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Now we're assuming I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. Hello boys and girls ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is my job to interview world-class performers from all different disciplines all different walks of life. My guest. Today is Elizabeth lesser. She is a bed.
Selling author and the co-founder of Omega Institute the renowned conference and retreat center located in Rhinebeck New York. I have a lot to say about Omega and will visit that in the early portions of this conversation Elizabeth's first book The Seekers guide Chronicles her years at Omega and distills Lessons Learned into a potent guide for growth and healing her New York Times best-selling book broken open subtitle how difficult times can help us grow as sold almost 500,000 copies and has been translated into 20 languages her third book marrow Chronicles.
Journey Elizabeth and her younger sister went through when Elizabeth was the donor for her sisters bone marrow transplant and her newest book Cassandra speaks. When women are the storytellers the human story changes reveals how Humanity has outgrown his origin tales and hero myths will also find out if it's Cassandra or Cassandra. I never quite know Elizabeth has given to popular TED talks and is one of Oprah Winfrey's super salt 100 a collection of a hundred leaders who are using their voices and talent to elevate Humanity. She co-founded a
Megan student 1977 time when a variety of fresh ideas were sprouting up in American culture since then the Institute has been at the Forefront of holistic education offering workshops and conferences in Integrative Medicine meditation and yoga cross cultural arts and creativity ecumenical spirituality and social change each year close to 30,000 people participate in omegas programs on its campus and more than a million people visit its website for online learning. You can find her online at Elizabeth lesser. That's Ellie es ser.
Dot org on Facebook and Liz lesser Instagram Al is lesser and on Twitter at Elizabeth lesser Elizabeth. Welcome to the
show. Hey, thank you Tim. Thank you for having
me. I'm thrilled because not only have I taken trapeze classes at Omega, but I have to tell you a story just to kick this off. I recall the first time I visited Omega and Upstate New York. It was to take a class that you are offering with Jersey and and yell aggregor Eric, who are
R2 incredible Olympic weightlifters originally from Poland now Jersey is certainly in his 60s and they're just incredible human beings the epitome of fitness. And while I was there I took my first yoga class in one of your beautiful beautiful structures and I'm in the middle of taking this class. There are huge Windows behind the instructor and I spot a squirrel and I start to think to myself am I on drugs right now because that is the
Strangest looking most gigantic squirrel I've ever seen in my entire life and you can imagine what that was. It was one of your crew of your groundhogs. They're everywhere these huge groundhogs and it's just a beautiful location a beautiful Center and you offer incredible programming. So I wanted to share
that you would think that from my years of being involved in Omega and our curriculum that I'd have like that. I'd be a True Believer in everything, but I'm not
Not I like have a massive bullshit detector. But those animals at Omega from 40 plus years of us being on that campus. They are tame sort of in the way you would imagine that animals around humans who are trying to be their most conscious selves would not be as afraid. You know, you hear that sort of theory, but it's really been proven like the fox.
Just walk across and sit there and watch people and those woodchucks are absolutely tame and their the bay and thinking of our
gardener. They're huge. I had never spent time around woodchucks AKA groundhogs and they're adorable and you see people taking photo ops with them and so on so it was quite the experience and I was I was thrilled to get educated on groundhogs, but let's let's back up and
and go back in time, and I'm going to butcher this pronunciation, but could you please tell us?
Who is pure vilayati Inayat Khan and I suppose first you should probably say that name correctly.
You're almost there. It's pure evil. Ayat Inayat Khan
a close
here is the name for teacher in Arabic Islam and careful. I it Khan was he died decade ago.
Sufi teacher Sufism being the mystical dimension of Islam. And when I was in college in New York City, it was that time in American history where like Eastern gurus were like watching up on the shores of America and I was very much, you know, I was at Columbia. So it was the 1970s a lot of social action a lot of anti-war civil rights.
It's very involved in that but the more it got violent and just sort of to the far edge of my revolutionary self. The more I realized this is not working for me and I became very interested in eastern spirituality and Christian mysticism and all kinds of things and one day. I was walking across the Columbia campus and I heard this singing coming from one of the buildings and it was
bunch of young people doing a circle dance holding hands and chanting the different names of God in all these different religious traditions. And I thought wow this is what I want. I want this. I want to get me this and I started hanging out with this group of people whose teacher was pure evil eye it and I yet con. I had never heard of him. I knew nothing about Sufism. I came from a very intellectual anti-religion.
A theistic family are like holy text was the New Yorker magazine and anyone who, you know, it's like an equation if you believed in God or if you had any spiritual longing and you that meant you were not smart or you were not valid, but I was just like born a Seeker. I was like always like going to mass with my Catholic next door neighbor. I just wanted some answers to this insane situation. We all found ourselves in so
I discovered my first spiritual teacher Kerrville iacon and I got a deep education in the Sufi tradition which you know Islam if we think it's kind of foreign now no one knew about it and here was this erudite scholar Lee man who was half Southern Indian Muslim Southern Indian and half American his mother.
Was actually a relative of the founder of Christian Science and had met this. Holy traveling Guru here blades father in that time and American the 19 tens 20s, when there was a Great Awakening happening careful. I it was lived in Paris grew up in Paris under the tutelage of his Sufi Muslim father and his free-thinking American mother he fought in World War.
War II he came to America at this time, when all these hippies were interested in spirituality, but he was very interested in excellence and discipline in scholarship and he was interested in all the world religions and holism and health. He's like a real polymath a super polymath and he attracted around him young people who were somewhat similar kind of taipei's.
Mitchell secrets and that is my root tradition and it was he who had the idea to start a holistic Learning Center and he put myself and my ex-husband in charge of it. And that's what became Omega Institute.
What an answer you're good at this. I have been long looking forward to this conversation and you have proved that excitement to be
well-founded. That's the Cliff Notes The
Cliff Notes the
If that's well, there are a bunch of footnotes in that Cliff note that I want to click on first just a confession. It's not really a confession. It's more of a disclosure because confession sort of implies something scandalous. I'm looking around me right now and I have a collection of poems which is titled the gift which is a collection of poetry translated of course of hafez, who is my favorite poet also known as a Sufi.
And often considered considered certainly by many to be the sort of Pinnacle of certain types of literature in the Persian speaking world and that led me to a number of books including tales of the dervishes by and I'm going to mispronounce this also HD show interest Shaw and if you had told him of not even 30 years ago 20 years ago 15 years ago.
