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Sharon Blackie is a former neuroscientist and a psychologist with a profound understanding of mythology and folklore. She has a new book out, called Ripening: Why Women Need Fairytales Now. And I was so excited to have her back on Pulling the Thread to discuss.

Today, Sharon shares some particularly resonant fairytales—the kind of stories that stick with you, and even reshape your thinking. We talk about why—when Sharon was still practicing as a psychotherapist—she specialized in narrative therapy and used fairytales in her practice.

Sharon explains some common misunderstandings about fairytales, and also offers some medicine in the form of story that I think many of you will find useful.

MORE FROM SHARON BLACKIE:

Ripening: Why Women Need Fairytales Now

Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

If Women Rose Rooted: A Life-Changing Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

Sharon’s Newsletter:

Sharon’s Website

Sharon’s Instagram

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

ELISE:

I feel like the book sets itself up because obviously we come to you for fairy tales. We come to you for the archetypes of being a sort of “woman” or the feminine. And we come to you to make sense of cycles and who we are at different stages of our lives and the stories that we tell or that we relate to that give us a context or set the stage for who we are. And you obviously, this is one of your many zones of genius, but you start the book talking about, and I think we know this, but I don’t know, there’s a way in which you said it that really landed for me, which is how desperately we need story in order to make sense of who we are and the linearity of our lives. Absent that, we’re just what? A jumble?

SHARON:

I guess. No, really. I mean, I think obviously you can go to the opposite extreme with that and just literally be making it up. There is always the danger of self-mythologizing, but that’s not really what I’m talking about with ripening. I’m talking about particularly all of those times where we know something needs to shift in our lives or that something is shifting like it or not. And we can’t really imagine exactly what it is. And I have found certainly as I kind of look back at my own life that fairytales in lots of ways have mapped it. The particular stories and images from particular stories at particular times in my life have really shone very brightly and made sense of what’s going on or what I’m about to become in a way that words really can’t always do. And that’s what I love about fairytales.

They’re not very wordy. They’re full of images and visual stuff. And I think that’s one of the reasons why they lodge with us in such a deep way.

ELISE:

It’s so interesting because just thinking about my childhood and we had many volumes of Grimms. We had the annotated, the short, highly graphic version. We had the full one. We had many and I loved them and I even did my ... I was a double major in college in English and fine arts, which is funny because I’m a terrible photographer, but there’s just an amazing arts program at Yale. It was like my therapy. Anyway, but I did my college thesis on essentially archetypes and fairy tales.

SHARON:

I didn’t know that about you.

ELISE:

I know. Isn’t that funny? And my English thesis was on John Milton and Andrew Marvell and the Garden of Eden and the Loss of Innocence. And then of course, when I was writing on our best behavior, I’m like, where is this coming from? And I’m like, oh, this is a lifelong thing for me. I just took some detours. But do you feel I feel like woman of a certain age and obviously Disney turns many of these into blockbuster movies or few and a very different version of them, but do you feel like kids and youth today are being raised on these stories in the same way that we were?

SHARON:

I don’t. I think they’re being raised on versions of the stories that aren’t always functional and it’s not just Disney. I mean, I think when I was a kid, Disney was still terrible. Even in the ‘60s, it was terrible. I mean, it just made everything saccharine and sweet and stories like Snow White, which you’ve got some real grunt in them in the original Grimms, right? It’s just like, this pretty little girl singing along in the woods with a bunch of little bearded all ... It’s just silly. But I’d already read the stories, so I didn’t really take that seriously. But nowadays, Disney is trying to make every fairytale heroine a hero. It’s just like they’re just trying to be the men. I mean, in a behavioral kind of sense to be swashbuckling and chopping off heads left, right and center and just trying to say, okay, in order to be a good fairytale heroine, you must act like the hero and you must follow the kind of the hero’s journey.

And certainly on the stories that I was raised with, which included grims. I mean, there’s some amazing stories and grims, but also include an awful lot of really feisty heroines from Scottish and Irish stories. That’s not what was happening at all. These heroines didn’t need to take a hero’s journey. They were perfectly fine sorting out the world by themselves. And that’s to me what was missing in the ‘60s from Disney. It’s what’s missing today from Disney. And now, of course, what we’ve got is fairytales subverted into romanticy, which I’m sure has lots of very beautiful elements to it. I have no clue actually, but I’m sure it does. But it’s just again, that’s not really what this was for.

ELISE:

Yeah. I mean, you write about too, I think a lot about developmental psychology and those models for boys and girls and Carol Gilligan’s work and Naobi Way’s work and how it butts against Erickson and Kohlberg and these distinctions. And then of course, there’s Campbell, as you mentioned, and the hero’s journey and the way that it has been historically split, where women hold relationship, nurturance, love, care, the home, and then boys have to go out into the world and individuate and grow and how terrible that’s been for our culture. But you write about how even when in fairytales, when girls are out, I guess some of them are women, she will always require and gratefully and graciously accept the help of others, ants, birds and mice, a helpful witch or a wise old woman in the woods. The gift, the superpower of the fairytale heroine is relationship and she will only ever make it through to the happy ending of her story because of her ability to create community.

So I love that. And I was trying to think, is that a component of any of the fairytales about boys and men? I don’t recall. I mean, I know that some of them, they have to get the antidote and they encounter the mentor. But I was like, “Oh right, it’s always the animals in the forest.” I very much relate to that.

SHARON:

Yeah. In fairness, I have to say that I have not done as big a research project on the fairytale hero, fairytale hero’s journey, but there are an inordinate number of fairytale heroes who are jokers or chances or who attain what they want through the help of three wise old women in the woods who bring the birds rather than them kind of doing that stuff themselves. So there are always exceptions, but my sense of it in all of the many volumes of musty old books that I went through is that there is something very specific about the fairytale heroines journey and it is, and that’s the contrast to the archetypical hero’s journey, whether Campbell intended it or not, that’s what it’s turned out to be of the individual searching for glory, the individual, the exceptional individual turning up and saving the world. And although a lot of these fairytale heroines are called princesses, that’s just shorthand.

These were peasant women that were telling these stories. They weren’t talking about princesses. It was just a metaphor. It was a symbol and they are not exceptional. They’re just people. They’re just girls who’ve been thrown out of the house with the clothes on their back if they’re lucky, or they’ve been thrown out of the house after their father has chopped off their hands or whatever might have happened. And this is not privilege, which happens to be a word I hate, but that’s a story for another day. There’s nothing privileged in that. There’s no exceptionalism. They’re just trying to get through the day and every single one of them puts one foot in front of the other. It starts with catastrophe. They just walk out of the house or they’re thrown out of the house, they put one foot in front of the other and how do they do it?

They do it by just not turning bitter, not cutting heads off, but just, “Oh yeah, there’s a loaf there and it’s burning and it needs to be taken out of the oven. Okay, I can do that. “ And it’s just that sense of what is valued in that journey is relationship with others and sense that you’re not the only one who’s suffering. The loaf’s going to burn for heaven’s sake. I better take it out of the oven. Why should it suffer because I’m suffering? And so there’s that beauty and also that reciprocity because by giving to the others that she meets, whether they’re animals or birds or humans, whatever it might be, she gets something back in return. And there’s a lot of stuff about indigenous wisdom these days, which is so important to us to learn from. But what I’m always trying to explain to people from this part of the world that I live in and grew up in is that we have our own stories of reciprocity in relationship.

They’re a little bit different and we don’t see them in the same way. We’ve long ago started to see them as entertainment, whereas in lots of native and indigenous cultures, they’re still very much teaching stories, but they’re beautiful and they’re absolutely the same kind of phenomenon.

ELISE:

Yeah. I think it’s so important in our quest for our own indigeneity and this feeling, this severing or this search that I think so many sort of quote unquote white people have for like, where did I come from and what’s my culture? And often our culture is, oh, you displaced this group of people and then you killed this group of people and you don’t really in some ways belong anywhere, but it visibly shows up in a culture that’s proclaiming white genocide and white culture is being erased. And in reality, you’re like, what does that even mean and what is your culture? So there is something I think really essential about unearthing some of these stories for those who are sort of obsessed with ancestry.com and saying, yes, there is a wisdom tradition here too. There’s story here too that establishes who we are. Because I think that that’s an unspoken anxiety, maybe not for you or me, but certainly for people in America where it’s this proclamation, I don’t know.

And it comes out in violence and it comes out in this really perverse way. And I think it’s a homesickness and a need to assert dominance because there’s this severance or this, I don’t know who I am or where I come from, so I have to make this current place right or how it’s always been. So I wish we were more connected or more tethered because I think it would be a balm in a weird way for what we’re seeing in America at least.

SHARON:

Yeah. And pretty much everywhere else as well. I mean, really since I wrote If Women Are is Rooted, which was published in 2016 and is still going strong, my whole point was I had lived in America for six years and I had read Louise Edrich and Joy Harjo and Linda Hogan and all of these amazing Native American writers who were so steeped in their land and their story and just thinking, why haven’t I got that? But then being the kind of sort of nerdy creature I am when I came back to my lands, I thought, okay, I’m going to do the research project. I’m going to look at the stories. And lo and behold, I found it. And it’s almost as if nobody had gone looking for it before because we have had it so ingrained into us that our myths, our stories, they’re not really myths at all.

They’re not really cosmologies at all. They’re just tales for kids or whatever. And it’s not that the stories hadn’t existed, it’s just that nobody had seen them in the same way. Of course, they were absolutely the same. They were cosmologies once upon a time. And it’s always seemed to me really important that we have to, instead of continually trying to appropriate or even to respectfully engage with the myths and stories of other cultures, we have to start from a place of our own belonging. And I thought at the time, for women particularly that’s a thing. But I have worked with a number of indigenous elders who say exactly the same thing. I mean, one of my friends is a woman called Sherry Mitchell. I don’t know whether you know her. She’s from Penobscot people in Maine, a lawyer who’s written some beautiful books about sacred instructions of her people and she says exactly that and is constantly recommending if women are resuted to Western people who come to her looking for wisdom, not to turn them away, but just to say, look, you’ve got this, you’ve got this in your culture, go back and kind of immerse yourself in it and then come and let’s talk and see what it adds up to.

And that sense of a lineage of something that anchors us either to a place for someone like me who’s still in the place where my ancestors were born or to someone from America who has ancestry in this part of the world, that sense of, okay, there’s an anchor from which I can build and grow and feel that sense of belonging. It’s so important.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, and you see in America, I think so many of us are like, “This is ridiculous.” 90% of us are immigrants to this land at some point in our lineage and we have to get more comfortable with that reality rather than this sort of I’m being replaced by blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

SHARON:

Yeah. But I guess for me, for a lot of the Americans I work with, that knowledge that they have these stories of relationship and reciprocity in their culture, which they can bring to a place that has stories of relationship and reciprocity from the Native peoples that for better or worse, they haven’t had a great relationship with over the past couple of centuries, that gives you somewhere to meet.

ELISE:

Yeah,

SHARON:

100%. We came from the same roots. Let’s just start there and see what we can co-create to move ourselves actually forward rather than constantly harking back to, and I don’t mean not acknowledging it, but harking back to the point of rupture, do you know?

ELISE:

Yes, 100%. And when you go into the Carl Jung concept of the collective unconscious and you start to see the resonance of stories from different parts of the globe and the repetition of themes and archetypes like the trickster who shows up as the Joker or Loki or the devil, you start to understand the basic framework of humanity and how humans relate to others and to nature and to the cosmos in such a profound and beautiful way too.

SHARON:

Yeah. And it’s only really, I mean, we do tend to forget that in the grand scheme of human history, I mean, certainly in Europe in the West, what we think of as the West with the capital W these days, it’s only really the past two, 300 years that we’ve lost it. Before the kind of scientific revolution and the enlightenment, I mean, the whole idea that people could lift themselves out of relationship with the land would’ve just been a non-concept. It would’ve been completely incomprehensible because that’s all there was. They couldn’t go down to the supermarket and buy a packet of bacon. It’s just like if they had a pig on their land, they got bacon. There just wasn’t that ... The sense of separation that we feel today wasn’t even possible because there was nothing else that could conceivably replace it. And so it’s not that far back in our kind of cultural memory, I don’t think.

And of all of the ways that ... If what we want to do is to create transformation in people so that we remember who we are, we remember who we were, we remember that sense of connection and relationship to the land, then we have to capture imaginations. We can’t just say, oh, everything you’re doing is bad. We have to actually capture the imagination so that people can envisage a transformation and new life and nothing does look like story, noth. And that’s why in the book I took a fair bit about the days quite a long time ago now, probably about 20 years ago, when I was still practicing as a psychotherapist and used fairytales, specialized in narrative therapy and used fairytales in my practice because cognitive behavioral therapy is really important. It’s a really important tool, but no one is going to get excited by it.

And I had a lot of clients just fail at it because it’s just like, oh God, this is so tedious. But as soon as you say, nobody ever sits in a therapy room and says, “Story, I don’t want a story. I don’t like story.” It’s just like story in there, they want it even if they can’t bring themselves to tell you. And so you’ve got them with that hook. You’ve captured their imagination and they’re already, before you’ve kind of finished the story, they’re already seeing how it relates to them, who they could be in this story, how they could, if they were that heroin, find their way out, which relationships they would make, what does it mean to be clothed in a dress of stars? The psyche is imaginal. It’s as Jung said and others from more spiritual traditions said before him, the image is everything and these stories just hand us that on a plate.

ELISE:

I want to talk about stories of transformation and women and whatnot, and I want to talk to you about beauty, but before we go there, and this is a story that I think that women relate to so deeply and yet it is also somewhat enraging and here in the US at least you break it, we fix it. We clean up the messes that are left to us and restore the world. So you write, the message that these stories leave us with is the message of so many fairytales. When a woman is left alone in a room with a spinning wheel then somehow or other, even if it can only be achieved with the help of a malevolent little mannequin, she’s going to find a way to spin straw into gold. When she finds a room full of dead things, she’s going to find a way to bring those dead things back to life and this role of the feminine, I guess you could say too, that men can access as well of restoration and repair that’s in so many stories of taking something on the brink of desolation and bringing it back to life.

So why is that our destiny?

SHARON:

Because it’s the nature of the beast. I’m just looking at it. If people forgive the essentialism, let’s just look at it from a purely biological perspective. I mean, women give birth. They create life out of their bodies. I’m not saying that men don’t have a role in it in a different role, an important role, but it’s just we are creative vessels and in all of our ancient Western traditions, philosophy traditions from Plato and neoplatonism onwards, there is a sense that humans are here to participate in the creation of the cosmos.

We’re here to kind of help the divine, whatever we think of the divine as being. We’re here to participate in that. And I think women do it particularly effectively. It’s equality that’s always been associated with the feminine. In that old tradition, the old philosophical traditions, neoplatonism, particularly there is this concept of the world’s soul, the anima mundi, which gives life to, gives birth to the physical world. It’s the soul of the divine which gives birth to the physical world and then animates it and nourishes it and nurtures it. We see this in the Celtic traditions with that concept of the other world that is always bringing life and nurturing and you mess with it at your peril. And so I think there’s always been this sense of creativity, of nurturing, of tending, of relationship, and it’s always been associated with a feminine. And we’re seeing that even in the fairy tales.

And I do think that one of the reasons why women today are so particularly good at this taking dead things and bringing them alive is because for centuries, people have tried to make men have tried to make dead things of us and it’s like there are just so many remarkable women that just weren’t having that. You see that in the stories, I don’t want to go on, but just there’s one story that really always I have loved ever since I was a teenager, and that’s the grim story of Made Marlene. And she’s the princess who refused to marry the man that her father wanted her to. So he locked her up in a tower for seven years. He walled her up in a tower with a bit of food and he said, “I’ll come back in seven years to see if your perverse spirit has been broken.” And seven years comes and he doesn’t come.

And so Maid Marlene literally chisels her way out of that tower by chipping away with the fork that he’s kindly left her and pulls the stones out and she emerges into a world that is effectively a wasteland, but she makes something of it. And so we’re always being dealt this dead stuff, okay? We walk out and it’s just, okay, we’re walled up in the tomb and then when we get out, it’s like there’s another wasteland, but she manages to create her own destiny, even though she’s clearly traumatized as fairytale heroines go. And I think that that is a pattern that women recognize that time and time again we’ve been suppressed Our voices have been taken away and these heroines show us that there’s always a way to turn it around and it always requires community, as you were saying at the beginning and that kind of relationship and reciprocity.

I love that about fairytales.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, it’s a beautiful story. I mean, it’s a messed up story as they all are and yet-

SHARON:

It’s timely.

ELISE:

It’s timely. Yeah. Can we talk about this other story? I hadn’t really encountered these, but I guess you’re saying that they’re prevalent, but this idea of the skin stealing stories and how so many women in your practice relate so intensively to this story of stolen identity and transformation.

SHARON:

Yeah. So I mean, there are various stories. So in Scotland and the Northern Ireland of Britain and up as far as the Pharaoh Islands, there’s this concept of seal women who generally speaking for one night every month when there’s a full moon, they can slip off. They come out of the sea and they slip off their seal skins and they’re human women and they dance on the beach under the full moon. It’s very beautiful. And then they put their skins back on and off they go. And the story is of a fisherman who says, “Gosh, that’s beautiful. I want one of those.” And steals the skin and won’t let her go back to her natural environment, to her element, which is really the sea. The human side of it is in this particular case is what’s unusual. It’s not unusual that a woman has become a seal.

It’s unusual. The seal has become a woman and he won’t let her back. And she just like, she died. She’s dying. He says, “Stay with me for seven years and then I’ll give you his skin back.” And he doesn’t. She has a daughter and the daughter finds her skin, which he has hidden under his boat and gives it back to her mother and then her mother kind of slips back into the sea. And that just resonates with every woman that I’ve ever known. At some point we feel that we’ve lost ourselves. And in Ireland, it’s normally a story of a mermaid and the man steals the mermaid’s comb, which is the source of her power. She’s sitting there on the rocks combing her long hair. He steals her comb and that means that she can’t go back to the sea. I found a wonderful story in Croatia a few years ago where it’s a wolf woman and the man steals the wolf woman’s skin.

So wherever you go, there are these stories of skins being stolen and we all know what that means. I don’t have to put it into words for you. It’s somebody stole that authentic, deeply embodied kind of not animal but almost kind of animal part of us and we don’t know how to get it back. And yet Salky gets her skin back. So I think that’s the kind of story that’s kind of image that I’m talking about that really just sinks into you and won’t let go.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, 100%. And you write about it too in the context of this midlife transition point that comes for all of us where we’re up against the wall and you have to grow, you have to shift, you have to transform. What got you here will not get you there or you’re really tired of what got you here or you don’t care or you’ve outgrown your beauty. Maybe we talk about beauty and the archetypes of the woman because as you point out, and we all know this, the way that beauty and goodness are interwoven in these stories and ugly and lazy or ugly and mean this prominence and it’s put on ... I mean, there’s this idea of an inner light or beauty as well, of course, but it’s definitely, and particularly in how it’s served to us culturally about beauty as goodness. And then all the evil stepmothers, and it used to be the mother, and then it was over time edited more to be the stepmother.

But this intergenerational war around beauty is quite pernicious. What is that about and what is the deeper invitation there?

SHARON:

Okay. So I see it in a particular kind of way. There are two elements to that for me. So on the one hand, fairytales are not novels. I mean, obviously, sorry, I’m stating the obvious, but they’re not novels. They don’t have characterization. They’re very straightforward. There was a girl who lived in the woods. We don’t know whether she’s got blonde hair or dark hair. We don’t know anything about her character. And so what they do, these very simple stories is they use shorthand. So beautiful means she’s good almost always. And that is contrasted with ugly, which is bad. And it’s just kind of a way of saying it rather than have to go on three pages about why she’s kind of good or why she’s bad. And there is a very strong element of that that is true. It’s complicated by the fact that the evil stepmothers are often beautiful as well.

But what is shown in the course of the story is that in their case, actually, surface beauty isn’t always to be taken at face value. So there’s sometimes a little bit more complex on the subject of beauty than we give them credit for. But they do hark back to this very, very strong thread in Western culture that dates back to Plato of beauty as a kind of archetype in the world, a kind of universal archetype, one of Plato’s forms and ideas which were actually kind of the thoughts of the divine mind in the cosmos. And beauty is a very, it’s a very complex one, and I don’t want to go into philosophy, but again, it’s kind of shorthand for goodness and truth. They’re all kind of tied up together. So even 2000 and a half years ago, beauty was seen not just as a nice shaped nose or glossy hair or whatever, but something in the cosmos that was true that was something that we wanted to get back to.

The eros is very tied up. I don’t mean the Cupid and the little kind of Roman God. I’m talking about this old Greek concept of eros, which is very tied up with the experience of beauty and wonder and awe. So there’s all of this complex stuff I believe that is tied up with this simple kind of, okay, she was a beautiful princess and it’s kind of hard to unpack it, but I don’t think it is old women 200 years ago saying, “Oh, you’re only good if you’re pretty.”

ELISE:

Well, and I think that too, these are stories, right? So these are words and the sparseness of the words allows your own imagination and your own mind to fill in the pictures. And obviously there was art and there were illustrations, but I’m imagining that these, this is an oral tradition, this is words and it’s hard to imagine now in our incredibly visual culture and in our Disney versions of these stories and our Barbie doll land where we have very pernicious and specific ideas about beauty put on us. I don’t remember the number of images we see a day now, but it’s stunning.

SHARON:

Horrifying, Ken.

ELISE:

Horrifying. But it would’ve been up to us as the person hearing the story to define what that looks like. And so I can give the fairy tales some grace, but I don’t think it has the same heft that it does now where you’re like, beauty image, beauty image, and you’re concretizing that in someone’s mind as a reality.

SHARON:

Back in the day, that just wouldn’t have been a thing. It just wouldn’t have been a thing. As I say, it would just have been shorthand for a set of qualities that were believed to be desirable in the world. It normally comes with courage and kindness and generosity is all packaged up with beauty and it’s just like, okay, she was a beautiful princess and they would’ve instantly thought, “Oh, okay, so she’s kind and generous and has all of these much more important qualities.” It’s just shorthand.

ELISE:

Yeah. And then I think you offer something really interesting too. And the second part of that question where we have this battle between ages and the loss of beauty being this tug of war, at least I’m thinking of Snow White, right? But you write, “The evil or foolish women in her story in contrast are those who resolutely refuse to grow like Snow White stepmother who can’t bear to acknowledge that time has passed, that she herself has aged and that her stepdaughter has grown more beautiful than she is or the witch and Rapunzel who can’t bear to acknowledge that her adopted daughter has grown into a woman and grown out of her tower who refuses to move on, but instead wants to stop the clock to keep everything just as it always was. “ That is, I think, very profound insight of a reframe I think.

And we obviously live in a culture that really loves to sort of be anti-aging and to arrest women in time. And we see this now more than ever with the plastic surgery happening where people are getting head transplants and going backwards and it’s so confusing visually, but that idea, the refusal to grow and to change.

SHARON:

And that’s really what it is for me. And I think I’ve always had this sense ever since I was very young that transformation is what it’s all about. I don’t mean transformation for transformation sake. I mean just that we move from state to state and that’s the nature of life and then we die at the end of it and that’s also the nature of life. And it’s not that we shouldn’t try to be healthy or that we shouldn’t try to take care of ourselves and to keep our body functional and moving and whatever. But when I was writing Hagitude, which would’ve been probably around 2021, somewhere around that 22, it really struck me that all of the conversations, for example, that would be suddenly erupting, at least in the UK, I think it was slower in the US, but all of a sudden it was possible to talk about menopause and it had never been done before.

It’s like it was one of those topics that just, “Oh, can’t go there.” And people were talking about it in the context of staying young, not letting menopause get you. And it’s just like, “I’m sorry.” Yeah,

ELISE:

Staying

SHARON:

Sexy. Yeah. But the whole point of it, and that’s what I was trying to do in Hagitude by trying to bring to the fore all of these amazing, powerful, funny, feisty, older women in European myth and fairytales was to say, “Look, it’s a whole new adventure. And if you’re going to refuse it, then you are kind of refusing the trajectory of human life because that’s what it is. “

ELISE:

And there’s so much to aspire to there, but it’s served to us as a malignant crone, right? That part of the cycle, the etymology of that word is carrying. And yeah, I think we’ve talked about this before in previous episodes, but that the menopausal culture here as much as I’m ... And we did a fair amount in my old job to sort of rebrand it or put it back into the culture in a way that was like, let’s have this conversation, but over time it’s become ... And I’m glad we’re talking about HRT and sort of the making this easier for people. And in so many of these conferences and conversations, it’s all about the body, it’s all medical. I’m like, where is the spiritual psychic storytelling here? This is a totally different landscape that’s I think very enticing to those of us who are not quite there, but invite us over the threshold.

It might be a bonfire as you write about. We’re burning up all sorts of parts of ourselves in this process, but let’s make it compelling because it is. I am very grateful to be aging and all I care about is growing myself up. And you mentioned that Animasmundi, this idea of creation and God and I see God or my concept of what we’re doing here is evolution and growth as a mirror for God and that our job here is to become more mature, become wider, become bigger, expand our perspective. It’s definitely not to stay stuck

SHARON:

Well, there’s no story if you remain the same and you get very dull and it’s kind of a refusal of the adventure of life. And that’s not to say that it’s not ... I mean, it is hard, but then so is life. I mean, there are all kinds of philosophical and psychological ideas about how we do grow through suffering and that’s not to say that anybody should wish suffering upon themselves, but we grow through going through hard stuff

ELISE:

100%

SHARON:

You’re going to refuse the profound initiatory experience that is menopause and that is the transition to midlife. For men and women too, midlife transition is still there for men, even though it’s less visceral because they haven’t got quite the same physical component. If you’re going to refuse that initiation, then you’re refusing the story of your life and you’re refusing who you are because who you are cannot be embarmed at age 40. It makes no sense. And then we refuse elders as well. We refuse the concept of elderhood. We all whine about the fact that we’ve got no elders, but we don’t want to become them because we want to be exactly the same that we were when we were 30 or 40. And it’s just so messed up in all possible ways. And I do believe that there are functional ways through it. And all of these archetypal old women in European fairytales that I wrote about both in Hagitude and in Wise Women, my last two books are just there to say, “Yeah, this could be fun.” Yeah.

There are difficult bits, but boy, there’s some deep richness there. I love being almost 65, even though I’m getting a bit creaky. I love it. I’m so at home in my skin if I can use the fairytale language now in a way that I never was when I was young.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, you found that abandoned salke seal skin or whatever the particular metaphor.

When you think about this moment, Sharon, when you think about where we are and what feels like what to use Father Richard Ward’s language, the wisdom pattern or this period of disorder, you wrote about, I think that this was in hagitude where you were writing about the trickster and it was hard to not feel like you were writing about Trump or similar figures. Although Michael, when I had Michael meet on, he was saying Trump is way too dark to be the trickster. He’s the destroyer.

SHARON:

Oh, come on Loki. I mean, Loki’s pretty dark. Loki’s pretty

ELISE:

Dark.

SHARON:

Yeah,

ELISE:

Loki.

SHARON:

And he’s a trickster. Tricksters are not good often. No. They come in and they shake things up in a way that you do not like, but that’s their job. So yeah, I don’t see it quite the same way as

ELISE:

Michael does. Will you talk about that a little bit? Where do you see us in our common collective mythology and some of these characters who are coming? I try to be optimistic about it in the sense that the wrecking law that’s cutting through is a very painful but necessary raising to the ground so that we can build the next iteration on maybe a stabler or better foundation than the last. But how do you see this?

SHARON:

I see it quite like that. Yes. I see it as reflective of the human life cycle. So we’ve just been talking about you’re just in the swing of everything and when you’re approaching midlife and what have you, and you’re finally thinking to yourself, okay, I’ve finally grown up. And maybe if you’re lucky, if you’re very lucky, you’ve got the job or you’ve got a little bit of stability, you’ve got some sense of who you are and then along comes menopause and raises it to the ground. And that’s the nature of life and it’s also the nature of civilizations. And I abhor Trump and those associated characters as much as the next person, but if we didn’t have something to come along and burn it up, what would we do? And I think often what Trickster does, trickster disrupts. I mean, the nature of the archetype of trickster is disruptive.

Trickster is a disruptor archetype and that’s why I don’t believe that you can’t have an evil trickster. Of course you can. Everybody says, “Oh, but trickster is in service to the sacred.” And it’s just, yeah, because disruption is sacred. When something is stagnant, when something is not working, when you’re going down the wrong path and boy, aren’t we, in comes trickster to break it all and say, “Why don’t you just start again?” So I don’t know whether that’s what’s going to happen in the world, but I do see these periods of intense disruption as kind of a sacred moment, potentially. I mean, what we do at the moment is down to all of us. There’s no guarantees is there in anything. There’s no guarantee that you get out of menopause alive, but it’s just this possibility. I’ve always said that trickster holds a mirror up to the culture.

And I actually wrote about that for the first time in 2016 when Trump got elected and we had Boris Johnson and the whole kind of Brexit phenomenon over here. It’s just like, okay, trickster is holding up a mirror to you if it’s a personal trickster or to the culture, if it’s a cultural trickster to say, “You think you’re ex, well, look at you actually. Here’s what you brought into the world. Here’s what you elected. If we’re looking at it in kind of mundane terms, this is who you are. Is that who you want to be? “ And it just allows everybody to go, “Oh my God, there’s the path we were going down.” And it brings it to a point of, it’s almost like a story. It’s the classic pantomimed villain you don’t believe with Trump that it could happen. It couldn’t possibly happen that America would elect a character like that to be president.

It’s a story. Of course it’s a story, but it allows you to go, okay, if we go down that route, here’s all the other stuff that’s bad that goes with it. Now what are we going to do instead? And we can only hope that that’s the way that people go, that they see that and go, “Oh, that’s awful. I want to create something better. We can be better than this. I can be better than this. “ And then they go away and start re-imagining the next phase of the story.

Maybe that’s too hopeful. I don’t know, but that’s- No, I’m with you.

ELISE:

Yeah. And I think it’s been a brutal awakening for a lot of people, but I think a lot more people are awake both sort of psychospiritually but also pragmatically and civically of, oh, this does matter. Politic sure is interested in my life so I need to engage. And I think also it’s done a really good job here of distinguishing for many of us the difference between federal and state power and watching those dynamics is really fascinating. But I think so many of us and you have to do this to be a functioning person but have sort of outsourced so many parts of our lives and now it’s like, well, what do I love and what am I willing to protect here? Who am I in this larger construct and what are my values? And I think so many of us hadn’t really been forced against the wall to even contemplate that, much less defend it.

Yeah. Yeah.

SHARON:

Exactly. And that’s where I do think fairytales come in and ripening is aiming to speak to that, that idea of, okay, everything looks broken. And of course what’s happened initially at least, and I don’t know, maybe people are coming out of it. I don’t know, but everybody goes into this funk. It’s just like, “Oh, it’s so hopeless. Oh, it’s so awful. What am I going to do? I’m going to leave the country. I’m going to dig a hole in the ground and hide myself in it for four years or whatever.” And that’s natural. That’s a natural response. You’re walled up in the tower and then can you claw your way out? Do you just sit there and think at one point, okay, I’ve run out of food. I’ve run out of soul food. There’s nothing to sustain me in this hole that I’ve dug for myself in this funk that I’ve made for myself.

How am I going to claw like Made Marlene my way out of the tower? And what am I going to look for? What am I going to cling to?

What am I going to try to bring into the world? And again, the risk of being really tedious, it’s community and it’s having an image of something beautiful that drives you on. And in a fairytale, something beautiful is often a dress made of stars that reflects the light of the stars or whatever. But again, we know what it means. It’s not about dressing up. It’s what would it look like? How would it feel like to wear a dress made of starlight or that reflected this? And we can kind of see that as something shining that we want to move towards, but the nature of most human lives is that we don’t really know what that is, but we know what it involves. And as you say, it involves the values and those are the values that fairytales put to us, courage and kindness, doing the hard work as well.

It’s not all pretty. And they’re so clearer at kind of showing us that this is how when you begin in catastrophe, it’s not through what you say you want to be, not through virtue signaling, but from the things that you actually embody in the world. And that’s why fairytales have stayed with us for so long, because there have always been situations where that’s mattered and it matters today.

ELISE:

Yeah. And there’s this symbolism of two where there’s this pervasive theme in so many fairytales that I think a lot of us want to reject, but it’s this 10th of garden you can reach and you write about how this housework motif, and again, I’m not putting a stamp on trad wifing, but you talk about just the symbolism of the regularly sweeping and airing out literal and metaphorical spaces about the task of sorting requiring us to be able to discriminate and bring order out of chaos. So many of those fairytales are about separating the wheat from the chaff and that there’s this basic daily quotidian as a metaphor, you can think of sweeping out your mind rather than sweeping out the kitchen, but that is this essential skill that we all need as well, particularly in this time. How do you discern? How do you discriminate?

How do you know what’s what? You have to keep it tidy. You got to keep it organized. You’ve

SHARON:

Got to do the work. And that’s really something that always struck me about fairytales. I love fairytales that have this kind of apprentice motif. One of the images in fairytales that has always haunted me ever since I was a small child is that image of the glass mountain. So it often occurs in stories where the girl has married a husband who’s a bear, let’s say, and he’s only a bear because he’s been enchanted by some wicked witch. So she marries him and everything’s going well and he’s just about to be disenchanted because she hasn’t done something terrible or they’ve made it through to a particular place. And then she does the wrong thing and she unbreaks the spell in a way and then he is taken back to the Wicked Witch who first transformed him into the bear and it seems as if he’s lost to her forever.

And in one of the stories of this kind, a wonderful Scottish story called The Black Bull of Notaway, the girl is faced with. He’s gone beyond the glass mountain. This glass mountain is slippy. You can’t scale it. You can’t get around it because it’s too big. It’s beautiful. It’s shiny, but you can’t climb it. You can’t get to the other side. It’s everything that is unattainable, your lost husband that he’s lost because you may stop. And she apprentices herself to a blacksmith for seven years so that he will make her kind of studied shoes, which will enable her to get a grip literally on the glass mountain. And it’s all full of the fact it’s seven years. I mean, of course that’s a fairytale number of years, but nevertheless, I mean, that’s a serious investment in doing the work. It’s like you’ve got to put it in.

You’ve got to find a way through. Nobody’s going to just lift you up and plunk you on the other side, which going back to our initial conversation, often happens to the fairytale heroes. The woman always has to put in this work, this apprenticeship. And it’s so important, particularly in a world where I think often we forget that we’re not entitled to everything coming to us. And particularly when things are breaking, we have to remember how we do that work and to apprentice ourselves to whoever it is that we think has got the wisdom or the skills or whatever it might be that we need.

ELISE:

I love that too also as a counter to a pernicious idea from fairytales that someone’s going to come and save you, right?

SHARON:

Yeah, but that never happens. I mean, really, when did any fairytale heroine that you have ever encountered outside of Disney or some of the literary fairytales say, “Oh, the nice prince happened along and made it all right.” That never happens in the oral tradition. The fairytale heroine is the one who saves the prince. She’s the one who saves the husband. I mean, okay, she didn’t land him as a bear in the first place, but she was the one who stopped him from being disenchanted. She goes and she fixes it. They save their sisters, they get their sister’s heads back. They do all of these remarkable things and men don’t come into it. There’s some weird thing, and I’m sure it is just Disney. And Charl Perro and the fairytale writers who actively tried to take the stories out of the oral tradition and make them suitable for in the case of Char Pero, the French court.

So they take them out of their working class peasant roots and bring them into the kind of upper classes in the courtly phenomenon. And in doing so, they strip all of these women of all of their power and it’s really very irritating.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, certainly.

SHARON:

Because they always have agency in the originals.

ELISE:

Well, thank you. Your work is so helpful. You are one of our wise elders and we need you. So thank you for all that you do for us, Sharon.

SHARON:

It’s such a pleasure to talk to you.

ELISE:

Sharon Blackie is a gift and all of her books offer so much wisdom. Obviously hagitude if you are approaching perimenopause or menopause just reframes that whole stage as something beautiful, essential, alchemical, the burning up of what was for something new, literally figuratively. And I think at these moments of time, there’s nothing more powerful than story to remind us of who we are, where we came from, how we have been here before, and how those who preceded us managed to get out of it. So let me read to you just a short bit. This is from Ripening, her newest book, which was the subject of our conversation today. “We need somehow to let their energies enter into us and then find a way to alchemize them. Stories show us how. The idea of catastrophic collapse is fast becoming the dominant cultural myth of our times and doomsayers everywhere are tolling the bell that heralds the end of days.

“But to find our way out of the dark woods that are closing in around us, we need a trail of breadcrumbs, stories which can lift us out of despair and powerlessness and propel us onto a path of wise action and deeply rooted hope. When all our old certainties are crumbling and in a world in which all bets see currently to be off, fairytales show us how to recognize the creative possibilities that bubble up to the surface when broken systems are cracked open. Difficult times can draw out our deepest and most exquisite creativities and to be alive in this world at this time is to stand on the threshold of their great adventure.” All right friends, I will see you next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it.

That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you. I

You can also find this episode on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.

Andrew Holocek is an interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner in Tibetan Buddhism and other wisdom traditions. He’s a profound teacher and his new book feels quite revelatory; it’s called Total Eclipse of the Mind: Unleashing the Power of Darkness for Creativity, Healing, and Transformation.

Andrew has been meditating for about 50 years and doing dark practice for about 30. As I tell him at the start of our conversation, I’m a terrible meditator, but I’m obsessed with darkness.

Today, Andrew explains how he uses darkness as a tool for essentially living a life of greater clarity, depth, and meaning. He explains a bit of the ancient tradition of dark therapy, and the nuts and bolts of how to dip your toe into dark practice at home, starting with just…closing your eyes for a moment. If the idea of being in the dark freaks you out, Andrew also gets that, and I think you’ll find his perspective on fear interesting, and even soothing.

Andrew also puts into context why more people have started turning to dark practice and dark therapy, which I found really resonant. As he explains, we’re living in a pretty light-addicted age, with a lot of masculine energy, and we’re all a bit addicted to light. But we’re also getting kinda blinded and lost in the light. And, perhaps, darkness is offering us a way to swing the pendulum back, and to see and feel things that we haven’t before.

MORE FROM ANDREW HOLOCEK:

Total Eclipse of the Mind: Unleashing the Power of Darkness for Creativity, Healing, and Transformation

Dreams of Light: The Profound Daytime Practice of Lucid Dreaming

Preparing to Die: Practical Advice and Spiritual Wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition

Andrew’s Website

His recommended masks:

Manta Sleep Mask

Mindfold Mask

MyHalos Mask

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:

ELISE:

I’m excited. So here’s my grand disclaimer, Andrew. I’m a terrible meditator. I fantasize about dipping my toe someday even in a basic meditation retreat, not even vipassana or something more advanced. So I will never be spending 49 days in the darkness or 4.9 hours outside of going to sleep, but I am obsessed with darkness.

There you are. Yeah. And I had no idea, even though I typically am quite tuned into what the cool kids are doing, but I had no idea that dark retreat is a trending concept. What’s going on?

ANDREW:

Yeah, exactly. What’s going on? Yeah. Well, there’s lots to say about what’s going on, which we can definitely talk about. And also maybe if you want, we can explore meditation and your relationship to it and why you think you can’t meditate. Because parenthetically, when I talk to people as a, I guess, meditation instructor, usually, in fact, I’d say 99% of the time when people say they’re having problems with meditation, it’s not meditation they’re having a problem with. It’s their definition they’re having an issue with. So if you reframe what meditation really is, then people go, “Oh, okay. I get it. “ So we can talk a litle bit about that if you’d like. But yeah, in terms of the darkness thing, it’s kind of hip these days. It’s in the zeitgeist. It’s kind of goth. It’s cool. Kids are into it. The spectrum from teenagers all the way up to the octogenarians and those preparing for the end of life.

It’s getting a lot of airtime these days. And I can say just briefly why I think it’s happening

And we can get into the weeds. I’ve actually reflected on this quite a bit because I’m writing and we’re doing all these studies right now, which is kind of cool. And so here’s a principle that really helped me wrap my mind around, whoa, I can maybe see why this is happening. So this following term, I love this term. It’s almost melodic. It’s an anchiodromia. This is a cool term. It comes from Heraklis. He’s the philosopher of Flo, the guy that said you can’t step into the same river twice. But he was also a very sensitive non-dual thinker philosopher. And so the word literally means running into the opposite. Carl Jung, of course, what a surprise, jumped on it and used it for psychological integration and whatnot. But the fundamental principle here that’s also echoed in the Daoist yin yang thing is that if you take something to an extreme, it will either flip into its opposite spontaneously or through some type of revolution.

And it’s all in a gesture of reequilibrating in the spirit of homeostasis, in the spirit of balance. And so I’ve been reflecting on this like you quite a bit. Why is this stuff really coming out in a big way now? And I think it could be the following, that we’re living in a ridiculously light addicted age. In fact, I like to argue that the principle signature of the Kaliyuga, the dark age, is in fact too much light runaway light, which parenthetically, by the way, is masculine. This is so cool. So the whole in wisdom traditions, light is considered masculine and darkness is considered feminine. And so have you noticed maybe there’s a little bit too much patriarchal energy these days. Maybe there’s a little bit too much runaway infatuation with light. And so we live in a light centric, wake-centric culture all in the service of egocentricity because ego is only fully online and operational in the waking state.

And so I think what’s happening is that there’s an underlying intuition in the zeitgeist that things are really, really out of balance. And one way to reequilibrate is to actually swing the pendulum back from this runaway infatuation. We really are, even at the deepest metaphysical levels, this principle goes really deep. We’re all addicted to light. We’re all light junkies in the deepest possible way. And so because we’re so lost in the light, blinded by the light that I think the pendulum is swinging back and there’s a deep intimation. It may be inarticulate for a number of people why so many people are simultaneously attracted and repulsed by the darkness or whoever represents. Well, one of the reasons I think people are attracted to it is because it in fact represents this balancing principle, represents depth, internality, and it’s also primordial. You can make light, but you can’t make darkness.

And so I think people are intuiting that they’re just out of touch. They’ve lost who they really are in the light. We’re blinded by the light. And so something about going into the dark, I can speak from decades of experience, it’s profoundly balancing healing restorative on so many different levels. And I think this principle of anatodromia running into the opposite is something that may be underlying this really interesting interest passion that’s happening in the Western world right now. So something like that, that’s what comes to mind.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, I mean, it makes perfect sense. And you write about this a lot, not only the light pollution in our landscapes and the way that we’re disrupting the reality that historically we’ve spent half our days typically shrouded in darkness, unadulterated darkness, but that also even in sort of the psychospiritual circles there is this obsession with light. “I’m a light worker, I’m a light holder, blah, blah, blah. “This very dualistic construct where this darkness bad, light good, and I don’t think people realize the way that they’ve weirdly been conscripted into this demonization of the feminine interiority. And as you say, we are children of darkness. We come from the womb and we return to the tomb. So it is an inescapable part of our identity.

ANDREW:

Yeah, very much so. I mean, many mythological traditions and religions and whatnot in the beginning, light, but light has to emerge out of some primordial matrix of darkness. So darkness, there’s this kind of genus faced thing about darkness on one level it’s considered demonic and devilish and virtually synonymous with anxiety, fear and death and whatnot. But that’s I think a facile enculturation that like you’re suggesting that darkness also represents originality. I mean, substance depth. This is where everything arises, whether a thought arising from the background of the mind and returning to it, us being conceived in darkness, spending nine months in it and then coming out into the light. So yeah, the restorative properties of the dark and what it can bring about in terms of creativity, healing, transformation, there’s I think an intuitive calling to that. And then interestingly enough, more and more artist types are going in.

The word is getting out. It’s a really hotbed for creativity. We can talk about why it’s profoundly transformational in terms of identity structure. I mean, there’s just a vast array of things that one can explore when you’re playing around with the darkness, whether it’s at home or whether it’s in formal dark retreat.

ELISE:

Yeah. So I want to talk about that because I did feel inspired. I was like, “ Well, I’m going to at least buy the mask. I had one and it kind of deteriorated. And so I need to get another one. It deteriorated in part because I wasn’t using it. But before we get into that, and you write about this, but about if you think about darkness within the world of Carl Jung, who you mentioned and everything that’s in the shadow and it holds everything that we don’t want to look at or don’t want to see or that we’re scared of. We’re definitely going to talk a lot about fear today, but that when we bring that to the light, when we take the things out of the hepty trash bag of shadow, one, it loses its scary dimension that we realize all the treasure that’s locked away in there.

And you write about in the context of coming from people who understood how to read dreams and how to go into the unconscious for prophecy or to understand who they were or what was happening. Yeah.

ANDREW:

Absolutely positively. And this is also worth throwing into the mix. You can think of the conscious mind as more masculine in nature and you can relate to the unconscious mind is definitely more feminine in qualities. And so many scientists will tell you now that minimum 95% of what we do is dictated by these unconscious processes. And so dropping into the dark, you mentioned young and deaf psychology and shadow work, this is an extraordinary opportunity. I think young would be just so delighted to realize that you can do the deepest possible shadow work cleaning up by going into the deepest of all shadows, which is ultimate complete darkness. And what I mean by this is when you’re in the dark, this is a wonderful juxtaposition of literal and metaphorical. You literally can’t project in your normal ways, right? You can’t throw crap around in the dark like you would in the day.

If you do, you’re going to get smacked with it. And so what happens in the dark that’s so interesting, and this took me quite a few years to figure out in terms of shadow work and projection, is that the weight when people go into the dark very often, not always, but very often, the vast majority of people, they struggle with it. They have a fight, flight, freeze response. They contract and defense against the darkness because they see it as a threat. And then when they’re in the dark, and I can attest from my own experience, it feels heavy, suffocating, oppressive, a little bit like a tomb, right? But what happens that’s so bloody interesting is that fundamentally the darkness is neutral. It’s just a metaphysical mirror. It’s neutral. And so what happens when you’re feeling that load in the dark, where is that heaviness coming from?

Where’s the suffocation and the oppression coming from in the dark? It’s not coming from the dark, it’s coming from you. So what I’m alluding to here is that the weight that you’re feeling of the darkness is directly proportional to everything you’ve projected onto it. That’s what creates the weight. And so what you can see in the dark that’s just magnificent and integral speak is called the path of cleaning up, which is owning up to our projections. You’re in there long enough, and I’ll never forget this moment in a retreat quite a long time ago where I stepped into it and I said, “Oh, geez, here I am again, kind of driving. Do I really want to do this? “ And the darkness in this particular retreat had dramatically changed. It was no longer suffocating, crushing, oppressive and heavy. It was loving, beneficent, kind. And it was like, WTF, what’s going on here?

Has the darkness changed? No, I had. And so I discovered then that the darkness was lightening up because I was lightning up. I was owning up to my projections. I was taking responsibility for these projections. And that, by the way, is dramatically revealed in the dark when you drop into the unconscious mind and you see all these projective vectors. This is the more revelatory experience of, oh my gosh, I’m cleaning up, I’m lightening up in the dark because the darkness in a very real way is considered a forceful method of liberation, by the way, in the Tibetan tradition. It’s kind of forcing me to own up to all my crap, to all the stuff that I’m constantly throwing out into the world. Like Carl Jung, I’ll end you with this quote because this is one of my favorite of all his quotes when he says, “Projection turns the world into a replica of one’s unknown face.” This is just a jaw dropping statement.

And so when you’re in there, you come face to face with all that and you have this amazing capacity to clean up, to lighten up, to own up to all these projections. So this alone is a marvelous reason for going into the dark that I wish somebody would’ve told me about 30 years ago that would’ve really helped me understand why is this so hard? The darkness isn’t hard I am. And so I get softer, the darkness gets softer. And so it’s a magnificent opportunity to ... Magnifying this, it’s not only a metaphysical mirror, it’s a metaphysical magnifying mirror. You get to see things you’ve never seen, you get to feel things you’ve never felt before in the dark because you can no longer run away from yourself. You can no longer distract from yourself. And that again is another reason it gets concentrated because you can’t use your usual distracting avoidance strategies.

