Giulia: Welcome everybody to the new episode of the trust podcast. I will ask the speaker of today (the theme of the day is the spiritual disconnection), how have we supported these experiences of being disconnected from ourselves? This photo connects to the day’s theme, and I will ask Eva Pomeroy from the Presencing Institute. She is a lecturer in Social Innovation at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. What are the feelings and emotions that this photo provoked you? First of all, let me Introduce a bit more of your work. Your work is based on the case experience in learning in both formal and informal educational settings. In essence, your work is about creating a context for transformation in learning experiences in the service of positive social impact and innovation. Eva, would you like to start with sharing your feelings that this photo provokes to you and your emotion.

Eva: Thank you, Giulia, for having me into this conversation. I appreciate it. When I first looked at this photograph, what I was struck by was a sense of quiet. I think that’s what struck me more than anything initially and quiet, is something that I would usually appreciate very much, but shortly after connecting with the sense of quiet, I think what I’m I was impressed upon me was a sense of loneliness. So, I see the figure. I salls is ah the windows as barriers. There are things happening outside, but the figures so solitary that I was really struck by a visual sense of loneliness.

Giulia: Thank you, Eva. Let me also introduce the other speaker of the day Patrizia Lombardy. Pro-Rector of Politecnico di Torino, Coordinator of the Green team at the same university, and President of the Italian Network of Universities for Sustainable Development (RUS) promoted by CRUI. She is an internationally recognized figure in sustainable urban development. She has also been the principal investigator and coordinator of a number of research projects funded by the EU related to sustainable development, smart cities, energy transition, circular economy, and cultural heritage. So, welcome, Patrizia and please share your feelings looking at this photo.

Patrizia: Hi, hello to everyone. Thanks, from my side as well Giulia for giving me the opportunity to share my feelings looking at this photo. The feeling is very sad because I see this young lady watching through a window that looks like a prison to my eyes. So, I feel very sorry and, in a way, I feel that at the same time, everyone has experienced this kind of feeling considering the pandemic situation that we are facing, and therefore it is even worse looking at this picture because it basically seems that it is a real situation and everyday situation right now. It doesn’t have anything to do with happiness or with a nice feeling on my side. Just sad.

Giulia: Thank you so much for sharing so honestly also the sadness. Sometimes we escape from that, but it’s good to unknowledge that we feel sad as well, and maybe this is the first step to understand this spiritual disconnection that is the theme of the day. So, I will ask you both a central question to dig into the topic of today’s episode. So, this spiritual disconnection is coming from something, how are we given support to the experience of the disconnection from ourselves. To break down the question into three others, I will ask you what are “the consequences of this disruption that is producing this situation and what is the worst result to expect?”. If we don’t act now, what should we be expecting? And feel free to draw from your experience into higher education institutions as well and your roles. But also, as your personal storyline. So, Eva, I don’t know if you want to start answering this question.

Eva: Yeah, well. When I think about firstly university and how we structure education. I think so much of our emphasis is on the outward experience. There are very few places within the curriculum or even the way we think about the purpose of education and higher education. In particular, for the inner experience and so what we will lack is something built into the system to help people support them and structure and exploration their inner experience, which would include connecting to purpose and meaning. I think we do better around connecting to beauty. So, I think in a getting a sense for me about the spiritual connection being about purpose, meaning, beauty, connection to something bigger than yourself. So, because the attention within the curriculum so that the curriculum I am familiar with across many disciplines is to draw into our minds and to draw our attention outward from ourselves, not those are bad things but there’s such a weight put on that kind of learning in that kind of knowing. It disconnects from that more inner intuitive, even aesthetic, really. And I think one of the things that I’ve been very struck by recently is the number of students who will openly talk about depression, anxiety, and that started to happen before the pandemic. So, it isn’t directly in response to the pandemic, although a lot of the evidence coming out is that it’s worsening in this situation. And I see that and that that directionality as being a direct impact of the disconnect between our outer and the inner, and it’s difficult to find the meaning in the learning and to find one’s place in the world when the emphasis is so exclusively or excluding of that inner experience and connection with self. I think there are in terms of what happens if we don’t address this. I think there are pockets in the university that are very innovative, where people are having young people having very meaningful experiences, but they’re their pockets systemically. I think what we are producing is a large number of young people who are feeling depressed, despondent, disconnected, and not feeling their capacity to bring what they have to offer to the world into it and to have agency to have an effect. And I would put all of those things into a broader sort of definition, a broader way of thinking about spirituality. And that is a trajectory that I think if we don’t address on a systemic level, will lead to a generation of young adults who are not able to have the impact that they want to in the world and to experience. Moderate to extreme emotional challenge and difficulty, so that would be my first thought.