Oh that I would be reading these things associated with even tangentially any monotheistic religion. I would have laughed and scoffed but it's the mysticism it's this direct experience. That is so interesting to me and I'm I'm wondering what it was in you if you could expand that you were seeking if you grew up in this family where the scripture was the New Yorker and to have an element or perhaps a
Speaking of Faith was viewed as a rejection of rationality. I'm these are my words not yours, but I certainly have been myself a militant atheist. No longer would consider myself such. What is it that you were looking for? And why was it that pure vilayet I getting that right here. Hmm Khan was the first to really scratch the itch
properly. Well, he scratched it and so did several other people.
All simultaneously at the same time because as I said, it was a time in history were like yoga and mindfulness and Buddhism and Tibetan teachers and people from all over the East were arriving here, you know, some sort of karmic need in Western culture attracted this wave of Eastern philosophy and all of these young people who had been their doors of perception had been opened.
Either through psychedelics or just this distaste for 1950s American rigidity the generational culture change. I had an enormous longing inmates if he's always used the word longing that that God is longing for you and you are longing for God God being not a being but as you said a mystical connection
Section 2 the universe words fail here words really fail when you start getting into the realm of the numinous and mysticism but I was always aware that what I saw and what was going on. It could not be everything the answer to what was happening in nature in energy. I just as a little kid, I was just like a nerdy Mystic kid. I was always like
What is
going on here? And why won't anyone tell me where did I come from? Where do I go with that when I die and what happens in between those bookends? Is there a good way to live? Is there a way to live with more connectivity to other people communication? I was just can massively confused and massively curious. So when I had a chance to delve into these different
different disciplines another first teacher for me was chogyam rinpoche. Who was it Tibetan?
Master who came to this country and was absolutely perfectly geared for America. He was young. He had escaped to bet through a very courageous crossing of the Himalayas with many thousands of his people the Dalai Lama decided he was going to be one of the young Tibetan teachers who takes Tibetan culture to the West he studied at Oxford. He came to America.
He started naropa that Institute in Boulder, Colorado and he wrote what I considered to be my favorite spiritual book, which is Shambala the sacred path of the warrior. So I learned Buddhist Meditation from him. But what I learned from Pure Evil Eye at Cohn and why Sufism became my route path was he often talked about the emotion of Illumination?
That it wasn't just Transcendence into a realm where there was no human emotion. It was actually a way to bring your heart and your feelings and your all and your ecstasy along with you on the path. You didn't have to become sort of a dried-out Buddhist kind of you know, emptiness sort of
an enlightened desiccated
void. Yeah a seeker of emptiness. He was a seeker of fullness.
And life and and he often talked about the emotion of Illumination and as a young kind of woman who was just didn't want to let go of my femaleness that really appealed to me that I could be an emotional creature and a spiritual Seeker.
So if we go back to those very early chapters in the formation the creation of
The Omega Institute do you use the the Omega Institute or do you generally say Omega Institute and leave out
the God. I love you for asking that it's one of my pet peeves. I always leave out the V but most of the people who work at Omega now put in the fee and I'm just the titular head so I can't say anymore. I leave off the The V.
Okay. I'll do my best. I'll do my best. I have a very close friend Matt mullenweg who was one of the
lead developers or the lead developer of Wordpress the platform upon which a lot of the evilest 30 plus percent of the internet is now based and almost no one capitalizes the p in WordPress and it drives him crazy similar. So if we look at those early very early formative. Let's just call it the first formative chapter of Omega Institute. What did the first draft look like? What did the Prototype?
Look like for Omega Institute and how did you decide on what to include vs.
Exclude? Hmm?
Well, we had been living communally pure Valiant con. I first spent my first couple of years in his presence as one of his students in California, and then he decided he wanted to start a commune. He wanted his students to not only live together, but also to test spiritual principles in the real world create our own businesses create our old economic system.
Emily is how are we going to raise our kids? It was like a petri dish for how would you walk the talk? And so we ended up through very strange circumstances purchasing an Old Shaker Village on the north side of a mountain in the Berkshire mountains back on the East Coast on the New York side of the Berkshires in a town called, New Lebanon New York, and this was the first
first settlement of the Shakers which was a community of Christian Seekers who were also living their practice being the change and they built these amazing structures in different parts of mostly the Northeast but also, Ohio and we ended up buying one how we did it as a fascinating story, but
You may not have time for that.
You know, the benefit of long form is we've got nothing but X. Okay, so I would love to hear more about these very strange circumstances. I'm guessing you didn't go to Shaker village.com and by what we're for sale. That's my
guess. Well, first of all, it was 1975 and we were living in Marin County and we were living the kind of, you know, post Summer of Love spiritual Seeker.
Hers California Dream and then suddenly appear relied had this idea. We need to go back to the land. We need to become self-sufficient and we need to see if these things were talking about mindfulness and love if they really work. So we're going to go do an experiment in living and this was like 300 of us. And so one of the students in the Bay Area in our group was
The wife of a man named Wavy Gravy Wavy Gravy was the Master of Ceremonies at the Woodstock festival and really like an icon of hippie Dome and his wife was from the east coast and her parents owned this summer camp in an Old Shaker Village and that is how we came to buy this huge tract of land and these amazing huge enormous buildings.
for dirt cheap because we had no money and then everyone picked up and moved across the country and settled in these falling down buildings and we proceeded to create a community of businesses and school and prayer and spiritual practice and it was out of that that Omega Institute emerged because prayerful I realized not everyone in
Almost no one was going to want to live communally the way we were and sure enough very soon afterwards. None of us wanted to live that
way.
So he put myself in my ex-husband who is a medical doctor. Dr. Stephen Rex often in charge of this idea. He had create a learning Institute of holism. He was a great Aficionado of
The libraries of Alexandria he loved the history of that time that era where it was the first example of the three Abra hammock religions coming together and influencing each other mathematics early science, and he wanted us to recreate the ancient schools of Alexandria a good deal of time. We had no idea what he was speaking about because he was just so highly educated and erudite and Brilliant but
Cuz Stephen was a doctor and I was a I had gotten my college degree in education and I was a curious Seeker myself. He put us in charge. And of course the first year we xeroxed a few pieces of paper and invited a few teachers and rented a private Prep School in Upstate New York, and maybe a hundred people came some of our first
Teachers were people who now are household names, but then they had no platform Deepak Chopra. He was a he had just left Harvard and was just starting his medical practice Elizabeth Kubler-Ross death and dying expert no one wanted to talk about death and dying then African dance teachers all sorts of different genres of learning that there was nowhere for them to teach. So after that first year we grew
Very quickly, we would grow in these leaps that we could barely keep up with. It was like Omega was this monster that we were running after and for the first three years we did not have our own home. We rented different spaces. The last place we rented was Bennington College in Vermont and we had to use their food service, which was like sloppy joes and potato chips and then just to appease us they would like
Have a bucket of raw tofu blocks at the end
of the line kind of thing. I'm a
handful we were trying to do, you know food as medicine. That was very new Eastern spirituality. That was anathema to America yoga mindfulness Alternative Health. This was all far out on the fringes of American culture. Eventually. We realized we needed our own.
