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Raised in the Pacific Northwest, Carol Lee Flinders attended Stanford University and received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. Carol has taught courses in Mysticism and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, is the author of the Laurel’s Kitchen cookbooks, Enduring Grace: Living Portraits of Seven Women Mystics, and Rebalancing the World: Why Women and Men Compete and How to Restore the Ancient Equilibrium. Carol gives lectures and workshops around the country.

Guy Spiro: Carol, how did your work evolve? What were some of your key turning points?

 Carol Flinders: I was thinking about that the other day. I was feeling something of an outsider, even when I was small. Not in a painful lonely way so much, but I felt I was looking for something that the very intelligent, energetic and fine people around me didn’t seem to think was missing. That haunted me all through college at Stanford. I remember feeling a hunger in me that my friends didn’t seem to share. That moved with me on to graduate school at Berkeley and to the study of medieval mystics, of all the weird things. There I was in Berkeley during the late ’60s, with all that going on around me, and I was deep in the library looking at people like Julian of Norwich and Clare of Assisi. It was as though they were saying something that seemed really important for me to bring down into the 20th century.

     Eventually that hunger brought me to a spiritual community in Northern California. I met a teacher in Berkeley named Sri Eknath Easwaran and I fell in with a group of wonderful people with whom I’m still affiliated today. In 1970 we bought some property in northern Marin County and built an ashram. Its evolution has been really quite remarkable. We have retreats here just about every week. We have people from all over the world who practice the method of meditation that he taught and the program for self-realization that he laid out. So it’s been a wonderful life and it’s astonishing to me that I’ve been here now since 1970, that’s 35 years and yet it’s felt like the richest and most variable life nonetheless.

 GS: How did you come to co-write Laurel’s Kitchen?

 CF: Our teacher was a vegetarian. Not out of health reasons, although that was certainly part of the mix, but because he had grown up vegetarian. The idea of harming animals just went so much against his grain that we joined him very quickly in that. Then came the question, well, what do you eat? We happened to be blessed with at least a half-dozen of us who were very good cooks from different ethnic backgrounds. We put together just a small, kind of loose-leaf cookbook for our friends and that expanded into Laurel’s Kitchen. It was a thrilling experience because it was our first joint effort and we discovered how wonderful something could be when everybody participated and subordinated their own sense about what it should be. Nobody was trying to put their personal stamp on it. So that was our first big collective enterprise and it did very well in the world. It allowed us to open up the dining room kitchen complex that we still cook in today. That’s how we did Laurel’s Kitchen. It was one of our first publications.

 GS: It kind of turned into the Be Here Now of natural food books. It’s one of those books that you saw in everybody’s house who was into these things.

 CF: It’s still really fun. I’m meeting people now who were Laurel’s Kitchen babies. They’re raising their babies on it. It’s really delightful to be a part of that.

 GS: What was your next book?

 CF: I wrote about food for twelve years or so, and then in 1993 I published Enduring Grace, the book about the women mystics. That sprang directly out of the work I had done as a graduate student when I wrote my dissertation on Julian of Norwich. Over the years, I just found myself more and more attracted to those women mystics for a variety of reasons. It came to seem like a very natural thing to want to make them available to the world, just as we were making available those lovely recipes. I describe that at the beginning of Enduring Grace—that the spiritual hunger and hunger for nourishing food aren’t so very different.

 GS: It also addressed the fact that what has been published and is commonly available tends to overlook women’s contributions to spirituality.

 CF: That’s why I needed to write it. And it was right here in our own Western tradition. Women like me had found ourselves seeking out Eastern teachers, but it was my teacher from India who ironically first really shared his enthusiasm for Teresa of Avila, for instance.

 GS: I haven’t read all of Enduring Grace but I read Rebalancing the World in preparation for our conversation. About the subtitle, which I now know you did not approve, “Why Women Belong and Men Compete,” ...

 CF: Which runs counter to the book, actually, and is not what the book says at all.

