Malcolm's Podcast

John 0:46

So welcome , malcolm , to your own podcast , slayer Dragons . We've chosen to begin the podcast with having you in conversation as the first guest on the podcast , and then you will be welcoming lots of guests over the next weeks and months . So we thought it was a good idea to get to know you a little bit , the why behind the podcast , and give everyone a bit of a sneak preview of what to expect from the podcast team . So we're looking forward to that conversation over the next 30 , 40 minutes or so . We've chosen the name for the podcast Slayer Dragons , as it's the same name as your book , and I wonder whether we could start by you saying a little bit about why you wrote the book , like the story behind the book .

Malcolm 1:42

Oh , thank you , John . Well , it's my third book and both the other books took around four years to write . Slayer Dragons with Compassion took seven months to write and it feels like it wrote itself . So the inspiration for it and I want to just stress in advance , this is not a grief memoir , but the inspiration for it was the death by suicide of my daughter , melissa , in 2014 . And I had to find some resources to deal with that . You don't just lose a child and go , oh well , I'll agree for a week and then move on .

Malcolm 2:19

And so I started recognizing that I already had some resources well in place . So I joined a number of different support groups , such as Samaritan's support group for those who've been bereaved by suicide , other ongoing groups , and I realized that one of the things I needed to stress was how much we need support at these times , but also we need to have a support system already in place . You can't just suddenly magic a fantastic support system out of nowhere , and I think , in the times we're living in , the recognition is that probably the most important chapter in the book is the chapter on Sangha , and Sangha is a Buddhist term for the communion with others of like mind . It was originally about monks , but now it's considered to be a Sangha , is considered to be a spiritual connection and community . I've been thoroughly educated , and not in a way that I would have chosen , but a way that's chosen me by the death of my daughter , and that was the inspiration for the book the understanding of what happens in those moments of extreme adversity and how we manage them . So over the next few years after she dies , I felt like I wanted to find a way of catharting through , not by going into groups and bashing my head on the floor like they used to do in the old days of encounter groups , but finding a way of actually getting this out of my system into something creative .

Malcolm 3:52

And I came across a chap in 2018 , who's now a good friend called Ben Crabe , and I was a student of the and Ben and I talked about doing originally about doing a group for empaths , which was the original inspiration to sort of recognize that Melissa was extremely empathic and when we're extremely empathic , we tend to suffer more because we can feel all the pain of the world and we have to really learn how to resource ourselves in order not to be overwhelmed by that . So the group I did just didn't quite float . But I said one day , how about if we did a book ? And he said , yeah , let's have a go at that . Ben is an editor and also a publisher , so he had lots of capacity for doing a book and we started to put together the framework for a book . Originally it was going to be called the Empath's Journey , but actually that didn't feel right and I realized there was a term that I had been using in my groups for many , many years , which is slay your dragons with compassion , and that term , what it means , is , don't go into things half-cocked . If you're going to deal with something , go all the way in and tease it out and deal with it so that you can move on from it . It's about speaking our truth . It's about learning to give difficult feedback when that's there to be done .

Malcolm 5:28

And so this book started to be born , first of all with Melissa's story , which was obviously a very moving story , but then finding and I normally hate these , these ideas of 10 ways to do this , but it did feel like there were 10 practices . So that's really what we've set up , and the book has actually sort of had its own life , and I was very touched when the first endorsement came from Elizabeth Gilbert , who wrote he pray love , and she and I had a very deep conversation about the loss of her partner . And when she came and spoke with alternatives , which was a series that I used to run , as in James' Piccadilly , and Elizabeth gave me a beautiful quote , it really heartened me to see that she'd been touched by the book . And then we put on Eckhart's Holour at the Alba Hall in 2019 . And I said to him would you be open to reading my manuscripts ? And he said , yeah , sure , and I gave him the manuscript and didn't think much more of it .

Malcolm 6:26

About six months later , just before we were going to press with the book , eckhart wrote a very beautiful endorsement as well for the book .

Malcolm 6:34

So , and then I was traveling a bit with Jack Cornfield , who we took to Spain to do a retreat , and again the same thing with Jack wrote a really lovely review of the book as well , and so I started to gather some very good affirmation , which gave me a lot of inspiration .

