Jerry Yudelson is the Earth Day co-founder and author of the upcoming memoir, The Godfather of Green: An Eco-Spiritual Memoir. In The Godfather of Green: An Eco-Spiritual Memoir, Jerry shows how the serious practice of meditation and mindfulness can go hand-in-hand with practical and radical ecology. The message is simple: change yourself before you try to change the world. This edict is close to Jerry’s heart and he has become known worldwide as “The Godfather of Green.”
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Contact Info
- Website: www.JerryYudelson.net
- Blog: www.ReinventingGreenBuilding.com
- Book: The Godfather of Green: An Eco-Spiritual Memoir by Jerry Yudelson
Most Influential Person
- My first teacher, Swami Muktananda
Effect on Emotions
- Occasionally you might have a blip of anger or sometimes you might think someone is being a little unfair. It's at that time that something kicks in.
- There's nothing to be angry about, instead how can you understand what this person is trying to say or what they are doing.
Thoughts on Breathing
- Breathe in deep, breathe out long.
- I have this app on my Apple watch and every now and then it pops up and says breathe. For 60 seconds you can stop and breathe and it will give you a tap on the shoulder.
- You begin to see this connection between mind and breath as a pathway into meditation but also as an awareness [asking] am I breathing now, am I calm and centered? Because if you're breathing deeply in and out, you're going to be calm and centered. It's impossible not to be.
Suggested Resources
- Book: Play of Consciousness: A Spiritual Autobiography by Swami Muktananda
- App: Breathe (on Gerry's Apple watch)
Related Episodes
- A Mindful Path To A Clean Energy Future; Jeane Manning
- Learn Animal Communication and Telepathy With Lori Ann Spagna
- A Place Called Earth Founder; Cameron Brown
Episode Transcript
Note: The following transcript is a draft transcript, and as such, may contain computer-generated mistranslations.
Bruce:
What does mindfulness mean to you, Jerry?
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
What it means for me is being aware at all times of what you're thinking, how you're feeling, how you're relating to other people. Are you coming from a place of inner peace, inner steadiness, coming from a place of love? And as you know, this is a lifelong endeavor to, to be real in the moment, to be ourselves in the moment and to understand our connection with other people in the moment. Because we all have these times early on where we think, Oh, I should have done this or I should've done that. That's not mindful, it's regretful. So I think the issue of mindfulness is trying to stay present and take the benefit of your practices, whatever they may be. In my case, meditation and other spiritual practices — take those out and offer them to other people. But not by saying I'm offering you something.
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
It's by being who you are and being real in the moment and acknowledging them. And it's interesting. My teachers would begin every talk by saying, “with great respect and love, I welcome you all with all my heart”. And I think by taking that feeling of oneness into our environment, we actually do create a better world for ourselves and for others. Particularly right now when everyone is so stressed out and if I go to a grocery store, I like to thank the people at the checkout counter for being there. They don't get thanked enough. They're exposed to all of us all the time. Even if they have a little shield in front of them, a sneeze guard like they have on salad bars. They need to be acknowledged and thanked. And so that sense of gratitude that we bring into the encounter with others and with ourselves is I think a foundational practice of mindfulness.
Bruce:
Well, let's talk about your practice of meditation. What type of meditation do you do and how often and how long and is it guided or silent? What's it like?
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
That's a great question. So I've been practicing a form of meditation called Siddha Yoga meditation since the mid-seventies when I met a great master named Swami Muktananda. He initiated people into a form of meditation, which is basically mantra repetition. Then going into a silence space and staying there as long as you can. When I sit to meditate, I usually meditate for an hour and I call the practice, simply, watching and waiting. You watch the play of the mind and you wait for the grace of your practice to reveal something to you. And sometimes it does and sometimes it's just kind of tight-lipped and quiet and you just do it, and do it again. And so what I wrote about in the book was over time I began to have insights into my own nature and into a sense of being willing to be guided by intuition in each moment.
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
And I think that is the fruit of a meditation practice, but ultimately it is just about watching and waiting while you sit and then letting the mind become quiet and then going to that place of inner bliss, inner happiness that each one of us has. As soon as the mind stops chattering, it's our own nature to be happy. But a lot of times, in a lot of circumstances, you just have to wait for that moment to come in during meditation. And all of a sudden you say, I don't need to think about this stuff anymore. Where did this come from? This is just, I have a phrase for it, I call it “desire looking for an object.” And once you can label it, you can put it aside. If it comes back later, fine. If not, I don't need it. So that's my practice.
