Malcolm Stern: 0:46

So welcome to Slay your Dragons with Compassion podcast, which I'm doing in conjunction with my friends, John and Sandra Wilson at online events. This is a podcast which has been exploring how people thrive through adversity, what makes them who they are, how do they manage their adversity and how do they use that as sort of grist for the mill, as Ram Dass would say in his book. How does that make them into bigger human beings? I've had to travel that journey myself with the suicide of my daughter, melissa, which the title of the podcast is based on my book. Around that, and it's a great pleasure to have today. My guest is Chukumeka Maxwell, who has been working deeply with suicide prevention and mental health and has been through some really big health challenges himself recently as well. So I just thought we'd have a good rap today about see what makes all that tick so, and should I call you Chuks or Chukamaker?

Chukumeka Maxwell: 1:44

Whatever you want, chukamaker is the way you say it. If you can, that'd be great. If not, chooks is fine.

Malcolm Stern: 1:51

Okay, okay, so we'll's call you Chuks, so that's what I'm used to calling you. So Tewkes lives in the same town as me Totnes in Devon and I've been aware of his work for quite some time and the passion he puts into his work. So, tewkes, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what makes you function?

Chukumeka Maxwell: 2:12

It's ironic. You should say that, because this week I was back in the manner that I was born. What I mean by that was that I was back in London and I'm originally born in Hackney, in East London, and my father was Nigerian, my mother was Jamaican and I still know all those properties that they ended up there in the 1950s. As I said, I was born there in 1960. I left, our house was compulsorily purchased and we left to go to Nigeria, and I sailed first class with my family down to Nigeria when my father had qualified as a barrister. Unfortunately, the civil war broke out in Nigeria and so in 1965, 66, my father was arrested and then my brother, myself and my mother. We did not have any education for two years and I was evacuated back here in 1967.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 3:04

So that's my first bit of adversity, really.

Malcolm Stern: 3:07

Yeah well, that's a hell of a piece of adversity. So you come from having it all sort of having a good profession, your father with a good profession, having a rich standard of living, and suddenly it all gets taken away from you. How did you deal with that internally?

Chukumeka Maxwell: 3:20

Well, it's funny.

Malcolm Stern: 3:22

Internally.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 3:23

I don't really know, because I was six, seven years old. What happened was the kindness of strangers and people, so my father was a citesman at St Martin's in the Fields in London the church there and through that they used to have a monthly broadcast on the BBC World Service, so people used to. He'd always mention my family, so that gave us our connection back to England, and how, eventually, my father was released from prison was through the Nigerian Embassy and the friendship that's around the corner of Elver Square. So the thing that happened to me, though, was, at the age of seven, my hair went totally grey and my skin went totally grey, and I was grey up until about the age of 22. So it was an internal, but I suppose the way I dealt with it was to forget it where possible, but it then made me into the man or the young boy that I was, and that would be quite aggressive and quite defensive.

Malcolm Stern: 4:22

So there's a difference between sort of forgetting it and really sort of like letting it be and moving on, or suppressing it, which often causes, as you said it it came out in your skin and your hair, yeah, and that often causes depression, the suppression of deep emotions, and also, you'd have been picking up on your own emotions, but you'd also have been picking up on your family's emotions as well, so you would have been a sponge for all of that. Yes, what? What drew you towards, uh, your work with suicide prevention, that's.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 4:52

I found that quite interesting, because that's obviously a subject that's close to my heart as well well, intuitively, I would say this, and it might be controversial, that most people are wanting to die, but they don't know how to live.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 5:06

I would say exactly the same thing, so we're on the same page with okay so to that point, I've been trying to work in prevention mental health, prevention, everything and it just really I just realized that people don't really want to talk about how to do well being, and in my spiritual experience I also realized that I too had been carrying a tremendous amount of sadness.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 5:30

So, if I'm honest, most of my life, no matter what I did, no matter who I was and I call it, all the different cults I belong to, no matter which culture I belong to, it ended in sadness, and so I wanted to get to an understanding of my own sadness but also really move beyond myself into recognising, like they say in Buddhism, that everyone you meet is suffering, whether they know it or not. And so from that end, I was really keen to get into it. And even on social work degree and everything else, we didn't spend a lot of time on suicide. It became almost like a stigmatised word, sorry, within our, our professions. So I was keen to explore that and I used to joke with the mental health lead of this county that I wanted to make devon a stigma-free zone, ie that we could talk about things.

