Power That Heals: John Calvi on Trauma, Justice, and Radical Love

What does love look like when it moves beyond sentiment and becomes a force for healing, justice, and transformation?

In this Season Six finale of The Seed, we welcome John Calvi, a Quaker healer, certified massage therapist, and longtime advocate for survivors of trauma. John began offering healing touch during the AIDS crisis in 1983 and has since worked with survivors of war, torture, sexual abuse, and incarceration—always centering presence, compassion, and deep listening. He is also the founding convener of the Quaker Initiative to End Torture.

The conversation is grounded in All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks, including her insistence that “there can be no love without justice.” From there, Dwight and John explore how love is experienced somatically—in the body—and how it becomes power when it refuses domination and instead fosters dignity, accountability, and repair.

Reflecting on decades of healing work, John describes moments when the boundary between stranger and kin dissolves, when tenderness reveals both suffering and possibility at once. He speaks candidly about power—how “power over” wounds and constricts, while power rooted in love expands our capacity to remain present even in the face of immense pain.

As John puts it:
“Pain becomes suffering when it becomes all that we are. The work is to loosen the contraction of the body, of the heart, of the mind—so that pain does not take over our entire existence.”

John and Dwight discuss the wisdom of the body, Quaker worship as a deeply somatic practice, and the slow, cyclical nature of healing. John distinguishes between pain and suffering, noting how laughter, stillness, touch, and truth-telling can interrupt despair and make space for hope.

In his closing reflection, Dwight weaves together John’s stories with his own experiences of intergenerational care—of children and elders, beginnings and endings—inviting listeners to consider how love becomes real when it is practiced in tangible, embodied ways.

This episode closes Season Six with a grounded offering of wisdom: that love, when paired with justice, is not abstract. It is practiced with hands, breath, presence, and courage.

NEW Video Version available at Pendle Hill's YouTube page.

The transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/
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The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center open to all for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people.