Giulia: Thank you, Eva. Also, you highlighted an important absence in our current curriculum that uses hands and hearts apart from our mind and brain. So maybe starting from acknowledging this absence, we can then start to find the motivation to get actively involved in renewing our current way of doing things. Other inmates might ask you if you resonated with some words that Eva told us about purpose, about reconnecting with ourselves.

Patrizia: Thanks Giulia and thanks Eva. Well, I think the three disconnections, spiritual, social, ecological, are interconnected. Unfortunately, we know that we live in a world where we have stopped being in harmony with all the ecosystems, and with the world, we are in equilibrium among the different parties. I think that we are inside a growing quantitative model of consumption market based, which helps the individualization of the people. And they believe that we need to reconfigure this situation and start rethinking as individuals and as the institution. I believe and I agree that education plays a bigger role. And so, we have a responsibility that is much bigger than others. I feel it, at least. And from an educational viewpoint, I believe that we need to help our faculties as well as our students to think in a systemic way rather than in silos and try to help consider in our thinking all the impacts and consequences of our actions. So, I believe as well that is crucial, that we find new approaches as well that helps people and all individual through to be able to think in the right way. And the right way is to consider the world picture because what we have done to the environment during all the decades since the Industrial Revolution is something that is very heavy to from an ethical viewpoint to be considered and that we are giving to the future generation this big debt, this big, heavy thing that they have to carry on. So, I really believe that we need to better educate people to be global citizens more than in front of everything. We put in the right order all the interrelated aspects, one into the other, and stop thinking about this consumption market-driven approach.

Giulia: Yes. Thank you. Thank you for also highlighting the connection between this disconnection, the spirit and the ecological and the social before giving the words to the students joining us today. I would like to ask both of you what your motivation was to react to that awareness about this divide, for instance. Since you are you, experienced something related to organizational change and the theory you apply to higher education and social impact. How what was your motivation to get actively involved in this innovation and dedication work, and what can we do to import to get engaged in our academic bubbles to be more systemic in our effect?

Eva: Sure. So, yes, I came into this through my work with Theory U, which, when I found it for me, was a framework for learning that really integrated the systemic awareness that Patrizia was just talking about, the inner connection that I was talking about a little earlier with action in the world, and so I thought putting those different ways of seeing the world and understanding it and knowing it and sourcing action from that connection outward with a larger, broader perspective and greater awareness of our context with our ecological or social context and a connection inward with our own sense of purpose. And then using that as a foundation for stepping into action was an incredibly powerful framework or model for learning. So, I started to work with that. One of the other things that using that model allowed me to do was to create an innovation lab at the university, where we could invite community members in as well. And so, the very structure of the lab itself modeled that idea of coming from a much broader perspective and a more systemic awareness because the community members coming in brought their context. They mixed with undergraduate and graduate students and faculty. And so, as collective learning together, if you like, it’s almost like we had the ecosystem in the room in some ways by virtue of who was there. And then the other thing was that we were then learning in community, which was a very practical experience, a way to shift from that individual focus and that sort of individual learning and achievement focus because the learning was so relational and happened in a collective. And one of my students said, it’s interesting, we will go out in the world, and we will embody the structures that we learned here. So, if you experience your education as linear, mostly cognitive and individual, I guess that’s what you bring into the world. And she said, what I’ve experienced here is what it means to be a learning community. And that’s what I’d like to bring out into the world. So those are some of the ways that I worked with that particular framework in trying to address some of these divides at the university.

Giulia: Thank you, Eva. And maybe I can ask Patrizia the same question because she was also actively involved in creating the first Italian University Alliance for Sustainability, the RUS. And how can we connect the important get engaged with the learning community of the overall Politecnico and, in general, the Italian university that subscribes to this commitment to be more sustainable?

