Podcast : Beams Of Peace

In this podcast, I chat to fellow Insight Timer guide, Jane Murray. We chat about Peacebeams and the currency of kindfulness. Just imagine living in a world with kindness as the de facto currency. What legacy would that leave for our children and grandchildren?

Transcript

So welcome everybody to actually what is the first podcast of 2021 for the new Soul Waves podcast.

If you've been following me on the Zone show you'll realize that I put that podcast into mothballs at the end of last year and this year I'd be podcasting earlier had I not published a book in January and I started the meditation series and ambient album inspired by the book but very much part of my what I'm doing going forward is to talk to people about the concept of Soul Waves and I can't think of a more perfect guest to start off the new podcast than Jane Murray from Peace Beam because I've got a suspicion that Peace Beams and Soul Waves are actually one and the same thing.

So Jane you used to be a lawyer,

A venture capitalist but then by day and a philosophy student and teacher by night.

Tell me what is a Peace Beam,

What are Peace Beams,

What's the concept of a Peace Beam,

Where does it come from and to in your life?

Sure well thank you very much for having me on your first podcast Tom it's a pleasure to be here.

Yes that is true I am still a lawyer in fact and I was a venture capitalist for a long time before I started Peace Beam.

Peace Beam arrived it's always very difficult I think as you know we were chatting before that sometimes it's hard to recall how these things sort of materialized in one's life but it was during the summer of 2016 where we had the Brexit referendum in the UK and the election cycle in the US that was you know very disruptive and it felt to me certainly living in London and being a commuter at that time that the levels of negativity that were circulating were astonishingly high and I found for myself for somebody who'd had quite a long-term practice of mindfulness and would have considered myself you know somebody who was able to respond as opposed to react was finding it extremely difficult to do that particularly on the commute particularly you know when we're around a lot of people.

I was at a kind of a pivot point in my life then having had that strange sort of day job and then in the evenings I was a teacher of fourth way philosophy in those days I was struggling to reconcile those two worlds really I think that's a common experience for people when they reach a particular time in their life and you think there's a choice point it's either I really begin to fully live my values and my authentic self or not and there are consequences that run from both of those things and there was a point in 2015 where it was possible that I was in a different position but peace beam itself as an idea arrived really fully formed for me it was just a realization one day on the train that if we could all just have a few short moments to reset to bring our nervous systems back down that we could start viewing each other through these really colored lenses that we were of antagonism and fear that was really something that I was really circulating in those days and that would be it was the idea that you know we can move from anxiety to connection or and isolation to belonging quickly it doesn't have to be you know a 10-day vipassana retreat or whatever you know that you have to take up for that so the the idea of the peace beam was that it was five minutes where the listener could be brought into coherence heart and breath and mind coherence connect to themselves and to the world around them and then crucially make that of it that energy available to people that they meet because one thing that I had found from some of the meditation or mindfulness traditions was that they sort of stopped short of making the energy that you access available to everybody else and so that's where the idea that you know that you know you're not going to be able to do anything about it that's where the idea that you know mindfulness when combined with kindfulness becomes this incredibly powerful wave of energy so that's where it came from and we've gone from there so the idea formed in 2016 and then it's taken us a while to sort of put some form around that as it always does.

Wow so because you're a great lover of words so initially you're beaming some peace from your heart into somebody else's world but then a peace beam then becomes a thing and I guess that if you get irradiated by a beam of peace you then become a radiator of these so it's like a nicely infectious thing obviously we're recording this podcast in the time of and not so nice infection but if you've got that idea that are you using that model it becomes nicely infectious.

Well I think in the same way that negative energy is infectious positive energy is too you know kindness is it can be viraled if you like you know where we experience kindness from another person it puts us directly in touch with our own capacities for that and then so and then the beam of that energy if you like is amplified each of us we all become amplifiers for the energy that is circulating at a particular time or in a particular community so yeah I think it does it does become a thing I mean it's obviously it's not tangible in a physical sense but it's certainly tangible in the emotional and psychic and mental field for for everybody.