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Transcript

0:01

Hey, hey, hey, My guest today is John Cowby, the Quaker Healer and a certified massage therapist. Genuinely, I'm not that nice a person. Good to know, I'll stay on your good side today, John. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, oh You're listening to The Seed, Conversations for Radical Hope, a Pendle Hill podcast where Quakers and other seekers come together to explore visions of the world growing through the cracks of our broken systems. I'm your host, Dwight Dunstan. This season's theme is inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his book, Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community? In this book, King wrote, Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. Today's reading comes from the book All About Love, New Visions by Bell Hooks. I will read excerpts from two chapters. This first excerpt comes from a chapter titled Justice, Childhood Love Lessons. Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love. There can be no love without justice. Until we live in a culture that not only respects, but also upholds basic civil rights for children, most children will not know love. In our culture, the private family dwelling is the one institutionalized sphere of power that can easily be autocratic and fascistic. As absolute rulers, parents can usually decide without any intervention what is best for their children. Without justice, there can be no love. And from another chapter titled Honesty, Be True to Love, Bell Hooks writes, psychoanalyst Carl Jung insightfully emphasized the truism that where the will to power is paramount, love will be lacking. Justice between people is perhaps the most important connection people can have. oh My guest today is John Cowby. John is a Quaker healer and a certified massage therapist. John began offering healing touch during the AIDS crisis in 1983. Since then, he's worked with survivors of war, sexual abuse, torture and incarceration, always centering love, presence and deep listening. For 15 years, John was recognized as a released friend. traveling widely to teach about trauma recovery, spiritual resilience, and the healing power of compassion. He's taught in prisons, hospitals, and sanctuaries across the US, Canada, and Central America. He's also the founding convener of the Quaker Initiative to End Torture and a songwriter. His song, The Ones Who Aren't Here, became an anthem in queer communities during the AIDS epidemic. John lives in Vermont. with his husband, Marshall Brewer. Welcome to the show, John. Thank you very much and thank you for the invitation to be here. Sean, I'm wondering here at the beginning of our time together, if you can tell us a time when love moved through you or around you with a real tangible force, more than a feeling, it became a kind of power. Yes, yes, thank you. Doing workshops to teach about healing from trauma. Often I would come into a room and there would be maybe 20 people or 50 people. I usually would know about a third of them, but most of the others I had never seen or met before. And as I came into the room and looked around, I would often see two or three people, maybe a half dozen people. When I saw them, there was uh a change in my heart where I felt an overwhelming tenderness as though I had found some long lost child, but it actually was a person I didn't know. I would receive messages about the nature of their pain and also whether or not it was my work to help to change that or whether it was not my work to do that. This tenderness would be overwhelming at times, perhaps to bring me to tears. And I would receive messages about how the pain was layered within someone's body or within someone's mind and how it is I might be guided to help release that pain. What I was experiencing was stronger, much stronger than falling in love. It was more like being present at a birth where I become aware of the miracle. of our connection universally and grateful for an opportunity to go and do some intense work, some very intimate work, really be very grateful to be a part of the whole process. That was a very common experience. When you would have these experiences where your notions of what a stranger means, bump up against what the reality, the somatic experience, the reality of the experience you were having. It was very transformational. Genuinely, I'm not that nice a person. Good to know. I'll stay on your good side today, John. You know, I certainly enjoyed this part of the process that brought out all of my best and connecting to other people's best. Another aspect of it was that very often these people, whether I was in a private session or in a group session, uh I would become aware of that person's pain and the pain would really be very overwhelming. So I had to prepare myself. to surrender to moments of grace, to let go of my own fears of experiencing someone else's pain. The Jimmy Carter Center had gotten a young fellow released from a prison in Nepal. He'd been suspected of something. He was completely innocent. was in a refugee camp. He got put into a stone prison in the Himalayas and told he would never come out of there again. He was there for five years. When we finally got together at the college where he was getting a master's degree, I was really frightened of laying my hands on him, feeling what he felt in that stone prison. But there's a kind of a surrender that would come upon me so that I could be in my tenderness and at the same time be open to the release of whatever pain. was going to come, which would pass through me and then out. The idea of anyone being a stranger or being unknown to me, it's almost as though the walls of the house lifted up or the separation of one person from another, whatever was separating, would be lifted up and away so that I could feel all that common humanity. In a workshop of 50 people, That is very open-hearted, which is a difficult posture to remain in. It's hard to stay there. I certainly have never been able to live there or to stay there for very long because it's a posture that demands a great deal of energy and awareness. And there's no goofing off. No, I imagine not. Yeah, there's no, idleness too. It's all intense. It's all very energetic kind of Olympian. And then you go and rest. um bell