Dr. Lyla June Johnston (aka Lyla June) is an Indigenous musician, scholar, and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages. Her multi-genre presentation style has engaged audiences across the globe towards personal, collective, and ecological healing. She blends her study of Human Ecology at Stanford, graduate work in Indigenous Pedagogy, and the traditional worldview she grew up with to inform her music, perspectives and solutions.
Lyla has been a featured guest on our Holding the Fire and What Could Possibly Go Right? podcasts, and we’re excited to welcome her as a panelist for Welcome to the Great Unraveling, our free upcoming event on Tuesday, May 14.
In this brief interview with PCI Executive Director, Asher Miller, Lyla shares what has influenced her journey towards justice and healing, and how we can find greater love and compassion–even for our “enemies.”
“The less we fight our imperfections, the quicker they are healed. The less we hold ourselves to the fire, the quicker we heal. The more we have a gentleness and compassion for ourselves, the more we improve.”
Join us on Tuesday, May 14 for the free online event, Welcome to the Great Unraveling. We’ll explore humanity’s history of unprecedented growth, learn how it’s shaped the mess that we are in now, and take away equitable solutions for supporting our communities during these challenging times.
We hope you can join us on Tuesday, May 14 at 11:00 AM US Pacific Time for Welcome to the Great Unraveling. Kumi and Dr. Lyla June Johnston will lead us through a framework for understanding the polycrisis of social and environmental challenges, and offer practical suggestions for how each of us can actively be part of the solution.
Register for the EventTranscript
Lyla June Johnston: On Love and the Four Elements Guiding Her Path in Servicelf-Care in the Journey for Justice
Asher: Okay Lyla June. It’s lovely to see you. Thanks for taking a few minutes. I just wanted to check in before we get together with Kumi in a few weeks on May 14th, where we’re going to have a more robust conversation I’m looking forward to. But before that, maybe just as a bit of an introduction to the folks who registered, I wanted to just ask you — and this could be a really dumb question and you have my permission to tell me it’s a dumb question — but I’m curious if there was a moment or if there was a series of moments that led you to what I would call our shared work. And that is healing the planet, healing humanity.
Lyla June: I don’t think it’s a dumb question at all.
It’s a really profound question that I think. Could be asked of many people. Well, I think for our shared work, which I define as our collective intention to make the world a better place, and to be in service to something outside of ourselves. I think there were many moments that led up to it.
Number one, I was kind of raised in a family where that was just important, to fight for something outside of yourself, to be a warrior, a peaceful warrior, to be a warrior who helped others. So I kind of had no choice in a way, but I’m glad about that. You know, I think I would rather be raised in a family where serving others is normalized than serving ourselves is normalized.
And I’m really grateful for that. I think over my lifetime, however, it was deepened because I went through trials and tribulations of my own and extreme bouts of suffering. Specifically in middle school. Well, maybe that’s all of us. Extreme bouts of suffering in middle school. But yeah, that was a time that was really, really, really, really, really hard, and for many reasons.
And that suffering that I endured, something that gave me a lot of compassion for others who are suffering. And I think that’s the gift of suffering, if there is one, is that we never want anyone to feel that and we’ll fight to support people who are going through that. If we had never suffered, we wouldn’t know, we wouldn’t know how important our work really is, you know?
Another big turning point was listening to Desmond Tutu when I was, I guess I was 16. I listened to Desmond Tutu. He was talking about forgiveness. We were in Bali, Indonesia, of all places. But, he’s the first person who ever really articulated forgiveness as a value and a norm that we should aspire to.
And that really hit me and changed the way I do our shared work because I basically decided that I no longer wanted to fight with animosity, but I wanted to fight with love, for even my enemies and those I was against. I wanted to not hate people anymore. That doesn’t mean I would stop fighting. I would continue to fight very strongly with all my heart and might, but it would be fighting for our collective liberation, instead of trying to tear down something or someone.
Sometimes you still have to hold the people you’re “against” accountable, but that’s also done in love. At least that can be our intention, is to love.
Another big turning point was, I think, when I broke my hip and my spine when I was 20. And at the time I was pretty deep into drug addiction and I was pretty much at rock bottom. I had a broken hip, a broken spine, a broken heart, a broken spirit, a broken everything.
And that’s when a lot of spiritual intervention came into my life. And that really solid… I had always been a spiritual person, and I had always prayed as I grew up in ceremony as, in our culture as native people, but it was not really personalized to that level until the ancestors and the spirits came for me so clearly in a way I could not deny.
And that really turned my work from sort of a solo mission to more of a like, “okay, I am backed by legions of benevolent forces that love us so much and that want us so much to have healing and are also tired of watching us suffer. And they’re trying as hard as they can to help give us relief from the not so nice spiritual forces that are pummeling us constantly and just really situated the fight more as a spiritual battle than a physical battle.”
And so that was a big turning point, as well, and transformed my work more — or our shared work for me — more from a, I don’t know, a social cause into like, “wow, I’m part of a larger ancient spiritual battle that’s going on, that is beyond the just physical planes. And the way I fight is, again, with love.
And it really reinforced that notion that love is the methodology through which we fight. That really strengthened, again, like, “okay, in this great grand, millennia old battle between what’s far from Creator and what’s close to Creator, the only weapons we need and the only weapons we have truly are love and truth and faith.”