Patrizia: Yes, well, when it was 2013, when we started this network idea, we were very few universities sharing good practice among each other, thinking that the cooperation is much better than the competition in this field. And it was a winning idea. In fact, we were seven, and now we are seventy-eight universities sharing the same idea, which is crucial. Nowadays to put together our forces, our competencies, our commitment for fasting, for making urgent action in the field of sustainable development. We are not sustainable universities. We are universities for sustainable development, which is very different. And therefore, and this idea is also very evident in the fact that we are progressing well since we started with very few universities that having inside an office that deals with sustainable development issues and now almost all universities, not everyone, but most of them. I mean, it’s been replicated since just three years ago. So, I expect that by the next year we will have a complete commitment. It’s important to have an office because it helps you to manage inside the university. So, it’s not just a single person inside, but the office is able to provide the appropriate management, which is crucial. And now, we have contact, and we have an opportunity to advise, advisor, also to talk through all the areas and missions of the university, including education. In the education, we are putting; it’s crucial that all our faculty members, as well as students, have this awareness of the trajectory that we would like we will take to get those humanities.

Giulia: So, I may take from both answers the need to feel to engage in a community. I mean, the spiritual divide will be firstly healed somehow if we are not alone in this effort. And this led me to a final curiosity before giving the words to Ramiro and Sharon that are here with us, the two students from Politecnico. Just a final question. What was your motivation to innovate? You are now two pioneers in your own fields related to higher education and sustainability. What was the driver that put you in march with this effort?

Eva: Hmm. I can answer that quickly my motivation is actually more inner than outer in this case. In that, I personally wanted to be more myself into the work, into the teaching, and this was the way that I was able to do that to address my own inner condition, as well as the sensing into the outer world and to do that in community. So, I guess I created the community I ultimately wanted to be a part of.

Giulia: Hmm. Thank you. And that is really connected with the jury. But now you I really find out the with others the purpose of each of us so we can be happier if we feel ourselves in the place where we work and we live. And Patrizia can I ask you the same, what was your driver for starting these new adventures?

Patrizia: But there was a disconnection, in a way, between what I was studying and researching when I was even a student, and it was also from my Ph.D. focusing on sustainable development and all these issues. And on the other side, in the environment where I was living, studying, and teaching there was a complete disconnection. And so, I thought that something would have been necessary. And therefore, I put effort into that. I ask the question, why? I am acting in a way and thinking that I wanted to make the truth together. And this is the starting.

Giulia: Interesting, because our lining, what we say, what we think, and what we do is really the secret of being happy again, of reconnecting this spiritual divide. May I ask Ramiro to jump in the conservation? Feel free to ask our guest speakers a question related to what you just heard from your student’s perspective or your personal perspective.

Ramiro: Hello everyone, it is a pleasure to participate in this podcast with you, and what I assume said before makes me see that we are living in a very fast-paced world now, and in which we do not have to look at ourselves or our surroundings, our environment and for this reason is that there are two concepts that come to my mind. One is being us, human beings, and the other has some personal interest in the materials. So, what do you think is difficult today to get out of these issues and cycles in a way, where you prefer to work hard for the material quantities, the concept of having instead of being a person? You know, living and connecting with the environment is what we are talking about.

Giulia: Thank you Ramiro. Patrizia or Eva, feel free to jump and answer.

Eva: I’m happy to jump in. I guess I would say that it may be that students who come into my teaching world are predisposed in this way. But, I have to say it doesn’t deal like it’s been very hard work to get more people into being state. Sometimes it just takes some permission and a little bit of structure and invitation to do so, and then when I’ve experienced is such joy in connecting with yourself and gaining your sense, you know, having something are meant to do in this world, there is something so deeply satisfying about that when the space is made for it, the space of invitation that is very easy actually to make that shift, so that’s what I’ve experienced.

Giulia: Thank you. I don’t know if Patrizia wants to add some comments?

