OVERVIEW
Brené Brown says “cultivating meaningful connections as a daring and vulnerable practice that requires grounded confidence, the courage to walk alongside others, and story stewardship.” Join Daniel Epstein and Gina Alicea this Sunday morning to take a deeper look into this practice, and be inspired by what is possible.
TRANSCRIPTION – COMING SOON
Rev. Aimee Daniels (00:00):
So good morning everyone. I’m Reverend Aimee Daniels and I am so excited to introduce our speakers this morning. Can I just say, I think you’re in for a super big treat. You heard it here. First we have Gina Alicea, who’s a licensed spiritual practitioner through Centers for Spiritual Living and also a ministerial student at Emerson Theological Institute. And I was thinking, how long have I known you, Gina? And I was just running it in my head again and I think it’s close to 20 years. Yeah, I was in the first prac class at what was then Chicago Center for Spiritual Living, and I think you were in the second class. So yeah. And Gina has a Master’s of Fine Arts and a Master in Education. She’s been teaching art for 28 years and has curated art exhibitions for 40 years. Last year she curated an exhibition of Daniel Epstein’s photography into an exhibition called Seeing the Other, which you’re going to see some of this morning.
(01:06):
And this exhibit was selected by the Muhammad Ali Center for a large scale exhibition starting in June of next year. And you can see the hand of God in their relationship. They are a couple, when you hear about Daniel, they’re a perfect couple because they’re bringing together both of their gifts. So Daniel Epstein is the author, photographer, founder of the Portraits and Faith Foundation, a 501 C 3 nonprofit foundation, committed to creating sacred listening experiences such as workshops and interviews to drive home this idea that there is no other. He’s interviewed over 500 people in 28 countries on their faith journeys and published a book with 125 of these interviews. You can see we have the book right here. There’s a few for sale in the back of the room, and we’re hoping we’re going to have Daniel back for a workshop early next year.
(02:04):
We would love to hear more about his work and learn how to be better listeners to create oneness. Really, that’s what we would call it here. Daniel’s also the founder of Daniel Epstein and Associates, a marketing and innovation consulting firm. Previously he was a Harley Proctor marketing director at Proctor and Gamble, where he worked for 21 years. He has an MBA from Kellogg at Northwestern. I’m an alum too. We have that in common and a BA in accounting from Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. And I think Gina is kicking us off. So everyone give Gina a warm welcome.
Gina Alicea (02:49):
Good morning, Cityside. So excited to be back and to share this project with you. And the assignment was wonderful. I was great when Amy asked us to come together and speak, I was excited because Brene Brown’s one of my favorite authors and I’ve read a bunch of her books. And so to pick up Atlas of the Heart and really dive deeper into it, although I’ve had the copy for a while, but have a specific thing to focus on, I was like, yes. So I get to do two of my favorite things, which is deeper dive with Brene Brown and deeper dive with Daniel. So yay. So for those of you that remember the beginning of Bodhi, we had such a meaningful connections there with each other in that beginning, and it was such a great foundation to build upon. And what I’ve noticed during the pandemic was that in the aftermath of the pandemic was this disconnection between others and reading Brene Brown’s work, her thesis on cultivating meaningful connections makes a lot of sense of how to do that.
(04:01):
She mentions in the book Maslow’s Hierarchy and the Need for belonging is on the third tier. It is right there at the beginning, right? You’ve got your physical needs, your safety needs, you’ve got belonging, we need to belong, and how can we do that? But by being our most authentic selves, and we have to do that courageously, right? Like we said in the reading where it said, you have to be naked to be able to do that. And I think right now, greater than any other time, we need that sense of acceptance and belonging. Whoops, sorry.
(04:40):
So Brene Brown states that cultivating meaningful connections is you have to be in this vulnerable practice. And there’s a three-pronged practice. She calls it the grounded theory. And it starts with requires grounded confidence, right? To have the confidence to be authentic, right? The courage to walk alongside with another person, not over, but alongside. And then to have story stewardship. So we’ll explain that just a little bit. The grounded confidence is to learn how to recognize and remove your armor. That’s stuff that we use to protect ourselves so we don’t have to be vulnerable. And then to really be connected to your true self, which here at C S O we teach about that your true self is the spiritual self. You’re connected to the divine. And then to really rumble with that vulnerability, it’s going to take a minute to get more comfortable being vulnerable, and then to practice this courage to be able to speak and be humble that you don’t know because you don’t know what you don’t know.