Malcolm 6:51

Not that , hey , I've got all the celebrities sort of like , you know , sort of writing about the book , but actually that people had been touched by it , and I think that's really what I wanted to do in this work , and what I really want to do in the podcast series , is to touch people's hearts , to have people connect . This is what I do in groups to have people connect with a story , with their own story , and suddenly feel like they've been fully penetrated by the energy that comes through . So I've got to have some very interesting guests in the next little while who are going to talk about basically their seminal moments , the times when they've had to meet their dragons , slay their dragon and move on . I love dragons , by the way . This is not about becoming a sort of a nasty piece of work that's out there slapping dragons to death .

John 7:41

Thank you for saying that about dragons . Thank you , I mean they're amazing affirmations for the book in terms of people who are kind of really doing so much work in this field . Could you also say , malcolm , a little bit about your own professional experience , just to give people a sense of your capacity for holding these conversations and the holding you do in your other work ? I mean , I really appreciate you beginning with your own personal experience and the tragedy of losing your daughter , melissa , but yeah , could you say a bit about your professional experience ?

Malcolm 8:25

Yes , I'm now in my 70s when I went to public school and my father was very keen that I had a profession , so I started studying accounting , which fitted me like a tank , not like a glove , and although I'm quite good with figures , it wasn't what I wanted to do with my life . I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life . But one day a friend of mine said hey , there's a vacancy in the estate agency firm where I work , and I thought this is a giant leap for me . I went from a profession to a semi-profession and started working as an estate agent . And then one night I was with some mates around at my friend's house and he had these tiny little pieces of blotting paper . He said this is LSD , why don't we just try this together ? So he put Pink Floyd on and we're sort of lying down and sort of , like you know , getting quite high . And suddenly I had this experience that who I thought I was was not anything like the wholeness of who I am , and it was such a visceral experience I started trying to talk to my friends about it and they said hey , man , you're stoned , You'll come down in a while . And in their minds I never came down from that experience . But what happened is I got opened and in that opening I recognized that I was actually part of the universe , part of the divine , part of the cosmos , and I determined that I would find a meaningful way to spend my life , to give my life to .

Malcolm 10:01

So I tried all sorts of things . I worked for a while in a terminal cancer hospice as an auxiliary nurse . I worked for the Mold People's Today Center . I worked for the Whole Foods store , because my diet changed from coaxing hamburgers to whole foods . And then one day I volunteered for Friends of the Earth to run a whale day for them . And when I was working as a volunteer in the office , and one day the phone rang and it was Mike Oldfield talking about nuclear power in Stroud , and I said hey , we're doing a gig for Friends of the Earth on whale day . Would you be open to playing ? And he said sure . So suddenly I had Mike Oldfield , who hadn't played for years at that stage , coming and playing at this whale day . From there Greenpeace , sort of like , invited me to go and work for them . So I worked and sailed on the Rainbow Warrior for a while .

Malcolm 10:57

So I was trying out all these bits and pieces and at the same time , in my early 30s , I went into therapy because I was having difficulties in all my relationships with women and I finally started to recognize that the sort of the obvious factor with all of these was me . There must be something I'm doing that's attracting all of this difficulty to me . So I'd been in therapy with a guy called Ian Gordon Brown , who was the founder of Transpersonal Psychology , for some three years and I decided to go and do a therapy group and I walked into this group and I suddenly knew it was like everything that sort of came through me that I wanted to run groups , that that was what my purpose in this life was , and I just thought this is crazy . You know you're jumping ahead , you know you're getting something from it . But I recognized that the person who was running the group was not running it authentically and I also recognized that I had the capacity to do that Something now that I've developed for more than 40 years .

Malcolm 12:00

I run an ongoing one year group which is one weekend a month for a year , which I've been doing since 1990 .

Malcolm 12:07

And it's a it's a transformational space , and so I also do one to one work .

Malcolm 12:11

I do some coaching work , but my main thing is running and holding groups , and I also had a TV series on channel four in the early 2000s called Made for Each Other , where we me and a divorce lawyer filmed that .