hooks shared that there can be no love without justice. What stories or memories rise up for you when you hear that line? Sometimes, rarely, I get a call to help someone who is going to remain in their circumstance of abuse. There's only so much room for me to work there. I'm put in a position where I'm encouraging someone to reach out for larger change. I'm not an aspirin. Through the help of a great deal of light and certainly not my own talents, I can be a catalyst when I am invited into the work. But then that person is going to see a larger, broader perspective, a broader view of the horizon and make some choices and take some actions. By and by they will come to see that their pain, their trauma is healed in a cycle of healing. It's not all done at once. There is some relief. There is some insight. and then we come around to a period of resting. After that rest, there is another cycle of work where we have new opportunity and new information and we make some more choices and take some more actions. That cycle continues. What have you learned about the difference between power over someone and power within or power with? Well, it's always interesting to encounter other people's concepts of power and what must be defended, what must be used for identification, what must be used for aggression or defense. There's very little in popular culture that teaches us about surrender, humility. There's a lot in popular culture that will take us away from experiencing and learning about our own essence and the essence of other people and how to be graceful in that relationship with another person. The ideas around power change. One of the great educations about power is true love, to fall in love, maybe to get married and find out the ways that you have been thinking about power all along. that maybe have been unconscious and now they've got to be put on the table in front of you because you are making a life with another person. And certainly raising children is a similar kind of circumstance. If you're going to stay in your old patterns of power and not learn anything, you're going to come into a lot of trouble. There is a wonderful Montessori educator by the name of Rosa Packard. And one of the things that she taught about was the idea that children are our emotional equals. What a child is experiencing has the same depth and importance and integrity and honesty as any feeling an adult is having. If you take that concept and bring it in deep, you're really going to have to slow down and be graceful in your response to children because that's absolutely what they deserve. I've worked with young people at summer camps and after school programs most of my adult life. so having worked at a nursery through 12th grade school, Quaker school, getting the chance to work at a school felt very aligned with what I had been doing since I was 15. Being around and helping to nurture the next generation, whether it was the three-year-olds or the 18-year-olds, I really... learned and what's humbled in many situations by the brilliance and intelligence, insightfulness, the ways these young people were astute. They're developing all these ways to communicate and express, but in terms of their brilliance and intelligence and emotionality, the quote you shared, it so much resonates with the sort of fact that you shared or the thing you asked us to take on about young people being our emotional equals. I got to experience that every day working at this school and it really shaped how I approach those interactions, not only with young people, I'm also thinking about the other side of the spectrum too, our elders. You know, I think about the ways in our culture we treat those two parts of the spectrum, right? The folks at the beginning of the road, the folks near the end of the road. I got to take care of my grandfather at the end of his life. It was in a similar way, humbling, rewarding and powerful to just be with him and to sort of have these notions of what he was and was not capable of and have those be totally interrupted, debunked. I really had to be called into a new connection with age, with his age in a way that how I was socialized to be dismissive or I know better. No, Pop Pop knew. The little young people knew. They knew I had to check my own attitudes and assumptions and beliefs about their capabilities, but they were very clear. They knew. Yes, what a blessing. How wonderful. I was a Montessori teacher with three to six year old children for eight years. I think what I noticed most is that children are better people than adults. They're still clear. There hasn't been too much obstruction yet in how they understand themselves or how they see the world. Generally speaking, there hasn't been too much trouble yet. which has altered their essence, being with them and enjoying their spontaneity. Also, how curious they are and how eager they are to learn have always been just wonderful experiences for me. Do you have any young people in your life today who are your current teachers or who you're learning from in connection with? Well, I guess that depends on what you mean about young. Yeah, there are a number of adults who are younger than me, and there are some children who I am in touch with and sort of keeping track with. I have become much more of a hermit. Now in my old age of 73, I am semi-retired from work, in part a medical retirement. So I am removed from the huge parade of intensity that I had when I was traveling around the country and making a couple dozen trips a year to teach. I am recessed out of that now and sitting back, but I am still in touch with some folks and still being of use where I can be. I'll be teaching massage and energy work, the beginning basic steps of healing. And it's a good time for that. Hmm. Yeah, it's a much needed time for that. Yes. Returning to the soma as a place for wisdom and understanding in these bodies. had someone once refer to them as our earth suits. This is our earth suit. Yes. You know, where we experience everything. We experience everything. I experience everything. I'm just like, right, I couldn't get out of that feeling. or that tight hamstring or that memory if I wanted to. The soma is a part of the place where it's all happening. Yes, yes, deal with this. Right. Yeah. takes us out of the theoretical. Right, 