(05:53):
So there’s stuff we just don’t know. So her second prong of that theory is to courageously walk alongside others. And so the practice of non-judgment and to be with another and just let that as judgment sit to the side, do not react, just be in that non-judgment space, practice compassion with another, and then being relational, really be able to connect eye to eye with people. We are human beings. We need that connection. And to be empathetic, that open heart. And then setting in respectful boundaries, right? There are times when I know I’m not ready to hear something and just, okay, we’ll get back to this. When I’m more grounded, when I’m more centered, then I’m more open to hear, right? So remember, setting boundaries is important too. And then story stewardship. Her third prong on this theory is when you’re listening, stay curious. There’s stuff that we don’t know, and others might be sharing their story and maybe they’re meandering to get to the point, but just stay curious.
(07:09):
What’s the pearl? What’s the gem that’s coming to you? You don’t know. You just got to stay curious. And then as this narrative is building, we have to have trust and believe and acknowledge and affirm that yes, each of us has a story to share. And each of us, we are there to listen to honor the sacred nature of the story of what someone’s telling us. We each have been through this. We’re spiritual beings having this human experience and this experience is creating these stories, and how can we be there with each other? So Daniel has created, and I think in my opinion, a wonderful way of showing how to cultivate meaningful connections. And so this is just one example. Of course, there’s 8 billion people on the planet, so there’s 8 billion ways to connect to others, but this is one example. So in portraits and faith, some of the ways that he’s actually embodied this and brought this into for this project to work was to be grounded in confidence and to have the courage to walk alongside with others and the story stewardship. So the way he’s done this, let’s see if I can, oh, his project is called Portraits and Faith, and he’s going to tell his story.
Daniel Epstein (08:40):
Hi, good morning. So I’m Daniel Epstein, and so my story is a little bit different. Maybe you are used to people who are working mainly or exclusively in the spiritual community. Well, my background is laundry detergents, and I worked at Proctor and Gamble for 21 years, was a marketing director in the laundry products area. I’m happy to talk about cold water washing, tied pods, stains of many different kinds. And I became like an internal marketing professor for the company. And now I do marketing and innovation consulting. But as I traveled the world, I started interviewing people about their spiritual journeys. I would add on personal days to all my global travels. And I think from a spiritual perspective, I have to quote a psychiatrist in Boston who once evaluated me and described me to a peer as a young man who wasn’t happy about much. And that was a good description of me at the time. I had a real victim personality, and I just kept thinking life didn’t seem fair. And that was really my personality, unfortunately. And through a lot of really good therapy and spiritual work and some excellent medication today, I feel more grateful, connected and of service. And I don’t feel like that victim or that unhappy young man anymore. And this project is part of that journey for me. I call this my sacred errand.
(10:26):
So I’ve interviewed 500 people in 28 countries using the following seven or eight questions, what is your concept of a higher power or God? And that’s probably the only theological question I ask. The rest of the questions are about personal experience. The other questions are, what is your earliest memory of faith? Whatever that means for you. What was the first time in your life you feel like you had to or chose to rely upon God as you understand God? And again, this my favorite interview in the whole project, which you’re going to see is with an atheist. So this is not about traditional religion or concepts of God at all. Only tell me about a time you doubted your faith. What happened? And then I asked some pretty straightforward questions, but they’re always very enlightening. What are you most grateful for? What’s your greatest wish?
(11:19):
Do you have a message? And then because I make a black and white portrait of each person, I asked, what would you like people to know about you when they see your portrait? And I was going around showing these to people out of a portfolio book for many years and people said, you really need to share this. And I’m very grateful that because of my work connections, I’ve been connected to Ken Burns and he became an advisor about 10 years ago, and he said, have the courage to say this isn’t a film. Everybody wants to make a P B Ss special, but not everything is meant to be that. And I thought, well, 500 heads, no B-roll, no storyline about me, which I didn’t really want. Anyway, so we decided, well, let’s make a website. And so that’s what we did. We started with a handful of portraits and interviews on the website.
(12:09):
And then over time of the last 10 years, we’ve added one every few weeks. So we have 126 now published online on this website. And then people urged me to turn it into a coffee table book, which is a different, more contemplative experience. And if you’d like to have that experience, it’s available in the back. And that was about two years ago. And so I’m really grateful. I have now interviewed and made portraits of 500 people in 28 countries. I just interviewed 18 people in Barcelona, so I continue to interview people. It’s been actually over 20 years now. Latest look at YouTube. We have 528,000 views, so people will watch long form content and spiritual content, not just cat videos. And we have about 4,000 active subscribers. So I’m really grateful for that. My goal is to have a profound healing impact on the world.
(13:12):
This project has helped me heal in so many ways. Like I said, I call it my sacred errand. I feel like my job is just to get out of the way. One of the ways I like to start this is by sharing with you a photographic meditation. I’ve put together 30 or 40 of the 500 portraits to some music, and I’m going to share this with you. It takes about five, six minutes. And so I would just say receive this like any meditation, except your eyes will be open and just receive these people from around the world. And then I’m going to share with you a few video clips of how some people answered some of these questions around the world in ways that were deeply meaningful and provocative for me. Here’s the photographic meditation, and I want to just share with you how people have answered some of these questions in ways that have become deeply meaningful to me, concept of a higher power. You may be surprised that my favorite interview is with an atheist, and I have a pretty big and broad understanding of faith. So for me, it’s all fair game. This is Tom from Brazil. He was my original producer, and this is how he answered that question.