Bruce:
Right, right. Well in my intro I said that you suggest people change themselves before they try to change the world. When should we start trying to help keep the world the way it is? I mean there are so many things we can do to change ourselves. And we've talked about meditation and you know, just looking at the world with a more positive view, what can we do to start to change the world?
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
I think everyone has to find their own path. In India it's called Dharma, your own righteous way of living. But this is an interactive process. It, it doesn't mean that, “Oh well I'll just sit here by myself and wait until I'm totally perfect and then I'll go out and change the world,” right? It's you do something, plant a tree, attend a climate strike, whatever suits your fancy, and then you go back into your practice and then you do something else. You can't not act it when you're living in the body. You always doing something. So, I think each person has to find their own path, their own practice that works. And it changes over time. When I'm young and angry at the world I've inherited from my elders as I was during Earth Day, I'm more inclined to protest and criticize and so forth.
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
And when I see that, you know, by finding ways for other people to get engaged, finding ways for other people to find a way to be supportive of what I'm advocating and letting them do it in their own way that I can make more progress. I think that just maturing over time, you realize that you have to bring people along. And when I think about the climate crisis, the climate emergency today, that is really a pandemic waiting to happen in the next decade and beyond. You realize that the best thing to do right now is to have a conversation with somebody. Hey, here's what's going on. Here's what I've found. What do you think, uh, how do you think we should approach this? And what can you do as individuals? You know, I plant a garden every year. It's not that the garden feeds me per se, but it's that the act of planting a garden does bring positive energy into the world. And I think whatever you do, whether it's raising your children to love nature as a parent, whether it's spending time by the seashore or in the forest as an adult, all of these things have a cumulative impact. And so, I don't preach one way or the other. You just do what you do. You tell people about it, you ask them what they're thinking, and you take the next step.
Bruce:
Well, almost all of us can plant things. I know at one point I lived in an apartment and I had a, a balcony and I could have some potted plants out there. I could have some different Herb's like basil and thyme and things like that. And I enjoyed it. It, it just gave me a certain amount of fulfillment. I could have a larger garden if I wanted to at this point in life because I do have the space for it. So, I think that could be a very, I don't know if I would say healing, but a very positive experience to do that, especially at this time.
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
Yes, I've got three tomato plants, a cucumber and some lettuce. And so every now and then for the next few months we'll have our dinner salad from the garden. I put up a hummingbird feeder. Just again, I live in, in a suburban area and it's not nature, but it's not, you know, the tough streets of Toronto, so to speak. In the U.S., a third of the population lives in suburbs, a third in rural areas, and a third in more urban areas. So everyone has going to have their own different approach. But one of the things I love about gardening is that you can't rush anything. Everything has his own time. Right now, I'm waiting for the bluebells to bloom, but they're going to take another few weeks as the plant grows and so forth. But I know they're going to be there. I can see them getting ready for the big dance and you know, just that kind of tuning in to rhythms.
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
I live by the ocean. I like to check the tide charts just to know when's high tide, when's low tide? We can't visit the beach right now because they're all shut down. But we’ll go when we can again; it's a beautiful way to just connect with the earth, with your feet on the sand. I think we can connect with the earth anywhere, even just talking to the trees in your backyard. “Hi, how are you doing? Nice to see you. Any problems here?” You want to do this by yourself of course, but I do think that as human beings, we've evolved to be engaged with nature. We haven't evolved to be in front of screens all the time, even though they're very useful tools. They've come to dominate during this time of lockdown. And there are beautiful ways to connect with people from all over the world and to see, my wife is on one now, which is I think it's called something like my back window where people all over the world are just showing the view out their window and what they're thinking.
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
And you begin to see that this is a common humanity. And I think that openness to other people has a positive effect at a subtle level that we don't always realize we're doing. But every person who is offering positive energy during this time is making a contribution.
Bruce:
I think you're right, your book called The Godfather of Green: An Eco-spiritual Memoir. I'm interested to know the level of mindfulness it takes to create something like that. I know you've written a number of books. Let's talk about how you made this happen.
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
I've written 14 business and professional books. And the thing about a professional book is it's all arms-length. It's about the subject matter. And a memoir is about you as the subject matter and the arc of your life. So after I'd written all of these books, about three years ago,I recalled something I had read once. There were some very well known spiritual books in the seventies and eighties by Carlos Castaneda about it, a Yaqui Indian shaman that he apprenticed with called Don Juan Matus. And in one of the books, I think there were almost 10 of them, Don Juan tells Carlos the writer that before he dies, he has to make an accounting of his life for himself. And somehow that phrase stuck with me. So, when I had some free time three years ago, I say, well, it's time.