Malcolm Stern: 6:20

We may not agree about them, but at least we can talk about them and we can have courageous conversations around them I think my philosophy around suicide has been that some people take their own lives and some people create an environment in which their health becomes so bad that it gets done for them. And I'm not, I'm not, I'm not sort of denouncing that the poor people who get sick with no, no obvious reason at all, yeah, and desperately want to live and I've worked with people who who were suicidal, then got, then got terminally ill and then wants to live, yes, by then it was too late. So, yes, it's, it's a I think it's a subject that that has a lot of room for exploration. Yeah, and I know that you've. You've put your heart and soul into this over the last few years.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 7:08

Yeah, being your, your passion, your purpose yeah, yeah, and I mean I write that word. Passion is is a sort of blessing and a curse. I call that word because you and I know that passion is unsustainable, in sense that I want to do things now, especially with what's happened to me of late which, yes, I can still talk passionately about them, but they're sustainable. What I mean by that is that I'm not burning out or feeling frustrated with what I perceive to be the lack of progress.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 7:43

Or you know, for instance, when I started, my real understanding of suicide prevention work was in 2015. So nearly 10 years in November that I consciously was doing that. There are many people I've met in those 10 years who've lost their family or members to suicide and I sometimes think, god, if they really listened to our prevention message 10 years ago, they may not be in the situation that they're in. So that's, that's the bit about recognising I'm not superman, I'm not god, but to keep on in that sustainable saying the same message helping people transcend their day-to-day issues to to hopefully live life well so actually, what you're looking at is is helping people transcend suffering, which is an inevitable part of the human existence.

Malcolm Stern: 8:29

Yeah and um, I know that you've been through, um, quite a lot of physical suffering. Recently I bumped into you at the doctor's surgery. Yes, um, and we were chatting about that. Can you tell us a bit about what? What happened to you? Because you were seriously ill yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 8:44

So I always joke. I'm going to tell you go back before I get to my present health condition, because one of the things about being ill, I had to get hold of all my medical records from. So from the moment I'm born till now, I think it's about 180 pages, which was a very interesting read. But then back along and about, I think 10 years or maybe more years ago, I had bladder cancer, and what we said earlier on about you know why I got into illness and health is that I recognized and and I used to say to people I was very joyful when I got my bladder cancer because I said I had pissy thoughts which I wouldn't let out and I had suppressed them for so long, and so the releasing of that was the cancer, and that was really a blessing in my respect, really a blessing in my respect. So then we lost my ex-wife. She died of cancer and I became a single dad about three years ago and so doing the suicide prevention work, looking after my daughter even though we were my ex-wife was separated it still hit me really hard when she died and then just carrying on with the suicide prevention work and then, on the 23rd of April 2023.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 9:55

I felt really sort of faint and not very good and I called the ambulance. Another really. I've really worked in my past for four years in the ambulance service, so I've seen a lot of life and death in many different realities. So I called them. They took me into hospital, they started to test me and they realized that I had something called endocarditis, which is a swelling on the heart. So suddenly they wanted to give me lots of antibiotics and I'm Mr Antibiotic man Anti-Antibiotic man. But in this whole process I decided that I was going to gracefully accept anything that came at me, no matter what I personally believed, but what I wanted the doctors to do was have a discourse with me.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 10:36

So anyway, they put me on 450 rounds of antibiotics every four hours over the next amount of months. And then from there, they said I had a leaky valve, I had hospital acquired pneumonia, I had to have an operation where they took out my heart and put in metal heart valves, and then, after the eight weeks recovery, I was meant to recover, and then I got into what's known as tachycardia very fast heartbeat, and since then I've had two cardioversions shocking my heart back into normal rhythm One cardiac ablation, which really worked, and then, when you saw me in the doctors, my flutters had just come back again, and so I'm waiting on the waiting list for another ablation. So it's been two years and one month how many hours yeah?

Chukumeka Maxwell: 11:24

yeah, but it's literally today. Ironically, isn't it? Today is the 23rd of of um of may and I went to the hospital 23rd of april 2023 so you've had a year of two and a half two years, one month two years and one.