Speaker 4 in video (20:51):
Well, I don’t pray. I don’t feel the need to pray, but I do believe that faith is something that we created. We humans. I don’t think a dog prays. I don’t think a plant pray. I think it’s something that we developed that something that we’ve found the need for it. And instead of God creating us, I think we created God. And that’s okay. I don’t have a problem with that. I think it’s just the concept. And for me, faith is not believing that this is the most important thing, that having things is the most important thing. And I don’t mean I don’t want to make a vote for poverty. It’s not that I want to have things. I just don’t want things to have me.
Daniel Epstein (22:19):
I love asking people their earliest memory of faith and not surprising. Music has a big role for a lot of people. This is a friend of mine, Renee Morgan Brooks, who used to be a music minister at a unitarian church. She went on to get a ordination, and I love her describing her upbringing and the way faith manifested in her life.
Speaker 5 in video (22:44):
I started off as a Baptist, and then my mother decided that she was going to live in Jehovah’s Witness. And that never took for me because by that time, I think I was in 16 and my grandmother lived with us. So I think my grandmother was a Baptist born and bred, and she was going to be Baptist when she’s dead kind of thing. So at age 16, and there’s no father in the house. And that means because my father died five, that means I now have a responsibility of driving my grandmother to the Baptist church, coming back and getting my mother into the chauffeur, the religious chauffeur. However, Sunday mornings were all about fixing hair and fixing waffles and getting everybody situated and ready to go to church and seeing my grandmother had my mother book sang in the choir. So while I’m preparing to take them through separate ways, there are always gospel songs that are being sung, songs of faith.
(23:50):
My mother was a bread winner, my grandmother was the homemaker. And when it was hard for my mother, she would sing. And it’s that kind of song that I can just imagine Harriet Tubman sing. Oh, I couldn’t When it became fulfilled, she seen things like set up, wasn’t going tell nobody, but I couldn’t keep it to myself. I couldn’t it to myself. I couldn’t it to myself. I set up tell nobody, but I keep it to myself for the Lord has done for me. And then she just squeezes herself like this and say Thank you. Oh yeah, that’s what I was raised with. So there was no chance not to be connected with this flow of spirit.
Daniel Epstein (25:17):
Really, the pivotal question is what was the first time in your life you feel like you had to or chose to rely upon God as you understand God? And again, I love hearing about spiritual experience from people of all religions. And this is actually a work colleague of mine who I didn’t know until I interviewed her, who talks about a very special experience on Hajj.
Speaker 6 in video (25:48):
There’s one very important experience. I met my husband at the age of 34, and as of the age of 21, I was very much interested in getting married and having a family. I was always dreaming of having six kids. And strangely enough, I was also dreaming of not working to find the right person. And this journey of finding the right person was not easy. So it had lots of frustrations, lots of ups and downs, hopes and frustrations, and it was not easy. And especially in our culture where there’s a lot of pressure to marry at an early age, between around maybe 2022, if you’re 25, you are already labeled as a spinster or there’s something wrong with you. So you can imagine the pressures that I’ve been through from family and friends and so on. But I did not want to give up and I did not.
(26:59):
I had a lot of opportunities. I did not want to get married just for the sake of getting married and getting the social acceptance from the society. So I was looking for someone very special, and this journey of search was very painful to me. Then as I became older and I got into the thirties, people started to tell me, you may not have children because it becomes more difficult with age and so on. So it was quite painful. But then the very strong thing that happened to me, I remember that it was the second week of December in 2001, I was in the holy land in Saudi Arabia and I was inside the Holy Mosque in Macca, and I was praying to God, I mean, to help me find the right person and so on. But then at a certain moment I felt that in a way I surrendered my personal will to God’s will.
(28:05):
And at this exact moment, it was different because before that I was praying and asking God to help me find the right person. But at this point in time, I felt that I have no power no matter what I want to do in terms of planning and thinking and trying to make things happen. If I don’t give my will to God’s will, it’ll not happen. And this thing gave me a lot of strength and it moved me spiritually very much. And two weeks later, I met my husband, and one year later we got married. But I still remember this moment in Macka. I was in the second floor of the mosque looking at the kaba down and I was praying, and I got this strong feeling of really it’s all God’s will.
Daniel Epstein (29:03):
And the last video I want to share with you is with a really amazing Catholic preacher, not a priest, but a preacher in the Philippines, just a trigger warning. He talks about sexual abuse.