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
I'm reaching a certain age. I'm now a seasoned citizen, so to speak. And it's time to do some inner work, some introspection. And I started writing. And at first when you write a memoir, it's like, well, this happened and that happened. Then this happened and that happened, and it's pretty boring. And then I started to dive deeper. Well, WHY did this happen? And WHAT was driving me? What was I thinking? What were the influences? And so, you go back to childhood and as they say, the child is the father of the man.. And I said, well, I grew up with this influence and that influence, but then at some point something happened, etc., and so I wrote out stuff and I shared it with friends and they were all like, well, that's interesting, as friends will do. I could see, you know, some interesting passages were there, but it wasn't digging deep enough.
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
And then I began to relax, if I could say it this way, to relax into the project. I didn't have to achieve anything any longer. I had to let a process play out. In that process was, I began to recall things from that were seminal moments. The death of my father and something I did at that funeral that had ramifications psychologically. An incident that ] first got me into being an advocate for solar power and solar energy. Um, and so I began to get these insights that you get as a writer, and you then must do something with the insight. You must make it real, flesh it out. And fortunately, when it came to my wife, she has a unique quality, which is she forgets nothing; that can be good and bad depending on circumstances. But it helped in creating dialogue; because she was an actress and acting teacher, she understands dialogue.
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
She also wrote some screenplays. I said, you know, when I asked you to marry me, what did I say? What did we talk about? And this is 45 years ago. Because what you find when you write a memoir, particularly one covering many years is, unless you are an avid journal writer, like real writers are, you don't remember a lot of dialogue.
You remember a phrase here or phrase there that had a psychological or emotional impact and you could build a scene around it, but you don't remember a lot of lines. So — long story short — my wife began filling in the blanks, such as “when we first got together, what did we talk about?” That kind of stuff. And then from my spiritual practice, I had in fact kept diaries, and did journal on occasion. And then I found journals from when I first met my teacher, and I began to recall some of the experiences I had.
For example, I lived in his ashrams for a year and a half, in India and in the U S and I had very deep meditation experiences that were very revealing. And so gradually I began to cobble this thing together and I saw, well, there's these two threads. Can I weave a tapestry out of these two divergent threads of environmentalism and spiritual practices? And so I began to ask: how did one inform the other? And kind of getting back to the earlier quote of “change yourself before you want to change the world.” How was I able to take my practices, inner practices into practical work? And what did I learn about people that allowed me to do this kind of work and to be effective? And eventually in my sixties to go all around the world giving talks about green things and green buildings. And not to feel that I was a stranger anywhere, to feel welcomed in all of these diverse habitats from the Middle East to Australia and South America and all over Europe and plenty of places in Canada as well.
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
So I began to see the relationship between things. And then, uh, one of the things that, that you do learn, and you read this from a lot of very successful writers like Stephen King who wrote a book once a memoir about how he writes: he says you have to read a lot. And so I, while I was doing this writing, I was reading a lot and I mostly read contemporary novels because I like to see, well, how does a novelist create a scene out of nothing of thin air, so to speak, out of his imagination, her imagination. And it loosened up my writing. I think if you're a practitioner of mindfulness or meditation, is you have greater access to your inner workings in a very spontaneous way. Things come to you. You hear people talking in the supermarket, they're not talking to you, but you hear something that somebody says, and you say, Oh, that's interesting.
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
Yes, that clarifies something for me because you can learn from everywhere. Everything, right? Not just your garden, but random conversations, how people are with each other. So, one of the things I learned as a writer is to be observant. And you know, it's not that easy for most guys of a certain age and in our society to be attentive to others. We always want to be out there ourselves. Right? So, it opened me up and allowed me to write what I think is an interesting book that isn't about trauma. Yeah, there were some rough periods, but I didn't have these horrific traumas that you read in a lot of memoirs where you wonder how, how did this person even survive to write this story? And you know, I respect that they've done that, but it's not the life I've had; I've been very blessed.
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
But I also think people want to read happy things. Want to read things that are uplifting that opened them up. And I think that's the feedback I've gotten from a lot of readers who I've asked to review the book, who are themselves meditators. That when one woman who I respect highly, who's the president of a nonprofit and has been in that world her whole life and made giving to others her whole life, she said, I couldn't put it down. Of all people, that's the least one I would have expected to be so engaged with the book. So, you know, I began to see, well this is really a gift that I've been given, the ability to write something, to have reflections that other people might find valuable and then to offer that in the form of a memoir as an offering that I can make to others.