You can no longer dilute the content of your experience. That’s what makes it so bloody transformational and also a bit challenging because you just go in the way anymore.

ELISE:

Well, I want to talk about the brass tacks of it. So you’ve done a three-year retreat?

ANDREW:

Yeah, I’ve been practicing for, I hate to say it this over 50 years. Yeah. So I did a three-year retreat a number of years ago and then I started doing dark practice actually be 30 years ago. It was July. I started teaching, learning it within the context of Tibetan Buddhism. That’s really where it’s been an established practice for almost thousands of years is fundamentally a way to prepare for the end of life. It is deep doctrinal footing in the Greeks. You’ll find it in the pre-Socratics, Parmenides. You’ll find it in the neoplateness, iamblicus. You’ll find it in the Egyptian sleep temple rituals. The Taoists talk about it. I mean, there’s definitely traditions, lineages of dark practice going back throughout the world for thousands of years.

ELISE:

I know you end the book with fear, but maybe we can talk about it next because I think even people who are listening to this and thinking, okay, wait, what? It’s one thing to be quiet with yourself and sit on a pillow. It’s another thing to go into the dark. And as you say, you can start with 4.9 seconds, maybe try 4.9 minutes. You don’t do 49 days to start or ever maybe. But even just thinking about it, and I think this is probably ... I do think I’m a walking meditator to be fair, Andrew, but I certainly recognize that stillness kicks up not only resistance but fear. And so I would imagine for many people that fear is supercharged by the dark. So what is that fear? Just the ego kicking and screaming?

ANDREW:

Yeah, this is so great. This is a big one. Yeah. So there’s a deep underlying intuition that when you rest in such complete silence and stillness, you’re going to die. It represents the death space. It really does. And my dear friend, this guy you have to have him on. He’s a rockstar neuroscientist. I love him. His name is Ruben Lalkenan. He’s amazing. Here’s dear difference. You got to get mine. And he has this great line, resting in the present moment is annihilation. And this is pure neurological stuff. And so absolutely positively that what this again is what darkness reveals, this is the most amazing. There’s so many ironies and paradoxes in this dark retreat thing. And Suzuki Roshi said once beautifully, right? If it’s not paradoxical, it’s not true.

And so what happens in the dark is, yeah, you can no longer get away from yourself. You’re forced into the present moment. Everything, the walls close in on you, this sounds so great. It’s like, oh yeah, I can’t wait. I want to sign up for this. The past closes in on you. The future closes in on you. There are times in there when it feels like the walls are closing in on you, the roof is collapsing and you’re going, “Oh yeah, this sounds great. I can’t wait to sign up.” Well, returning very briefly, and I’ll tell you a little bit more about the fear thing to this principle of an anchiodromia, when you’re squeezed into the present moment to such an extent, you go into something to such an extent, it flips into its opposite. When you’re squeezed into the present moment to such an extent in any deep meditation, but in particular in the dark, it flips into infinite expansion and openness.

And this is really helpful to understand in terms of what’s happening when you’re in there, all the stuff closing in, closing in, and then eventually it just completely opens up and everything just releases and all these ecstatic things take place. But before that takes place, for sure, fear. And this is because your egoic structure is being starved fundamentally. Ego lives on distraction. Ego lives on motion. Distraction literally means to pull apart. And when you’re always pulling apart and distracting, that’s what keeps egoic structure alive, which is why in this day and age with all these artificial light sources, these weapons of mass distraction, this is one reason they’re so popular because they actually feed egoic structure. Ego lives on this type of relentless movement. And so when you enter a sensory deprivation chamber like this, or again, just any deep meditative thing, all that is put under house arrest.

Everything is put on hold. Basically when everything is held to such an extent, it’s like this coffin thing, like I alluded to, this tomb, then ego can no longer move. It feels like it’s starving. And then eventually you feel like you’re just going to either go crazy or die in there. Ego moves. We move as if our life depends on it because it does. And so when you go into deep meditation or you go into the dark and you can’t move, the ego knows move it or lose it. That level of negation, sensation holding is going to fundamentally lead. You’re going to drop through the fake news of ego arch structure and you’re going to open to what lies below that egoic structure. And so therefore fear, this is a really important thing. I mean, my dear friend Pema Children, she’s made a career out of this.

You really want to grow in this short and precious life. Don’t just follow your bliss. They’ll just get you blissed out or can. You really want to grow, you follow your fear because fear is the affective expression of ignorance. That’s what you’re really going after. But ignorance is hard to target because it’s so insidious, it’s so ubiquitous. Fear is its affective expression. And so you can use fear actually as a sign, as a marker, as an indicator. So when you’re feeling really deep fear, deep inner work, it’s actually a really good sign. It means you’re getting really close to the truth. And so if you actually have the right view, that’s what I’m trying to establish here and you then are interested in perhaps exploring the nature of this thing called fear because if we don’t establish a relationship to it, we’re going to spend our lives living from it.

And you can make a very solid case that your entire life becomes a really protracted, extended, sophisticated avoidance strategy to avoid the harsh truths of what’s lying deep within you. And so we keep moving, literally distracting unto death when we can no longer move and no longer distract. So I’ll pause because there’s so much to say.

ELISE:

There’s so much.

I want to go back. Fear is the affect of expression of ignorance. Is that what you said? And so when you’re saying ignorance, let me make sure I understand here. We’re talking about, again, going to this idea of shadow, you can’t know what you don’t know, right? And is that what you mean? There’s this terror that comes from an inability to touch the truth.

ANDREW:

Exactly. We’re always afraid of what we don’t know. I mean, even when we’re anxious. Pick up any colloquial example, right? Fear of a public speaking, fear of a job interview, fear of a date. We’re fear of end of life. We’re always afraid of what we don’t know. But like Marie Curie put it so beautifully, nothing in life is to be feared. It’s only to be understood.

The more you understand, the less you fear. And so by working with this thing called fear, yes, we’re targeting what we really want to get after and transform is ignorance. Now, this is not just colloquial over the counter ignorance. This is just like the ignorance that you’re alluding to. Ignorance as to the nature of reality, ignorance as to the nature of mind. This is a primordial ignorance. So this is what we really want to target and eventually transform into wisdom. But it’s like official living in water. We’re so ensconced in this milieu. It’s so close to it. It’s so much the fabric that we’re living in that, like you said, we don’t see that we don’t see. We don’t know that we don’t know. And so when you’re in the dark, one of the things that the darkness does that’s just so magnificent is it provides mixing metaphors.

It provides an exquisite contrast medium. When you’re in the dark and you can no longer move, you can no longer run the contrast medium of darkness actually allows you to see and feel things you’ve never seen and felt before because you can no longer distract yourself from these feelings and these things. And one of the most principles of these feelings is in fact fear. And so yeah, when you’re in there and you start to drop in, you start to get in there, I’m sure many of your listeners, maybe even you yourself, like when you take a really powerful psychedelic and people are freaked out, they’re afraid of it, you do really deep inner work, people are afraid of it because they don’t know. Again, the Marie Kari thing, they don’t know. They don’t understand what this fabric of fear is about. It’s actually its evolutionary role.

This is important to throw into the mix right at the outset. We need fear. We wouldn’t be here. Yeah,

ELISE:

Totally. It keeps us

ANDREW:

Alive.

It keeps us alive. We wouldn’t be here talking about the nature of fear if we didn’t have fear, but this evolutionary driver fear becomes a devolutionary retardant if we don’t understand what it is about. And so I’ll say one last thing a little bit deeper in and then we can talk about it. And this is important because again, anybody doing deeper work, when you’re no longer window shopping, you’re going to come up against this fabric. In a certain way, this is what you’re paying for. But here’s the way I’ve looked at it from an evolutionary point of view. Fear protects form. Ego is exclusive identification with form. And so as you’re going from Ego to ego lessness on the psychospiritual path from form to formlessness on the psychospiritual path, how is that related to developmental ego structure? It’s a death threat. And so therefore, when you start to go all the way down there, this is the most important thing.

And this is the contrast medium I’m talking about. The darkness provides and invites this incredible contrast medium of openness. Fundamentally, what happens in the dark is you open, like Rumi put it so beautifully, into wider, wider rings of being. The mind falls into itself in the darkness, opening, opening, opening. And what happens is, and if you understand this, this is a big deal, you’re going to fall all the way down into the bedrock of the relative self-sense. And then what’s going to happen down there is you’re opening, opening, opening you to come down to this primordial contraction. So this contrast medium of openness in the dark, this is huge. The contrast medium of openness in the dark allows you to better see just how contracted you are and that we contract all the time. It’s another expression of this distraction thing. Every time you distract, you are contracting.

And with every contraction, you’re giving birth to a girlic structure. And so what happens here, and this is not just dark retreat, this is really deep in our meditation, this is psychedelic work. You’re going to open, open, open. You’re going to go all the way down. You’re going to drop into the primordial contraction. And then as that starts to dissolve, there’s going to be this almost violent contraction of fear. And if I invite you and listeners to just for just a second, pause for just a second, do a little introceptive inquiry and touch into what do you feel somatically, viscerally when you feel really intense fear? What do you feel? An almost violent contraction. I mean, I won’t do it because I don’t want to scare you, but sometimes what I do is I’ll just bark out really loud just to startle somebody and almost everybody jumps and when you pay attention to that, you’re going to feel this really intense contraction.

Well, that very intense contraction is what egoic structure actually is. And that intense contraction is what lies at the base of the relative self sense. And everything we do is basically, again, this avoidance strategy to avoid this really uncomfortable feeling. We spend our lives trying to dilute it. In the dark, you can’t do that anymore. Just like in death, you can’t do it anymore. You kind of have to face it, that’s what you’re asking for. But if you understand this process, this phenomenology, oh, lordy is this a big deal Because then it helps you see that, oh my gosh, I spent my entire life distracting from these primordial really uncomfortable feelings. And if I can bring them into the light of conscious awareness in the dark, establish a relationship to them, befriend them, realize their value, then I can transcend but include these feelings. And now you’re really putting the accelerator on for evolution.

And so this is the greatest thing about the dark. You go into the dark, it’s pitch black, you can’t do anything, you’re hitting the brakes, everything’s put on hold and it is a profound act of cessation negation that everything comes through a screeching hole in the dark. This ironically is the most profound catalyst and accelerator for human development. So I’ve thrown a lot of noodles on the wall for last minute.

ELISE:

No, I’m still thinking about the contraction and how easy it is to evoke that and how hard it is to just be with that hard stuff.

ANDREW:

Let me just say one thing real quick. You can campaign on this stuff. You can get elected on this stuff because there’s a sense, when you think about these levels of contraction that fear brings about, on one level, it’s actually quite comforting. It’s actually pathologically reassuring because what it does is that contraction freezes, reifies space. This is what creates the sense of self another. This is what creates our entire dualistic relationship to reality. And so if you understand the ubiquitous play of this narrative of fear, you realize how it is literally ubiquitous. It’s everywhere. And if you can understand it, befriend it, relate to it, boy, then you transform fear into fearlessness, contraction into openness, and welcome to rapid psychospiritual development.

ELISE:

Yeah. Oh, and we definitely need that. I want to talk, you mentioned in the book that scientifically you don’t quite understand how the brain has been rewired by this experience, just that it is more malleable potentially. And there’s emergent science and psychedelics that that’s exactly what happens, that there’s this training or this opportunity for a few weeks after. It’s why integration is more important than the journey itself for retraining habits and patterns. It’s why Ibogaine is so powerful as an antidote to opioid addiction in particular, right? Plugging the craving, but also giving people an opportunity, a real on- ramp to do something different. So do you think it’s the same exact mechanism that’s happening that’s akin to a drug-free psychedelic experience?

ANDREW:

100%. 100%. So this is cool. This is another ... Boy, these are great topics. So this is one reason so many scientists, and again, we have five studies going on right now. This is why so many scientists are really, really into studying this dark stuff. And one is I’d say three of the researchers I’m working with are really we’re leading experts in psychedelic research. And so the parallels they tell me over and over, the parallels here are just like my Gen C people say, Redick.

ELISE:

Radic.

ANDREW:

Exactly.

And so Dark Retreat at the early levels, dark retreat is a psycholytic process. A process of loosening, lysis means to loosen to break up. You go into the dark initially, all this stuff is going to break, loose, it’s going to come up. And let me tie this into the meditation thing that we started with a half hour ago. Some people, a lot of people ask, “Well, okay, what is this dark retreat thing really all about? “ Well, NBA superstar Rudy Goldbert has a wonderful summary statement. He did three days, four nights, came out and said, “Dark retreat is meditation times a thousand.” I think it’s slightly hyperbolic, but not a lot. It’s just really intense, concentrated inner work. And so the reason I say that is if you can join that with Trump orimate’s outrageous brilliant statement, that meditation isn’t a sedative. It’s a laxative.

I love that one. And if dark routine is a meditation times a thousand, well, you’re laxating. I mean, you are purging in the dark and this again is a lot like psychedelics. You’re purging. Now it may not be literal, you may not be throwing up and whatnot, but you’re psychically purging for sure. So the first part of the dark practice is definitely psycholytic. It’s a stool softener. This shit’s going to come up. You’re in there, you’re opening up. My favorite definition of meditation, habituation to openness. You go into the dark, you’re almost forced to open. It’s the only way to survive. I’m being slightly exaggerating, but not a lot. And so you open, open, open, all this stuff breaks loose. It comes up magnificent. It has to come up. And this is, again, why it ties in so deeply with the true deeper end of its psychedelic, because psychedelic literally means mind manifesting.

That’s what the word means. And so when you’re in the dark, it is totally psycholytic on the front end, deeper end, psychedelic mind manifesting because all this stuff, it’s a sober psychedelic. You become the metacic. You don’t need any exogenous agents. And in fact, one of the studies we’re going to be working with for sure is when you’re in there long enough, no doubt endogenous DMT is released. That’s where it gets pretty trippy and colorful and lights and colors and all that. That’s a kind of a cool thing that happens. But the most important thing that happens is through greater degrees of openness and openness and openness, all this stuff is going to come up. All these unconscious processes, all this undigested material, even all the way down to these primorial traumas that are born from these primority of contractions. And what trauma is. It’s a chronic contraction.

Even those contractions are going to break loose and come up. And so this is super helpful to understand because it can be a little bit of a crapshow in there at first, but this is what you’re paying for. You’re paying for all this lysis. You’re paying for all this stuff to come up. And so to come back to your issue of what happens is called critical learning periods. Sensory deprivation’s been studied in animals, but not to the extent that we’re doing with formal doc retreat, but there’s no doubt whatsoever that when people come out of the dark, they’re in a highly, not even neuroplastic space. It’s just like psychedelics. Psychedelics have been shown when you finish a trip, your brain is in a highly neuroplastic space, which means it’s really highly conducive to reshaping, to remolding. You’re in a really porous, permeable, malleable space when you come out of the dark.

And this is a magnificent opportunity for growth and transformation and for rewiring and restructuring, literally changing the way you perceive, changing the way you see. And so it’s not merely what’s called neuroplasticity, but the deeper end of it is called metaplasticity is like the very essence of what happens when the brain becomes so fluid and so malleable and therefore so available for transformation, literally to transform, to change shape. So this is another really important thing to understand in terms of, okay, you want me to do what? Whether it’s an hour in the dark or an afternoon. Well, maybe if you understand, and again, there’s so much more to say here, you understand, oh, this is what happens when I’m doing the dark retreat. This is what can take place in terms of divination and creativity and insight and healing and everything. Okay, now I’m starting to get it.

And then bingo, are you going to go in there? And like I say in the introduction to my book, this is the most transformative thing I have ever done. This is including 30,000 hours of practice.

ELISE:

And in the typical MAPS psychedelic MDMA protocol, you’re with a therapist and they’re listening to you and they’re taking notes. Obviously when you’re doing dark retreat, you’re essentially alone apart from someone maybe bringing you food, but you bring sticky notes and you bring a voice recorder because I was like, how would I take notes? How would I capture? So you’re sort of therapizing yourself?

ANDREW:

Well, yes. So a couple things here. Yeah. Dr. Retreat is absolutely positively therapeutic even though it’s not over therapy. Now let me say this because there’s a recent institute that it’s called the Darkness Therapy Institute recently opened. I have a connection with some of the scientists and one of the founders there. This is big in the Czech Republic in Germany. It’s called Darkness Therapy. So it hasn’t gained much of a foothold in the West, but mark my words, this is going to really take off because yes, in addition to the type of thing that I have been kind of trained to do, I go in, I do my solo thing, somebody will deliver food once a day or if I’m in there, most of the time now I can just do it all by myself, believe it or not, in the dark. It’s kind of- I know

ELISE:

You’re like access to a microwave. I was like, “What are you talking about, Andrew You’re zapping food in the dark.

ANDREW:

Yeah, it’s actually pretty easy. The whole thing can actually be very, very fun and playful. But yeah, the therapeutic end of it, again, the lytic aspect, the therapeutic end of it is a big deal. And so this darkness therapy stuff that I was so glad to hear, this Institute taking root, this is magnificent because it then allows not merely a guide to be on site, but an actual therapist to be there with you. It’s almost like a ... Well, I mean, one level could be like an exposure or desensitization technique, but the idea is just like with meditation as a catalyst, dark retreat being a catalyst for standard meditative protocols, it is absolutely positively a catalyst for therapeutic transformation. And so they’re doing their own set of studies on this, which is amazing. And I guarantee as the data centers coming out around this, both the soft science and the hard science, you’re going to see, I think the Western scientific substantiation for some of these outrageous claims, but why is this practice so wildly transformative?

Why does everything happen with such rapidity in there? And so we have models, we’re working with it. I’ve done it for so long that I have a pretty clear idea of what might be going on, but now we’re going to be tackling it.

ELISE:

Well, this is exciting. I mean, and having done sort of the MDMA protocol, you do wear a mask so you are in darkness talking. That’s sort of the only way to access that deeper unconscious and you take it off to go to the bathroom, whereas you are going to the bathroom in the dark. But one of my anxieties about psychedelics, and I understand why everyone wants to study this, it’s legal, it’s free and available in everyone’s bed with a mask or you have a dedicated sort of blacked out room.

ANDREW:

Yeah. Yeah, right right here behind current curtain number A, I have my little- Little

ELISE:

Dark

ANDREW:

Studio. Yeah, one brief thing, you can also playfully, you can also microdose in the blink of an eye, right?

ELISE:

Just close your eyes.

ANDREW:

Close your eyes and there’s the dosage. So anyway, I cut you off.

ELISE:

No, and maybe my anxiety about this is overstated, but I feel like when we look at what’s happening in the world and the people in charge and what’s happening in the tech industry and having some proximity to those people over the years and understanding the, I guess you could call it devotion to psychedelics, whether aided or not and the Messiah complexes, to quote Wilbur, the waking up without the growing up. And is that a risk or has that been your experience with dark retreat as well or is it not as intense? Yes,

ANDREW:

It can be.

ELISE:

Okay.

ANDREW:

No, no, it can’t be just as intense. You can become a total state junkie, right? Because when you’re working, you mentioned Wilbur’s integral approach of waking up versus growing up, or I would say in conjunction with growing up, this is dealing with both the spiritual and psychological lens of it. When you’re working with a spiritual end, you’re working primarily with states of consciousness and what psychedelics can do, in fact do do and what meditation can do is it can definitely introduce altered states of consciousness. I would say parenthetically that what it does, these agents, whether it’s dark retreat or psychedelics, I would actually say they point out natural states. This is the altered state.

This is the altered state. You see this world dualistically, solid lasting and independent, you’re tripping. This is the altered state. So these medicines, these agents give you glimpses of the natural state. And so the vector of waking up is in fact about introducing you to these more open states of consciousness. There’s that term again. And one of the issues there whenever that happens is these states of mind can be very delicious. I mean, they’re like metaphysical valium, spiritual cocaine. These are really delicious states of mind. Now in and of it themselves, that’s not inherently problematic. In fact, you can be aspirational, inspirational for continuing onto the path. I want to stabilize this. I want to enhance it, but there’s a very near enemy of aspiration is grasping and contracting onto that space. So if one isn’t careful, whether it’s the dark or anything, deep meditation, psychedelics is the issue of becoming a state junkie.

You just keep coming back to get your hit. And so I think the most important thing is to understand what brings about these states of consciousness, these so- called beautiful altered states of consciousness. Again, this is something you can do for yourself just with a very brief inquiry. I invite listeners, do this, can close your eyes, pause for a minute, and bring to mind two or three experiences in your life to which you would append the label mystical

Spiritual. Was it in fact a psychedelic experience? Was it in fact a deep meditation experience? Was it in fact a walking nature? So bring to mind two or three experiences to which you would depend a label mystical, spiritual. And now look briefly underneath, is there a common underlying factor, ingredient, denominator behind all these states? I argue that there is and it’s openness. Every one of these states of ecstasy is brought about by the cessation of the contraction. So every state of ecstasy and the state of ecstasy is directly proportional to the preceding state of agony. So in other words, if you’re really contracted, there’s this narrative. Again, if you’re really contracted and you’re having a sense of experience of opening, you can think you’re enlightened. It’s that ecstatic.

And so the issue is understanding the phenomenology, the process. What’s going on here? I’m just opening. What’s my favorite definition of meditation? Habituation and openness. So if I understand the phenomenology that dark retreat, these medicines, these are like pointing out transmissions. They’re pointing out particular wonderful states of open mind. Well, instead of then becoming a state junkie and a dark junkie and a literal, most people psychedelics are not addicting in this regard. Why not work to stabilize the state, the spiritual, mystical experience by practicing openness now? Everything then becomes spiritual. Your entire life becomes a psychedelic experience. Your entire life becomes ecstasy if you work with the underlying phenomenology, which is one of openness. And so for me, this is the key. This is what these medicines can point out. I like darkness because instead of, I mean, even Abigain, that’s one that I haven’t done 24 hours maybe, 36 maybe.

I mean, you can be in the dark for days and weeks. And so this is when you get to see this stuff in really extended periods of time over and over and over again. And it’s kind of a game changer, at least it have been for me. I don’t need ... In fact, I was going to say I share some stories about psychedelics in the dark. I’ve never done a psychedelic journey in the dark. I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t recommend it at all, but there’s some super interesting parallels again between both of these. But to me, and then I’ll pause, the underlying kind of message here is the openness that brings about these ecstatic states. That’s the message. And then why not practice openness? Everything becomes spiritual. Everything becomes festival if you just to it.

ELISE:

No, I think that’s a beautiful outcome and I’m sure there’s my own projections on this, but you mentioned this idea of people being, “I’m enlightened.” And as Wilbur would say, you can have an enlightened Nazi. So that’s what I worry about sometimes is this, I’m special, I’m enlightened, I’ve seen it. And even the way that I think that sometimes that’s described as this all doesn’t matter. And it’s like, well, this is people’s livelihoods and we do live in this material world. And I don’t know.

ANDREW:

When you say this, you mean normal life kind of thing?

ELISE:

Yes. Yes.

ANDREW:

Oh, I think it very much does matter. And this is super important because otherwise you fall on a classic spiritual bypass pathologies,

ELISE:

Right? Yeah.

ANDREW:

Totally. For me, what I do here is I work with, I like what William Blake talks about when he talks about double vision, capacity to keep one eye on these so- called mystical experiences, the heavenly dimensions, and then one eye on earth until eventually you realize there’s no difference between them or with the darkness of the light, one eye and the dark, one eye on the light. And so you work and you integrate in your honors from integral approaches, you honor both those eyes, you honor.

ELISE:

So let’s talk briefly. I know we’re almost at time about the brass hack. So essentially there are some retreat centers that offer this around the world, but it’s kind of rare. So do most people do it in their own house?

ANDREW:

Yeah. I mean, most people, this is a pretty small population.

ELISE:

The

ANDREW:

Millions

ELISE:

Of people

ANDREW:

Shutting themselves

ELISE:

Up in closets. Yeah.

ANDREW:

We’re going to change that. Yeah, these centers are popping up all over. I have connection to a bunch of them, but not all of them. And it’s exciting. Speaking of brass texts, the best way to work with this is, and this is kind of what I’m riffing and writing it out and doing some studies on, we’re languaging it as gray retweet, gray, which is a way to weave in and out. Because even if you’re going in for one, two, three days for a lot of people, there’s just like, no way. There’s just no way I’m going to do that. So you mentioned earlier, if you’re closing your eyes, you can do that. But at a certain point, getting one of the masks that you talked about that you wore through, there’s three or four of them now, Monte Mahalos, mindful masks. These are great because you can open your eyes up underneath them. This is the way to start. They’re not expensive. They’re like 30 bucks. I have no stock on this stuff. And it’s a way to just titrate to drip it, to get familiar with it. The very definition of meditation in the Tibetan language, by the way, to Gom, G-O-M, to become familiar with. So you become familiar with the darkness in your own terms.

And then what happens if you put the mask on, you mentioned 4.9 seconds. I play with this 49-day model and then 4.9 minutes. The idea is a graduated titrated approach where you can work with a dosage. So coming back to the psychedelic thing, one of the biggest issues with healthy psychedelics and the darkest dosage because in the dark, just like with psychedelics, you can overdose on yourself. How big a dose of yourself can you handle when you can no longer run away from yourself? And so therefore, again, it’s so profoundly revelatory. You’re in there, you’re going, “Oh my gosh, I spent my whole life running away from myself. Really?” Well, you drip it, you put the mask on, you go, “Oh, this is kind of cool. I can do this for 10 minutes a day.”

And you start to feel the restorative aspects. “Wow, this is kind of cool. It makes me slow down. It makes me feel a little bit more, brings me into this more intimate sense of touch. This is what’s so beautiful about the dark. It invites intimacy. It invites touch. Is it boycotts our most superficial dualistic sense of sight? And so by putting the mask on and becoming familiar with it, working with it, playing with it, you might comment at some point, I’m in my mask for a couple hours and you go, no, okay, now I might be interested in exploring a dark retreat. Literally, millions of people can do this at home. And in fact, I would totally recommend it because it’s super easy. It’s unbelievably safe. I mean, how can that hurt you?

And then as you become more familiar with it, you go, wow, this is kind of cool. And then it may elect like, “ I want to see what the next step might be like. “And then literally, my teacher Kempo Rimbache, this is the way he taught us. Literally he said,” Go into your bathroom and throw a towel underneath the rug or become literally a closet meditator. That’s kind of cool, right? Go into your closet, shut the door and see what that’s like when your whole body is in there. And then maybe, oh, let me go to a retreat center for a day or for two days. “And so this way, if you do it this way, you drip it, you titrate it. It’s so gentle, it’s so graceful, it’s so basically accessible this way, then you can see for yourself like, “ Whoa, there’s something kind of cool here.

I mean, there’s something really potentially restorative about just bathing in this dark space, this wisdom of the darkness. And so that’s definitely the way to play with it because then it’s super easy. It’s super simple.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, there were parts where you were talking about dark retreats specifically, but as a parent and my kids are a little older now, but I was like, oh my God, what I wouldn’t have given to just be in the dark. And I think you were describing it as sort of dropping in and out of sleep, lucid dreaming, but just the deep restoration. It’s so

ANDREW:

Beautiful. Yeah. I mean, I’ll put my mask on. I mean, no kidding. I’ll put my mask on for five minutes or so, 10 minutes during the day just to like, oh, Hello Darkness, my old friend. Oh, there it is again. And the mind just ... Right now it really is like medicine for me. I just go in there and I relax. I open. It’s as if the darkness is absorbing all my stress and anxiety. And at the same time, it’s as if I’m absorbing the medicine of the stillness and the darkness itself. And for me, yeah, it’s been a pretty cool transformative and ongoing journey. I continue to do it. I continue to explore it because the unconscious mind is vast. It’s enormous. It’s so deep. There’s so much to explore. And every time I go in there, it’s like, okay, what is the darkness going to show me this time?

What is it going to teach me next time? And so for me, it’s just this endless, continuous exploration. I just love it.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, I’m inspired. I’m going to babystep my way in. It’s hard for me to turn my mind off. It’s hard for me to feel like I can’t take notes. It’s hard for me.

ANDREW:

Okay. So interjection. You started this an hour ago.

You don’t have to turn your thoughts off. That’s not the point. The issue V. Don’t try to stop the play of your mind. You have kids, right? Thoughts are just the children of your mind. And what thoughts do like kids is they just play. That’s just what thoughts do. The issue is not to stop your thoughts. That’s what I mentioned earlier about most people’s sense of definition. Their definition of meditation is just off. Meditation is about establishing a more open, there’s that word again, kind, insane relationship to the contents of your mind. That’s all it is. And if your mind is like your kids and running all over the place, instead of like, “Oh God, I can’t meditate. Oh crap, maybe, oh wow, this is amazing. Look at what my mind can do. “ And so literally like your kids, don’t fight with your mind, love your mind, love your mind.

If it’s speedy and they’re throwing a tantrum in there, whatever, there’s again, this notion of holding, right? Hold the mind in the cradle of loving kindness in this attention and environment and then you just witness it. You go, “Wow, look at this. You just watch. You just watch.” And so yeah, then it becomes like, whoa, I can meditate because I can basically establish a new open relationship to the contents of my being. That’s all the meditation is. Don’t try to stop your thoughts. Don’t even try. Let them play. Just don’t let them seduce you. Don’t go non-lucid. Don’t let them hook you and draw you away. Let them come and let them go. Like Pema Chodron said, “You are the sky. Everything else is weather.” So mixing metaphors, now that your thoughts aren’t just kids, now your thoughts are weather patterns, right? So you’re sitting there, you can do skygeezing practice.

I do this with my morning coffee. I sit out, I look out over the window, I see the mountains, I see the weather, clouds are blowing by, birds are flying through it, lightning, wind, whatever. It’s the same thing with my mind. So you are the sky.

You can weather it. Amazing.

ELISE:

I will find a link to one of the masks that he recommends to drop in the show notes, but there are many. They have little, not foam, but sort of a soft structure around them. So as he mentioned, you can open your eyes under them and darkness is maintained. They’re actually very relaxing and comfortable. I’m just going to read a bit a few paragraphs from The Total Eclipse of the Mind. “The power of dark retreat comes from its ability to erase. This practice is about subtraction, not addition. Darkness itself is the result of negation of light, not addition. It’s defined by absence, not substance. You can make light, but you cannot make darkness. You can make lies, but you can’t make the truth. You can fabricate deception, but you can’t fabricate reality. You can only reveal it. The very structure of darkness suggests its benefits as the primordial eraser.

“Only elemental truth is allowed in the dark, which is precisely where dark retreat takes you. When brought to fruition, dark retreat erases you all together and points out the unerasable. With everything that is happening these days, our crazy schedules, ridiculously busy lives, and endless obligations, do we really need to add anything else to our lives? I take the greatest delight when I can remove things from my packed day and recently I had a dream where an authoritative voice boomed out repeatedly, less is more. Relate to dark practice as the addition of a tool designed for deletion like a snow shovel, sponge, or dust mop. In this regard, dark retreat is the most retro thing you can possibly do. Darkness will restore your identity, return you to the nature of your being, and eventually revert you to the reduction base of reality itself. Well, friends, that sounds like a promise.”

I will see you next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you.

I spent most of that show trying to stay standing upright while the crowd convulsed and watching concert goers get passed on their backs by way of upstretched arms. People were climbing up on the stage and falling backwards in trust falls. Trust falls are my nightmare. Every time we had to do some variation of them in bonding exercises at the beginning of the school year as a kid (we’d gather at Camp Paxon for a few days on Seeley Lake), I would squirm out of it. My instinct to turn toward the ground so I could break my own fall was too great.

Well, we don’t get to avoid what scares us forever, and I find myself in a bit of a trust fall with the universe—and all of you. I talked about this at some length in Monday’s solo episode (“Taking Your Foot Off the Gas”), but I am heading into a “rough initiation,” to quote Francis Weller, and I need to take a sabbatical to give my body a chance to heal. (I’ll share more about the specifics in the June solo episode, which comes out at the end of next month; I’m not being coy, it’s all unfolding in real time, and I need to go through my own process without too much feedback.)

This sabbatical was not planned, nor is it by choice, but as I got organized for it, I found myself looking forward to something that’s not what I would choose because it means I get to take a break. That was a pretty big revelation: In addition to needing to step away to take care of myself for a bit, I’m wiped. I’ve run out of steam. It’s time to stop running.

I’ve written about this before (“What Kind of Horse Are You?”), but I strongly identify with two creatures: My “Shakti”—my connection to the vertical, my life plan or pattern, my intuition—is governed by my panther. My “Chi,” or life force energy that shows up in the horizontal (my work, my daily life) is run by my horse. I have a lot of Chi, or horsepower. While my panther is a wise guide, knowing when to move and where, my horse is both strong and ruled by fear. When I get scared—spooked and startled—my horse takes off. I end up overpowering myself: I will do, do, do and work, work, work, to guarantee everything will be okay.

I let the horse go partly because the horse has taken me far. I love its propulsive energy and the hit of control I feel by carrying myself away. Leaning into my horse feels better to me than standing still and trusting everything will be okay.

It’s not an accident that I fell off a horse a few years ago and broke my neck; and then insisted on getting right back on. :) This June, I get to be with the horses but I won’t be able to ride. Hard medicine, but what I need.

It’s time for more Panther. It’s time for me to find faith for myself by not exclusively relying on myself. There’s a lot of grandiosity in the way I’ve been approaching life: the Divine/God/whatever-you-want-to-call-it can worry about everyone else because I don’t need anything. You worry about them God, I’m totally fine over here…I can take care of myself! But maybe I can’t. My body is saying enough. The little girl in me is really saying, enough. Enough horsepower. I’ve had my foot on the gas for a long time, and what’s mostly at the wheel is my fear and anxiety. It’s not such a fun ride anymore, it’s not sustainable.

I talk a lot more about this in the solo episode—if you’re an overfunctioner, there’s something in there for you, I promise—but I’ve set myself up to be paid in what I produce…all across the board. Nothing I’ve created compensates me in perpetuity (no product, no courses, no company dividends). This is true for a lot of creatives. And it’s true for corporate types, though there’s no HR safety net—the structure is me. (I’d still choose it every day.)

As I’ve settled into this particular call to adventure, I’ve been working to locate my fear. I’m not scared about what’s ahead of me practically (I’m not facing anything life-threatening); I’m scared about what will happen if I stop “performing.” In the past month or two, my fear has been located precisely there: How I will support my family if I don’t religiously write every week (even though only a tiny portion of this community—2.5%—pays me for it)? How will I support my family if I don’t publish a podcast every Thursday that’s supported by your listens and the corresponding advertisers? How will I support my family if I tell all my consulting clients that I need to step away for a minute and put my monthly retainers on pause? Will people forget about me? Will they stop listening and reading if I disappear for a few weeks or even a few months? Will they decide they don’t really need my help or insight anymore? That’s the lesson plan of this rough initiation: Learning to let ceaseless productivity go and find faith that something bigger than me—all of you, the universe—can hold it for a minute….and guess what, it won’t fall apart.

Can I trust it? I’m trusting that I can.

So practically, what does all of this mean?

THE PODCAST:

The podcast will run per normal through the month of June because I’m compulsive and record way ahead. There are some great episodes coming, including the return of mythologist/psychologist (her new book is Ripening: Why Women Need Fairytales Now), Belle Burden (author of Strangers), professor Paul Eastwick (author of Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection) and therapist Mark Wolynn (author of the mega bestselling It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle). Over the course of July, I’m re-running some of my greatest hits, recontextualized for this moment. I’ll be back at the end of July with a solo episode update, and then return to regularly scheduled programming in August.

THE NEWSLETTER:

This is my last newsletter for a minute. Episode pages for the podcast will go up, but I’m not going to be sending out a newsletter for at least a month, likely two…maybe even three? Eeks.

I’ll be back though, and better than ever, because during my sabbatical this newsletter and community will be re-homed on Beehiv. Many of you have asked me when I’m going to jump ship and bail on Substack and the time is now. (Well, to be fair, I’ve been working on it for a couple of months, but well, I’ve been busy and distracted, so now-ish.)

A vast majority of you won’t need to do anything for this move—you might not even really notice. I’ll be porting all of my subscribers over. I will also port the Stripe back-end over too, so if you’re part of this paid community (THANK YOU!) then you likely won’t have to do anything either. (Beehiv has amazing customer support if there are any issues.) If you’re not part of the paid community but have thought about joining, now is actually a good time—I’m going to raise my rates a bit when I make the transition, so you can lock in the annual rate ($80) now. The only people who will need to take some extra steps to stay connected are those who “follow” me through the Substack app—I don’t have your email address in that case, so you’ll need to formally subscribe. Similarly, if you’re paying me through the Substack app, that will all be cancelled when I leave, and you’ll need to recommit. We can cross that bridge when we get to it. (I’ll send out a final email with any important details—and if you’re one of the people paying me through the app, I’ll send you a note when it’s time.)

I know there are a lot of writers/creatives in this community. You can probably guess the reasons why I’m bailing, but I thought I’d hammer them out for anyone else contemplating the move.

So first, Substack has been very good to me and I’m grateful that I got this newsletter going here a few years ago. At its launch, Substack was single-mindedly devoted to writers and newsletters and promised to be a reprieve from social media and algorithms. They offered a blessedly simple CMS and a democratization of tools. There was also great growth, which justified the 10% revenue share.

A couple of years ago, they started to introduce social media artifacts, like “notes” and “followers.” We were irked, but they promised they would continue to prioritize subscribers over followers—though it’s hard to feel that’s true. (I have about 80,000 followers and 41,000 subscribers, so go figure. ) Subscribers are the dream, because as writers, we need your email addresses to be able to reach you. If you “follow” us, we have to rely on yet another algorithm to show you our content…and if we leave, we can’t take you with us. (Substack also promised to never hold writers hostage…oops! They’ve gotten pretty good at violating their stated values.) At some point early last year, during a fundraise that valued them north of $1B, Substack did something to the platform—I don’t know if they broke it, or if they’re simply prioritizing flashy new writers and people who are using tools that writers really didn’t ask for, like…Substack TV and endless video variations—but growth halted. My friends stopped growing too. Most of us have started losing subscribers, month over month.

Here’s the other big issue with Substack, which dovetails with concerns about the fact that they platform Neo-Nazis and people like Andrew Tate. They’re not just a platform, which gives them ample opportunity to say they’re merely supporting free speech. They take a 10% revenue share from everyone publishing on Substack, which means they are enriching themselves on hate speech. It’s a real f*&cking ethical pickle, and I don’t want to participate in it.

Also, their rev share is really, really expensive. When I got my 1099 from Substack last year, I realized that between Stripe (2.9% + a $0.30 transaction fee) and Substack (10%), I’m paying close to 20%, which is disheartening. Beehiv charges a flat fee based on list size and they do not share in your revenue, so moving is a smart financial choice. They also offer a lot more flexibility: Tiers, one-time payment options for people who want to attend an energy bath or workshop but not subscribe, a tip jar, etc. Friends who have made the transition say that operating a Beehiv newsletter is like driving a Maserati—there’s way more support and functionality. In comparison, Substack is a beater. (For one, there is zero support, despite the high pricetag.)

There are other fantastic options besides Beehiv, including Ghost, which I seriously considered. Ghost is a non-profit that baddies like Rebecca Solnit write on…but you need to have some technical know-how, since it’s all open source, and well, that’s not me. I’m a one-person show! If you decide to publish on Ghost, check out Outpost as a marketing integration, they seem fantastic. Someday, I’ll move to Ghost; in the interim, I’m excited to give Beehiv a spin.

Alright, that’s a lot for one email. I’ll be back soon-ish. In the interim, you can find me every Thursday on Pulling the Thread. Please don’t forget about me! I’m going to close my eyes, lean back, and resist every urge to turn my body to the ground and run. :)

You can listen to this episode on Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

As I’m heading into a series of initiations, I’m sharing a few challenges (opportunities!) that I’m sure many of you are familiar with: our struggle to prioritize ourselves, worrying over what will happen if I slow down, wanting to have faith in myself in the way that I have faith in other people and in the world. In this month’s solo episode, I’m also sharing a bit about my upcoming move from Substack to Beehiv, a sabbatical of sorts that I’m taking, and what’s coming up on the podcast.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Dre Bendewald on Pulling the Thread: “When Women Tell the Truth About Their Lives”

Uta Opitz

Harriet Lerner on Pulling the Thread: “What Our Anger Teaches Us”

Francis Weller on Pulling the Thread: “There Are Two Moves When Faced with Uncertainty”

Carla Schwiderski

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:

ELISE:

So friends, without going into too much detail, I will get to detail in the coming months when I have more to share and report. I find myself going into a rough initiation and it’s actually multiple initiations. This is a term from Francis Weller who has been on the podcast talking about this concept, which is this idea that life confronts us with these doors that we’re forced through, that we would not choose to open on our own and that we’re sent out on a journey that’s not by choice, not preplanned, not expected, and yet a durable part of life and something that can’t be avoided either.

So I don’t want to talk about the specifics right now because I’m still understanding the specifics, but I’m going on a journey and there is nothing life-threatening about this journey. I am not scared of this journey, although I’ve come to understand there are lots of parts of it that are deeply terrifying to me and I think those parts are also quite universal. So that’s what I want to talk about today, which is as I get ready for the summer and what’s arising, I’m having a really hard time putting myself in a circle of care or allowing anyone to help me. And it’s funny, I have an amazing episode with Sharon Blackie coming up on the podcast. She’s the author of Hagitude and her newest book is called Ripening, and it’s about the need for fairytales for women, how desperately we need them because these are essential stories that erupt in cultures across the globe, which share similar themes.

We were talking about the hero/heroine’s journey and she was saying that one of the hallmarks of the journey for women is that we always have friends. They’re always friends on the journey and often women are in these fairytales have to make new life from old dead things. They have to bring things back to life and they do this always in relationship with ... there’s always critters. There’s birds and bugs and bees and wise old women in the woods and there are always these unexpected helpers along the way. They never do this alone. Keeping this in mind, I have this lone wolf tendency, which is, I got it, nothing to see here. Don’t worry. Other people need more concern and care. And this is of course true, but in this particular phase, I feel like the syllabus for me is to learn how to accept care and be in community with people instead of just patrolling.

I wrote about this in one of my newsletters, but I like to patrol the edges of the circle and look for who needs what and what can I reflect back to someone and what’s happening over here? How can I serve? How can I be helpful? Which I know is resonant for probably a lot of people who are listening to this, a lot of women. I’m like, “I’m good, I’m good, I’m good.” And there’s a certain grandiosity to that, which I’ve had to confront in myself. I’m somehow better than all of you who need things because I don’t need anything. And if I need anything, I will take care of it myself. And this is what I’m going to get is medicine in the contrary, which is that I do need help and I do need support and grappling with that is the really scary part of it.

I’m going to talk a bit more about the specific anxiety and fear that comes up for me because it does of course in some ways impact all of you. I just want to name that, that I have a lot of trouble. And I was explaining to my friend Dre, Andrea Bendewald, who’s been on the podcast before and who leads these incredible circles and she’s leading a circle for me and I participated in one that she did a couple weeks ago where I’m like, “Dre, I see this syllabus. I know the lesson I’m supposed to learn here, but it’s like I cannot get into the classroom.” And there’s that part of me that’s just give me the reading and I’ll go figure it out, but I have to take the class and I have to figure out how to get across the threshold and I don’t know how.

I don’t know another way to explain this feeling that I have of I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to do this. And of course I’m trying to figure out how to do this, but there’s no way to figure out how to do this except to let it happen. So that feels big for me and that maybe I’m getting a couple of opportunities to learn this lesson now, which I didn’t really learn in the past. I fell off a horse and broke my neck in 2022 and just managed to escape. I got very, very lucky as a nurse said, “There’s someone who’s holding you when you fell.” And I felt that way too and I just managed to sort of skirt around any real encounters with helplessness. I was sidelined, but I was still working my way through it with my little neck brace on and there were certain things that I wasn’t allowed to do, but I was completely and totally fine and I will be completely and totally fine, but I feel like maybe I missed ... I didn’t pass that class guys and I’m getting that class again.

And I know I’m not alone. I know how many women just cannot accept care and I’m going to talk a little ... I’ll get into more specifics in next month’s solo, but Music kills us. This inability to sort of prioritize ourselves is quite deadly. We have obviously in episodes past talked about this idea of overfunctioning versus underfunctioning, which is a concept from Harriet Lerner. I’ll include a link to her episode as well. We didn’t really talk so much about this as we did about anger, but this is her sort of theory, which I think tracks to reality that there are two camps of people. There are the overfunctioners and the underfunctioners. The underfunctioners hit a crisis point and collapse. They just fall apart on instinct and they just can’t deal and overfunctioners on the other hand hit a crisis point and it’s like they come alive and they don’t only know how to deal in a crisis, but they are just like, “I will get through this.”

Any feelings about anything gets sublimated entirely to their competency as they’re sort of taking care of everything and crossing things off to-do lists. And I’ve written about this before as I am an overfunctioner. And again, there’s grandiosity there. I take pride in the fact that shit’s hitting the fan, I got it. I’ll take care of this. I will make this better. And there’s a real cost as much as I can sort of feel myself and feel my competency in those moments, there’s a real cost to that. It’s like I was doing an energy healing session with Uta Opitz the other day and I was having this physical experience in my chest where she was like, “What’s happening in your chest, the solar plexus?” She was like, “It’s so intense.” I’m like, “Yep, it’s really painful.” And then I could feel it sort of like a not unwind and release and then just like that another, to me it felt like files emerging out of a file cabinet.

Then there was another tightness and a release and then another and another. And I don’t even know what tiny percentage I managed to release in that hour long session, but I just was like, “Oh, I understand. I have just been taking things throughout my life that happen that are stressful and I file them. I just overpower myself in the doing, file them away and never tend to them. I never take care of sort of the work required to release them from my system. And this is probably why I’m so breathless and why I struggle with anxiety. So that’s where I’m at.

So the fear that I’m feeling that’s very pronounced for me isn’t about sort of my life or life expectancy. It is about the fact that my livelihood, value, my worth is attached to what I create and in every single one of my many, many jobs I am paid based on output, whether that’s sort of downloads of the podcast that advertisers sponsor or Substack where actually very few people pay me, it’s like 2% of my audience, but where I am sort of put myself on a plan where I write a newsletter every week and do office hours and workshops and whatnot with my clients where I do consulting, they are paying me for a certain amount of output. They’re paying me to be me, right? Some of it’s helping them think through big intractable problems and some of it is actually tied to physical creation of copy.

And then of course there’s my books. Everything I do is on me and as a solo person, I don’t have an HR company to go to and say, “Hey, I need to disappear with any expectation of being paid.” And so consciously and unconsciously, I’ve set myself up just for a bit of a high wire act that’s where I get just really scared. And some of this is rational and much of it is irrational, but there’s a bit of a trust fall that I need to take with this community, those of you who are listening now and the people who I work with who have all been amazing of, “Will you still support me even if I can’t produce at the same rate or I need to take a sabbatical and focus on myself and will you still care? Will you come back? Will you forget about me?”

And that’s where a lot of my real terror lives is can I have faith that there is support outside of an immediate compensation for what I produce for people and every part of this life that I’ve structured, particularly in the last six years when I’ve been just fully off of people’s payrolls is that leaning on myself, using myself as my structure and feeling like that’s where it is. It’s all on me. It’s all on me guys. And then to sort of say, “Actually, that’s not sustainable and I can’t even really sustain this pace even without other things going on in my life. This is too much.” But to say, “Can I trust fall into this community knowing that they will support me or have my back even when I can’t show up with the same regular intensity that maybe they’re used to?” So that’s big for me.