Yeah so so we bumped into each other or our our soul waves and peace beams bumped into each other on the wonderful app which is Insight Timer and I know that because this podcast will end up on Insight Timer as well people on there will get it how does it go down in those worlds of the legal world and the venture capital world that you come from I mean is those and and you know some of the political worlds where it's it's tough in those worlds you know it really is a lot of fear and anxiety and and negativity I always think that the negativity is just positively not pointing in quite the right direction but how does those old words worlds that you used to know it accept the concept of a peace beam?

Well I think initially when when we went you know when we started out and we started out as a social movement and then just because it's in my blood and in my nature I understood that there was a possibility for peace beam to become a company and an entity in and of itself so we went out in the early days to pitch to my kind of network which was available at the time and it was a real struggle so 2016,

Well it would have been 2017 really it was a real struggle to convey these ideas and I knew it would be.

We weren't just talking about peace beams but we were talking about from the kind of structure of the company as well that it was our intention that any of the capital in the company even though we were a private limited company but any of the capital in the company would then be made available to peace related projects or heart-based projects that ordinarily wouldn't have access to capital so it was you know we were going with a really radical approach which I knew wouldn't go down because I mean I obviously have been on the other side of the table for a long time but what has been really fascinating to me Tom is that in the last three years and it has been exponential in the last 12 months that the understanding of what is intended from a company like peace beam what we mean when we talk about the need for us to understand the value of humanity the value beyond our narrow understanding of capital what we mean by the viraling of kindness the ripple effect all of a sudden has become almost common parlance and I was absolutely astonished to be invited just at the close of 2020 to talk as a thing called kind fest which was this huge online festival where people were talking about kindness the power of kindness what you know the the emanation of kindness the ripple effect how it is the tapestry of the world that we live in and I was one of I don't know maybe 40 people who were being interviewed from a work point of view from a business point of view about what this means and how important this is for building a new economy imagining a new world so I think what's happened in the last three or four years from from really going from where you might as well have been speaking you know mandarin in a in a room of English speakers to all of a sudden everybody really understanding it has been has been astonishing to me wow yeah you should make realize that you know we take words for granted don't we and and the world the word humankind could be reimagined as a human it is kind yes yeah but I think that that there is a there is a unique power in and I believe you know kindness is is a is real power it's where we access our genuine power our power to create to collaborate to build to ease to nurture to it is our the the fundament of our creative power and and I think that that's it is really important for us to rescue kindness from being conflated with somehow weakness or being a pushover and you know the word kindness has been really undermined I think particularly in the last 200 years where you know we've had the predominance of the age of reason and the age of reason has brought us astonishing things it's you know you and I wouldn't be having this conversation without it but at the expense of a lot of our um the attributes of what we are as human kind as you say yeah well it also sounds like you've got your own version of bitcoin which is kind of pay yeah because we you know we use it a great deal less much energy yeah exactly so as in none um so yes kind of pay came really came from I think my own personal uh I I hesitate to use the word obsession but I think it may be appropriate uh obsession with how as human beings we understand value how we attribute value what we decide is valuable and what we decide crucially isn't valuable and the consequences of that and I think as my background as a lawyer and a VC really informed my you know genuine confusion around how we do that you know that that that we could build for example a VC culture where the idea of move fast and break things was you know something to be applauded and aspired to um even the process of how companies were valued we we specialized in mobile telecommunications that was our kind