#115 Remembering Nature’s Ways: Darcia Narvaez
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Maurizio Benazzo: Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. My name is Maurizio Benazzo.
Zaya Benazzo: My name is Zaya Benazzo. We
Maurizio Benazzo: are speaking to you from the territory of the south Pomo and Coast Miwok,
Zaya Benazzo: indigenous People's lands, indigenous
Maurizio Benazzo: People's Lands.
Zaya Benazzo: Welcome, everyone. We're very excited for our guest today and for the beautiful conversation that was offered to us.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yes. Let's read a brief bio. Darcia Narvaez is professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Notre Dame.
She grew up living around the world as a bilingual, bicultural Puerto Rican German American, but
calls Earth her home She used an interdisciplinary approach to studying evolved morality, child development, and human flourishing. We were listening to her book, The Evolved Nest, while we were driving in Japan, rented a car, going to see the macaco, the monkey of Baraka in the snow. And it was such a perfection to hear your words.
You put us in a state of interconnection even more than we were to begin with. It's such a joy and an honor to have you with us. Your book really touched me as a reader. Very deeply. And yeah, thank you. Thank you for being here, Darcia.
Darcia Narvaez: Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. It's an honor for me to be with you in this marvelous organization you have and all the wonderful leadership you provide in your art.
It's really, it's wonderful. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thank you.
Zaya Benazzo: This will be a conversation format, no PowerPoints, but I believe this is more natural way actually of exchanging and learning. And maybe we can start with what was a little bit about your own journey, what drew you to study and learn with indigenous communities and also to look at animal societies and.
to learn about actually human child rearing and human developmental needs. Like what made you look into in that direction to learn? How much time do you have?
Darcia Narvaez: So I spent half my childhood outside the United States and would see children my age on street corners selling gum in rags, not going to school like me. And then we would come back, we'd be away for a year, come back for two years and go away for a year. My father was a professor of Spanish linguistics.
So he took us all with him. And I could not understand the injustices of the world. And I would cry for those children and cry about what's wrong. And when you're young, you just see the superficial things, but it's always plagued me what's wrong with the world. And so it took me a while to get to investigating those questions.
I went to seminary, though, trying to find things and. I grew up fundamentalist Christian, and you are in that world, I was against science, against business, against intellectualism. I've done it all now, because reality, truth is in between everything else, right? It's interdisciplinary. It's the in between ness.
It's the relationships among all these domains, or these, what we think are separate, really are separate. Not, and my PhD work started, I got my PhD in 93, and I focused on moral development. That was, I found that field was like, oh, this is going to give me the answer, got tired of that because it's the field tends to focus on reasoning, and if you just reason like a moral philosopher, a sophisticated way and then apply it to your will, oh, that's good, you're a good person, it doesn't matter what happens, as long as you had a good intent and it, it was narrow I started to read widely.
And when the United States went to war with Iraq on flimsy grounds, I was one of the protesters, the 15 million or so around the world protesting that they aimed to do that. I could not understand. How could a country do something like that? So evil. Really and so I discovered that, morality or, encountered the truth that morality is neurobiological.
It's how you're raised that shapes your mindset, your orientation to the world, how receptive you are, how connected to your own spirit you are. And so I found a hunter gatherer childhoods, the anthropologists doing their work and showing us. Look at how they raise their children and maybe it matters or even future.
Yeah. So I started to investigate that. So that's things in a nutshell. ,
Zaya Benazzo: wow, what a journey. What a journey. What a journey too.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yeah. And in your work, you talk about the evolved nest concept.
Zaya Benazzo: It's,
Maurizio Benazzo: Your book, the Above Nest. How do you define the term. How do you, what are the key component that makes the evolved nest across all the species?
Because that's right.
Darcia Narvaez: Every animal has a system of supports for its young, a developmental system that optimizes normal development. And so every species has a slightly different nest. Ours is particularly intense because we resemble fetuses of other animals. until almost two years old. So you really need an external womb experience.
Ashley Montague called it womb with a view because you're carried around all the time. Yes. And you need that for at least those two years, right? So that's immediate responsive care and lots of affectionate touch and never isolated never disconnected always In relationship physically, mostly and then you get mobile, the child gets to move around, but you're always there nearby, or the caregivers, multiple nurturers.
So the evolved nest represents our species nest that has been identified, the characteristics all over the world. They're the same things. They might be, slightly modified in how they behave. Our presenter experienced, but they have the same basic components. We've identified 9 of them that we've studied in my lab soothing perinatal experiences.
So that means the mother feels supported during pregnancy. The child is wanted so she has a lot of positive. Biochemistry just in a positive receptive mode. And so that's building the brain and the body of the baby, the fetus to be, constructed healthily and part of perinatal soothing perinatal experiences is also birth is soothing and welcoming.