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
And so I really have viewed this project and this process as creating an offering the same way that you might create a wonderful dinner for guests and do your best to cook everything nicely and have the silverware out and the nice dishes and all this stuff you don't eat off of every day. So, long story short, it's an offering. It's a reflection and it was an intensely valuable process for me. So I would say for anybody, if you reach a certain age, whatever that might be, do it for yourself and then offer it to others. And if you have the ability and the good fortune to find a publisher, then you can publish it.
Bruce:
Jerry, in our area around here, there are a lot of wind turbines, there are solar farms, and of course, we know that that electric vehicles are becoming more popular. Are we on the right track with all these things?
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
I think we're on the right track, but we're still the tortoise racing against the Hare of climate change. I was in Winnipeg a few years ago researching a book, and I found out that Winnipeg was the windiest large city in North America, because the wind blows across the prairies, unhindered, for hundreds of miles. And I'm thinking, well, where the wind blows, you put up wind turbines! Just as the U.S. has wind turbines all over the Midwest because the winds blow of West to East, coming out of the Rockies and flowing across the Midwest. And you can still graze cattle underneath if you want. So, I think you could power all of North America with solar panels in just a small part of the desert of California and Arizona. It was the sunshine 330, 340 days a year full on. So yeah, I think we're on the right path. In fact, something like 70 to 80% of all new electric power capacity added every year in the U.S. now comes from wind and sun.
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
But electric cars today are only one or 2% in the market. Right? So, what I hope we learn from this pandemic is that we do have the power to create a different future. We do have the power to respond to serious challenges, and we have to get serious about being ready (for climate change) because we've had plenty of warnings. We've had plenty of task forces and I don't know the situation in Canada, but it's clear the U.S. had lots of task forces and knew what to do about a pandemic, but never really decided to stockpile any supplies in the larger context. There's a lot of things we can do, but time is short. And I think that's the issue with our politics. Even in Canada, you have some of these same issues. The real question is: can we move quickly enough to avert the worst effects of climate change?
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
It’s baked into the pie that the oceans are going to be warmer for 300 years. Nothing we can do about it. And sea levels are going to rise and Antarctica is going to lose an awful lot of ice as is Greenland. And we know that's already underway in Canada. The Arctic ice is getting smaller at the end of each succeeding summer. Good news about warming, I guess, if you live in the far North. But the bad news is you won't have any ice roads to serve all those communities. They'll all be swampy. We now know that we can respond. We now know it's not going to be easy, but we can do it in a more mindful way than just waiting for something to happen. And then having this flurry of response where our Congress suddenly spends $2 trillion it didn't have, just to try to buy a little time for people. That isn't going to work for very long, but people do need to be helped.
So, the long answer to a short question is yes, we can do a lot, but we have only a 50/ 50 chance right now of holding warming below 2C (above preindustrial levels). And that's only if we take lots of actions between now and 2030. So, the next decade is really a momentous one for what I might call the human experiment.
Q: Now you talked about your gardening. Do you live in an eco-type home? What's your lifestyle?
Jerry: You know, we moved to the West Coast for my wife's health. Before that, when we lived in Tucson, Arizona for 10 years, we did in fact create this home ecosystem with solar power and lots of fruit trees and gardens and got an award from the city of Tucson for having the first green home-based business. It’s a little more difficult now because we live in a 20-year-old smaller home in a community with strict rules about what you can do to the property
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
And it's also, we're at a point in life where you have to start watching your money, so you do things the best you can. For example, have a good reason before you drive somewhere. You take transit when you can. If I got to Los Angeles, I take a train, it's a hundred miles. I am a vegetarian. I have been since I met my meditation teacher and he said, you should be a vegetarian. I said, okay, I'll try it. And here 40 years later, I still am, so I eat lower on the food chain, which has a beneficial impact how you try to eat, to get food from farmer's markets. It’s this sort of environmental mindedness that exists at a lot of levels and it exists at a level of how we vote as, as citizens, how we respond to others, what we advocate for so everyone can find a place.
Bruce:
Well, Jerry, Earth Day is coming up on April 22nd. Has it always been that week in April since 1970?
