative than a narrative that's constructed through a relationship with the other people and the natural world.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. I'm not going to say my parents were careless parents because they weren't, but the typical thing of me growing up was my mother would kick me out of the house. And she would tell me what time to be back for dinner. And then it was pretty much, you went off and had your own Huckleberry Finn adventure every day. The parents didn't know what you were doing and they didn't know where you were going. They just said, you're back here by five o'clock. Probably that world's not possible anymore, but that to me if I look at rewilding, that's what you're talking about, rewilding spaces. Give kids the space, trust them to go out and find their way through the world without you helicoptering over them.
Dana Klisanin: Yes, I, and I had a similar experience growing up I, for at least part of my childhood was in Florida and I would go out to the beach, go surfing, go sailing.
In this huge, just my sisters and I, and we would set off and my mom was just trusted that I guess we would come back and we did fortunately. But yeah it certainly created a love within me for not only the ocean, but the natural world at large. And I do think that it is important to think about, not just our children, because obviously a lot of people now have grown up – a lot of generations younger than us, have grown up without this experience that we're talking about. So it's not just people who are now. Three years old or six years old or 10 years old. It's people that are 30 years old 40 years old that have also most, at least some of them, have grown up without as much connection with nature.
And so they can also benefit from. From getting out and doing some of these practices and see how it informs and changes the way they think, the way they take action, the way they lead, the way they parent, it does touch everything. And in fact, if nothing else, other than to simply help them de-stress, get away from technology, get out there and just get in nature, take a walk. It's not going to harm you in other words
Peter Hayward: What are the things that are getting your attention that you're paying really careful attention to right now?
Dana Klisanin: I'm paying attention right now to how, especially in the futures community how we can use these ideas of rewilding, regeneration, to help inform the way we think about futures, the way we do futures. I was at a conference in it was the World Future Sudy Federations 50th anniversary conference.
And we did a seminar on the transpersonal within futures. And we had such a wonderful reaction to the way that just a few transpersonal questions like simply saying to the people in attendance to talk about a transpersonal experience that they'd had in their life. And this was after, of course, explaining what a transpersonal experience is.
But it just opened people up and across the board. Everyone said, wow, that was such a bonding experience. It brought us into interconnection with the other people much faster than any other type of exercise that people might do to try to create this kind of bonding. So, I guess one of the signals that I am paying attention to at this time is how to bring transpersonal more into the futures world because that was originally my interest when, back when I was in psychology was transpersonal psychology, which led to integral psychology. And, I know that it's there in futures, but I think it could be expanded. I think there could be more of it. And so that, along with the rewilding work and some work around the antifragile mindset are some of the things that have my attention.
Peter Hayward: So let's lean into transpersonal because it is a fascinating space and we both know that there is a fear for many people to go into this space, both personally and professionally, and yet against the fear, there is almost like a hunger for people when they're given the chance. It's a place of, if I say it's a space of danger, I mean that in the sense that danger in the sense of I don't know what happens next. This isn't necessarily anodyne and safe. This is risky, and it has the possibility of learning. And I wonder, is there a, is there something in this transpersonal that kind of links back to this kind of broader notion of trying to step into spaces where we don't need to feel we have to have control?
Dana Klisanin: Yes. Absolutely. There is. Because the transpersonal is something that we don't have control over, right? When it happens – an experience of wonder and awe, of beauty, of a deep and profound connection with everything there is, there is something that sure you can cultivate it, however when it happens. And so it's, not within our control.
But what is within our control, and beautifully within our control, is, if we've had such an experience is to share it with others. Not that it's easy, because often people say, oh, I can't find the words, I can't describe it, like when people have, let's say, a near-death experience, and they say, oh I can't put words on it, but then they do, they try their best, and I think that's what we found with our workshop was that people just love to have the chance to share it with someone because there's not enough opportunities where we're able to sit down with another person and say, wow, this wonderful thing happened in my life.