Malcolm 12:27

When they filmed all these couples and for 24 hours a day for two weeks and then brought them into the studio and took a look at their relationship , and I can tell you anyone's relationship dissected over two weeks is going to look weird and we had some really interesting stuff . But it also gave me a feeling about broadcasting , so I had a really strong feel for that . I did some work for in-flight entertainment , doing DJing for airlines and stuff like that . So I had lots of different explorations , but my whole thing was about groups and about actually I'm much better with a spoken word than I am with a written word , although so your dragons has come out really well , and I've tried since then to do two more books and they're not as good and I can't do them , but I just I thought that what I want to do is actually to sort of like to draw the wisdom out of people and see what it is that they've learned in their lives .

John 13:24

Thank you for that description , malcolm . It's been a rich journey so far .

Malcolm 13:28

And I've loved working with online events . It's like it just feels like a rhythm that fits me very well , yeah .

John 13:35

Well , yes , you've been doing groups , so there's online events too , where people can come in and have really a feel for that experience and have a transformative moment in a couple of hours and , yeah , which is a lovely invitation also into your year long work .

Malcolm 13:53

Yeah .

John 13:55

I'm trying to think about the . I suppose I'm thinking about the kind of things that you felt like that have been helpful for you and that you'll also be looking to in terms of the guess on the podcast . I mean , I think for any therapist that are listening , all the things you're saying will be resonating . There might be some other people who are not therapists going . I'm not sure about this whole therapy thing . That's not really a question .

Malcolm 14:31

I'll come , but actually what comes up for me , john , is what is therapy ? And for me , the essence of therapy is love , and so for me , it's a practice of love . When I'm running a group or when I'm working with an individual , I'm getting my judging self out of the way , and at Essalem , there are four secrets to running a therapy group . One is show up , be present , trust the process and get out of the way , and I think that's a really neat little package and that's what I want to do in terms of the podcast , as well as actually to show up and actually draw out , as you're drawing out of me , what's true for other individuals and I've got some very interesting friends over the years one from Alternatives , where we put on some of the best speakers in the world , an alternative issues , but also the whole therapy world and just the sort of sense of people who are interested in our next stage of evolution , which is what I'm very interested in is what George Travellian .

Malcolm 15:36

So George Travellian was someone we had early on at Alternatives . He was called the grandfather of the New Age , and so George said he said there is a new breed coming , homo noeticus , and I'm very interested in us evolving beyond the lying , cheating , scheming lives that we tend to lead , as human beings , into a place of where there's more dignity , where there's more nobility . And the guests that I'll be choosing , that I've chosen some already , but I've been making less and it's amazing how many people I've got and who I've spoken to who are interested , are people who've had a major life here often , but have also found a place inside themselves where I think to me the Dalai Lama puts this beautifully , where he says my religion is kindness and there's something about how can we evolve into the next step of our humanity , away from war , away from hatred , and towards a place where we are practising integrity and kindness and compassion .

John 16:44

Yeah Well , it feels like we're at a real inflection point in human history in terms of what we've got going on in the world . What you're describing feels like an emergency , like we need that kind of movement into a different space so that we can live in a world where all of us and all of our families feel safe , feel treated with dignity . Yeah , so please that you're doing this work , malcolm . In the various contexts that you are .

Malcolm 17:20

Thank you , John and you've been a great ally in this as well . We've been working together for the last year and I'm feeling sort of very inspired by our connection and the possibility of actually weaving this work through into your network and all the rest of

The Great Turning and Finding Integrity

Malcolm 17:35

it . But I remember going back to this sort of like , this change in humanity . I remember we had Joanna Macy , who's someone I have a great deal of time for , spoke at Alternatives at St James's and she talked about this is the time of the great turning .

Malcolm 17:51

There are only two ways we can go from here . One is we are going to evolve and become our next stage of evolution , or two is we're going to disappear from the planet as an experiment that's moved on from because the Earth will survive , whether or not humanity will survive . We are right in the midst of this right now and I think we've got to do everything we can to feed that place . And what she said is I don't know which way it will go , but we don't really have any wise choice except to feed the part of us that is looking for the next stage of evolution , and I think that's what I'm looking for in myself is to find is to practice being a true human being , a human being who is living with as much integrity as possible .

