Merav Richter

Transcript

who here has had a midlife crisis for all of you who haven't yet it's coming and somehow for some reason they always involve hiking it's weird I don't know why but see I wanted to hike the Camino de Santiago for the last 30 years after I read a book by Paulo coo I made this my dream my mission I really wanted to make it there but life had other plans kids loss of jobs loss of husbands jobs until finally a few years ago I made the decision that that's it I'm walking 500 miles on that Camino to Santiago and as I was walking no phone

no data blisters on my feet rocks in my backpack and a heart broken in a million pieces and for some reason camito to Santiago is always uphill I don't know how that works but as I walked it one song kept me going the song from the greatest showman you might know it I walked taking those steps every step bruised and bloodied and as I marched along those Spanish hillsides the cows would look at me like I'm crazy and the chickens would cool along and the pilgrims thought I had mad cow disease but I was there step by step I am brave even though I was

scared shizas I am bruised in a million pieces this is who I'm meant to be this is me see a few years prior to that my then husband of 25 years was diagnosed with stage four live and Incredibly incredibly miraculously after a whole summer of chemo and lots of prayers and lots of healing the doctors well they don't say it's a misdiagnosis they say it's downregulated and there's no Hallelujah and I waited for a full year after that but somewhere in there something didn't sit right I I didn't know what it was but something wasn't right and so I made the tough decision to ask

for a separation you know it's kind of like uh in The Matrix have you guys seen that when there's the blue pill you can remain Comfortably Numb stay in this little bubble of your world that has everything you might need all the Creature Comforts and gosh you won't know anything or take the red pill and it's going to hurt like hell but your eyes will be opened I chose the red pill and that's when I found all the lies all the deceptions all the betrayals all those intuitive hits that I'd been ignoring for 25 years that I'd been shutting myself up that I hadn't been

reclaiming myself that I didn't go on my own pilgrimage so there I was was hiking the Camino and every step that I took I realized there's no life that isn't filled with some sort of Crisis midlife quarter life sometime in life you're going to have a crisis but the crisis is what gets you to your quest the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you see your test is your testimony your mess is your message so sing it with me put your arms out sing it with me I am brave I am brave I am bruised I am bruised this is who I'm meant

to be this is who I'm meant to be this is me this is me

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Transcript

we all have deeply personal stories to tell stories of our family that change the course of the rest of our destiny and the rest of our lives tonight i'm going to share mine but first let me ask you where do you think consciousness lives it's a completely rhetorical question but some people say it lives in the head some people say it lives in the heart some people say it lives in the body tonight i promise you that i don't know i'm not gonna give you the answers and i may by the end of this speech even give you more questions see i started to do

this question and look for this answer when i was 23 years old my mother went into the hospital to have a brain tumor removed and while the surgery was successful overnight there were tragic complications by morning she had suffered a stroke she was in a coma the doctors declared her brain dead i tried every day when i visited her to sit by her hospital bed i'd walk in hi mom how are you doing today the only way i knew that she was still alive was because the machine kept beeping beep beep beep i kept trying hi mom how you doing today i was hopeless one

day out of sheer frustration i grabbed the book of psalms that my mom had on her bedside table the book that she read every single day the book that i had never read and i opened it up to a random page and i started reading a psalm and to my shock my mom finished the psalm it was like a bird had been led out of a cage i tried another page she finished the psalm i couldn't believe it i ran to the nurse's station my mom is conscious she regained consciousness the nurses brought the doctors into my mom's hospital room checked her i could see

the pity in their eyes i picked up the book of psalms i read i could see one nurse looking at me as if to say the psych ward is on the seventh floor dear one doctor pulled me aside and he said sometimes in our grief we hear things that don't actually exist we hope that we're hearing someone's consciousness but we're not really he assured me that i could not have heard my mother but i didn't buy that i knew what i heard so i tried this little experiment i went to my mom's house and i brought a box of books and see my mom was

a special needs teacher so she carried this box of special books that she would take for the special kids i sat at my house my mother's hospital bed and i picked out one book random opened it up i read the sun did not shine so we sat in the house as that cold called what day i knew it i kept going page after page book after book when we finally finished that book i brought that box of books i brought more books my mom's favorites and when we finished those books we started having conversations not real conversations like this but conversations in consciousness now i

know i get it i'm not the first person to sit at the side of the hospital bed of a loved one and hope to hear consciousness i'm not the first one to wonder where consciousness actually lives and i'm not the last one to hear their child or their parent or their husband or their wife as they're dying hear those words from them as william james said the reality that we perceive is just hiding with the filmiest of screens true consciousness funny it took nine months for my mom to give me life and nine more months for my mom to give me the meaning of life

my mom was showing me behind the screen she was showing me where consciousness lives she passed away quietly gently in the night but even after her death she kept showing me behind the screen with the flock of birds that flew overhead at her funeral with the dove that sits on my windowsill with my daughter who has memories of a life she never lived so to answer the question where does consciousness live now i don't know the answer for everybody but i know at least for me i may not know where consciousness lives but i do know where to look for it thank you