 GS: ... my first reaction was, “Uh-oh, women good and men bad.”

 CF: I know!

 [laughter]

 GS: But then, early on when you make the statement that anybody who has spent time on a playground knows that little girls can be just as managerial as little boys, I started to feel better.

 CF: Let’s just be truthful.

 GS: Well, no thinking person can deny what has happened to women over roughly the past 10,000 years. And yet, I believe that we over-identify with our genders. Are we in fact male or female?

 CF: It’s not the fundamental truth about us and yet it seems to me our culture keeps forcing us into that identification. We’re not born thinking of ourselves obsessively as man or woman.

 GS: Include the concept of reincarnation and we’re both male and female.

 CF: I love the idea that a lot of people in India hold, that you go back and forth from birth to birth, male now, female later. So we’ve been on the oppressing and oppressed end over and over again. By now we should know better.

 GS: From there the book seems to start out saying, “hunter gatherer good and modern society bad.”

 CF: Right. But then hopefully that was corrected, too.

 GS: Yes, please talk about that.

 CF: I think it is easy to romanticize the hunter gatherer phase, and a lot of people do that. That wasn’t what I was trying to suggest, but rather that when we were collectively leading that much simpler way of life, we were all, men and women alike, living in much closer connection with the land or the earth, with one another, and with the sense of a kind of ambient spirit enclosing everything. But when we made the decision to become farmers and form cities and city states and so forth ...

 GS: But you make the point that there was never really a decision made.

 CF: I know. I use that term paradoxically, almost ironically. We just all enthusiastically embraced this shift toward this much more complex, enterprise-based culture.

 GS: Isn’t that arguably an evolutionary occurrence?

 CF: I don’t think there is any argument about it. It is evolutionary. What is required of us now isn’t just simply to turn back and strip away everything we did for 10,000 years, but to recognize that in the speed with which all of that change took place, we lost our balance as human beings and in our communities, and we’re feeling that now very intensely in the sense of kind of dislocation and confusion, and longing for simplicity and longing for connection. So the challenge now to the very complex entities we’ve become is to figure out how to reintegrate what we lost into what we are now. You almost wish you could just blow a whistle and everything stops right now. No more anything. We need to just have something like a world summit in every living room, and at least for a year or two just start reclaiming what we’ve lost. I think an awful lot of what looks like gender war and so forth would fall away.

 GS: Talk a bit about the values of belonging and the values of enterprise.

 CF: The values of belonging are based in a sense of deep connectedness. This is so in the human beings of the Pomo tribe, my own neighborhood, or Congo Pygmies. The child is raised with a deep sense of security. No identity crises at all. You know who you are in terms of your tribal family identity, of the region where your people have lived for thousands of years, of the form in which spirit has communicated itself to you and yours all that time. That gives rise to values like trust, openness and generosity because you know you depend on one another. There is a deep interdependence. There is a sense of leisure, a sense that there is time to play, because play is terribly important in shoring up those connections that allow you all to survive in a relatively threatening environment. There is a kind of resilience that comes of knowing the natural world so deeply. You know its resources. You know how it can take care of you and you take care of it. You have that sense of reverence for the natural world and desire not to do anything to harm it. So there is a certain kind of restraint in your life. You don’t take more quail than you absolutely need for example. So those are the kind of values you can think of as a matrix in which the human being ripened for probably millions of years.

 GS: Then it all changes.

 CF: Then we move to 10,000 years ago when we discovered this other relationship to the natural world—that of farming. It’s a tremendous shift in consciousness because now, instead of looking for connection with the natural world, we’re looking for ways of controlling and manipulating it. We look out across the field and instead of seeing a very complex community of plants and animals with which we live in a kind of cooperative interdependent way, we see a field that could be completely stripped and planted with one crop, barley, say. Then we can harvest the crop and we can stay there. We don’t have to be itinerant. We can stay in one place for the first time now and build a village and then a city, and this is incredibly liberating. The possibilities are infinite. Culture happens. All kinds of things happen when you can stay in one place that can’t happen when you’re on the road and have to carry everything with you. It’s very intoxicating. We find ourselves now able to build boats, to have armies, to strategize, to explore the world. So the values that come into play at that point include competitiveness and inventiveness. You’re looking for an edge all the time. You want control over the resources. You’re competing with one another for good harbors and fertile river land. You’re looking for the main chance. There is a reason for inquisitiveness now that hasn’t been there before. So generosity kind of fades a little bit. A sense of interdependence gives way to a sense of competitiveness.