There's no separation of mom and baby, no painful procedures. All this is the normal way of welcoming baby into the world. for that. We violate all these things all over the place, and we have the evidence for how terrible it is, which you can talk about that. But then the next one is breastfeeding. Every animal's milk.
Mammals are breastfeeders. That's what mammals means and Every milk is different. Ours is low fat, low protein, but high sugar lactose. And, but, it's got thousands of ingredients that are building the brain properly and building the gut. The immune system is mostly there. And ours is so thin, unlike a predator's milk, you have to ingest it frequently.
You have to, keep the baby nearby so the baby can decide when they need the milk. So it's infant directed. So those are two for the babies. The rest of them are for us too. For everyone throughout life. You want me to keep going or you want to?
Zaya Benazzo: Let's pause and maybe talk a little bit more about the baby and like what happens before we are born and how that shapes who we are.
And also when we are living in a world with medicalized birth, like what's the impact on us, on our brains, on our way to feel. a sense of belonging, all of that. What's happening in modernity with our child birth? Yeah. Yeah.
Darcia Narvaez: It's trauma, traumatic for mother and child. So if babies are left under normal, natural species normal conditions.
The baby decides when they want to be born. And babies vary by about 55 days. How long they want to stay in the womb. 55 days, right? Yeah, but we have medicalized birth. And so the doctor decides, oh, this is the due date based on whatever. Then I'm going to induce your labor because this is the due date, whatever it is.
And so you're pulling babies out. Most babies now are born prematurely because of that, right? Based on some due date. And so when you ignore the baby's signals, the baby's already getting traumatized by not being able to get their full capacities for living outside of the womb. You have to have your lungs develop properly.
So there's a lot of lung issues. And then the mother went, the birth practices are just brutal because we've moved into profit oriented childbirth. And a lot of doctors want to get that baby out in 26 hours. A firstborn baby is going to take maybe days for that mother who's not used to giving birth and everything, they need to do that.
Dance interpersonal dance of the baby comes out a little bit and then goes back a little bit more and it goes back and that's gets mom and baby used to the rhythm of being together. And when you use drugs to pull the baby out, you're now pouring in fake oxytocin, which diminishes the mother's oxytocin.
So mom's hormones are intended to go in these waves of energizing and then calming and keeping pain from happening. But medicalized birth keeps mom in this tethered to the monitors and all these things and she can't move. So pain increases because she can't move around you normally would.
And so she wants painkiller. Oxytocin, the fake oxytocin is flooding her body, so it misses up all the hormones. And the child's too. The child has taken all in, all these drugs into the body. And the child, the fetus cannot process them. So they're going to be drugged when they come out. They can't breastfeed.
They're, they cry because they feel so distressed. And then they sleep. And so our hospital birth babies are essentially two months behind a naturalistic birth baby. They can't sit up. A natural birth baby can sit up and look at you and smile and, can watch mom around, move around the room.
Our babies can't, hospital birth babies can't do all these things. And they have such high levels of hormone energizing hormone that both mom and baby do for the birth process. But if you separate them and don't put them together right away after birth, the baby's still there. And so that's why they cry for for the first few months.
Everyone says, Oh, babies cry. That's the way it is. Only in these circumstances and the mother to her, they need each other to help get the bonding process going, get the oxytocin going and deep, the endorphins of being together. And so we mess up all sorts of things. And so the. Moms can be feel more detached from their baby to have their caregiver attachment system triggered on.
So it's not just the child's attachment. The caregiver has to feel attachment and these all these interventions prevent that from happening. So lots of things go wrong and then painful procedures. They give sugar, intense sugar to the baby to keep them quiet. Okay. So they can do a poking or vaccination or circumcision, which is another common, still common in the U.
S. And that then imprints, that actually ruins the microbiome. Because the microbiome, it, breast milk, puts a film of protection around all the gut where the immune system is primarily. And anything you give the baby other than breast milk breaks the film and lets infectious agents in anyway. Yes, we are all
Zaya Benazzo: very well familiar with this world, at least those of us who live in the West.
And we know how damaging, I was born in a communist country that they would take the babies. They would take us away for two weeks from the mother and just bring us to the mother three times a day for breastfeeding. And imagine how, uh, we're born in a disconnected world. Like the, we don't have relationship to know, to have a sense of a healthy sense of self to develop.
I just, it's mind blowing. Like, how can we arrive? collectively to a place of such a deep disconnect of the natural ways of being. And then once we have our child you speak beautifully in your, you describe In your book, the birding practices in the natural world, like the elephant herds, how they welcome, and it's not just the mother is the community, the emperor penguin, how they cooperate, not just the female, but the male and the community.