of sweet spot in our fund and how those companies were valued the implications of the dot-com boom and then all of the effects of of that you know how you know even in energy companies you know all of the things that are off balance sheet all of the things that are off balance sheet um like the resources of the planet which if they were on balance sheet would mean that those companies would look a great deal less attractive than they did for a hundred years and so it would that sort of obsession that I had when when as I was in peace beam and we were really holding these radical ideas around value and we had to do it ourselves internally as well to really be able to you know because you've got you've got to authentically live what you're talking about so that meant that you know our all of our equity was divided completely equally regardless of the usual parameters that people would have around you know how much time was given or how much work was done so we were really radical about that and then we were really radical about you know making a decision that we were going to use all other forms of capital and we were going to build a company like that allow it to scale in its own way allow it to grow organically so really taking it outside all of the normal parameters and kind of pay was a logical conclusion of that for us so if we as a company and as a movement as an idea are putting kindness as a superpower and front and foremost of um the human power that will imagine and can build a more thriving world then we would have to accept that as invaluable and good exchange for the for the stuff that we produce and so you know we looked at we looked at that for you know maybe uh about 10 months we were testing it with with people we found that it was quite difficult to communicate what the idea was um and now we're producing a white paper on it with um in conjunction with the lse one of the phd's from their anthropology department uh we're really looking at whether this has the potential to be something that can be used by other organizations and other companies and so in very simply the idea is that we accept money for our products but we will also accept kindness so you write to us with three acts of kindness and we'll send you a voucher to buy any of our products so it's we're really living into that if we're deciding everything is valuable then it's valuable so what what does that mean what what does that how does that actually play out into the lived experience is it possible in the context of our current system to do that all of those things so it's very yeah it's kind of very at the edge of what would be considered sane i think in a commercial setting but not not so crazy as you might think as well because obviously the alternative currency world has a very different understanding of value so just those kindnesses can be um given to other people that are not you but traded in with you so obviously it'll work if it's macro'd up it'd work very well because everyone's just kind to each other um and but but how does it work because obviously it's got any any new currency like bitcoin has got to work in hybrid with the old currencies because i guess you still got some bills where you need some you need to pay some bills you need to put food on the table this sort of stuff and then tesco wouldn't take wouldn't take a kindness for yeah groceries no not yet but so so so part of the part of the exploration around kind of pay is so that we we hold those questions right we you know so as a company what that means for us is that we have all of our b2c so um how we would describe that is anything that we put out for our listeners so we have a lot of listeners on insight time or you have a lot of people who come to our website anything that we produce for them will be available using kind of pain we also produce material for um other businesses and for third level um so we do a huge amount of work with the london school of economics their accelerator we produce a lot of material for them which we charge for so that sort of that balance that allows us if you like to experiment with kind of pain but our idea is to really if we believe in interconnection um and not just as something nice to say but as something that is an actual fact then how does that translate into how we live in real terms so if i believe that you doing a kind act to another person or an animal or something good for the planet on the other side of the world has a direct impact on me creates a peace being creates a soul wave then then then we then we live like that we believe that you know you are creating a world in which we can all thrive and so we are going to take that in exchange for what we give to the world as well wow how wonderful how wonderful so um because we're doing this we're having this um this conversation in what was hopefully the end of lockdown three in the a.