 GS: You say in the book that enterprise itself isn’t necessarily such a bad thing, but the impulse of domination that seems to follow closely is where the problem is.

 CF: It’s almost like there are two phases to the whole enterprise chapter in our history. Initially there’s this thrilling sense of infinite possibilities and inventiveness and maybe a lot of cooperativeness. You’re bouncing ideas off one another, and look what we can do together. But given that typically we’re always in a situation of limited resources, invariably we find ourselves competing for access to those resources because I want to put my idea into play and you want to put your idea into play. Given that things are moving fast, it’s very easy to slip from that into confrontational, combative kinds of behaviors. It’s hard to envision what would save us, except that now we know what the consequences are to just giving way to those impulses. We’re in a position to second guess ourselves. We can kind of go back and say, well, maybe we could have handled that differently. I think we can start modeling that within our own lives. To recognize that something is at stake each time I decide to go after something at the expense of my neighbor. There is something precious that can be lost, and I think we can see that played out in the neighborhood as well as between nations and within the family. What I’m trying to suggest is that we’re at point in history when we’re well positioned to understand the damage that we do when we give way unrestrainedly to enterprise.

 GS: It seems to me that the time that we spent on enterprise has encouraged individuation. That has had its downside, and yet it gives us the possibility of evolving an individual consciousness that comes back to an understanding of interdependence.

 CF: I think we agree. That’s exactly what I’m saying. We can come back full circle. Individuation is an absolutely necessary part of our evolutionary process in the sense that “I am somebody.” It looks to me as if the chief engine that drives evolution might well be what happens to an organism under stress. An organism, any organism, whether it’s an ant, a caterpillar, or a gorilla ... you poke along in your own environment and you’re doing just fine, and then something happens and you have to figure out what your response is going to be. Resilience is the very essence of living creatures. The ability to suddenly organize yourself and be very aware and alert and figure out a new strategy when your environment gets threatened and things aren’t as they were. I am coming to see that, for the human being in the 21st century, our ability to come to grips with where we are as a species and start making some wise choices is paramount. I’m seeing people look and turn inward to find the resources that they need to face challenges. I’m sensing that the choice to take up prayer and meditation is one of the ultimate evolutionary adaptive strategies.

 GS: Talk a little more about rebalancing enterprise and belonging. We’re also talking about rebalancing male and female.

 CF: Reclaiming wholeness. I like that term. We’re in it together and we need each other to do it. I think that is awfully interesting and awfully challenging. How can we come together and talk about things that women have talked to women about and women have talked to men about? I’m not sure men have talked to men about things.

 GS: Not nearly enough.

 CF: Not nearly enough. That’s what I keep coming up with. There was a very interesting New York Times Sunday edition that had a little bemused article about men wanting to have dates with one another, and they were talking about straight men. Having dinner or going to a museum together, or just getting together to talk, but seeming so overwhelmed with self-consciousness. It’s extremely hard for them to do it. That was really meaningful for me because for years I’ve been saying men have got to be able to start talking to each other instead of just playing ball with each other.

 GS: It’s refreshing just for there to be open dialogue between men and women, because men have been so demonized.

 CF: I’ve had wonderful times in workshops with this book when men do come, because they walk in the door and after a little while they look at me and say, “Oh, you mean you’re actually not saying that it’s our fault!” I say, “Yes, it isn’t your fault.” We’re not talking about fault here at all. We’re talking about this very difficult situation that we find ourselves in, that we can only get out of by working together and listening to each other very carefully. I do want to say that about these workshops. They’re an opportunity to be heard.

