Our first Wisdom Exchange in the Bay Area wouldn’t have come together without the generosity and goodwill of several people, particularly Suni Nelson, who helped organize things on the ground as I was planning this from FL, and the leadership of Ravenswood Family Health Center, who kindly donated space in East Palo Alto.  And of course the participants, as they agreed to test it without much information on what they should expect. 

Danger: Live Wire

There was one participant, however, who I instantly knew would grant me no mercy and for the purposes of this post, I’m going to call her Mama Foe.

If you know anything about East Palo Alto, you know it is a stark contrast to the wealthy neighboring city of Palo Alto, a community made up of the titans of Silicon Valley (Steve Jobs was a Palo Alto resident) and elite intellectuals working at Stanford University. East Palo Alto is mainly comprised of African Americans, Latinos and Pacific Islanders and this city has risen from profound crime and poverty since the 80s and 90s.

  Mama Foe was from East Palo Alto and to say she was unfriendly when I greeted her upon arrival would be an understatement.  She was hostile. Despite this, however, she was proactive in helping me check on the status of the room and with this it became clear to me that she was a leader in this community.

Simma down now, silly girl

We moved into the room and got straight into this Wisdom Exchange.  

And Mama Foe was having none of my silliness, which I’m convinced is good for the soul (particularly the collective soul) and comes with a WiseTribe Wisdom Exchange. Her presence was powerful and moods are contagious and unfortunately negativity is fast acting. So I decided to scrap the fun and launched straight into a storytelling technique. 

Around the room we went, peering into individual story lines and gathering insight from the lives of relatively privileged white people.  When we came to Mama Foe, who immigrated to the US about forty years ago, her story was vastly different and would leave anyone cynical about the “American Dream” which often lures immigrants to the US. 

When hearts open…

She embraced this moment and as she opened up in sharing her story, she became an entirely different person than any of us initially perceived. She moved from hardened to vulnerable and it was as if her body began to relax as she gained relief from simply being heard.  I can’t speak for the others, but this was a transformative moment for me and I think it was for Mama Foe too. 

By the end of this Wisdom Exchange she had moved from closed to open, from cold to warm, from cynic to WiseTribe advocate and –the best part for me– from Mama Foe to Mama Friend!

Graciously, she called me the next day to apologize for being hard with me from the start, but explained she wasn’t fully sure about what she was going to experience by attending (which is my fault!). She asked me to keep her informed of anything she could do to leverage her leadership status to help push this crazy WiseTribe dream of mine forward and followed up with an email that said: 

It was so wonderful talking to you this morning. The best thing that I am so grateful about meeting you and everyone else is that I am safe to share my struggles and know that I am loved.

The stories that fill our lives are so vastly different from person to person but the range of emotions that every one of us feel is actually pretty limited.  Just think of how much more productive our relationships and time could be if we could find better ways of relating to one another on the commonality of emotion and begin filtering the exterior details that generally separate us.  

“It turns out that looking at things from other people’s point of view is practically the secret of success.”  ~Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters

Jacqueline