American Roots & Blues

Philo is Interested in many things, but none seem to get him quite as fascinated as what he calls “heart awakenings.” It’s his own term, he explained to me when I sat in with him in the KCSB studio, but one that describes an immediately recognizable phenomenon. “Your heart just speaks to you at a certain point,” he said. Heart awakenings tend to precede one’s major shifts in perspective, and thus one’s major changes in life.

Their guests tend to have undergone heart awakenings at some time in their lives. His radio show, Art of Peace, is the product of one of his own.

Christopher Lowman had a heart awakening. “Here he was, this East Coast guy, wealthy, educated, but he felt like he wasn’t making a difference,” “So he studied these Japanese healing techniques to cure the effects of trauma, then went to Rwanda and started working on the people who had been traumatized by war. He formed this whole group, Moving Towards Peace. Chris isn’t a loud guy; at first, he didn’t want to take a stand. But he was helping.”

B. Allan Wallace, a former Buddhist monk and current lecturer on Buddhism and the mind, also had a heart awakening. “Here’s a guy, a PhD, more brilliant than ten of us put together,” “and he wanted to become a Buddhist monk! He researches what’s called contemplative science—meditation—which teaches people to be still. You listen to him speak, and you can’t help but settle down and be calm. He doesn’t even necessarily talk about Buddhism as a religion now; he thinks of it more like Western psychology.”

The initially formidable-sounding General Leopard would seem an even less likely candidate for a heart awakening. Now known as Christian Bethelson, he was once a military general in Liberia, “like the Blood Diamond general,” “He was doing these terrible tings. He was on the verge of killing himself. He was an Ethiopian presidential bodyguard during the coup, where he was tortured. But he came upon a guy from the Everyday Gandhis. They’re a group that do this thing they call ‘dreaming together’ for days before they decide what they’re going to do or what they need to help the world, and he joined them.”