And without any real money.
Or know how we bought this old Yiddish kids camp in the Hudson Valley that was had been uninhabited for 10 years. All the pipes were burst. The electrical wires were down. We had like three months between buying it and opening fortunately. Our early students didn't care. Now people expect much more upgraded housing at that point before like sleeping in rooms with back.
Spraying around. So anyway, the early prototype was both highfalutin based on pure evil eye its intellectual prowess and just young Scrappy people having to run a business, you know, it's a business and we needed to make this thing work financially so that we could hire people we didn't pay ourselves for like the first nine or ten.
Years. It was definitely a labor of passion
well, and we're going to make it past like chapter 1 in your life of of many. I've except I'm going to have so many questions, but I want to pause for just a second because you said something that I think is worth exploring and that is after a while. We didn't want to live communally either. So let me just get booked a bookmark that and I think it's worth saying or I believe that those who don't study history are condemned to repeat it.
And there are many communities now many movements one might even say now that rhyme with the movements and excitement different breeds of excitement of the the 60s and 70s. This includes the so-called psychedelic Renaissance right now. I think people who are even remotely involved with that should study their history and there's an increased may be related increased interest in intentional.
teas and communal living so I would love to hear why after a while you guys did not want to live communally in the way that you had been what were the
issues I'd say the biggest issue was that we were Americans Born and Raised on the Milk of individuality and
comfort
and neither of those things are served that well when you're trying to live communally now,
I wouldn't trade like the seven years. I lived that way for anything. I learned so much about humans and about the extent of our capacity to be in each other's space. But you know, if you look at other cultures, especially tribal cultures or even India, let's say or China this obsession with individuality and individual space is not as laced into the DNA of the culture as it.
It is here in America or the West it was very hard for me and for us and I'm a pretty communal person. I I like being around people it was difficult to share decision-making about everything from how do we eat to what constitutes good behavior among children? We used to have extensively long meetings about how much cheese can each child
eat.
Can we eat?
I have a dog can we have
pets? That's a good? Yeah, it seems like a small thing or personal decision, but it's
not and these conversations because we also believed in something I highly dissuade you from consensus. Every decision had to be agreed upon to all a hundred and fifty people at say in the room it, you know, this would just go on forever and ever so there's community living in there's Community a living.
We were taking it to a real extreme a lot of people in a small place everybody having kids and trying to create our own Financial systems. And so I would say for me there were a few things that made me unable to tolerate that anymore one was when I had my kids and I really just didn't want to share parenting that intimately with other people and the other thing was I just began to
Have these cravings for things like my own washing machine
- more more cheese. I want 20 grams of additional cheddar god dammit.
Anyway, it's it's a beautiful Instinct. And I think it's even a fantastic phase to experiment with and it's antidotal. It's an antidote to excessive individuality.
Dividual ISM and you learn a lot.
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Not to belabor the topic of curriculum, but I would love to just hear you comment on in those early years how you chose the teachers and the topics was it a reflection of your personal and I use yours plural, but in terms of leadership in the founding team, was it a reflection of your personal interest. Did you pull or ask possible students? What they would like to have and therefore you are guaranteed to have some attendance. How did you think about picking?
Choosing from the universe of possibilities because one of the challenges with lots of options is the Paradox of choice Frank you you have so many different possibilities within Arm's Reach. It can be very difficult to filter and select. How did you do that?
It is difficult to filter and select and a lot of what we offered and I was in the early years that the person who
chose the most of the curriculum we all had a hand in it. So a lot of it was just what are we interested in and this assumption that if we're interested in it, at least some other people might be interested in it. But also this idea that you know, the tagline of Omega is Awakening the best in the human spirit, so I'm not an athlete, but I knew that for some people Awakening their best
Was athletic socks that Athletics was going to be the door to everything to Excellence to getting in the zone to experiencing a world beyond your own small limited ego-self. I knew that that was a Gateway for many people. So I'm a very curious person and I'm also look for connectivity everywhere. So like I would like start
Experimenting for myself. Let's say in yoga, which I loved. It was really my first experience of Awakening the body through movement and I thought oh my goodness. I don't know shit about this. There are people out there who like are making the body as their path. I don't know about this. I better find out and so I would research and read and even though it wasn't necessarily my biggest interest. I wanted Omega 2
Be truly holistic. So and once you open those doors as you say like, where do you stop because we've had some pretty like out their courses at Omega out their teachers and you can get so far out on The Fringe that you are actually offering quackery and harmful things. So one of the first dates was that this cannot harm anyone.
one and it can't be like so out there that is going to ruin our reputation as a place that isn't it even a little rigorous in its selection process, but somebody might disagree with that because we've had Faith healers and people who believe that there are UFOs and you know, one of your favorite teachers Terence McKenna, who's it was a Consciousness ethnobotanist who some people might say was
Izzy
mechanical elves mechanical elves it's hard for most folks to make sense of mechanical elves it inside inside
joke, right, but I would sit in it, especially in our early years. I would sit in on this many as the of the workshops and conferences as I could just so I could kind of ascertain it is this person whose book we read a good teacher. Is there a ethics here?
Or is there a moral morality here? You know, we had to draw some lines. Like if a person was exploring sexuality, but began to have like sort of orgies in the classroom. No, we're not doing that. We're not going there. Everyone must be closed and no one is having sex. You know, we had to like draw some lines if we're talking about medicine, you know, like Consciousness medicine. We're not taking it here. We are a business we have the health
Part B coming here. We are going to follow all the laws. So there were some ethical decisions and there were some just sort of let's keep it a little tighter than everything but boy, we experimented far and wide in the Arts in sports in all sorts of ecumenical spiritual religious Traditions.
What do you mean by ecumenical in this case?
Sometimes it means I think a collection of or multiple influences from Christian churches, but here I feel like maybe you're using it in a different
capacity. Yeah, I'm using it as not just Christian but all churches so multi-religious. Let's let's see. Okay, let's not use that. I might be using it incorrectly so multi religion and multi mysticism and Shamanism and indigenous cultures and you know, and there's been over these 40 years. There's been
Trends it's been really interesting to see what trends come and go. I mean, I'm one level there's nothing new Under the Sun there are ways that different generations and different times people speak and learn in different ways.