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Transcript

Leeman a little bit closer I have a confession to make I hear voices strange exotic foreign voices now I get it if I would have admitted this a millennia ago I would have been burnt at the stake centuries ago would have been thrown River decades ago I would have been tied into a straitjacket but today I get to spread my wings and fly see since I was a little girl there were only two things I ever wanted to do fly and write luckily for me for over half my life I've worked at the airline and I got to travel all around the world hearing strange

exotic foreign voices I've been from Jersey to Jerusalem Miami to Mumbai Pittsburgh to Paris and what I found was that while we all may speak in different tongues there was one common language shared by all of humanity you want to know what that is but 20 years ago it was my first time in New Delhi the crew and I were standing on a street corner trying to decipher a map does anyone remember maps a young woman approached us and asked if she could help us and at first we were a little hesitant we didn't quite trust her but as she led us down the street

where we were going we fell in love with her with her charming smile with her endearing personality we asked her to be our tour guide for the day and as she toured us around her city her name was Priyanka and we started to notice something about her something not quite we noticed that while her right arm was straight and strong and she used it to point the way everywhere we went her left arm hung limp and lifeless by her body when she noticed us looking at it with sympathy in our eyes she said no don't pity me and she brought her arm out from behind

the sari and said this is my lucky arm this was my salvation she explained that when she was a baby her arm was broken and never set properly and that was done on purpose so that she would become a better beggar but she didn't want our pity no this was her lucky arm she explained this was the reason she that she was adopted into a loving environment and taught to read and write and taught English but more importantly she was taught how to love because that's our one shared common language love all over the world from that day on I realized that I could never

ever take anything in my life for granted when priyanka feels so lucky about everything in her life I made it my own personal mission statement to go around the world capturing people's stories asking them what do you love what do you feel lucky about and I compiled those stories and weave them into my books and I thought well what happens what would happen if the whole world fell in love and the more I talk to people the more I realized that's a lie no that's BS a Hollywood belief system that we've all bought into no no we don't fall in love we rise in love

love is not something that we happen to walk into down the street fell into a hole oh my what is this oh I thought this would be warmer think about it when you're driving down the street in the car truck cuts you off do you fall in love when you get to the to work and your coworker tells the same damn joke every single day do you fall in love when you get home it's a screaming do you fall in love no you rise in love and what if the whole world rose in love what if each person that you meet you made your own

personal mission statement to find out what do they love what do they feel lucky about and what if you ask yourself those same questions

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Transcript

in 1984 I was 10 years old I used to run to the top of the hill in the back of my school yard out stretch my hands look up at the sky twirl around and pretend that I was Wonder Woman I was like a clumsy mini little Amazonian girl full of wonder and magic and mystery and imagination I used to spend a lot of truths and deflect bullets with my magic bracelets stab the evil guys with my sword of Athena and fly off in my invisible jet anybody else remember playing superhero superzero well over 30 years have passed since then and I did sort of

become Wonder Woman except not in the way that I was expecting you know I wondered where I left my keys where's my phone I wondered where all this extra weight came from who are these kids I would walk into our room and wonder what am I doing here what am I doing here but most importantly I wondered where that ten-year-old little Amazonian went I wondered where was the magic and the mystery and the awe and the Wonder and the imagination games so I set off to find her and I realized that there are three secrets to becoming Wonder Woman I call them the three thieves

courage curiosity and community the first courage as Maya Angelou said courage is the most important of all virtues without courage you cannot practice any of the virtues consistently and sometimes courage does not mean being brave and heroic sometimes courage if that's still small voice that says just one more time just try again one of my favorite authors Anais Nin said life shrinks and expands in proportion to your courage so don't be scared to collapse and expand that's how galaxies are made the second of the Seas curiosity Einstein said that curiosity is more important than knowledge just think about that for a moment being curious about

the things that you don't know it's more important than all of the things that you already know in life courage and curiosity are constant companions and the third sea to becoming Wonder Woman is community community comes from a latin root communis and unity communists' being the common goal shared by all and unity meaning oneness so community really means oneness that is shared by all the great Buddhist monk teknon Han said that the Guru of the future will be the community the Sangha and then we are all firmed up builders in fact it's your job as an individual in this world of the future to live

your life in such a way that people want to join your community you are the Thunder Builder the community and just like in Paradise Island the common unity makes superheroes and super Shiro's of us all in my life my community reflects to me everything that I'd like to be your community is the source of your power so empower your community daily my community teaches me wonder curiosity courage and the deepest sense of community my family my neighbor's my friends all come together to remind me that this is a wonder filled world isn't that you

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