Again, this is the rough initiation that I am in where I physically will not be able to maintain this pace. I’m going to need to take some sabbaticals and the specifics of that and please, again, this is my sort of request to this audience. Please stay with me. I am going to take at least a month away from Substack where I’m not going to be writing original essays every week and I will just be publishing show notes. It might be longer. I’m actually using this opportunity to transition off of Substack to Beehiv. Many of you have messaged me saying, “Are you aware of everything that’s going on?” This is in terms of not even the platforming of people like Andrew Tate and neo-Nazis, but also the way that the Substack business model works. They’ve really painted themselves into a corner where they’re being enriched by those people because they take a significant chunk of our revenue as writers.

So I am moving to Beehiv and there will be a newsletter explaining the implications of that. Most of you might not even notice, it will just look different. For those of you who read in the app, I will no longer be publishing there so you will have to subscribe and put in your email address. And for those of you who are generously supporting the show and the newsletter through Substack, that should for the most part port over seamlessly because it’s Stripe, the backend is the same. So you shouldn’t notice anything, although there’s amazing customer support at Beehiv to support anyone who’s having any issues. The only people who will need to sort of resubscribe or recommit as readers and/or as paid subscribers are those who have paid or subscribed through the app and you will get a message about that. So anyway, that’s some business semantics, but that’s underway.

I’ve been working on it for a minute, but I think actually it makes sense for everything to just move while I am not actively writing. So that’ll be the month of June. It might be a little bit of July too depending on how I’m doing, but that’s going to happen and I’m excited because Beehiv has a lot more functionality. There are things that I can build and offer down the line that we talked about in that survey that I sent and just more ways to engage without and support this work and/or join things like workshops without needing to be a monthly paid member. And so yeah, there’s that. So please stay with me. And then the podcast, which is probably what you guys are most curious about since you’re listening to this here, will continue. I have an amazing month of June that’s already recorded and loaded and ready to go.

I have some really great conversations coming. I’ll be back at the end of June to talk a bit more about what’s happening with me and then in July I think I’m going to go into my archive and pull up some big episodes that many of you may have missed or that are worth re-listening to and I’m going to recontextualize them for you in this moment in time. And then I’ll be back in July also with my solo, sort of an update. But that’s the plan. And then August, maybe business as usual, but I’m in deep surrender so we’ll see. I also, since these solo podcasts feel like the inner sanctum, I’m going to be using this time where I’m stepping away from the weekly race to really work on my next book. It’s sort of a sabbatical recovery, but I need to go deep on that.

I’m very excited about my next book, I have to say, and there will be more to come on that soon, but it feels alive and important and like I’ve really found the book. And I’ll talk more about that process because I know many of you guys are creatives, but we’ll do that another day. What it looks like to sort of find the book, just the process, because it’s always interesting to me how hard it can be even when you’re writing something to understand what you’re writing until you’re done writing and then often you have to go and rewrite it. It’s quite painful I have to say.

Yeah, this is the first time in my career and in 25 years where I had, like many of you guys, a bit of calm in 2020, 2021. I had sort of this year when I didn’t have my day job and I was just working on my book and I was not yet allowed to launch a podcast. And so I didn’t have that and I didn’t have a newsletter and I experienced as I was writing On Our Best Behavior a lot of focused time just exclusively on that. And that was wonderful. I loved that as much as I missed being in people’s ears every week. Yeah, this is the first time that I’m doing anything like this and it’s a big confrontation with myself. What happens if I take the foot off the gas? What happens if I do less? I was talking to my son Max today.

I was driving him to school and I was explaining, he was asking me if I was scared and I was like, “No, what I get scared about is exactly what I’m explaining to you guys now.” And he was like, “Yeah, don’t you just think people are going to think that you’re lazy?” And I was like, “That is precisely the point Max. That’s it.” But that laziness is tied to livelihood.I’m not so worried. I don’t think you guys are going to judge me. I just think that there’s a lot of competition for people’s attention and time. And then it’s like, can I have faith actually in this container because there are moments where I’m like, “Oh my God, this show really after all this time it should be sort of quote unquote bigger and this is very difficult.” And there feels like all the countervailing forces are kind of against smaller shows like mine and is this even worth it?

This show barely covers the expenses of creating the show. It’s not a profit center for me, I’ll put it that way, but I just so love it. I love it so deeply. And then every time I’m sort of feeling that way, I encounter people in the wild who listen to the show and feel moved by it and the people who come on to share what they know. And I am just reminded of how amazing this community is and how desperately I would miss it if I weren’t doing it and that of course will always keep me going. I love it. This is not what pays my bills, but it feeds my heart and maybe it will pay my bills someday. You just never know. The world is wild. I’m working on this week’s newsletter right now, which was supposed to go out a few hours ago, but it’s about sort of the marketing tides that I’m observing and how things are shifting.

And I do feel like there’s about to be, there is a fracture. I don’t know how obvious it is to the general public yet, but that this manufacturing of virality is starting to become in this age of transparency really quite obvious. And I think in that process too, not only will it become obvious, it will become irreconcilable. So we’ll see. And that I think is a benefit to anyone who is trying to create something that’s a little bit more organic, durable, et cetera. And that’s what I remind myself too in these moments where I get scared because I am like, “Oh, and this community has been slowly forming. A lot of you have been with me since I worked at Goop and did that podcast and others have joined more recently, but it’s a bit like it’s a slow iterative, it just doesn’t disappear.” So that’s what I’m really working with.

Can I have faith? I have so much faith for other people. I have so much faith for the world. I think everyone else is sort of deserving of that embrace of faith. And that’s where I’m like, oh, and I don’t have any faith when it comes to myself. I have this, I got it, God, or divine or universe. I got this. Go worry about everyone else. I’m a good student. I’m a good soldier. I’m a good patient. I’m good. I’m good. I’m good. Don’t worry about me. And again, it goes to the grandiosity that I talked about at the beginning, but also I do need to have some faith for myself and I’ve never tested it. This is a trust fall for me, but I think I’m having going to have faith that I’m going to be very moved by just even, okay, Elise, from this, what if you slowed down?

What if you didn’t write every single week, but maybe you wrote every other week? Or what is a more sustainable structure for me going forward where I don’t paint myself into this corner where I have so much anxiety? And the anxiety is kind of funny because I don’t ... Substack is really supportive, but that’s not where I get my livelihood either. But I would love it to be. I think that’s the other thing that’s coming up for me is all the ancillary things I do so that I can do what I love and really leaning into actually I would love for what I do to be supportive enough that I could do less of the things that I don’t love as much. And could I have faith in that? Could I have faith that I can do good and do well simultaneously? Can I have faith that this show could be bigger and more financially remunerative even though I have no idea how to make that happen and no one really does?

But yeah, can I have more faith in this community? So there we go. And for anyone else who’s like, “Oh, I am on a rough initiation. I’m on a journey too. I am with you. “ These are funny things too because it is also something that as much as I’m like, “Oh, it needs to be relational and I need the birds and the trees and the whatnot.” This is a journey I have to take with myself and I know that people who are like, “Oh, I’ve been on a journey, know exactly what I’m talking about.” Where it is a little bit of that as well, where it is actually this is an individual process that I’m going to do with support and the person who I feel like I’m really taking with me and this is something I’ve been thinking about deeply and don’t yet have sort of the wisdom to reflect back, but I feel like there’s a need.

The person I’ve been taking with me who is so present every time I go into a meditation or do an energy healing, the person who is so present is my inner child, little Elise. And I can’t remember who told me, oh, I don’t know, half a year ago or a year ago. It was some sort of healer, maybe an astrologist that was like, “Your inner child is pissed.” But that’s what I’ve been working on too is mending that relationship with this inner child that is very tired and feels overpowered and feels like she doesn’t get to play. And so that is who’s consciously coming with me on this journey. Almost everything that I’m doing right now is focused around her and I wish I could be more clear about what that means. I just don’t quite know what that means either. I just know that there is a part of me that really wants my attention and that is who I am bringing with me.

That is who I’m going to let drive the car through this entire experience. All right, friends, I hope that wasn’t to again, like nothing that’s going to happen is earthshattering or even very scary. I will be right here with you if not in your inboxes. And as always, thank you for listening and being there. I remember Carla Schwiderski, who’s an energy healer who I love, who has written for the Substack a bit. She’s a Brazilian queen and she was saying, she’s come in contact with some parts of this community just through what she’s shared. People have gone to her. She does group healings and also individual work in person and remote.

She calls everyone sister, “Sister, you know sister.” She was like, “You are part of a wave. Your community is a wave and everyone is in this wave together and you guys are all moving vast amount of energy in the collective all over the globe and it’s a wave.” And that to me is an image. That’s beautiful. And I love that sort of this many leaders, everyone part of the same body of water moving in the same direction with power. So thank you for being in this wave with me and I will speak to you soon. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing.

You can also listen to this episode on Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. (It’s also available on YouTube.)

Bruce Feiler is one of the most delightful people to speak with. He was on Pulling the Thread a few years ago talking about life transitions, which was the topic of one of his many bestselling books. And now he’s back for a conversation around his new book A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World—and How It Can Save Us.

Today, Bruce shares some incredible stories of people around the world who are creating rituals for all kinds of moments—from celebrating professional and personal milestones to honor walks for organ donors, miscarriage rituals, and Taylor Swift divorce parties.

Bruce also guides me through a ritual design class in real time, showing how simple—and powerful—it can be to create a ritual of connection in our own lives.

MORE FROM BRUCE FEILER:

A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World—and How It Can Save Us

Life is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

Bruce Feiler on Pulling the Thread: “The Non-Linear Life”

Bruce’s Website

Follow Bruce on Instagram

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:

ELISE:

Bruce, I love knowing in a world full of uncertainty that like clockwork every two years I can see you again and we can talk about a big thinky book that you’ve written. You are so prolific and you do ... It’s my cup of tea, but these sort of landmark books around these topics that I think you’re quite prophetic. I’m sure people have told you that before, but life is in the transitions, for example. Didn’t that come out concurrently with COVID as we were experiencing one massive transition together and this book on ritual I feel like is a solve. It’s an antidote for the chaos that so many of us feel. So how do you know what’s coming, Bruce?

BRUCE:

Well, let me start with what has just come, which is this incredible privilege and honor and frigging pure delight to talk to you. I am doing a few conversations around this publication. I have looked forward to none more than the on that we are about to have. As you said, you and I met in the bottom of the pandemic and I just felt a kind of kindred ... I have such incredible affection for you and I have, as I just said to you before we came on air, if we can use that term, such appreciation for your willingness to go to places and pull the rest of us to places that we might stop before we walk through that door. And your voice is so singular and my ability to be in this orbit just thrills me to such end. And so I just want to say that publicly.

I know everybody listening feels that and maybe they don’t get the chance to say it, but I’m going to say it on behalf of them. So thank you. Thank you for what you’re doing. Thank you. Thank you for keeping me. So

ELISE:

Sweet. Thank you.

BRUCE:

I’ll take

ELISE:

That. I’ll hold it. Thank you.

BRUCE:

Yes, good. Please do because I can’t mean it more if I said it another three times. I don’t know. A few times in my life I’ve been able to see around corners. My wife likes to tell this story that walking the Bible, my book about tracing the five books of Moses through three continents and five countries and four war zones came out in the spring of 2001 and six months later of course was nine eleven. By the way, that’s 25 years ago walking the Bible. Wild.

That is wild. 25 years this very month. And five days after nine eleven, we were sitting at a friend’s Shabbat table actually and everybody was talking about what happened. That was on a Tuesday, this was on a Saturday. And I was like, “Yeah, this is the greatest family viewed in history. This goes back to Abraham. He’s the shared ancestor of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. And as Linda, my wife tells this story. Everyone’s nodding along and we’re connecting it to the ancient world, exactly the kind of stuff that you have done that you tend to be more like in the middle ages, but you get the point. And at the end of this, I said, Trust me, Abraham’s going to be on the cover of Time Magazine a year from now. And as Linda says, everyone’s nodding their head and then suddenly when I said that everyone’s shaking their head like, “What are you talking about?”

And obviously a lot of people are listening to us, but as you can see over my shoulder, there’s a cover of Abraham. There’s a picture of Abraham on the cover of Time Magazine a year later. I actually happened to put him there. That was an excerpt of my book on Abraham and sort of the interfaith movement that it launched. So every now and then I can see Around Corners. A lot of times I see Around Corners and hit brick walls and I’m dead wrong. And what happened with Transitions was when I started that work in 2017 of collecting and analyzing stories, I wasn’t thinking about transitions. I was just like, no one knows how to tell their life story anymore. What can I do to help? Because this happened to me. I was a storyteller with a very linear life. I figured out what I wanted to do early.

I did it for no money. I had some success. I got married. I had children. That’s the linear fantasy that we all have. And then suddenly my life blew up in my 40s. I got cancer. As you remember, I had financial troubles and then my dad got Parkinson’s, got very depressed and tried to take his own life six times in 12 weeks. So I was the storyteller who was ashamed to tell my story. And when I did, it turned out everyone has stories when their lives blow up. And so I started collecting these stories. It’s now been 500 that I’ve collected in less than a decade, all bulks of life, all 50 states. And I wrote that book Life is in the Transitions. And in 2019, I came forth and I said, “I’ve got this book on transitions. Why is no one talking about life transitions?

Why has there not been a major book on this since 1979?” And everybody looked at me like I was crazy. I thought I had seen around a corner and I was wrong. And then the pandemic hit and suddenly the entire planet was in a life transition at the same time for the first time in a century. So it turned out in that case I had a language for what people were feeling. And I think that kind of the reaction to that book is this in a lot of ways. And it was like, oh, this is a technical scientific term, but you’re putting words to something that I felt that I didn’t know there were words for. Linda likes to say that I have soft knowledge about hard things. And most public discourse is about having hard knowledge about hard things. You need a hot take, right?

I’m doing hot takes on soft topics and therefore it’s a little confusing, I think for the culture. And then in a lot of ways this happened again what was I think then three years later and yet again, I had a feeling that I couldn’t describe I was ashamed about. And then when I started talking about it, it turns out that a lot of people had that feeling too. And that’s what led us to this conversation.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, I’m sure you’re probably familiar with the work of Francis Weller who does so much work around initiation and death and he talks about these rough initiations and what you’re describing is I think what happens to all of us if we live long enough, which are these rough initiations. And then he also talks about how trauma is formed when we are not able to integrate what’s happened to us on the most basic level. And so when you think about our culture right now, we are lacking, although you make some really good arguments for these nascent rituals and initiations that have started to percolate throughout or they just look a little different, but we don’t have as many holding rituals as we once had and that’s bowling alone, that’s a lack of people going to church, myself included, I don’t go to serve, I’m an unaffiliated spiritual person, but we just don’t have it.

And it’s would you say to our detriment?

BRUCE:

Well, I think we’re in this space. So let me talk about how I came into this space and then sort of what I feel like I have found in this space, which I do think is a quite hopeful and profound message. So what happened was my wife and I are the parents of identical twin daughters as you know. 21 years ago we went from empty nest to full nest in 32 minutes and then 18 years later, it’s a lifequake. It was joyful, but it was a lifequake. Everything changed. 18 years later, we went from fullness to empty nest in 32 minutes when we dropped our daughters off at opposite end of the same college. And we came back to our home in Brooklyn where we live now and I walked in our front door and I felt homesick in my own home and it was exactly that feeling.

I was very precise about it. I was like, “You are out of your mind. You cannot tell anybody this word. That’s what a kid feels on their first sleepover or an adolescent feels when they go to a sleepaway camp here, this disgraced word and feeling, keep it to yourself.” And as we’ve been saying, I spent the previous many years thinking about lifequakes and life transitions, right? Life quake is a massive burst of change that when it has pain and confusion but can hold hope and renewal. That’s what life is in the transitions is about. And I though, “Oh, I’m ready for this. I’m the transition guy. I wrote a busselling book and I gave a TED Talk and I teach a TED course. I am supposed to be qualified in the public sense for this. “ And I thought, “I need a ritual. I need something.” And that’s when I stumbled into this paradox because it wasn’t just my children.

My dad had just died, my mom was aging, my marriage now needs to be renegotiated, all my friendships remade. And I had this feeling that so many of us have, we’re cheating on our friends with our phones, that we’ve sort of abdicated human connection in favor of isolated interaction through screens and I didn’t really know how to do it. And what I stumbled into is this paradox that I think shapes so much of our lives. And the essence of the paradox, it’s like three parts. Part number one is ritual works. Ritual is the original elemental human act. It’s the oldest algorithm that we have. We have evidence going back 300,000 years before we were anatomically human that the first things our ancestors did to connect them with others was to bury their dead and to have ceremonies and rituals. We have this inside caves with bones and ochre and all this kind of stuff.

And so we think today that religion created ritual, which has created a lot of the confusion that you mentioned, but in fact, it’s the other way around. We have organized ritual hundreds of thousands of years before we have organized religion. So you have ritual going back to our oldest humanity. And essentially when organized religion pops up in the late first millennium BCE, it sort of does a takeover in modern language and it’s incredible. And they create infrastructures. Five of the Catholic sacraments are about moments of transition, right? You go to the Jewish calendar, the Hinduka. Every calendar that organized religion has all these life rituals in the middle of it. And then so what’s happened when organized religion begins to sort of take a step back and then later more steps back from the center of public life, we have disengaged our lives from the ritual calendar that we grew up with.

And so just to put some numbers on that, Arnold Van Ganep, when he coins the phrase rites of passage, says that what he calls the big four life transitions in 1909, birth, coming of age, marriage, death. Okay. At that time the average lifespan was in the 40s, of course now it’s in the 80s. And most of those we’ve turned our backs on. People are not having birth rituals, coming of age rituals are in shambles. Only half of us are married anymore. In 1960, 90% of American adults got married. Now only half of us are married at any one time. And maybe you were aware of this because you are so attuned to these questions, but we’re not getting buried anymore. Only a third of us are buried now. In 1970, 5% of Americans were cremated. Now it’s 65% going to 80, only one in four is buried, only one in five has a ceremony of any kind.

ELISE:

Wow.

BRUCE:

So as you say, we are in what I call a celebration recession. So the traditional ways we’ve interacted and the number, if you add up, and I ran the numbers on this, you add up births and deaths and marriages. The average person in 1800 had 80% more ritual occasions than we have today. So it took us essentially a hundred centuries, that’s 10,000 years to create these collective occasions around moments of instability to mark them ceremony, celebration, retro, or whatever you want to call it. And it’s taken us 25 years to abandon them. So that would be depressing if it weren’t for this other side, which is what you hinted at, which is that alongside this recession, there’s a recovery going on of people inventing new rituals, new ways of gathering. Some are just new names like celebration of life or commitment ceremony. Some are silly like promposals and gender reveals, but some of them are very profound and I think dovetail with a lot of your work because they are shadow rituals that organized institutions did not mark.

So not just marriage but divorce, not just fertility but infertility, not just birth but still birth, not just first menstruation, but last menstruation, groaning and aging and coming into your voice as a mature woman. And so this is very interesting. And then they’re so creative, as you said, marking things that we never marked, cancer versaries, sober versaries, NICU graduations, adoption ceremonies, honor walks for people donating organs, first cell phone, okay, mom proms, daddy-daughter dances. You can go right down the line. I think the hopeful message that I feel that’s been hiding in playing sight is that there is a backlash going on to digital saturation, political polarization, now to the AI onslaught where people are saying, “I’m just not going to let these technologies take it over.” And it’s being led by young people and the core thing, then you can take this wherever you want to go.

The core way to understand this in my view is that top down pre-scripted hierarchical, often patriarchal life rituals that were forced on people are dying and in many cases dead. They are being replaced by bottom up, bespoke, individually created occasions to get together for occasions that were not previously honored, but that except in these long, non-linear lives that we have, we spend half of our adult lives in transition and we go through multiple members. I want a doula maybe for my birth of my child, but maybe for the death of my mother, but also for the closing of a company or for any project that you’re bringing to a close. So people, there’s this craving for gathering, but no one knows how to do it. And so a lot of what I’ve tried to do in a time to gather is the old rules don’t apply.

The new rules haven’t been written. Let’s come up with a code that anybody can do at any moment to help people together.

ELISE:

Preach.

There’s this moment at the beginning where you describe the groundstakes in a way that I thought was so beautiful and revelatory. And so do you mind if I read to you from your book?

BRUCE:

Please. Your course will be better than mine.

ELISE:

Okay. So you write, “All humans go through times when we feel out of sync, out of touch, or out of step with those around us. This uncertainty often escalates in moments of addition or subtraction. When someone joins the group, a baby, a spouse, when someone leaves the group, a death, a divorce, a coming of age, when someone destabilizes the group, gets sick, retires, sets off on a new path. A hallmark of being alive is that when we experience such moments of unbelonging, we take steps to reaffirm our belonging. We gather, we honor, we weep, we mourn, we feast, we dance, we listen, we share. When the group becomes tender, we tend the group. We all become groupkeepers. We turn to ritual. Beautiful. And I just think I was like, oh, this idea of being out of sync or falling out of belonging I think is so resonant to so many people.

It’s when you’re going through something and you’re like, how is everyone just carrying on like normal? My world has stopped for wonderful reasons or terrible reasons. And I think one, this creativity that you describe is inspiring. There’s no reason that we need ... I don’t think anyone’s really interested in following sort of old scripts necessarily, but it’s also an invitation I think that many, maybe it’s women more than men, I don’t know, but it’s hard to be like, I need to call my circle. I need a ritual. And maybe as this becomes more pronounced in the culture, people will recognize that there’s a way to do this, to acknowledge whatever they’re going through in a really beautiful way. Can you talk, I mean, this is in some ways I think one example, but I was so moved by the origin story of these honor walks.

BRUCE:

Incredible.

ELISE:

Can you tell that story?

BRUCE:

I’m happy to tell this story. I’m going to give you a warning.

ELISE:

Yeah. You’re going

BRUCE:

To cry? No and everybody ... I might cry. Sometimes I’ll cry when I tell the story. And it teased everybody else. I’m going to tell that story and then you and I are going to do, everybody should know. I gave you no advanced warning, but you and I are going to do a real time ritual design class once I tell this story.

ELISE:

Oh my God.

BRUCE:

Amazing.

ELISE:

Okay.

BRUCE:

Okay. We’re going to find something in your life and we’re going to show absolutely how easy it is to create a ritual of connection. Okay? So you can think about this. I gave you whatever the length of this story is. To go back to the quote and to go back to the core issue that’s going on, a nounless, verbless, unable to be described in this sense of craving longing, but a frustration that what is the script that my longing fits into? That’s a core problem. If you go back to the kind of essence of the work that I’ve done since I’ve known you and that you and I are now having our third conversation about, it’s that we have linear expectations for our lives, but we have non-linear real lives. And that gap between the expectations of linearity and the reality of non-linearity produces this sense that my life is off schedule or off kilter or somehow the life I’m living is not the life I want to be living.

What’s going on now and that work in essence was about how individuals manage their lives. And this work that I’ve been on now is essentially how groups manage themselves. How do families, how do neighborhoods, how do teams, how do communities, what goes on? And so therefore we think that we know back to the script we were told, you’re supposed to have four big life rituals in order, birth, coming of age, marriage, death. And by the way, if you choose not to get married or have children or get married and have divorced, it’s like you’re off schedule and you could be decades before one of these pre-approved rituals is supposed to come your way. But now that people are decoupled and have permission to not follow them, they’re saying, “I want rituals when my life takes a swirl or a curve or a wallop or whatever it might be.

One of those people is a woman named Missy Holiday. She grows up in a small town in Ohio. Father’s the mayor and fire achieved mother teaches Presbyterian Sunday school. She grows up, becomes a nurse, gets married and moves to Indianapolis. She comes back home one weekend. Her younger sister whispers that she’s about to get engaged the next week, gets in her car, drives to work, slides on some ice and wraps her car around a tree. So suddenly we have a big wallop. We have a lifequake in the middle of this family. They’re trained, they get her to the hospital. They’re to brain tests, she’s not living, but her body is still functioning. At six in the morning, a doctor they never met walks in and say, “She’s an organ donor. We’re taking her away.” And boom, within minutes, she’s out the door. And Missy is just like, “I don’t want anybody to have this done in such a horrific way as I just experienced.” So she talks to her husband, she quits the nursing and she moves back home and she starts working in a donor support group and she finds incredible conflict between and among the three core groups, the family, the hospital, and the people who are trying to use the organs to save another life.

And she says, “You know what? “ And then she turns on the TV one day and she sees one of those incredibly beautiful rituals to honor a police officer, Slain, where they line the hallway. We all have that visual. And we remember, especially for those of us who remember nine eleven and she said, “You know what? I need a ritual. I’m not a ritual designer, but what I’m going to ... “ So she starts talking to everybody. She starts thinking, “What does this group need? What does that group need?” And she creates a ritual. And so what happens is, so she plans, it takes a long time. She plans it. The first time they do it, they put the living deceased person, if you will, into a gurney. She puts this phone with a Spotify account. The family picks Annie’s song. They push the body out into the hallway and the entire, and I mean the entire hospital staff lined in blue scrubs is aligned the hallway to pay respect with a flameless blue and yellow color that’s the colors of organ donation.

They push the body down. They get exactly five feet from the double doors where the body is going to go into the operating room where the organs can be harvested. The family says goodbye and she calls this an honor walk and one of her rules is no one can take a picture. She makes an exception for the woman who pushed the widow. The next morning, Missy, the woman I’m talking to, her phone blows up, “I want to do an honor walk. How do I solve this problem? What do I do there?” It turns out that woman posts the picture on Facebook. It gets two million likes. There are 50 donor support organizations in this country and dozens around the world. They all do honor walks. They have a quarter of a billion views on YouTube. There was one on the front page of my hometown paper in Savannah, Georgia within the last few weeks.

So this is a perfect hall of fame example of a new modern ritual. Well, then nobody knew what was coming. First of all, it wouldn’t have been in the ancient world because they didn’t or your beloved middle ages because there would be no organ donation, right? That’s a 75-year-old custom at all. It’s a pain no one realized that they have, but it’s a pain that can meaningfully be bombed by having a group ceremony. And I’ve got them for adoption ceremonies for adoption reunion ceremonies. And as you said, a lot of these are led by women, but there’s also a parallel thing going on in the men’s movement called Masogi, which is the medieval ritual of jumping into cold waterfalls in Japan that has been modernized for men athletes. And so there’s this Masogi movement where people want to do once a year, men mostly, but not all men, do one very hard thing that might take their life to give them confidence that they can do other hard things.

I’m talking about cutting two holes in a frozen lake and swimming from one to the other. Swimming with sharks, paddling in the Amazon with alligators, very extreme. In the NBA when this started, they had a boulder in the bottom of San Bernardino Harbor and it was like, you got to move the boulder a mile, but you got to go down 10 feet and everybody moves at about six inches and you have to do teamwork. And so this has been taken over by Joe Rogan and all these people of an example of kind of male bonding let’s use experience. Masogi has two rules. The first rule is you can have only a 50% chance of survival in what you do and the second is don’t die. So in the same way that women have rewritten and brought old things like placenta rituals and stillbirth ritual, my favorite chapter, I mean, Linda’s favorite chapter in the book is the Taylor Swift Divorce Party about this woman who creates a new ritual around divorce with shake it off cupcakes and we are never ever getting back together napkins.

And it’s like you can be sad that your marriage is over but you don’t want to be alone. My favorite is the one about the revival of new ways to honor deceased children because no organized religion had a way to mark stillbirth. In Judaism, Maimonide is the greatest thinker of all time. If you die before 31 days, it’s as if you never lived. The Catholic church, if you die without being baptized, you’re not going to heaven. In Ireland, people would take these dads, usually would take these stillborn babies, take them to the edge of town, bury them under abandoned churches so that water coming down from the roof would give them what are called Eavesdrop burials surreptitiously baptized them so they could go to heaven invented an entirely new ritual that was outside the mainstream and now women are bringing that with miscarriage rituals that are incredibly powerful.

So it’s all the same thing. As one person said to me, a millennial ritual designer, I need a ritual when I want it when I need it. And she talked about the double mastectomy ritual for her friend. So anything will work. Okay. So with that, I’m turning to you, my friend. We’re going to create a ritual now in real time to show people that these are the three or five things you knew to do a ritual. So give us something that you’re willing to share. Could be something personal, could be a milestone with a family member, could be a professional project. What is something that you’re going through now that we’re going to design you a ritual for? And it could be joyful like a graduation or a birthday or a milestone professional moment. It could be mournful like a loss of a loved one or a loss of a job or the death of a pet or whatever it might be.

ELISE:

All right. I mean, I am going through some stuff maybe without being specific. How about a ritual for a non-life-threatening health journey?

BRUCE:

Perfect. Okay. We’re going to go through a non-life-threatening health matter and everybody listening to us know someone who’s going through that. Okay, here’s what we need. You need five things to make a ritual successful. Okay. What is a ritual? A ritual is a shared, unnecessary act that makes us feel at home. Okay. It’s an act because we’re doing something. We’re not talking, we’re doing something. It’s shared it’s going to connect us. It’s unnecessary because you don’t need to get down on one knee to get engaged or wear black to mourn or circle the bride six times to get married or put vermilion in your hair. These are unnecessities that become necessities because we give them collective meaning. And back to homesickness, we want to feel safe and secure in the ideal version of the home that we have. Okay? So first question is, first thing you do is you need boundaries.

Okay. We need to welcome, barring this phrase from the Catholic church, welcome with joy. We need to create a circle, open the circle. Okay. Where are we doing this? Let’s start with that. We doing this in your backyard, we doing it at your home, we’re doing the top of a mountain, we’re doing it on a beach. In

ELISE:

Nature. Somewhere, we’re

BRUCE:

Doing it in

ELISE:

Nature. Yes.

BRUCE:

We’re doing it in nature. Okay? Yes. And who are we inviting?

ELISE:

My husband and some close girlfriends who enjoyed the woo. Okay.

BRUCE:

Who enjoyed the woo. I’m going to give you a woo-free one, but that’s fine. Some people like the woo. So we’re going to have a group of six, eight, 10?

ELISE:

Six.

BRUCE:

Six. Okay, fine. We’re going to go to the wits. First thing, we’ve now traveled to nature. We’ve got to open the circle. Okay. We got to light a candle. We got to form flowers. So what are we going to do to set the boundary and the purpose of the boundary? Think about this. Circuses have rings, trials have courtrooms. Okay. Yogas have yoga thing. Wash your feet. I went to a cacao ceremony in Bali, like you wash your feet before you walk in. I will say that anything I’m doing here I’ve done before. So we didn’t say this, so I’ll just take a second. I then, after figuring out this is what I wanted to do, I went to rituals in 16 countries on six continents, group baptism at the Vatican, traditional bride price in South Africa adolescent tooth filing in Bali, six weddings in a day in Las Vegas, 10 funerals in a week in Ireland.

Everything I’m bringing, cold plunging, forest bathing, I’ve done it all. And we’re going to bring some of these ideas. So what’s the boundary? The boundary is supposed to say outside we were that, but inside we are this. How are we going to set the boundary at the start of this thing?

ELISE:

Everyone is going to bring a totem and we’re going to set a circle with each person placing a totemic item.

BRUCE:

Perfect. And they’re going to place it at their feet in the middle of the circle or?

ELISE:

At their back.

BRUCE:

At their back. Okay, fine. So it’d be perfect. It’s the boundary. It’s exactly what we’re looking for here. Okay. Number two, we need stakes. What we need to do is define the tension and direct our intention. So we need to somehow say, okay, we are here because one of us is experiencing some issues around their body or mind or general wellbeing. We can just focus on that or everybody could focus on their own. So you could open it up that way. So we need to set the stakes. How are we setting the stakes? We’re here to celebrate because they’re getting married. We’re here to celebrate they’re about to have a baby. Define the tension and identify the intention. That could be a song, that could be remarks, that could be lighting a candle. How are we going to define the stakes?

ELISE:

We’re going to breed together. There’s going to be a sort of short meditation to get everyone’s parasympathetic, to get us all into space.

BRUCE:

A lot of data that rituals. Yeah. They align us. Yep.

ELISE:

Yeah, yeah. Getting into alignment. I as someone who’s very uncomfortable with attention, always want everything to be a shared. So to me, it becomes a ritual where everyone is bringing some part of it or relating to it in some way in themselves.

BRUCE:

So you offer an invitation. Okay. I’m thinking about this. You’re welcome to think about me, but really I’d prefer for you to think about you. I wouldn’t advise making them, but you open it up inviting them to think about a similar moment of tension in their own lives. Could be health, could be personal, could be professional, whatever it might be. Okay, good. We’ve now defined the stakes here. Now we’re going to go to number three. What you need is you need the peace plan. You need compromise. The rituals inherently life has conflict. And back to like, oh, it’s woo-woo. They’re great rituals can be wonderful. And that’s a lot of the language. But the truth is that’s not one of their main functions. One of their main functions is to modulate the conflict.

You and I are getting married. You want a big wedding? I want a small wedding. Okay. You want your preacher. I want my sister. Okay. You want to have your sorority sisters by you. I want to be alone. There’s conflict. Okay. You’re not having a baby. You want to do this to the baby. You want to baptize the baby or circumcise the baby. I don’t want to do that. The ritual, this is like the truest and least romantic thing, but it’s about compromised rehearsal. Because if you don’t get the tensions out, I’m like, I’ll just tell you a quick story while you think about what are we going to do in the middle. But a quick story, when my dad died eight years after that suicide spree that I described, what kept him alive was I would send him an email every Monday morning and he would write it down until weeks before he died.

He finished a 65,000 word memoir, one story, one question, one week at a time. Wow. And when he died and I flew back from Brooklyn where I lived to Georgia where I’m from and we were talking with the rabbi and my mother says she doesn’t want dirt thrown on the casket. She finds it barbaric. She wants long stem yellow roses. My sister says the dirt’s my favorite part. It’s the only part that I like. Long stem yellow roses are too hallmark. And nobody was moving. And I was like, “Okay, Rabbi, I think I got to call you back.” And then I sort of middle childhood my way through a compromise by doing what I later learned ritual designers do all the time. What’s really after what you’re saying, mom? Is this about assimilation about appearances? What’s really about this to my sister? And so what do we do?

I was like to my sister, she lived with a guy for 62 years. She wants long stem yellow roses. Let’s get her some roses. So we ended up getting three dozen long stem yellow roses. This was sort of a COVID graveside funeral, so it was small. And then my mom didn’t like dirt. My dad loved nothing more than walking on the beach on Tyvee Island, Georgia. So we got little packets of sand and we gave everyone a choice. The ritual surfaced the conflict and then the ritual resolved the conflict. So what you want now in this middle part is a way to honor that everybody’s experiencing something different. I will give you an example. I was asked last week to lead a ritual at TED and so it was a ritual renewal. It ended up being standing room only and they asked me to do it again two days later and we had 50 people in the room and I went around and gave everybody a cube of bitter chocolate.

We divided into pears because in a group of 50, it’s too much to share. So we divided into pairs, gave everybody a piece of bitter chocolate, take a minute or two, tell your partner what is it that you’re struggling with right now and then your partner will share what they’re struggling with. And then we passed around little cubes sections of sweet chocolate and then resolve the tension on your tongue, eat the sweet chocolate and then tell your partner what would be a sweet outcome of this tension.

What is something we can do either to the group because they’re six or maybe even better pair people off so they can share with someone what it is that they’ve identified is their intention. So what can we do there?

ELISE:

I’d want it shared collectively. I think that ... That’s such a good question. I’m trying to think of the internal conflict. I mean, I think maybe in rituals when we have to go out on a journey by ourselves, even

BRUCE:

Though

ELISE:

Everyone’s impacted, the whole family system is impacted. That conflict to me is what’s the path of the mountain and-

BRUCE:

Oh, I like this. Go with this. Right. So how could people simulate their own path up the mountain? I mean, that would be interesting. You could send people off to reflect on what path they are on, go, “This is taken directly from forest bath work. Go find something in nature that calls you, reflect on what you’re finding. It could be a tree, a blade of grass, a bird, a flower, a tree that’s fallen over, a tree stump. Go take a walk, see something, find something that reflects the journey that you’re on and then come back and share with the group what it is, what path you’re going to be on. You could do kind of a mini forest bathing. This feels already like a forest bathing thing. And what’s interesting about forest bathing, which began, for those of you who don’t know, began in the 80s in Japan where 80% of Japan is forested, but only 20% is habitable.

So you got 160 million people living in an area the size of South Carolina and the forestry surface wanted to get them to go. And so they invented this thing called Shin Runyoku, which is forest bathing is the English term that stuck. And now this is done in 70 countries around the world and it’s different from a walk in the park. It’s different from taking your dog for a walk in the woods because you do it shared. You both have individual experiences and then come back and share. So I think there’s something here you could easily borrow from far. Go take a little walk, se what draws you and then come back with the group and share what you did.

ELISE:

I love that.

BRUCE:

Okay.

ELISE:

Yeah. Okay.

BRUCE:

Okay. Okay, let’s keep going. So we’ve got boundaries, we’ve got stakes. We now have this compromise. We want everybody to do their own thing and then share with the group. Now what you need is empathy. This is the hold space idea that comes up so often. We need to offer people support for whatever journey they are on. When we did this at TED, I had people when they first walked in say what was giving them joy at that moment, that was welcome with joy. We had this flameless candles and then they had the chocolate thing where they learned their partner’s struggle and what was their sweet dream. And then I had these empty bowls and then everyone put the flameless candle in the bowl and shared a wish for their partner. I wish you a healthy recovery, right? I wish you finding the work that you want.

I wish you release from the guilt you feel about that. I wish you to not hold yourself to such perfectionism and standards and to be forgiving to yourself. And then what happened was I asked people to do this one by one and over time they just naturally started going up in the same pairs that they were in holding hands as if giving a wedding vow and shared their wish directly into the eyes of the other person. And what was powerful about that, it’s a reminder, Elise, that all of these rituals have every other one in them. As you know, I’ve rebranded them in this book, not birth, coming of age, marriage, death, but welcoming, becoming, loving, mourning and renewing. I learned this from my kids because when we had this ritual before they went to college, they were sadder about the end of their childhood than they were about the insecurity of going into young adulthood.

I think we felt that as parents. I was sadder about the losing and missing the day-to-day dadding that I’m a very involved dad, as you might imagine, would do than I was about what turned out to be a different way of relating to young adults. So what can we do now that we’ve heard everyone else’s journey to offer them solace, comfort? I’m here to celebrate with you. I’m here to mourn with you. I’m here to laugh with you. I’m here to weep. It’s all there in Ecclesiastes. So what can we do now to honor the stories that other people have shared and say you’re not alone?

ELISE:

I mean, I think just the communion of it alone is an opportunity for that. As I’m listening, I’m sure everyone listening to actually relate to this too. It’s like I love doing this for other people. There’s nothing more joyful. I was talking about this with my friend Richard Christensen last night. He was talking about the role of hosting and service and how affirming and wonderful it is to take ... His dog just died and he was very sick at the end and Richard was talking about tending to this dog freeway and taking him outside to go to the bathroom, just lining up his pills. And now that freeway is gone, just the emptiness of not being able to serve. And I feel that. I love taking care of people and being there and supporting them in these moments. And yet I so struggle to let anyone do that for me.

It’s such a ... I have a reflexive ... I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what it is, but I think what I’m going through right now is actually a direct confrontation with me about taking my own medicine. And as a person of faith, I have so much faith in everyone else’s lives or ability to ... I’m like, I can see the path, I can understand the lesson, et cetera. And then I don’t weirdly have faith and I don’t have it for myself. Does that make sense? And so-

BRUCE:

I appreciate that. Look, first of all, this reminds me when I was sick, when I got cancer at 43 with three-year-old identical twin daughters.

ELISE:

Bone cancer, right?

BRUCE:

Bone cancer in my left femur. So I was on crutches for two years. I was on chemo for a year. I was on a cane for a year after that. My leg was rebuilt. I had a surgery, had a cancer that only a hundred adults a year get and a surgery only two people before me had ever been lucky enough to have. And yeah, I remember sitting in the second floor window in our bedroom, which is one of the few places I could go for much of it, looking out the window and down and people walking like, “You don’t have cancer. You’re not worried about dying.” This sort of hostility that came out of my fear of being alone and being isolated and it totally upended the normal rules of the group. So suddenly now my mother and my mother, like the people above my generation were taking care of me and of course that meant I was treated like a kid because that’s how caregiving goes and then I’m supposed to be parenting my kids at the same time.

So this is exactly what we’re talking about. It’s the instability in the group and the group has to remake itself and reassign roles. And that’s a lot of what we’re talking, this beautiful death ritual described by a designer named Sarah Kerr. When she comes into a family when the dad’s about to die at the patriarch, there’s this murky grayness and she said everything was out of place and she puts their hands, have them anoint the body, put their hand on the body. She talks about there being an island of the living and an island of the dead. And our job is to push the living to go to the island of the dead. And you do that by calling out the people around Aunt Sarah, Uncle Bobby, the dog, this new person is calling to join you. And then she says there’s this moment of incredible pain and realization where you’re looking around and, “We’re the family now.” And then she has them take the same oil and anoint everybody of the living family and saying, “Okay, we’re beginning to realize that all the roles that the patriarch played, we now have to assume in some form or another the group has to remake itself.

That’s why we’re doing this. “ So since you say you’re not comfortable doing this, what I might recommend here is that you go first, you pick somebody else in the circle and say, “Here’s my wish for you for the future. This is what I will vow to do to hold you up to walk by your side to celebrate you if you need to be celebrated or mourn with you if you need to be mourned.” And then that person will pick somebody else and sooner or later there are not that many people in the circle someone’s going to have to come to you and hold space for you. Here’s how we’re going to close. We’re going to close with a moment of hope.

I talked to this designer, I mentioned her earlier, Faith is her name and she talked to young people, hundreds and hundreds of coffees with people saying things she didn’t imagine. I spent my whole life wanting to do this career. I got a major and then I got to graduate school. I started doing it three years in. I don’t like it. I want to find love, but I’m not ready. My body’s not ready for love. I love my parents, but I need some distance from my things that nobody would’ve ever imagined to create a ritual. And she’s the one who did this double mastectomy ritual and where she just invited people over, we’re not going to heal, we’re not going to lecture, we’re just going to hold space. They bought gifts, they bought comfy clothing because we all know those cancer surgeries have drains and tubes and monitors.

And what faith said to me was, “What I’m listening for in the ritual is the deepest fear and the highest hope.”

ELISE:

Beautiful.

BRUCE:

And the purpose of the ritual is to turn the fear into hope. So we want to end with a moment of hope. What I’ve been doing in rituals is taking pebbles and giving people permanent, colorful markers and having them write their hope on this pebble. Got this idea from a ritual designer who when she had miscarriages, she went to the beach and she took stones and she threw them into the water. She said, people thought I was crazy, but I wrote out the names I had picked for my child, the dreams I had for that child, all those things that I had to let go. So what I asked people to do was to write stones, write their hope out in a word or a phrase, go to the middle of the circuit, put it upside down where it remains anonymous. And I went to an exquisite celebration of life for a man in his forties who died by suicide in Dublin.

It was in the crematorium and the woman, this incredible woman, Karen Dempsey is her name. She goes by the Instagram moniker, bald priestess. She has alopecia, baldhead, beautiful makeup. Remember I said that the rituals, they don’t avoid the conflict. They lean into the conflict. She said, “We’re here to honor Carl’s life and to deal with our own confusion of how Carl chose to end that life. And I have here a bowl of pebbles near where he died. I invite you to come take a pebble, take it home with you and keep it and remember Carl or give it back to nature to return it to Carl lived and where Carl died. And so then what we do is everybody then goes up, goes, picks up someone else’s stone, reads their hope out loud and then carries that home, that hope with them. So we now are now trying to fulfill not only our own hope but the hope of somebody else in our group.

We’ve created a kind of web of hope that will last going into the future. So what can we do to end this ritual, Elise, where everybody can have a moment of hope? And you know this, I’m sure you know this term, your best possible self, right? This is the world you live in.

You can’t achieve your best possible self if you don’t identify your best possible self, right? This is our best possible selves. What is this group in its greatest capacity? So how are we going to end your ritual?

ELISE:

I am going to borrow everyone’s totem for the journey. Oh my gosh.

BRUCE:

So you’re going to take home their totems.

ELISE:

I’m going to take home everyone’s totem. They’re going to give them to me first. Totems.

I’m going to take home with the totems for safekeeping stewardship and to take where I’m glowing and then I’ll be back and I’ll return them.

BRUCE:

Perfect. So in another ritual at the end of the journey, my recommendation would be that you consider, I’ll do it as an invitation, not as a wagging my finger, have them and view it with a hope.

ELISE:

Yeah, exactly. I’m going to have them ... Yeah, now I’m reconceiving. And so maybe I’m going to get a grid. I’m going to have everyone choose a crystal and then I’m going to have them charge it over the course of the ritual and give it back to me and I can grit it for myself. Little compass.

BRUCE:

So on the journey that you’re about to undertake, I just pulled for those of you who are not watching us on YouTube, I pulled the stone that I ended up with when I did this in TED and I’ll hold it up to the camera and it says fear into hope. I love that. So that was someone else’s hope and it’s now my hope. Good handwriting by the way.

That’s fine. That’s so funny. It was like the people losing hair and others with people with hair. And I went sauna and cold pledging in Copenhagen. And what I noticed was everybody was thinner, fitter, and more tattooed than mine. And there were three rounds. And then when the guy who was leading this sound of comb pledge ritual called Soundagoose, he said to me, yeah, everybody’s checking everybody out in the first one and the second they’re neutral. And by the end, they’re focused on their own journey. I was like, oh yeah, I fit that to the T. So yeah, the good handwriting, but that’s what back to the scene around the corners and what the thing that we feel to me is the craving for connection. And that’s the unifying idea now, but we don’t know how to connect, which is in effect what a time to gather my offering here is in effect, an invitation.

If you come on this journey, you’re going to, by the way, meet the most amazing people and we’ve just talked about some of them, go to these extraordinary things backstage, but generally feel empowered to do this for yourself. By the way, let’s say one more thing about this journey, about this ritual we just designed took us 15 minutes and doesn’t cost a dollar. You don’t need to do a lot. We’re not doing dishes after this is over. We don’t have to have elaborate invitation. You don’t have to have a degree. You can just say, “I’m in a place I need to connect with others.” And there is a blueprint of togetherness. There are simple things you can do today, tonight, tomorrow, this afternoon, this summer for a graduation, a birthday party, a shower, a pregnancy, or a loss of a loved one, a loss of a pet, a loss of a job, a loss of a stage of life.

Whatever you’re feeling, you can create a ritual, you will make yourself happier and you’ll make everybody in the group happier.

ELISE:

Thank you and thank you for this book and you’re just delightful. So a time to gather, everyone. It’s always a good time to gather. Bruce talked about this in the beginning, this idea that this feeling of homesickness and this longing, and I think that that’s something that almost to a one, just like a vast majority of us carry. I think it’s largely intergenerational and it gets into these questions of indigeneity and how cultural events both chosen and deeply not chosen have moved us around the globe across centuries. And it’s this, where did I come from? You could say in a spiritual sense that home is way beyond the earthly plane and that we all come from somewhere else. I do think some of us are aliens. That’s a whole nother conversation, friends. But anyway, the way that he positions rituals as bringing back into cohesiveness after you’ve been disconnected I think is such a helpful reframe, sort of bringing you back into the rhythm or the pulse of the group when you feel out of sync.

And then before I go, I just wanted to ... He writes about this guy, Ezra Bookman, who designs rituals, is a ritual designer and he talks about the difference and this was, I thought, just fun and illuminating. Rituals are intentional, symbolic, elevated actions. Routines are intentional repeated actions and habits are automatic repeated actions. I think that’s so clarifying. Habits, routines, rituals, and rituals, as Bruce said, are completely not necessary and yet they carry intense symbolic value. So let’s have more of them. I think we need that more than ever. Allright, friends, I will see you next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing.