Malcolm Stern: 11:39

Two years and one month that's right of real suffering. And, um, obviously I'm hearing a gracefulness in how you dealt with it. For example, you had to go against your normal thinking because actually you were in a situation where you've got to follow some, some authority to help you get through it. And what's the? What's the prognosis now? And I wonder how it impacted on your relationship with your daughter. How old is your daughter?

Chukumeka Maxwell: 12:04

she turned 19 last week and I have another one who's 36 in London and just before this, uh, zoom, she left me a long message about me, should I say?

Malcolm Stern: 12:18

so, um. So how did that impact on your relationship with your daughter? Did you get closer, did you I?

Chukumeka Maxwell: 12:24

think I think the youngest one became very worried about me and therefore quite aggressive in the way that she responded to me. Because of me maybe lifting too many things. I ate a predominantly carnivore diet, high fat, medium protein. She's freaking, um. She felt that I wasn't necessarily being honest with how I was feeling, because her fear of me dying is quite high and so for me, my illness, I can deal with it. I've had so much love, so much kindness from so many people. But I am also responding to people's perception of what is going on for me and that can be painful, limiting in some respects, because I don't have a fear of dying. What I have a fear of is not living well right, are you living well, jokes.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 13:23

I'm in process, I suppose what has happened of ladies. I've just had a bit of a blip and I'm acutely aware of the amount of people around me who are suffering and I want to share with them ways to enable them. Not so, but but as I said to you earlier, I'm not God, so that impacts me. So what I've noticed. I joke with people again that I've had to have open heart surgery to reopen my heart, because I remember being a child and, like all children, I'm very sensitive and you man up and all that generation I'm from the 60s and 70s. So, whereas I believe we're all sentient but also sensitive beings and so we've got to feel it, and in many other aboriginal cultures of which I'm part of this lifetime and previous lives, you feel everything. But again you mentioned it earlier we've got to transcend that to really be able to help. Otherwise we're in the, in the, in the quagmire with everyone else.

Malcolm Stern: 14:18

Doesn't mean I'm superior, but it's very hard to explain and it's very often misunderstood so, um, are you, uh, in, in I was gonna think of saying in remission, but remission is the wrong word. But is your current heart situation resolved to some degree, or are you still in the place where you're going? I don't know if this is going to kill me.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 14:43

No, the heart condition I don't think will kill me. If anything, I've been given a heart that will make me tick forever. What I need to do is more. You're a man. Yes, it's more about how do I really?

Chukumeka Maxwell: 14:55

I believe and it sounds odd, not through necessary suicide also that we're destined to live a much longer lifespan than we do. I think our thoughts, our feelings, our behaviours, environments so many things have shortened our lifespan. So I feel that I've regenerated. I look totally different to how I did when I was ill, so that's pretty amazing. I'm comfortable with not knowing when I'm going to live or die, but I'm not worried about when I'm dying.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 15:24

So that fear alone enables me to live and take each day as it comes. I call it like each day is a holy day, holiday, and I don't really do Monday, tuesday, wednesday, but I do fit into that. But I don't really do Monday, tuesday, wednesday, but I do fit into that, but I don't think of it that way. I just go here, we go another day on planet earth and I'm losing that sense of oh you know, here we go again, type of thing. Like you said, how many hours it is so many hours, but trying to enjoy all those hours in the simplicity and yet still be in action. Does that make sense?

Malcolm Stern: 15:58

it does make sense. Are you still able to, to apply yourself to your work? Yes, yeah, that's great. So that's still because I one of the things I I believe and I've seen this many times in in both the clients I've worked with, in my friends, etc. As well is that when you're doing work, that your soul as well is that when you're doing work, that your soul yeah, I want a better word, yeah is it is is sort of inviting you to do. Yeah, it brings a sense of youthfulness around. Yes, I am very grateful that I'm still doing work. That that that, you know, feeds my soul. Yes, and I'm hearing that there's something very similar for you as well yeah, yeah, and and also the, the big take home.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 16:35

If someone asked me once if I was not to do that work, what would happen? And I did have to really sit with that uncomfortably, because other people would take over. Maybe other people would do it. So I have to also watch. Because of boarding school, because of being a black person in a predominantly white world, this place and the messages that I've been given throughout my life, the inability to truly relax into life is a curse that I have to be very cognizant of so that I can relax and not project that you're white or I'm this and that that gives you the privilege to go on holidays, to do this, to do that, to find my own natural rhythm rather than the dictated rhythm, whether I'm a man, a black man, a boy from the east end, a working class, all the labels which are limiting my natural spontaneity well, I mean, you've raised something that I has come up quite a lot for me in groups, because recently quite a number of my groups have black people in.