And even, some of the experiences that were shared had come out of a grief experience or painful places that led to a transformative transpersonal experience. And so people are hungry for the ability to, A, have the experiences, but B, also share their experiences.
Peter Hayward: In terms of just for the listener's benefit, obviously a lot of professionals are listening to these kinds of podcasts. In terms of setting up something that is safe for people to participate, what's some of the things that you can do to set up something there that people can feel both welcomed, but also feel safe
Dana Klisanin: I think that, the most important thing, and what we did was simply explain what a transpersonal experience is, and then say, if this isn't something that you feel comfortable with, and you don't want to share this, you don't have to participate. In other words, you certainly never would want to make anyone feel like they, they had to participate.
There was no one who left our, the room who didn't want to share their transpersonal experience. And generally speaking, a transpersonal experience is not necessarily going to be something that's going to make someone feel unsafe. Now there may be parts of their story, of the narrative that led to the transpersonal experience that they might feel a little exposed sharing for, for example, same way that you know, with the antifragile mindset, some of that research ties closely to post-traumatic growth.
Post-traumatic growth is an area of research that's closely aligned with the antifragile mindset in some regards. And so, if someone's saying they grew from trauma, they may feel some trauma having to share the trauma that they experienced before they had the growth.
So you could say maybe something could be true in a similar way for a transpersonal experience, but not to the same degree because a transpersonal experience itself generally isn't traumatic.
Peter Hayward: Correct. Fascinating. Fascinating. I had a previous podcast before yours, I had Rodney Frederickson, and he's working in the notion of somatic futures, there is the event that causes trauma, and we then carry the trauma in our body. And it's the ongoing embodiment of trauma that is the thing that we need to work with.
Dana Klisanin: Yes. That would be like “The Body Keeps the Score.” That was very popular during COVID, the book. And I think it's an interesting point because, we don't so much think about that as the opposite way, right?
The body also keeps the score of awe and wonder and beauty and love, right? And how do we and because we don't give it as much attention, the only place that people, and they're not even comfortable. Okay. So let's just say people think of a sexual experience as something that they might be able to relate to and say, okay, my body remembers that experience. However, that's just one of so many different types of transpersonal experiences that our body is keeping. And some of these are experiences, out in the natural world are likewise experiences our body is recalling seeing a wild animal suddenly race in front of you, or a hawk above you, or a dolphin leaping all of those leave their impression on our body in the same way that trauma might, but most hopefully with a more positive impression.
Peter Hayward: Is it about trying to connect people with their bodies more in other words, getting them out of their head, which is obviously part of their body, but to actually getting them in touch with their body and their body in space and their body in place and having a language for their body, having a literacy about what their body's feeling
Dana Klisanin: I think so, and it's also about having a language for expanding our body and not thinking of our body just ending where our skin ends. And again, that goes back to this, the breathing exercise. Your body doesn't end with your skin because you're constantly taking in the body of the planet around you, the oxygen is coming in and out, and you are therefore interconnected with everything around you.
And we do tend to think of our body as just this, inside of our skin. And I do think it's important that we get our body outside of office rooms and get out and maybe barefoot in nature and feel that connection. That if, because air is, again, it's something that's intellectually, in other words, it's something you can't see. If it was a color and we saw it coming in and out of our body, then we might think of ourselves as more connected to the trees and the things around us.
But if we're outside and we are touching the bark of a tree or picking up a leaf or in some other way, using our senses, then sure, it could definitely lead to, as you were saying, this expanded awareness of our interconnectivity.
Peter Hayward: I'm going to move you into the communication question, but I want to particularly talk about the book you've written what's the book about?
Dana Klisanin: I did write a book. It's a first in a series called the Chronicles of G.A.I.A. And in that title, Chronicles of G.A.I.A. is an acronym for the Global Anticipatory Intelligence Agency. So, there is someone from the future who works for G.A.I.A., who comes back to the youth of our time, to a team of young people at a boarding school and recruits them to tackle a series of missions that are important to protecting the environment.