If you want to share something, some learnings from From the animal kingdom and yeah. Where does that leave us? There's such a big gap between what's nature and where we are today, so we will keep feeling that grief. I think we keep, and often kind of desperation, but I'm sure a remembering is happening collectively and that's why we are having this conversation.
Darcia Narvaez: Yeah, so the elephant the herd travels together with the matriarchs in charge and when the baby is ready to be born, they're all around, they know it's happening and there's a pause and then the baby will fall to the ground and you can see Watch. It's been observed that all the other elephants will touch that baby gently with their trunks, as a welcoming and that's actually quite normal for us to to have our birth experience with mother, but then to be shared with the community within a few days, usually a birth where the baby then learns, Oh, I'm This is a different person, safe, but smells different, moves differently, and they already now get to be imprinted with a community of support of being flexibly learning to be flexibly relationally attuned from the beginning.
And they're always in a safe place. So the elephants provide that other communities, the sperm whales. Also, they are introduced. The mother introduces the baby to the rest of the herd. I'm sorry. I'm using the probably wrong terms. Not heard, but pot. Yes. It happens in many of the elephant, I'm sorry, of the animals that are group oriented in terms of raising their young, like
Zaya Benazzo: we are.
So we, life arrives within community, right? That's the nature. We don't arrive into, and we, again, in modern world, often mothers are even alone. We, I was just looking yesterday, we're talking in the US, I think 27 percent single mothers. Like, how far that is from raising a child communally.
Darcia Narvaez: And all the alienation that keeps getting built in, generation after generation, it's getting worse.
People don't trust others, right? Yeah, you're bracing always against. Yes.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah. And how that impacts the young child's brain, like missing this real relationality and how do you, is there a connection between that disconnect and children being raised on phones and screens and how that early trauma is carried
Darcia Narvaez: further by.
Sure. The parents. Today aren't getting the support they need. And we know that a mother, mostly it's focused on mothers, the research if she doesn't feel like the community supports her and the child, she's not going to be as attentive to the child. We've set up the society to be that way. We don't care about you.
You're on your own. And so she's not, she can't. We've put our parents in terrible situations. And the States is about the worst place to raise a baby in the world, unless you're in a war zone. And it is a war zone here, I think, socially. And what you do is you bring the hospital home.
You, you set up a separate room for the child, a separate bed. This is all crazy from a species normal way of raising your babies. And you sleep train them. Train them to detach from me. The parent and the parent is told to detach from the baby's needs, right? And we know sleep training is quite damaging, although the research that they do is masks that, just like formula companies, they do, they sponsor infant formula studies and They're all misleading and, conflict of interest everywhere.
So we're doing things that the parents, Oh, we think, yeah, we were told by our pediatrician to sleep train. I get emails all the time. Now my child is, distressed at age 13. She can't get along with anybody. I think it was the sleep training I did of her with six weeks where they told me just to close the door and go down the hall and let her be there all night long in this one.
Mother found her baby covered in vomit morning. That is super stress. And once you've gone to the super stress in the brain, then is melting. Brain connections. That's what happens. Cortisol just melts things. So you always want to keep the baby calm. That's part of the evolved nest, is keep baby optimally aroused so that they're in a growth condition, not in a distress condition, which is misguided development.
Zaya Benazzo: That takes us also to education and learning how Western ways of learning are so left brain oriented. And again, that disconnect is repeated in the way we organize schools and learning environments. Yeah. How is that done in nature compared to, and also indigenous communities compared to Modern societies, if you can speak, yeah.
Darcia Narvaez: Indigenous communities, they don't have terrible twos, the tantrums that we think is normal. Yeah, it's normal because you've disconnected from the child and then you try to control them, no, you can't run over there. No, don't touch that. No. Whereas a two year old has got this inner drive to learn and run and touch and, and you want to honor it.
And so in, in indigenous communities, the egalitarian hunter gatherer communities, which is 99 percent of our history as a human genus, Spent in that kind of society. In those societies, the child is allowed to do whatever they want, even play with machetes, at age one because they trust the spirit of that child.
There's an inner trust. what I call an inner moral compass that the child has for growing into their wholeness, their uniqueness. And when you start to thwart them, spank them, punish them somehow and this is even apart from isolating them in their own crib or whatever, if you start to punish them, they start to get self doubt.
It's oh, you've already taught them, maybe if they cried and you never came, you've already taught them, Oh this body doesn't know anything. I better shut it up. I better, not communicate. They're not trustworthy. The world isn't trustworthy. This isn't trustworthy. And you cut off your spiritual development.