It’s so helpful. Thank you.

I’ve been told many times by well meaning types that if I don’t focus on video—and as part of this, create an inordinate amount of clips of said video (minute-long snippets from episodes to be blasted all over social)—I will likely not have a podcast in a few years. Maybe. But I’ve also been told by friends who have enslaved themselves to the YouTube and the social clip algorithm that they think all these clips have killed their shows. Why bother watching the whole thing when you can get the highlight reel?

All of my friends in the space and I have watched on as video podcasts have seemingly surged: Partly, this is because they’re prioritized by the algorithms. Sensing the threat of YouTube, Spotify went hard on video podcasting; it promotes shows with video more aggressively in the algorithm, and always shows videos when they’re available (you have to manually swap to audio, annoying!). Apple recently announced they’re introducing video, too.

I’m sure they’re doing this in response to the threat of YouTube, but there are financial implications too. Historically, platforms have been able to charge higher CPMs (an advertising term, which translates to cost per thousand impressions), meaning that over the years, they’ve juiced algorithms to try to make video more of a thing. Remember Facebook Live? So many small and mid-size media companies chased that dream and invested heavily in video when it was really, really expensive (and very low quality) because Facebook artificially promoted those Facebook Lives in an attempt to make them a thing; those media companies eventually lost their shirts (and sometimes shut down), because guess what? Nobody wanted to watch Facebook Lives. Artificially juiced audiences don’t stick. It wasn’t real. Everything went bust. (Video became short form and moved to Instagram, and then TikTok, and eventually YouTube shorts.)

When everyone went gaga for YouTube, I found myself poo-pooing the trend again. Part of this is my bias (just not a fan!), and part of this is that I do not believe that this explosive growth maps to “real,” sustained audience. Back in 2018/2019, when working on a TV show, the only thing we wanted to do was sit on a couch and talk—like a news magazine, or talk show—and we were advised that we needed to splice this together with visually arresting and varied content of people doing interesting things because…nobody watches people sit on couches and talk. They had all the data; everyone clicks away. I have a hard time believing that retention rates on watching people talk have improved in the past 10 years and yet suddenly everyone is paying out of their own pockets to create their own video talk shows.

I think people are much like my two boys—they watch, they scroll, they pause, they scroll. And for this, YouTube is huge—much like TikTok, you don’t need any subscribers to rack up views on your YouTube (anything under three minutes). (Max is racking up views with his astronomy videos: “I’m doing better than you mom.”) The YouTube shorts feed is based on interests, not curation. (Instagram is arguably the opposite—you theoretically see what the people you’ve chosen to follow post, though it’s become much more like TikTok in the last year or two where you’re more likely to see “Suggested for You” content from people you don’t know.) YouTube long-form video is a very different thing, though. Yes, some people are killing it, but it’s really hard to distill actual viewing habits from what looks like “views.” A 60-second watch counts as a view, which is why people are cutting NCIS-style trailers to get people past that window. Whether those people are sticking around to watch two hours of a conversation is a different thing entirely—I’ve heard that getting someone to watch 20% of something on YouTube is considered very healthy. On podcasts, metrics are opaque, but the expectation is that people listen to 80-90% of an episode.

So why am I prattling on and on about this? Because in this age of transparency, I think the marketing apparatus around video podcasts, video podcast creators, and YouTube is starting to expose itself—and we’re all going to realize that we’ve been played in pretty significant ways.

I had heard vague whispers of clip farms, but I didn’t really understand what people meant until Sami (of Betches) posted this on Instagram—it was after that kid Clavicular almost died on camera while livestreaming on YouTube. She had seen someone talking about participating in clip farms: The idea is that streamers and podcasters put out bounties for people to clip their videos and post them for cash. It’s like the next version of Cambridge Analytica, but instead of bot farms, you get gig workers: These real people create fake fan accounts and post video clips from podcasts and shows like crazy, earning bonuses for creating the impressions that thousands of “real” fans are digging this content and organically sharing it. Not only does it amplify audience for the podcaster/video creator, but it creates the illusion that their views are incredibly, organically popular, that these views are ubiquitous and shared throughout the culture, and that everyone is paying attention to this person and naturally drawn to what they make. It is fake it until you make it the max. Her point is that podcasters in the manosphere, people like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, MAGA, et al, have been running this playbook for awhile now—convincing us all that we’re living amongst loads of extremists who like really scary shit. In reality, it’s almost entirely fabricated.

People are starting to catch on, and my sense is that once more people understand the way our feeds—and our minds—are being manipulated, this whole apparatus will fall apart. Meanwhile, it’s all over our politics, and all over culture in general. Vulture just posted a piece last week about how Justin Bieber’s Coachella concert went viral through fabrication (here’s Sami on that one, too)—it’s called “The Feed is Fake.” Taylor Lorenz posted screenshots of Spencer Pratt’s L.A. mayoral campaign advertising on clip farming websites as well. The theory is that once someone engages with a podcast clip, they’ve been hooked and will automatically see more of that type of content, reinforcing that this content is everywhere because people are so enthusiastic about it they are sharing it into their feeds. Clippers will post thousands of pieces of content. It creates perceptions of popularity and eventually echo chambers. Joe Lim, quotes in Vulture’s piece, believes that “90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise.” Lim had a company called Floodify where he ran 66,000 fake accounts. It’s definitely in politics, fintech, and pretty much anything else that appeals to (mostly) young men. (Here’s a Forbes piece on crypto clip farming.)

I’m guessing Diary of a CEO (Steven Bartlett), along with many other podcasters, have taken this in-house and now run a dedicated team of people posting clips across myriad accounts rather than risking exposure on clipping websites. I can’t figure out when this reel is from, but here’s one guy describing how he participated in a Diary of a CEO clipping campaign for $15,000: he earned $1K of that bounty by posting clips across dedicated channels, i.e. fake fan accounts, that he created for that purpose to earn views. I’m guessing that podcasters are becoming far more stealth as this begins to blow. I can’t imagine that the FCC is going to do anything about this. When brands work with influencers, it needs to be loudly disclaimered…#ad. But this is something else entirely. Here’s clip farm Vyro: On their home page you can see Theo Von, Mr. Beast, Mark Rober (sad), Logan Paul, DOAC, and more.

Instagram is pushing against this, even if they’re not saying that this is a push against clip farms. (Here’s Adam Mosseri explaining that Instagram will no longer promote content creators who post other peoples’ content without radically altering it.) I don’t spend much time on TikTok so I’m not sure what’s happening over there, and I am definitely not an expert on YouTube shorts, but I want to believe that more and more people will come to understand that they’re being manipulated through mob mentality, that they’re not joining an organic upswell of support but instead are part of an orchestrated infection.

And as for YouTube podcasts and the mandate to go full video (and fully produced video at that): I maintain that it’s a bubble. Theoretically, I can’t afford to lose my shirt either way, but I’m still going to sit this one out and see what happens on the other side.

You can also listen to this episode on Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. (It’s also available on YouTube.)

Dr. Kendi is a world-renowned historian and scholar, and the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller How to Be an Antiracist. He is the Carter G. Woodson Endowed Chair in History at Howard University. His new book is called Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age. It is incredibly insightful and illuminating in terms of mapping how we got to where we are. And I think what Dr. Kendi shares in our conversation today is also quite helpful in terms of pointing us in a potential direction out of this mess.

I’m so glad that I got on his card for this interview, and very excited to share it with you now…

MORE FROM IBRAM X. KENDI

Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age

How to Be an Antiracist

His Website

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:

ELISE:

It’s nice to see you again.

I interviewed you many years ago, probably six or seven years ago at this point. So it’s nice to see you. I wish we were meeting in a different culture and climate and that we didn’t keep having these conversations.

IBRAM:

Yeah. I mean, I wish these conversations were in the past tense, but maybe one day we’ll get there.

ELISE:

Yes. I maintain my optimism. Well, thank you for this latest work. I thought it was incredibly helpful in the way that you outlined it for creating this larger context for me and to make all of these figures who are obviously allies and friends as we saw with JD Vance showing up for Orban. Thank God he did not get elected. But these cronies, but the way that you assembled it, I was like, “Oh, I understand now what to me has always seemed sort of a bit like an incoherent stream of consciousness from Trump. I understand now the closet in which he is operating and sort of these pieces of clothing that he is putting in here. I get it. So thank you. You made someone who I do not understand a bit more legible, so thank you.

IBRAM:

You’re welcome. I mean, that was the purpose and frankly, I learned that as well through the research.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, it was really, really a helpful read. So let’s start with this, the sort of basic definition of great replacement theory, which as you point out is slowly boiling us across the globe and is this unifying principle that all of these authoritarian leaders are employing to get us by the throat. So can you explain what that is?

IBRAM:

Sure. So I ended up defining great replacement theory based on studying its full history as a political theory that suggests that there are these powerful elites who are enabling peoples of color to displace the lives, livelihoods, even power of white people who thereby need authoritarian protection. And so when we hear things like immigrants are invading the nation, we’re hearing great replacement theory. When we’re hearing ideas like diversity programs are discriminatory, we’re hearing great replacement theory. Even when we hear ideas like the enemy is inside the gates or ideas like we need to separate ourselves from international organizations that are enabling this great replacement, whether it’s NATO or the European Union or in Canada, there’s a province Alberta that’s trying to separate from Canada. We’re also hearing great replacement theory. But what I also document in chain of ideas is that it’s actually mutated beyond a racist theory, a racist theory which positions people of color as replacing white people or that there’s this war against white people.

It’s mutated to say that there’s apparently a war against men, that women are waging. It’s mutated to say that there is a war against heterosexuals, that apparently queer people are waging, that there’s a war against Christians, that apparently Muslims are waging, or that frankly, any ethnic minority in countries across the world are being positioned as displacing and taking over the country, whether it’s the Muslim minority in India that’s positioned as replacing the Hindu majority or even the Muslim minority in China that’s positioned as displacing the Han majority. So it’s mutated to essentially state that there are these disadvantaged and minoritized groups who are apparently displacing the privileged and majority groups and taking over and therefore all these privilege and majority groups need authoritarian protection.

ELISE:

Right. And so you outline this playbook and then you start to see and then you are sort of profiling these people across the globe who have emerged and come to power in some cases and sometimes been stopped at the last minute from coming to power who are employing this playbook, which really rides psychologically rides on fear and is also, I think you make a very compelling case, it’s neo-Nazism and it’s just been renovated and dressed up to look like something else because it is not necessarily targeted directly at Jews, even though antisemitism is on the rise. So as a Jew, it’s very helpful to understand. I mean, it chills my bones when I hear about lists being made at the University of Pennsylvania and wars and universities being waged on behalf of Jews because it feels with this proclamation that these professors are anti-Semitic and not that antisemitism isn’t a very real and terrifying issue.

I have a child at a Jewish day school. I understand I pay a special stipend for security, but that Jews are often frequently as our gay people and as our Black people used as a Trojan horse of we are not racist and we are not Nazis because look how much we care about the Jews in this particular instance using Jews as a way of saying, oh no, no, no, we’re not Mussolini’s granddaughter. We’re not the party of Hitler renovated, but it is. You make that quite clear. This is Neo Nazism, which is a different flavor, the same ice cream.

IBRAM:

Yeah. So there’s two arguments or frankly elements that I show to demonstrate this. One is that literally the political parties or even the leaders themselves who are articulating great replacement theory were in the case of parties founded by Nazis or former Nazis in the case of parties or people who collaborated with Nazis. So you’re talking about the National Front in France, which was co-founded by a collaborator with the Nazis in France or the Freedom Party in Austria, which was founded by former Nazis or even the brothers of Italy, which of course is the party of the prime minister of Italy, which was originally called the Italian Social Movement, which came from the term Italian social republic, which was the northern state of Italy that was led by Mussolini through the power of Nazi troops. So you have the actual parties themselves who literally were originally founded by Nazis or collaborators with Nazis and then you have actual people who are the children and grandchildren of former Nazis.

And so the most obvious example is the current president of Chile, whose father was a lieutenant in the Nazi army and a card carrying member of the Nazi Party, even as only about 10% of Germans were members with cards of the Nazi Party and he fled Germany after the war, like many Nazis, arrived in the Southern cone, became a very wealthy business person, had children, one of whom was the current president of Chile. And so that’s the actual organizational personal connection, but then the ideological connection whereby in the case of these Nazi theorists, they positioned international jewelry as controlling the world as certainly controlling Europe as the cause of all the bad ills and the most specific bad ill. It was that apparently Jews were displacing and replacing Aryan Germans and taking over and affecting what they called the racial purity of Germany, or they were poisoning the blood of Germany.

And so similarly now, the construct of international jewelry has changed to the construct of globalists or the construct of a powerful elite. And then they point to wealthy Jews as apparently behind that like Jewish Soros and a whole host of others. And then instead of saying that the Jews are replacing the Aryans, now they say that the Muslims are replacing the Christians or the Black people are replacing the white people.

ELISE:

Right. Or as you say, culture is the new blood. So they’ve moved it out of the vernacular of genetics to talk about this idea of quote unquote white culture. I don’t really know what that is, but that white culture is being swamped or erased by these other cultures. And I mean, of course, once you articulate it, you’re like, “Oh yes, this is so obvious.” And then one of the more pernicious things, which I think is understandably very confusing, besides the abundance of names and just the ability to rebrand and rebrand and remarket these things and not know what anyone is actually talking about based on the title of their political group, but they also understand, I think you call it proximate denial. Is that what it is?

IBRAM:

Proximity denial.

ELISE:

Proximity denial that if they get Tim Scott or Marco Rubio or Alice Weidell in Germany who is a lesbian married to a Sindhalese woman, is that right? Or a woman of color or Barry Weiss that you have this plausible deniability. We cannot hate gay people, we cannot hate black people, we cannot hate Jews because look, we’re led by a person of color. I mean, it’s brilliant and it’s confounding, right? But it’s when you hear Candace Owens and you hear what she is saying and the hate-filled anti-Semitic, I mean, it’s horrifying and then it’s completely confounding. This breaks my brain in terms of understanding what’s happening here.

IBRAM:

Well, and this is the reason why I’ve attempted in my work and I’ve received a lot of pushback even amongst people who could claim that they’re against racism or against sexism or anti-Semitism and that is I’ve tried to get people to disconnect ideology from ... And so you can have a set of racist anti-black ideas and be black. You can have ideas that are patriarchal as many feminists have talked about and be a woman. You can have ideas that are hostile to queer people and be queer. You can be pushing policies that are endangering Jewish people and be Jewish. But we, I think have been long taught that if you’re a proximate to a particular group that there’s no way you can be participating in that bigotry towards that group. And then what’s even more pernicious is we imagine that if a person is a member of a group, then they are an expert on the bigotry that is affecting that group.

Because not only do these spokespersons for these great replacement parties say that their parties are not racist or not sexist, but they also say, “I’m black so I know what racism is. “ Or, “I’m Muslim so I know what Islamophobia is and this party is not that.” And because we connect identity with both expertise and ideology, it has then allowed these spokespersons to then argue that some of the most hateful and extreme parties and leaders of our time are somehow not hateful and extreme.

ELISE:

It really forces people to think, which is very difficult, right? We immediately ... No, but it’s true. I mean, it’s very hard. You want to look and say, “I understand this person. I know what they represent and who they are and what their world experience is. “ We’re built to categorize people quickly and easily and this instead it’s, well, what is this and what is this person actually saying? I mean, it requires a level of engagement that is definitely too much for some people, right? And then they find themselves entrapped in participating in things that they would’ve said that they would never have participated in. It’s a slow slide, yeah?

IBRAM:

It is. And that’s frankly why I ended up calling what Great Replacement Theory effectively does to people is it change them by their own ideas. And it ultimately really the purpose of this theory is to get people to consent to their own domination, get people to demand for the preservation or the restoration of privileges at the expense of their power, at the expense of democracy, at the expense of their rights. So privileges become everything because what these politicians are saying is that for the most part that people’s privileges are being lost, that their nation, quote unquote, where they were the majority or the privileged group is being taken away, that their culture, which has been the center of sort of the cultural atmosphere of that country is being taken away. So no, I want you to protect that, protect me because people then connect their identity to their privilege and they don’t even know how to imagine themselves if they are not a man who has male privilege, right?

If I can’t dominate women, so what does it even mean to be a man? And so it then compels people to want to support these authoritarians who ultimately strip them of something far more important than their privilege and that’s their power.

ELISE:

Yeah. And then you end up in sort of post World War II Germany or post World War I, Germany, where everything is destroyed and everyone is suffering. And you write about, I mean, beyond even putting aside the six million murdered Jews, you look at that country and the devastation, the economic devastation, the cultural devastation of Hitler. So that’s the inheritance, right? And you write a lot about Heather McGee and her work and this idea that we cannot get out of the zero sum thinking, whereas when poor people generally are helped, it is beneficial to everyone when people of color ... When we go after, try and excise groups and take away their privileges, we devastate ourselves at the same times.

IBRAM:

Exactly. And I think that that ... I’m happy you mentioned the case of Nazi Germany because I think there’s a certain segment of humans because of the sheer amount of carnage and brutality that was brought on Jewish people and other so- called undesirables, it’s hard for people to really want to study what truly happened. And because we’re not able to fully study what happened, we’re not able to accept the level and the depth of carnage as Jewish people and other undesirables faced and then even look beyond to see the level of carnage that other people face. So the people who were told that they were being protected from the Jews were ultimately harmed by their “protectors.” And that’s why I write about that in the introduction, how you had Hitler during World War II and even justifying the war, claim that he was seeking to defend Aryan Europe or white Europe, but ultimately 45 million white Europeans, civilians and soldiers were killed during the war, the largest amount of mass death in history.

And that’s how if you can get your slayer, if you can get people that you are slaying to believe that you’re trying to protect them, if you can get people you’re literally robbing to believe that you are their savior, that’s when you’re able to institute and bring into being what is now the authoritarian age,

ELISE:

Which is emerging at different clips but emerging all over the globe. And you point to various theories about exactly what the intent is that Russia and China and the US have some sort of covert agreement where we each rule our slice of the world or whatever it is that’s happening, but something is happening and there is a playbook that’s being executed on us. And many of us despite theoretically learning from history or not are letting it happen because the victims or the targets are different, but it’s the same thing dressed up. In the beginning, you talk about these tenets, these pillars, livelihood that all this taxpayer money is going to these immigrants and people of color and everyone else, they’re taking people’s jobs, this idea of culture, replacing cultures of white people, electoral power, this is a wild one, but that Democrats are importing voters so that we can maintain power.

And then freedoms, this is all related as you point out. Vaccine mandates are curbing people’s freedom and therefore civil rights legislation, gun safety measures, anti-racist and feminist education are supposedly taking away the freedoms of white people. So it’s all connected as you point out and it’s psychologically connected certainly, but it’s also politically connected as well. So that was really helpful just to be like, this is a through line of the sort of machinations that the notes that are being struck to really scare the shit out of people.

IBRAM:

It is. And another area I think just to add to this is the most extreme great replacement theory is this idea that white people are suffering a genocide and apparently at the hands of immigrants who are apparently all animals and rapists, Muslims who are apparently are all terrorists and black people who apparently are all criminals. And as a result, you’ve had a number of people who’ve decided that they are going to pick up their guns and end up slaughtering Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, Jewish people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Latino Americans at a Walmart in El Paso, Muslims at multiple mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and on and on the belief to quote the shooter in Pittsburgh that quote, “My people are being slaughtered, so I have to go in to defend them.” And another group that these theorists imagine are contributing to this genocide of white people are actually white women who they claim are not having enough children.

So they’re saying that there’s these declines in birth rates among white people. They primarily say it’s because of “gender ideology,” which is another word for feminism and that has infiltrated white women and these quote childish cat ladies don’t want to sort of do what they’re supposed to do as women and their primary duity apparently and birth children. And so there’s a tremendous amount of anger among these theorists and politicians within this movement for even white women. And then there’s obviously a tremendous amount of resistance to abortion in any form of reproductive justice and freedom, which they also imagine are bringing on the great replacement.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, and this also goes back to Nazism, which I didn’t know the three Ks, kinder, Kirch, children, kitchen, church, right? It’s just the same pattern pulled forward. And you mentioned the way, I think one of the easiest ways for people to connect to this idea that you can be a woman and be a guard dog of the patriarchy is you look at who Trump surrounds himself with. Well, they’re all getting guillotined right now. But Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi and Karoline Levitt and Tulsi Gabbard, he loves blonde, I guess Kristi’s brunette, but this particular archetype of woman to put out on the front lines, like modern day Phyllis Schlaffley to do this work and be his ... I mean, it’s wild. They’re his shield, but I think a lot of women can look at that and say, “Wait, what? This is different.” So I mean, there are a million directions to go, but let’s talk about immigration because I was just earlier this week I was in Omaha intervening.

I don’t know if you’ve ever chatted with Devorah Dwork, who’s a genocide and Holocaust historian who’s written nine or 10 books and maybe more Or her latest book is called Saints and Liars and it’s about Unitarians, Quakers and American Jews who were working throughout mostly Europe trying to get political prisoners, Jews, et cetera, out to immigrate them. To Shanghai, I mean there’s some wild stories as you know, but it really puts a point on this idea and you hear it all the time from people who don’t really know that much about the Holocaust of, well, why didn’t they just go to fill in the blank? No one would take people. It was much like it is today. You couldn’t go anywhere and you had likely been stripped of your papers. So even if you had been legal, you might no longer be legal or no longer have papers and these are desperate people and it’s the same story now.

Why would someone pick up, abandon everything that they have and try and flee somewhere else? Why do you think it is so difficult for people to remember their empathy for people in flight? What is that?

IBRAM:

I think that’s one of the, frankly, that question is one of the defining questions of our time, particularly because sometimes if not most times, we develop our empathy or maintain our eporthy through a knowledge of our own personal history. And so if you are, let’s say you’re an American who is Jewish or Black or of Italian descent or Polish descent or Russian descent or Irish descent or Spanish descent or Chinese descent or Indian set. If you are a person whose ancestors a century ago when they were migrating to this country or even migrating, let’s say from Mississippi to Chicago as African Americans were, and they were primarily cast as criminals, they were primarily cast as invaders. It was imagined that these immigrants and migrants were going to destroy the nation. There was a New York eugenicist named Madison Grant who wrote a book called The Passing of the Great Race in 1916 in which he was outraged at the number of people who were coming to the country from the East or the West.

The East being from China and other parts of Asia, the West coming from particularly Southern and Eastern and Europe as well as Jews. And he argued that these immigrants were coming to replace us and the us being Anglo-Saxon Americans. And that book ended up being translated into multiple languages. One of those languages was German. And when Hitler was incarcerated for his attempted insurrection, he ended up reading the passing of the great race and ultimately calling it my Bible.

ELISE:

I often think that, and you see this in the culture, the obsession with 23andMe and ancestry.com and where did I come from? And I think that there is this angst, this, I don’t know if you call it homesickness, but this anxiety certainly, particularly I think for white people when we talk about things like white culture of where did I come? We’re all indigenous somewhere and this, where did I come from? Who am I? I am a stranger in a strange land. We all are. And essentially, I mean, 99% of us have moved or been relocated in our family line or against in deeply unsavory ways. I don’t know that we really understand the impact of that on our psyche of this need to claim home, need to claim something, but it feels so pernicious somehow or that that’s some driver. I don’t know, but I do feel like there is an anxiety amongst white people too of this, where do I have a claim?

I’m going to make my claim here and nobody ... I don’t know. I don’t know how much that kicks up for people.

IBRAM:

Well, what I write about at one point in chain of ideas is that I speculate that among some people who believe these pernicious ideas, there is this belief that there will one day be a turning of the tables. So there’s a knowledge. So for instance, the emergence of Great Replacement Theory as the theory we know it today really emerged in the late 1800s and it was articulated by these white colonial leaders who started to imagine what would happen to the world if people in Latin America, Asia and Africa were no longer colonized and they started to theorize that there would be a complete turning of the table, that these Africans and Latin Americans, Asians wouldn’t just seek to gain their sovereignty and their freedom, but that they would come and try to colonize and take over Europe and engage in genocides and ultimately do a complete turning of the tape even as- Keep revenge,

ELISE:

Like revenge Ritlard.

IBRAM:

Exactly. And so that was really the origin story of what we now know is Great Replacement Theory, even as the evidence in the 1800s shown that people were actually truly just seeking their freedom, just as even in Europe where you had nations that gained their independence or their sovereignty after being colonized by another European nation, they didn’t try to then reach, but somehow some way people thought that there would be this revenge, this turning of the table. So we have to apparently, it was imagined, continue to dominate and control them because if not, they’re going to dominate and control us, which of course was the Hitler idea that we have to annihilate them before they ultimately annihilate us. And that is the single most dangerous idea that humans, in my opinion, have ever created because it will continuously lead to political violence, to genocide, to war, and it will prevent us as a human community from living.

If there’s any idea that can bring about our extinction, it is that one.

ELISE:

Have you ever encountered James Kimmel Jr? He’s at Yale that he wrote this book called The Science of Revenge. But yeah, his work essentially is he was a former litigator that he thinks that we have undiagnosed revenge addiction, like running rampant across the globe

And it’s easy to find co-participants in this. Yeah, it just makes me think that that’s also ... Hitler was a revenge addict. Mao was a revenge addict, Stalin Trump, obviously and that it’s like having an alcoholic running a bar. It’s incredibly dangerous. And until we attend to that or even understand it or recognize it that I think it has us by the throat because they really can whip people up into participating in things that they don’t realize. Do you feel optimistic? Obviously Orban losing Marine Le Pen is not allowed to run. I mean, maybe it’s hard to feel optimistic, but do you?

IBRAM:

So let me say this. I feel the most hopeless or pessimistic when I don’t really understand what’s happening in society or in our politics. And frankly, that’s to a certain extent where I was at when I started the research for this book. And so once I finished the research and wrote this book and gained clarity and was able to really understand how we got to this point, it gave me a tremendous sense of hope. The clarity gave me a tremendous sense of optimism because frankly, we have not only been shoved in this authoritarian age, but those who’ve shoved us have tried to conceal exactly how they shoved us. The idea, in this case, Great Replacement Theory, that helped usher us into this age. I mean, right now, even as it relates to chain of ideas, those who have been using this theory are alternating between trying to ignore the chain of ideas, hoping it’ll just go away and coming out and just slamming it and completely misrepresenting it because they want the playbook to continue to be concealed.

But once we understand the paybook, then we can begin to understand how to counteract it. And so I actually feel much more hopeful now and much more optimistic. And frankly, that’s the reason why I wrote this book.

ELISE:

We obviously in this culture have talked a lot about the breaking of these norms and these standards and you write about researchers, this is in 2020 and 2021, that the researchers revealed YouTubers no longer spoke about anti-whiteness through a defensive framework. The YouTuber spoke in a way that indicates that the idea had become normalized within reactionary political discourse and no longer needed to be quote unquote proven as a reality. So there is this idea some of these things have really stuck and germinated particularly amongst young men in

IBRAM:

The

ELISE:

Adolescencesphere as Michael Mead calls it. How do you think that we restore this assuming that the worst doesn’t happen and that ice is curbed and we get a changing of the guard and we can start to restore our culture, do you think that people will just sort of wake up?

IBRAM:

No, I do think we have to ensure people know what is happening to them ideologically and allow people to have a different way of understanding what’s happening in the world. And I think part of what’s happened is among those who have been trying to build authoritarian states, they’ve largely cohered around this narrative of great replacement theory even as it’s radically different in different nations. And I think those who are trying to restore democracy, there are some of us who are talking about the relationship between racism and the rise of authoritarianism or sexism or antisemitism or ... So we’re in a way talking in different lanes and focused on different lanes. Even some critics of this book have sort of argued that somehow I’m not really talking about the material conditions that help to propel this age of authoritarianism even as I talk about the relationship between ideas and material conditions.

And so I’m saying that to say that we who are serious about democracy and are serious about ushering ourselves out of this age, we have to sort of build solidarity around a clear idea of what the problem is and what the solution is as opposed to competing and arguing constantly amongst ourselves. And that’s one of the reasons why in writing chain of ideas, I didn’t think I would be able to tell the full story if I did not talk about the relationship between the way in which this racist theory is connecting to sexism and homophobia and antisemitism and xenophobia and how it’s connecting to ancient fascism and how you have these super wealthy people who are taking jobs from people, but trying to get them to believe that Muslims and immigrants are taking their jobs to try to help us to try to cohere around a master narrative that’s actually based in facts and history so that we can explain to people what’s happening to them and how, again, we can usher ourselves out of it.

That’s what I’m hoping people can help. And I’m going to continue to learn and refine based on what other people are saying and researching, but that’s what we need.

ELISE:

Is there a directory of all of these political parties and their association? One of the things that I find, and you write about this too, that is so disconcerting as a voter, for example, is when you’re trying to discern the impact of a policy, right? There’s just so much spin. Is there a database where people can understand the ideology at first from a political political lens, not neutral, but- Did you build

IBRAM:

Up? If you go to chainofideasbook.com, it has a database of all of the political parties around the world who have been espousing great replacement theory. It also includes the main political leader. It also includes a quote from that leader. It also includes where that political party is at in terms of their sort of power. And so we really wanted to map the problem so people can see just the sheer scale of parties across the Americas and Europe and Asia that are espousing and even North Africa that are espousing this theory and we’ll continue to try to maintain that database. But I mean, it also really shows the tremendous amount of research, frankly, that went into this book.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, it’s a great service and it’s so helpful just to even have every from Canada to Germany to just essentially what’s happening in those countries in a coherent way that connects to what Trump is up to and Netanyahu and so on and so forth. And it’s full of interesting stories. I had no idea, for example, that Hitler’s original plan for the Jews was this idea of remigrating them all to Madagascar. That I did not. No, that was the plan originally until it became quote unquote the final solution. But yeah, you do a beautiful job of also saying, “What was this is now rebranded as this? What was that is now rebranded as this in a way that I think is incredibly clarifying. So thank you.

IBRAM:

Of course, of course. I mean, I guess my job as an historian, I mean, this is complicated propaganda, right? And I think it’s on us who study it to clarify it for people so that they can understand it and be more effective political actors.

ELISE:

Right. And understand what they’re being sold and how to discern what’s really happening and the way that they are. And I know you’re not a psychologist, but the sort of psychological manipulation is very intense, very human, very understandable, but the more we can understand how we’re being played, the stronger and more durable we become in terms of discerning what’s really happening.

IBRAM:

I mean, just to give an example, imagine if we were forced to eat food without an ingredients label and so much of our campaign, so much of the campaign ideas that’s put ... There’s no ingredients label. So this book gives, I think, people the ability to see that ingredient label, some of which goes all the way back to Nazi Germany or to Apartheid or to the colonial or enslaving era so that they can understand what’s, as you stated, what’s being fed to them.

ELISE:

Chain of Ideas is a big book, but it is divided into these very short chapters, which makes it really digestible and easy to get through and it’s full of interesting stories. I found it really helpful in terms of understanding globally what’s happening and how all of these various parties are connected. And he also, of course, makes a case for the countries that have been, including here in America, so deeply, deeply, deeply enriched by immigration and how these numbers, which are often presented to us as just these massive sweeping hoards and Trump loves to call every immigrant a criminal, but how they’re presented to us as these unfathomably huge numbers and yet even in countries like Germany, which have taken in so many immigrants, climate refugees and so on and so forth, they’re just so incredibly enriched by these new citizens who are taking care of older populations and helping with the economic growth that we all rely on.

And as someone obviously who lives in California in a state that is dependent, enriched, indebted to immigrants, it breaks my heart when we are so cruel in the face of what’s often complete desperation. So I wanted to briefly read from Ibram’s book. This is a really helpful ... This is near the end of the book. “World War II ended the Nazi age in 1945, all those bombs on the House of Hitler. The House of Hitler became uninhabitable for the rest of the 20th century. It became difficult for politicians to attract voters with Nazi ideas and win and yet politicians and obscure parties like Germany’s National Democratic Party, Italy’s Italian social movement, Austria’s Freedom Party, and France’s national front did not abandon the House of Hitler. They gutted it, they renovated it, new walls and fixtures and furniture. White and Christian, the New Aryan, Muslim and immigrant, the new Jew, globalist elites, the new “international Jewry,” culture, the new blood, cultural Marxist, the new cultural bulsivist, remigration, the new final solution, mega prisons, the new concentration camps, electoral dictator, the new conventional dictator, neo-Nazi renovation that ushered in the authoritarian age, a renovation completed in the 21st century by a secret agent in Russia, a career political operative in Hungary, the French daughter of a party founder, the billionaire grandson of an apartheid promoter, the son of a Nazi lieutenant in Chile, a lifelong Euroskeptic in England, Islamophobes from India to the Netherlands, a leader of a troll farm in El Salvador, a real estate tycoon in the United States, a renovation marketed as “not racist,” by party spokespersons of color suited in proximity denial.”

All right, friends, I’ll see you next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you.

There’s still time to sign up to join me and at Omega, in Rhinebeck, New York from May 25-29. If you need a break, this might be the retreat for you. If you want to understand who you are and how to serve in the midst of all this chaos, this might be the retreat for you. And if you want a moment to let go of something that no longer fits and step into something new, this might be the retreat for you. Come join us! More info is here.

This weekend I gathered with some dear friends for an impromptu circle with Dre Bendewald (you can hear her on the podcast here). What happens in the circle stays in the circle, but a big thematic came up for me, something that I’ve been working hard to understand. This is it, in a nutshell: I don’t like to include myself in the circle. I’d much rather circle the circle, noticing and serving other peoples’ needs and reflecting what I see. I don’t know if this is because I think of myself as an outsider-insider—someone who occasionally gets invited into the garden, but mostly likes to stay on the perimeter—but I’d much rather observe and mediate than participate myself. And I definitely don’t want to put myself in the circle of care, because obviously, I don’t need anything! There’s nothing to see over here!

In Morality, Jonathan Sacks offers the following passage:

“There is a fascinating passage in the Talmud, describing an event in the third century, which tells of a certain rabbi who had the power of healing. When he laid his hand on someone who was ill, he was cured. Then, continues the Talmud, he fell ill himself and sent someone to fetch another rabbi to heal him. Why, asks the Talmud, did he not cure himself? It answers: a prisoner cannot release himself from prison. It takes someone else to turn the key that unlocks the door.”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I’m facing a “rough initiation,” to quote Francis Weller (podcast episode is here). It’s a life class that I need to take, and it feels like I can discern the syllabus from where I’m standing outside the locked classroom door, but the reading material, the core curriculum, is inside and therefore outside of my reach. I will need to cross some sort of threshold in order to get there—and I’m not sure what or where it is. This is an interesting conundrum for someone who likes to figure things out and “do the work” on my own to understand—I don’t know how to do this work. I can’t teach myself, I need a teacher.

My sense, of course, is that the initiation will unfold the minute I stop trying to figure it out and allow it to unfold. If I can only let go. (This is why there are initiators, though life often steps in to fill the void.)

There are a few passages that I have written out on index cards near my desk. One of my favorites is from the Alan Watts classic, The Wisdom of Insecurity, where he writes about the difference between faith and belief.

“We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religions that is not self-deception.”

This always cracks me open: It’s such a profound take , not only on the distinction between dogma and agnostic spirituality, but a quality in our stance to life. In Watts’ view, belief suggests that you are clinging to an assurance that you know how things are (and how they should be), while faith requires an attitude where you’re willing to recognize that you never will.

You need to be really brave and courageous to lean into faith. I’m really good at having faith on behalf of everyone else (and all of humanity); I often find myself losing faith that it—that it being God’s care, a divine plan, a wise unfolding—could possibly extend to me. I want to put myself out of that circle too: It’s okay, God, I’ve got it. I don’t need any help over here. I’m just gonna lone wolf my way through life. Don’t worry about me!

And yet. And yet. Even as I write this, I know I do have faith, even that I’m being delivered right into the hands of a teaching that I need. And yes, not knowing how to fulfill the course requirements gives me anxiety, but that’s also the point. It’s fitting that the subtitle of Watts’ The Wisdom of Insecurity is A Message for the Age of Anxiety. We are certainly living through that.

Cynthia Bourgeault (podcast episode here) writes about the definition of faith as well, offering, that its true definition lies in something St. Paul once said: “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” She elaborates, “But in our own diminished age even faith has now gone dark and tends to be understood as a ‘blind’ leap into the dark rather than a luminous perception of the invisible golden thread.”

As you know, I like to pull on threads; my life revolves around understanding their structure—how they hold each of us and all of us—together tight in a collective tapestry. And so follow the thread I must. I’ll do so with faith, “an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be.” And I’m going to try to do it within the circle—as even I need some help now and then. :)

With belief, we fixate on the future as something that we can will into being; but faith means we might get something even better than imagined. Here’s to life’s enduring mystery and the faith—not belief—that it will deliver us exactly where we’re supposed to be.

You can also listen to this podcast on Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. It’s also available on YouTube.

I met Stacey about a decade ago when I was working at goop, and had the good fortune of hiring her and getting to work with her for a few years. She’s now a freelance journalist and writer, and the author of a new book called, Being 40. Stacey is the kind of person that it’s easy to be incredibly proud of.

Today, we talk about this decade of our lives but more broadly about the scripts and checklists that women are often handed throughout our lives—and how we go about setting these down, centering ourselves, and self-authoring our lives.

Stacey has a pretty incredible personal story herself, which I actually did not know much about until reading her book and having this conversation today.

MORE FROM STACEY LINDSAY:

Being 40: The Decade of Letting Go—and Embracing Who We Are

Follow Stacey on Instagram

Stacey’s Website

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:

ELISE:

Stacey, I’m so proud of you. I’ve known you for a minute. When did we first meet? How old were you since this is a book about aging?

STACEY:

I was in my mid 30s, so I think I was technically 34.

ELISE:

Or 35. You were that mature?

STACEY:

I was. And what’s funny about that too, is I was not telling everybody my age, which is wild to think. I mean, that is so young, but at the time I was already starting to kind of feel it and I think subconsciously I was starting to get interested in this general topic. But yeah, I wasn’t telling people in that context. Oh, I’m 31.

ELISE:

I don’t remember. I mean, I don’t think I would’ve asked you, but I’m sure you felt extremely pressured. I have really good friends who are still on TV and are shocked that they’re still on TV because they are my age, right? Which is closer to 50 than 40. And I know they’ve felt scrutinized and sort of under the gun. But yeah, I still remember it was in our old offices and you came in and you had just left. You were done, right, with James?

STACEY:

It was done for a long time. So I worked for James Caan years prior and then-

ELISE:

Okay. But he was still very close because you came in through him, right? Is that how you’d came to us and then Montana, and I just remember hanging with you on the couch in that office. Then and now.

STACEY:

Thank you. You too. Thank you. We had a lot of fun. You and I had a conversation when you came out with the last book with Phil Stutz,

Who is, I know, incredibly meaningful to you, has been for so long, and he’s meaningful to me. He doesn’t have such an immediate presence in my life as he does for you, but we were in conversation and I had mentioned, I remember that moment meeting you. I remember the first time you walking toward me. And I get goosebumps thinking about this because I think about it the first time I met my best friend. I think about it when I first met my husband. And you don’t know it’s happening at the time, but when you go back and realize this is a person who’s had an impact on me, this is a person who changed the course of my life, not even knowing that was going to happen. And that was the case for you. I remember you walking, you’re like, “Hi, sorry, I’m late. Come on back.

You were super cool and chill.” It was great. And

ELISE:

We’ve been having this- I’m

STACEY:

Sorry I was late. No, you’re two minutes late. I was just excited to meet you. But the fun part is you and I have been having this stretched out conversation ever since, even though months will go by sometimes, but it’s really fun.

ELISE:

Yeah. And yeah, similar patterning. I think we’re obviously interested in many of the same people and the same things and these big questions about what is a meaningful life and how do we get to it and how do we move past the barriers? And reading almost 42, it made me sad because there’s so much I don’t know about you. I didn’t know about your mom leaving. I had no idea. To me, you always seemed, I would always hear about when you going to visit your mom in Montana. So that broke my heart. I didn’t know that.

STACEY:

It’s such a defining, almost qualifier in how I view the world, how I’ve lived my life, the work that I’ve done around our relationship too. And I’m going to start crying now at the beginning because when I talk about this, it’s hard not to get emotional and just the empathy I have for her leaving. And at the time I was so young, I was a teenager, so my brain wasn’t even fully formed. I was just surviving. I had a boyfriend. I had high school. I was riding my horse. I was working. But then as life went on and I realized, wow, I have a lot of anger. I have a lot of confusion. This changed my days, let alone my years and structure of what I thought my life was. But then at the same time, I had this whole bucket of empathy that I just was starting to kind of slowly fill for her.

And that’s taken a lot of work, but it’s been one of the most defining and meaningful lessons of my life, witnessing her and reclaiming a love between us too. The love was always there, but building a new love, I think.

ELISE:

Yeah. Yeah. You sort of drop the story like a hot potato and then you move off of it as quickly as you can into sort of an expert, which I was like, “I see what you’re doing here.” And you use her incessant apologizing as a way of explaining how bad she clearly feels. But yeah, I mean, that’s a big deal to come home and find an half empty living room and a despairing alcoholic father telling you that your mom has left.

STACEY:

Yeah. And I wanted to talk about both of them too. And that of course can be a whole book in and of itself. But what’s so important about that story and that part of my life is because so many people can identify with that, with having people they love, maybe disappoint them or leave them and not understanding it at the time. And what is this thing called forgiveness? What is that when you’re in pain and when you’re depending on somebody? But what’s interesting about this too is that these structures and societal structures and expectations and kind of these legacy stories of trying to do the right things that really impact women, they also impact men too. I look at my father and I look at, he was trying to do quote unquote all the right things. He was working hard, he was raising his kids, he was trying to be a good husband and he was falling short in a million ways.

So there’s these pressures that come and impact all of us no matter how we identify, what our sex is, what our gender is, what our lifestyles are. It can be crushing and we can’t change. I mean, we can work toward changing systems, but I think we can really though, in the immediate sense, work toward how am I going to maybe break this cycle in my own life? How am I going to start to really interrogate some of the things that have caused pain for people that I love, but then continue to cause pain for myself

ELISE:

Fascinating. How old was your mom when she left? She

STACEY:

Was in her late 40s. So isn’t that fascinating?

ELISE:

Yeah. No, I mean, it’s interesting. And even now I’m like, I can tell you don’t want to stay in this, which I completely understand. No, let’s- No, it’s okay. But I relate to you, right? The glancing contact with your own life, this is very painful. I don’t have anything like this, but also how the mother, even though she’s not perceptibly sort of the center of this book, right? And I found this when On Our Best Behavior came out, everyone wanted to talk to me about my mom who is a figure in the book, but it really is that relationship is so central, right? Because beyond getting what we hope we’re going to get or what we need from our parents, this is the model for what it is to be a woman, right? This is our most present example. So it’s interesting that quiet repetition of the pattern of, I need to write a book now as I cross into this liminal phase about maybe ripping up this script in a less disruptive, painful way, right?

STACEY:

Right, right. I mean, so much of this too is about the lives that are inside of us that are unlived and the pain that that can cause too. And seeing that, of course, I mean, mother to daughter, daughter to mother. I mean, when you see your mother with this angst, with these unlived desires and dreams, and it was interesting because I just interviewed Dave Evans and Bill Burnett. They just came out with a new book- Designing your life. Oh, yes. They have a booboo. That’d be great to have a conversation with for you. And they were talking about this theory that they believe in is basically we only live, I forget what the percentage is, but we only live 14% of our life or something. We have so many unlived lives, right? They pull from the Walt Whitman quote, “We contain multitudes,” which we’ve heard, but it’s so deeply, deeply true.

And on one hand, I find a lot of hope in that, which is exciting because none of us are boring. There’s so much going on inside of us. And then on the other hand though, it can be really overwhelming and again, painful. And I saw that in my mother and in my father too, of she had these desires in these passions and so much of which they were not expressed. Her interiority was not matching what was going on in her day to day. That is so loud for people to see. And again, you don’t realize it when you’re young, but then as you start to mature and you get older, and in the case for me as a woman, I started to think she was in a beautiful sense, but a cautionary tale. And the beautiful thing too I want to say about my mother is she has since blossomed too.

She has found this deep sense of joy and it’s amazing to see, but I think a lot of that is a cautionary tale for us.

ELISE:

Yeah. How in that moment did she justify to herself sort of leaving you guys where you were versus let me have a conversation and even understand what they would want as I take myself to a different state and always, right? How did she justify that to herself? I’m just curious, not judging.

STACEY:

I don’t know if she ever fully did. I think that she was always steeped in pain, which is part of her incessant apologizing. And still to this day, when she reads about this, when we talk about it, she bursts into tears. But she was existing on an adrenaline rush at the time. I don’t know. She got the courage somehow to do this really drastic thing, which was quite literally, I was gone out of the house, we all were, and she packed up most of the things, including a lot of the furniture and left and went to live someplace else. So there was this just swell of adrenaline, I think, that was pushing her forward. And I don’t know if she was justifying it. I will say though, one of the reasons why I don’t know is I didn’t talk to her for a while after that.

I had some contact with her, but about a good, almost a year went by before I started picking up those pieces and actually having a conversation with her again, because I was in survival mode too. And I had to go, I stayed living with my father for about six months after that, and his drinking got so, so bad, and I didn’t include this in the book, but so bad, I had to go live with someone else. And so it’s a beautiful part of the story that at the time I had a boyfriend all through high school, all through college, huge, very meaningful person in my life still. I went and lived with his parents and they put me through high school and then they put me through college. They sponsored my life, my boyfriend’s parents. I mean, how we kind of pick up the pieces and mother each other in different ways and how life can look differently. So I think the work of my mother’s life is she’s still trying to maybe justify and understand herself too. And isn’t that one of the human questions too of why do we do what we do sometimes? And to try to have compassion and to think, “Okay, I really am trying the best that I can with what I have within my capacity.” And that’s a hard thing to swallow sometimes, but I wish we said that to ourselves a little bit more though. I am trying, this is what I have. These are the tools I have and I’m trying my hardest.

ELISE:

Yeah. That’s beautiful. And you are as always an incredibly generous and kind person and knowing you forever, I don’t think that this is a put on either. This is really who you are. You’re so sweet and tender. And it was interesting reading the book. I’m going to give you some feedback that I feel like people would give me, which is that the most compelling parts of the book are you and yet you’re so loath to hold attention on your story and so quick to continue to sort of outsource authority to other people. It takes one to know one, Stacy. I

STACEY:

Know you know this, right? Yeah. You know

ELISE:

This well. Yes. So assuming this is only one of many books, your charge is to center yourself. And I think that I recognize how hard that is, but there’s some part of you I think that is so ... I mean, not a small part, but a big part of you that is deeply wise and has a lot to teach us and it doesn’t always have to be triangulated through other people.

STACEY:

It’s hard. It’s hard. I think this is- I

ELISE:

Understand.

STACEY:

This is the work of my life, right? It is. And I always think it’s so funny when you read or listen to interviews about actors and they think, “Oh, I just want to be ... It’s easier to pretend to be somebody else too.” And sometimes I believe that and sometimes I think you just love the attention,

ELISE:

But-

STACEY:

Yeah, I get it. It’s fascinating why our culture is so fascinated by actors in general. But in a way, I can understand that because I think sometimes maybe that’s why I chose journalism too. I want to tell stories I do, like you, have this endless well of curiosity, endless. And it goes toward suffering. It goes toward this weird thing called meaning and what is it? It goes toward how do people quite literally pick up the pieces and move from day to day to day when they face such adversity? I love that. I want to know all about that. I have a voracious appetite for that, but it’s easier for me to interview. And I generally want to know about it from other people. People are fascinating to me. Kindness is fascinating to me. I wish we had more of that, but it’s easier for me to put the mic and point it towards somebody else too, rather than myself.