So the first book, “Future Hack,” is setting the stage of what as what I just described of this time traveler coming to our time, recruiting the children, then leaving their boarding school and going out.
The second book that I just completed for the series is called “Norbu's Secret.” And that book takes place in Ecuador, in the Amazon. Rainforest and it is focused on the jaguars and the Indigenous Achuar people, as far as empowering youth to know more about Indigenous peoples and also protecting the rainforest.
Peter Hayward: Wow. And so what are you trying to do with the books? I suspect there's also a deeper motive.
Dana Klisanin: The motive is to empower youth who are in growing numbers struggling with eco-anxiety and anxiety around climate change to create a narrative in which they are able to, A. handle that anxiety, to give them tools, and also just to empower them around the ability to take actions. To feel inspired and empowered, to give them agency and education– introduce them to some of these ideas that aren't commonly taught in school. UNESCO just recently came out with their “Greening Education Policies” just last week, I believe.
The idea that UNESCO would like to get more environmental education into schools around the world. And so part of this book series is this idea of bringing in environmental education. It's connected to an online ed tech site called Mission G.A.I.A. And at Mission G.A.I.A. youth can learn about whatever mission the kids in the story are on. They can get more details. They can go deeper, learn facts, and create their own slogans and artwork, their own campaigns – to just to give them a feeling of an ability to participate while educating them.
Peter Hayward: One of things that I've been paying attention to Dana is what is it that an elder does to support young people? As an avid book reader, I go back to the David Copperfield and then recently the Demon Copperhead of Barbara King Solver of young people just encountering adult after adult that they couldn't rely on and having to find their own way through the world. What is it that adults If they were good elders, if they were good ancestors, what, would we be doing to support young people and maybe they happen in your book?
Dana Klisanin: We do have some elders in the book that support the young people, but in a broad sense it's an – one of the points in the UNESCO education Policies was this idea of bringing an elder. So it's interesting that you bring it up, because I think that certainly one of the most important things elders can do is share their stories of their connection with the natural world.
And also, just this resiliency, and the long view, because as we all know, when we're young, we want things to happen instantly. And it's hard to be patient or to understand just how complicated things are, how interconnected and complicated. And so I think sharing stories of “successful stories” is helpful, but also just sharing this idea of a longer timeframe that something might take time.
I know that it is hard and challenging for young people because – and I feel their urgency and pain. When you have statistics of if we warm another degree. we're going to lose all this life in the ocean. We have huge predictions of extinction of species in the foreseeable future – if actions don't change if behaviors don't change. And so it is hard to look someone in the eye and say, it just takes time because they're like we don't have time.
And so, I do think that it's, however that said, that's the facts. It is hard to get things to change. Another thing, that's inspiring to me and that I think is inspiring to young people is the idea that, there's the X prize and there's various monies that go towards innovation and that at any time, it is true that we can have an innovation that does change things. And so too, to study, to learn, to hold on to the passion, and to just apply yourself in whatever way you feel drawn to, because you or your friend that's standing there beside you might actually have a solution that, that does, change things, it's rare that one thing can do that, but we have, new techniques coming out all the time for carbon capture and there's a lot of room there for young people to innovate.
Peter Hayward: You have mentioned it a couple of times and we haven't really leaned into it. The antifragile mindset, which contains an element of resilience, which contains an element of just persistence. It's through the repetition of act on, act that change is sustained in the long term. It's the way you get fitter. It's the way you get stronger. You don't lift one weight once you lift one weight, a hundred times every week for X number of years and you get stronger.
Dana Klisanin: Yes. And one of the things that's is interesting to me about the antifragile mindset is, first off, it's a theory that is currently always undergoing its own, let's say weightlifting to, to find its strength, but one of the things that I have written about recently is the idea that this antifragile – antifragility is something that we all could have.