Malcolm Stern: 17:36

In my ongoing, ongoing, yeah, there is a theme that seems to run through that, which is carrying the trauma sometimes of being different or uh, or having been, uh, marginalized. Yes, I wonder if you could say a little bit about that, no more than you than you?

Chukumeka Maxwell: 17:51

yeah sure I can do I can. This is my, this is I because I think like my father brought me up saying I had to work harder than the white man sent me to boarding school to be a little englishman. But the institutional discriminations and the colonization from old europe, of which, england apart, have colonized a lot of people's aboriginal thinking and now some of us and some people, especially Totnes, glastonbury, places like that are getting back into their Aboriginal way of thinking. Now I fervently believe and have had experiences of reincarnation, so I am cognizant. I could have been, dare I say it, a white person who has made some of the systems that I am now incarnated to change. But I can't change it through violence, I can't change it with carrying that burden.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 18:43

But what I do notice, when, for instance, something comes on on TV with a black person that's killed someone or a white person, I feel it and it's almost like I can't explain to predominantly my white friends why it matters so much or why, if someone rejects me, it re-triggers a feeling of exclusion because of my colour.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 19:05

It's not about my sex, because people will start to talk about sexuality. I'm like it's got, it's not the same it. This is very different and even psych, where black people feel that white people are going to give them permission to do certain things and vice versa. It's a messed up world. It's, like you know, for me, most of my I grew up in a very Jewish area when I was younger, so all my friends, family, were all Jewish and in my sense I have this deep feeling that I was Jewish in a previous life, but as a black person trying to explain that in 1960s Britain and then I've watched Britain's put us into these different separate cults, and I've been to Sikkim and Bhutan, I've been to America. I love this planet but I don't feel at home in any one nationalistic reality.

Malcolm Stern: 19:56

Yeah, it's interesting. I sort of find that patriotism is a very strange thing when you identify with one thing. I was studying in a group once, a Jewish studies group, and they talked about the Jewish soul.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 20:13

Yeah.

Malcolm Stern: 20:13

And I challenged that and I said that's not how I see it.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 20:15

For me there's the Jewish soul, yeah, and I challenged that and I said that's not how I see it.

Malcolm Stern: 20:18

For me there's a universal soul. Yes, and they wouldn't have that and I didn't feel able to stay in the group. I didn't want to become part of an elite. Yes, and I wanted to sort of recognize that every human being, every being, actually we're going beyond humans. Yes, every being has a soul beyond humans. Yes, every being has a soul. Every being has the right to be here as well. Yes, and I think so.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 20:40

Getting beyond those boundaries where we define ourselves is actually a really important part of our evolution as well, in some of my esoteric studies they say about the jewish problem and the black problem are the two things which will solve humanities, like you've just mentioned there. So so that to me is really important, because what we've got going on in Israel and now in Palestine is not based upon truth. What we've got going on in certain parts of Africa because that was all named in different, it's not the truth, but that bit like in my heart. There's seven races which come together, which is the true rainbow colours and pure white light comes out of us in synthesis together. That's the way I view it.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 21:20

So everything else is really hard. I can go into those groups, like you just mentioned, but I have to come away because it's still formed on separation and that separation it's a bit like they say in star wars you know the dark side that you know when you try it leads that way. Anger leads to yeah, that phrase I can't remember exactly now, but that separation it just wells its head. So sometimes my default position when something bad happens to me is to go. It's because I'm a black man and it's not true, but that's the spell that I could be in.