John 18:39

Yeah , and how do you feed that in yourself , Malcolm ? Because that can be a real challenge when we're faced with the challenges in our life . I guess yeah .

Malcolm 18:52

I think we have to develop and support structures for ourselves . One , of course , is meditation , and I do that mostly daily . I fail sometimes , but mostly I do that daily , finding a place of stillness in myself . Two is getting out into nature , and I moved out of London , I moved to Devon when the lockdown first lockdown came in 2020 . And I often find that if I am jangles and I go out into nature and walk along by the river or through the trees and not everyone has the privilege of having that in their lives , right on their doorstep Again I feel uplifted . I have very good support structures .

Malcolm 19:32

I have a regular Monday morning what we call an inquiry session with a friend . We've been doing this for about seven or eight years and we take 20 minutes each to share what's going on in our lives and the other then to reflect what they've picked up from what we've been doing . So we take an hour on a Monday morning . I've got a fortnightly triad , three of us who gather and again share what's in our lives and look behind the story into what's going on for us . So all the time we're aiming to educate ourselves . There's journaling , there's all sorts of practices that we can take on , and I've written about a lot of these practices in Slay your Dragons , and there's also the practice of using our relationships to educators .

Malcolm 20:16

There's a practice of embracing death . We've been a very death denying society where actually it is inevitable . I suppose we may have we've made , develop some chemical means of extending life , but it is inevitable that we are born and we die , and there's something about accepting death . So a friend of mine has become a death doler and she said oh , when you die , I'd love to , I'd love to come and be with you when you're dying . And I thought that's beautiful . Rather , that's the . You know I want to talk about death , but actually I do want to talk , and the Buddhists talk about , you know , about die before death . You know it's come to terms with that . There's also understanding our suffering , but it is inevitable as human beings that we suffer , and so we have to find ways of managing and and developing tools to deal with our suffering . And in my group , so you know , another of the practices is bearing witness . If we really bear witness to each other , then we , we create an environment in which magic can happen as well so many different ways .

John 21:25

Welcome , and I guess they're going to get expanded . As you talk to guests who are coming on the podcast , the book is a great place for people to also find some of those resources , and I'm thinking about if someone is listening to us who is in that . I guess there must have been some real desperate times for you after your daughter died , some dark times , and if someone is kind of listening to the podcast in that place , they don't have a support system right now or maybe it's collapsed around them . Sometimes that happens in life . I wonder if you might say something about the things that were helpful to you in those really , really tough times .

Malcolm 22:15

Yeah , I think one of the I want to just go back a step before that , and it took me six months to grieve . I thought there was something wrong with me , but what had happened for me is that I had I had hatred is probably the right word hated Melissa's mother , who wasn't my

Embracing Grief and Emotional Vulnerability

Malcolm 22:34

ex-wife . Melissa was the result of a brief relationship I had and I had really disliked her . I'd found her very difficult . She didn't allow me to speak at the funeral , all sorts of things that went on and I found myself full of venom . And then one day , six months after Melissa died , we were at a playback theater celebration of Melissa's life and I didn't know she was going to be there and we sort of met and sort of like snarled at each other for a bit and both our sons came and stood with us and they held a space where we actually had to speak with our hearts . I don't know where these 20 something year old boys found this , but they found something that they held a group for , for for myself and Melissa's mother . And at one stage I remember sort of like taking her in my arms and sobbing and everything got released and I recognized that the hatred had kept me at bay had kept me away from my grieving process , and after that the grieving felt like it flowed and it comes and goes . I can be talking about Melissa very matter of fact , as I'm doing now , but sometimes I'll be talking about her need and if I'm giving lectures but I never censor myself so if I'm talking about her and my tears come , then my tears come and this came . I just want to fill this bit in . Then we'll come back to the .

Malcolm 23:55

This came when , when Melissa was born . So when Melissa was born , we'd planned this really fantastic home birth with an acupuncturist and a healer and some sound , you know , meditations and all sorts of things . And everything went wrong and suddenly , after 36 hours it was an emergency cesarean operation and I didn't know if Melissa would survive or not . There was , she was in distress in the womb and she came through and she got delivered and she got put into my arms and I felt this immense emotion well up in me . And then I looked around and I'm with all these strangers who are nurses and doctors in the room and I stopped myself and at that moment I decided that I would allow emotions to come when they wanted to come . I mean , I'm not going to do this when I'm working with chief executives usually , although I might if I'm in a the right environment . So there is still a place where I can stop it . But I actually want to let it flow .