K obviously people podcasts have got a long shelf life so someone might listen to this in uh 10 years time or so um but we even though the pandemic has been pretty horrendous for the world it's seen lots of kindness come from it you know all the stuff that captain tom did and and so captain tom and all the people that have said well i'll just look up to my neighbors and stuff like that so in some ways it's been a great reset for the planet and i guess also then it's a great time for something like kinder pay to to become a real currency yeah i i hope so and i think certainly there is certainly there is that potential because again i think that you know going back to trying to explain some of these ideas three or four years ago was a lot trickier than it is now so people as a result of the impact of the last 12 months people can understand viscerally like in their real lived experience how vital kindness is that it is it is literally the west the weft and the weave of the tapestry of a rich life you know um and i think that we all of a sudden could understand how we have become quite maybe cut off or displaced from the acts of kindness that creates that richness that create community that create the sense of belonging whereas and before perhaps we didn't really notice as much you know we were we were more distracted from our day to day we weren't you know very few of us were probably really living in present time and i think the impact of the pandemic has been that you know firstly people have had to stay in one place for long periods of time which hasn't been normal in our society and as a result of that we've been able to see where we are in relationship to that place to the people in that place to the people in our family in relationship to ourselves and how kindness flows in all of those relationships so yeah i'm hopeful that that those understandings whether whether or not kinder pay becomes um a recognizable currency i'm hopeful that those those understandings stay with all of us yeah i guess i've been relating to bitcoin it's more like a philosophy than a currency to some extent isn't it well i suppose all currencies are like a philosophy yeah well i mean you know what's interesting i think at the moment is the first time in human history where every single currency on the planet is a fiat currency is one based entirely on trust nothing is backed anymore so which is why you know we are ripe for for change it is possible for us to transfer our understanding of value to place our trust which is a placement of power um behind other things so instead of i promise to pay the bearer is i promise to be kind every every single day right but the other thing that we we found that is quite interesting about kinder pay is that with a lot of other alternative currencies or virtual currencies there there is a pegging issue even with bitcoin that bitcoin you know is a great idea and sounds like a marvelous thing for the future but we still translate it back into what is that in real cash right whereas with kinder pay what we say is it any three acts of kindness whether that's for yourself for the planet for animals or for somebody else because you can't measure the impact of an act of kindness in the way that we would traditionally measure other forms of capital it's not based on quantity because a smile could be the difference between whether somebody decides to live or die literally and and i know that there are cases where that has been the truth where somebody who is really in tremendous despair and the fact that a stranger smiled to them made them make a different decision so whether you're planting a million trees or smiling at a stranger there's no way for us to measure the ripples the soul waves the peace beams of those acts wow so it's a completely different basis for a currency if you like well you can't monetize it as such yeah wow yeah so another aspect of this then is is your philosophy and your guidance which i've been listening to uh just this morning on forgiveness um i guess and the forgiveness is almost like a precursor to this new world this new kind of world yeah that's true i hadn't actually drawn that parallel tom but yeah i think yeah we've got to get we're going to go through that phase to forgive ourselves for the old ways for the new ways to come in yeah yeah yes i think that's right you know and that's so we like you you know we have a lot of material on insight time but this is the first time we've actually done a course that's on um insight timer and i wanted to do it on forgiveness because i feel that it is a stumbling block for so many of us particularly i think we have in our um our modern understanding of um even of mindfulness or consciousness-based activity we still have a sense i think so many of us have a sense that we ought to be getting things over and done with quickly that we ought to be able to let go that we ought to be able to establish good and healthy boundaries and move on to some kind of you know better version of ourselves and i think for so many of us these these things are really difficult to do you know they take time they take a great deal of patience it takes a great deal of self-acceptance self-forgiveness in order to allow ourselves to expand into the real possibility of ourselves and i think with forgiveness my experience was that i would often be really disappointed if i didn't have a sense of self-discipline and i would often be disappointed where i thought that i had dealt with something and moved on only to find that it was a landmine somewhere in me and you know years later maybe the same event would come back and i found that you know i was it was still had huge emotional charge and it was only through really understanding that you know forgiveness is a is a presence it's with the combination of patience and time we can allow it to do its work and its work is love right but it has to do that work in us we have to allow it to be in us and i had a comment from somebody yesterday who was you know struck by the fact that even though things come back up that we found and maybe we find that we're unable to forgive some things but we can forgive ourselves for not being able to forgive and i think that's the point that i really wanted to get across with the course is that um forgiveness is it's it's an entire field of goodness and possibility that we can allow ourselves to rest in as opposed to some kind of like silver bullet solution that we need to you know achieve and then move on to