Remembering the UN’s Origin: A Fireside Chat on Regenerating Global Leadership - with Jyoti Ma and Alexandra Timor

In this fireside episode, three women from three continents sit with a deceptively simple question: What was the UN born for - and what does that origin ask of us now, as staff inside the system? Spiritual elder and bridge-builder Jyoti Ma reminds us that every enduring system has an origin story that carries its “codes of purpose”. The UN was born from the heartbreak of world wars as a spiritual endeavour in the broadest sense: a faith in peace, human dignity, and our capacity to choose life over domination. For UN colleagues, this is not abstract. It’s an invitation to pause, breathe, and re-align daily work – reports, meetings, missions – with that original intention: to be a walking practice of peace, not just a bureaucracy that manages crisis.

Earth lawyer Alexandra Pimor stretches our understanding of “We the peoples”. If Earth is a living being, then tree nations, water nations and all more-than-human relatives also deserve a voice in decisions. For practitioners, this translates into very concrete questions: Whose interests are present in the room when we design programmes or negotiate text – and whose are missing? How might we bring rivers, forests, future generations and Indigenous guardians into our risk matrices, logframes and governance structures, not as metaphor, but as stakeholders?

Both guests return again and again to agency. The UN as an institution may feel stuck, but UN staff are not. “The people are the power,” Alexandra’s daughter reminds us. We already “power” the system through the choices we make every day:

• How we speak in a meeting – from fear or from purpose.

• How we respond to violence – by normalising it as inevitable, or by holding a warrior’s stance that protects life.

• How we start the workday – clocking in on autopilot, or asking: “By the end of today, how can I be proud of myself – and of the UN?”

Jyoti invites us to see this moment as the closing of an old cycle and the dawn of a new one. Our task is not to fix the past, but to dream a new dream for the UN – rooted in reciprocity, unity and care for all life. Practically, that might look like: creating small circles of deep listening in offices; inviting Indigenous wisdom and youth perspectives into formal and informal spaces; noticing and amplifying projects that already embody original principles of collaboration, sacredness of life and mutual care.

For UN staff feeling tired, disillusioned or “too small to matter”, this conversation offers a quiet but radical reminder: you are not a cog in a broken machine. You are a gardener in a living ecosystem. Every email, every policy line, every act of solidarity with a colleague or community is a seed. When enough of us choose to seed from this remembered origin, the UN can once again become what it was meant to be: a place where humanity remembers that we are Earth, and we are here to serve life.

Listen to the Full Episode

Youtube: 

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/remembering-the-uns-origin-on-regenerating-global/id1841851629?i=1000737078881

Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/5JT6lGppI54PeBUscTbKsU

About the Podcast Guests

Jyoti Ma – Vision Keeper of The Fountain: Jyoti Ma is an internationally respected spiritual teacher and bridge-builder between ancestral traditions and modern systems change. As Vision Keeper of The Fountain, she has dedicated her life to restoring balance between humanity and the Earth through sacred reciprocity and unity. She helped convene the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers and the Mother Earth Delegation of United Indigenous Nations, and works closely with the Kággaba Mamas in Colombia on the Sun Project to “remember the Golden Body.” Her mission: to return humanity to a sacred, reciprocal relationship with Earth as the foundation for a thriving future. 

Alexandra Pimor – Director of Nature Governance, Earth Law Center:  It is such a pleasure to welcome Alexandra (“Ally”) Pimor back to the podcast — she first joined us in Episode 6 for a conversation on Nature On The Board and the Rights of Nature movement, which continues to inspire many listeners.Ally is an Earth lawyer, legal scholar, and systems thinker working at the frontier of regenerative governance. As Director of Nature Governance at the Earth Law Center, she leads the pioneering Nature On The Board initiative — bringing the Rights of Nature into corporate and institutional decision-making.She served as one of the first proxies for Nature at the UK company Faith In Nature, and mentors a global network of Nature proxies through the Dandelion Fellowship. Her work invites us to reimagine law and governance as living systems that serve all of life.