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
Yeah. I think people, um, originally chose the date for Earth Day, I think because the weather was likely to be good. Right? They started the previous September to organize things and wanted to do it while college students and others were still in school, which kind of makes it happen before middle of May. At one time, we had a national Arbor day, that was on April 14, so they didn't want it on that day. So somebody came up with a date that was in the middle of the week and was something that would probably work weather-wise throughout the U.S., so yes, it's always been April 22nd, and has been celebrated every year. And a big celebration was the 20th anniversary. Um, and the interesting enough the first Earth Day in 1970 led directly to the first U.N. conference on the environment in 1972.
There's many versions of why Earth Day came about in 1970, but it was really a spontaneous gesture because at that time we had rivers on fire in the U.S. because there was so much oil in the rivers from chemical plants and so forth. We had the largest oil spill in us history at that time in Santa Barbara, California the previous year, so everything was kind of coming to a head.
I grew up in Los Angeles. There were 180 days a year of air pollution alerts where it was dangerous to breathe. While we used to have a morbid joke, which was “I wouldn't want to breathe any air I couldn't see.” And you could see the air pollution right in front of you. Today Los Angeles County has three times as many people and only 80 days a year of unhealthy air. So, we've made progress. But it was mostly because of regulation and technology. You may not recall, but cars used to not have catalytic converters. Yes. And they were just putting nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides and unburned hydrocarbons into the air. And of course, we had diesel particulates from diesel cars, buses and trucks. You breathed and the particles got right into your lungs.
Bruce:
And I think a lot of motorcycles and lawnmowers still spew that kind of thing. Am I right?
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
Right. And in Asia, when you see all the photographs of Asian cities like New Delhi and Mumbai, Beijing, it's two-stroke engines, everybody owns scooters, motorcycles, that are all burning diesel. And that when you talk about electric vehicles, you want to say, well, it's not hard to electrify a scooter and you can charge a scooter and go the whole day without really using much of the charge. So the easiest thing to do is just to take all of those, open up the workshops and refit all of those scooters for electric motors. That would be easy. Those are direct drive, you know. We can do this. A lot of this can be done technologically, but a lot of it is also about our way of thinking. In Canada at least you're blessed with the idea of the First Nations here as a live part of your culture.
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
I would say in the U.S., the presence of Native Americans is real, but it's more like a ghost reminding us of our past transgressions. You also begin to see that we've treated the earth as a waste dump, as a place that we can desecrate without penalty, for a long time. And that's a mode of thinking that isn't how people used to be. It isn't how Western culture used to be. But with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the idea that man is the measure of all things, then with the steam engine and the coal mines, we took a different path 300 years ago and now nature is fighting back. And we now have to really face the fact that we're creating a world that we're going to have to live in for the first time in human history. Human beings are the dominant species on the planet and we're responsible for the environment, and we have to act in a very different way. And that's the hardest thing. You know, it's easy to change technology. I can change out your diesel engine for an electric engine in motor in a day, but to change culture, it takes generations and we don't have that much time. So that to me is our greatest environmental challenge is mindfulness of what we're doing and a willingness to follow that insight wherever it leads. Right.
Bruce:
Jerry, as we move forward in the interview, I want to ask you five quick answer questions. So just 30-second answers are perfect. The first one is this. Who is one person who influenced your mindfulness practice?
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
Yes. Well, I would say my first teacher, Baba Muktananda and of course his successors Gurumayi. She is my teacher now. And they gave me everything I needed, in fact, Baba would often say, well, I've given you everything. Now you have to do some work.
Bruce:
Yeah. And that's, that's the case with all of us, isn't it? Now we have to do something. How has mindfulness affected your emotions, Jerry?
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
Well, I think occasionally I might have a blip of anger or I think that somehow somebody is being a little unfair, and it's at that time that something kicks in and it's the witness. It's the watcher. It says, you know, Get off of it, there's nothing ever to be angry about. How can you understand what this person's trying to say or what this person's doing? It doesn't mean that if somebody's doing something that's really bad, that you don't say anything, but your anger is not emotional. It's directed for a purpose.
Bruce:
Tell us how breathing is part of your mindfulness.
Jerry Yudelson, The Godfather of Green:
My teacher says repeatedly: Breathe in deep. Breathe out long. Just breathing regularly. I do think that you begin to see this connection between mind and breath as a pathway into meditation, but also as an awareness in itself: Am I breathing now? Am I calm and centered? Because if you're breathing deeply in and out, you're going to be calm and centered. It's impossible not to be.