Malcolm Stern: 21:55

That's interesting because one of the things I've written about in my in my book slay your dragons with compassion is about being put under spells. Yes, we start to believe the spells we put on. So, for example, if a doctor says to you you've got six months to live, absolutely a spell where actually you're counting down your days yeah, and so I think we've got to break free of our conditioning.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 22:15

Yeah, that's part of our task as human beings as well yeah, and so you've hit a really good point there, because the other reason why I chose suicide prevention work is because it gives me the permission to go. I don't know why you want to kill yourself. Let me hear your story, let me hear you and I'm not going to change it, but I need to hear. So it gives me the permission to really say and I say this to professionals you need to have the courage to say you don't know, so that like, for instance, yes, you've got the balance of probabilities, but you don't know that this person could live six months a year. And I've seen so many miracles.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 22:50

So that's why, as well, if I want to go into the, the assisted dying thing is that I don't want us to put people in spells, to think that they're always going to be in pain and everything else, and bring on their death earlier. So I talk about passive suicide, which is what you talked about earlier, about illnesses and stuff, or active suicide. Yeah, and both of them, all of them, and because we separate the mind and body in this culture. Really problematic, but in my mind it's all mind initially.

Malcolm Stern: 23:22

One of my biggest learnings around suicide was when I was working in a medical practice in Lyme Regis. A woman came to me and she said I am going to take my own life If you want to talk me out of it. I'm not interested in having therapy. I said I'm perfectly happy to see you and one deal is you don't do anything without letting me know in advance. And so that's the deal we had.

Malcolm Stern: 23:43

So for three years we talked and it turns out she'd been terribly abused in her marriage. Yeah, she deliberately married a man, 30 years her senior, who was impotent, never had to have sex again. Yes, she smoked 60 cigarettes a day. Yeah, one day she came in she'd had a diagnosis of terminal lung cancer. Yeah, and instead of being delighted which I thought she would be in my naivety it was horrified and she realized she wants to live for the last year of her life until the cancer became too much for her. She lived the life of Riley. She started traveling all over the world, sexual experiences, all the things that she'd kept herself from, and it took her to being given a space where she was no longer in in charge and choosing it.

Malcolm Stern: 24:26

Yes, I find that way through. Yeah, yeah, and I've been fascinated about, obviously because of my daughter's suicide, it's, it's an, it's an area which I'm really, really deeply interested in. And how can we prevent that? Which is why what drew me to your work as well, because that's what we've got to do. We've got to find ways of preventing without saying it's a sin, it's wrong, yeah, but how do you work with someone and help them to find their way through?

Chukumeka Maxwell: 24:52

Yes, yeah, that's a question for you, really, yeah. And so the course I do is a course called Applied Suicide Skills Intervention Training, which is like suicide first aid, a bit like physical first aid, and I've done an intensive five-day course to become a licensed instructor and we have instructors all over the world and on that course I learned more in five days of how not to work with people than I did on a three-year social work degree, than I did in all my four years in the ambulance service, and it's given me such a skill that I passionately believe that everyone should at least have this conversation, because if you can deal with suicide, there is not a human problem that you can't deal with. There's not a story someone can tell you, no matter how bad, but it. For me, boarding school has been a place as well where there's been a lot of suffering. A lot more is coming out now and I'm involved in that as well, because we've had suicides at boarding school, but people don't know about it, and the reality is that suicide affects every culture, race, class, you name it. So it transcends all these labels that we put people in, all these labels that we put people in, and so therefore, in my mind, everyone's potentially at risk, and to promote health and well-being, inner joy, inner peace, is really hard. It's hard to do for yourself, let alone for other people, so that to me it becomes in in esoteric terms is the the the happier, the more pure, the more healed you are. It radiates out of you, so you can do it without even speaking.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 26:31

I didn't get diagnosed with dyslexia and dyspraxia till I was 43, so I use language and words and pictures much more than I need to at times. So, for me, a quiet joy and and really positively, how would I see it different. How do I understand that men who separate from their partners and are being dragged through the court system feel like they want to kill themselves? So what am I going to do? I'm going to go in there and talk. How do I understand that mothers who are feeling really horrible through their pregnancy infect their children's mind and brains, not judging them? How do we help mothers? There is not a part of human life that should not be about suicide prevention, to prove that we can transcend our limits of old age, which is, in my mind, a disease plus everything else.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 27:26

That's the soul work and then suddenly, spontaneously, I meet you or I meet people in morrisons and suddenly you realize I don't have to try. So hard everyone's here.