Malcolm 24:55

And when my dad died , I gave the eulogy at his funeral and I cried my way through it and I remember someone coming up to me again . That was very different and I thought actually it feels very authentic . I want to learn to grieve . So that was one of the big things that happened to me is that I got taken into the grieving process in a really big way after Melissa died and I also recognized who could handle me I don't mean that I was falling all over the place , but who was able to be with me in those times .

Malcolm 25:26

And I was in a men's group and there were two of the men in that group who I didn't feel comfortable with . It wasn't that I needed to talk about Melissa all the time . I needed to be naked , and so when we're naked we need to be in safe environments . So I learned to find safe environments and some of the friendships I had were upgraded and some of them were downgraded , not through any sort of particular reasoning , but just I needed to create an environment around me where it was safe to be my grieving , stripped naked , vulnerable self at times and not to have to play the game of . Well , you know , it's been a couple of weeks , so let's move on and let's go out and forget all about this .

John 26:15

I'm really touched by what you've just described by your sons and that moment when I listen , that was amazing .

Malcolm 26:23

You know what I think about that was amazing .

John 26:26

Yeah , well , I think that's a beautiful call for all of us who might be next to someone whose distress is showing up in anger and we like to really hold that space and to allow ourselves to be emotional . I mean , I think that is that vulnerability for all humans can be hard and I think there's a real culture and the West around males and not showing emotion and the stopping , and it's not as you say , it's not always appropriate , but when we can , yeah , and the moments that we can .

Malcolm 27:05

There's something so beautiful about vulnerability . See , there's again . One of the other practices I've got is about embracing grief . I remember someone coming to my when I was working you know medical practice as a therapist . I remember someone coming to my , to my office , and he spoke about how depressed he was . His wife just died . And I said to him you're not depressed , you're grieving . And it was almost a light had come on him and that's a therapist with sometimes shine a light that flips things 180 degrees in a moment and suddenly he was all right with his grief rather than he'd been trying to suppress it and push it down .

Malcolm 27:47

We have to learn to grieve . That's the proper response . I remember after the Lockerbie bombing there was a picture of an eight year old boy standing by his parents grave and the newspaper said what a brave chap . He didn't shed a tear . And I thought this is such madness that we encourage people to squash their emotions down . We are emotional beings and I trust I'm not talking about emotions where we're sort of spilling out all over the place and and we're sort of out of control . I'm talking about allowing our emotions to come through us , and there's a study been done at the University of Berkeley in California that says tears carry debris out of the body . We have to relearn how to to cry , how to let our tears flow , and I remember doing it was a measure .

Malcolm 28:36

It was a retreat which was led by Rundus is a great teacher who I was very fortunate to have become quite friendly with and put on at alternatives a few times and did Quite a lot of retreats with him . And there was a retreat where there were 40 therapists in the room and he did a meditation on grief and half the people in the room were on the floor sobbing , wailing , and I was smugly sitting there thinking well , you know , I'm in pretty good shape . And he said and for those of you who are unable to do that , that's your grief . And I again I recognize then I had very well learned how to block my suffering and to pretend it didn't exist . So coming to terms with our suffering , which is often the result of thwarted desires for things to be other than what they are , coming to terms with my suffering was has been a lifelong journey since , since my early 30s and I'm now in my , my approaching mid 70s . But I feel like that's part of the human condition and rather than you know , in my younger days I used to think that the , the beloved of God , wouldn't suffer much . But it's not the truth and we see , actually we see some wonderful examples of people managing suffering and and almost and becoming awakened through their suffering , and that carcala was , was almost suicidal when he , when he woke up , and that's quite rare that that instant moment where it happens but it was that instant moment was preceded by 10 or 20 or 30 years of great suffering . So I think we we have to recognize that it's part of the human condition to suffer and it's not what happens to us , it's how we manage what happens to us .