Yeah. It's so true. What was once old is yet new again. I mean, there's so many things that at least in my lifetime and certainly, you know, yours move in cycles, and it makes for
a fascinating study now there are topics you can exclude or things that might be harmful if we're taking the sort of Hippocratic Oath first Do no harm for the selection of courses and teachers and then there's assessing both the teachers and the students and I'm going to use that as a segue to a word that I believe you coined that I'd love for you to explain and that is in Irv is. Mm-hmm. Could you please explain what a nerve is? Mm?
Is
I have always been an activist meaning. I'm very interested in what might make change to the suffering of human kind whether its political or social justice or environmental or feminism. You know, I have one foot firmly in the activists aspect of my nature, but then there's the seeker and the Mystic and
Because the word mysticism or spiritual they have a lot of trappings that you say the word spiritual to someone and they think it's too whoa or mysticism. Sounds like whoa, that's not me. So I came up with the word inner visum if activism is how you relate to the injustices in the world inner visum is how you interact with all of the layers of
You are your psychology your wounding your mystical bent your nature your nurture all the different parts that you know, your internal family system lover. I know that you love that psychological school. There are parts inside of us. And how do you listen to them and determine which ones you want to listen to and how do you activate them?
Put them in charge of a better life. So it's an exploration of your inner life and how to make it like pure evil eye. It always said put your soul in charge of your life. How do you put the best of your inner self in charge of your life?
If I may I'm just going to read and you can please fact check me if any of this sounds suspicious but a portion from an interview that I found in the course of doing research for this interview that's related to tourism.
And it goes as follows. I began to notice that a lot of the people working for justice and peace causes were really angry people people who had never taken care of themselves and are projecting their own stuff all over their issues. I thought how are we ever going to spread peace and justice for not working on it in ourselves. I want to walk this path and every part of my life and that involves some kind of inner work. That's why I call it inner visum. I want to work on my own peace of mind so I can be a real Peacemaker if we can match up what we want out there with what's going on in ourselves. We will be
Much better activists. So if that sounds like something that you might have said, I mean even if it doesn't I agree with it and all right, perfect. And it just it makes me think of a few things number one Jack kornfield who's been on this podcast and I consider a friend that likes to say something along the lines of remember your Buddha nature and also your social security number. I think there's a sometimes a tendency to put the let's just called.
although I want to come back to that word and help us to Define it for at least share how you define it the spiritual or the esoteric in place of some of the Practical and I won't mention names but I was at a different Retreat Center ones and I'm sitting in the cafe that's drinking my yerba mate tea because it's a very acceptable way to get hyperstimulated and I was overhearing this conversation where this this woman was complaining and complaining to
in else about all sorts of things the landlord that this that the other thing and then her friend asked how she's doing if she's thinking about moving and she said well, I'm really having trouble paying my rent. But I've just been really busy getting non-dual and I and I thought huh that strikes me as a problem. But in any case there isn't really a question there. I suppose it's just an agreement with this type of framing
I think that it's really important. In
fact about who I don't know maybe 15 years ago 35 year 30 years and I don't know to our work. We really began to be.
Tired of ourselves teaching this technology of Inner Awakening to the same people over and over. It's like how many times you have to wake up in the morning, you know, you're awake do something. So we started we called it internally the movement from me to we and we started inviting for free several weeks out of every season nonprofit groups working at the frontlines of all sorts of
environmental social justice work to come for free with their entire team to Omega and to give them whatever they felt they needed in terms of self-care and lining up what was going on inside and within their team and their work in the world and we have done this now with hundreds and hundreds of nonprofits taking what we know and giving it to the people who can really use it because as you said,
Often you'll look at a group of people working for social change and they're just so angry and they're not communicating. Well amongst themselves and there is a lot of ego at the Forefront and some of these spiritual Technologies can not just help people be happier, but can serve the work we all want to do in the world.
I certainly agree with that statement and I think this is a good place to take a look at this word spiritual and I'd love to
Here you expand on your definition of that term. I think that as you said a lot of people have an allergic reaction to that term not necessarily because they dislike the definition or the connotation. It's that in so many conversations that can be very slippery and then not being a catch-all that doesn't really have a clear definition on the other hand. For instance. You mentioned mysticism. I'm fond of that word because to me at least it implies a direct experience of the Divine.
Fine, and if you don't like that word divine you could replace with sacred you can place it with nature, but it's a direct subjective experience. That isn't really subject to debate on some level. So I quite like the purity of experience that that connotates but spiritual how would you define that for yourself or suggest people? Think
about it?
Well, I also prefer the word mysticism and the root of it being mystery. We dwell in mystery. No one has figured this out yet folks if they
had. Where do you go when
you die, can you communicate with the ancestors who passed over? How do we live a moral life? You know, these are all Mysteries that people have been exploring forever. So I love the word mysticism me.
Meaning a way of approaching and relaxing into the mystery spirituality, you know, you got to go back to the word Spirit which is the indwelling nature of all things. I was just every morning I pick a quote from a huge basket of quotes I have and I try to live by it and this morning I picked a line from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and he wrote
Their lives the dearest freshness deep down things.
The dearest freshness to me that that might be spirituality like what is so fresh and deer and essential about anything that tree that bird you told me before we started Taping that you were watching that person in front of you that fear of yours that wound of yours. What is the dearest freshness?
Down inside now. Somebody might say there is no dearest freshness deep down inside it all just it's you know, the sort of Nila stick approach. So I can't really Define spirituality for people who don't have some sort of connection to or
faith that there is an essential Consciousness that is fresh and dear but that to me is what spiritual seeking is all about.
She mentioned earlier these nonprofit groups and so on Frontline workers coming into a mega Institute and that initiative being started to help those those people take these tools and put them into action.
Right and that these practices are not necessarily solely for or they are not necessarily for practice in the meditation hall. Right camera was might have bent our broker Jack kornfield telling me story of these various people in meditation Retreats who would get pissed off super pissed off about something and they would say I need to go to the meditation all right now and they would run back to deal with their anger in the meditation Hall and just now just such a hilarious and unfortunate image that that
Jurors, because so divorced from implementing these things in sort of ordinary reality and building practices that can withstand reality. So I'd love to talk about your sisters bone marrow transplant and how some of this awareness has been translated and specifically I have a note in front of me and I don't I don't have any more context than this but the quote Do no harm and take no shit meditation.
What is this meditation and how did it come
about? Well, I found a needle point with that slogan Do no harm but take no shit in my sister's study office after she had died. She was my little sister and I come from a family of four daughters and Maggie. My youngest sister was the most you know, like if there was a
favorite adorable one who everyone loved it was Maggie and she was a nurse practitioner and an artist and a very tough customer. She thought just about everything I did in my life. She called it. Whoo. Whoa Voodoo. She was a western medicine. You know, she she lived in Vermont and her patients were all the rural poor and she just had very little tolerance for the woes.