You cut off your heart. You get your gut misdirected as to what's a good thing or not. A power orientation is easy to get into and so we damage in so many ways and that's where looking at hunter gather societies and how they raise their children to be flourishing and unique and honored because it might be grandfather spirit in that child.
It's an ancestor's spirit that may be there, and you don't want to disrespect them, and they know there'll be some damage.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah, absolutely. It's about modern parenting is about controlling and shaping, and instead of trusting and listening and following the society.
Maurizio Benazzo: We
Zaya Benazzo: were filming for our next documentary with Munduruku people in the Amazon and we lived in the village for a week and there was Beto, two years old, naked, running every day.
Until the last day of our stay there, I didn't know who was his mother. He was just running from hut to hut. Everybody was holding Neto and he was holding snakes in his hand. And he came to us with
Maurizio Benazzo: his name, barely walking, came to us with his name. It
Zaya Benazzo: was no stress. Nobody was going like, no, don't touch.
Don't. He was free to explore and share. And he was proudly coming back and sharing. And
Maurizio Benazzo: in the evening, he was coming, always completely well dressed.
Zaya Benazzo: Yes. How did that happen?
Maurizio Benazzo: Washed. Washed, dressed, and he always come up dressed and beautiful what a, oh my God, what a beauty.
Darcia Narvaez: Yeah, so there's yeah, lack of coercion and the kind of joint parenting, joint child raising.
That's our heritage. We're different from chimpanzees because we do the cooperative breeding is what the anthropologist Sarah Hrdy calls it. And they don't do that. And what it does is it Helped us develop a big social brain where we can read the mind of others. We can, we like to share throughout life, not just in childhood, like chimpanzees might do.
And so that cooperativeness, the lack of worrying about who's the father. That came with patriarchy. Patriarchy, you start to have hierarchy and possessions and then you want to pass them on to your son, usually. And so with the domesticating animals, pastoralism, you had a herd and you want to pass it to your son.
And so then you start to get all this separation of males and females because you don't have that in hunter gatherer societies. too much. It's you're always with multiple ages all the time and open to all the uniqueness there, but also feeling very communal.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yeah.
Zaya Benazzo: And also the learning, what we've seen is by observing is not by following by osmosis is not by putting in a child in a desk, in a Confined environment, pouring information that is not connected to the body.
Darcia Narvaez: So in Native American tradition, you learn, you've learned something if you've been transformed.
If your self has been transformed, then you know something, right? So you know how to do something. Native American elders complained when they had a choice before they started kidnapping children for boarding schools. They complain that when we send your our Children to your schools, they come back and they don't know anything.
They can't hunt. They're uncomfortable with if they can't eat. They can't be go hungry. They can't take the cold. They don't know how to find themselves find their way home from a distance. What use are they? So that's all, holistic learning, how to be here in the landscape and live appropriately with all the bio community, the animals and plants in a responsible way.
That's learning, right? And we went into the left brain stuff, the ivory tower thinking, and we think that's good enough, just thinking. And that's considered by the wisdom traditions of the world. To be dangerous. Thinking is dangerous, because you start to believe that's who you are, and it's so detached.
I call it detached imagination. Detached from relationships in the moment, detached from emotions, but I made this good model, this abstract model, and I'm going to apply it in the world. And that's left brain stuff doesn't, pay attention to whether it works or not. It doesn't
Maurizio Benazzo: know a lot. Wow.
Darcia Narvaez: We've undermined right brain development if we use this right left brain stuff, which is now getting a little outdated in terms of neuroscience, but it's helpful to understand how right hemisphere development is scheduled to grow more rapidly in the early years.
And when you disconnect children, and you isolate them, and you put them in front of a screen, instead of, having a face to face interaction. You're undermining its development and so then they have to rely on their survival systems, the systems we're born with to keep us alive. So the stress response and other aspects, they have to rely on that and scream to get their needs met or just shut down because no one ever comes, dissociate, right?
And then they go to school and it's all left brain stuff, right? It's oh, just learn this information and take the test and, oh, aren't you smart? and you've got only a partial human being there.
Maurizio Benazzo: And he's prepared to be part of a society, right? The patriarchal, modernity, capitalistic society of oppression and division, individualism.
It makes total sense as if as a full system. That's why your work is so beautiful and revolutionary.
Zaya Benazzo: It's revolutionary and yet it's so natural. What you're writing of course, that's how it is. Like, how can we go so far from the most natural way of being? Yeah. So sad. That is the sadness of modernity.
Yes. In your book, you also talk about trauma in the animal, in the natural world and the animal societies. The, what happens to the elephants and how you've seen bullying and violence interspecies. Tell us what you've learned by, from those examples.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yeah.
