“Death does not have to be treated like an enemy for you to delight in life.” Sit with spiritual teacher Ram Dass in a soul to soul connection a year before his passing as he shares his perspectives on love and finding peace in death.
“These are hard times friends, and we need to raise our voices together.” Vocal activist Melanie DeMore shares how the power and connectivity of singing can transcend divisive forces and spread love.
“Since the beginning of time our people have been making and doing. For 200 years we have been interrupted.” In the face of extinction, native artist and activist L. Frank Manriquez from the Californian Tongva/Ajachemen tribe examines the subjugation of artifacts and the importance of cultural continuity in serving her ancestors’ legacy.
“I think that love and protection made me survive in the second world war.” Maida Pollock was 22 years old when she was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Now 97 years old, Maida reflects on how the love from her family was an inoculation against long term harm after witnessing the Holocaust.
“A wave is not just a ripple in water, a wave is the thread, visible or not, that unifies pattern.” Everything in life can be viewed as a wave and kinetic sculptor Reuben Margolin takes us inside his obsession with wave patterns as he shares his artistic journey of translating their grace into moving works of art.
“So many people’s lives were shortened by me, now I have the opportunity to give back.” Del Seymour spent 18 years of his life living in the streets of the Tenderloin of San Francisco. Del now works to heal and transform this neighborhood through community development and personal responsibility.
“We are all artists, either consciously or unconsciously.” Born in a bicultural/bilingual home, Rafael's poems are shared in both English and Spanish. A Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing & Literature, César E. Chávez Lifetime Award recipient and City of Berkeley's first Poet Laureate, Rafael explores the responsibility we each have as we create the world around us.
“If you love someone, take care of them.” Pearl E. Gates exploded onto the late ‘70s New Wave Punk music scene with her band Pearl Harbor and the Explosions. Her life of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll hit pause when she first decided to care for her father in law. Pearl shares how struggling with depression and being both a stage personality and an off-stage friend has been a dualistic life challenge. Caregiving for her sick friends and family has given her the strength to come out of periods of deep depression.
“You have to persist, you have to believe in yourself when everybody else says it won’t work.” Born in 1933, Huey Johnson’s life’s work includes being president of the Nature Conservancy, founding The Trust for Public Land, The Grand Canyon Trust and the Resource Renewal Institute. The United Nations has called him "a catalyst and champion for environmental protection.” A self described salesman, Huey abandoned his first career selling plastics and found a way to leverage his salesmanship to fight land development and protect millions of acres of open space.
"It's funny how an illness will open up a lot of other doors. You take what you know how to do and reinvent yourself." Joan Jeanrenaud is an American cellist who played with the internationally-renowned Kronos Quartet from 1978 until 1999. In 1999 she had to leave Kronos, in part due to being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and she now composes and performs solo works and collaborates with other artists.
"Anything that brings that little bit of happiness for even a moment, to make someone smile... that's f*cking gold." John Law has been embedded in Oakland and San Francisco's underground art, pranks and events world as a prime mover of culture jamming since 1977. A member of the legendary urban exploration Suicide Club, Law was instrumental in forming the later Cacophony Society and in turn co-founded the Burning Man festival and the Billboard Liberation Front.
"I remember the smell of Albert Einstein, which I have not smelled since." There is perhaps nobody on earth more iconically linked to the counterculture movement than Wavy Gravy. Christened "the illegitimate son of Harpo Marx and Mother Teresa" by Paul Krassner, Wavy refers to himself as a "temple of accumulated error" and yet he's always ready with a twinkling insight, a fantastic story and a helping hand. About his stories, Ram Dass said, "everything Wavy says is true, although it's all unbelievable."
"It's more than lip service to say that every life matters." Gaelynn Lea dives deep into the wonderous musical moment just before her 94-year-old grandfather passed away. Gaelynn was born with a genetic condition that causes complications in the bones and limbs. She fell in love with music as a child, developed a technique for playing the violin from her wheelchair, and became an accomplished recording and touring artist after winning NPR’s Tiny Desk competition in 2016.
"It was a closing window on a time when someone like me could be welcomed in Iran." Todd Rundgren reflects on the warm feelings he felt from the Iranian people on his travels there in 1978, unaware that behind the scenes the Shah was losing his tenuous hold on power after many years of being propped up by the American CIA. It's an intimate geopolitical story from one of the great iconoclastic individualists.