Stuff we had a loving yet. We're so different relationship. And there were times like in all siblings lives where we weren't the kindest to each other and when she was diagnosed with a very serious lymphoma, and the only thing that would save her life was a bone marrow transplant and for any of you listening who know about the science of blood cancers, the really serious ones are you will die.
Die within weeks if you don't treat it and bone marrow transplants almost kill you in order to save you and so siblings are the ones who are most likely to have a good match DNA match of the of the stem cells that is found in the bones in the marrow. And so each of our sisters were tested and I was the one who tested as her perfect match we lined up ten for ten.
Is considered a perfect match and this was exciting but also mystifying to all of us in Maggie and I were so different and when I studied up on the science of bone marrow transplant what can happen once the donors bone marrow gets into the patient is that the patient can reject it or the donors cells can attack?
The patient they call it rejection or attack attack or rejection. And that's the actual word medical term. And when I heard that I thought to myself. Well, that's what my sister and I have done our whole life. We've attacked each other we've rejected each other like and since I believe in the mind-body connection, you know your own if you're nervous and stressed you can get a cold your cells can
You know, your immune cells can be diminished by your stress. I thought well, if every cell in her body after the transplant is mine because that's what happens in a bone marrow transplant. They kill all of her blood cells and every bit that is reproduced comes from my stem cells. It's a little more complicated than that, but that's the basic science of it, and I thought well, like if my they're all my cells. I certainly want to work on our
Ancient rejection and attack because maybe we could teach ourselves how to get along and so I suggested to my sister. Should we do some therapy together which for her was like, so anathema to what she's all about. But you know when your life is it when you're about to die, you'll do anything you'll jump out of a plane, you know, this was her jumping out of a plane going into therapy with me and we did that and we worked on our
Relationship very quickly because we didn't have much time. It was amazing. We called it our soul marrow transplant not a stem cell transplant but a soul marrow transplant and we did this clearing with each other where we looked at the assumptions we had made about each other over our many years of being sisters and we cleared them with each other. Did you mean that know, what did you mean? It was amazing? We fell so deeply.
We in love and she lived for a year after the transplant. She called it the best year of her life because she was able to kind of start doing that same work with other people like letting go of assumptions and coming into a cleaner Fuller relationships after she died and I was going through her office. I came across that needlepoint framed. Needlepoint Do no harm and take no shit and Do no harm is the
Growth which she was a medical practitioner, but then she was also someone who was very aware that nurses often take a whole lot of shit from the medical professionals above them. And so she and her fellow nurses loved that slogan Do no harm but like know who you are and have a strong backbone and have some boundaries and it reminded me of a
Of a very common Buddhist practice. You see the iconography of the Buddha or Quan Yin with one hand the right hand up in a stop mudra gesture. Like you're putting your hand out like stop and then the left hand is a cup. It's the gesture the mudra of compassion. It's you're holding all the suffering of the world in your hand and transmuting it into care.
And then there's the other hand which is saying stop and it felt to me like it was a good way to describe what that meditation that Buddhist Meditation is. It's like you can be so open to the suffering of the world and of your own heart keep your heart wide wide open. That is the path of the sacred.
Seeker but if you don't have a strong backbone and that's why you see in meditation the posture of a strong back if you don't have that strong backbone and that ability to say no I have boundaries. I know who I am. I am valid I belong here.
If you don't work with those two things together, you either become too hard, you know that stop can just make you so rigid and hard and kind of like an asshole or if you're to open and too sensitive and too soft. You just get run over because that's what happens. So that is to me like a noble meditation Do no harm and take no shit.
First of all, I just want to
two
Express sincere condolences for your sister. I can't imagine losing my younger brother and I can only imagine how hard that must have been and secondly, I'd like to revisit that clearing that you described. So I've read you speak about
add but not as we might commonly think of add authenticity deficit disorder.
And I would love to hear you explain what that is. And then also give any advice to those who might want to have clearing conversations with people close to them and work on ADD authenticity deficit disorder.
Well authenticity is one of those buzzwords like spirituality that has you know, some people
Don't like that word or it's been overused or there's this idea that all you have to do is be yourself and then everything will just work out forgetting that there are other people out there who may react to your authentic self enough to most loving way. So I just want to put a caveat on the idea that all you have to do is work on uncovering your authentic self, but
Add all of us have this ever since childhood these scripts that we have to fit in that there's a way to be and that there's something about the way you are. That isn't right. I mean if you ask almost anyone I tend especially recently having written this book about women to focus more on, you know, the impostor syndrome and add in women, but I know men have it to a sense that
There's something fundamentally wrong with me and I got a hide it and I have to correct it by being like all those other people and you know, we get these scripts from our parents or school if we're a person of color. There's the white supremacy way to be if we're a woman in business. We need to be more like the warrior men men have to be a certain way within relationship. There's
all these like confusing scripts that keep us from finding. Well, who am I what is my gift and and how can I be that in the world and the way that related to the conversation I had with my sister these sessions. We only did three of these sessions with this wonderful therapist who walked us back and back and back into our childhood and
What we uncovered was that each of us thought the other one didn't really value like or see us we felt judged and without taking the time ever because none of us are taught this to say is this what you think about me is this what you need me to be to be loved by you instead of checking it out. We did all sorts of weird things.
Things attacking each other rejecting each other feeling hurt lashing out never having those essential conversations of how do you see me? What do you need from me? What is going on in our relationship? That's keeping us from connecting. How do we meet each other in each of our core authenticity is in a way that creates love and a creative relationship. So we needed that help.
There's I'm sure you know this and listeners you all know this too. There's some sort of bizarre magic that happens when we put down what roomy the great Sufi poet calls the Open Secret this secret that we're all carrying around that we don't we don't live up to what other people are who other people are that? We're somehow flawed and all kinds of weird coping mechanisms come from that
When we put that down when we just show up with the other person am I enough? Oh, yeah your enough here enough. Stop trying to be something else. You're okay and you you find that enoughness in each other. It's like a freaking miracle and it's not that hard but it's scary. You know, I write about this in my new book I was asked after.
911 a lot of people were asked social workers therapists mindfulness teachers to go and do a lot of the First Responders had to take these PTSD courses and they didn't have enough teachers. And so I was leading mindfulness meditation classes for First Responders in New York City at six months after 9/11 and I did it for maybe I don't know three months to Short Course in teaching basic.
Illness skills and everything was going fine with these guys who I absolutely adored.