And so that was a big turning point too of really being like, “okay, no, this is for real. This is not, we’re not running a test here. This is what my ancestors and all of our ancestors have been grappling with for a long time. And we’re, we’re not alone in this fight. We have many physical and spiritual beings who are, who are with us.”
Asher: Thank you. So much to follow up there, but Iwant to ask you another question, because I think it’s something that many of the folks out there, me, myself included, who see the struggle that we’re in and what we face, are reckoning with. And that is just how do we take care of ourselves in this, especially when we see that there’s so much other suffering out there that it’s hard to compare our own to.
So is there a practice in your life that makes you more able to confront this work? Or does it feel like that’s sort of a moot point? What sustains you, I guess is maybe the question.
Lyla June: I think there’s different kinds of sustainability. There’s emotional sustainability, there’s physical sustainability, there’s spiritual sustainability, and there’s mental sustainability. And maybe other sustainabilities I don’t know of.
But yeah, I think that physical sustainability is the basics, right? Like sleeping, eating healthy, trying to get out and exercise, and try to feel the sun on your skin. All of which are sometimes very challenging for people, sometimes very easy for people. But I’m definitely obsessed with leating healthy foods that actually feed me.
I don’t eat a lot of processed foods. That’s because I wanted to eat what my ancestors ate. So I try to stick to the diet of my ancestors, as wel. Not just no processed foods, but I don’t eat a lot of wheat, cause we just never ate wheat and it doesn’t seem to do much for me. Try to eat bison, venison. and a lot of squash, and corn, and beans, and such. Amaranth. So anyways,, there’s the physical sustainability, which is like honoring your physicality,
Trying to sleep. That one I’m not so good at. I’m like perpetually sleep deprived, but working on it.
The next one though is like a spiritual sustainability, and that one might be more important or maybe more fundamental, because the big thing that gets people, from what I’ve seen and what I’ve experienced, is our self esteem, our self confidence, our self love,
You know, that is really the bedrock on which all our other work rests. And if you are a survivor of adverse childhood experiences, as they call them. Which I’m a survivor of many of those, and most people are, unfortunately. We have a really hard time loving ourselves, believing in ourselves, having confidence in ourselves, And even if you’re not a survivor of ACEs, you know, adverse childhood experiences, you’re also going to get hit and pummeled in other ways. And the animosity that is going on in the world; we’re a bit mean to each other these days. I guess we have been for a long time.
But you have to sustain your mind, and your spirit, and your emotions, One of the practices I do is I continually ask Creator to help me release any self-judgment and to love myself.
And when I look in the mirror, I try to say “Hey, I like you.” You know, like, “You’re doing a good job and I love you.” And that’s a really important practice. Especially, like, I ran for office. I work in kind of a public sphere. I work in a very traumatized community because we’re trying to stand back up from attempted genocide. You know, they wiped out 98 percent of native people on this continent by most estimates. So we are also very laterally violent to each other. Not because we’re bad people, but because we’re hurting and we in turn hurt each other.
So that’s all to say that I get a lot of… I think maybe most of us do get personal attacks, spiritual attacks. You run for office, you get slander. And there’s just a lot of voices trying to tell you that you’re not worthy. “You don’t belong here.” What’s the other one that comes to mind? Uh, “Who are you to do anything, really?” And I think that’s something that you have to learn how to battle. Again, not with hate or force, but with love.
Love is the greatest weapon. Love is the greatest shield. Loving those who tear us down and loving ourselves for having to put up with being torn down. And also being accountable at the same time, like lovingly accountable. Like, “okay, cool. I want to learn. I want to grow. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna look at my mistakes with compassionate accountability.”
Like, “how do I learn from this and forgive myself and do better?” That’s where you hit the sweet spot, is where you not only have a lot of self love , but you also have constructive self-accountability, Which is really mature and responsible to have. And it’s okay to be imperfect. We would expect all of us to be imperfect But I think that’s the main thing that most human beings grapple with is: “Am I good? Am I a good person?”
And sadly we grapple with it in silence, in silos, when actually we’re all dealing with it, and we all have a little bit of not self-assuredness, you know? And so putting those curtains down and just saying like, “okay, this is me. You know, I’m struggling and that’s okay.”
And ironically, the less we fight our imperfections, the quicker they are healed. And the less we hold ourselves to the fire, the quicker we heal. And the more we have a gentleness and compassion for ourselves, the more we improve.
So, yeah, I think that’s a big thing. I think, especially those of us who do start to move the needle, and who are a threat to the status quo, we’re going to get hit harder, you know?
And so the more successful and effective you become, the more important it is to get good at loving yourself.
Asher: That’s really well said. You just laid out a bunch of challenges for me because those are all buttons for me. I sometimes think that I’m just playing grown up sometimes. I don’t know if you ever have that experience, but…
Lyla June: Hey, well, you’re extremely brave to say that. And everyone else can now has permission to say that too, cause they’re feeling it too.
Asher: Yeah, no, I try to remind myself that we’re all just kids inside, trying to do our best.
Well, thank you for, for sharing those reflections. It makes me even more excited to be in conversation with you and Kumi in a little while.
I know that there are a lot of people who’ve already signed up to participate and others are going to be joining us. So, just very grateful and really looking forward to it. Thanks so much.
Lyla June: Thank you, Asher.