Darcia Narvaez: Yeah, my, my co author is has written about elephants and bears, but the example of the I guess the most explained example in the book was about elephants where in Africa, in a preserved area, they found that the young males were actually attacking rhinoceroses.
and actually even raping them and they couldn't figure out what's going on. It turns out that these male elephants were the children of mothers who had been killed through poaching or other reasons. And They were brought together and thought, Oh, they'll be fine. Because that's what we do in America with kids, right?
Just put them in the car, whatever. They'll be fine. The kids are all right, not understanding that there's a developmental scheme for elephants and for humans too, which we can talk about. But the young. Elephant and males are always, I should say, males are always, at least in the human world, more affected by stress, social stress by things not going right, because they have less built in resilience, and this is probably true across animals males have less built in resilience because they have X and Y chromosomes.
And males, females have two X's. So if something's wrong with one of the X's aspects, the other one can fit in and males, at least human males mature more slowly by two years after babyhood. So they need a lot more nurturing. They need more of the nest, right? All right. So the male elephants, they're supposed to stay with their mothers until their adolescence.
And then. They don't go off on their own. They go join the male band of the older elephants that teach them how to be a man, a male elephant. And what happened with these young bulls is they didn't get, they got, they lost their mothers. When they're young, and then they didn't join a male band to help them learn how to be an adult.
So what's they've done now is they've realized this with my co author's wonderful research that they've had complex PTSD from all these things going wrong. And so when you put them now with older males, they start to settle down. So their testosterone starts to diminish and things just go in a better way, because that's what they need.
And somehow in the, the Western world in particular, we think, Oh, I'm going to decide what people need, rather than looking at evolution and what we know about animals and humans, that we have developmental course. There's a lifespan course. Our species, we're not adults till, according to neuroscience, till almost age 30.
So we need lots of mentoring and lots of, uh, support of various kinds throughout those years before we're adults, and then we become the mentors and the elders for the others. And we're supposed to be in multi aged groups, not isolated in classrooms with the same age. What are you going to learn from your classmate?
How to take risks, how to be competitive with people at the same level. In our ancestral context, hunter gatherer society, you're in mixed groups. The kids go off and play and it's a mixed age group and the older ones love to teach the youngers, and they imitate. They're not really teaching, they're imitating the youngers or imitating the elders and it's just a nice flow.
So there's no intervention to force children to do anything is just unheard of. You would never do that to anybody in the, in that context. That's the grounds for breaking the relationship.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yeah. And that brings also another aspect that in modernity, we completely eliminated the rites of passage.
We, ceremony in indigenous community, there is at a certain time, there is a specific way to, to grow, it following a certain path. So how this lack of a ceremonial transition can affect
Zaya Benazzo: the sense of belonging, the
Maurizio Benazzo: sense of belonging. Yeah. The connection in this young people can you say more about.
Darcia Narvaez: Yeah, and so in Native American communities, you're, you are the community, the elders the adults decide when the child is ready for one of these vision quests and then goal, it depends on the community, exactly how they talk about it, but the goal is really for that individual to feel comfortable.
Connected to the universe, how are they going to, that they can survive that the there's spirits around and they will communicate to you and are you listening and you will survive if you're listening and you will feel then this cosmic connection. So I talk in my recent work that we have the evolved nest of development, but we also need a vertical connectedness or vertical nestedness.
We have to feel connected to the cosmos, and we need to feel connected to Earth, that we're part of its systems, that we are part of the community, the dynamic, flowing community, and we also need vertical nestedness, I'm sorry, horizontal nestedness, so we feel connected to the ancestors, that we honor their gifts, their wisdom, which evolved nest is part of that, and then future generations, that we are always keeping them in mind as we make decisions and take actions.
Zaya Benazzo: Wow. So beautiful. As you spoke about vertical connections, and I keep asking the question why we are here today. What brought us here? And this is recent history. I don't know how recent, maybe since 2000 years. I don't know where do we start to track that disconnect, deep disconnect, but definitely it feels like it has to do with.
Church Christianity with Patri patriarchy, we did UPS Connection Only Separation Up Separation, living the Earth, living
Darcia Narvaez: Ancestral. Yes, I write about that too. That the kind of Christianity that Rome selected, after Jesus was on, on, on Earth there were multiple kinds of Christian groups.
Who are taking his words to heart, and some of them were led by women, but the Roman Church, Constantine selected the very patriarchal version of the Christianity that was much more like the Jewish religion and that one then, uh, anyway, is associated with the denigration of women and original sin, the idea of original sin.