Until I tried to bring the idea of mindfulness into being mindful in our relationships with others and really getting down into what's going on for you in your soft heart. That was no they were not going to go there. It was terrifying. It was easier for them to go into a burning building on 9/11.
Then to get soft with their wife or their colleague their friend and to say what they needed to apologize to express fears and wounds. So it's a courageous act to bring your authentic self into a relationship and it takes some training and some help so I would say let's say you have someone in your life you'd like to do some of this.
Raishin with forgiveness acceptance explanation seeing hearing I would say get some help do it with a witness a coach or a therapist because it can go south really quickly and so commit to it and don't do it with someone who doesn't want to do it. You cannot drag someone onto the Dance Floor there has to be some shared interest in this
idea. Did I do?
Like to throw out a question and idea just because I've seen it play out in my own life and it may seem counter to what you just said, but I think that it's very case-by-case and that is in preparing for this.
And reading about add in this case authenticity deficit disorder. There were few examples in interviews of questions that represent these open secrets that you then ask your sister such as and please let me know if this if any of this is incorrect, but you know when I got divorced, why did you reject me in the time I needed you so much more for a while you barely let me in your home. What was that about? These are Big questions and open.
Secrets like you said and I have in my experience sometimes found that not value necessarily and dragging someone to the dance floor, but just in the asking of the question there can be an incredible unburdening and that it wasn't an answer. So Lee and answer that was required to help that unburdening but just the asking of the question if that makes any sense the release
Thinking of that open secret. Hmm. I would be curious to know if if that resonates at all or if you have found that to be true at all and your
experience. I think it's so critical and such a beautiful Revelation. One thing. I've really feel I've learned better since that work with my sister and just getting older.
There does not have to always be resolution. They're often just has to be the questions. It's like you don't have to pull out every single stick from the cleared out River. You can just pull out a few so that there's a little more movement and let trust that that movement will do its thing. I've been such a fierce seeker and experimenter with so many different psychological.
Called and mystical and Medicine Traditions like going for it. I'm going to clear out every stick in the river and I've really loosened up on that. It's like do a little bit give it a really good try work on your egos need though to control everything and just just see what happens little by little and then throw it up to the Fates.
I certainly got a big download about what you just said in that work with my
sister such a beautiful story and certainly such a sad story. Do you have any recommendations for people related to breathing? This is something I have. I have number of close friends who have lost their parents and and struggled incredibly to process those experiences not to say there is any easy way nor should there be an easy way but we seem to really
Lack any structure or certainly I think there's a dearth of meaningful rituals related to morning in secular in the secular United States, and I'm sure elsewhere. Do you have any suggestions recommended resources anything for those who are grieving?
I love the words grief and mourning I think grief.
Is just a sign of how well you loved grief is like a badge of honor you loved you are a lover. And of course you're going to grieve depending on how much you give of your heart when the object of your love is gone. It's going to hurt and part of consumer culture is that we
Foreclosure which is one of my least favorite word's. I'm just into keeping it open keeping the heart wide open because if you shut down to pain you shut down to Joy. We all kind of know this intellectually, you know that the heart is a big muscle and you keep It Wide Open you're going to feel everything and it's very understandable that would close down the heart you get wounded as a child you shut down.
Down but then you shut down to everything. So one thing is to Buck the system that says your mother died. You should go back to work in three days. Like in the old country you would wear black for a year and you'd see the woman in black walking in the town square and you'd say oh, oh give her space give her room. She's
Name where you sit Shiva in the old Jewish traditions for a year or just cultures indigenous cultures where the Underworld the underworld of darkness and loss and feeling these are like sacred places to go into and we've lost that because it's not productive to grieve. So instead you swallow it and you end up really not being productive at all because your
drinking too much and eating too much and working too much just to cover the wound. So it's both to me a structural social thing that we don't give time for grief and loss and morning, but it's also a individuals courage to feel it all all the way through to ask it to have its way with you and teach me and to wear it as a badge of love to wear your grief.
Lee and not to think you have to have closure
so many excellent points and now all the I'll just add
that one book that really helped one of my friends after the loss of his father was on Grief and grieving finding the meaning of grief through the five stages of laws by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler, and he said that he wished he had read it before the passing of his dad that it would have actually served as incredible.
Preparation it would have been very helpful preemptively. And so he recommended it to me and many others just based on that experience of
his I yeah, I recommend lots of books on Grief and death. You know that there's a
Wonderful Sufi saying or maybe it's a Buddhist saying I don't remember die before death and then do whatever you want. It's all good. So really owning that we all die. We all lose and making friends with that, you know, Pema chodron a Buddhist teacher. I've studied with a lot. She calls mindfulness unconditional friendliness.
That's great.
So having unconditional friendliness to loss and grief and change tard so hard practice, but any of those books to read about grief and loss before they happen it's preparation so that you can welcome the inevitable.
Are there any books that come to mind off hand the EU would or might recommend
there's one by a Catholic
Mystic he's no longer alive on Reno n and O wwen I think could be nou wwen.
And I think it's called on Grief.
It's a small book and it's a beautiful book and that that book by Kessler and Elizabeth. Kubler-Ross is also a wonderful book.
It is on rien ouw Iain sure that if we do a quick search for grief the book maybe the blessing hidden in grief. That's at least one essay that he is written, but certainly people
can do it's something like letters.
Consolation something
like that. There is there is also a letter of
consolation. Yeah, that's the look. Yeah,
and so we'll link to all of these in the show notes as well for everyone at MDOT blog / podcast one more note and then I want to ask about the new book and explore that a bit. I think we may have to do if you're open to it around to I am so enjoying this conversation and take a furious notes just for myself, which is always exciting for me that the first is just to touch again.
When on your wonderful metaphor of clearing a few sticks from the river, you don't have to clear every last bit of detritus to make a lot of progress and it makes me think of a quote that I've kept in mind and Revisited often from of all things a very famous track coach named Hank. Cryogen Hoff. I'm not pronouncing that correctly. But what else is new and his quote?
As in his athletes performed spectacularly one Merlin Joyce who's considered Queen of the track really? Enjoy Saudi and 23 combined medals at the Olympic Games and World Championships. That's just one athlete and his quote was do as little as needed not as much as possible. And I think this is really helpful to keep in mind when you are.
Quote unquote doing the work because there are points of diminishing returns and there are also costs when you are sort of constantly whipping your
back now, let's track this that's a fantastic quote. It's so true. It is not something that I learned until somewhat recently. And I think it's really important and there are diminishing returns and there are problems that you
By excessive
anything. Yeah, there's white knuckling is not a free lunch not to say you shouldn't do things that are uncomfortable. But if you become obsessed on constantly doing things that are uncomfortable, I guess what your life is going to be consistently very uncomfortable which say is isn't always the ideal and it makes it actually sometimes quite difficult to be unconditionally friendly in the mine.