the next thing with so i'm hoping it's not the last course you put together on in such time because i don't think you spotted but i got one called the art of timefulness and it sounds like a very nice bed fellow the art of kindfulness would sit there very nicely and my philosophy you mindfulness leads to timefulness because it leads it gives you more time and then once you've got more time you've got more time to be kind and the first thing i say in in in some of my meditations is be kind to yourself first because no one else can breathe through you and an airplane depressurizes put your own mask on first be kind to yourself first and then be kind to someone else and then be kind to the planet and it comes full circle and i guess the same is true of forgiveness be forgiving yourself first must be like one of the precursors yeah absolutely i mean i think it i think it absolutely is you know and i think it's that step that is missed you know by most of us right you know we we we we are very hard on ourselves you know and we think that if we somehow and i think there's a lot of shame as well i think one i mean positive psychology i think has done you know has been incredibly helpful but i think one of the unfortunate side effects of it is that we can feel a bit ashamed of you know where we yeah where we maybe haven't been able to let go of something or where we can't be positive about something yeah so we were talking before about my book soul waves and how it starts in 2058 in meijing so in 2058 2060 so four decades from now when kinder pay is the de facto currency of the planet because we discovered a better way to be what world do we evolve into what world did we evolve into what do we leave behind and what do we then in what do we then what do we then leave as a legacy for our our children and grandchildren to to inherit i mean there's so gosh there's so much to say really um but if i think if i was going to keep it brief which i think is important i think the world that we the world we leave behind is one where we have fully integrated um the power of receptivity the power of collaboration the power of kindness and the power therefore of possibility and i know these are all very traditionally they are feminine principles they are you know the the kind of action of the feminine in the world but i feel now that there is that moment and that possibility where these can be fully integrated in ourselves individually and therefore in the world that we live in um and in a world where kind of pay had become the de facto currency it would be it would be inevitable i think that those principles have been fully integrated and we're capable of being fully expressed wow because we have noticed that haven't we over the last years is is the countries that are led by feminine energy seem to have dealt with coronavirus slightly better than the ones that have been dominated by male energy and so how can we help these males then to into a kinder world they might be a bit fearful of it all and letting go is is quite tough isn't it well i don't think it's just males you know i think it's for women and you know the feminine principle in all of us has been you know profoundly undermined for millennia you know it just it didn't happen last week it's for millennia so these are intergenerational wounds that we all inherit i think the process that we are going through collectively the difficulties that we are facing the consequences that we are also right up front and center with in terms of the impact on uh planets on on how we live on the air that we breathe we um the process of really coming to face to face with the consequences of our actions is is in fact i think our medicine it's where you know we can understand that those the feminine in all of us the feminine in the world feminine in our relationships in once expressed right with that we'll find a way to move through some of the existential crises that we face at the moment wow that's deep stuff isn't it wow so what's what's next for you in this when you when you come out of the physical lockdown what's next for um for you jane and for peace being what's what's the next year going to unfold for you well i mean one thing tom that i think i mean i was kind of new anyway but certainly lockdown has shown us that you know god really does laugh at when we make plans i mean i have an idea of what i would like um for us really it's um it's really establishing kinds of pay and finding we would like to find some partners who are willing to experiment with it um with us we want to produce this white paper that we're producing um with the lse and really to produce just continue to produce more content with peace being we do you know as i said that we do a lot of um b2b um material as well but one thing that we a decision that we made quite recently actually is that we're going to step away from social media and not that we're going to come off platforms but we're going to be posting less and really focusing our energy on producing the rich and thoughtful content that we are best at you know we found um over the last couple of years we've been debating this a lot about whether you know social media um can take away i think a lot of time that is better spent um by us producing content so really that's what we want to do over the next uh 12 months is just keep producing um more of the stuff that we can and making kind of pay um as visible as possible and as partnered as we can well a very simple kindness for anyone to pay with would be to take any of the nuggets of your content and share it with a couple of friends so that your social media um that the social media energy can come from your your your listeners and your readers exactly yeah who are who are probably going to be a great deal better at using social media than um than we are you know i mean that's the one thing you know in peace because we're an all-female team in peace team as well and we're very good at you know understanding where our strengths really lie but also what our limitations are even energetic limitations you know and um yeah social media has been useful for us but what is more useful for us is producing our content so fantastic so if anyone's listening to this and wants to uh increase their kind of pay bank balance then where's the best place for people to find you uh on the web and on insight timer so i said well we are on insight timer under peace beam and on the web all of our content is available um using kind of pain uh and it's www.