ELISE:

No, I found with On Our Best Behavior, and my next book, I’ve cured some of this, though not all of this, but I would be like, “Who can I attribute this thought that I have to? “

And I think some of that is protective and some of that is I just feel much more comfortable refracting light, right? I don’t ... And there’s certainly a patterning. I mean, we both worked at a company for a long time that had no bylines, and I’ve done that many times throughout my career. And I kind of don’t mind it, but it’s interesting in this time now that we’re coming to, and you and I are both in very similar professions, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot too, I’m sure you have deeply, which is the promulgation of AI and how much content there is now. And is it even being handwritten or is it being generated by notion or whatever it is and where’s the hand in this? Does the hand matter? And I don’t know, it’s a really existential question, I think, for people like us who are writers in both personal and commercial ways, right?

And how are you thinking about that?

STACEY:

And I don’t think that any of us expected it to move at this pace. We knew this was when we started to sort of get whispers of this and we knew human beings are so incredibly intelligent too. So look at how fast the computer has advanced and all these other things too. And when there is a will, there’s a way. I didn’t see this coming so quickly though. I feel like just even two months ago it was different than it is now in terms of how information is aggregated and how things are created and ultimately the impact it has on critical thinking, that’s the thing that is really concerning me the most, but actually also still gives me the most hope when it comes to our work and these conversations. Critical thinking is just, it’s atrophied a little bit. And I’m not blaming anyone. I see it in myself sometimes too, but just in terms of you go on social media and it tells you exactly what kind of jeans that you should be wearing.

And I’ve had this is a weird example, but it’s one that’s meaningful to me too. Everybody, you should be wearing barrel jeans, let’s say right now. I don’t like those, right? But it doesn’t matter. That’s what you wear right now. That’s what you should be wearing. Or you’re supposed to contour, do some contour thing with your cheeks too. And we can maybe talk about this too. That’s why I think beauty is such an interesting lens through which we can kind of look at the world and how we’re functioning in it. But the critical thinking part of it, at least right now and in the foreseeable future, that’s still ours. I don’t think that it can take that away from us, but we have to be really careful not to let that totally atrophy and just kind of let our decisions just be on autopilot thinking, okay, this is what is a good piece of content or this is what is a good fashion choice or the right genes or whatever it might be. So I’m really doubling down on my critical thinking and just trying to take a pause too before I take anything as, not even as gospel, but just as truth or whatnot or as right. It’s just-

ELISE:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s interesting too, when you think about what AI is built on, which is on everything that’s been, right? So it’s so good at analyzing patterns or data or eating up a bunch of stuff and synthesizing it. And you and I are both synthesizers in some ways, but it can’t necessarily foretell the future except on pattern matching. And I think your book, my book, it’s all about, okay, this is the script. So how do we actually self-author if in many ways as women, we’re living in an AI world and we have been through this is what it means to be a good woman or this is what it means to be governed by fear, all the variations on that. So what’s possible when we actually self-create? So 40s, let’s talk about the premise of the book, which is, do you think one, I think 40s maybe is the new 30, right?

But 40’s always been a bit of a specter in people’s minds. It

STACEY:

Has. It has.

ELISE:

Yeah. Yeah. Just because it’s halfway?

STACEY:

Why? For some reason, I don’t know. I call it the sticky qualifier. I think I use that terminology in the book because society has always had something to say about turning 40, being in your 40s. That is kind of the point. You’re either in front of this age or on the other side of it. And you could argue that nowadays, I mean, society again is so harsh on women no matter our age. So you could say 31 year olds are feeling like they have to fix themselves or they’re feeling old or whatnot. I mean, age is a weird thing, but 40 is particularly fascinating though. It is that kind of sticky point for society and you hear it in the headlines too. “So-and-so I’m getting married after 40 or she looks great at 45, or I’ve heard it in my own life too. Stacy, you’re 40 or you’re 42.

You look great. I don’t get it. What does that mean? “But from my story, I didn’t have a lot of angst leading up to 40. I was just in a stressed out time anyways. I was working my butt off. I just didn’t really have angst leading up to it. And I want to acknowledge that a lot of people maybe do. I mean, it’s a big birthday. I guess any birthday with the zero behind it. If you’re lucky to get there, it’s a big deal. But I started noticing something after when I was quote on the other side of 40 and I genuinely started feeling this was different. There was something about this where, like I already said, society has something to say about it. Okay, whoa, I’m in my 40s. This is massive. And at the same time, I still feel for good, for better, for worse, I still feel 22, I still feel 31.

I still feel so much younger. How did this happen so quickly?

Another thing that I was really finding myself up against was I just felt like I hadn’t checked any of the boxes that society told me I should have had checked by this big age. And a lot of these things I wasn’t necessarily aiming for. I turned 40. I wasn’t married. I didn’t have children. I still don’t have children. I didn’t have owned property or a lot of money saved or even big career things that I thought I was going to have accomplished. And again, some of those things I wasn’t necessarily yearning for, but I did feel like I had to explain why I didn’t have them in my life. And I felt like I had to justify why. And the other part of why I think the 40s are so fascinating is it’s undeniable. Something does start shifting in our bodies. It’s different for every woman, but you can argue that at some point for every woman in your 40s, you are going to experience hormonal shifts, changes, things are different, all of that.

And that’s cool too, but that’s also scary and that’s a big thing. And there is just this really interesting, I call the 40s an intersection and all of these things kind of coming together and life gets tough. Life’s always tough, but things sort of ascend a little bit when it comes to pressures. If you have children, changing relationships, aging parents, again, societal expectations. So I wanted to really look at this because it was, again, I’m biased. I’m in it. I think it’s fascinating, but I want to look at it through a really critical lens to start interrogating some of these things and then also a hopeful lens because the other fun part of this is I was starting to feel this very primal desire to finally let some of this shit go.

And I know you know that and thank the world for your book for helping us do that. So yeah, I think I can obviously, I mean, I wrote about it, but I think it’s such an interesting time. And then the cool thing too though is if you argue this book, I use the 40, I anchor this book in the 40s, but it’s really just about being a woman alive today and everything we’re up against.

ELISE:

I have loved my 40s. I’m sure I’ll love my 50s. I really enjoyed my 30s. I kind of hated my 20s. I know obviously you talk about Satya and Quarterlife in the book and the way ... I mean, that book was really thing to me in the sense that

And obviously she’s a childhood friend and co-conspirator with me, so I love all of her work, but I think naming the cultural deception that so many of us labor under, which is that your twenties are so fun, like you’re never going to look better, you’re never going to have more fun. It’s like, what are you smoking? I have no money. I don’t know what my career is. I don’t have a partner. That checklist that I think so many, the vision that so many women in particular have of I need to get these things done on a really intense timeline that’s out of my own control really saps joy out of 20s. And I know some people have a really fun time, but I look when I’m on Instagram, I’m like, oh, you couldn’t pay me to repeat that decade.

STACEY:

Never. You couldn’t pay me anything to go back to that.

ELISE:

Oh,

STACEY:

God. And I have such a deep reverence for her. And I know you and her are so close and I discovered her work through your work and you and Kiki putting her first essay up on Goop. And I remember reading that and thinking, “This is fresh. This actually offered me some vocabulary for this weird angst I’m feeling inside.” And I didn’t even realize it at the time too. I mean, I was identifying with it because I was technically still in quarter life when I first read it in that phase that she talks about. But it’s funny, so she’s so lovely and so brilliant. And I interviewed her for this book and I’m wondering if she remembers this, but I remember she said, basically I just asked her, it was a leading question too. Tell me this doesn’t end, right? We still kind of have these existential questions.

I asked her something of the likes of that. I remember her saying, “This is the easiest interview ever,” because no, this doesn’t end after 40. We still have all these questions and this yearning and all of this search for meaning. And of course her Jungian approach is, I mean, the world would be better if we heard more from her and of her. But yeah, her work was very clarifying for me because again, while this is a different timeframe, there’s major overlap I think in just this, “Okay, I think that I’m supposed to be or I’m told that I’m supposed to feel and act and live this way, but inside of me, this is really what’s going on.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, and it’s these dual pedals of meaning and then stability and that some of us seek the former and some of us seek the latter. And obviously the work of being human is finding a way to bring them together, right? That creates a sound grounded, meaningful life, but that’s very, very hard. And maybe you and I have done it somewhat effectively, but you never ... I’m still, of course, always looking for structure and stability, always, right? You don’t escape it. And before we started recording, we were talking about the way that at least our current culture positions this for so many women. It’s sort of this walled garden or secret garden with everyone else looking in at what it takes to have a really meaningful life and like your functional doctor and all your things and this life of G purpose, excavating great questions.

And then in reality, the stability, at least in the United States that’s required in order to pursue that is a very intense hurdle. And I say this as someone who’s doing this with my life and trying to hold these two things together, one, it’s hard, but it’s financially a very privileged position to be able to generate enough work to be able to even think about these things,

STACEY:

Much less embrace that. You can have the time to consider this. Of course. Absolutely. That’s not lost on me. I know that’s not lost on you. To even think about this is an incredible privilege to have the time and absolutely, I know.

ELISE:

But it’s also, I would argue and push back on that and say that there’s a version of it that’s commoditized and commercialized and sold back to us, and there are other access points that are entirely free, right? It’s like going on a hike, finding a piece of grass to sit on and reading something from a wisdom tradition.

STACEY:

Yes. And going outside and looking up at the sky, and this is very stutsian, that having the reminder that there’s something bigger than us too,

And pulling the beauty from that and finding the faith in that, that there is something bigger than us. And that might sound out of the world, that might sound woo-woo, whatever, however that sounds, but I find a lot of solace and grounding in just in doing that. When I am spinning sometimes in my own little life, right? Deadlines, mortgage, rent, whatever it is, worried about my mother, concerned if my husband is happy and fulfilled, worried about my friends and their children, worried about the wars that are happening, the administration, all of it. It’s too much sometimes. And when I literally just step outside and look up at the sky, it actually will reset my nervous system. And that is one of the many things that’s accessible. One thing I know that I have been deeply, deeply craving, and I made an attempt. I do not know if I was able to do this with the book, but I took a big swing as I tried to get to some specifics for women in language a little bit, and then also in free tools, because you and I have been talking about this too.

The first part of that in the language, even in the context of talking about our forties, there’s a beautiful conversation going on that has been going on for several years about midlife, and it’s great, and it doesn’t land for me. It’s the same thing as kind of saying, “You need more purpose.” Well, what does that mean? I am literally day-to-day trying to put food on the table and trying to take care of myself and the people I love. And again, I’m coming from a privileged place where I’m able-bodied and I have a strong community and all of these things that other people don’t have, but still, what does that mean? I want particulars. I want specifics. I want something I can grab onto. And in regard to the book, I really wanted to talk about the 40s specifically because midlife in general was just, it was glazing over this topic.

It just was not meeting me where I was and where I am now. And then on the other side, when it comes to specifics too, just these macro terms and these suggestions, they can be really overwhelming and hard. How do I ... Okay, one thing too, watch my stress levels. Well, that’s really important. How do I do that? How do I do that too if I don’t have a doctor on speed dial too? Or how do I get these fill in the blanks? And so I love the conversation about what are some things that we can tap into day in and day out that will give us some hope, some solace, some momentum to keep moving forward. And I think of Francis Weller for one person, I know you’ve had a beautiful conversation with him and I’ve been lucky to have interviewed him too and him just talking about ... I asked him, I said, “For people who are completely overwhelmed and don’t even know, he’s all about community and really paying attention to the we in community and getting more in that mindset of you and I are connected.

It’s not about individualism. It’s about being together.” But I asked him, I said, “If this is just the whole concept of community is overwhelming.” I forget exactly how I phrased the question, but I said, “If we are just even facing loneliness in our life, we don’t even know where to go and find a friend, what do we do? “ And he said, “Go outside and touch a tree and talk to a tree.” I started crying inside. I think I held my tears back after the interview, but again, just those beautiful, accessible things that we can do to make ourselves feel better and also to make each other feel better. And there’s endless other ways I think we can start to employ this in our lives.

ELISE:

Yeah. I think this is maybe a totally weird thing to share, but I grew up in Montana, as you know, as we’ve established throughout this conversation, I grew up in not only in Montana, but mostly outside. And we lived like 20 minutes from town and I just spent a lot of time, some time with my brother who was mostly reading, but I just spent most of my time by myself outside, flipping over rocks, climbing trees, whatever, just making weird witchy brews in the woods, that won’t surprise anyone. And I was at a retreat and I was in a deep meditation and I heard a voice. I want to say it was sort of the mother, Mother Mary or whomever. And it was like, I had this feeling that ... And she was like, “I was always there.” I don’t know. It was a deeply, I’m not telling it very well, but it was a deeply held all those moments when I thought I was by myself, but this deep communion, you can call it nature, Gaia, of just being held by something larger and in a constant and enduring relationship with something, I guess I would say non-human.

But yeah, I mean, my horse was my best friend too. Let’s be real, Ebony. Anyway, okay.

STACEY:

Can we stay on that for one more second?

ELISE:

Sure.

STACEY:

Because I love that. I know I’m not alone in saying that. I want to hear about your upbringing, Montana more and more and more. I think it’s so fascinating. And of course, Montana’s very big for both of us in our lives. And what you just talked about though to me is one of the rare experiences of the divine in this life.

There are few things, but they are real that really allow us to tap into this, what I think is the divine, something bigger, something spiritual, something beyond this realm that we know of, this tangible realm and animal, our relationships with animals, they’re nonverbal, but it’s so immediate. It’s so profound. I mean, I could talk about my relationship with my horse for days. My horse passed a long time ago. I can talk about my relationship with my dog right now for days. I mean, she’s cute, but still it’s something so much deeper and it’s that connection with the divine. I experience it with young children too. I experience it through music and I also experience it when I feel deeply close to myself. And so what you were just explaining, I get emotional thinking about that because you felt held in the company of something that was always there with you.

And what I heard was, yes, you were and you are in the company of this spiritual being, this person, whatever it may be, but then also really connected to yourself.

ELISE:

No, totally. And yeah, it was like a reconnection to something that I’d always understood, but would never have been articulated, which was like I wasn’t alone. And I didn’t really feel alone as a kid out there in the woods. It’s wild to think about now because my mom’s anxiety over the years has only climbed. She professes so much anxiety for my kids. I’m like, “Well, you unleashed me in the woods where there were mountain lions.” A neighbor girl, literally a mountain lion figureated around her. Her parents managed to pick her up and throw her in the back of a pickup. But yeah, my brother and I would saddle up our horses and ride up the creek into, it was some sort of wilderness, protected wilderness just up the road. We lived on this dirt road, but we would just go by ourselves, go into this fat cave.

I mean, I just ... It’s a different time, different time. I wish I’m deeply sad having kids that ... And I give them a little bit of this when we go to Montana and they’re off in the woods on bikes, but it’s hard in today’s times to imagine the context of parenting where your kids are like, “We’re off. See you in a few hours.” But what are you going to

STACEY:

Do? You go every summer, right? You go and spend time there

ELISE:

Every single year. Yeah, multiple times. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and it’s home in a deeply felt way. So you think about your mom sort of blowing up her life and your life in her 40s in order to give birth to this version of herself, that flood of hormones or whatever it is, that labor where she was like, “I’m going. It’s happening and I’m out of here. I can’t even think about this.” Feels like that sort of force, right?

And obviously you’re in a much gentler way and you come into your 40s without operating by the checklist, whether that was your choice or not, but when you think about this book and how do you think about the version of yourself that you’re trying to give birth to now? What is that? Who is that? Tell me about that, Stacy, your autumn queen.

STACEY:

My autumn queen. Oh, I love her. I mean, that really spoke to me. And I know you have had conversations about this too, but when Steph Jagger, I leaned in when she said autumn queen. What? That is amazing. I mean, I stand by everything that I write about the autumn queen in the book too, because I bring her with me everywhere. And some days she’s a loud voice and I really listen to her counsel and other days not so much. So I want to be, she’s the coolest and the autumn queen is this archetype that very loosely but really honors the 40s in terms of this power and this rawness and this creativity and this knowing ourselves. And she precedes Krone, which is beautiful, but often storytelling will kind of push us into Krone a little too early. And so who am I becoming now?

ELISE:

Yeah. Who is she and who do you want to become? Who do you hope

STACEY:

She

ELISE:

Is?

STACEY:

Yeah. I hope she’s

ELISE:

Really rich and really powerful.

STACEY:

I mean, I keep thinking of feeling when I think about this, right? Because part of me, I’ll envision her and I’ll think of somebody who is the tangible things that we use to express ourselves with. She wears Levi’s jeans. That’s how I genuinely feel most comfortable. And they’re not tight. I don’t want to wear anything tight anymore.

ELISE:

I get it.

STACEY:

Think about all the tight things we used to wear.

ELISE:

No, I can’t even.

STACEY:

Just the things that make me feel the adornments that genuinely make me feel good, air dried hair and Levi’s jeans and my grandmother’s jewelry and the Montana Sapphire actually that my husband bought me, just simple things that remind me that I’m loved and helped me hearken back to a time when these people that I loved were still alive. But mostly I’m thinking about a feeling. I’m thinking about, I want to feel very in my body. I want to feel that I operate with genuine compassion for myself and for the people around me. I want to feel like I let kindness and understanding lead the way. And there’s no way that I can totally understand everyone or everything, obviously, but just a proclivity to understand. I’m going through something right now that I feel deeply, deeply wronged by somebody and I’m trying to let understanding lead the way in the terms of this person is functioning in their own orbit of maybe hell right now.

They’re going through what they’re going through. And so I’m kind of experiencing this maybe because of the things they’re experiencing, but they’re still a human. They’re still trying their best. And I think that is ultimately how I want to lead. Now, I’m not going to have that for everyone, obviously. I’m not going to have that for our current president, and I’m not going to have that for some other big figures in our lives. But she wants to do the best she can within the reach of her own arm. I’m talking about she, me. I get overwhelmed. I’m a highly sensitive person. I’m an empath. And I think in some ways those are superpowers and in other ways, those things have held me back a lot too, because I can get physically overwhelmed with feeling people’s sadness. I have a particular weakness when it comes to men suffering.

And I think that links directly to my father and everything my father went through and physically holding my father as he died. So when I see men around my father’s age, I have a weakness for them and I’ll feel myself carry their pain sometimes. That’s a fascinating another conversation too. But then I think, okay, I can’t change the world, but I can change things within the reach of my arm, even if it means, again, smiling, being a little bit kinder, smiling at somebody when I walk by them, doing my part, calling local politicians, showing up for city council meetings, doing the best I can with the work that I believe in, not taking the things that I have for granted. And that’s so easy to do and continuing to follow my curiosity too. I don’t want to arrest myself of the things that I really, really want to do.

And you touched on this and you’re so damn good at this, Elise, but you touched on this earlier of saying part of the book, there are the most interesting parts of the book are my story. And I’ve muzzled myself for so long and I continue to because I think maybe it’s the right thing or it’s a safe thing or I don’t want to inconvenience anyone. And so the woman that I’m becoming and want to continue to become is to not muzzle myself anymore. I don’t want to because it’s not doing anyone a service. It’s a disservice, not even to myself, but to the world, to other women.

ELISE:

As I’m listening to you, some things I want to reflect back are, and you’re like, “F you, Elise, you’re not my mother or my therapist.” No, but I can hear that instinct and I think that we both have it, particularly in the lane of work to manage ourselves and hire mind everything, right? And is it cognitized? I don’t know, that might be making up a word, but that mental acuity of, it sounds like you’re suffering or you’re experiencing a betrayal and the higher minding your anger, I don’t know. Do you even feel your feelings? This is something I worry about a little bit with you is where is it? Yeah. Are you processing it? Do you feel like you have an intimate relationship with your anger and your fear and maybe a little bit of hate? I know we don’t like that vibration, but I don’t know.

STACEY:

But it’s real. It’s real. Yes. And we know what happens when we avoid these things too. They just manifest and they get bigger and bigger and bigger. So I appreciate you asking that because you’ve touched on it. I mean, it’s so true that I still am working on facing a lot of these things and feeling these things and-

ELISE:

You go very quickly to this person is human and this person is suffering and this person is going through their own process and it’s negatively affecting me, but you do it with your mom and you do it. It’s just a pattern. I’m just going to point out. It is.

STACEY:

It is a pattern. It’s

ELISE:

Concerned for them and compassion. And can you own that you didn’t get what you needed and maybe you didn’t get what you deserved or maybe you’ve been betrayed?

STACEY:

Absolutely. I’m working on it and that’s part of who I’m becoming is owning this because there is a lot of anger and rage in my body. And I thank this time of my life, the 40s, this awakening in a way, this declaration, whatever you may call it, to allowing me to finally start to look toward that and to realize that and to express it too and to be talking about it in conversation with people I trust with you. No one’s listening to this, right?

ELISE:

Do you know

STACEY:

Your

ELISE:

Enneagram number? Are you a nine? What are you? Six?

STACEY:

Oh my gosh. It’s so funny. I have kind of a fair weather relationship with the Enneagram, even though I think it’s probably so fascinating and would help me, but I think I’m a

ELISE:

Two. Two. Yeah, you might be a two.

STACEY:

Does that make

ELISE:

Sense? Yeah.

STACEY:

But then I think I have a four. Is there a shadow part of it or there’s a

ELISE:

Four different move to different levels under stress? Anyway, it’s interesting talking to you because there are fours who everyone wants to be a four. I think it would be very difficult to be a four. Fours are like, how are you not feeling this? And this is so intense and this is so deep. They’re considered to be the creative angsty artist, but fours often cannot move past their own suffering and get sort of swallowed by it in a way that is difficult. And I have a lot of compassion for fours and it’s also hard to be around. I think maybe for ... I’m a six, I don’t know, you might be a two, but the two would be the helper or the fixer. And you manage your fear and your bad feelings by sort of taking care of other people. And I think this conversation might be evidence of that, Stacy.

STACEY:

Absolutely. Well, I will say I am doing internal family systems work right now and that has had some profound ... I’ve had some profound revelations, but I’ve found some deep catharsis from it. And I glaze over this story in the book too, but I include it where before, so I am in a relationship with a loving man and I know you’re married to a very loving man too, and we’re very fortunate for that. And I got into my relationship with him when I was at 40. We’re married now. We’ve been together for about four years. Prior to this relationship, I was with somebody when you and I met actually, who was intensely abusive and abusive in multitudinous ways. And I’m even getting hot talking about it because I’m still just now starting to process this. But in Internal Family Systems Works, I’m doing all that mattered in that relationship with him was I worried about him.

I cared for him and he was doing these egregiously abusive things, financially abusive, sexually abusive, emotionally abusive, and went on and on and on for years. And I do talk about it in the book where one day I had a girlfriend come pick me up. I quietly packed a bag, I hit it outside, I grabbed my little puppy that I had. She was brand new at the time, and my girlfriend, Kat, came and picked me up early in the morning and drove away and I never saw him again. And it took me so much courage to do that. And there’s this caretaker though that is so alive that just, again, wondered when this person was doing these horrible things, you can’t justify that too, but I kept seeing, “Oh, he’s in pain. His family abused him. He’s not getting what he needs out of this world, so therefore I need to step up and make sure that he does.” But I saw the absolute damage that caused me in my life for so long and also how that was just an echo of things that I was still dealing with.

And I’ve been approaching a lot of the rage and anger I have toward that in therapy, in this work. And it has helped me express it, but it’s also helped me to have compassion for that part of myself that has kept me safe, that has done all this caretaking for so long, just to protect me, to keep me safe and to bring it back to this moment in the conversation we’re having, there’s something beautiful about this age, this time that actually did propel me to want to really start looking at this and really, really start doing the work because this is heavy stuff to carry. And I know that if I’m experiencing this, I’m one of countless people who are experiencing their own version of this and of countless women who are.

ELISE:

Oh, a hundred percent. I think the, I’m sorry, I had no idea and this is a testament to how you hold yourself, which is as this kind, polished person in the world. Yeah. I mean, you’re really ... I can only imagine what you were holding. You do not unleash it. We’ve all been around hurt people who hurt people. So I can only ... I’m glad that you’re working on it because you’re clearly holding it. You haven’t been giving it to other people to hold for you.

STACEY:

Trying not to. Trying not to. Not

ELISE:

Trying not to.

STACEY:

I mean- Do you want to go do some mushrooms?

ELISE:

That’s so Funny. People think, of course, now post goop, that’s people’s association with me. Obviously it’s pulling the thread. No, but I encounter people all the time who are like, I watch you do mushrooms on Netflix. And I’m like, yes, I was the Brentwood mom doing psychedelics before psychedelics is this industry that it is now. It’s funny, that was it for me. I did the three part MDMA maps protocol, but I don’t really ... I’m sure I would get a lot out of it, and yet I also just don’t want to actually open my energy that big. And I also feel like I’m not someone who needs to be put into contact with the universe or source or God. I feel like I’m already really out there and anything. I’m with you. Yeah. I need to be in my body. Yeah. Yep. That’s the hard part, right?

STACEY:

Yeah. It is the hard part. It really is. I know, but I’m with you. In mushrooms in particular, I’ve done them only a handful of times and woo. Yeah, I’m sure I will again, but wow.

ELISE:

Well, I can imagine an MDMA mushroom being very healing for you as you’re grappling, being with yourself. MDMA is very powerful. Not so much in content, but in this being with your younger self and being at a remove and really being able to hold yourself as a child. I found that very powerful. Oh, Stacey, congratulations. I’m so proud of you. And I can’t

STACEY:

Wait. I love kicking it with you. You’re so brilliant.

ELISE:

Such a good hang. This is fun. And I can’t wait to see what you do next. So Stacey’s book is called Being 40: The Decade of Letting Go and Embracing Who We Are. And she is a wise guide through this decade and belong and such a lovely person. And it’s interesting because you can know someone well or stand shoulder to shoulder with them every day and yet not know these big drumbeats in their life. And maybe that’s more indicative of me being someone who, even though I love asking people questions, tries not to pry, but just like the brave face that people put on as they go about their days, even when they’re contending with really painful things. Anyway, she’s great and I hope she focuses ever more on herself and her story and the way that everything she’s learned over the past 40 odd years converges in her as an example for other people who are similarly wired and similarly curious.

And I, in our post group time, been lucky to be interviewed by Stacey many times. She’s just a fantastic interviewer and really thoughtful and prepared and grounded in love. So support her and support her book, particularly if you’re coming to this age. I think it’s a really honest assessment of all the programming that converges in our lives and it’s structured around otherhood, motherhood, beauty and bodies, work, and all those questions about are we there and is this all there is? And what am I supposed to be doing with my time? These are probing and insistent questions that I think we will grapple with until the grave, though I want to believe that that’s not true. I want to believe that we can put on our loose Levi’s. For me, it’s Levi’s and a flannel shirt, guys, and be with our autumn queens. I’m happy to be a crone too.

So be crones. I’m going to crone out. All right, friends. I will see you next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you.

I listened to many introductions and short speeches—a few were insightful and clarifying, they were all genuinely lovely. Yet I was struck by some of the things I heard, mostly in the patterning of the remarks, and what it suggests about how we, as women, receive attention and recognition.

• First, the honorees got to choose who introduced them: Of the 10 or so women, all but a couple chose men to do the honor. It might have been a nice way to illustrate allyship, I’m not sure. Several of these men were their bosses. (One was the recipient’s husband and co-founder, and he was hilarious and delightful.) To me, at least, it put a spotlight on how we still feel most comfortable asking men to anoint us with power. No status quo disturbed.

• Even though one recipient recounted being told by a former award winner (in the bathroom, of course) not to demur but to own it, the instinct for many was to not talk about their personal accolades and accomplishments, all they had learned, and hard-won advice they could offer to all the someday wannabe recipients in the audience. The speeches mostly (not exclusively) revolved around everyone who had helped them get where they are. Team effort, team effort, team effort. I love that women are relational—and this drives me crazy. Because, yes, own it—we have far too few examples of women willing to stand out and shine, which was…the whole point of this luncheon? We all have an instinct to get into a defensive crouch before others do it on our behalf. The instinct is to cling to the herd as it’s so much safer there. Nobody wants to be the tall poppy in the poppy field. But when the most powerful women in an industry do this reflexively—the women who are tall poppies and can endure the weather up there—they underline that it’s still not safe to excel.

• There was an intense centering of families and children. One recipient used the phrase “working mother,” which made me cry a little on the inside—and not only because it inherently suggests that mothers who don’t work in formal jobs, don’t work. It made me cry because you would never hear a man describe himself as a “working father.” We really don’t need to be modifying our roles as parents in the first place. We’re parents. And many of us also have careers, or start-ups, or small businesses, or side hustles. Since the ‘70s, families have needed two incomes to stay in the middle class. Work is a reality for a vast majority of parents. It’s only the women who continue to apologize for it, who perpetuate the idea that children suffer because of economic realities and this hardship is the fault of the women. At a lunch celebrating executive achievement, I really was startled to hear how several women needed to subtly explain that their primary concern was always their children. Or at least, that their children never suffered at the hands of their ambition.

I understand why we do this; I’ve done it myself. And I probably have a reaction to this because of my own anxiety about being a mom who has frequently worked more than full time and not always been super present. I’ve certainly beaten myself up for choices I’ve made in the past that I wouldn’t make again. (As one example, I missed my youngest son’s first three birthdays, because the company’s annual retreat and summer board meeting always conflicted and I didn’t feel like I could skip…plus, hey, he was a toddler and he wouldn’t exactly realize. Still yikes. I AM SO SORRY SAM.) So yes, I get the defensiveness, and I still don’t think it helps us to keep reinforcing that we should be defensive.

If you’re on social media of any kind, it’s likely that you’ve seen a million hot takes on Emma Grede in the past few weeks. Emma has been on tour for her book, Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work and Life—I’ve been present for the entire journey, and Emma and I have become quite close. It’s been fascinating to watch how she operates in all parts of her life, and admittedly, she has taught me a lot and challenged me on some of my thinking. She’s getting lit up—pretty much exclusively by other women—for her take on WFH (not a fan), unpaid internships (relied on them as she was shoving her foot in doors), pitch structure (feels women’s anxiety about money results in them putting purpose (“I’m a good person”) before profitability when they’re raising, and it doesn’t necessarily land), and so on.

Some of the firestorm Emma’s living in is because we live in a social media landscape where the best “hook” for hitting the algorithm means hitching a ride on a trending topic (and offering a negative take); and some of this is because she’s pushing on sore wounds that we need to heal. I have more to say on her message, but the core thesis is that the systemic issues are real and confounding and we can’t wait for equity, we have to make it, from the inside out. She argues that we have more power than we want to believe—and we can and should, start with ourselves. We have to. We might hate our cards, but we’ve got to get in the game and play them anyway.

Emma is undeterred by criticism—she would call it “feedback”—but it still makes me sad. Because speaking of tall poppies, Emma is a real one: She’s an unapologetically ambitious, incredibly hard working woman who came from very limited means—she didn’t graduate from high school, much less HBS, and she’s gone on to mint many successful companies and invest in even more. The instinct to mow the lawn and put her back in her place, to strike her down…God, it bums me out. It’s also wild to watch people twist themselves in knots to deny her any credit (But it’s this, but it’s that, but it’s her husband—WTF, in particular, is that?) Instead of the perpetual playbook of knocking our stars out of the sky, we need to normalize the opposite. It doesn’t mean that Emma is the right mentor for each and everyone of us (she’s pretty clear about that)—if she’s not for you, change the channel—but she’s a pretty incredible model for many entrepreneurs and wannabe entrepreneurs of what’s possible. We need as many of these as possible! The whole point is that she doesn’t want to gate-keep, she wants a million little Emma’s, and she wants to tell the (sometimes unvarnished) truth about what it’s taken to get where she stands. She doesn’t lie to make it all more palatable. She really doesn’t perform “goodness.” I respect that so much.

(For more on all of this, see the “Sloth,” “Pride,” and “Envy” chapters of On Our Best Behavior—also, “Anger.”)

But back to this idea of women needing to center their children, because Emma’s press tour kicked off with an article in the Wall Street Journal titled “The Kardashian Whisperer Who Says Three Hours With Her Kids Is Enough.” The internet rightly went nuts in her defense—you would never see a title like that about an entrepreneur who is a dad—and it still underlined that regardless of someone’s achievements, a woman’s most important responsibility is to her kids…and a question around whether three hours with your kids is “enough.” (Is it not? Because three hours of quality time with each of my kids on any given day seems like a lot.)

I brought up Emma though, because she said something to me that changed the way I talk about my work with my kids—and I wish I’d adopted it sooner. As my kids have gotten older, they actually protest my work trips more—flattering, I guess? Historically, my go-to has always been to wring my hands—to tell them how horrible I feel about it, and how tough it is. “I’m sorry, I know it’s bad, I have to…” (See: “A Quick Gratitude Shift” for the flip on this last phrase.) Emma challenged me on this directly: “But don’t you love your work? A lot of people hate their jobs, but you don’t: So why lie? Why wouldn’t you lead with that to your kids?” In contrast, she tells her kids all the time how fulfilling she finds her career and that she misses them when she’s away but hopes they go on to do work they love to do someday, too—and that she doesn’t want them to ever feel bad about it. “I tell them about all the things I get to do—including that I like having some time to myself.” In doing this, she’s trying to break the guilt-apology cycle that has so many of us by the throat. “Plus,” she offered, “I think it’s a modern plight to center ourselves so aggressively in our kids lives—yes, the need us, but I think we over-state this need in our minds.”

When I got home from New York City, my youngest barely looked up when I walked through the door.

“Hi mom!”

“Did you miss me?” I asked.

“Hmmm, not really? Did you buy me anything?”

Here’s to honest answers—and telling the truth about our lives.

You can also listen to this episode on Apple—or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find it on YouTube.

Alexandra is a health and science journalist and an Opinion editor at The New York Times. Her first book, The Elusive Body: Patients, Doctors, and the Diagnosis Crisis, just recently came out, but she started the reporting for it back in 2018. It’s a fascinating read—full of interesting research and human stories—about how often patients are misdiagnosed, the large cost of this, and the people who are creatively working to improve our medical system. Which includes many talented doctors from within the system.

We talk about all of this today, including the amazing cast of characters at the Undiagnosed Diseases Network, which is run out of the NIH, and which could serve as a model for our larger healthcare system.

We talked about patient experiences, which I’m sure will resonate with many of you. We also talked about the role that technology and AI currently plays in a doctor’s diagnosis, and how this might change in the future. And we get a bit into the downsides of some of the newer early screening and detection trends.

MORE FROM ALEXANDRA SIFFERLIN:

The Elusive Body: Patients, Doctors, and the Diagnosis Crisis

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:

Speaker 1:

Lemonade.

ELISE:

Hi, it’s Elise Luna and host of Pulling the Thread. Today I’m talking to health and science journalist, Alexandra Ciferlin.

Hi, it’s Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread. On this show, we pull apart the web in which we all live to understand who we are and why we’re here. My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny seeds of awareness so that we might all collectively learn and grow. Here is today’s guest, journalist Alexandra Ciferlin, talking about a unique group called the Undiagnosed Diseases Network.

ALEXANDRA:

What’s great about this program too is that many of the experts involved in it, it’s run by this physician, Dr. William Goll. We’ll be very frank with the patient like, “I think you have something very rare. I may not figure it out or I may not figure it out today or this week or this year, but I am committed to helping you figure it out and I’m going to do everything I can and put all the resources I can towards you.

ELISE:

Well, I feel like books like this are always well-timed, but this book feels particularly well-timed in the context of where we are culturally and technologically, right? But when did you start working on this?

ALEXANDRA:

I started the reporting for this back in 2018, so quite a while. And so many things were different. That was pre-COVID pandemic. That was pre this iteration of artificial intelligence. And so much of what happened over the years reporting this book ended up informing my

Thinking about so many elements and so many of the conditions I cover and how the solutions. So it’s been a long time coming.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, and I think it just sort of puts its finger right on that point of fracture in our healthcare system, unfortunately, but where we find ourselves with this rolling disaster in terms of NIH grants being rolled back, just extreme mistrust, maha and its emergence. Now we have AI. But I feel like this, ironically, I guess, diagnosis exactly what happens that inspires or has inspired this moment that we find ourselves in, which is there are a whole lot of people who are misdiagnosed or are lacking diagnoses. And we don’t like to think about it. And my dad’s a physician and I’m so grateful for doctors and scientists. And this is just the baseline reality of the human body, right? The elusive body. It’s the name of your book. And the sooner we can start talking about it and naming it, and instead of pretending like it doesn’t exist, I think it’s an important step towards getting our whole system back on the rails.

Would you agree? Totally.

ALEXANDRA:

I do. I do. I absolutely agree. And I also think that, as you said, it’s not just the patient community, I would say, that is sort of upset about the status quo, though obviously those are the people who are going undiagnosed, but I have found through the reporting that so many of the medical professionals that I spoke to are also frustrated by the state of the system that they are supposed to be working in. So this is not a new trend, but right now a lot of physicians have huge caseloads. They only get so much time. I think if the average appointment is 18 minutes and you’re seeing something like 20 people a day, and that amount of time might be okay for a quick diagnosis of something like shingles, something pretty obvious. But for something that takes a little bit more time or is a little bit more complex, physicians don’t have all the time in the world.

They also have all the administrative demands on their time filling out electronic health records. These are things that the medical community has been complaining about for a long time. And I think the answers to helping the diagnosis crisis, as I call it, will require changes on all ends of the spectrum, both from the medical community and system-wide. And I actually think there are many people within healthcare who would agree that this needs to change and who would desire a better system to work in.

ELISE:

A hundred percent. And I think so often, as the world often is, it’s presented to us as this sort of false binary of Western medicine versus Eastern medicine and doctor versus patient, and that somehow wanting people to feel well, do well, be diagnosed and walk out of hospitals intact isn’t the goal, isn’t why people go into medicine, right? Inherently, it’s a human and healing practice, and yet I think so many of us feel there’s an antagonism, or that’s what we’ve seen play out politically, that there are all these people conspiring to make us ill and keep us ill. But I think some of the roots of this are really expertly explored in your book. So let’s start with just the basic facts. This was shocking to me that the statistic that ... What is it? That almost 800,000 Americans become permanently disabled or die each year because dangerous diseases are misdiagnosed.

That’s a John Hopkins statistic.

ALEXANDRA:

Yes. And the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine also have this estimate that most people will experience a diagnostic error in their lifetime, some with devastating consequences. So I think while physicians get the diagnosis right most of the time, there’s still this huge number of diagnostic errors that happen every year. And there’s a variety of different estimates on the prevalence, et cetera, that Johns Hopkins ones is one of the most recent studies on this. But even some will cite some of the more conservative statistics, which would say, let’s say a doctor gets the diagnosis wrong in some way five or 10% of the time. So most of the time they’re actually getting it right. But then if you consider that there are 155 million visits to the emergency room every year, there’s one billion doctor’s visits every year, that’s still a lot of affected people.

And I think what’s been interesting in reporting this book is when I talk to people about it, just tell them I’m working on this book, it is about diagnosis, it’s about what happens when there’s some kind of error, whether somebody doesn’t get the right diagnosis, whether it takes a very long time, whether it’s wrong diagnosis. And almost every time someone says to me, either that happened to me or that’s my mother, my friend, everyone seems to know someone who has experienced either a very long time trying to get a diagnosis or they simply don’t have one currently. And I think what’s been interesting is that that has sort of been taken for granted. It’s very frustrating experience on an individual level, but what I found when reporting this book was just we’re talking about so many people who go through these really long diagnostic journeys and it’s so frustrating and isolating and often counterproductive, and there just has to be a better way.

ELISE:

Yeah. And the unfortunate thing, of course, is that there are the true sort of medical mysteries, and we’ll talk about the UDP and that whole world. That was so fascinating. And then there are the people who, as you, I can’t remember the exact terminology, but are laboring to prove that they’re really ill. We know all of this from the last 20, 30 years, these diseases that were thought to be all in your head and chronic fatigue and other sort of complicated autoimmune diseases, long COVID, which I know has sort of proven this out as actually a real and concern and shed light on some of these other issues within the same sort of domain. But can you talk about that, the promises of evidence-based medicine and then its pitfalls and where it fails patients who don’t fit the diagnostic criteria and then what happens to them?

ALEXANDRA:

Absolutely. So as medicine has gotten more scientific over time, so through the history of medicine where you have gone from basically a physician’s observations just of the person in front of them to a physician being able to not only listen to your heart and lungs and your chest with something like a stethoscope, to actually being able to peer inside your body with an ultrasound to being able to sequence a genome, there’s now so many more technical ways to diagnose. At the same time, what this has meant is that there is now a system in place where when a physician is looking at a patient and wants to diagnose them, often the signs of illness become almost more important than the symptoms. So what I mean by this is if someone comes in and they say, I’m having this horrible burning itching on my neck, and a physician takes that and says, okay, there’s so many things that could cause an itching sensation.

But then if the patient shows them an actual rash, then the physician can say, I either recognize this, perhaps it’s shingles, that’s a well-known kind of rash that a physician might see very often. The signs of disease like a rash, a fever, a test result have now, because we have the ability to measure those things, those become so important to the diagnosis. It is much harder for a physician to diagnose someone if they come in and they don’t have a lot of signs of disease. So they come in and say, “I’m very fatigued. I don’t feel like myself anymore. Even I’m feeling general pain, I’m feeling lightheaded, or even I have a headache.” Those symptoms could be symptoms of a huge number of possibilities. So what happens with some conditions, and for a long time, a lot of autoimmune type of illnesses might fall into this category because you are having people feeling a lot of things without a lot of test results that can prove what’s happening.

So those people are then falling into this bucket of the doctor doesn’t really know exactly what’s going on. And this sort of category can be really frustrating to be there. Sometimes it’ll be categorized as a medically unexplained case. They’re not quite sure what’s going on. And I think for a long time, there are a lot of those kinds of cases without a clear understanding of what’s going on. What’s interesting and what has changed a bit, and we sort of mentioned this at the beginning of our conversation, is this growing understanding of how certain things like viruses can cause a very long tail of an illness or just the growing understanding of autoimmunity in general, which has allowed medicine to be more open-minded to a variety of possibilities, whereas maybe even not that long ago, you would be told, “I have no idea what’s happening to you.

You might be told, “Oh, maybe this is psychological,” when really you were just at the edge of available medical knowledge. So it’s been interesting in that way that both science has improved the accuracy of diagnosis over history, and also when there are cases that are in some kind of murky middle, they can get kind of lost.

ELISE:

Yeah. And historically, I mean, there are massive implications for that beyond feeling gaslit, that somehow you have a psychiatric disorder that’s creating these feelings or you want attention. I mean, whatever the ways that we used to talk about people who fell into this black hole, but you couldn’t get a diagnostic code, you couldn’t get a treatment plan, you couldn’t get insurance coverage. So it has had sowed a lot of distrust versus where medicine seems to be going, particularly with things like long COVID or recognizing the recent sort of, was it, I don’t know if it was a meta study or that Epstein-Barr virus drives

At least a certain amount of MS that you can have these ... I think I have a fair amount of latent strep in my system, for example, that can kick up in weird ways, but now we’re starting to understand that, that’s actually a real event. COVID was helpful in that context. But yeah, in that chasm though, you end up with a lot of veterans, right? Massive groups of people who are abandoned and left to their own devices and frustrated and sick. I did feel reassured by your book that doctors are not leaving that as a vacuum, but are starting to become more comfortable saying, “There’s something happening. I don’t know what it is. It is at the limits of my knowledge or my institution’s knowledge or medicine’s knowledge, and it doesn’t mean that it’s not real and valid and that we aren’t going to try and help you.

We need that conversation and the funding for it so desperately, right?

ALEXANDRA:

Yes. And I think that COVID in a way actually really helped many in the medical community to understand this because there’s been a variety of diseases and diagnoses that have been associated with viruses and are basically potentially a lingering long-term, sometimes chronic response to having some kind of viral illness. And within these communities, and there have been people in science and medicine who have been studying them for a really long time, but it really wasn’t until COVID that the idea that a virus could basically just do rick havoc on a person’s body and that it might take them a really long time to recover was something that became far more acutely understood by all physicians. You mentioned Epstein-Barr virus. That was very recently, in the last five years, pretty definitively connected to MS. And that was a huge finding. It was just incredible that one of the most prevalent viruses can cause this disorder that people have had forever and has been a bit of a mystery.

And when I started reporting this book, neither of those things were widely recognized. And so even just in the past five years or so, this understanding that, oh, perhaps this has been happening for far longer than I’ve ... Perhaps a medical professional might go back and think about the cases that they’ve seen in the past that perhaps they may be dismissed as something psychological when in fact it was just something they didn’t quite understand yet.

ELISE:

It’s interesting in sort of my previous career, we would write about some of these connections between Epstein-Barr and what is it doing to the body and mostly not through sort of the studies that have emerged in the last five years, but through physicians, experiential or patients, et cetera, and get maligned for it. And that’s sort of what then drives this, not to say that everything was perfect or that everything was accurate or right, but it’s that when that’s shut down rather than saying like, “Let’s explore it. “ You start to get a population that is unwilling to ... You start to get this animosity, I guess, which we’re really seeing play out big time now. But I agree. I feel like I’m hopeful that as things like COVID will sort of get it on the line, that there’ll be a certain amount of humility that I think hasn’t always been attached to the practice of medicine.

Even though I know so many just incredible, wonderful, humble doctors who are absolutely willing to say, “I don’t know. “ But that hasn’t necessarily ... Maybe that’s been too rare historically. And you write about this. Doctors, for all of those perverse incentives and whatnot, can’t spend as much time talking to you, are glossing over the physical exam, are missing things, or this isn’t taught in the way the human side of medicine has been somewhat abandoned for technical testing, and there’s a lot that we lose in that.

ALEXANDRA:

Definitely. And I think you mentioned the physical exam, so that is something that used to be sort of foundational in a bedrock to medicine and to diagnosis, and that’s something that increasingly is going away. I was at a recent event where there were physicians and scientists, and someone just basically said, “Our medical students are not good at the physical exam. What do we do in this era?” And they were specifically talking about how do we think about artificial intelligence and people leaning on that more, but they were just reiterating that some of these mainstays of understanding the human body are changing, and it really does need to be something that’s instilled very early on in medical school. Something that was interesting to me in the reporting of this that you alluded to as well is that that humility and that sort of ability to say, “I don’t know what’s going on with you.

This is beyond my scope. I’m very uncertain right now.” That is still a very uncomfortable position, I think most physicians would say to be in. As a physician, you want to heal the person in front of you, you want to give them answers, and when you can’t, it’s really frustrating. But on top of that, even though uncertainty is such an inherent part of medicine, and as a practitioner, you’re going to deal with that so often. I found in my reporting that many clinicians talked about how they were never really trained for that. There was never really a session in medical school about, “And here is what you do when you have no idea what’s going on. Here is the script that you should use to explain to a patient that you just don’t know and you need to ... “ Physicians know how to refer people, of course, but many people I interviewed for my book talked about just this deep discomfort with uncertainty and how they really do think that if uncertainty became a bigger part of their training, basically how to deal with it, how to navigate it, that would be really helpful to them.

There are many things that sort of perpetuate this idea that the doctor needs to be all knowing at all times. And I think having that humility be more ingrained in their training could be really helpful.

ELISE:

Yeah. And just to stay there for a minute, and you write about this a bit, but what happens in terms of the legalities of that and also with errors and how so many doctors because of our incredibly litigious culture are also taught to minimize mistakes or to not own the wrong decision, even though that’s going to happen. My dad’s a physician, my mom’s a nurse now many years ago, but my mom had an aneurysm in her brain behind her eye that had partially ruptured and she was lifting weights and had a horrible headache. And my dad was like, “You’re getting an MRI.” And my aunt had also had an aneurysm. Anyway, my mom flew that night to see the world specialist and this specific type of aneurysm, which is hard to locate. He saved her life and his team left surgical gauze in my mom’s head and she was having recurring double vision and just not healing well.