Fulness sense that you mentioned, which I also love so much your new book and let's start with my weakness yet again. Can you please pronounce? I've heard both I have friends who pronounce these differently. So, how do you pronounce? Is it Cassandra speaks or Cassandra speaks?
Well, I don't really know either I chose Cassandra Cassandra sounded affected
area affected to begin with who I need to I need to stem the tide.
Here, but all right, Cassandra speaks when women are the storytellers the human story changes. What is the Genesis of this book writing takes a lot of effort. It takes a lot of time. It's a huge commitment why this book
at 20 years ago. I started I curated one conference at Omega. I've curated many conferences on so many different subjects.
And I often I'll do a conference based on what seems to be making people uncomfortable. That's funny given our little bit of last conversation. But like what makes people kind of whoa wake up and say, why does that make me uncomfortable?
Yeah the proper dose of discomfort.
And so this was putting the word women and power together, like what if I create a conference called women and power and we just explore that.
so I invited just like four or five different speakers one was Anita Hill and the Clarence Thomas hearings had really were still fresh in the American mind where Anita Hill had been brought into the hearings and she accused Clarence Thomas who was up for the becoming a Supreme Court Judge the first black Supreme Court judge, and she accused him of
sexual impropriety and she was treated very poorly and he of course was appointed the judge and she really put the word sexual harassment on the map and I also invited a friend of mine Eve ensler who wrote The Vagina Monologues and a couple of other people to explore what happens when women become powerful. How does the world reaction what happened to you?
What's going on when we put these words together and it was so explosively popular hundreds of people came. I was surprised I thought maybe like 50 people would come so I repeated it the next year and the next year like by the third year there were 2,000 women and a smattering of very brave men in the audience in a ballroom in New York City in a hotel and every year since then I have had this conference with everything from all the
the women Nobel Peace Prize winners to activists and artists and the first woman astronaut and just any woman who's a Maverick and breaking the mold and asking herself. What do I do with my power and can I do power differently? And does that have anything to do with me being a woman? These were the questions we were asking and I would give a keynote every year to start it off and I thought actually when my daughter
Lost said why don't you just take all those speeches and turn them into a book. I knew better that it wasn't going to be that easy because folks are never easy. They're in fact, they're horribly hard and I said, yeah, that's yeah, maybe I'll do that and I started work on it and I sold it to my publisher and I got the contract and then so much happened in the culture around women in the three or four years. I was writing the me to movement Trump things.
It's like that intersectionality black lives matter. It was a really difficult writing project to write about the old myths the old origin stories from the Bible and the Greeks and all the Western Traditions that have painted women in one way. The old Power books. I went back and read, you know, Machiavelli and Sun Tzu and different business texts that describe what leadership and heroism.
Like and I just spent these years exploring the research in how women lead. Is it different how women do the inner visum work? So we don't just you know, Nietzsche says be careful when fighting monsters. You don't become one that there was so much going on with women getting into the corporate world or into leadership and then like nothing was changing who cares so that was the exploration and that's
That was the Genesis of the book.
Why Cassandra? Where does that name? Come from?
Cassandra was a mortal.
Princess in Troy and Troy and Greece were always having Wars and she was so beautiful. She was the youngest and most beautiful daughter of King Priam Queen. Hecuba in Troy. This is all Greek myth. These are not real people. These are the myths just like Adam and Eve they weren't real people. So these are stories that inform us.
Through the Ages Cassandra was so alluring that even the gods wanted to have her and Apollo son of Zeus wooed her by offering her a gift. She couldn't refuse she didn't understand that the gift came with the payment of being his concubine, but she wanted this gift which was prophecy. She would see into the future. She would know what was going to happen.
And then she would tell her people in Troy and so she could inform history so he gave her the gift and then she would not sleep with him. So he cursed her. He didn't just take the gift away. He said Cassandra you will know the future and you will tell the future but no one will believe you and so as I was reading and studying that story and other Greek stories.
I was watching the televised trial of those hundreds of girls who had been molested by dr. Larry Nasser, you know, he was the doctor for the Olympic Committee and Michigan
gymnastics
gymnastics. Yeah and over 30 years. He had been claiming to do medical treatment on hundreds and hundreds of girls and young women, but really he had been sexually molested.
And they would tell their mothers and fathers. They would tell their coaches. They would tell their University the Olympic Committee and no one would believe them year after year. They took the word of this one man over these girls and finally some of the girls started speaking out and speaking out and there's just the judge who was assigned the case in Michigan judge Rosemary, Acqua Liana.
Just someone everyone should know about she defied normal courtroom procedure and she allowed any girl who wanted to speak for as long as she wanted to speak to tell her story The Trial went on for days. And dr. Nasir had to sit there and listen to every single girl. Tell her story and before each girl. Spoke. She would say I hear you. I see you your words matter.
Leave them here with me and then go out and live your life and they were believed and I would watch these little girls faces and by now somewhere women because some of these girls were molested at like 9 years old.
And their whole countenance would change with the experience of telling their truth being validated. So I decided of all the stories that I unpack in the book whether it's Eve or Pandora or literary women. I decided to call it Cassandra speaks because it really speaks to me of women know something of Great Value just like men do but our stories and our
Instincts and our values and sort of our because of both nature and nurture what we care about has been determined as second-class Behavior, you know, like the caretaking roles. They're not very important compared to a CEO or a fireman the things that we hold dear and know how to do have been invalidated so that we don't even trust our
Ourselves we don't trust what matters to us matters the most in the world. That's why I named it Cassandra so that we would all start telling our truths and demanding to be heard and validated
sounds like a lot more work than just stringing together a bunch of speeches and very worthwhile as a project. I would love to come back briefly to
The the Nietzsche quote that you mentioned in in camera or the exact quote but fighting fighting monsters, we must be careful that we do not become monsters ourselves in your reading it also sort of ties into in. This is going to form into a question Gloria Steinem has a quote which is when we do acquire power we meaning women we might turn out to have an equal impulse towards aggression. Do you have any thoughts on whether or not that is inevitable if we have an equal impulse?
Towards aggression or do you have recommendations for trying to mitigate that possibility for women as more and more women gained power to help prevent abuses of power.
Well this really did become as I was writing the question. I was grappling with especially as you look at many women who gain power you look at some of the women who are in Congress now and you think really you want that story. That's the story you want. How's that different?
So where I have landed is it's not so much that women have less aggression. Actually, I think we do because I'll go into that right now, you know, we are both nurtured and natured beings and all you want to do is look into the research of hormones and the effect of estrogen and testosterone and progesterone.