Malcolm 30:23

And that's what I've been trying to do with Melissa and , extraordinarily , as a therapist , people came to me who had had children who'd taken their own lives , not because they read my book , because it wasn't out of that time when it first happened , but we send out a signal , that of what we can deal with . And I found that my work had deepened significantly . I was no longer looking at this angle of deep suffering and despair from a philosophical lens . I was looking at someone who could share that .

Malcolm 30:55

Now I don't have any conversation with someone I met about the Sopranos , which is the TV series , and she said , oh , the therapist , and Sopranos was terrible . She would show her emotions . And I thought you're not someone I could be a therapist for , because actually I will show my emotions as a therapist I won't take over the show so that I remember running a group once and my assistant was banging his head on the door and on the floor and sobbing . That's not what I'm talking about . What I'm talking about is actually allowing our empathy to share suffering , and so the word compassion means with suffering , and I say that in most of my groups . If we can go with each other suffering , we can allow ourselves to be opened up by him .

John 31:43

Thank you , malcolm . Well , I just know we're getting towards the end of our time . I want to squeeze a little bit extra in the round . I think both as therapists , we could easily think about that for lots of other contexts outside of bereavement and having lost someone close to us , but that might not be so obvious to someone that maybe who's thinking well , I am a CEO , or I do have a or maybe a small company to run , or I've got something completely different that I'm struggling with . It's not about death , like that kind of access to emotions and you know , could you say a little bit about , because I know you've worked with so many different people and so many different contexts .

Malcolm 32:33

Well , it's interesting what I've observed over the years , because I also work in the corporate sector and I've worked for the European Central Bank and BMW and Cisco systems and organizations like that , and initially , when I started working with those organizations , to back 20 , 30 years ago , I would wear my disguise , that wear my smart jacket and shirts and not stray into the realms of emotion . But laterally , what I've discovered is that actually most people want not that they have to embrace death at this stage , but most people want to not be in the straight jacket of having to pretend everything's okay . There isn't a single one of us that gets through this life without a great suffering . There is not . That's what I've discovered and learned in myself and also in others . And so if we soften to that rather than harden against it , it starts to become the place where we transform , and that's what I've noticed with the people I'm working with when , when , when it's legitimate then to honor that place .

Embracing Suffering and Transformation

Malcolm 33:37

I remember I was working with a one of the defense industry organizations . That was a very powerful the accounts , the finance person there , and he did some work and suddenly found his tears . Someone who'd been seen as a hard man , very tough , and he found his tears and he was so embarrassed . But then he saw the faces of his colleagues around him who looked at him with compassion and softness for the first time and he no longer had to carry that hard man act . I'm not saying it changes overnight , it doesn't but he had experienced the cracking of the facade of the persona . And that's what we're ultimately looking at is how to become what we truly are . And Robert Lewis Stevenson says to be who we are and to become what we can become . That is the sole purpose in life .

John 34:32

What a profound statement , yeah , yeah , because we're all often looking out into the world where people are other people , and maybe we're doing this ourselves too . We're pretending everything's okay , so we think , well , it's only my life that's falling apart and that softening that you talk about , like if we could all be welcoming each other's difficulties suffering .

Malcolm 34:59

Yeah , there's nothing close . I've got in Swaya Dragunov's . This is by Michael Meade , the great anthropologist . He said this to become equal to the dream sown within us , our heart must break open , and usually must break open more than once . That's why they say that the only heart worth having is a broken heart , but only in breaking open fully and reveal what is hidden within .

Malcolm 35:28

And I feel very blessed in my life that I have gone through a lot of experiences that have ripped me away from my moorings , that have forced me . I would never have chosen it . I don't think we ever choose suffering , although the early Christian martyrs used to do that . They would ask for more suffering from God . But I think that for most of us we try to avoid suffering , but if we actually turn and face suffering rather than and soften around Stephen Levine has written a lot of books on death and dying and the round suffering , so that our first instinct , learned instinct , when we encounter suffering is to harden around it , whereas the practice that he describes is of softening around it , of allowing it to touch us and break us open .

John 36:16

And I'm imagining those are the well . I'm feeling quite excited about the conversations that you're going to be engaging in . I'm imagining those being conversations about how people have managed to do that in their lives and over Well . Well , maybe , I mean , we use that word to work on , don't we ?

