This was one of my favourite interviews to date. I did not need to edit out one second of the body of this conversation and it speaks to the flow that Leona embodies and how easy it was for me to connect with her and have a wonderful conversation. There is an incredible living wisdom within Leona that I appreciated and learned from in this hour long interview. I hope you enjoy listening to her as much as I did.
Leonie Flamand Gallant is Metis. she grew up in a small French rural community in Saskatchewan. Her mom was French from Montreal and her Dad was Cree and French from Manitoba . She is the 6 child in a family of ten children. Being Metis was not spoken of in her family, her knowing of her heritage came from being called “half breed “ when entered school. In her work with Virginia she recovered her heritage both Cree and French. The Metis people of Canada have a very rich and interesting story of how colonialism affected their lives.
Leona made a decision to learn from the masters in the profession of working with people, Virgina Satir and Maria Gomori were at the forefront of her education working in the helping field. She was a stay at home Mom raising four children for the first ten years of her adult life, the next ten was working and training in the profession shew anted to be a part of. In her profession she worked as a drug and alcohol counsellor, a stopping the violence counsellor [ working with historical sexual abuse], from 1992 to 2000 she facilitated a counsellor training program that trained adult learners to work with Alcohol and drug and family development in a Native friendship center Tillicum Lelum in Nanaimo BC. Their program was Satir based and every person as part of their training did their own family reconstruction which she facilitated. In 2000 she created her own business and contracted with Tellicum lelum the Satir part of the training program as part of her business. She is now still involved with Satir work in her 81st year of her amazing life.
2:14 We begin a meditation
6:41 Leona and Tim begin the interview. Leona talks about living with no resistance and openness.
She describes feeling open and then when she’s around someone who is afraid and the feeling of fear comes in. She gives herself permission to feel what comes up. She recognize that she doesn’t have to go back to where she was but to stay long enough for something else to come so she can see the person to in front of her..
10:26 She describes status quo all the ways of how she learned to be by the family and the culture. Essentially all behavioral patterns. If we allow ourselves to feel then we can have choice. What is present in this moment? Leona consciously chooses not to battle the pattern but to engage it with acceptance and non judgment.
13:00 Leona notices anothers resistance and then focuses on her own resistance and this leads to connection...touching somehow albeit not literally a physical touch.
14:20 Congruent is a living word meaning a word that she will constantly learning about them and with them. Can we treat words as living things. Leona talks about the importance of accepting one’s experience as human with no resistance.
16:00 Leona talks about her experience of shame about being herself and being Metis in her early life. Virginia talked to her about the wonderful Metis people. The experience of total acceptance from Virginia helped transformed. She describes that she was walking into an energy field where she felt good inside.. ..Virginia felt so warm that it was impossible not to feel warm inside yourself.
“Journey to Self” was the name of the training she did in 1980.
22:00 She did parts party, family mapping, family story and other experiences helped her transform her experience of being Metis as a wealth/resources.
25:00 Leona experienced herself dissociate in the beginning of the training and Virginia had her stand on stool and she connected with her and it helped her land back in her body.
She noticed that her changing her relationship to herself.
28:00 Leona talks about Family Reconstruction , which is a major vehicle for change in the Satir Model.
31:00 She talks about the counsellor training program she was part of running and the use of Virginia’s work and her various tools. Leona shares that ‘hearing your own story is healing’
33:00 Leona would work with people to get the story of the mother and the father’s story and sculpt each. What was happening in the world when people were born, growing up, how did ht mother and father learn to parent, how did they meet, what happened in school, what happened in the community they lived in,
36:00 What did a person learn through the events, histories that are buried deep within the person. The learnings that created the patterns. This was an opportunity to see yourself and parents in a different light and to answer the question of ‘how come?’ This is the engagement with the wholeness of life, of full humanness.
39:30 Leona talks about understanding of how a person grows up and why you learned the coping that you have learned. This creates a hopeful energy because if you can understand that you learned to do what you; then you can realize you can unlearn the old and learn something new.
41:00 Self and Essence are both the same and different. Leona describes the continual movement of learning to love yourself. To learn to love period. Leona uses the metaphor of baking bread. That sometimes we bake bread and it falls flat and to be hopeful about the process of learning what went wrong and learning to enjoy what’s there.
Essence is about enjoying what is there; the total moment.
42:24 Leona connects the word self to memory and identity and essence as beyond memory and understanding...that is the transcendent. She describes playing between the memory and the essence and the wholeness of the separate and connected as a whole.
45:00 Tim reflects on his experience of connecting self and of essence being with Leona and his appreciation of her.
46:30 Leona talks about Brian Swimme. “We live in the context of the universe” How big is our learning capacity when we consider the vastness of the universe?
49:00 Words are important. Words are pointers to the essence and are like doorway into the vast meanings of the word.
“We’re not caught up to Virginia” Leona says.
50:50 Leona’s wish for growth and peace in the world is in our ability to be with fear in a non-destructive way with myself, with family, with community. Fear has a face a feeling, a power. How to be with that power that brings forth love and not more fear. “How can I embrace fear with love?” Leona asks.
I can learn to be with my fear. This is a skill that can be learned. Maybe the fear yeast for some growth. IF we can encapsulate our fear with love , we can grow and learn.