And we most women do have more estrogen and if you talk to people who have gone through transition trans people, you know men who get flooded with estrogen and how it totally changes their experience and vice versa women who are trans men. There's a great book out recently of a woman who transitioned into being a man and suddenly wanted to become a
Lightweight boxer because there was so much aggression and wanted to know how to channel it. So there are distinctions between women and men and there's it's there's great variety. So it's very hard when writing about all women and all men but in general there's less aggression in women, you know, there was this study done in the 30s and 40s.
Walter Cannon, he was the one who came up with the word fight or flight. So they did studies on human beings brought them in to the lab what happens under simulated stress situations measured the hormones measure different chemicals in the blood. Oh under stress all human beings fight or flee. Well in 2007 Shelly Taylor a scientist at UCLA realized only men.
We're used in the laboratory. None of those studies were done on women and that's the way most studies medical studies psychological studies were done in the 1960s 70s 80s all the way up until the early 21st century. So she brought women into the lab and she did a lot of research into studies done on female animals and she came up with the term in a wonderful book that people I think should read call.
Called attending Instinct Shelly Taylor. She came up with the phrase tend and befriend under stress in these laboratory experiments women's instincts were more to tend to the most vulnerable in whatever the tribe the clan the family but organization the business.
Or befriend, you know women you come home from a hard day at work. You're feeling really pissed off and angry you call three or four of your friends and you talk it out and you feel these Circles of befriending helping you sort things out and finding new ways to deal. That's the befriending circles. So under stress women often will tend or befriend. So the human instinct is not only to
Fight or flee? Yes. Everybody has the fight or flee but everybody also has the tend and befriend and it's not a question of women good men bad. It's this imbalance of what we have called heroic and Leadership, which is all the fight or flight without much of the tend and befriend. I mean, imagine just just like think of them some of the statues you see everywhere.
I once made a study of this. I walked through Central Park and I made a note of every single statue in the park. And I think there's like something like 59 statues and like 50 of them were soldiers were young men holding each other with blood and General Sherman on a golden horse and it just everywhere it was it was soldiers and Generals.
And I thought now what if there was a statue of a woman giving birth with lots of blood and pain and her helpers all around her. That would just seem so like weird wouldn't it like, oh don't don't show that but it's what you pay attention to as a culture and name heroic that everyone then wants to be like which has put tend and befriend type people at a disadvantage.
And also once you do get into powerful positions, that's how you feel. You need to be and it goes against your authentic core. So I'm less interested in women getting into power and more interested in validating and valuing and calling heroic the tend and befriend Instinct.
I think that's an outstanding objective. What impact would you hope this book to have me looking back?
Six months 12 months several years after publication. Is it a culture shaping effect? Is there a particular hope that you have if any type I mean certainly you just named in high-level terms one such hope but is does anything else come to mind for you?
I think a lot about like I have three sons and they all have children now and they are.
The most heroic fathers they are in there with their kids unattended befriend level just as much sometimes more than their wives their wives have jobs. They work hard they make money. So do my son's but there is it true expectation that parenting is shared. That would be one of my
Great Hopes from the book that you know how we always say a girl can be anything a boy can be but we rarely say a boy can be anything a girl can be I would like that statement.
to have a lot of clout that like a boy would feel enormous Pride to have his tend and befriend nature developed that a man would be proud to cry and share and talk and all the things that are considered, you know all women, you know, you're so you talk too much you're too emotional like that the quality
At ease of emotional intelligence would be really cool and hip and dudes would want them
just to build on that. This may be in the chapter called In Praise of Father's there's a lion I actually believe that full-hearted fatherhood might save the world. Why is it needed and that might seem like a silly question, but I'm wondering and perhaps a better way to ask. The question is what is full-hearted fatherhood mean compared to
What we more commonly
find well one it's not a sense that you're babysitting that you're giving your partner. This is, you know, assuming it's a heterosexual couple that you're not giving your wife some time off. It's an assumption that
If women can penetrate the old world of mail.
Work World and make money and work and be outside the house that men can make equal interior changes that allows them to actually want and need to father as much as women want and need to mother and more than that. And I mothered pretty fiercely and I lost a lot of traction in the
World because of it but I always knew someone had to take care of the kids and that was falling on me. I would like to live in a culture where not only is it expected of mothers? It's also expected of fathers, but it's also expected of society so that we have childcare and that we have parental leave and that because it all starts with the kids.
It's in the home. That's where it all starts, you know, Gloria Steinem you quoted her. She said I'm forgetting it fully. But if we want to have
Justice outside the home we have to have it in the home if we want to have freedom outside the home we have to have it inside the home. So it starts with enlightened families and relationships.
So that's full-hearted fathering to me is knowing that it's that it's a masculine valid that there's a lot of muscle given to it. You know, like I love that men love excellence and strength and muscle and you know, all the I don't know you could probably come up with better adjectives, but I want care and love
Of to have equal amounts of
muscle Elizabeth just a few more questions and then certainly we can save save room. I have many pages of additional questions left over which is good news. So perhaps we can do another conversation at some point, but let me just ask a few more and the first is absolutely metaphorical. But if you had a huge billboard
conversely if you just want to send something to every person's smartphone if you want to think about it that way upon which you could put
A phrase quote an image question anything like that? What might you put on that billboard?
Oh, wow. That's asking a lot. I'm like a quote slut. I have so many clothes. I think it would probably be not either or but both and more mmm.
That's fantastic. It is excellent. And and the last question is do you have any closing comments questions you'd like to pose to my audience requests. You would like to make of them anything at all that you'd like to add before we bring this conversation to a close
just to be gentle on yourself that I think my favorite thing about what we talked about today Tim was this idea of the stick in the river?
That you know to to work hard to pursue Excellence but to be forgiving and gentle, you know, we're all bozos on the bus. We're all tripping over ourselves and it's okay. It's okay. It's all
right, Elizabeth Elizabeth lesser what it would be a superstar. You can be found at Elizabeth lesser dot-org all over social.
Including Facebook Al is lesser Instagram at Al is lesser Twitter at Elizabeth lesser. Your newest book is Cassandra speaks subtitle. When women are the storytellers the human story changes, of course everyone listening. You can find show notes links to everything. We discussed at Tim top log forward slash podcast and Elizabeth. What a treat. Thank you so much for taking the time
today. Thank you for having me
and to everyone listening.
Thanks for tuning in and until next time be gentle on yourself. We're all bozos on the bus together. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one. This is five. Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? And what do you enjoy getting a short email for me every Friday and that provides a little more soul of fun for the weekend and five. Bullet. Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found.
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