Speaker 7 in video (29:19):
Why was I molested? Why was I sexually abused? Maybe because I deserved it. Maybe I’m dirty, maybe I’m ugly. I became addicted to pornography because any kind of addiction is really trying to escape the sadness, the emptiness, the shame within you. Even more than pornography, I became addicted to pleasing people. I began to project onto God what I felt about myself. Maybe God is also ashamed of who I was. Maybe God didn’t like me, also because I didn’t like myself. And maybe God is a God with a checklist of my sins. He fell again in pornography. Oh boy, what’s new? I cannot pinpoint a particular day and time where suddenly I realized he wasn’t like that. But gradually it just grew on me that there is this God who accepts me as I am, and who loves me and enjoys me, who likes me, doesn’t just love me, he likes me. He likes all of me.
Daniel Epstein (30:32):
So this has been 22 years for me, and there’s so many lessons. I mean, first at a time that I needed a higher power or something bigger than me. I drafted off of other people’s stories until I could develop a faith of my own. And I think that’s okay. I’ve also come to the point to what you see on the screen, which is that I don’t have to agree or even respect any one theology. I just have to say there is a person trying to connect with the divine. And I can honor that even if some of the theology doesn’t make sense to me. And of course, I mean all within the realm of people, no one doing harm. This is people who this is uplifting them and leading them to be better versions of themselves. And I can honor each person’s desire to connect with the divine.
(31:27):
And this made me even think about that all the energies are really needed. Islam means to be submitted to God, and I need to be submitted to a higher power, even if it’s the great blessed consciousness and sacredness that we all create. Something I love about my home religion Judaism is that we’re encouraged to argue with God. And that’s what you saw El means to struggle with God. Christianity, I needed to feel a sense of unconditional love, that for some reason I didn’t feel growing up, even though there was a lot of love in my family for a long time I felt like a mistake. And so I needed to allow that unconditional love to come in from indigenous elders. I have learned to see God in all of creation, not just humanity, but the rock that is the uncle and the tree that is the grandfather.
(32:28):
And certainly Buddhism. The energy for me is to eliminate the suffering. I cause myself and other people. Hinduism looks polytheistic, but it’s monotheistic and it helps me understand all the different manifestations of the divine. And then a lot of people are fascinated that I feel like I learned so much from atheism. I dunno if you remember from math class growing up, but the empty set is a subset of all sets. Well, atheism and reb Zalman, a really famous rabbi who I was fortunate to interview while he was alive, says that doubt scrapes the barnacles off of our faith so that it doesn’t become superstition.
(33:34):
It’s about receiving somebody’s story. How much more so someone I perceive to be the other. And so that’s what I call sacred listening today, receiving the story of someone you perceive to be the other. And Gina Ali and I have now been a couple for a year and a half, which is a great, great blessing in my life. And also she’s a curator and an artist. And so she turned this content into an exhibit called Seeing the Other and displayed this at the gallery. She runs at the University of Chicago. And I was so grateful not just to see this up on the walls of a gallery, but to engage 24th through 12th grade classes on this idea of the other. And who do you see as the other? Think back to my photographic meditation a minute ago. Are any of those people for you the other?
(34:27):
I just love this idea that once we know somebody’s story, it’s hard to hate them. And so we are gratefully taking this exhibit, and not just the exhibit, but the educational program of seeing the other to the Muhammad Ali Center for 11 months starting this coming June. And so that is what I’m doing with portraits and faith. And if you’d like to receive portraits and reflections when I publish them, please just sign up at the website. It’s free. Here’s the QR code you can scan. And I call this my sacred errand. I feel so lucky and my job has been to get out of the way. And I also say that the guy working on this project is the me, the version of me. I most want to be the best version of me. And so this has been just a blessing that this has kind of fallen into my lap. Thanks.
Gina Alicea (35:36):
Going to pray us out. And I’ve seen that photographic meditation many times, and every time I watch it, I just stand. I look at it and I say, I am you. I am you. It just moves me every time. So let’s just tell you a moment to go within and just take a deep belly breath, knowing that right here in this moment as we see the other, there is no other For we know that there is only one thing happening right here and right now that is the divine manifest as each and every one of us as 8 billion people on the planet. The divine is incarnate, is expressing in as and through every single one of us, the love of the divine, the wisdom of the divine, the intelligence of the divine. It is the truth of our beings. How wonderful it is to be open and receptive and curious to listen to others, to carry that love forward into the world.
(36:50):
We just say thank you for this experience today, to see each and every person as the expression of God, of the divine, as this power and presence in the world. That is love. That is what we’re here to do, to share that love with each other, to accept each other, to receive each other’s story. So grateful to be here today. So grateful to share this moment with you. So grateful that we can take this experience out into the world. It is a blessing. You are a blessing. Let’s share our light this week. Thank you, God. And so it is.