Especially if we are taught that it exists. And as we know, until something is [shown to be] possible, then it might not be possible. And so right now, we're taught, or most people are taught, that resilience is the place, the place of, I don't know, the goal.
However, if we expand resilience – if we think of it as a spectrum – is what I'm trying to say in which antifragility is beyond resiliency, but it doesn't mean that you cannot be fragile. That you have one side of your psyche that is fragile and one side – let's just say you have the fragility on one side, resiliency in the middle, and then antifragility on the other end, and all kinds of shades in the middle. If we were taught that we had this antifragile capacity, then when we're in a fragile state, it would help us to come out of the fragile state, possibly more quickly, not that time matters in some of these things,, but simply sometimes people get stuck in a fragile place and they think they're never going to come out of it, and resiliency is only bringing them back to the status quo. But if they had the idea that I can actually be stronger from what I suffered, then that's just another way of thinking, that, we currently don't teach – we don't teach it to adults, much less to young people.
Peter Hayward: Yes, it's the narrative we tell of ourselves.
And to look back to times in your life when it's been dark and when you've not seen change and you've felt fragility, but to tell that when you are standing here now, to say what you achieved to get to where you are now, that the actual fragility of the past is necessary for you to create the narrative sense of where I've got to, notwithstanding.
Dana Klisanin: Yes, I often like to explain it by talking about the butterfly because it starts as a caterpillar, and if it only sees itself as the caterpillar, then [it can’t grow or overcome its limations]. It has to go through the chrysalis process and turn to actual jelly before it comes out with wings. But we often limit ourselves –to not allow ourselves to go through the jelly process to come out as the antifragile with the wings – we just think of the jelly as a place you don't want to go. You don't want to get in any kind of difficult situation. And by trying to avoid difficult situations, people don't make decisions because they're afraid to make decisions. It impacts every level, leadership all the way to the top.
Peter Hayward: Let's. Draw this to, I won't call it a conclusion, but let's at least put a small little bow on it to finish the chat, rewilding the imagination, where we started the conversation, covered a lot of ground. In terms of where you're going forward and what are the pieces of work that, what are work and project that you've got coming forward and what are the things that people that are interested could pay attention to and and follow you?
Dana Klisanin: The work that I am doing right now, research-wise, is looking into this application of rewilding the imagination to help us open up our ability to anticipate and navigate future possibilities. So as far as the futures field, that's an area that I'm looking at. I'm personally working on a book for the public on rewilding. It's not specifically focused towards the futures community, but it's just more health-related for people interested in rewilding that's currently what I'm working on.
Peter Hayward: And, is there a third book in the
Dana Klisanin: In the trilogy – I said trilogy, in the G.A.I.A. series? The G.A.I.A. series, yes there will be a third one. It will most likely be something around oceans. So where this one was about the rainforest, the next book, I actually haven’t written the outline, but I do have a character in the story who grew up near the beach, and I imagine that character, becoming the advocate for the oceans and the coral reefs and so forth. So, most likely, it will be.
Peter Hayward: Fantastic. Look, it's been terrific to have this conversation. We just had a couple of goes at it. So it's finally good that it's happened. And
Dana Klisanin: Yes.
Peter Hayward: Congratulations on the book on the G.A.I.A. series. Lovely also for me just to talk to someone who's happy to canvas notions of consciousness, the psychology and also the events that happen outside the self, the things that, both inspire us, create awe, and link us as human beings. So again I've had a wonderful time talking to you. Thank you so much for taking some time out to have a chat to the Future Pod community.
Dana Klisanin: Thank you, Peter. It's been a real pleasure.
Peter Hayward: I hope you enjoyed my chat with Roger. His book is a great read and I recommend it. Plus Roger has given you a great set of references on his Show page on the website. FuturePod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the Pod then please check out the Patreon link on our website. I'm Peter Hayward thanks for joining me today. Till next time.