100%. It feels like a way I am out of the theoretical. There's a through line that becomes very clear, especially when I think about being on this planet connected to human and non-human kin. You know, the miracle of being alive on a planet that's floating in space that's one of many, many, many, many, many, galaxies. When I get out of the theoretical and into my body in particular kind of way. I'm keenly aware of how interconnected everything is. Yeah. Yes. Once again, just thinking about young people, I get to live with a baby. I'm in an intergenerational home and I live with my seven month old nephew. I feel like he's in touch with a lot. He's not just having his own earthly playing experience very much. So it feels like he's connected to some other force. Like sometimes I just look at him and he just looks back and he's just staring. He hasn't learned to. not stare or be shy about it or he's vocal. Someone once described to me kiddos are the greatest activists when they're upset or something's wrong when there's an injustice they make noise about it right they just they'll they'll let you know yeah it's been such a beautiful gift to have been with my grandfather at the end of his life and to be with this new family member at the beginning. Yes, how wonderful for you. Yes. I'm wondering, because you're a body worker, if you can share about the kind of love that lives in your hands when you're doing healing work. As you talk about the love in your hands and that show up in body work or the energy work, if someone was skeptical about the kind of work that you do, what would you tell them? Well, mostly in the circles I travel in, I don't run into a lot of skepticism. Mostly people are in a great deal of need and they're ready for any kind of help that works. Occasionally there'll be a doctor who will come to one of my workshops. It's been recommended by their therapist or their supervisor or their spouse saying, you are very tired. You're exhausted. You are in your head so much and that's why your body is hurting and you have to go to this John Calvi workshop and see if you can unload some of this. And they'll come in skeptically and they will state their skepticism very clearly. I'll be honest with them and say, well, I'm not here to convince anyone, but let's just go along and you see what you notice. And very often an old pain in their back or a small headache on the left side or something they've been carrying for a while just gets dispersed and goes away. And they're very surprised by it and they're very happy about it. One fellow I know went back into the cardiac unit and began to use the energy work on his patients to help them relax in times of great stress. That's a wonderful kind of thing that happens where someone adds to their capacity to help another person. Just put your toe in the water. It's one of the things I love about being Quaker. Quakerism is really a somatic religion. We experience changes in our bodies as we sit in meeting for worship and sink down to see there's a stillness and a change that comes over not only our minds, but our bodies. We sit there trying not to hear ourselves, trying not to be interrupted by the noise of the world in the back of our minds. the list of things we haven't gotten done yet that keeps being spoken over and over and come down to that place of quiet and stillness, which can be hard to reach and needs a lot of practice years of practice. And then as you come down into it, you can feel your posture change, your self-discipline for not wandering in your thoughts change. It brings us to that wonderful place where we feel some unity with other people. There are meditation forms where the sensation primarily is that you are experiencing the universe, but you're not really experiencing the other people around you. Quaker meaning for worship in that deep, deep silence. Very often there is the sensation that we are all of us going into an upper room and we are experiencing one another without our bodies. That's a really wonderful place to go to. from reading about you, John, and your work and now just being present with you. What's coming through is just how you relate to suffering and power. Yeah. Well, that's lovely topic that I'm sure we could spend five days on. I sort of want to make the distinction between pain and suffering and understand that pain is an aspect of life. When pain is great and we are overwhelmed by it, whether it's happening in the physical body or in our thinking or in our emotion or All of those, there is a point at which pain becomes overwhelming. It is all that we are experiencing. It's all that we think about and it's all that we talk about. That is what is turning it into suffering, making the pain all of our existence that there is nothing else that can bring out a huge feeling of hopelessness and helplessness. big trouble. Pain is one of those things where if you can step back a little bit and see how that pain is constructed and if it has meaning, does it have some meaning for you in your life that is actually explaining something um or showing you your participation in it or showing you the injustice of it? Hopefully that you can tap into some anger. rather than go into despair. The idea of working with pain and separating it from suffering, I think that's a very important piece. um People's basic response to pain is contraction. We get smaller in the ways that we think, we get smaller in our emotional life, we get smaller in our physical life. We actually begin to curl our bodies in. so that the spine begins to go into a curve of a C, the letter C. One of the things about bodywork and about laughter and about meeting for worship in that beautiful silence is that you can begin to dismantle some of that contraction. The muscles don't have to be as tight. The thinking does not have to be as tight. The emotional life doesn't have to be as small. We can begin to expand some. Now if you can walk into a crisis situation with a good joke, you're going to be able to help people because laughter begins at the diaphragm at the center of the body. And when that diaphragm gets to laughing and shaking, moving, it actually begins to loosen up the whole rest of the body. So if you're carrying something heavy and you start to laugh, you're going to have to set that thing down because your