And so a lot of people think their babies are sinful when they want something. And so they punish them, right? So it's just insane. But there are other versions of Christianity. And I advocate for creation spirituality, which is Matthew Fox. He was excommunicated for, he's more, it's more like St.
Francis of Assisi the version that we are all part of earth and we're community members and, honor the animals and honor the plants and creation spirituality is much more aligned with all indigenous the indigenous worldview that we are. Members of the bio community. We are partners, not dominators.
We're the younger ones in the evolution or creation of the world, and we need to learn from the others. the youngest. Yeah,
Maurizio Benazzo: youngest. The young. We are the last one. And
Zaya Benazzo: the most destructive.
Maurizio Benazzo: The most destructive. We are really younger and that's why they struck you. We are in the terrible two because we haven't been the terrible 2000, because we haven't been, we haven't been held, so we don't know how to use our energy, and we're only able to destroy.
Darcia Narvaez: That's where the evolved nest is so important, and that's what got degraded with patriarchy, with hierarchy and patriarchy, and just less and less nurturing across generations. Till now, the worst place, again, is the United States.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yeah. Followed by Europe.
Darcia Narvaez: Yeah. At least you have paid parental leave in many countries, right? And baby friendly hospitals, which are oriented to supporting breastfeeding and not separating mom and baby. And you don't have circumcision happening all the time for non Jews and so you have advances.
Yeah.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yeah. Because we have grandmothers around still. Italy, for example, grandmother is only 30 miles away and she can come and kick your butt. Let's be clear. So that's the only reason. That's
Zaya Benazzo: probably the rest of the U. S. Yes,
Darcia Narvaez: did I go through it? Yeah, there's a welcoming social climate. So to welcome.
So I mentioned that with during pregnancy and gestation that the mom and baby feel welcome. But afterwards, the baby needs to feel welcome. And that's where the elephants coming in and everyone says hello. That's where. Having the father penguin who takes the egg and lets the mother go back to the ocean to feed for a couple of months.
And the father holds the egg in, on its feet. And but not alone. There's a whole host of other animals. Of males doing the same thing in the freezing cold. And so they have to keep shifting who's in the middle? 'cause that's the warmer place. And on the outside is pretty chilly, so they're moving around but keeping that egg warm.
So there's a community there as well. So our community, it's quite yeah, has really broken down, and I'm forgetting where I was going now.
Zaya Benazzo: Let's
Maurizio Benazzo: talk about
Zaya Benazzo: that. No, we were covering the rest of the Oh, I'm sorry,
Maurizio Benazzo: yeah. Yeah.
Darcia Narvaez: Climate, yeah. So for us, it would be, yeah, handing the baby around, following the signals of the baby, and getting them used to lots of different people, different smells, and, activities and always a set of nurturers, multiple nurturers, because babies need 24 7 touch, affectionate touch, caring, co sleeping or bed sharing, safely of course and no punishing touch, no spanking. Because that misdirects development it changes the focus of the child from that internal growing to, oh no, am I going to get punished?
I better not do that, right? So you don't want to punish a child, slapping, pinching, hitting, whatever, or isolating them. And then there's free play, self directed play with multiple age playmates. So that's what children do in our hunter gatherer societies. They're running around with multiple ages.
Trying all sorts of things parents don't watch because they're going to do all sorts of risky things they need to do to develop their wisdom of the body, wisdom of getting along on the on earth. And so I said, multiple nurturers responsive relationships so that in babyhood, you're keeping baby optimally aroused so that they're growing and growing.
So you don't want them just to sleep all the time and you don't want, but, you have to be responsive and you don't want them. Distressed. So that's where you touched and carry them all the time. They like movement. They need movement. They expect mom to be gathering, right? Like our ancestry.
And then two more. I think I've covered. Yes. Two more. So nature, immersion, and connection, of course, in our hunter gather societies, you're out there living in little huts and things, but we don't know. All these things, we don't have to do it the way they did it, but we need to remember that this builds a good brain, a good social, emotional intelligence, cooperation just awareness of being a bio community member.
And then there's one more and that is restorative healing practices. Practices because we as humans make choices. We're the animal that can make more choices than other animals and we often make a mess of it and we get discombobulated and dysregulated because we have culture that tells us one thing and our body maybe another.
So we need regular healing practices to get ourselves back in balance, in relational balance. balance with the natural world, mental, physical health. So that's soothing perinatal experiences, breastfeeding. And I didn't say that our average age of weaning of breastfeeding. Okay. Hang on to your seats.
It's four years or years. Why? Because the immune system takes at least that long to reach adult levels. And breast milk is providing so much protection from infectious agents. And then welcoming social climate, affectionate touch, no negative touch, self directed social play. Multiple nurturers, responsive relationships, nature immersion and connection, and restorative healing practices.