"The world is greater than our capacity to understand." Margolin Malcolm has written and published many books about Californian history and Indian life, including The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area. He co-founded The Alliance for California Traditional Arts and has received a Chairman's Commendation from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
“If you know what your purpose is, go there, be brave. It will be worth it." Shamanic fusion dance choreographer Anandha Ray created the CovenantVR experience that astounded San Francisco in July 2019 at the Grace Cathedral Movement Arts Festival, and there were many obstacles to overcome to realize her vision
Created specifically for Virtual Reality, CovenantVR is a shamanic fusion dance performance which blends many forms of dance with the goal “to allow movement to open portals of inquiry to better understand the state of being human.” Filmed in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, you can also spend time with choreographer Anandha Ray in her WisdomVR experience as she shares the many obstacles she had to overcome to create this piece.
“Let your body move the way it wants to move and you’ll be dancing your dance.” Since the late 1930s Anna Halprin has been creating revolutionary directions for dance, inspiring artists in all fields. Defying traditional notions of dance, Anna has extended its boundaries to address social issues (including reclaiming a mountain in California from a serial killer), build community, foster both physical and emotional healing, and connect people to nature.
Dr. Stanislav Grof's professional career has covered a period of over 60 years in which his primary interest has been research of the therapeutic potential of a large subgroup of non-ordinary states of consciousness that have great therapeutic, transformative and evolutionary potential. In this WisdomVR experience you can sit with Stan and his wife Brigitte as they share what Stan's massive stroke in October 2018 was like and how they're healing from it.
"Synchronicity is the material world playing with the human psyche." Stanislav Grof, M.D is a psychiatrist with more than 60 years of experience in research of “holotropic” states of consciousness, a large and important subgroup of non-ordinary states that have healing, transformative, and evolutionary potential. He is the foremost LSD and psychotropic researcher on the planet and a co-founder of Transpersonal Psychology.
"It was a baptism, and he had been baptized by the earth itself..." Legendary Yosemite National Park ranger Shelton Johnson (featured in Ken Burns' "The National Parks") stands with you in front of El Capitan. He tells the story about how he fell in love with wilderness and mountains and shares what it’s like to bring inner city kids to our national parks. It is "the dream of knowing nature."
"The opposite of poverty is not wealth, it is justice." Award-winning slam poet CeCe Jordan’s words about social justice dig deep into the magnitude of what faces teachers and students who are trapped in a system that considers our children to be "checkboxes of at risk behavior.” Her passionate poem brings extra power in the VR headset as you encounter CeCe deep in her personal space. You’re face-to-face with her, feeling her heat as you begin to comprehend the social justice challenges that confront us.
"The President would embrace me on that stage, and the three of us, before that slave-built White House, would be standing before the nation..." Betty Reid Soskin shares her story of receiving the presidential coin from Barak Obama as she introduced him to the United States on national television. On that day she discretely carried a photograph of her great grandmother Leontine Braud Allen with her to honor the lives of her ancestors.
“I don’t think I realized until that moment how important a song can be.” 98-year-old Betty Reid Soskin wrote this civil rights anthem in 1964 after being inspired by Fannie Lou Hamer's fight for the Mississippi Freedom Party to be seated at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in the face of President Lyndon Baines Johnson's attempts to keep them out
“My great-grandmother was born into slavery in 1846 and taught me some of most enduring lessons.” Betty Reid Soskin's great-grandmother Leontine Braud Allen became a midwife and lived to be 102. Betty is now 98 and tells us about Leontine’s tremendous influence on her life, inspiring her to become a helper to others during the civil rights movement, in society in general and even now in her role as a ranger with the National Park Service.
"Sometimes we forget that intelligence has a shadow and we ignore that shadow at our peril." What it's like to see the world from a Zen Buddhist perspective. Author, actor and Zen priest Peter Coyote (along with his dogs Chico and Pablo) compares two contradictory but useful ways of looking at our world. The first represents all things as separate and independent and the second represents all things as being interconnected. Meditation practice can help us account for this contradiction and reduce suffering.
"We are loved and our love is for giving." Huichol-trained shaman Tom Pinkson shares the wisdom of his teacher Guadalupe de la Cruz, and how she taught him that we are all sacred, worthy, luminous beings, and the nature of our being is love.
"And I looked at him, his body, and I thought 'You are going to heal this for me today.'" Legendary author ("The Gift of Fear") and renowned security expert Gavin de Becker shares with you the story of how the death of the patriarch of a family in Fiji healed a lifelong trauma that began with his mother's suicide.
