Mostly unscripted. From the heart. Exploring philosophical, scientific, technological and poetic spaces beyond either/or bounds. Philosophy as a verb.
Hey everybody.
This podcast is about seemingly impossible combinations and this one is the doozy of love and power. It’s about the politics of care. Or love in politics. Can you hold those words at once? Can we? We might be surprised by ourselves.
Jamie Bristow has spent the last fifteen years bringing mindfulness and contemplative practices into the British Parliament, the UN, and halls of power around the world. And now he’s decided love is the only answer. But what happens when you bring the language of love into spaces where we typically speak only of power via politics?
This episode of Love and Philosophy, hosted by philosopher Andrea Hiott, delves into the intersection of love and power in political and personal realms. Guest Jamie Bristow, with his extensive experience working with people in the British Parliament and the UN, explores how mindfulness, consciousness, and inner transformation can reshape politics and society.
Through discussing concepts like Eros, resilience, and ontological metamodernism, the conversation examines how personal and societal change can be navigated, holding love and power together to create meaningful transformation. The episode also touches on Jamie’s journey from a corporate advertising executive to a ‘legitimizing agent’ for contemplative practices in politics, highlighting the role of faith, trust, and the evolving nature of consciousness. More in depth on those themes in the post below.
Jamie is a policy advisor working at the intersection of inner & outer transformation, resilience and sustainability.
00:00 The Sacred Nature of Power02:05 Introduction to Love and Philosophy02:25 Exploring Love and Power in Politics03:14 Jamie Bristow’s Journey08:41 Mindfulness in Parliament18:38 The Intersection of Inner and Outer Worlds31:51 The Role of Love and Power in Society43:45 Exploring the Concept of Eros44:23 The Broader Implications of Eros46:33 Love as a Cosmic Force47:43 Resilience and the Role of Love52:51 Trust and Faith in Personal Growth55:43 The Politics of Love01:14:06 Navigating Modernity and Postmodernity01:19:18 The Middle Way and Superposition01:27:50 Closing Reflections on Love and Philosophy
The System Within: addressing the inner dimensions of sustainability and systems transformationMindfulness in Westminster: Reflections from UK PoliticiansReconnection: Meeting the Climate Crisis Inside OutThe Conscious Food Systems Alliance (UNDP) Power & Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change by Adam KahanePolitical Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice - Martha Nussbaum
legitimizing agents
Jamie calls himself a “legitimizing agent” — someone who takes what’s considered fringe, woo-woo, or even what seems like ‘career suicide’ and makes it speakable in mainstream contexts.
A decade ago, some governmental members who took mindfulness courses did so under strict confidentiality. “Just don’t tell anybody,” they’d say. Now some of them are talking about it on the front pages of major newspapers and the idea of mindfulness and meditation is almost commonplace.
Part of this may be about the meditation techniques and stress reduction but the motivation discussed here is also deeper and gets at something bodily and crucial beyond discipline.
Jamie talks about it as “the missing inner dimension” and it does hold a powerful punch to ask if we want to be treated as our politicians treat one another, though as usual here, the host also wants to explore how we might talk about this beyond inner/outer while still respecting both. The answer comes down to a life’s sustainability and transformation, and the social scaffolds that add up to our collective means of civilization.
living paradox
There’s a Martin Luther King Jr. quote that structures this conversations in many ways, which Jamie brings up and Andrea recounts in the intro:
“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.”
We’re so familiar with how power degenerates and how it becomes manipulative, oppressive, or corrupt. But (as Jamie discusses here) we’re less familiar with how love can degenerate, or how we might sculpt and twist its energies into forms that cannot be maintained.
Love can lead us into real power but our desire to feel it can also be confused with the desire for ‘being liked’, which can lead to us being too passive or people-pleasing, avoiding difficult boundaries and necessary confrontation; sometimes the drive for unity without differentiation can actually limit our capacity to show up fully in the world.
Towards how we might live in this dance, Jamie talks about learning in mindfulness training to be “strong in back and soft in front at the same time” — to have rigor, discernment, and clarity while also being compassionate and receptive. It’s rare, he admits, and it’s powerful.
corporate exec, dharma bum, political insider
What is an insider really? Does anyone ever feel like one?
Jamie’s own journey embodies this tension between power and love, between wanting it and having it and being seen as having it. He was running a global advertising account, responsible for a billion-dollar brand, when something shifted. He describes it as moving from what Harvard professor Robert Kegan calls “the socialized mind” to “the self-authored mind”, a shift from running the company code absorbed from society’s values to taking his own direction.
He became something of a “dharma bum” then in Barcelona, meditating with no income and no plan. It was a move that required faith—as Andrea brings up towards the end in an interesting insight, faith in himself and in possibility itself.