Maurizio Benazzo: I want to move in your village. Let's build a little, let's build a little, let's make one. Let's make a new universe. This is so fundamental for life.
Darcia Narvaez: Yeah, and we need all those things ourselves. All of us need. Yeah, we still need it. We matter, we belong, right? We need affection, play, help us grow and get our empathy
Zaya Benazzo: growing.
Yeah, all of it. And what happens when we raise our children with tight schedules, when we take them from one class, ballet to soccer, to everything structured and controlled and then they arrive home and they're in front of the screen, what? What do we what I have? No, this is the reality we all know very well, sadly.
How does modern families start to remember the evolved nest ways of being and raising children and being what? What would you say? Where do we begin even to undo this very quite recent? Madness that we've,
Darcia Narvaez: yeah, that evolved us. org. We have some checklists for childhood. And so it's even beyond babyhood then, right?
Cause we're talking about school aged children. So finding ways to, show affection and be together affectionately every day to cuddle on just sit shoulder to shoulder with your adolescent because they may not want to otherwise touch you. Who knows? And then to find ways to play together, if you have a young child before age seven, maybe Have a pillow fight and let them knock you over And that will just, wow, they love it, right?
And that can heal rifts in your relationship as well. Make sure you allow the child to build relationships with other adults, other people who are who like they get along with. They have a spark between them. And give as much freedom to the child as possible. And try not to over Control helicopter.
You want to helicopter a baby, although that's a bad word, right? Because you want to keep them calm and with you all the time. And then when they want to move, though, you let them go. So it's a nuanced thing here, but an older child, they should be able to go out there and climb the tree and you don't have to watch.
And then to have nature immersion, boy, that is one of the healing forces of the world to be able to go into a forest and sit there and just listen, open your ears, open your eyes, your nose and become one with the rest of nature. To have times for that. And then these healing practices. So sing, put on the music that you can dance to and dance together and then, or act out, an animal, how are you feeling today?
I'm mad. All right. Act like a lion. Ah, whatever. And so you can express yourself and do it in a creative, artful way. And, bring in the arts as you can drawing, singing. And so on. So there's various things you can do a little around the edges. It's going to take a lot of around the edge work for our complex society and our complex systems to break it.
You got a lot of stuff around the edges. It can suddenly shift. So we're waiting for that viral moment. When everyone goes, ah, evolve this, of course, let's do it.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yeah, absolutely.
Zaya Benazzo: I'm hearing more and more young parents are looking for unschooling, or for gathering communities and creating different alternative ways to create And learning environments for the children.
As long as the
Maurizio Benazzo: unschooling doesn't become homeschooling and then it becomes restricted to even more restricted and the kids doesn't even have a chance to see other. So we need communities. We need more communities. We need more people around, the nuclear families. It's a new creation, if you wish.
Darcia Narvaez: So
Maurizio Benazzo: we need to expand the nuclear family to a community to go back to the village.
Darcia Narvaez: And the unschooling within the community, right? Within the community, not
Maurizio Benazzo: unschooling, stay home, I'll teach you everything myself.
Darcia Narvaez: Yeah. That's narrowing instead of expanding the child.
Maurizio Benazzo: So
Zaya Benazzo: much. Okay. I, of course. This is so rich. We can keep going. I just gonna ask one question because I love octopuses . Oh, you have a chapter. Your chapter is oc So good emotional intelligence, and what are they, what are we learning about Human intelligence, learning about octopus intelligence. Yeah.
Emotional intelligence.
Darcia Narvaez: I've been happy to see that in some places they're starting to forbid the harvesting of
Maurizio Benazzo: octopuses
Darcia Narvaez: of, we're starting to realize how intelligent they are although there's been a move to experiment on them because of that. So I refuse to eat anything on the menu now that has any octopus.
But they are just amazing. They show us emotions through color. They change the color of their skin and their texture and all. And they can do all these very unbelievable things. If they're in a tank, they can actually squeeze out. They're very small. They can change their shape so much and escape.
And they color blind, right?
Maurizio Benazzo: That's amazing.
Darcia Narvaez: They color blind. They're
Zaya Benazzo: not paying attention to the colors like we do. Yeah. So something from outside is creating this Web of intelligence of colors, right? Yeah,
Maurizio Benazzo: they change color, but they don't see color. So that's incredible.
Darcia Narvaez: Yeah. We have so much to learn from them.
But in a respectful way, right? Just like with indigenous peoples, they have been so mistreated. But we have so much to learn because their traditional ecological knowledge of knowing this landscape and how to what animals and how to be respectful of the animals and plants and river and mountains there.