And back in Montana where I grew up, they went back in, found the gauze, retrieved it, et cetera. And what was so striking about that experience is my mom reached out to her physician and she ran my dad’s practice. So she was always on guard against malpractice. She’s not immune to that anxiety, but she reached out to him to tell him what had happened. And this might’ve been before all the checklists that are now in place, making sure that people are properly counting out everything that went in and he wouldn’t respond. He never engaged with her and he didn’t apologize. And so she sued him and remodeled her kitchen.

ALEXANDRA:

Good for her.

ELISE:

I know, but she was really pissed to have to do that and yet felt forced by his own inability to apologize. And then conversely, my dad, who’s retired now, was never sued and things would of course go wrong. He did practice a lot of intensive care and he chalks it up and he’s of a different generation to having the bedside manner to go and sit with people even when things were terrible and to be human with them and to wish for a different outcome, to take responsibility for anything that was his responsibility. Anyway, I don’t think that doctors are really allowed to do that anymore.

ALEXANDRA:

No, that’s been one of the really frustrating parts of reporting this was in talking to experts who are really trying to think about solutions, something that everyone runs up against is this sort of litigious culture and this fear that health systems as well as individual physicians have over admitting mistakes or even tracking them. So

Might realize until this reporting that oftentimes a doctor or a health system may never know if they got the diagnosis wrong because it’s not really tracked in that way. So if you are going, let’s say into an emergency room and you see one physician and they do the diagnosis and then they go off on their shift and then perhaps you leave, but it wasn’t correctly diagnosed, so you go back and you’re seen by somebody else or you end up going to a whole other medical system, that first doctor that you saw is not necessarily being informed that they didn’t get the diagnosis right. So there’s no real reflection happening. And what many experts who are trying to fix this problem and saying, we do need to take on diagnostic error and lower these rates, what they say is it’s really hard to get a medical system to say, we’re even going to track this.

And honestly, sometimes for good reason, because what would happen legally is very scary to them.

What is interesting though is that many of the clinicians that I spoke to interviewed for the book who are considered especially good diagnosticians, many of them personally track cases and do feel like that is actually something that is very important to their own training and diagnosis, very important to their ability to get things right because they are learning from mistakes. So many of them will develop their own practices where basically they look at the last two weeks of all the patients that they saw and they try as best they can to get some sort of sense of the follow-up, whether they’re looking back in the person’s record and seeing, did I get that right? Did I get that wrong? And if I did get it wrong, why? Was it because I’ve never seen this kind of presentation before? Is it because it was at the end of my shift and I was really tired?

Trying to think through all of those factors and they really do think that that is an important part of their practice, but that’s not something that is implemented system-wide.

ELISE:

No, and I loved those stories. I loved Dr. Dollywall and the way that he does that so specifically in order to learn and to become ever better. And you have this quote from Dr. William Osler in 1905, which is, he advises the students to keep notes on their patients, begin early to make a threefold category, clear cases, doubtful cases, mistakes, and learn to play the game fair. No self-deception, no shrinking from the truth, mercy and consideration for the other man, but none for yourself upon whom you have to keep an incessant watch. But that’s a fantastic process to create a sense of accountability, to close the loop. I think it was Dr. Dollywal talks about when you don’t know how the story ends with the patient, then you’re going to tell yourself the most complimentary version, but that we don’t get better. And that feels not only imperative because of this diagnostic crisis, but also imperative.

I mean, you write about AI and how it’s sort of probably past the point of being able to pass its medical school exam at this point, but that it’s still, it’s at best an excellent counterpoint, but that it can’t do the physical exam. It lacks the context, it needs to be fact-checked, it can hallucinate, it can spiral. So we talk a bit about how this could look as a pairing.

ALEXANDRA:

Yes. So it’s been really interesting how quickly this iteration of artificial intelligence, especially these large language models, programs like the ChatGPTs or Open Evidence, which is a more medical system-focused version, it’s wild how much they’ve progressed. And when the book comes out, I’m sure there is going to be something. What has been interesting is that many of the medical experts I’ve spoken to are pretty optimistic about these technologies in a way that was surprising to me because back in 2018 when I was reporting on whether AI could help with diagnosis or medicine in general, there was a lot more skepticism because I think the kinds of technologies that had been available, just they weren’t as good. Now, these versions do appear to be much better and what they’re doing is taking just enormous amounts of information and distilling it very quickly. And so I speak to a lot of physicians who have started using these tools basically as what you might call a curbside consult, which used to be you would pull aside another doctor in the hallway and say, “Hey, I have this case.

Can I talk to you about it? And what do you think? “ And more and more physicians are now basically putting that kind of question into a chatbot. The issue is that it’s still, for every two studies that have some incredible finding about how well these technologies are performing, there’s a study that finds they’re not that great. So it’s still a bit mixed. What I think could end up being helpful in this process is it does seem like these tools can be helpful for things like identifying something that is very rare. So a given doctor who sees tons of cases of things like pneumonia probably doesn’t need to ask a chatbot what this patient has because they’ve seen all the different ways that pneumonia can present in a body because they’ve been a primary care doctor for however long. But when a physician bumps up against something they’ve never seen before, there’s some early evidence to suggest that perhaps a chatbot with access to tons of medical literature might be able to identify or at least raise a possibility that potentially a physician hadn’t considered before.

I think merging what a physician does, which is not just being able to hold all the information about the human body and their mind at one time, but is also clinical judgment and just being able to decide, okay, here’s this list of possibilities, but what do I actually think is happening to the person in front of me? I think that ability is very human and is something that I imagine physicians will be doing for a very long time still to come, but perhaps some of these artificial intelligence tools could help them with that disease differential list, that list of potential conditions, especially if it’s something that seems complicated or potentially rare, it might raise something they hadn’t thought of before, but then it’s still going to be up to the doctor to decide what to do with that information and whether it does actually make sense for the person that they’re seeing.

ELISE:

Yeah. It feels like if anything puts even more of a permanence on the human parts of medicine, the physical exam, the context, the environment, all those less obvious cues or things that might not necessarily be picked up on a lab, whereas the AI could crunch all that data, I’m sure much more efficiently, but it seems like it will always be, at best, it’s a dual-pronged approach. Let’s talk about, I loved this idea of the UDP and that this exists at different universities and it’s an NIH program. I know it’s sort of under fire, but this idea that there’s a group of houselike physicians, even though we don’t get necessarily the results in a single episode, but who are taking on these cases that are not diagnosable. Can you talk a bit about ... I loved that whole cast of characters.

ALEXANDRA:

Yes, I love this cast of characters as well. So the Undiagnosed Diseases Network, it started as the Undiagnosed Diseases Program is run out of the National Institutes of Health. And basically the UDP, which is the program at the NIH, it started with this goal to basically take on the most complicated medical mysteries, undiagnosed patients in the United States. And it’s such an interesting model. So people who typically they have seen many different physicians and they very clearly have something wrong. This is often someone with what might be a rare or even a novel disease. They get referred to the NIH, which then has this amazing protocol for trying to diagnose these patients. So if you are accepted into the program, what happens is a group of experts from different disciplines. So it is like a geneticist, a neurologist, a cardiologist, a dermatologist, anyone that they think their area of expertise might be relevant, they gather and they review the patient’s file, their medical history, the letters from the doctors that they’ve seen.

Typically, there’s letters from either the patient themselves or their family members, and they all review that before the patient even arrives and they sort of come up with a plan of what they’re going to do to try to diagnose this person. Then you get to go to this program typically at the NIH or there are these clinics now at universities around the US, but you go and you have what is typically a week long, maybe even beyond that series of appointments where you are seeing a variety of physicians and scientists, you’re doing all sorts of diagnostic tests, you get access to a variety of different technologies like genetic screenings, et cetera. And they take this very comprehensive, holistic approach to trying to understand the patient from all angles and ideally make a diagnosis at the end. And they’ve been quite successful in identifying very rare diseases and even identifying novel diseases that have not been seen before.

And what I love about this model is that it just feels very humane and it’s obviously very scientific, but from talking to numerous patients who have gone through this, often what they talk about the most is less, I got access to this incredible diagnostic tool, but more, this was the best medical experience I’ve ever had in my life.

And it does feel like it could be an actually very applicable model for instances in which someone has something much more complicated and difficult to diagnose that this kind of approach of having many people of different disciplines work together to figure out the diagnosis could be very beneficial.

ELISE:

Well, I think many people have an experience of, and I think my guess is that this happens to more women and certainly more people of color where you go and you feel, and rather than sort of innocent until proven guilty, you feel sort of guilty of Munchausens, I don’t know, guilty of making stuff up like you’re proving out, I don’t feel well. And I think in reading the case studies of the UDP patients, just that being heard, being listened to, being taken seriously, being treated in that way is kind of just the table stakes that seems hard to achieve. And if we could all just start there with slightly better bedside manner, curiosity and an acknowledgement, I get that you don’t feel well, it feels like it would go a long way towards rebuilding trust.

ALEXANDRA:

Yes, I definitely think so because I think what many patients who I interviewed for this book will talk about is how in a typical doctor’s appointment, they almost felt like it was about getting them out the door. Whether or not that’s true, that’s what it felt like. It was really hurried, especially if it’s a person who has something a bit more complicated and is not a quick diagnosis, they will feel like, oh, I have to reexplain all this information to this doctor and then they’re going to say they don’t know what’s wrong, so I have to go find someone else and I have to bring all this with me. And everyone’s just sort of trying to scooch me through the process as fast as possible versus when you go to the Undiagnosed Diseases Network or the Undiagnosed Diseases Program, you know that you are entering a space in which they are explicitly there to try to figure you out, which really should be what every appointment is, but it doesn’t always feel that way.

And what’s great about this program too is that many of the experts involved in it, it’s run by this physician, Dr. William Gall, will be very frank with the patient like, “I think you have something very rare. I may not figure it out or I may not figure it out today or this week or this year, but I am committed to helping you figure it out and I’m going to do everything I can and put all the resources I can toward you and hopefully we will get to an answer.” But I think just having that commitment to be with the patient over this journey, I think is very trust building and can really help what feels like very fractured relationships between patients and the medical system. People I think are aware that diseases are complicated, diagnosis is complicated. Of course, they want answers right away, but I think people also understand this can take a while, especially if it’s complex, but what they really need is someone who makes them feel like they are committed to getting those answers.

And I think people lack that right now.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, and I think it pushes people, and again, all of these things have sort of their own shadow and their own light, but it pushes people to feeling like, “I have to be my own advocate, I have to be my own Dr. Google doctor. I need to go and get all these scans that I can get without a prescription to diagnose myself.” You write a bit about diagnostic creep, but I think as this technology becomes more available, and I know things like thyroid cancer have been well explored or this idea that sometimes we don’t need to know that there’s a non-invasive, that fine line between hitting everything with a hammer and actually only attending to the things that actually need intervention. Can you talk a bit about that because living in LA, I certainly see that where I’m like, I don’t want a full body scan.

I’m not symptomatic. Yeah.

ALEXANDRA:

Yeah. I can’t tell just how popular it is, but I find the growing popularity of full body MRIs to be pretty concerning because when you go searching for something, you’re going to find things. And with a full body scan, something might come up and it looks concerning, but perhaps it’s just a benign cyst that would’ve gone away on its own and it didn’t need any sort of intensive intervention. What I think can happen is when people feel like the medical system is ignoring very real symptoms that they are having, after they’ve gone through the traditional system for a while, they will or can get really fed up and feel like, “You know what? I’m throwing up my hands and I’m going elsewhere.” And it might be the influencer I see on my Instagram, it might be a full body MRI, it might be who knows what.

And sometimes people get the relief they’re looking for, but sometimes they can also be vulnerable to more medical type scams. I think there is this desire for answers and for relief that is very understandable. I think when you get to a place where you’re maybe more worried well isn’t quite the right term, but you’re sort of diagnosing things that are maybe ... There’s a lot of self-diagnosis, for example, that happens, I think, a lot on TikTok and social media platforms where people maybe didn’t think they had ADHD, but now that they see a bunch of videos online, they think maybe I do. And in some cases, maybe they do, but in other cases, maybe they don’t. But I think there’s just this desire for answers and diagnosis is an answer, but it’s not always the right one. And I do think that it is helpful for people to be more directly engaged with the healthcare systems.

ELISE:

I think that that’s right. You think about something like thyroid cancer, you mentioned in the book how the jury is still somewhat out, which was shocking to me, but that things like mammograms at the pace at which we currently get them, that I think we’re acculturated to believe diagnose, treat is always the best thing when in reality our bodies, if we were scanning our bodies every day, we would find sort of the beginnings of a cancer that then gets resolved on its own before it ever crosses our awareness or might be so slow growing, it will never be a problem in our lifetimes. That’s very difficult for us to sit with, but I do think when we think about where the technical part of diagnosis is going or things like function health, the biotracking, what it says, here’s information, take action on that information, I don’t know that it’s always helpful.

ALEXANDRA:

Definitely. And I think there is this big debate around the benefits of early screening, whether it’s for something like cancer or something else. And this has been why some of the guidelines around mammograms have shifted back and forth at this point over the years. But I think what perhaps some people get confused about when it comes to screening and the benefits or risks of early screening is the goal of screening for something like cancer or breast cancer is to prevent early deaths from breast cancer, to prevent cancer deaths. It’s not just to find things, it’s not just to find tumors. And this is very complicated, I think, to really wrap your head around, but it is the case that sometimes a very, very, very early stage cancer found in someone was never going to affect them over their lifetime. And so you have to ask the question, well, if that’s the case, then is it worth it to be treating that very aggressively?

Or had I not known about it, would it have not caused health problems or led to early death over time? It’s complicated questions, but I think the goal of diagnosis is not just to find things, it’s to ideally accurately diagnose someone so that you can provide a treatment that either alleviates their symptoms or helps them live longer. That’s the idea, not just finding things that need to.

ELISE:

And there’s a very massive, a life-changing difference between something going on in your thyroid and something going on in your lungs, right? If you could catch lung cancer stage one, that would be lifesaving, dramatically lifesaving. That’s one of those horrible deadly cancers that’s typically always caught at the end. I have hope that the technology will become more specific or more helpful in that way. I do think, and you sit obviously in this space in your day job, but that consumers are ... We’ve been getting a massive civics lesson for the last decade. I know some people have been engaged much longer than that, but I think everyone is like, “Oh, I do need to be political or this does affect me. “ And to that end, I feel like we’re in the middle of this grappling with healthcare and I do feel optimistic about the other side that we’ll see some sort of retooling, that there’ll be some context, some perspective taking around this entire process that will put people’s minds more at ease and create better relationships that include uncertainty and that the technology will come to a truly helpful place rather than just a chaotic overwhelm of today you have this thing wrong with you that you need to attend to or not, right?

ALEXANDRA:

Yeah. I’m really hopeful for that too. I really think that the issues with the healthcare system and where people feel like it’s falling short for them are so widely recognized and unfortunately increasingly recognized. And as I mentioned earlier, on all levels, I do find that some of the first people to criticize the way that the health system is functioning right now are people working within the health system. Everyone is very frustrated and I’m hopeful that we can figure out a way to inject some humanity back into it, not just in terms of having incredible bedside manner, though I think that matters hugely, but also just longer appointments when they’re needed, people not feeling like they have to be their own advocates through the entire system, and hopefully there could be more integration with other disciplines, et cetera, like the Undiagnosed Diseases Network model. I do feel hopeful about this because I do feel that both patients and the medical community do desire this better way forward.

ELISE:

So you will fall in love with some of the physicians that Alexandra profiles in the elusive body. These are physicians who are deeply caring and empathic and also genius level diagnosticians who also work hard to disabuse their students that technology will save us all, or that technology is inherently better than the physical exam and the context that goes with the patient and what they’re presenting with. So I don’t know, I’m hopeful that AI technology, the need to recreate, reconstitute our healthcare system as sort of one of the most pressing needs, at least on voters’ minds, will force the next iteration or evolution of medicine that will serve everyone so much better, where patients are seen by doctors who are allowed to spend time with them at their bedside, doing that physical exam, doing the interview, listening, looking, seeing, searching, because hopefully AI and other technological advances will take care of so much of the other dredge work that’s required in the practice of medicine.

So I think it will become more human, more loving, more clarifying, and more empathic. I’m going to hold that as a vision. So the book is called The Elusive Body. She’s a great writer and it’s a really interesting and fun read. Thanks as always for listening. I’ll see you next time.

If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you.

1. I’m hosting a group energy healing session for paid members of Pulling the Thread on Zoom with Uta Opitz this Saturday, May 2nd at 10amPT. Come, close your eyes, and relax. We did this once before and it was honestly pretty incredible—remote healing works, and when super-charged by a group it can be even more moving. Info for registering is at the bottom of this email.

2. I’m hosting an in-person retreat at Omega in Rhinebeck, New York with from May 25-29—I think it’s shaping up to be incredible. There’s still time to join us, you can register here.

I have a confusing relationship with my anxiety—at times, it feels anticipatory, like it’s tethered to my intuition. At other times, it’s debilitating. On Our Best Behavior opens as I’m in my car, experiencing, I dunno….day 37 of a prolonged bout of chronic hyperventilation, which is my particular brand of an anxiety disorder. Unlike the version of hyperventilation where you frantically breathe into a paper bag, chronic hyperventilation is oppressive and tedious—it’s marked by the feeling of not being able to take a full or complete breath, leaving you to sigh and yawn while you feel like you’re slowly asphyxiating. I can do this for weeks and sometimes months at a time. I’m guessing some of you reading this are going to realize that you have this affliction as well: In my experience, most people don’t realize it’s an anxiety disorder or that it has a name. Many people have reached out after reading On Our Best Behavior to say, I didn’t know that was a real thing, I thought it was only me. (I interviewed former UN Ambassador Samantha Power years ago—in her memoir she described it as “Lungers.” She’d never been diagnosed.)

So that’s the downside. And nothing has driven me more nuts over the past twenty years than this downside. I’ve seen physicians, I’ve had my tongue released, I’ve been treated for mild asthma, I’ve worked with breathwork coaches, I’ve seen every variety of healer. Mostly, this has been to no avail, though some interventions have helped. I do one meditation for 20+ breaths where I focus alternately on spinning the chakras up the front of my body clockwise, then the chakras down my back counter-clockwise. (Yes, I was surprised to learn that you have two sets of chakras.) That practice can ease my discomfort when I’m really in it.

The idea that has helped me the most, though, is the realization that the anxiety doesn’t always belong to me. I know this, in part, because it’s typically not tethered to what’s happening in my life: During some of the most stressful stretches, or when I’m really pedal to the metal, I can be absolutely fine. While at other times, I don’t have all that much going on and boom, I’m breathless. I’ve started documenting the really tough bouts and tracking them to collective and personal events. I haven’t sorted out all the patterns, but the anxiety seems to not be consciously anticipatory—i.e., it’s not attached to something that I know is coming or that’s bothering me. Instead, it seems to be unconsciously prophetic. I wish I could be more specific than that, as it arrives without content—it’s just a barometer indicating that something significant is going to happen. Something significant happens and the breathing pattern lifts, leaving me unencumbered and able to respond.

Obviously, I wish it were different: It’s crude at best and deeply uncomfortable. But instead of trying to resolve it, I try to resist it less and use it as a sign that I should rest…because soon enough, I’m going to need my energy to respond to life.

I was thinking about this a lot in the context of my conversation with Rachel Goldberg-Polin, who is profoundly wise and a woman of deep faith. We didn’t get to it in our chat, but in When We See You Again, she writes about her dreams in the lead up to October 7, which made her think her life was in danger. And then, of course, there’s Hersh’s own prophecy, where he details in 9th grade that he’ll get to the other side of his tunnel.

There is, of course, nothing to do with prophecy: If you can even decode the information, there’s no way to take action except to understand that you’re part of some deeper, unseen order and that your soul is prepared for what’s coming, even if you are not. (On the podcast and in the book, she also tells the Death in Tehran—a story that exists in many cultures—about the king’s servant who runs into Death at the market. Terrified, he asks the king for a horse so he can escape to Tehran. Shortly after, the king runs into Death and asks him why he scared his servant. “Oh, I was just surprised to see him—we have a date later tonight In Tehran.” The moral: You cannot outrun your fate.)

In this sense, portentous anxiety is not helpful. Wherever you go, there you are. But it’s still a tool—or at least, it’s not something that I can outrun.

I had the psychiatrist and author Amir Levine on last week’s episode of Pulling the Thread and he offered some extra context on the wisdom of anxiety. His first book, Attached, sold something like three million copies—and his latest, Secure, will likely do the same over time. (There are certain books that just move.) In Secure, Levine explains the way in which we can all be more secure in our relationships—along with how to treat those of us who are wired for anxiety or avoidance. He makes the point that in terms of our survival over time, we need a wide range of temperaments. Those who are secure are the most durable and good at connection; those who are anxious, and therefore hypervigilant, tend to see threats before everyone else; while those who are avoidant tend to be willing to leave the herd and explore.

In one study, the anxious types were the first to notice a smoking computer; the avoidants were the first to take action and leave the room; and the secures just sat there, calm and unphased. His larger point is that there are survival benefits for the collective to have anxious and avoidant types in the mix. We’re not this way because of nurture; it’s entrenched in our nature and it can be a gift. (This is a different situation for anxious-avoidant types who are really dysregulated, often from childhood trauma.) Levine offers that roughly 20% of the population are anxious attachers, and that this subset “possess remarkable perceptual abilities that far surpass those of others.” (As an anxious person, I love the idea of that even as I’d trade my anxiety disorder for hyperviligance any day.)

After all, being an anxious-attached person is energetically costly: We are wired to read the environment—and everyone’s faces—for threat through subtle cues, like facial expressions, tone, etc. Is that person mad at me? Is that a saber tooth over there in the bushes? And when we feel generally unsafe and insecure, this can ratchet up to debilitating heights. It’s good for everyone to feel as secure as possible, as much of the time as possible. This was the focus of most of my conversation with Levine: How do you shift yourself toward secure, regardless of where you sit on the attachment spectrum? He also details how to work with—and love—those who are different. He prescribes really simple interventions, like SIMI’s (“seemingly insignificant minor interactions of everyday life”) which are particularly helpful for avoidants, who need to be reminded that relationships are important and that they can keep anxious-types in their life from spinning out by doing small things to stay in touch throughout the day. (A SIMI is something like sending a quick check-in text or even “hi,” or acknowledging that someone needs something from you and you haven’t forgotten, etc.)

Levine’s main thesis is that we all need to choose relationships that are CARRP. CARRP stands for Consistent, Available, Responsive, Reliable, Predictable. Sometimes even seeing a list like that—the brass tacks of a highly functional and secure relationship—is helpful context, particularly if most of your relationships are not that. For Levine, these are the table stakes of feeling secure.

Obviously, there are many situations—like work—where we don’t always get to choose. You can’t demand a CARRP boss, for example; many of us have likely found ourselves in romantic relationships with non-CARRP people as well. And he has many antidotes for that: But just knowing what to aim for is a helpful first step.

This is a lot for today, but drop a line in the comments if you want me to detail Levine’s Protest-Regret Cycle and Attachment Gaslighting—fascinating and something I experience all the time. He also has a concept called Wall Tennis with Love that is super-helpful—it’s essentially a strategy for anxious types to “turn down” non-CARRP relationships in your life slowly, so you don’t trigger a Protest-Regret Cycle by severing an attachment too quickly. (And hey, if you don’t want to wait for another newsletter, there’s always our podcast conversation.)

You can also find this episode on Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I had some personal highs this April, and some real lows—as well as a strange feeling (for me, someone who is constantly in motion, always moving forward) of being a bit unmoored—a reminder of needing to wait, of letting cycles be, of accepting stillness (or trying to, at least). I’ve also been thinking of a (related) Carissa Schumacher metaphor—the idea that each of us prefers a different part of the cycles of life: seeding, growing, or harvesting. I’m reflecting on all of this—and a few other new things that have become very meaningful to me—in this month’s solo episode.

RELATED CONTENT:

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:

ELISE:

Well, I don’t know about you all, but April for me was putting everything that’s happening collectively aside, a real wild ride. I’m going to look back at this month as one of some incredibly high highs and also just some strange eddies. These moments where I have felt for reasons and for no reasons a bit at ends. And that’s a rare feeling for me. I’m one of those people, for better or for worse, I have this quirk where I just set forth in a direction. I’ll be on a street in a city I don’t know with someone who is guiding me around and I’ll just start walking constantly.

This happens all the time. And whomever I’m with has to sort of call me back and say, “Hey, we’re going in the opposite direction.” So I guess all to say that I don’t always know where I’m going, but I tend to make a decision and move forward and make that decision right, unless it’s absolutely wrong. But this month I’ve had this feeling and apparently we’re in a very long collective void. I’ve had this feeling of being unmoored and unanchored and not necessarily directionless, but more like I can’t get my feet on the ground. I can’t get the sort of wind into the sails to direct myself. I don’t know any other way to explain it. I wrote a newsletter about this too that some of you may have read, but it’s that dead, calm feeling that hopeless powerlessness, hopelessness sounds awfully dark, but a bit of stillness, which can be an incredibly helpful medicine, but which I find very scary, I think, because I would much rather be moving even if it’s not actually towards where I want to go.

I’m just one of those people. I see a line and I’m like, “I will walk around the building to get to the shorter line or I will ski around to get to the shorter line, not really factoring in the fact that it’s probably ultimately going to take longer than I would to just stand.” I just can’t do it or I find it very difficult. So anyway, so that’s what I’m experiencing is this standing and also this meeting or this confrontation with the universe where I’ve had this confrontation before. Some of you may relate to this when I first started working with Carissa back in the day, which was during COVID and she said to me, “If you don’t make space, if you don’t start canceling things in your life and making more room, then we will cancel them for you. “ And they did. So I also feel like that there’s a little bit of that at play of watching me overfill my plate and with a little bit of a laughter saying, “Ha ha ha ha ha, not today.

I just keep doing the same thing.” I’m being a little bit abstract, I realize, but yeah, I’m feeling again like I need to create space because I have, again, as is my tendency taken on too much and been trying to walk maybe in the wrong direction and I am just being put back in place and told to wait. It’s very difficult. In a recent newsletter, I wrote about that using a meta metaphor, a nature metaphor, which works on many different levels, which is this idea that in our current culture, which is this up and to the right growth oriented, capitalistic, more, more, more, more, more, very orange and spiral dynamics world where we are not in any sort of relationship with the natural world where we get whatever we want whenever we want, regardless of season or location or geography. We’ve in some ways forgotten how to cycle.

We’ve forgotten what it is to wait. We’ve forgotten what it is to let things ripen. We’ve forgotten what it is to recognize that things have their moment and their time and then they go away and then maybe something new emerges. We just don’t think in that way anymore. And we are, as much as we try to define ourselves as distinct from nature, because as you guys know, nature means not human, which is crazy. That’s the definition, the textbook definition. We are part of and we are nature and it’s important to remember those rhythms. Often those rhythms are easier for women. We cycle with the moon. We can build babies and our bodies and let them go. We understand inherently what it is to wax and wane, but it’s a little bit more difficult, I think, for men who don’t have that active metaphor in their bodies, maybe.

I don’t know, I’m not a man. But even so, we live in a culture that would insist that these cycles of relevancy, that these booms and busts, that this way of planting, growth, eruption, ripening, death and decay, that that doesn’t apply. And it does, right? We all know that bringing any bit of creative work out into the world follows that cycle, making something, germinating, having an idea, seeding it, growing it, harvesting it, delivering it, et cetera, is a natural cycle and you are moving through it the whole time. So to that end, Carissa had, I don’t know, many years ago, offered in a transmission about understanding where your preferences might be or what your essence most aligns with in terms of the cycle of seeding, growing and harvesting. And her point, and this is all from my notes, but her point was that often we do all three or we might do different functions at different points in our life, and we might enjoy all three, but that mostly we might have a preference.

And she talked about how cedars are the ones in a spiritual sense who are working with one consciousness or bringing these ideas through that need to be here at this moment in time, and we’re injecting them into the culture in some way for seeding. The way I relate to it is at the beginning of a creative process, when I’m drafting, when I’m outlining, when I’m structuring and creating the container, that to me is a seeding process. I very much love the seeding process. And then there’s the growing process. And I’m going to talk about this as a metaphor in a minute too in a slightly different way, so hang with me. But the growers are the ... She talks about them as sort of the coaches, the therapists, the teachers, anyone who’s engaged in helping people evolve, grow, change, or moving ideas, products, concepts through as they get ready, as they’re refined, as they’re tempered, as they are perfected.

However you want to think about that, that’s the growing process. I’ve spent most of my career probably sort of in that growing space. And then there’s the harvesting, which is taking whatever has been grown and produced and bringing it to market. And this is the most visible. This is sort of the payoff. This is the market-based one and the marketing one. And her point was that there’s a lot of attention on the harvester and a lot of us want to be the harvester because it’s the most visible, but that we should always be careful not to harvest and appropriate that which we did not seed or grow, which makes sense, but this is the media layer of our world. And yeah, I don’t really ... It’s funny, I’ve definitely participated in that over the course of my career, but that’s my least favorite part. If I could just seed, that’s how I’ve really come to understand myself.

I would be thrilled. And I think that’s why I continue to enjoy collaborating and ghost writing, because to me, that’s a seeding process. That’s who is this person? What are they up to in the world? How can I reflect that back to them? And then how can I distill it into this essence of why they’re important to the collective? It, to me, feels like a seeding process, and then they get to ... I guess I grow it, but then they get to harvest it, and that’s great. Have fun. Truly. I love every other part except for that part. And so I think part of my enui or feeling really out of sorts right now, there are other reasons, but one is also that have drafted my next book and now it’s in the sort of growing refining stage with my editor and getting its facelift, which is exciting, even though sometimes think parts of books go and you mourn them, but then you’re like, “ I’ll use it.

It’ll find its place. “But yeah, this is not the part that I enjoy as much as coming up with a concept, feeling sort of pregnant and alive and incubating whatever it is in myself and then in the world, there’s just nothing like that for me. The other really important part of this metaphor, which I think needs to be stated is that in a traditional growing cycle in nature, yes, you get to tidy plant tidy rows of carrots or whatever it is that you’re seeding, but then the rest of it is up to the divine, right? You don’t get to be the water and the sun and the chemistry, you don’t get to be God there. And there’s an act of faith of putting whatever it is out into the world of planting your seeds in the ground and hoping for the best, maybe fertilizing them, making sure they’re getting the right mixture of sun and water.

But aside from that, the whole process of growth is out of our hands. And that’s a miracle. That is a remarkable thing, this lack of control that we have over, which is really significant. We never know what’s going to happen. You just never know. And I think that in our incredibly technical, algorithmically optimized, data rich world, where we’re getting so much better at predicting what’s going to work and we’re making decisions based on algorithms and AI and you’re feeding it ... I don’t do this, but a lot of really successful people in my space, for example, run everything through algorithms and through AI before they even decide what to create. They’ve already market tested it. They’ve already optimized it. They’ve already pushed beyond any chance of it not hooking in some way into the collective. And so I have a lot of thoughts about that, as you can imagine.

I think one of the issues is that it severs or distances us from the reality that we don’t know. And that’s part of what it is to be alive and how exciting it is to make something and then just have to know that you don’t know what’s going to happen. And I think everything that we do to try to engineer certainty is completely understandable and also sucks the joy out of life, even though it doesn’t feel joyful, right? You’re like, “I just want to know that this is a bestseller. I just want to know that this gallery show is going to sell out whatever it is, however you’re applying yourself, you think that you want that certainty, but I promise that nothing feels better than having it organically connect and not manipulating the system to make it so. “ I mean, that’s my theory and I have a lot of thoughts about this, but anyway, that’s the reality.

That’s the natural process. You don’t know. You don’t know what’s going to happen. You might be able to predict there’s going to be a good yield of carrots because you’re controlling whatever factors you can to ensure that they do the best that they can, but then it’s really not in your hands. And I think that that’s remarkable and so human to have that sort of trust, faith, spigot on and to do your part and then pass it over to the universe or the divine or whatever conception that you like to co-create with you and acknowledging I don’t have that much control. I just don’t. I really don’t. Anyway, that’s where I am at creatively and I’m laughing because I don’t know exactly what will happen with my next book. There’s a part of it that might come out and I’m like, “Oh, well then that will become this book.” And then I’m already outlining my next book.

And as I was drafting this book, I was like, “I’m done. I don’t have any more ideas, but ha, ha.” So in that sense, I’m feeling as much as I feel unrooted, ungrounded and unanchored, I’m feeling full of inspiration. I just have to figure out where it goes because right now I don’t feel connected. I’m at ends. This month was also great though because I have two sons and I try and protect their privacy as much as possible by not sharing them or talking about them that much. But it was their respective spring breaks. They’re at different schools now, which is kind of sad, but they had one week in common and so we went skiing up at Mammoth and it’s wherever we’ve gone, we’ve brought crazy weather with us. And so we were there in April, but it was like a winter storm. It was so cold.

And of course I didn’t have my boot heaters and I frostbite my feet when I was a tween competitive skier and so I need heaters. Anyway, it was kind of a debacle and yet it was so fun. And I can’t explain how good that felt because at the beginning of the day when my kids were complaining, because it was super icy and very windy and flat light. And I was like, “This is a disaster. We just need to go back to LA.” And there was a little bit of complaining and then something happened and then my kids just had the best time and it was so fun, infectiously fun to be with them. And I like to go ... My first choice for skiing historically has been like going skiing with Chelsea Handler at Whistler, like going snowcat skiing or going by myself and going exactly wherever I want to go on the mountain and pushing myself to the point of exhaustion and all of that, going fast and hard because I don’t know how to do anything without a lot of intensity.

And this is not that skiing with my kids. And yet I was like, “This is so fun.” Even though for the first two days I felt like I barely skied. I was just turning and stopping. And I don’t know, there’s something that happened in me. I love being a parent. I really do, but there are times when I’m not that present. Something happened this month where I was like, “This is so fun because how many more of these do I have? How many more years do I have where my kids actually want to hang out with me and actually want to spoon with me, my youngest, who slept with me, which was so sweet.” And I don’t know, I felt like a shift in myself in terms of, I don’t want to say priorities, but I was like, “God, this is as good as it gets and this is really great.” And then my oldest Max had two weeks off, which is an awfully long time.

And my husband, Rob, and I were going back and forth about what to do with him and Rob works for an actual company. And so I was like, “Well, fine, I’ll figure something out. “ And then I was like, “What?” I got to shift my thinking here. And Max loves science and nature. And so naturally I was like, “What do you want to do, bud? What’s on your bucket list?” Because let’s keep in mind that my kids are on the dole only for not that much longer. And then they don’t get to vacation with me. So I was like, “What do you really want to do that’s relatively local?” And he was like, “I am dying to take a helicopter ride from Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon.” And I was like, That’s so not on my bucket list. That sounds terrifying, but let me see what I can do.

And so my nature loving, nerdy science boy, Max, and I drove to Vegas. We are the two least likely people to enjoy Vegas. I have to say, I don’t gamble, I don’t drink, I’m just not that fun guys. I used to go out and dance in my crazy shoes. I have had my nights in Vegas, but not now. And anyway, I was like, “All right, let’s do it. “ So we drove to Vegas and I let Max do our itinerary based on YouTube and we used some AI, which definitely wasn’t what I would recommend, even though so many people are like, “Let Claude do your trip itineraries.” It sent us to a discovery desert science center that we were very excited about. And again, every time I use AI, it’s so polished and it presents to you in such a way that it feels perfect.

And so I didn’t think to double check everything that it sent me and it sent us to this desert discovery center to see what we were really excited to see. We, not being the operative word, but Max was very excited to see it’s the second largest meteorite in America. Well, I think the Desert Discovery Center has been closed for four years. So we walked around its exterior, but we couldn’t see the meteorite. Then it sent us to this place that was total tour strap for lunch, which was kind of disgusting, but an adventure. And then it sent us to this ghost town, which we actually loved. It was, again, another tourist trap, but fine. It was a refurbished ghost town. It had that Laura Ingalls Wilder general store where you could buy stick candy and cap guns. And yeah, they had a geode and gem store.

We hit that hard. It was called Calico Ghost Town or something. I can’t remember, but Max loved it. And yeah, we went to Vegas and we got up really early and took a helicopter ride to the Grand Canyon. We went with this company called Maverick. They were great. I loved our pilot. It was a group of us, small group. And they took us over the Hoover Dam and over Lake Mead, which is quite low and it was beautiful. It was God, it was stunning. And then into the Grand Canyon, and then we got to get out and look for lizards and scorpions. And then we flew back. We stopped to refuel. We stopped in the sort of field of Joshua trees and then back to the strip. And we saw a Cirque du Soleil show. Max really wanted to eat at Hell’s Kitchen, even though he had never seen the TV show because he really wanted to try Beef Wellington.

Is that the one? I think that’s it. It’s wrapped in Filo dough. And it was just fun, even though I find Vegas depressing and I very much worry about Vegas when you see the current level of Lake Mead. But I don’t know. It was so special to have a few days with just one of the kids and to let him sort of operate our itinerary. And yeah, we saw the Bodies exhibit, which somehow I had never seen. That was really cool actually for those of you who haven’t seen it. It’s at the Luxor. Yeah, Vegas, baby. Anyway, that was ... And then we drove back. We stopped for 8,000 snacks and I don’t know, we just meandered home and I don’t know, I was feeling so grateful for that time with him.

I think I’ve been in a ... I wrote a newsletter about this too, but a gratitude transition period where there was just this small three-word phrase that changed my thinking because I have this aversion to gratitude practices, I just don’t like performed obligatory gratitude. It doesn’t feel real to me. And I know you can fake it till you make it. And I’m not talking about manners and saying thank you and feeling it and sending people notes after they’ve had you over for dinner. I express a lot of gratitude and feel a lot of gratitude. I’m not talking about that, just more of that, “You should be grateful.” That energy, which I think is pounded into us because, or it’s becomes a bit of a prescription because we know that it’s so good for us. But again, back to Chrissa, this transmission, very simple transmission, but it was about changing any time you find yourself saying, “I have to, “ switching to, “I get to.

“ And it’s just this tiny reframe. I was just doing it this morning at my workout class where we were doing so many, I don’t know, weird squats and I was like, “This is so painful.” And then I was like, “I get to do this. I get to do this. I’m strong and I’m able bodied and it feels good to move my body.” It just immediately gets me back into a place of an appropriate relationship to life. And I felt that way very much about planning this trip to Vegas where originally I was like, “Rob, you should go. You would enjoy a helicopter ride. I will be scared.” But then I went from, I have to do this to, I get to do this. And it was so fun. And I hope Max, I think he had a great time, but I hope he remembers it forever.

And not to end this on a downer note because this book is weirdly as hard as it is, it’s not a downer, but I think I was obviously really affected by Rachel Goldberg Polin’s book, When We See You Again. And if you haven’t listened to my conversation with her from last week, pause. This isn’t about spoilers. You are welcome to finish this solo, but please go and listen to our conversation and please buy her book. That was two asks, but go and listen to our conversation and I think you’ll feel inspired by her book. It’s not a book that I think people are like, “Oh, I cannot wait to read this memoir of the mom of Hersh,” but she is so wise and I really needed to come into contact with her pain. And I recognize that’s a strange thing to say. So let me explain what I mean.

So for Backstory, Hersh was kidnapped from the Nova Music Festival on October 7th, 2023. He lost his arm, his left arm, his dominant arm, and he was taken into Gaza and he was held hostage for 328 days, at which point he was assassinated and he was 23 years old. He had just turned 23 and an American and you probably saw Rachel who’s this sort of very tiny person with Hersh’s dad, John, and they spoke at the DNC and they were on the news and they were just climbing every mountain trying to get the hostages freed and as part of that, a ceasefire deal. And so this is her memoir and she became sort of the mascot in some ways of the parents and in the same way that Hersh was one of the hostages that I think for Americans at least was indelibly put into our memory.

And this book is beautiful and raw. And that’s sort of the point because one of the things that I say to so many people who want to write books is, and this is not just me, but it’s, “Oh, well, you want to resolve, you want to have some distance, you want to heal, you don’t want to write from the wound, you want to write from the scar.” And her point, which is, I understand from people I know who have also lost children, is that this is the wound that never has a scar. This is never, this is an open gaping wound for the rest of your life, A, and B, there’s something about not intellectualizing, not packaging, not distancing from pain like that, that’s so visceral, that’s so profound. And her point is she needs help carrying it. And I feel like in our world where we get distance, even though it’s been so much and so brutal on every front constantly.

So I understand if you’re like, “I can’t take in anymore.” But this book weirdly, for me, was that important catharsis. I needed it to sort of break the dam, my Hoover’s damn sized grief, at least for the moment, and to get really close to her and her pain. And the thing that’s so wild about the book, and you’ll hear this in our conversation, is one, the absence of anger, the absence of a desire for revenge. If there’s anyone who has every right to be furious at everyone on every side, it’s Rachel, but it’s not part of this book. It’s not a part of her. And that I think is a lesson for all of us. She is just grief. And it also makes the book, this is not the right word, but almost safer, if that makes sense. You’re not going to feel ... You’re just going to be with her.

And so that’s, I think, a really important part. And then her faith. It’s really a book about faith, and I think that’s what relieves her of her anger. It is about this foundational knowing that there’s some bigger construct. And this is how I see the world too. I think it’s maybe the most health or sanity protected way to see the world, or for me, the most useful attitude. She sums it up with the Book of Job and these two lines, God gives, God takes, and she writes like, “The rest is all commentary.” And I guess what I’m trying to say too is that she doesn’t fight with reality. It doesn’t mean that she doesn’t ardently wish for a different reality, but she doesn’t fight with reality. And that is some Yoda level modeling. I don’t know if that’s the right word, but there’s an acceptance in this book and in her that is so incredibly profound.

And again, it does not diminish the excruciating pain that she is still in her point. She calls it her sickness, is that with the loss of a child for which there is no name because it is so far outside of the natural order, you never recover, you never heal, you are perpetually at half masked at best and you definitely never get over it, but you don’t sometimes can’t really even move forward. You’re in an arrested liminal space. And she needed people to understand that, both for her and also for other bereaved parents who are putting on personas and engaging with the world, but who feel like no one will ever understand the whole that lives in them. So with that hole in her, she is a woman of faith who accepts and essentially the book is about what it is. If this is a preordained story, if this was Hersh’s life, what do I do now?

And that is a really profound question. So as I think about that book, I think that book had a profound effect on my April two, both in terms of reminding me of how good it is, even though it’s been a hard month personally, but how good it is and what it is to really be still and instead of trying to pick up the wind, just accept my stillness and be present. And that sounds so trite, this idea of being present, but I don’t know that I could learn that lesson outside of being forced to be present because I can’t navigate anywhere. I don’t know. And hopefully I’m doing a good enough job of explaining this strangeness of the feeling, but I am a person who is always figuring out the next best step and putting myself into motion and that is not possible right now and that’s new for me, but I think I’m learning a really profound lesson.

I hope you all can relate and I hope this wasn’t too abstract and I will fill in some of the lines, I’m sure, in the months to come, but that’s where I’m at. So I get to, not I have to, and I’m getting a faith test of what it is to just let myself be blown here and there without trying to control exactly where I’m going. All right, friends, I know it’s a void. I know many of you guys are probably in your own weird voids. Often with these collective voids, they just show up for all of us in quite varied ways, even as obviously we’re in a series of ongoing, horrendous collective voids and we have been for 10, I mean longer probably, but really definitely since COVID. I mean, that was the first of a massive collective void, but they just keep coming, coming, coming, coming.

I don’t know. I don’t think it’s going to get easier, but I think part of what gets easier is when we’re like, “We’ve been through things. We can do this. “ When we will look at this period of time and just sort of stack the events, it I think will be quite staggering what we’ve managed to navigate our way through and still stand on the other side. All right, friends, I’ll see you next time.

If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you.

You can also listen to this episode on Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. It’s also available on YouTube.

Many of you will already know Rachel Goldberg-Polin. Her incredibly moving and beautiful book, When We See You Again, is out this week. It’s about her son, Hersh, who was stolen from a musical festival on October 7th, 2023, and who was executed after 328 days of being held hostage.

While I completely understand the instinct to turn away, I also really hope you will stay with us for this conversation, if you can. Rachel is incredible, and there are so many gifts to be found in her words. She told me stories today that made me laugh, that stunned me, that were utterly profound, and that will stay with me forever. If you have ever wondered why we’re here—or what your “why” is—I think you will also be changed by Rachel, too.

MORE FROM RACHEL GOLDBERG-POLIN:

Her Book: When We See You Again

RELATED EPISODES:

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

ELISE:

I know some version of grief and I also know you are magical and I’m excited to talk to you about those parts of the book as well. And first, it’s beautiful. It’s obviously very hard. My kids were circling me over the course of the weekend as I was reading your book and it released a dam in me as I think it probably does for so many people. And I want to talk to you about your experience of grief at the end of the book and letting it happen. But like most people, I think we all function by keeping it as far away from us as possible. And then when I go, I go down big. So thank you for that once in a decade catharsis. All right. So I want to talk about, you write at the beginning that your book is not from a healed place and that the wound is still open and will be probably forever.

But as you were working on this book and bringing it out into the world, do you feel like you’ve taken more steps towards that deeper understanding of even your why, which is sort of the thesis of this entire book? Was it therapeutic at all or do you feel like it was a re-traumatizing experience?

RACHEL:

Yes.

ELISE:

Both.

RACHEL:

Yes. It is both. I think it’s both. I know it’s both. I started to write because my soul was buckling from the weight of the pain, of the loss, and I couldn’t really shoulder it anymore. And I just tipped over and it spilled out all over the floor, these words.

They’re just packages of pain, I think. Someone asked, “What is this book about? “ And I said, “Oh, it’s about two things, love and pain.”

And they said, “That’s it.” I said, “Actually, it’s about four things, love and pain and pain and love in that arc.” It’s really a love story doused in pain or maybe it’s a pain story drenched in love. But I wanted to warn readers in the beginning, as you mentioned, I said, “I am underneath the truck as I’m writing this. I have one arm sticking out and I’m tapping with one finger trying to write this. I have no perspective. I have no distance from the impact of this gargantuan, Herculean, colossal journey. I’m still in it. “ And I wanted to be very clear about that upfront because I do think that sometimes people wait for that panoramic distance from an event so that they can comment on it in a way that is more measured. And I thought, I just want to give over my pain.

So as visceral and present and thorny and sticky and ugly as it is, actually that’s exactly how I want to give it over. And I don’t know if it was helpful. I don’t know if this process now, as the book comes out next week on the 21st, and I have no idea if it’s going to be horrific or fair or fine or dreadful or epiphanal. I really don’t know what to expect. I’m curious because I think when you don’t have a grand plan in terms of, I’m going to teach you how to make a million dollars, start from here, go here and here is your check. And really all I’m doing is I’m saying, “Please hold part of this. Please, please, please hold part of it. Just one molecule, take one molecule for me. “ And also, I think that the book for me, I’m hoping, is a little bit the answer to the most kind, innocuous question that I get asked constantly that is completely reasonable and comes from a heartfelt place. And I lose my mind. And it’s when people say, “How are you? “

And I lose it. And it’s not rational. And it really is me with the problem. When you’re in a relationship and you want to break up and you don’t want to hurt them, so you say it’s not you, it’s me. But it is actually them. I’m telling you, it’s me. It’s not you. It’s not them. It’s not anybody. I am broken. I am not normal. I even said it’s a disorder. And truly take apart the word disorder. I mean, this is the opposite of in the Latin an order. I am the opposite of order. Actually, my life is the opposite of order. I buried my son and that is out of order. Now, I’m also not unique. There are millions of people who have buried their childrens, millions and millions of people. There are many of your listeners who have buried children. I’m not unique, but I couldn’t carry all these words anymore.