Peacebeam.

Com fantastic very easy yeah well it's been a real delight and a pleasure uh jane i hope this is the first of many people this is the first of many many conversations that we have and uh thanks for all your kindness much amazing thank you so much tom it's been a real pleasure as well thank you for having me and just before we go uh jane you very kindly said that you'd share uh a meditation with us and the one that really resonated with me was love and gravity could you tell me a little bit about that meditation before we play it out and if you're driving while you listen to this podcast do pull because i guarantee it's not safe to drive and listen to jane uh that's that's very kind of you tom um well this was written i wrote this i think maybe uh about 24 months ago and it came from came from a dream actually that i had where i understood that gravity as opposed to being a force that you know pulls us down or keeps us in a particular place is is a force of love holding us close to the earth and it's quite difficult to as you know right it's quite difficult to recount a dream and what the sensation of a dream was or even the understanding of a dream and so writing the meditation was the best way for me to impart that so it's about yeah it's about love so thanks for sharing love and gravity hi welcome to peace beam let us begin step one notice just take a few moments here and hold the question how do i feel today and see what comes back and just notice it step two breathe just bring your attention now to your breath and rest it there gently observing the inhale and the exhale and just be here for a few moments breathing and now just start to imagine that your breath is flowing in and out through your heart and that the rhythm of your heart and the rhythm of your breath are uniting connecting connecting greeting each other here creating a space for you to drop into for these few brief moments step three activate when we contemplate our planet sometimes we can feel connected especially when we're in nature a sunset over an endless ocean the silky silence of a towering forest the secret calls of twilight and indigo dusts sometimes it's more difficult especially in busy cities it's hard to feel that deep link in those moments when we do feel the connection we can feel something deep in us something like recognition something magnetic something like the pull of gravity and maybe the pool is gravity in its literal sense gravity pulls us to the earth keeps us close tethered gathered in all of us here and when we feel those moments of deep connection to the earth's beauty it's as though we see beyond the mechanics of gravity into its mysterious heart that maybe it is the love between ourselves and the earth the earth keeps her loved ones close close our home our planet is the largest being that we will ever know this living dynamic spinning dazzling blue planet is our friend and companion from the first breath to our last heartbeat so today we're going to deepen our connection to our companion earth by considering gravity as a sign of the love and companionship between us and our world held firm to our giant friend and all of her gifts spinning together in the infinite blackness of space step four beam look around you now and observe the law of gravity and think of this the earth is always holding you close and let that realization fill you with gratitude today and beam that energy out from your heart to the earth and to the people that you meet today have a beautiful day

Reviews

Didn't want this interview to end. Thank you Tom for your curiosity and then sharing it with us, looking forward to the next interview with Peacebeam ❤

This was absolutely delightful AND inspiring. Love the vision!!!
I want to share with you, that when I started listening to IT a few years ago, Peacebeam was my VERY favorite and I am so grateful for all of you on IT, you are making a difference here on our blue home 🌎.
🙏🏻✨🕊🌈

Great

Excellent talk! Such a lovely meditation at the end. Loved the idea of our Mother Earth hugging us and holding us close. 🙏🧡
Thank you Tom and Jane. What we put out into the world comes back to us. May we all be kind to create this ripple effect through everyone and everything. 🌈🌍🌎🌏🌈💫☮️💫🌞💫

Love this concept of making mindfulness and kindfulness a bridge of connection

That was a beautiful way to launch the 2021 podcasts💫🙏🌎. Thank you both💝

Enlightening, thank you🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻I am a Peacebeam fan and it is fascinating to get more background and to hear about kind-a-pay. May that idea get hold🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