We need all that traditional knowledge, right? But we don't want to come in and steal it like it's happened so much. And while I'm on this tangent, in the book Restoring the Kinship Worldview my colleague Wahink Patopa and I Talk about the indigenous worldview. We call it kinship worldview, which is different from the traditional ecological knowledge.
The kinship worldview is what we can all have. It's a contrast to the dominant worldview, which is we're all swimming in and we don't even realize it's a worldview, right of hierarchy and denigrating femininity and, the rigid progress orientation and all that in the indigenous worldview is what we all have.
It's all our ends. It's being a member of the earth community. And so we identified, I think there's 51 precepts now at the worldview literacy dot org site. But anyway, so we have to distinguish that we can all adopt that now traditional ecological knowledge. We need to guard and support indigenous communities to maintain that and actually.
They're the ones who are maintaining our biodiversity on the planet, right? We have much to learn there. We have much to learn from the octopuses. I read a novel about octopuses recently. It's called Remarkably Bright Creatures, and that term is what an octopus in the book says about humans, chapters about the human perspective, and then the next chapters about the octopus and oh,
Maurizio Benazzo: the human
Nice.
Darcia Narvaez: Seriously.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah. And that brings us also for a moment into the fires that we're seeing happening as we speak in California, in Los Angeles, again, is connected to everything we speak here. Believe. Yeah. Remembering indigenous way of tending with the earth and listening to the earth. Yeah,
Darcia Narvaez: yes we've lost our way but we can return to it.
It's in us. We have our ancestral wisdom deep in our bodies and spirits and minds. We just have to access it. And what we've done, though, because of all the trauma. Is people immediately go into self protectionism, right? Their stress response system is so easily activated by, oh, so many things threat.
And when that happens, the blood flow shifts away from your higher order thinking to the muscles to get you to fight, flight, something, right? And so you don't think very well, and you're not going to be open minded or open hearted, right? And so we have all these people that are bracing against the world instead of being in that Low of connectedness of love, a biology of love.
Instead we've created biologies of fear in all of us from the child raising practices and from the trauma we continue to force on people throughout their lives. Yeah.
Zaya Benazzo: Thank you so much.
Maurizio Benazzo: Darcia. Do you want to say something to close this circle of little squares? And
Zaya Benazzo: we hope to continue this conversation with you and I'd love to have another one on the kinship. worldview with your co author and that it's just so rich. There's so much here and it feels very potent. This is the medicine we're longing for in the Western world, that remembering of the most natural way of being.
of being and relating.
Maurizio Benazzo: And let's build a village. Let's build the villages. Our dream after many villages all over this point of light because we are getting deep into the darkness and it's time to. Yes.
Yeah.
Darcia Narvaez: Yeah.
Maurizio Benazzo: Thank you so much.
Darcia Narvaez: You're welcome. I'm really it was really nice to be with you.
Such good questions, from you two, , I think we have to keep our eye on the prize, so we can be nested again, and we can all find ways to help ourselves become nested, but be nested daily in our evolved nest curriculum. It's a PDF you can download, and it has links to podcasts and essays and videos and pre test, post test, and then it asks were you nested today?
All right. Here's some suggestions if you weren't, in the different components. We can all start to move in this direction. And then we can also look to see how we can help others nest. And so we also in the curriculums make suggestions for the workplace, your neighborhood, your family so that you can be a nesting we're going to have our next well, an unofficial nesting ambassador.
We're going to have our official nesting ambassador program launch, I think, probably in February so that we can help the people around the world who are all excited to actually apply this in their walk of life, whether a parent, a community organizer, a doctor, a professor whoever. You can join us for that.
Just sign up for the EvolveNest. org newsletter, monthly newsletter, and you'll find out.
Zaya Benazzo: Wonderful. And it's such an empowered way of being is we're not waiting for the change to come from the institutions from the schools. We are the ones that will be bring the change one step at a time together. Yes.
Yeah, as our
Darcia Narvaez: friend by, yes, we have monthly meetings that Justin mentioned that we have monthly just anybody from around the world can join us for an hour. And we talk about the three films that we've done, the Breaking the Cycle, Evolved Nest, Nature's Way of Raising Children, and Reimagining Humanity, all of those together, 30 minutes of your time.
So please watch the films. And then you can come even if you haven't watched them, you can come to the discussion and just feel. Connected to people all over the world who are interested in nesting.
Zaya Benazzo: Thank you so much. Thank you. Everyone who joined us today will continue those, this exploration.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yeah.
Zaya Benazzo: Nourish our re imagination, remembering about humanity and natural ways of being. Yeah. So much. Thank you. Be well. Thank you everyone.