And I think I was saying to someone that if someone’s born without sight, it’s very difficult to explain to them what blue is, but I have this desperate need to explain to you my blue. I have this desperate need to explain my pain. And I don’t know why. I don’t know why I have that need. What is that broadcast therapy that I’m so desperately thirsty for? What is it? I don’t know. But now it’s out and I really pray that it’s not going to cause me more pain.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, first, to affirm you, how are you, is a terrible question for anyone in grief. If you’re going to ask it as a reflex, add today or in this minute as a marker to provide a little bit of relief because that’s an impossible and terrible question with no correct answer. So I completely relate. I relate deeply as an introvert too and finding yourself as sort of the mascot of this crisis and having an exceptional experience where all of the attention is on you, I can only imagine how excruciating that is for something you would never choose. And so I feel for you. And I understand completely wanting to explain blue, but doing it through, I need you to feel without needing me to explain it every day to everyone how this feels. And I will say as an unpackaged, the instinct or the impulse to write without distance, I think is a real gift.

Because as much as I also can hold this idea that when you’re traumatized, you can traumatize other people when you don’t have an understanding of what you’ve experienced. I think too many of us, and you do it so beautifully. I also want to just say that, and we’ll talk more deeply about that, but that when there’s distance and packaging and story and explanation and context, I think yes, it helps us make meaning of our lives, but it’s also distancing from pain. And there’s so much distancing from pain and death in our culture. And it’s part of the reason I think that we are living in this moment and we need to have these visceral experiences and not distance desperately, as terrible as the medicine is. So thank you, because I think that it’s a tremendous gift that you didn’t want to give. And I also feel what was so profound about When We See You Again is that I expected, and maybe this was part of the process of doing this book, I expected to encounter anger and rage and maybe just a tiny thirst for revenge and it’s absent.

How?

RACHEL:

Well, I think that that wasn’t what was coming out. And I wanted really badly to tell the truth. And the truth was the love and the loss and the grief and the mourning and the suffering. There wasn’t those other ... If they were present, and I do think that there are moments of anger in the book or rage, but those weren’t ... I’ve always had an issue with that. Even as a little girl, I always knew I went to sad, I didn’t go to mad. And as I was saying, I mean, Hersh was so with me and I so desperately wanted to explain who he was. And so the ugly wasn’t really what I was going for. The ugly comes because the loss is so embedded and my DNA is different now. It’s like after Chernobyl, it changes your constitution when anyone has the loss of an extremely core person in their lives.

And I love what you said about that we fear pain so much. It makes me think that that’s what led to the opioid crisis, is that this need to avoid acute, severe pain, and yet pain also can promote healing. Without pain, parts of us die. And even I remember reading an article years ago about a child who was born without the nerve awareness. So he didn’t know when he was burning himself or he didn’t know ... And

You end up really hurting yourself if you don’t experience suffering, which sounds counterintuitive, but that’s where the greatest love and growth comes from those losses.

ELISE:

Yeah. I think we also labor under this belief, it’s global culture-wide here in the US, certainly that we only take action from anger, but in reality, we protect what we love and that is a far more powerful, durable, safe motivator. I want to talk about your faith, but before we get to that, that moment when you go and you see Or who has just been released and he tells you that Hersh heard you, to imagine that was a totally life-changing event.

RACHEL:

I said that to someone else, that that was one of for sure the most magnificent moments in my life that will stay with me for the rest of my life. He also gave me back part of my life because when I buried Hersh, I buried part of myself, obviously. And when he gave me all this information about Hersh when they were held together, and at the end, the most interesting ... I can’t even say it’s the most interesting because all of it was so interesting. It’s like, which of your eight children do you like the most of which of these, all these things or told me. But when he said, Hersh told me that he heard you on the news. And I said, “Oh, he heard that I was on the news? What?” I could not compute. And he said, “No, he heard your voice being interviewed on the news and he told me what he heard you saying on the news.” And all of a sudden I felt when you get weak in the knees, when you just have this jolt went through me and there was a flutter of something and part of me permitted itself to come back to life.

And in the Jewish faith, we believe that your name is intrinsically woven to what you will do in your life. And that’s why sometimes it’s actually said that there’s no longer divine inspiration in the world except when we name our children, the moment we name our children, meaning sometimes you’ll think, “I’m going to call him Adam.” And then the moment you have this child and you’re going to name them and you’re like, “Nope, it’s Solomon.” Where’d that come from? I don’t even like the name Solomon, but you have divine inspiration. And it’s clear to me that Orlevy, his parents had complete divine inspiration because the name Or in Hebrew means light and he gave me back light. We were absolutely living in darkness from day 330 when the angels of death came to our door to tell us that Hersh had been executed and we got him back in a bag with six bullet holes, his hair full of gunpowder, missing his dominant left forearm, skeletal, filthy.

And we were in complete darkness from day 3:30 when that happened until the evening of 496 when we met light, we met Or.

ELISE:

Yeah. I can only imagine obviously in some sense, Hersh had to have known that you were climbing every mountain and every wall on his behalf, but for him to know and also the comfort, I’m sure, of him hearing your voice. Yeah. What a gift in a terrible moment. And then also that he had managed to get a book and so amazing now, obviously that you’re writing a book, but that Hersh had managed to get a fantasy novel.

RACHEL:

I know. It’s crazy because what was explained to me is they were all losing their minds. They were all in pain. They were all in trauma. I mean, Hersh, before he was kidnapped, had witnessed the murder of 18 people. He was in a five foot by eight foot bomb shelter. So picture your bathroom with 28 people smashed into your bathroom and then grenades being thrown into your bathroom and then machine gunfire in the doorway of people shooting at point blank range. So 18 people were murdered in front of him, including his best friend Aner Shapira. His arm was blown off, Hersh’s arm was blown off and then he’s kidnapped. And they were obviously suffering in ways we can’t begin to even pretend to imagine. And when he walked into the tunnel on day 52 that Or Levy, Eli Sharabi, Ohad Ben Ami and Eliya Cohen were in, they all were in shock because Hersh walked in with his mat. They had each been given a mat to sleep on. He walks in with his mat and in his hand, it was under his arm, in his hand was a book. And they all said, “What is that? What are you doing with that book?” And he said that he had ... You end up with a rapport with your captors.

And he explained to them. Hersh was always a voracious reader. He read early in kindergarten and always had a book. We were always every week religiously at the library taking out, you could only take out 12 books. So he would always take out 12. And he had begged them and said, “You must get me a book. You must get any book.” And I’m an English reader, get me any book. And somewhere, one of the captors found this book that was a young adult fantasy genre book by Leigh Bardugo called Shadow and Bone, which that wasn’t Hersh’s genre, but beggars and hostages can’t be choosers or explained to us that Hersh had read the book over and over and over. He would just get to the end and start over and over and over and over. And when he ended up leaving that tunnel, Eliya Cohen told us that the captors came in on day 54 and said to Almog Sarusi, Or Danino and Hersh, “You guys get to go home.

You’re getting released today. Come on. “ And then they turned to Hersh and they said, “Be happy you’re seeing your mother today.”

And he turned and he gave them the book so that the other hostages would have something to do. That’s how sure he was that he was going home. And Or said that that book mentally saved them because it gave them something. First of all, they read it over and over and over again. And Eli Sharabi, they had taken his glasses. So he couldn’t read, even though he reads English, he couldn’t read anything. So they would read the book out loud. They had book club, basically Alon Ohel is also an English reader. He read the book, but they taught Eliya Cohen how to read English. He did not know how to read English with this book because they had nothing to do, but they had the book. So when I first met Eliya Cohen, he gave me a huge hug and he said, “And now I can speak and read English beautifully because of Hersh.”

ELISE:

Amazing.

Or has a tattoo, right? Because of Hersh, because he was telling everyone, reminding everyone about Victor Frankl and knowing your why.

RACHEL:

Yeah. He was saying to everyone the famous quote in Man’s Search for Meaning, “When you have a why, you can bear any how. When you have a why, you can bear any how.” And Or told us that Hersh kept saying this mantra over and over and over again, and he was telling them, “This is what got Victor Frankl through the Holocaust.” It was a riff on what Nietzsche originally said. And Hersh kept saying to each of the men in that tunnel, “Figure out what is your purpose? What is your meaning? And you will get out. “ All of us have to keep our eye on the prize in this world. And it really resonated with them. And they said that every day, even after Hersh and Or and Almog left their tunnel, they would all go through ... They would do a little circle every day and say, “What’s your why?” Because your why changes sometimes.

And sometimes it can change within the day. Your why for the morning isn’t your why for the afternoon. Or said to us, we met him, he was 50 kilo and he’s like maybe six feet tall. And he said to us, “When I’m feeling stronger, I’m going to get that tattooed right here.” And my daughter heard him interviewed after he got the tattoo, which he got in English, by the way, that when he went home and his son saw the tattoo, he said, “Daddy, what is that? “ And he said, “It’s you.”

ELISE:

So beautiful.

RACHEL:

Because Hersh kept saying, “Your why is your son. Your why is your son. You have to get home to your son.” And for people who don’t know, Or was at the Nova Music Festival with his wife, Einav, who was one of the 18 people who was killed in that bomb shelter. And it’s just a really powerful gift that we were given.

ELISE:

Yeah. God, and unbelievable, and aner presumably saved many lives in that bomb shelter too.

RACHEL:

Anyone who is alive today is alive because of one word, and that word is on Aner.

ELISE:

Yeah. Who is Hersh’s best friend and Hersh watched him die.

RACHEL:

I also just want to say he did also save Hersh and he gave us a gift. And I’ve said to his parents, Moshe and Shira, over and over, I have thanked them because those 330 days that were utter torment and torture and agony and misery were a gift because we got to try to save him.

ELISE:

Yeah. Yeah. You write so beautifully about that with your fierce little fist or something. I can’t remember exactly what you said, but the honor of getting to fight for Hersh and the other hostages for so long. I can imagine that is the most excruciating and the most loving action to be able to take, to do something. And you did a lot. So throughout the book, I love the sort of moments where you’re talking about your faith and teaching about Judaism and there are these little respites that are such beautiful and soft places to land. And you have this incredible faith, which I respect deeply, which is, I can’t remember exactly the words, but I guess when the other, after you receive Hersh’s body and bury him, after his murdered, you continue to fight with Jon for the release of the rest of the hostages and ultimately the ceasefire.

And people want you to be enraged when the final hostages come home that Hersh is not among them, that’s not fair. And you say essentially, “I know he’s not supposed to be here because he’s not here,” which is so profound. I mean, but can you talk a little bit about this faith and even your dreams?

RACHEL:

So the first thing that I’ll say about faith is that it’s incredibly challenging for any of us to describe how we feel about this universe and how it’s organized. And I always say, I believe in an idea of God because I think that everybody’s idea of God is so different that it’s loaded when people say, “Oh, I believe in God.”

Because what is yours is even if we grew up in the same household with the same parents, going to the same church or going to the same synagogue or mosque or temple or wherever. And we have different appreciations of how this whole place is organized. And I have been extremely grateful and thankful that I happen to be a believer and it’s not hard for me. And that’s been from when I was a young kid before I even really understood the world. And then as I wasn’t raised in a observantly Jewish home, and then I came to learn and discover and observe in a way that’s different from how I was raised. And I kind of feel like it’s cheating a little bit. I say, I just know. I know that there’s God where knowing is different than having faith because I know this is a phone.

I don’t know if faith this is a phone. I know it’s a phone. So it kind of makes it, it’s like a little bit cheating because having faith is hard because having faith means you don’t know, but you hope. So that’s a little bit. And so that was why when the last living hostages came home, thank God in October of 2025, so many people were saying what you were sharing from the book where they were saying, “It’s not fair and it should have been Hersh and how is this possible? And it’s not right.” And to me, it seems very clear that Hersh is not supposed to be here now because Hersh isn’t here now. And that’s how I know. It doesn’t mean I like it. You can hate it, but you can know it. And that’s definitely how I feel. And I’ll tell the story of Death and Tehran because I think I love that

ELISE:

Tale. I do too.

RACHEL:

Yeah. So I had never read Man’s Search for Meaning. And then of course, after meeting Or Levy and him telling us that Hersh was quoting from it, I thought, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to get my hands on that book.” And it’s a slender book. It’s an easy read. I mean, it’s a terrible read, but it’s an easy, terrible read.

ELISE:

And it’s beautiful.

RACHEL:

Totally. Completely. And Victor Frankl talks about a tradition of folktale that’s in many cultures. There’s a ancient Mesopotamian version. There’s an Islamic version. There’s a ... I’m trying to remember. There were four different versions of this tale, but more or less the story is that there’s a king and his servant and they’re walking through a garden and they part ways for a moment to go around a bush. And when they come back together, the servant says, “Oh my gosh, your majesty, I just saw death. Quick, give me your finest horse and I’ll run away to Tehran so that death doesn’t get me. “ And the king says, “Sure, take my finest horse, off you go. “ And he goes galloping away. And then the king is by himself in the garden and he bumps into death. And he says to death, “Why did you frighten my servant?” And death said, “Oh, I didn’t mean to frighten him.

I was just surprised to find him here because I have a date with him later in Tehran.

And it’s like a mic drop moment of you cannot outrun your destiny. He ran straight into his destiny by trying to run away from it. And there’s also a version of that in the Talmud about King Solomon. And it’s the same idea. And the punchline at the end of the passage with King Solomon is your feet will always take you where you’re supposed to be.

ELISE:

Yeah. Yeah, I know. I mean, and it’s a terrible realization because we want to believe that we’re sort of this completely self-authored every decision and every decision does matter, et cetera. But this idea that there’s this overarching fate that’s ours.

RACHEL:

I love it.

ELISE:

Yeah. You love it? Yeah. Yeah. It’s comforting.

RACHEL:

I don’t even know if it’s comforting. There’s so much chaos and pain and confusion and discombobulation in the world, but if somewhere there’s this exquisite tapestry that’s actually there and we don’t see it because we’re too close, that is really interesting to me. My mom, I grew up in Chicago, so I have a bad accent, but I’m really friendly and she was desperate to make me cultured. So she would take me constantly to the Art Institute and her favorite painting, which became my favorite painting was the famous one by George Serrat.

ELISE:

Yes, “In the Park with George.” Yes, one of my favorite paintings too.

RACHEL:

And she would ... Now this was back in the day because I am old, they didn’t have the red velvet rope. You could actually go up to the painting. Now they have a whole situation because I think people like me were probably touching the painting, but she would put me very close to the painting and I would say, “Oh, I see our dots and it’s giving me a headache.” And then she would say, “Close your eyes and take 15 steps backwards and now open your eyes. And suddenly here you go, this magnificent order

And gorgeousness.” And I really believe that. I believe that there is a huge masterpiece. I’m a molecule in that. I am nothing. I’m smaller than dust. I am probably, I will never be privy to know why my dot was put here and not here, why it’s this color and not that color and why this had to happen and why that had to happen, but I really believe it. And then when these ... It doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t mean I don’t have an obligation to make things better, to make things different, to change things, to identify injustice and make it just. It just means there’s something bigger than me and I’m not a big shot. I might think I am. And I also love, there’s a part, this is a complete tangent, but there’s a part in the Torah that talks about predicting that initially when we’re trying to be successful or do whatever it is in life that we pursue, when we become successful, we think it’s because of us and we lose the perspective that it’s a blessing that’s given to us.

We think, “I am so amazing. Look at this car and look at this house and look at these jewels. And I worked really hard and look at what I did.” And not having the ability to see this is a gift and it is a blessing and be grateful. And it doesn’t mean you don’t have to work hard. And it doesn’t mean you weren’t a partner in it. It just means you didn’t do it yourself.

ELISE:

I want to talk about that, this idea of the blessing and the why. Ultimately, I know that’s an ongoing question, but can we talk about how ... And I would imagine that this maybe provides some iota of comfort too, but that you found and somehow decided to keep a page of a journal of Hersh’s written in Hebrew. You couldn’t read it. And it sounds like he had terrible handwriting, but after your daughter translated it for you and he writes about being in a tunnel.

RACHEL:

Wow. Yeah. Big wow. What happened is during COVID, when the whole world was closed back in 2020, I said to the kids, “Everybody clean your rooms really well, tear them apart and clean them really well.” And I went around with a garbage bag and I went to each of their garbage cans and I was dumping what they had thrown out. And in Hersh’s garbage can, there were all these old spiral notebooks from high school. And I remember opening them and thinking, “This is so interesting,” because it would say on the cover, he would write science and there’d be two pages of notes from science and then it was all empty. History, two pages of notes and then it was all empty. So I thought, why is he throwing these away? So I tore out all the pages that were few and I left the notebooks empty in the place where most people, we all have a place where we do that reusing of last year’s notebooks.

And on the bottom was a journal, an actual journal, like a hardcover little book. And I know because my mother raised me not to be nosy that you’re not allowed to read someone’s journal, but I’ll say that he made it easy because number one, it was in Hebrew, which is really still hard for me to read, to understand. I can read it. But number two is his handwriting was atrocious. So even if I read Hebrew, I couldn’t read his Hebrew. But I thought here he had written three entries and then the rest of the journal was empty. And I thought, “I don’t know what he’s saying here, but I’m not throwing out his words.” So I tore out the entries, the three entries, folded them up, and I put them in an envelope in my closet that said in English, “Private.” And I put it in the back left corner of my closet.

And I thought one day when he’s older, when he’s traveled the world and come home and is introducing us to his partner or something, I’ll give him these words that he wrote many years ago. And in the spring of 2024, I came across the envelope. So it was now four years after the envelope had been living in my closet and Hersh was still being held hostage. And I thought, no, it’s not appropriate. I’m not opening this and reading it. It’s none of my business. And I didn’t, and I put it back. And then he was killed. And in December of 2024, I was sitting in the kitchen telling his little sister, Orly, about what had happened and that I have this envelope that’s been sitting almost five years in my closet. And she said, “I want to read it. “ And I thought, “You know what?

Now it’s okay. It’s okay.” And I went and I got it and I gave it to her and she’s sitting across from me in the kitchen table and her whole face drops.

I said, “What’s wrong?” And she looked up and she said, “It’s prophecy.” And I said, “What is it? “ And she reads this passage. Now, the most important thing is that he had dated them, and I assumed they were from 2020 because that’s when he threw it away, but it was from 2014. It was from nine years earlier from when we were reading it. It was from when he was a freshman in high school. He had just started October 26th of his freshman year of high school, ninth grade, and he talks about being trapped in a tunnel and he uses the word tunnel in this tiny little ... It’s like a page and a half. He uses the word tunnel 12 times in the piece that in our lives, we’re going to find ourselves sometimes trapped in a tunnel, how you digest that ... He’s using it as a metaphor, but how you handle your tunnel, how you can you push through so that some tunnels are very long, some tunnels are very short, but you have to keep going through your tunnel.

And he says at the end, “The one thing I know for sure is that I will get to the end of the tunnel.” And it was just this very eerie, otherworldly kind of moment for us and our family. And when we showed it to the rabbi who ran his high school, he used to go to a 900 boy high school, Orthodox high school here in Jerusalem.

The rabbi said, “This is his goodbye letter to you that he wrote in ninth grade.” And so in the book, we actually have the exact translation verbatim with the mistakes of the letter that he wrote, the entry that he wrote.

ELISE:

It’s so beautiful and very profound and also resonates. You write at various points that this hallway is a metaphor in Judaism for many, I don’t know if it was Akiva, I can’t remember exactly who, but that people talk about this as this life as this hallway to some much larger hall or place that’s on the other side. And do you believe that?

RACHEL:

I do. You’re talking about Rabbi Jacob.

The Mishnah talks about how, and then multiple Maimonides and Rashi and all these different commentators along the way have deconstructed this idea that this world in Hebrew, they say Olam Hazeh, this world is different than Olam HaBa, the world to come. And people get obsessed with this world, with the wealth and the toys and the gossip and the friends and the peel, not the fruit. And it says, “This is just the lobby. It’s just the hallway depending on who’s talking.” They said, “It’s the hallway. You want to get to the banquet hall.” And I wrote in the book, it’s sort of like this world’s the elevator. Nobody lives in an elevator. It’s a means to get somewhere else or in a lobby. Lobbies are places that people pass through to get somewhere else. And this world, according to Jewish tradition, is a place to really affect change and do good and be benevolent and go to where you’re really supposed to be.

And there’s something gorgeous that I learned recently by the Baal Shem Tov, who’s the mystical father of the mystical movement within Judaism from about 300 years ago. He said this unbelievable thing, which is someone asked him, “So why do souls come here? What is the point of coming to this world? Why is a soul dropped here?” And he said, “Every single soul comes to this world so that one day they can do one act of kindness once.” Meaning you have to do thousands of acts of kindness, right? But there’s some reason why you were put here and there is an act of kindness that you will do that will fulfill your why, and then you get to go. But it doesn’t always happen, meaning someone can do their act of kindness when they’re five years old, and then they’re still here till they’re 97 because maybe they have to be 97 for someone else to do their act of kindness to them.

ELISE:

Wow.

RACHEL:

And what really brought me comfort was knowing, and I know Hersh did his act of kindness. I don’t know if he did it when he was two years old to me, or if he did it when he was 23 years old in one of the tunnels. Maybe he did an act of kindness and then he was able to go, but I know he did it and that gives me tremendous comfort. And I am aware that I’m here because I’m not done yet. You’re here because you’re not done yet.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, and I think that sometimes people like Hersh, and I loved Jon’s epilogue in the book too, and sort of the things that have emerged in the wake of Hersh’s death and his name, but sometimes people go and I feel this way about my brother-in-law, my brother’s husband who died at 39 in his sleep, it completely changed the trajectory of my life in the most beautiful way. It gave me much deeper meaning, much greater understanding. I mean, it was the most profound impact on my life. I wouldn’t have given him up for that ever. But you also think about the way that Hersh and you and Jon and your whole family have sort of resonated with the world as a symbol of something, reminding us, I think, of something in the midst of horrible horror that I can only imagine as Hersh sort of looks back and sees that impact that there’s some ... I mean, it’s staggering, but that there’s some other whys that he’s just unlocking as this rock hitting the ocean.

And you wrestle with your why. I mean, and one of the whys obviously in some ways is we don’t have a name for grieving parents. It’s so odd. We don’t have names for people who have lost siblings. We don’t have names for grieving parents. We only have widow and widower and orphan,

Because it’s so unnatural out of order. As you said, it’s disorder, but in some ways it’s like, please hold all bereaved parents with tenderness and care. But do you have a sense of your why? It feels like it’s more than that, even though that’s so big.

RACHEL:

We’re trying very hard to hone in on what do we do with this humongous, gargantuan, enormous challenge that we’ve been given. How do we take this and create purpose? How do we take this and keep breathing in this world without air? And it can be done and it must be done and we are still reeling and the whole world. I mean, we are at an inflection point. It’s very clear and nobody really knows where to turn, what is something to hold onto, where is the meaning? And we are very much aware that this was not punishment, this was not a mistake.

This was supposed to happen this way and it is arduous and thorny and sticky and ugly and painful and wrapped in love and wrapped in meaning and potential. And we are duty bound to figure it out. And so to me, it’s very obvious that I think about my great-grandparents had to get married, so my grandparents would get married, so my parents would get married, so I would be born, so I would marry Jon, so I would have Hersh, so he would get killed, so I could do this. What is this? I’m not sure yet, but I will figure it out because it is our why. It’s just obvious to me. But Jon feels very strongly, and I agree that we have to make the world a little different. I think all of us feel very overwhelmed. And Rabbi Tarfon in Ethics of Our Father in the Mishnah talks about the idea of it’s not on you to clean up the whole mess, but you also can’t pretend you don’t see it and do nothing.

It’s okay. I get it. We’re all overwhelmed. There is unbearable pain and suffering. You don’t have to cure it. You need to help.

That’s what we’re all hopefully trying to do. I think what ends up happening sometimes is we try to distract ourselves and I don’t blame us for distracting ourselves with worrying about the things that we know are not important. We’re always saying that. That’s the disclaimer. I know this is ridiculous, but ... And then somehow, then it’s allowed. As soon as we say that, then we’re allowed to have the ridiculous thing be front and center. But I think that what happened to us is it’s almost like what happened in Chernobyl. It changed our DNA. It changed this disaster was so deep and embedded in us that I’m no longer myself who I was before. And then I actually realized maybe I am myself, but I’m now revealed because the ease is gone. I don’t have any more ease in my life and I miss it. I remember it.

I was really blessed. I went through 53 years of a really easy, beautiful life and the ease may have made it where I wasn’t digging as deep as I could have. And now, I mean, I wish I had ease, but I don’t.

That isn’t what the hand that I was dealt, and I’m going to play this hand as best I can.

ELISE:

I know we’re essentially at time. There’s a small moment, but I didn’t know this, even though I’m Jewish, but like you, I was not raised as an observant Jew and I feel like I missed ... So I’m still learning. I’m on the curve. But you talk, I think it is so profound. I was stunned by it. You talk about on the Sabbath how you bless ... There are many women that you can sort of bless your daughters in the name of, but that you bless your sons in the name of Joseph’s sons. Is that correct? And who break this incredibly long chain that marks our entire culture of brothers hating, killing each other, which is when you think about everything happening in the world, this is an interfamily, that is what we are doing, right? We are all from the same father. We’re all from Abraham.

Can you explain that to people? Because I didn’t know that.

RACHEL:

Right. So on Friday night, it’s traditional for Jewish parents to bless their children, to be like different respected people from the Torah. And girls are blessed to be like the matriarchs like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah. And it’s interesting because our boys are blessed to be like Ephraim and Mannaseh. And you kind of think, really? Because if we’re playing Family Feud and I ask you to name the top five male characters in the Torah, I really don’t think Ephraim or Mannaseh are coming up there. You might have Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Solomon, Moses.

ELISE:

Moses.

RACHEL:

But what’s with these boys? And it is explained, and there are a couple different explanations, but one of them is that they were the first set of brothers to break the paradigm of hatred of sibling rivalry. And we see in the Torah, the damage that that poison of hatred even amidst brothers, what it can do. We have Cain and Abel, you have Isaac and Ishmael, you have Jacob and Asav, you have Joseph and his brothers, he’s one of 12 brothers and they hate him so much that they throw him into a pit and they end up selling him and he’s sold and taken away to Egypt, and he ends up getting out of prison in Egypt, marrying, having two children, and those two boys end up loving each other. They break this paradigm of hatred between brothers and they don’t resort to violence and nothing untoward happens between them.

They actually just loved each other. And it sounds so simple, but that is the point. It is the hardest thing in the world to love each other. And we know this. But once I will just end by saying something that I have learned through this experience of radical loss is that love is stronger than time and love is stronger than death. And I didn’t know that before. And love is like bamboo and it keeps growing because I am telling you, I love Hersh more today.

I love Hersh more right now than I did this morning. And it makes no sense. And I’m not being one of those people. I am just telling you the truth. And I said to a group of young people I was talking to recently, one of them said, it was a high school and they asked, “How do you explain grief? What is grief?” I said, “Think of anyone you absolutely love, really love.” I said, “It could be a parent, a sibling, a grandma, a best friend, but really love who’s integral to your life. Are they in this room?” And all the kids went like this. And I said, “Do you not love them anymore?”

He’s not here the way he was. The love is still here and it is still unfolding.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, it’s beautiful. Thank you for your gift. I think it is so also stunning that Hersh’s most treasured belonging at the end was a book and that words helped sustain the people that he left behind in the tunnel. And it is ... I wish you didn’t have to write it. I’m so sorry, Rachel. And as I know we all are, but it is a beautiful gift. So if there’s anything I can do to support you and your family, let me know. And thank you.

RACHEL:

Thank you so much for carving out the time, and I really appreciate it. And I pray for all of us to have strength and love and light.

ELISE:

She’s stunning. And the book, When We See You Again, is really beautiful. It is certainly hard. And yet I promise you it’s worth it to say with her and her pain. It’s a very beautiful and pure kind of pain. And the absence of anger, rage, desire for revenge is remarkable. It’s not a political book. It’s a humanitarian book, which I think in this particular moment is a great reminder. We didn’t really talk about this. We glanced over it, but she writes a fair amount about the suffering of that club that nobody wants to join, which is bereaved parents, parents who have lost children or whose children have died, just to be frank. And how it is like a homesickness. She calls it Hershsickness, where each day it only grows. There’s no abatement. Grief is pretty pernicious. And this is a certain kind of pain that if you don’t know what the color blue is, you don’t quite understand, but maybe you can touch.

And in the book, if you read between the lines, there are sort of guidelines. There’s recommendations for how to be with people who have experienced this. And after her died, many people rushed to tell her that she would never get over it. I don’t think she was worried that she would, but this is certainly true. My friend Nora gave a TED Talk that’s called, “You Never Get Over It. You Move Forward.” And Pauline Boss writes about this. I’ll include all the show notes. I’ve done many episodes with Francis O’Connor, who Rachel also writes about as well. And what happens when an attachment figure dies and how primate mothers carry their dead babies around for months and stop grooming there in grief. It is a visceral, wild experience. But this is why she and Jon ultimately wore the masking tape, marking the number of days that Hersh was in captivity because they just couldn’t bear to tell people and answer that question compulsively.

And so she writes, “I think this is really helpful. These kindred sufferers want, I know, to offer comfort as well as to receive it, but as someone who still feels open lesions all over my body, when people grab me or try to hug me, it has been painful. I think this is confusing for the person offering themselves in kindness to me. I know it is coming from an abundantly benevolent place. Years ago, a gifted teacher, Alana, taught me a piece by the famous Reb Shlomo Bobov about the Chesed (kindness). This most complicated of disciplines requires looking at the person in front of us and asking ourselves, what does this person need rather than what do I imagine I would need in this person’s situation? All right, friends, thank you for listening. I will see you next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word.

Please rate and review the episode, follow Pulling the Thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you.

You can also listen to this episode on Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Amir Levine is a psychiatrist, a neuroscientist, an associate professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University, and the coauthor of the mega-bestseller Attached.

I just read and loved his new book, which is called, Secure: The Revolutionary Guide to Creating a Secure Life.

Today, we review the four attachment styles and the myths surrounding them. Amir explains how each of us—regardless of our starting point—can flex and become more secure in our relationships. He takes us through his tools for those of us who tend to be more anxious, and his strategies for those of us who tend to be more avoidant. He explains why certain seemingly insignificant minor interactions—which he calls SIMIs—have an outsize effect on our brains and our intimate relationships.

We talk about a lot of psychological phenomena that I think will resonate with many of you—from attachment gaslighting to something called “the protest-regret cycle.” Amir offers some advice for turning down the volume on the insecure attachments in your life, and for finding what he calls the hidden sparks of talent in our partners and in our ourselves.

This conversation was such a delightful one!

MORE FROM AMIR LEVINE, M.D.

Secure: The Revolutionary Guide to Creating a Secure Life

Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How it Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

Amir Levine’s Website

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

ELISE:

I love the premise of this book and the spirit in which it’s offered, which is once we have an understanding of attachment, how do we become more secure? And as a testament to this book, I workout with a handful of friends a few times a week and I wasn’t diagnosing them, but we were talking about one is avoidant and one is anxious. And I was like, “For you two, you really need some ... “ I was explaining essentially the book and I think that’s a sign that this book also will have legs as it goes out into the world. So it did Attach. It didn’t launch as a bestseller. It just ... How many copies have you sold? Millions?

AMIR:

Oh yeah. It’s like more than three million copies.

ELISE:

Isn’t that crazy? That is so- That’s insane, right? Edge case and books. And it’s just done it slowly over time.

AMIR:

Yeah. And I think this whole idea of attachment styles is just such a powerful, something that comes from research. And before these attachment style, before we translated it into something that people can use in everyday life, it was just buried in all these lingo, scientific lingo. And it was a challenge to take it and create it into something that people can use. And I think in this book, I go a step further because I don’t even ... I have to tell you, now I think about attachment styles as a starting point, not really a diagnosis. And also in this book, I talk about how it can change from relationship to relationship and how it’s not set in stone and how it doesn’t necessarily come from childhood. All these different myths that people have about it, I really try to append that in this book and really give a much more up-to-date information.

Attachment styles are really your starting point and you can get so much further. If you learn the brain logic of attachment, you can really open it up and change a lot. So it was important for me to get this message out. Here’s

ELISE:

What you

AMIR:

Can do to change.

ELISE:

Yeah. I want to go into all of that, including this idea of it being a starting block or a way that maybe you are designed or patterned rather than a foregone conclusion that’s your parents’ fault, because I found that particularly relieving. I am secure, anxious, and I’m married to someone who is secure, avoidant. And so even- It sounds

AMIR:

Similar.

ELISE:

Yeah, you’re probably the same. And it’s funny, we saw very occasionally, we haven’t been in years, and I’ve talked about this on the podcast, but many years ago we went to see this marriage therapist here, Stan Tatkin, who uses a version of attachment theory. Yeah. And he has his own, he trains therapist. He’s amazing, is sort of a legend, and you go in and you bootcamp with him, and he puts you on tape, and he puts you into conflict. And the whole thing is the content is boring. I do not care what you ... We’re not here to litigate rights and wrongs. If you want to have a successful partnership, you need to know the animal that you’re with. And it was so helpful and revelatory that we don’t need a recurrent therapist to process what’s happening between us because I know his patterns and he understands mine.

And that’s why I think your book is such a gift because even reading it, I was like, I need to remind Rob as an avoidant how to manage me when I go into anxiety so that I don’t make his avoidance worse and he doesn’t make my anxiety worse. So let’s start at the beginning.

AMIR:

Okay.

ELISE:

Let’s start with, I guess there are four. And your point is the more secure we can all be, the more we can help modulate each other and there are ways within that our world too. Yeah, because

AMIR:

Secures are so good at it.

ELISE:

Yes. Yes, exactly. So let’s start with the four types.

AMIR:

Attachment

ELISE:

Styles. Yeah. Yeah.

AMIR:

So there are four attachment styles and it’s called the anxious, avoidant, secure, and fearful avoidant. So there are three insecure, ones anxious, avoidant, and fearful avoidant, and one secure one. So you can even divide it into insecure and secure. And sometimes it’s helpful to do that because a lot of the tools in the book that I bring to help people with insecure attachment styles, they’re good for everyone. But it all has to do with how comfortable we feel with intimacy and closeness, but also how sensitive of a radar do we have to potential danger in a relationship. And danger in a relationship from an attachment perspective, something very, very specific. We constantly monitor, we do it without even knowing it. We constantly monitor for the availability of our loved ones or the people that we’re close with. And if we feel that there’s some sort of disruption in that availability, it will set up the alarm.

So for example, even as we’re sitting now, you kind of have an idea where your loved ones are. You mentioned Rob, you probably have an idea where he is, and that is pretty much okay. But if I told you, God forbid, and I even hate doing it, that there was a terrible earthquake or something bad happened, you wouldn’t be able to continue this conversation. You’d have to stop and you’d have to reach out and make sure that he’s okay. And then you can come back, we can continue, albeit a little bit on edge and we can continue it. So it shows you we have this radar they’re constantly surveilling for that our loved ones and feels them out, knows that they’re out there because fundamentally that’s how we feel safe in the world. So to make a long story short, people who have an anxious attachment style love to be close, but they also have this very, very sensitive radar for potential threat in their relationship.

People with avoidant attachment style, they also want to be in a relationship because we’re a social species. We all need relationships. No one can do without it. But once they get into a relationship, something funny happened. They don’t feel too comfortable with too much closeness. It’s like, “Oh, okay, I want you, but I want you there, not here.”

ELISE:

And

AMIR:

Then people who are fearful, avoid and have a mixture of both. It’s almost like one hand they say, “Come forward.” And then the other hand they say, “Stay back, stay back.” And it introduces a lot of conflict, inner conflict also, and outer conflict. And the secures of this world are people who love closeness and intimacy, just like the anxious, but they don’t have a very sensitive radar. So everything goes over their head. They’re easy to get along with. They don’t really get upset very easily. And because they have this calm demeanor, they can really help people in relationships calm down very quickly. They’re usually the first ones to apologize. It’s just like they’re just very, very, very good in relationships. I’ve really come to fall in love with the secures of this world and the process of this whole journey of me becoming this attachment expert.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, we all want secures in our life to modulate our nervous systems and keep us calm, right? Exactly.

AMIR:

I’m glad you mentioned that because if you think about it from an evolutionary perspective and from a psychological perspective, this is the true function of a relationship and secure relationships excel in it really because we’re social species. The main way for us to regulate our affect, which is going to calm ourselves down is through other people. And you can think if something really bad happens to you, we have an attachment hierarchy in our head. I know exactly who’s number one that I’m going to go to, who’s number two, is number three, and I’m sure you do too. And when we’re securely attached to them, sometimes it’s just a hug or a single word that will make us feel better immediately. There’s no Xanax or clonopine in the world that gets even close to that effect because we’re a social species.

ELISE:

Yeah. And I feel like right now, I don’t want to drag us into culture, but there’s so much happening too that if you’re wired for anxiety, being in the presence of other people who are also sort of hyperventilating about what’s happening can be not always productive. Similarly, you don’t want to feel abandoned by avoidant people and you don’t want to feel gaslit. We’ll go into all of that. But first, I thought just to go into sort of the biology that you pull into it, but that these are gifts. It feels like the fearful avoidant one, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but that’s where often familial trauma patterns and disordered relating shows up. Whereas for the other two, it’s not necessarily poor parenting or a misalignment. It’s actually maybe a superpower in the same way that being secure sounds really nice, sounds delicious.

AMIR:

It’s true, but this is one of the most important things that I wanted to convey in this book is to really dispel this myth that’s so common now. You can hear it so much on social media that it’s something that you need to heal where in fact it really is, again, from an evolutionary perspective, it is very, very valuable that we’ll have different segments of the population respond differently to different scenarios. So what really happens is that people with an anxious attachment style, when you review the literature, and even the research literature itself is a little bit biased, but when you actually look at it from my perspective, which is like a therapist’s perspective, a secure therapist perspective, I really discovered that they had this amazing ability, not just to identify danger, but also to just really read social cues better than anyone else and faster than anyone else.

And I even gave that example in the book about this woman who had an adopted child and actually gives me goosebumps whenever I talk about it.

That she goes, she’s there with her daughter in the first day of school and all of a sudden her daughter meets a new girl and they start playing together. And then she stops and she’s like, “Oh my God, this girl, this other girl, she’s my daughter’s sister. I’m convinced of it. I see they don’t look exactly the same, but the way they act, their facial expressions, they were sisters and she turns to others and like, what are you talking about? “ No one believes her, but she doesn’t really give up. And eventually, lo and behold, they are sister and they’re still in touch till this day. She found her daughter’s sister. So you see, it’s not only danger that people can identify if you have those amazing superpowers and it really plays out in so many things in our world, like in negotiations, at work, how we parent, how we befriend, it’s that extra sensitivity, but that sensitivity comes with a price.

ELISE:

Yeah. Yeah. I love the study that you cite where there’s a smoking computer and those who are anxious are the first ones to notice that it’s smoking and the avoidant ones are the first to leave the room, which is perfect, right? It’s like in that moment- Perfect. In an emergency, my husband is spectacular.

AMIR:

They’re just like, “Okay, what do we need to do? “ They’re like, “Oh, here, honey, I have to ask you, what should we do? Should we do this? Do we do this? “ It’s like, “No, I’m going to do this. You follow.”

ELISE:

Yeah. He’s like, “You get in the car, you take the boys, da, da, da, da. I’m going to do this. I’m going to get this neighbor go. “ He’s monitoring everything. It’s amazing. It’s very ... He doesn’t leave us behind, but he is the first to leave when he sees you.

AMIR:

Right, exactly. And you follow, and he doesn’t need a lot of reassurance or, “Oh, what are we going to do? “ It’s just no action mode. I think that study is brilliant just because it really shows that superpower thing and the person who is such a brilliant study and it really drives such an important message home. I think definitely you can see the advantage from an evolutionary perspective to have these canaries in the coal mine that can

ELISE:

Identify,

AMIR:

Oh, a little bit of smoke and then let everybody else know that the people sort of rush out first and then the rest follows. But evolution doesn’t really care about our personal wellbeing. So evolution really cares about the progression, the continuation of the species. It sees us as a vehicle of genetic transfer, but I care about our wellbeing. So I think the research overwhelmingly shows that people who are secure, the benefits are really far and wide, not just in relationships, also for us ourselves, for how we see ourself, how we experience ourself. And so I really thought really along and hard, how can I help people live with that biology that they’ve brought with them, but still become more secure? And the science really shows that you can become more secure.

ELISE:

Yeah. And that this idea of sort of the orchid dandelion, if the anxious attached has this superpower but is an orchid, how do you create an environment in which you feel safe and secure enough to be your glorious orchid self and be ... When I worked in a more corporate culture, I was known as the secret shaman because I just knew what was going to happen. It was like my own psychic intuitive power, particularly in how dynamics would play out between people or when something was wrong. You see?

AMIR:

Yeah.

ELISE:

Yeah.

AMIR:

Incredible.

ELISE:

Yeah. And it’s not always great because sometimes you get blamed for what happens just for anticipating that it’s going to happen. And I’m like, I’m not that powerful. I’m pretty powerful, but I’m not that powerful. But yeah, I mean, it’s this ability to discern, intuit, read people, manage energy is one of my sort of bread and butter traits. It’s gotten me very far. So let’s talk a bit about- Sure. Yeah. Because the two things that you outline, I want to talk to you about this whole idea of semis and harp, but the gaslighting and then that dynamic of the backlash.

AMIR:

The

ELISE:

Project regret

AMIR:

Cycle. Oh

ELISE:

My God. Yes. Oh my God. I was like, you are screaming at me on the page. So can we talk about that? Or maybe before we get into that, should we talk about how the ultimate goal is if you’re an anxious person to create more security in your relationships and if you’re an avoidant person to understand that other people need more security and to sort of do the bare minimum to create that standard, even if you’re like, “I don’t need this and I don’t understand why you need this. “ Yeah, exactly. Basic relationship hygiene that I think goes over that. It just goes over there and the avoidance. They don’t realize anything. My husband is like up in the carport all the time. I get it. I love it. He knows he has to come and see me occasionally, but he would rather live in a different house.

AMIR:

I love that. That’s so funny. But you see, the thing is once you know that,

ELISE:

He told

AMIR:

You, you have to understand the animal that he is. And I love

ELISE:

That. It’s not personal.

AMIR:

No.

ELISE:

No.

AMIR:

And in a way, it gives you also space. So the thing is, the whole idea is to understand that once our attachment system is not activated, so that good relationships are not really about constantly talking or being attached at the hip. That’s not the attachment logic. The attachment logic is that, again, it’s just a way for us to feel safe. So what it wants is for the relationship. We know where you are and now we can forget about you. I mean, we still kind of, like I told you, the surveillance, but forget about you and we can engage in the world. And you can see it so clearly with kids, you bring them into a room full of toys and it’s like, “Oh, start pointing and wanting to play with the toys.” And every once in a while they’ll look to see if the mom is there or their caregiver is there, but they’re not constantly where she is or where they are.

But if they leave the room and they leave them, they drop the toys. They don’t want to play with anything. You’ll try to give them a throw in your face or crying. It’s like you’re owing it for them. So as an adults, we don’t really play with toys like that anymore, but we have the same neurosecretary, we have the same biology. So really secure attachment, secure relationships. And that’s what a lot of people don’t really understand. They’re there to, they need to be in the background. They need to be boring, so boring from the sense that they don’t activate us. So we can engage in our work, in our career, in parenting, and having friends, and having hobbies, all of these different things. It’s sort of similar to playing as kids. So the idea is to keep that for anxious and for avoidance. For all of us, the secure secret that I really try to untangle in the book and show you how to get to that secret is to find a way to make those relationships in the background and not to blare, get the alarm going off constantly.

Who can work like that? Imagine if you were in a home where whenever every move you’ll make, the alarm will go off. You can live like it’s not. And not only you can live like that, now we have the science to also show how bad it is for your health and longevity, not just psychologically.

ELISE:

Yeah, 100%. So to that end, sort of using my own marriage as an example, I’m not worried. I don’t have any anxiety that my husband is sort of plotting leaving our partnership and he gives me a ton of space, which I appreciate to go and do my work. And he knows that he needs to send a text every five hours, just a bat signal like, “Hi, that’s it. We don’t have to ... “ It’s enough. I know whenever I call him, he’s like, “What? Why are you calling me? “ That’s enough for me to not feel freaked out or at risk and it works really well.

AMIR:

Right. So what you’re describing, but I love the excitement because clearly the book spoke to you and I’m so

ELISE:

Happy because- Yes. It’s so helpful. Yeah.

AMIR:

But what you’re describing basically is are those semis, the seemingly insignificant minor interactions because oftentimes when people think of changing and how do they change, how do they become more secure? They think about the big things. I need to go and talk about my childhood. I need to unpack really difficult things that have happened to me. And rarely people think about what I’ve come to call the seemingly insignificant minor interactions or in short semis as a vehicle for change. But when you understand the brain from a neuroscience perspective, you understand that each and every one of those semis are a vehicle for change to help people become more secure, to actually change your brain. Your brain’s wiring towards becoming more secure because each and every interaction like that is very meaningful for the brain because our brain constantly scans for connectedness and it’s very aversive to it when we get that disconnect.

Even if we say hello to someone and they kind of don’t respond to us,

ELISE:

It

AMIR:

Actually injures our brain. But when we get that connectedness, the way that you described it is amazing. It’s because you can do your own thing, but everybody has their different set point of when they need that check-in, which is just the way that the kid looks to see if the mom is there. We are doing the same thing with those simis. And if you get those secure simis, you’re set, your husband gets his freedom and you get your freedom. That’s what we want really for be able to have the peace of mind to explore.

ELISE:

Yes. And this is great for giving language of, “Oh, we had a wonderful weekend with you. I need six hours to just go be by myself without needing to explain it or for me to take it personally.” No, it’s so helpful. And then I think your point too, and in the book, the way that it’s let you go and you plot your different relationships and you can have a different dynamic amongst different primary characters in your life and then start to recognize I can only manage as an anxious person however many anxious attachments and I need to turn the volume down on those. So let’s talk about the Simis I think is such a good example of just, it’s not that deep, it’s not that much work to do this baseline hygiene when you’re dealing with someone who’s maybe your significant other, your primary coworker.

AMIR:

Yeah.

ELISE:

Yeah. It’s easy to sort of- It’s

AMIR:

Not just our ... The whole thing about this new book is that the new research really shows that attachment comes into play everywhere with our friends, with our coworkers, with our kids. It’s really everywhere. And those see me, by the way, that really invite you for a moment. So part of the research really shows that hyper-connected state, which is kind of what I came to understand is so beneficial to the brain. I came to understand it from, first of all, from the negative, there’s something that’s called the cyberball effect

ELISE:

That I

AMIR:

Call it in the book. And I start, I think the first chapter is about that because I really want to tell people. You have to understand, our brain loads exclusion. And in the cyberball experiment, you play catch, it’s a little video game, really like a two-dimensional video game, and you play catch with two other participants, imaginary participants, and all of a sudden they stop throwing the ball in your directions. And lo and behold, areas of stress and self-scrutiny and horrible distress and painful distress sort of come online in the brain and nothing mitigates it. If you give money to people to say, “Okay, whenever the ball is not throwing you in your direction, we’re going to give you a little bit of money.” No, it didn’t help. Even when they told people that the other two players are despicable people, they told minority students that the other two players were members of the KKK, still they had this really adversive reaction also psychologically, it makes people have low self-esteem, feel that life is less meaningful and have a less sense of control over their lives.

Things that you would think have no connection to these little moments of exclusion with other people. I mean, my self-esteem, why should I care if someone didn’t throw the ball in my direction or didn’t say hello to me or how much control I have over my life or how much meaning I sent to life. All these deep psychological things that we assigned to the self is actually related to how connected we feel to the world.