 GS: Are you comfortable with the label “feminist?”

 CF: I’m perfectly comfortable with the word, except that it turns out that other people define it so differently than I do. I realize that it’s put up a barrier between us so I don’t use it very often. I revere the word. It has a noble history for me, but I don’t use it very often because I don’t want to alienate people and then people don’t want to talk to me.

 GS: It’s so nice to hear somebody who is identified as feminist understand that men also have been hurt.

 CF: Yes I know, I have a husband and a son.

 GS: I mean it’s in the best interest of all of us to understand each other better, and to stop doing some things and start doing some things.

 CF: Exactly. But its hard because we have these habits of thousands of years. There is something interesting that’s happened, even since I finished writing this book. There is the research emerging ... have you heard the phrase “tend and befriend?”

 GS: Tend and befriend? No.

 CF: It’s so cool. You’ve heard the expression “flight or fight.” That’s been around since 1930; that’s been our understanding of what happens to the human being in a threatening situation. You have two choices, you fight or you flee, depending on what your assessment of your enemy is. Well, a couple of women researchers in a laboratory at UCLA were having coffee in the year 2000, just chatting. One of them happened to be an endocrinologist, and they realized something.

    They were part of a research team, and when things were going badly with the research or their grants were threatened, the men on the team tended to disappear and kind of hole-up by themselves. But the women tended to come into the lab, clean things up, make coffee and reach out in conversation to take care of each other. Suddenly a light bulb went off as they realized that the research on which the fight or flight model was based had been carried out, 90% of it, on men only.

     It turns out that women, females, have a very different response to frightening stress than men do, and you can make sense of this if you look at the fact that typically the female has charge of babies. She can’t fight and she can’t run away. She has to figure out something else to do. So what she does is, she reaches out and ameliorates the situation. She finds ways of taking the pressure off everybody, taking care of everybody and forming friendly alliances. It is fascinating and it turns out that this is supported by the very different kinds of hormones that are released when adrenaline courses through the body. In males it has to do with testosterone and in females it has to do with oxytocin, which has to do with connection. Intimate binding together. Isn’t that amazing?

 GS: Yes.

 CF: So I think that one of things that is happening now, in looking at the genome and the X and Y chromosome, and looking at different ways that the male and female brains are structured and operating and so on, is that this is not absolutely 100% true in all cases. We don’t have to be stereotypical about it, but there really are fundamental differences having to do with our evolutionary history. We need to acknowledge and incorporate those differences into our conversation, as well as being respectful of one another. We do have these very different gifts and very different ways of being in the world. So we can’t necessarily expect one another to see things immediately the way that we see them.

 GS: Talk a little about what you do in your workshops.

 CF: Well, first I try to just throw out some of the basic ideas, the models, and give a brief history about why I’m talking about values of belonging and values of enterprise. Then I start drawing on people’s experience so that they can start making sense of it in their own terms. Moving from the pre-historical past into contemporary times turns into these very rich discussions. Very often towards the end, which reflects what happens at the end of the book, is a feeling of the need to collectively turn inward. This moves very naturally into a group meditation.

     I’m really hoping that men as well as women will be coming to this. I look at it as a precious chance for men and women, in a very welcoming environment, to have a searching conversation about the effects that gender stereotyping has had in our lives, and some of the ways that we can collectively shed these and move into a new territory, a new space.

 GS: To the benefit of all.

 CF: To the benefit of all.

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Carol Lee Flinders will present the workshop “Mother-Lines of the Spirit,” on Saturday, May 14, from 9am-3pm, and on May 15 she will speak at Sunday Service at 10:30am and give a second workshop on “Rebalancing the World” from 12:30-3pm at Unity on the North Shore, 3434 Central St., Evanston. For ticket information and reservations, visit www.unityns.org, and see the advertisement in this issue.

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