Malcolm Stern: 27:36

We just need the communication it's funny, you know, you're just talking about mothers. Just reminded me, when I was working at the the line practice in the medical practice, I worked at the senior doctor there. I was chatting to him one day and he said you know, he said we, we don't understand postnatal depression. He reckons that 90 percent of women have postnatal depression and and? But they don't. They keep it quiet because it's painful.

Malcolm Stern: 28:02

You know, some women come into him and say they want to throw their baby out the window yes you know, they're not violent people who hate their children, but the depression is so strong, yes, and I think the the the sort of like the undoing of the shamefulness around these feelings that come for us, yes, the way we can actually talk about things, it's part of what heals us yes, exactly yeah.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 28:25

So the medication hasn't really worked, but the talking has. Yeah, it's the relationships I've had with the doctors, because when they've been vulnerable and said we can't even look after ourselves, I'm like now we're talking, let's have that conversation about that, because you're meant to be curing me, but you are knackered, you are not being authentic, you are not knowing. I am comfortable with you knowing. I am comfortable with you not knowing. I am comfortable with you telling me about your family and you know. And then it changed. It was incredible.

Malcolm Stern: 28:55

You know you remind me of the book I read by Stephen Levine, who is I don't know if you know his work on death and dying. Ok, one of the things he said is that when someone's dying, they are much more attuned to who can be with them. In that I know after my daughter died I was in a men's group and I left the men's group because I knew that two of the men in that men's group were really uncomfortable with me. Yes, because I was in the place of deep grief, not that I needed to talk about it yes, yes I needed to show up and be real.

Malcolm Stern: 29:24

Yes, so what steven levine said is that someone's in a in a ward in hospital waiting to die. Yeah, and they know who can meet them in that place. So the doctor will come in and they'll know that he can't meet them. So he'll say how are you today? Fine, thank you doctor. Then the cleaner might come in and say yes, how are you doing today? And they'll open up because they know there's receptivity.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 29:44

Yes, and I think that's the work that we need to do is have things open up so we don't have to be ashamed of our thoughts, of our fears, of our feelings I talk about it, I because I teach at the medical school or clinical psychologist wherever I get a gig, and I say to people you, I want us to de-professionalise our jobs so that we can be like you mentioned there, and this is compassionately slay your dragons and once you can do that, you have no fear of being authentic with other people, having lived in Jamaica, nigeria and all these places. They say that people in Britain aren't truthful because they never tell you how they really feel. And that's a really hard thing and you know sometimes that when you ask a person how you feel, they will tell you how they're thinking.

Malcolm Stern: 30:33

Well, I've got a little sort of like mnemonic that goes with that. So you say to someone how are you feeling? They say fine. Normally what they mean is fucked up, insecure, neurotic and emotionally unstable.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 30:42

Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is?

Malcolm Stern: 30:43

a very public public school thing.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 30:45

This is about the heart.

Malcolm Stern: 30:46

Yeah, and what he says is 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 the only heart worth having is a broken heart, for only in breaking can it open fully and reveal what is hidden within. Yeah, I reckon you've had a bit of a heart dialogue, really.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 31:23

Yeah, exactly, and it's a bit that reminds me of that. Um, what was his name? Cohen song is the crack that lets the light in oh yeah, I was wearing that t-shirt yesterday actually.

Malcolm Stern: 31:32

Okay, okay, that's how the light and it's ironic part of me has always known this.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 31:37

It's like can I die, then? I, can I not have the pain bit and just do the joyful bit? And I think I remember going back when I was in about 17 or I can't remember what age it was to be quite honest, but literally knowing that I had to enter into suffering to transcend it rather than, like I was saying, just going through, you know, not caring, not really worried about anything, about anything, but but knowing that part of it, and also, for me, intimacy in relationships is really hard, especially with a female, because I know at some stage they could either die or it changes. So that fear of the heartache of loss is has stopped me from the courage to even go forward. And I'm not talking about perversion, I'm talking about the spontaneous, open-hearted love without the perversion or the predatory behavior.