Patrizia: Yes, thank you. Just mention that the process requires really some collective effort, and I think that in our university we have tried to make this effort available in two ways, one is creating the screen theme office. It is a way of mobilizing ideas and a sense of community, at the same time, it is a way of making people more aware of the consequences of their actions, and at the same time highlight all possible ways for moving into a more coherent development model. On the other side, we have also put effort into creating a teaching lab that helps our faculty communities in a way to revise the educational approaches, and I think it is quite crucial to make this happen to better answer to this kind of challenge.

Giulia: Well, I am happy because we started the conservation feeling and sharing our sadness to the photo and the present situation, but we also shared the opportunities to be joyful in rediscovering ourselves and aligning our spirituality with what we do every day, what we say every day, but anyway both happiness and sadness are part of life, and this is part of the game no? Being alive and feeling one day sad one day happy but feeling may be grateful to be still feeling, no? Maybe this may open the floor to Valerie, that can guide us to the final meditation to feel present and metabolize what we just heard from the wonderful speakers of today that I thank once again.

Valerie: Yes, thank you very much. It was very inspiring, especially your personal experience. I wish to guide you through mindful experience, mindful practice, as you were saying to connect ourselves to start with each of us. I invite you to sit comfortably upright in the chair where you are sitting and put your feet on the ground and just use what mindfulness is, putting attention to our body and to the sensation of each of us for a moment. So, when you have your feet on the ground, just be curious how the ground feels, allow yourself to drop the efforts, effort of talking, of listening, maybe of excitement or sadness, and just feel the moment relaxed beyond your folders and even the face. And since with all the senses we have and the connections and the articulations and our skin how it feels being sitting, sitting on this chair, curiosity. And you may even feel the curiosity of your breath, the way the air enters, and the way the air exits. With all the words we have been talking about, the subject excitement, the sadness, the joy, everything being enlightenment, the body, and for sure your mind would like to chat or think or say something but bring up the courage to fully be present now, with your breathing and your body sitting on the chair. And then, I invite you now to put your hand on the chest, on the heart area and sense also all this area with friendliness of your heart, your heartbeat and coming for a moment to yourself, just being aware of yourself, sitting with your feet on the floor on the ground, with your breathing, with your awareness, just with your feet on the ground. And we will connect to this inexperience we were talking about the experience of the self of the moment, sharing the space with the others, but for a moment, the attention is yourself. And let’s move to be grateful for having this breathing you know you breathe in the fresh air, and be grateful, the fresh air to breathe in and let go the effort, you allow yourself to breathe in and let go all the efforts while you breathe out. And in this learning and growing, you were talking about just being grateful for our legs, for holding us, that are holding us while we sit all day, while we move to what we want, move to other people, move to the community. And we can be grateful for our arms embracing our hands being on the chest, bringing the warmth, the joy, and bringing our wishing into action. We can bring our lives looking outside, finding other people we need to put into action our wishes and the wishes of the community, and letting go of all the efforts and looking around with fresh eyes. And from this sensation that you have from yourself, feeling yourself, your body, and the ground, you can just get into a big experience of the space we were sharing until now and we’re sharing now, to connect something big, this gratefulness in the heart area and the body, and being able to calm the mind. With this joy being alive, looking around, with fresh air, and being connected. I invite you not to let go of your arm from your chest area and be able to connect to the others of our shared space, space of the trust podcast, the inspirations, the ideas, the learning and growing, all the sensation we are allowing this part. And while you let go of all this, mindful practice, you can go back to the sensation of the room, of the feet. And now I invite each of you to sum up the podcast in three words, so we might start with Ramiro. Ramiro, would you like to give us three words of what you took with you summing up what you heard and you experienced? Please.

Ramiro: Yes, for me, three words to wrap up this podcast would be slowed down, and consciousness, and some interception the unsolved.

Valerie: Thank you very much. Patrizia would you like to give us your three words which you sum up the dialogue of today?

Patrizia: Well, I will say integration, awareness, and education.

Valerie: Great, thank you very much. Eva what would be your 3 words?

Eva: My three words that I am taking with me would be connection, inspiration, and gratitude.

Valerie: Thank you very much. If our students would like to add something too, I am happy to listen to you also.

Giulia: Thank you all from my heart. Thank you for your time and your deep connection with us today. I’ll see you the next time and thank you again!