Malcolm 36:38

But that's not the language that you're using , which is catching no endorse and embrace and it's like we never get rid of anything , so overcoming sort of feels like we move past it , but actually it's learning to integrate it into our sense of being . So one of the people who I've just been speaking to about doing a podcast with me is a young woman whose mother was murdered and her journey through the murder of her mother was murdered by a lover and her brother was in the house when the mother was murdered but didn't hear it or see it , and so he didn't get killed as well . So she's been utterly educated by her suffering and so she's a youngish woman but she's had to grow up in a big way . This happened for a ten or more years ago and that's become her life . Now is actually helping people deal with their suffering as she deals with her own . I think that's the thing . If we allow ourselves to educate by what we're educated by , that becomes a profound moment .

John 37:43

Yeah , and notice we're just about out of time . Is there any other conversations you might give us a kind of hint at that ? Are coming down the line before we finish .

Malcolm 37:57

Yes , another woman who I'll be talking to was a pop star and sort of living the high life and developed what was seen as a probably terminal cancer . It didn't end up to be that way . She had cancer three times and was transformed by her cancer and so she went from being a pop diva to what she calls now a soul healer , and she does beautiful work with sound and music because they're the things that helped her come through her trials . I've got a woman who was a yoga teacher very beautiful , very able and adept and was struck down by the disease so that all she could do was lie in bed all day long and she became an artist and her artist is absolutely exquisite and she's come through it . It's taken years and years but she's now able to come out of her bed and she's able to come out of herself and recognize that what looked like terrible suffering shifted .

Malcolm 39:06

I think what I'm recognizing is that this human experience we have goes way beyond celebrity , way beyond fame and fortune . We have a shared humanity and if we can learn to embrace and love our shared humanity and have our hearts touched and use our experiences rather than to say that there's some horrible God up there meeting out vengeance on us . But actually and it's easy for me to say that from a position of relative safety , and of course I look at what's going on in the world around us and I can't begin to come to terms with that I'm not so bland as to suggest that just to embrace the bombs that are dropping on your home or your homeland being destroyed the jury is still out with that , how we get through that . But what I am saying is that while we are in this human form , with the set of circumstances we've got , it's a great opportunity to actually develop ourselves and become bigger than we've been , than we've known we are .

John 40:14

That's the challenge that is in front of all of us and that you're hoping that you will support with the podcast , along with all the other ways that you do the work that you do . And any last comments , malcolm , as we kind of come to the end before you then move from guest into host , I guess for the next couple of sessions .

Malcolm 40:36

You've done a nice job in modelling that for me , john , thank you very much . I think I'm looking to see education in a very different way . In this , I'm looking to see that we get educated . I often say in my groups we're educated by osmosis by having something happen around us . It triggers something in us that makes a shift . So I actually think that that's what I'm very interested in is how we educate and support each other towards the next phase of whether we survive or whether we actually become more than we've been . The Hindus call this the Kali Yuga , the dark age that we're in , and there is also the golden age . That's part of the cycle , presumably , of who knows all this stuff . But I think that we are moving to the point where it's unacceptable to continue in the ways that we've been and no one is it unacceptable ? We won't survive if we do it . So that's what I want to say . I think that's what inspires me to have these conversations is to do my very small bit towards uplifting and drawing out the very best that's out there .

Living a Wild and Precious Life

John 41:52

Yeah , what a beautiful and important task for the finally important task for the podcast .

Malcolm 42:04

There's a lovely phrase I just , I just quote I'd like to finish on , which is from Mary Oliver , from the poem Wild Geese , and she said how will you live this one wild and precious life ? And I think that's , that's beautiful . It's like we've got this one incarnation that we know of . There's John and there's Malcolm here , but we've also . How are we going to make the most of this privilege of being human for a limited period of time before we merge back into the cosmos ?

John 42:41

Yeah Well , that couldn't be something more powerful to conclude on . Malcolm , thank you for that , and it's been a real privilege and honor for me to host you as the first episode of the podcast . I just really enjoyed our conversation , feel really deeply impacted by it . I hope others who are listening and who will listen also have the same experience and really looking forward to the conversations that you will host over the next weeks and months , maybe even years , malcolm , as it grows . Thank you .