Malcolm Stern: 32:31

So I actually get it, and that's why most of us, you know it's like to really open our hearts to love me. We open ourselves to pain as well. Yes, yes, together yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 32:41

and so in suicide prevention, if someone knows that you notice that and you're not judging them. Oh my, my God, it's the most incredible feeling. And even in the courses you know, I did eight this week. I've done 42 of these courses over the last 10 years, which is not a lot, but I've worked with about 7000 people, again in reflection, in hospital. I don't care how many people I've worked with. It felt like nothing, you know. So it's like it's. I'm not expected to get an ology, I'm not expected to get a, a, a, a, you know, mbe or anything else, and that inner quiet, humility, is, is the is the sweet spot.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 33:21

So, if you were to ask me am I joyful? I'm joyful as long as I'm in my sweet spot, the moment I move out with any complaining lack of grace, why me? Why did this happen? It totally dissipates. So it's a daily, daily reconnection. I call it God because my name, chukamika, means thank God. I can't undo that, that connection, not in a religious sense but just in the miracle of life and scientific sense off the scale yeah, it's funny, you know, you just used the word humility.

Malcolm Stern: 33:55

I was talking to someone yesterday about um, um, what makes I put on lots of speakers at alternatives at st james's yes, really, in my time when I was there, yeah, and I was looking yesterday at that whole series and realised that the people who'd really impressed me, there was a quality they had which was in common with all of them and that was humility. There were people like Joanna Macy, bob Thurman, who was the first Buddhist ordained by the Dalai Lama, first Westerner ordained by the Dalai Lama, jack Kornfield, ram Dass. These are the people. They all carry a sense of humility. They're not going I'm great and sort of doing a big song and dance act. Yeah, so it's been a great dialogue. Jukes, I'm really enjoying talking to you this morning.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 34:37

I was thinking of you again because this morning it was Lucy Winkup coming from St James's on Thought for the Day and I thought it was ironic. That's how, to me, synchronistic things are. And years ago when I was in London I used to go to St James, just sit in there and pray. My friend, I think yeah, got married in St James's. So again, st James's, st Martin's in the field, really important churches in my life in the past.

Malcolm Stern: 35:01

Lovely, that's brilliant. So we're coming towards the end of our chat together, but I'm really enjoying the engagement, the dialogue and the sharing of depth thoughts as well. And the question I always ask at the end is this what particular dragon have you had to slay in order to be who you are? What hurdle have you had to overcome to be Chugs fully now? Hatred, hatred.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 35:28

That's very good, so tell us a little bit more about that so I'd say to people I've been schooled in hatred, so lots of the things I've been sharing with you is where I've been in a particular cult, that's and you mentioned that in your men's group or your jewish group. So that forms separation. It means I other people, it means I look at I. Then through hatred, I then empower the seven deadly sins, I then break all the ten commandments and now so to is to recognize that humbly, admit that I've done that, forgive myself in that. So I talk about care being compassion, acceptance, respect and empathy.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 36:06

So, but it starts with self-care, self-compassion, self-acceptance, self-respect and self-empathy. It is painful, it is so hard when you recognise you've done harm. I want us to turn around, as the Lord will say, from do no harm, do good. So to do good all the time to myself and to my others, and recognize that everyone I meet, everything I meet, is part of me and part of God and my job is to caretake. And in my upbringing and my life before this question you just asked, it's been none of those things, because it's about power over, uh, winning, playing rugby, being a hundred meter runner, so it's almost like, and that even hurts, so it's like hatred is what I'm overcoming to move towards the law of love that's great, and I just want to say, just for those of the people who are listening um, often you can think this is too big a step, but for me, what we're talking about is a practice.

Malcolm Stern: 37:05

Yes, you are having to practice this on a step, but for me, what we're talking about is a practice. Yes, you are having to practice this on a daily basis. Second place you pull the weeds out. In fact, you slay the dragon of hatred.

Chukumeka Maxwell: 37:14

On a daily basis, on a daily basis, and we're capturing dragons our own and other people, yeah, so we have to continue to slay and the dragon, you know, is something that's very ancient in this country and as we slay that, that will make our country, our lives, a lot, lot better thank you so much.

Malcolm Stern: 37:34

It's been lovely speaking with you. Likewise cheers. Thank you, take care.