body just can't maintain the stress of holding all the muscles tight to carry something heavy. And that's true of the mind and it's true of the heart. So we want to take a look at the ways in which we can loosen up that contraction in every part of someone's life so that the pain is carried in a way that it is not understood to be the entire life. And of course, with great pain, with chronic pain, that's hard to do. Pain that goes on and is consistently difficult. It's very hard to work with. It can cause people to lose their hope and lose encouragement and feel that there's not going to be any end to this. And that's just a frightening place to get to. There was a young man from Iran being tortured in Iran for being Christian, put in prison. He escaped, got onto a boat that came into New York Harbor. jumped out of the boat and the United States refused to give him asylum, but they did allow him to go to Canada. In Canada, there was this amazing old Quaker lady who would receive refugees at her home and connect them to the social services. Her name was Nancy Poka and she invited me up to work on the refugees who had been tortured in her area in Toronto. And after I did some work with this young fellow, and he lay on the massage table. He took my hand and began to weep. And he said, this is what my body felt like before the hurt. That just touches on such a deep level that you can enter into the dance and relieve some of that. If someone can feel what it used to be like, even for a little while, that's a great deal of relief and such a blessing, such a gift. He went on to do beautiful work in Canada. Such a gift uh you John, I want to thank you for the gift of this conversation. Very much so spiritual duet of sorts. I don't know what instrument you have or I have, but we were on, I felt us on stage or in a jam session with our spiritual instruments and our time together and making only the kinds of songs that you and I could make with the instruments we had and... Yes. That's a good way to put it. Thank you. And I'm so grateful and excited to be in community and more touch with you after this conversation. We've been swirling in Quaker community and now we get to have this as a point, a node on our relationship to one another. So just thank you for everything, for spending the time, for sharing and for all of the things that you do in the world, all of the ways that you move. for embodying power and love in such a grounded and spirited way. Thank you, thank you very much and thank you for this invitation to be with you and for all the good work you are doing in the world. Thank you. you you I dealt with some very, very heavy topics today, First and foremost, an invitation to take care of yourself, a deep breath, tall glass of water, some time in nature, a call to a loved one, listening to a favorite soothing song. These are all things that I go to when I need to tend to inner upset, turmoil, discomfort. And so I offer those for you and also trust that you know what you need most at this time. Having to think seriously, really be under the weight of what justice means is not an easy thing. Personally, I feel a lot of conversations around justice can quickly go to the theoretical and become less grounded in the here and now. Ideas of forgiveness or belonging, accompaniment, being present with someone, those can once again live in this theoretical and it can get hard to think about ways that folks are doing this in a tangible material way. And the stories that John shared, wow, I'm struck and honestly shocked by how much this human loves. How he extends love, how even in the need to hold accountable, he does so with love, embodies love, using his words, using touch. It just illuminated all the places that I still have to grow in myself where I struggle to extend love to others, whether it be individuals or strangers or organizations, corporations. Even myself growing up in this body and with the experiences I have, I've internalized a lot of messages around not being worthy or deserving of being treated with care and dignity, being treated with love. And I don't know, there's just something about being in John's presence and being with his stories, his experiences. I feel more able to be loving towards myself than I was before that conversation. I'm hoping that some of the love that emanates from John and his calling, his vocation, what he does with his life reaches you, that it feels grounding, that it feels like a source that you can call on, a well that you can tap into, and that you just feel more surrounded by that divine love that we so often talk about in Quaker spaces. I know for me it's not always easy to feel, but that conversation really helped me tap into it in a new way. Thanks for listening, friends. The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill. Quaker Center open to all for spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We're located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania on the traditional territory of the Lenni Lenape people. We host retreats, workshops, and lectures all year round. For a full list of these upcoming education opportunities, visit Pendlehill.org slash learn. This episode was produced and edited by Peterson Toscano. Our theme music is the I Rise Project by Reverend Reda Morgan and Bennett Kuhn. produced by Astronautical Records. Other music comes from epidemicsound.com. You also heard some of my music as well, and I hope you enjoyed. You can stay in touch by following us at Pendle Hill on all social media platforms or by emailing podcast at pendlehill.org. That's podcast at pendlehill.org. For full episode transcript, links and show notes, visit Pendlehill.org slash podcast. You can also worship with me online through Pendle Hill once a month. I attend this virtual Quaker meeting on the last Friday of the month. Worship begins at 8.30 AM Eastern time and lasts about 40 minutes. To access the virtual worship space via Zoom, visit Pendlehill.org slash worship. If you're finding these conversations meaningful, consider supporting our work financially. Simply head over to Pendlehill.org slash donate. You can also support us by letting people in your life know about our podcast. Please subscribe, rate, or review us on your podcast platform. These seeds could not be planted without you.