That path eventually led him to work in climate communications, where he became disillusioned with what he calls “the information deficit hypothesis” which is the idea that if we just give people the right statistics, they’ll change.
He realized his own inner transformation had made the same facts land differently. This is when he started asking: Why aren’t we thinking about the inner dimension of the climate crisis? He asked this because he realized this ‘inner’ world is what had changed for him. The first step beyond the assumed inner/outer dichotomy (that we are trapped in our heads, for example) is often in realizing that there is something powerful that comes through awareness of the world oneself.
eros as world-creator
As the conversation heats into new grounds, Jamie talks about Eros and says he forgets that people still associate that work with sexual desires. Eros is not just sexual, though that is a manifestation, but it is a fundamental creative force in everything.
Drawing on the soul-making dharma tradition he practices, Jamie describes Eros as the impulse to move toward something, to become intimate with it, to penetrate or be penetrated by mystery and beauty.
“It’s a world creator,” he said. “It’s a fundamental generative force in human nature and perhaps in the cosmos.”
But there’s another kind of love, one without an object, more like an ongoing “background radiation” of beneficence. In his deepest moments, Jamie senses a divine ground of being that has no separate subject and object. The boundary between his love and cosmic love becomes indistinct. This is another sort of power that is the kind that transforms us.
stack of possibilities
As the conversation progresses, Jamie ends up coining the term “ontological meta-modernism.”
He’s not talking about the middle way as a lukewarm compromise between extremes. Instead, he describes a kind of “superposition” (if one is borrowing from quantum physics) where multiple perspectives exist in a stack, all influencing how we show up, with different ones becoming more relevant in different situations.
“Maybe I’m 60% panpsychist, but I’m still at least 10% scientific materialist,” he explained. “And I really like Christian mysticism. They’re all in a stack, in superposition with each other.”
This tolerance for ambiguity, this ability to hold complexity without collapsing into a single answer is at the heart of both love and real power (the kind that is infused with unadulterated care). It’s not about choosing between modern confidence in objective truth and postmodern paralysis in total relativism. It’s about something that moves through both, holding the paradox.
what politics could be
So what would a politics of love look like? Maybe like it was already in love. Both eros and beyond.
Whatever it may be, Jamie suggests it can’t be grounded in specific theological claims, but it must invite discourse about what truly matters and about meaning, care, connection, and what constitutes a wholesome life. This is a way of bringing what’s sacred into public conversation without requiring everyone to share the same faith tradition or beliefs.
Systems alone aren’t enough. As Gandhi supposedly said, “We want our systems to be so good that we don’t have to be.” That fiction is evaporating. We need the conversation about who we want to be as people, not just what rules we’ll follow.
learning what we need to learn
At one point, Jamie mentions that he and his partner Rosie Bell wrote about pathways through climate collapse that aren’t just binary, that are not just “we’ll barely make it” or “total catastrophe” options. One pathway they sketch is darker but also somehow hopeful, as it states that we might see the suffering, the systems failure, to learn what we need to learn.
A Zen Master was asked when people learn. His answer: “When they have to.”
Maybe we don’t have to yet. Maybe that’s changing. Or maybe we can do this by feeling into all the suffering that already exists without having to create ever more of it, even if we don’t yet feel it as ‘our own’.
gifts of philosophy
At the end of Andrea and Jamie’s conversation, Andrea asks Jamie about love and philosophy. His answer surprises her becasue he brings up his dad, who had not yet been mentioned. He thanks his father, who raised him by being a philosopher (so to speak), introducing him to thought experiments as a kid. “How do you know you’re not a brain in a jar? How do you know any of this is real?”
Elsewhere Jamie had previously talked about his spiritual journey in somewhat negative contrast to his philosophical upbringing. But in this moment, he recognized it as an enormous gift: being held in love while being taught to question everything, to be a lover of learning.
That feels like the place to start and so to come back to here. Whether as a parent, a friend, a colleague, or a citizen representing other citizens (which is what politicians are in a democracy) to hold space for someone to become a philosopher, a questioner, an explorer of what’s possible. To do that with love. In power. And with power. In love.
Strong and soft at once. Holding the paradox without collapsing it.
It’s messy. It’s vulnerable. It’s urgent. And maybe it’s exactly what this moment between worlds is asking of us. Which brings us to one bit of gratitude we want to give, and that is to Manda Scott who has is a master connector of people, ideas and hearts (and is the one who put Jamie and Andrea in touch a while back). If you haven’t heard her Accidental Gods podcast, check it out!
Thanks!
Or you can buy us a coffee if you’d like.
This is a community funded effort so any amount helps.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.
This article and podcast is informational only and not meant as professional guidance or advice.
Love and Philosophy would love to hear from you if you have practices or are part of communities who are trying to find ways to hold paradox, which means to move beyond binaries without thinking one side has to win over the other, & to do this with care. This post is towards all this. What do you think?