So if we understand that, and then you understand that the opposite, what I’ve come to call hyperconnectedness, which is the reverse cyberball, you’re now standing in the middle and you’re throwing the ball to one person, they throw it at you, you turn to the one next there, you throw the ball to them, they throw it to you, and the opposite happens. All the benefits, exactly the opposite. You feel more self-esteem, you feel more that you’re control of your life, that life is more meaningful. So in this book, I really try to create, how do I create a hyper-connected state where we can engulf our brain and our lives in this very, very nourishing environment that can help us change?

ELISE:

Yeah. So let’s talk about the cycling that happens with the anxious because- That’s very important. This is so important, sort of this gaslighting and the other backlash cycle, I think.

AMIR:

Yeah. The protest regret side

ELISE:

Of yes. Oh my God. Okay. Take us through them because I think there are going to be people nodding along and feeling very seen.

AMIR:

So I think what happens when you’re anxious, again, you have that very sensitive radar with all the benefits, it’s sometimes really hard to be anxious because you see things that other people don’t see. And I like that you know those movies of people with superpowers, how initially many things go wrong and don’t go wrong because they don’t know how to control their

ELISE:

Powers. Their power.

AMIR:

So that’s how I think about people with anxious attachment style. If you don’t know how to control your power, it can really, many things can go wrong in your life. And one of the things that go wrong is that you see threat and you respond to it and you don’t know how to sort of channel. You create an environment that’s unsafe for you, that’s not suitable for your, like you said, your orchid brain to that particular ability and you suffer in it. And so the attachment gaslighting, it’s basically what allows you to create that environment. Let’s say you’re in a work situation where you constantly are not invited or where people, there’s a lot of insecure interactions going on and you notice everything. You just see everything and you suffer. So maybe that’s not the ideal workplace for you, but our culture doesn’t recognize that so much.

So instead, people find themselves either externally or internally gas lining. Internally will be like, “I’m too sensitive. I shouldn’t let it get to me. “ Well, I mean, guess what? How can you ... I can’t shut my ears. I can’t stop hearing. It’s hard to ... How do you turn off your senses, your ability to sense the world? We can’t. So by engaging in this self-attachment gaslighting, you’re missing an opportunity to try to create the environment that’s right for you and you’re really cutting at your powers by saying, “Oh, I shouldn’t respond to it. I shouldn’t respond to it. “ Instead of saying, “Well, I like the way that you mentioned it when you were working in a corporate environment.” It was challenging because you had all these powers and sometimes it hit a wall. Whereas I think where now when it’s more about connecting with people in a way that’s different, you can use it to the full.

So that’s a good example, I think, of how changing your setup can really change and let your powers shine.

ELISE:

Yeah. I think too, I think for someone who’s wired like me or maybe like you, I find working on my own to feel more secure because I have fewer people to emotionally manage and modulate and I’m not having to read as many interactions to understand what’s happening and who is safe and who is not.

AMIR:

Although

ELISE:

You

AMIR:

Clearly can do it and you’ve done it very well.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, 100%. And I recognize that about myself. I would not have assigned it to being an anxious attachment person. I would’ve been like, “Oh, I just am highly intuitive.” But I think that the two obviously are correlated. And I have enough experience now in my 46th or 47th year, whatever age I am now where people don’t gaslight me as much, right? They’re more inclined to be like, “Oh, if you’re feeling that, it’s likely real.” So my husband, I manage my own catastrophizing, but my husband doesn’t gaslight me, but he doesn’t catastrophize with me either.

AMIR:

Right.

ELISE:

But that helps.

AMIR:

That helps a lot. Part of what I try to do is to teach people how to create their secure village. And it sounds like you’re Your husband, to a very big degree, is your secure village, and you don’t want them to catastrophize with you. If anything, you want them to do this kind of secure priming that will actually give you a secure viewpoint of things. But that’s very, very different from gas lighting. So the gas lighting would be like, oh, you’re too sensitive, you’re reading too much into it. But the secure priming would be, they did this to you this time, but they really love you. And I’m sure they didn’t even think about it at the time that they did it. So they help you give you a secure perspective on things. And that’s very, very different from gas lighting.

ELISE:

Yes. Or why don’t you sleep on it? Oh,

AMIR:

That’s

ELISE:

A great one too. Which is for me- You know that you’re

AMIR:

Going to feel

ELISE:

Better later. Yes. Don’t react in the moment. Why don’t you sleep, go for a walk, which is very helpful because let’s talk about the next cycle. It’s so fun.

AMIR:

During great cycle, what happens when you don’t sleep on it?

ELISE:

When you decide. Yes. When you take action because you have such a strong, intuitive or set- And you feel like you have to react

AMIR:

Immediately. No, I have to say this. It’s almost once it just comes flying out. And I talked to someone about this as a psychologist and she said, yes, this protest regret cycle happens to me all the time with my ... She has adult kids. She gets upset that they don’t call her enough, that they don’t listen to her. When she calls them, they get off the phone quickly. And then she lashes out at them. And then she really says really mean things. You don’t care about me, you don’t love me. You only come here when you do laundry. Take your own laundry and take it home, which is called protest behavior. And that’s very important attachment lingo. Protest behavior is any behavior that you engage in to try to increase the availability of the other person. Because remember I told you, we scan for the availability.

And when we feel that they’re not available, if there’s kind of danger that happens, then it gets activated. But even if they’re not available because they disappear on us or don’t text us, that can trigger protest. And protest, it triggers an activating thing that you start thinking about and then protest behavior. Protest behavior is any behavior to try to get the other person to engage with you. And it can be very bad behavior. The marriage doesn’t care.

ELISE:

Yeah.

AMIR:

It can be really mean and horrible, but it doesn’t care because it’s about safety. And it’s more about ... The feeling is if you’re not available to me, life is dangerous and we can talk where that comes from. But then you protest, which can be really ugly. So she yells at them, “Yo, don’t bring your laundry here. Don’t come here.” And then hangs up the phone. And then for a while you can stow on it even more, I don’t know, for an hour or two or day or two. But then eventually what happens, the regret sets in because especially people with anxious attachment, they have a very sticky attachment and it’s not that easy for them to let go of people, which can be both good and bad. But once they engage in that protest, then once it comes down, the attachment needs come rushing back in and, “Oh my God, what have I done?

I’ve really, really fought myself into a really bad place with this person.” And then you engage in that attachment guys lighting, “It’s all my fault. I was too sensitive. I shouldn’t have done that. It’s not a good response.” All the while forgetting that it wasn’t out of nowhere that you lashed out. There was a reason they were not consistent, available, responsive, which is kind of like the hallmark of this of secure attachment. They weren’t. So there’s a reason why I did that, but that now goes away. You don’t even think about that anymore. So you have to apologize. And because you really upset them, now the whole conversation is about how bad your behavior was, but the original reason why you lashed out to begin with hardly ever killer comes up. And so then you go back to a relationship.

ELISE:

Yeah.

AMIR:

But then eventually again, it will come up because you haven’t resolved anything. So that’s why it’s a protest regret cycle. And it’s especially with people who are not secure, they instigate because they’re not being what I call CARP, they instigate that activating strategies and protest behavior, and then you go off to the races.

ELISE:

Yeah. I want to talk about CARP. Before we get to that, because it’s obviously massive, for people who are listening in this protest regret cycle, it can also be ... I mean, obviously you want to keep your children close. You want to manage through that interaction in a more skillful way. And so that in the process, you can be like, “I need a little bit more from you to not fly off the handle.”

AMIR:

I have an example for that. So the same situation, mother of school college kids. And also she noticed that when she calls them, they’re like, “Oh, I don’t have time for you. “ And then so what they did was, because again, you remember how we said that attachment is simple. It’s in those simis. They set up all of their exercise apps to synchronize, so they all see what each other is doing. So whenever she sees that they go on a walk, she gives them a thumbs up. They give her a thumbs up after, I don’t know, Pilates class. So in a way, people always talk about how technology makes us disconnected, but technology is what we make of it. And she found a very shrewd way to make them feel more connected. And so there’s a little bit of a back and forth synchronicity that allows them to feel more secure.

And then she actually did say that she knows when they’re driving somewhere or when they have time, that’s usually when they call her. And she said, “Yeah, I know I’m a voice, but I love my children.” So she made sure that those times she’ll be available to answer their calls.

So you find ways.

ELISE:

You find ways. And it’s like a skillful management.

AMIR:

A way of

ELISE:

Managing

AMIR:

It.

ELISE:

And then for those who are listening, and we all have a lot of, we’ll call them relationships that are highly optional, right? Whether it’s a friendship or a romantic relationship where you’re not legally signing any documents where you get into the wrong dynamic with someone who leaves you feeling highly insecure. Your point is you want to minimize the amount of insecure attachments that you have so that you are maintaining good ground for your orchid nature, right? And that there are ways to not trigger the protest regret, which happens when you’re like, “I’ve had it, you’re dumped, go F yourself.” And then you’re like, “What have I done?” We’ve all been in those cycles. So can you talk about turning down the volume? That was so helpful.

AMIR:

Yeah, because I mean, so the stakes are so high. So when you have all these superpowers and the volume is up and you get triggered all the time, it not only is bad for your relationships, there’s really all these studies that shows that it’s bad for your health. It increases inflammation. There’s this one study now that shows that it actually decreases longevity. It makes you age faster. It’s kind of crazy. And then the way to change is to actually create this hyper-connected world around you. So you want to immerse yourself and enrich social, secure social environment. So how do you do that? So the way that you do it, you have to first learn about the five pillars of a secure life, which is you want yourself to be and other people to be consistent, available, responsive, reliable, and predictable. It sounds like really ... Yeah, that’s CARP.

I actually have on my website, you can go and you can download a little cheat sheet with CARP and SINIs on it because I really wanted it to be available to people so they can use it and they can sort of keep it as a reference card basically. So you want people to be consistent, available and responsive, and then you monitor for that. So you want to create this enriched social environment for yourself. And the way to do it is really to ... All really it asks for is to make a shift in your attention because usually what happens when we get triggered like that, we get consumed with those insecure relationships and yet at the same time, often most of us, the vast majority of us have these secure relationships in our lives, these secure people in our lives that we barely pay any attention to because they’re boring.

They always text when we text them. They’re always there for us. There’s just no drama. So our brain naturally gravitates towards that drama, trying to fix it. And part of the whole anxious thing is that we get preoccupied with it and it’s hard to let it go. So part of the idea in this therapy, and also what I talk about in these tools is you really have to make a list of the people who are secure in your life. And I call you, instead of like, “ Why haven’t you texted me? What’s going on? I’m engaging in protest behavior, shift and think about, okay, this person, let me text them instead. “And then over time to really deprioritize those insecure relationships and prioritize those secure relationships that we don’t really pay enough attention to, we have this amazing resource available to us and we don’t use it enough.

And the whole idea in this book is to teach you to shift and actually make use of that resource and create your secure

ELISE:

Village,

AMIR:

Basically.

ELISE:

When I was reading about the protest response over my life, there have been relationships that I’ve needed to let go of. And we don’t really talk culturally about things like friendship, divorce, or when you’re like, “ I can’t be at this work relationship or whatever it is But historically I’ve been triggered by that protest and I do it very gently, but I feel so bad. Oh, I shouldn’t do that. I shouldn’t let this relationship go. “And so it consumes a lot of energy. And so just this idea too of, no, you can turn the volume down on these relationships by only responding when they reach out, not initiating, and so you’re not triggering your own anxious attachment style, but you’re minimizing them until you’re in the Christmas card territory.

AMIR:

Yeah, exactly. So the tool that you’re describing,

ELISE:

That I’m

AMIR:

Describing in the chapter for the anxious, I call it wall tennis with love.

ELISE:

Wall tennis with love. Yeah.

AMIR:

So the idea is, I don’t know if you’ve ever paid tennis against the wall, but it’s like- Yeah, of course. Whatever you dish the wall, it sort of gives back in just a little bit less, it can’t really start a serve or anything like that. It returns whatever you dish it. So the idea is that you are the wall and in this insecure relationship, once you’ve determined that you need to put the volume down, it’s basically how do you do it in a way that doesn’t trigger your attachment Because if you’ll try to cut just to completely cut down the ties, usually that actually then there’s an attachment backlash

ELISE:

And

AMIR:

You get into that protest regret again. So the world tennis with love allows you to take the volume down. So when they reach out to you, and it has to be with love because you don’t want to trigger the relationship. When they reach out to you, you respond very warmly, you inquire, but you don’t initiate too much. It’s kind of like an art to learn how to do that. And I actually discovered myself in my own life, I thought that it’s a way to make the relationships go away, but in some instances they did really recede into the background and became like the Christmas card territory. But in other instances, it actually created a new type of relationships that I have with people that we do communicate from time to time, but it’s on their dime and their terms, but I don’t have the expectation anymore.

So it doesn’t trigger me. I never really think about ... I will never initiate because I decided it’s wall tennis with love. And you can see, sometimes you’ll see the thanks. Sometimes this particular person think about sends me, he’s a friend of mine, he sends him and I immediately respond hi as soon as I can, then nothing for days. And then another hi, and then I say another hi. And then all of a sudden he calls and I answer and I talk to them very warmly and ask about their family and this and that and the other thing, but I will never call and if I’m in trouble, if I need help to deescalate an insecure relationship, I have my secure people to call. I will not call this person because they’re not going to help me. And if anything, sometimes they’ll either not listen or get tired of listening to me or abruptly get off the phone and then all of a sudden that what happens when we talk about the avoidance, I get even more upset because they’ve sort of cut me off abruptly.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, it’s so helpful. It’s just like, oh, now I understand that feeling of regret, remorse. Oh, I was too hard on them. Oh, I’m being mean or unfair when that gets triggered by me that it’s, “Oh, this is actually a dynamic of relationship attachment. I’m wired for this and I can actually manage it and sort of go through relationship withdrawal without experiencing intense cravings.”

AMIR:

That’s

ELISE:

Exactly

AMIR:

It. It’s kind of a way to

ELISE:

Bypass

AMIR:

That thing. Kind of like, okay, I’m

ELISE:

Like- Skip the drama. Yeah.

AMIR:

Completely.

ELISE:

Yeah. And then in the avoidance chapter, this section just made me delighted and laugh because it’s such a ... I mean, I experience it all the time and I have friends who are highly avoidant who I love and it’s that being a cat around these people a little bit while recognizing they just don’t ... My husband, not to pick on him, but he doesn’t really listen to the podcast. But if he listens to this, he’ll be like, “Oh, I need to just practice my carp and do my simis and we’re golden.” But he’s funny because he would never occur to him that he’s sort of doing this avoidance style, but when he wants something and someone doesn’t immediately respond to him, he gets very like, “What?” And I’m like, “That’s funny. I sent you something four days ago and I don’t think you’ve read it.

“ But that avoidant deep need for space, but then the way that they get triggered, right? So can you talk a little bit about their attachment

AMIR:

Wound or tendency? I have to say, I really try to make amends to the avoidance in this world, in this book, and not even just make amends, give them tools they can use rather than go and tell them, because a lot of the time you see a lot on social media and there’s also in general, I think I told you, I think there’s some bias even in the research questions about the origin of these attachment styles, which is really unproven territory in psychology. We’ve played the blame game so much and sort of attributed things to childhood in a way that’s not really supported by research completely.

ELISE:

So

AMIR:

The idea for avoidance is that you had a lack of closeness in upbringing, your needs weren’t met enough so you learned to fend for yourself and that’s why you are the way you are and that you need to heal somehow from it in order to be able to be more open and closer to others. But when you look at biology, you see, actually really you can just look. I see it everywhere now because once your eyes are open, you can’t not see it. There’s a preference from distance and closeness. Again, because we talk about there’s a need for variability within the population. Everywhere we look, some dogs, for example, my dog, he doesn’t like too much closeness. He’s over there, he’ll still be close, but not sitting in my lap, not sitting close to me from afar. He’ll sit there, but from afar. Other dogs like my nephew has a dog, she constantly, she’s on your neck the whole day.

She needs to be super close. And some cats actually also love closeness and some cats, if you’ll try to pet them, they’ll claw you. So that preference for distance and closeness is everywhere in nature. And why wouldn’t it be in humans too? And it’s all very biological, but at the end of the day, I really thought it would be important for people to understand. We have this preference from closeness and distance, and people just prefer more distance, but then they build a whole psychology around it. So that’s where the three pitfalls that avoidance often fall into because they don’t understand. Avoidance are about 20, 25% of the population. It’s not that they don’t understand. They never really to stop thinking about the fact that the rest of the world doesn’t process things the way that they process things. So the first pitfall, I think we said is heal thyself.

I call it heal thyself because usually avoidance when they’re having trouble, they take care of their own issues. They don’t come to you to talk to you about my partner who’s secure and avoidant, there’s avoidance. Things happen to him at work. He doesn’t come to talk to me about this trouble. Very rarely he would come. Most of the time, no, I need to solve it myself.

ELISE:

You’re like, “I’m a therapist. Bring it to me. “ Yeah.

AMIR:

Yeah. No, no. It’s like, I need to solve it myself. It’s like, no, I don’t need to talk about this. Well, I have this very over ... I think the vast majority of the population has that need to talk about things and regulate, co-regulate, but they don’t. They oftentimes, most of the time, regulate them on their own. So the idea that someone will come to them for help is just very foreign to them because, look, I don’t do that. Why are you coming to me now? And so what happens is, unbeknownst to them, think about what happens when we go and we’re in trouble, help us, help us. And the other person is blowing you off. That elicits the protest regret cycle.

So all of a sudden you forget about the bad things happen to you and you’re like, “Whoa, this person’s not available to me. “ Then it becomes all about that now and then you lash out and then you start to really argue with them and they’ve added insult to injury and they are clueless that they’ve done that. And so much of my therapy when I teach this to patient, it’s like a revelation for avoiding. It’s like maybe it is, you need to understand that yours is a minority response and the rest of the world doesn’t operate like you. So you need to find a way to extend of yourself a little bit in a moment like that because otherwise it’ll pay off for you.

ELISE:

Yes. If you

AMIR:

Want your distance and your quiet time, you need to act now before it gets much, much worse. And I like to give that analogy. You don’t wait for a child to be super hungry to feed them or you don’t wait until they’re super tired to put them to sleep. So same thing here. You need to take care of this need early on when it’s still small,

ELISE:

Before

AMIR:

It explodes into something huge that you become the center of it.

ELISE:

So

AMIR:

That’s the sort of heal,

ELISE:

I heal

AMIR:

Myself, why can’t you?

ELISE:

Preventative care and-

AMIR:

Entirely.

ELISE:

Yeah. No. And when we were seeing Tatkin, he was like, “You can stay up until whatever hour you want, but you’re going to go to bed with your wife and tickle her back or whatever until she falls asleep. And then you can get up and go do whatever you want, but you can’t just parallel play through life and expect not to have issues.” Yeah. It’s funny though, because there are times when we either have the best marriage or there’s something wrong, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong.

AMIR:

So no, no. So that’s the ... I always talk about the pitfalls that prevents us from getting into a secure mindset. And one of the pitfalls is telling people that life is always a mixed bag, especially relationships and having this idea and you can’t really throw the baby with a bathwater thinking about imagine an idealized life and then feeling really bad about the life that you have here, especially if there’s a lot of things like the way that I’m hearing from so many good things. So no, there’s always, when we meet another person, there’s always going to be they like things this way and I like things that way. But one of the things that I really teach, and I call it the hidden sparks of talent, it’s like to learn to identify both within yourself and in others, the hidden sparks of talent, because if you understand biology, we are so enormously diverse molecularly.

We are made of all the ... It’s like a kaleidoscope. Each and up is our own unique version. And what it does, it really translates to very unique talents that each and everyone have, that we all possess. Sometimes you know how people can turn their tongue in a certain way or they can ... But we all have these little things from starting as little as that to bigger things that we have. And what I find to be really helping people move towards security is to start looking at the hidden sparks of talents in their partners and also in themselves. And oftentimes when we come from a place of insecurity, the things that we think are the biggest impediments are actually hidden sparks of talent. And it’s such a helpful shift to think about it from that perspective.

ELISE:

Yeah. I love that. Well, I love this book. I’m so excited for it to be in the world and it’s very loving and not criticizing. There’s a lot of beauty in the way that each of us manages. So if we can understand that better, we can manage ourselves and each other better. Know the animals we’re with. It’s really what it comes down to. Yeah. And

AMIR:

Know the animal that you are.

ELISE:

What a delightful person. He is delicious. I don’t think he would mind me describing him in that way. I just wanted to double back on two of the big concepts in the book that I think are really important to understand whether you identify as an avoidant or an anxious or secure or a fearful avoidant, which I think is ... And he writes a bit about this in the book. We didn’t get to it really in the conversation. That’s the trickiest. That’s, I think, not to diagnose, but that’s where you might already have been tuned for anxiety. And then maybe you grew up as the child of alcoholic parents and you are really become sort of fearful and avoidant. So I think that’s where a lot of our childhood trauma or patterning shows up when it gets into that territory. But I am not a physician.

I don’t know if you guys know that. I wanted to just reiterate what the CARP is because this is what you want to sort of maintain as much as possible. And then also the semis. These are big themes in the book and really important and easy to understand and action. Okay. So the five pillars of security, this is CARP, which stands for consistent, available, responsive, reliable, and predictable. So consistent, you keep the same level of involvement over time without fluctuations and keep that at the level at which you are able to commit, right? Available. You are there for the other person when they need you. Responsive. When the other person contacts you, you respond. Reliable, the other person feels they can count on you to be consistent, available, and responsive. Predictable. They can anticipate your actions, no negative surprises like ghosting or other erratic or abrupt behavior, and no still facing or cyberballing.

Still facing is when you sort of evince no response to what someone’s saying to you. It’s the still face experiment that you probably heard about where the mom with the baby goes still face and stops responding and how scary that is and disorienting. And then simis, those are what he calls seemingly insignificant minor interactions of everyday life. And his point is like these are very small attenuated ways of showing up for people with huge upside. So for him as a therapist, it’s showing up for people on time. It’s just small indications that their time matters, that you’re paying attention, you’re acknowledging them, you’re not avoiding them, et cetera. These are not major things. This is sort of the small preventative hygiene that keeps relationships really functioning. It’s keeping your word, right? It’s like, “Oh, let me call you back.” It’s calling the person back or sending a text to say, “Hey, I got dragged into something.

I’m going to try you tomorrow.” Stuff like that. Those are simis, but they really create sort of that secure base for other people. All right, friends, this was a fun one. I will see you next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you.

Meanwhile, there’s still time to book my IN-PERSON retreat with Satya Doyle Byock from May 25-29 at Omega, in Rhinebeck, New York. You can find more information here. As far as we know, this is a one-time opportunity.

The energy out there feels weird. Besides the mishegas of this past decade—and its many acute crisis points—there have been many other moments that feel…odd. I feel that way about the energy of this current moment—it’s suddenly still, like we’re in the eye of some sort of storm, and it’s disconcerting.1 Or, to keep throwing metaphors at you, it feels like a moment of dead calm—you know, when you’re out on a sailboat (I’m never on a sailboat if I can help it, FWIW) and the wind goes away, and you’re adrift. You’re not anchored, you’re moving with the ocean, though you don’t know where—and you don’t know when the winds will pick back up to send you to your destination or to bring you back to shore. That’s how this moment feels to me…I’m unmoored, ungrounded, not quite sure how to read the energy or pick up the wind. As someone who enjoys motion, periods like this make me uneasy—I don’t quite know what to do. I’m at my best in a crisis! And patience is not one of my virtues.

To that end, I’ve been searching for clues and G.P.S. points to re-orient myself.

I recently got to spend a few days with one of my best friends, Richard Christiansen (you can hear him on the podcast here). Richard is the founder of Flamingo Estate and an incredible gardener and horticulturalist (he grew up on a farm in northern NSW Australia, and like me, is most comfortable with some dirt under his nails)—and he is also a master of the nature metaphor. For every moment, he can produce the perfect plant, flower, or fruit to describe the experience.

For my birthday last year, he sent me a mango tree with this note:

A Mango tree does everything on its own timing. It won’t be rushed. It grows slowly, quietly, almost as if it’s ignoring the world, and then one day it gives you something so lush and generous it makes the waiting feel holy. They don’t bloom for everyone, only when they’re ready.

A Mango tree isn’t flashy in the beginning. It builds itself in secret—roots first, then shade, then sweetness. It asks for patience. And then, when it finally offers fruit, it’s not modest about it. The gift is rich and bold.

They make shade. They give people a safe place to hide and seek protection (as do you). They lower the temperature around them. They become refuge. You are like that too—just being near you changes the weather in your body.

And Mango fruit itself is fragrant, sun-warmed, a little wild, difficult to eat elegantly, worth the mess. Nourishing, unusual, and impossible to fake.

First, may we all have a Richard in our lives. And second, may we each find our nature metaphor. Just looking over this again the other day reminded me of who I am and how I like to fruit—it restored me.

It also brought me back to one of the most helpful meta-metaphors for all creative types, which is that work (and life) functions just like all other growing cycles in nature. Despite our desire to define ourselves as anything other than nature, the same laws apply (the textbook definition of nature literally excludes humans, which is wild). You plant your seeds and then you have to wait—you can say a little prayer that something will root, grow, and blossom, but you don’t get to make this so. You don’t get to be the water, or the sun, or God. You don’t get to rush nature. You’ve done your part; and then you have to let it be. It’s maddening, but it’s also the truth.

I’m in a post-seeding period right now: I’m not creating anything new, though I have planted fields I can’t abandon. I’ve drafted my next book (my very favorite part), and now it needs to be iteratively improved—from draft to draft to draft—until it’s time to bring it to market. I think I feel stuck because, at heart, I’m a Seeder. And right now, the planting season is done; I’m at a bit of a loss. Besides, as much as I love to seed, in our capitalist world, that’s not quite enough. We’re expected to work the whole cycle.

In the fall of 2023, Carissa Schumacher gave a transmission about this. She talked about originality and cycles of innovation, as well as our connection to our vehicles (a vehicle is a relationship, a job, a function—often, we over-identify with our current vehicle, not realizing that we change cars frequently.) The below is all from my notes, so pardon the brevity.

First, she talked about the word “entrepreneur” and how all souls are entrepreneurial—particularly in this Aquarian age. We are no longer in the suit and office vibe of the ‘80s, when it was not popular to do your own thing. Now everyone does their own thing.

The meaning of entrepreneur = to enter and seize, capture, often by force. (In a business context, you’re capturing “the market.”) The issue is not so much with the word, but that it’s too general: What does it mean? She broke it down into three types.

1. Entrepre-newers: Introducing things that are legitimately new and deeply original, sourced from one consciousness.

2. Entrepre-mores: Minor innovations. Taking things that are already done and also doing a version. Similar to starting another laundromat.

3. Entre-manures: There is a lot of manure in the world. This is the 18-year-old telling you that they’re disrupting an entire industry. The person who takes one Reiki class and believes they’re the Dalai Lama.

The inference? Connect to your essence and aim for 1 and 2.

Next, Carissa talked to us about being Seeders, Growers, and Harvesters—she offered that while some of us might dibble-dabble in all three, we tend to gravitate toward one part of the cycle more naturally.2

SEEDERS: You and your vehicle (job, role, functional relationship) plant seeds, and are originators. Artists, designers, visionaries, conscious creators. Einstein and the “Theory of Relativity”—he received this and seeded it.

GROWERS: Cultivators who help to seeds grow. Trainers, coaches, guides, counselors: You grow, expand, and evolve people and ideas. This can sometimes feel workhorse-y, but it is a very important service.

HARVESTERS: You take what’s grown and bring it to the market and to the world. Newscasters, podcast host, media, etc. You bundle and present. In the current culture, everyone wants to be harvester because it’s the most visible. But it’s very dangerous when people take seeds to market and claim they grew them—this is appropriation.

I’ve done all three—at various points of my career I’ve had to lean hard into Growing, in particular. I’ve had to Harvest as well. As someone who works for myself, I still do all three simply because I have to. But in my heart, my joy is in Seeding.

There are a lot of seeds in the ground right now. I feel this personally, but also collectively. Yes, we’re in some sort of collective void, but I also think we’re disoriented because we’re looking at fields that look desolate and fallow and bare—but are actually full of seeds. We don’t know what fruit they will bear yet, but may it be juicy and delicious, and just the sustenance we need.

In the interim, there’s nothing “to do” but to wait.

You can also listen to this episode on Spotify, or watch the conversation on YouTube.

Janine Slome is an incredible intuitive and numerologist. I had a fascinating numerology reading with her, which you’ll hear a little bit about toward the end of our conversation.

Today, Janine shares some of the background of numerology. She explains why the practice can serve as a potent portrayal of life, and how you can use it as a map to guide you.

We also talk about the different types of karma, where karma comes from, and, yeah…what we might each do about our own karma in this life.

Throughout the conversation, Janine shares several of her broader, cultural and global predictions for our future.

This is a bit of a wild one but I think many of you will enjoy it!

MORE FROM JANINE SLOME:

Janine Slome’s Website

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

ELISE:

We’ll just dive in. I thought it would be helpful for people who maybe have an association with numerology as adding up the digits of their birth or whatever it may be for you to explain how you’d use numerology and its deep roots, which I think are fascinating.

And then I would love to dive into what’s happening collectively. We’re in different parts of the world, though we’re all

JANINE:

Connected.

ELISE:

And you and I are connected through some ... I don’t know. As you know, I have a strong tie to South Africa.

JANINE:

You’re very special to me because of that.

ELISE:

Yeah. And South Africa, I feel like is its own strange vortex at this moment. And maybe I feel that way only because my dad’s a South African Jew like you, but here we are. All right.

JANINE:

Absolutely.

ELISE:

I think that’s helpful for people to understand the context in which you approach numerology and what these years mean for us individually and then collectively.

JANINE:

So I think I just want to start with the origins of numerology. And the irony is that it actually first showed up in the ancient civilizations of Atlantis and Lumerius, of which some people don’t really believe that there was an Atlantis, but there are some explanations that it was connected to that. But the earliest sort of reference to it was actually from Mesopotamia. And the irony is long before I ever started doing numerology. My earliest past life memory was in Mesopotamia as some kind of peasant woman. And I don’t know maybe if I had some gypsy caravan and I was doing my numbers from there, but it’s a very interesting thing that Mesopotamia was the first place where they started using numbers and systems as a divinity for things. And then it went to Egypt and the Egyptians used it in architecture in the building of the pyramids.

So it wasn’t properly formed at that stage. I think Pythagoras is still regarded the real father of numerology, and he was around the time of, I think it was about 550 BC. So he’s really been noted as the real father of it. But it’s so interesting when you look into India, have an Indian numerology system, which they call Giatish. And it’s actually, it informs both Hindu and Buddhist practice. And it’s the first time that referencing was made to the letter of the name having a corresponding digit. So like the E for Elise would be a five, the L would be a three. So they were the first ones who really started putting that together. And it’s amazing because obviously my work is so diverse and I had this beautiful Indian couple who had this beautiful traditional Indian wedding. And then when they had their baby, they all go to the priest to get a special naming for their baby.

That’s not necessarily the name that the baby is known by in the world, but I just think it’s something that’s really quite sacred and quite beautiful. And I’ve got a Ghanaian lady as well in Washington who’s about to give birth and she and I were chatting and she says that the Ghanaians give a day name to the baby. So if the baby is born on the 14th of May, for instance, that baby will be assigned a Ghanaian day name. So if that name is not really used and known in numerology, then it doesn’t really hold value. But I just still think it’s a beautiful side that we haven’t really seen. And I’m wanting to explore how these Indian names or these Ghanaian names somehow interact with the chosen name or the way that the person is known. So I think that’s the next frontier of my study is to look into that.

So then we had the Chaldean numerology, which is a very famous numerology system, which was actually set up by the Catholic Church of the New Babylonian era. And the Chaldonians, in normal numerology, everything goes from one to nine. The lettering is one to nine. Those are the values. The Chaldonians decided they’re doing it from one to eight, because nine they consider as being one of the most sacred numbers so they don’t use it in numerology. So as you can see, there are so many different systems and different interpretations of how the numerology is applied, but the one that I work with most is the Pythagorean numerology. And if anybody has ever seen their charts, if I’ve ever shown anyone a chart, it’s full of grids and it’s got diamonds and it really does look like a Pythagorean theorem the way it’s all drafted. So yes, it’s an incredibly interesting tool.

I am a healer and I am an intuitive, but I’m also a skeptic. And I think that’s why the numerology held so much intrigue for me because it’s such an accurate portrayal of life, life in our personal lives, life in what’s going on in the world.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, it’s so interesting too, I’ve done a session with you and I have my skepticism too. And there’s a scale of quality, particularly in the world of intuitives where some people get an occasional psychic hit, of course, but mostly maybe don’t have that well tuned of a muscle. But it’s always interesting in the context of exquisite readers like you or amazing astrologers or people who are really deaf with systems like human design. And when people push back, I’m like, you’re underestimating the accuracy of description when it comes from someone who really doesn’t know you. And there’s something about its accuracy and it’s not wishful thinking either. It’s not like you’re like, “Elise, you’re going to win a lottery ticket and you’re going to ... “ It’s grounded in real life experience, past and present in a way that it must be so fun and affirming to accurately reflect people who you do not know.

Yeah. Yeah.

JANINE:

So yeah, that’s exactly what it is. And for me, the numerology chart holds the entire blueprint, the full blown potential for your life and for your incarnation in this lifetime. Whether you choose to work with that or not, that remains up to you. And that’s sometimes where I might have a little bit of an argument with the client because I see that they’re actually not working the numbers in the positive and in the best way that they could fulfill their karmic destiny and they might be working into the punitive or the diminished version of it. And that hurts me as a soul deeply when I see or when I hear people talk about family members that have just not gotten the karma, that have just never used their free will to take up the magnificent opportunity that’s in their chart. And that’s why I love my work is I love presenting that beautiful opportunity.

And yes, there are bad things and there are good things, but it’s all about reframing it from a higher perspective so that the soul can choose to work harmoniously with those numbers or to push back against the tide and have an incredibly, incredibly difficult life.

ELISE:

Yeah. I don’t want to jump ahead yet to the collective, but it reminds me too of there’s this Sufi master teacher, Louellen von Lee, who I love. I love his work and I love him as a person. And we were chatting and he’s now his internal, he doesn’t do podcasts or anything anymore, really engage that much with the external world. And he’s sad in part because he’s in his visions, he has watched exactly what you’re describing, this capacity or this potential for us to transition to a new era at a higher level than we are and we’re taking the hardest path. And so I think for much of his life, he was trying to urge us to not make this so painful or difficult that there was a way of doing this without what we’re currently experiencing and we’ve somehow abandoned the better choice. So we’ll get to that.

I don’t know if you agree with that or disagree with that, but let’s talk about on the personal level, the way that this lands, that you’re defining or creating a chart for someone. And can you talk about the years, the cycles and so on and so forth?

JANINE:

Okay. So what I usually start with is the ruling pathway. And the ruling pathway we get by adding all the digits in the date of birth and then we keep reducing. So let’s say it adds up to 52, then we say five and two or seven and we keep reducing to a single digit. And that is the ruling pathway that accounts for 50% of the reading. It shows the fundamental journey that the person is on and what they’re going to experience and what sort of stuff they’re going to come up with, whether they’re a creative or more scientific in nature. So the ruling pathway is extremely important, but what I find even more important is when I take the values in the letters of your name, like the E is the five, the L is a three, and I take those values and I get what we call an SPD and SPD code is a sole personality destiny code.

And this holds all the hidden dreams, the potentials, all of these kind of things. So the soul number is the inner way of being. So we’re not all outwardly the way we are on the inside. The inner way of being is our dreams, our desires, our inner things, our insecurities. The personality is how we present to the world and how other people perceive us. And then the destiny we get by integrating the personality together with the drives and the dreams of the soul and we add that all up together and then we get a destiny number. It’s a bit like the human code or the pin code or something like that. And I often say to my clients, “I’m sorry for reducing you to a code, but you are a code.” And that code is very, very powerful. And furthermore to that is when I look at your name, I put all those letters into a grid.

And if you are missing a five, for instance, let’s say you don’t have an E in your name, so you’re missing a five in your grid, that is a comic lesson. That is a significant, what we call a karmic debt, and that is something that you have to overcome in this lifetime. So we find those little karmic debts, then we add them all together, and then we get a massive karmic accumulation, which sounds very frightening, but it’s actually, it’s wonderful. And often when I speak to the karmic accumulation, on a deep, deep, deep level, my clients resonate and they say, “I know what you’re talking about. “ I cannot tell you how deep it is. And often they’ll say to people, “But nobody knows that about me. “ That is one thing where there are 23 different types of karmic accumulation. So it’s not just random here and there that you’ve got a five and a this, and it really is very targeted and very important.

And it was actually quite sad in the early days of numerology and specifically, I would say from the 80s, the 90s, even when I finished studying in the late ... I think it was about 2008, we were told not to discuss karma with our clients. We were told that that was an area of sanctity and that we should not discuss karma with our clients. And so for the first few years when I started doing this, I didn’t discuss the karma. But what I found is I started to slowly integrate it because I felt intuitively it was important for people to understand their karma and where they fit in this whole grand scheme of things and what their karmic mandate or potential is in the current consciousness and in what we’re moving towards, I do believe that’s a very important component of what we’re dealing with now in the world.

ELISE:

Let’s talk about that for a minute and this 20 types of karma and the way that it’s allotted to us. And does that ladder up to this idea that we need to do our part or our share and there’s versions of all of it? And where does the karma originate? I know we generate a tremendous amount of shadow, all of us, every day. Is it that, that accumulation of wars and genocides and pillaging and every animal that’s died to keep us alive? What is it?

JANINE:

I think the only way I can answer that question, because I’ve been thinking about it quite significantly at the moment, I’m seeing a lot of clients coming up with what we call a 16-7. So there are certain numbers in numerology we can’t reduce. The 13-4, the 16-7, the 14-5 and the 1910. So those are karmic malifics you never reduce. And what I’ve noticed, there’s more and more people that are coming in with a 16-7 comic ... It’s coming up somewhere in the chart. It doesn’t have to come up in the karmic accumulation. It can come up in the ruling path. It can come up in the soul position. And what I’m finding is most of these individuals lived during the, very much in the Renaissance medieval times where the church was the law of the land and the church was very punitive. I mean, they weren’t modern forms of government and in those days there was a chronic, chronic abuse of power by the church.

It was like, “Do as I say and not as I do. “ And what I’m finding is a lot of those souls coming back onto the earth plan now to transcend the dogma of conformed religion. And they’re usually born into homes where there’s heavy, heavy religious ... So they’ve either gone to a Catholic school. Last night I met with somebody who was raised in the Church of Scientology and who has run a mile since she’s been in her 20s. So they’ve come into heavy religious dogma in this lifetime, so much so that it has forced them out of their head and into a heart-based relationship with God, the universe, the cosmos, whatever you want to call it. And I find that very fascinating that there’s so many of those souls incarnating at the moment that are transcending dogma and that are bringing new principles to light on spiritual concepts and ideas.

ELISE:

That’s fascinating. Okay. Thank you. That’s really helpful for that people understand what we’re talking about. So it might be an ancestral or intergenerational reincarnation line that’s specific.

JANINE:

Absolutely. Absolutely. And there are souls incarnating at specific times for specific reasons. And also in South Africa here, we’ve got the most tremendous, this rhino poaching, our rhino rhinoceros, there’s virtually nothing left. I mean, it’s all been used for different medicinal purposes and whatever. And somebody once said to me, and it was a thought I really had to think about, is maybe the rhinos have chosen to leave the earth plane. And for me, that resonated so much. And I think that there are a lot of animals that have chosen to leave the earth plane because the energies here are just too heavy, or certainly they’re going to start lightening up quite soon, but it’s been very, very heavy on this planet and there are some species that have chosen to leave.

ELISE:

That’s so interesting and heartbreaking and also whether it’s- But it’s beautiful for them. I like the idea of it being a choice rather than a forced extinction, right? I want to pull that thread that you just laid down that things are going to lighten. But before we go there, can you talk a bit about the cycle of years that we go

JANINE:

Through? Oh, the personal years, yes.

ELISE:

Yes.

JANINE:

Yes. Okay. So based on your date of birth and the current year, it’s 2026, everybody’s in a personal year and you can be in a first year, second year, third year, all the way to the ninth year. And after a nine, we cross back into a one. So our lives go in cycles of nine, and each year has its theme, its story, what needs to happen. And if you understand the trajectory of the year, you’d be able to work with it rather than against it. And when it’s good, it’s good. And when it’s bad, it can be incredibly, incredibly challenging. But if you know how to work with the energy, you’re not going to suffer as badly as someone who doesn’t know what the hell has happened to them, why all of a sudden the wheels have completely come off. And the spiritual cycle runs from October to October.

And a lot of people question me on that. And that is the Jewish New Year, but it is also the ancient biblical calendars that worked on the lunar solar logos. The modern day calendars work only on solar. And the Gregorian calendar was developed by Gregory the 8th in 1582. So I always say to people, “It’s a modern day calendar. It holds no relevance in this type of work.” Even if you think of America and the changes your country experienced, it literally commenced in October 2024 when things started to change quite dramatically. So yes, I still work on an October to September cycle.

ELISE:

Got it. But it’s helpful context because when you were explaining it to me, and some years are for seed planting, some are for harvesting, some are for composting, right?

JANINE:

It’s very cyclical. There are years where health comes into the spotlight. If someone is in the fourth year, then health comes straight into the spotlight and there’s a feeling of repression and limitation. If you’re in the first year, you are in the year of new beginnings. I mean, the sun has come out, it’s a new day and the opportunities available are endless. And so when someone’s in the first year, I say to them, “You need to get going. You can’t go on holiday now. You need to be present in your life and make use of this incredible energy gateway that’s opened up from October to September to mobilize new projects, to meet new people, because what you do in the first year would set the course of your life for the next nine years.” So they are incredibly important cycles. And if you understand how to work with them, you can really make them work in your favor.

ELISE:

Yeah. Okay. So let’s talk about the collective and the year that we’re in. And I mean, I don’t want you to give us false hope. I want an accurate depiction of what’s happening, which is very scary and painful and uncertain. And in many ways, I know we can never know how the story ends, but what’s happening? Where are we?

JANINE:

So I listened to Pamela Gregory. I listened to a whole bunch of different divinities and healers, and most of us are speaking the same language, but through different divinities and different mediums. And so what I want to say from a numerological perspective, everything up until 1999 was characterized by one number, one, the 1100s, the 1200s, the 1300s, it’s all been characterized by one. One is the sun, it’s the masculine, it’s, I lead, I rule, you follow. It’s that kind of energy. It’s quite self-serving and the one energy stopped when we hit 2000. And now we’ve gone into the two energy, which is the divine feminine. And all of us children born in the 1900s, we’ve all got one and nine in our chance, which is world domination and war. 1910 in numerology is the number for an abuse of power. And so what we’ve been seeing played out right now in the world is the remnants of our generation and what we put into the world.

The hope hearing is that the twos are coming in and the twos foster co-creation, community-led governance. It’s a completely different consciousness system. It’s inclusive, it’s kind, it’s diplomatic. And so I always talk about 2020 as being an important year, and I’m not sure where I heard this, but I love to delineate the word COVID-19 because cocoa jointly, the world was in it together. V was the 22nd letter of the alphabet 2020 when we went into lockdown. It is the Latin word for ego and 19 is the fall of the 1900s. So all of us, as I’m saying, all of us kids born in the 1900s, we’re holding this energy of an abuse of power and everything was fine in the universe until we hit the double twos. And then when we hit the 2020s and we hit the double twos, the old world firmly collided with the new and the universe is busy churning out these old moded structures, things that are not working for us anymore.

And so I find it an incredibly exciting time to be alive. I must be honest, during COVID, I asked the universe, I said, “I don’t know what I was thinking when I arrived here in the 1970s. If I knew there was going to be a COVID and all of this drama, I’m not sure if I would have chosen to incarnate, but now it’s getting exciting because now we’re starting to summit.” And so the interesting thing, and just taking this a step further, is that in 2017 was the first year of a new nine year cycle, which ended in 2025.

And the irony of this is that it coincided with the year of the snake. Now, the ninth year is the year of loss and endings. It’s the end of the old way of doing things. It’s the release of the lowest self. It’s all of those kind of things. And you see, this is how they all intertwined. In Chinese divinity, it was the year of the snake, which was the shedding of the old. And so I’ve been feeling, since Gaza, I’ve been feeling we’ve been starting to summit, like we’re getting to the top of the hell of what’s going on and the fear and what everybody’s going through, but we’re actually starting to come down the other side. And I know it doesn’t look like that at the moment, but now we’re in a global first year, and this is a year of new beginnings. And we’re seeing these wars and we’re seeing all this stuff going on all over the place, but Gaia is healing her own karma.

ELISE:

Say more.

JANINE:

Gaia is shedding her own trauma right now. And it would be so beautiful if we could all hold a space for her while she does this. I’ve actually got goosebumps just talking about it because it is the final purge. And the other thing that’s becoming very evident is that we are moving away from linear time and back to circular time. I’m not sure if you understand those concepts.

ELISE:

No, I want to know more about all of this. I mean, I do feel like Gaia, I mean, obviously furious, right? It’s the thrashing, and if this is sustained, it’s not survivable, right? And so I want to know about that and then talk to us about linear versus circular time.

JANINE:

So linear time posits, and I think we’ve all been following linear time. Linear time posits that we’re going from A to B and B is the finite, and that’s the end of the story. And circular time says that, no, we move in cycles and embryo is formed, it’s then raised, it then dies, and then another embryo comes in. And so farmers today are the closest members, sedentary souls that are working on circular time. Now, circular time, because it’s working with the seasons and what’s going on. And what I’m loving about circular time is that seconds are not seconds, they are heartbeats.

Days are not days. They are sunrises. Weeks are not weeks. They are moon cycles. Quarters are not quarters. They are seasons. And I think we need to understand that there is a flow and things are cyclical. We’re not getting to this end point where the world’s going to blow up and that’s going to be the end and someone’s going to push the atomic bomb and that’s it. I don’t see that. I see us moving through a cyclical period where we are shedding a lot of karma. Gaia is shedding a lot of her karma and there’s always rebirth.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, it’s so beautiful and it goes to the idea of transitioning from something that’s solar, masculine, right? This up into the right dominance-based growth curves that now we’re living our lives by. Optimize every hour to some sort of outcome, which is death, friends. It’s inescapable versus I think something that women based on our bodies come to more easily, right? We cycle with the earth. Absolutely. We move, we feel it in our bodies, we create and we do the full cycle inherently, whereas men what seed. And I think that all of us understand this unfolding spiral when you look at your life and we’ve all had those moments, right? Sometimes you call them deja vu, but other times you’re like, wow, stuck in this story, trapped in this pattern, here I am again, right? Different storyline. How do I graduate? How do I get out of this or transform it?

JANINE:

And to take that further and going back to the personal cycles, some people would say to me, “Well, Janine, why do I have to go through a seven year every nine years? Why do I have to go and do the seventh year every nine years?” Well, because conditions have changed and you’ve reached another level of maturity. And what I find is the seventh year learnings for me, if I think of the last three decades, it’s all been around a similar theme, but I’ve had a different ... Posture towards it based on my maturation or based on my level. And I did think in my last seventh year, I even said to my therapist, I said, “I feel like I’ve gone a thousand steps back.” And she says to me, “No, Janine, you’ve actually gone forward. You just don’t realize it now.” But yes, psychically things are going to keep coming up, especially with our karma that we need to look at.

But then we look at it from different paradigms and we look at it from different circumstances and maturation dates, but it’s all one big cycle. And I really do feel that the future, and I am going to reference South Africa here, we’re going back to the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, and artisanal work will be prized over intellect. And we will want to go to flourishing local markets where there’s fresh produce, grass-fed meat, as opposed to going to a supermarket where it’s traveled 5,000 miles across a country in a cold store and a whatever. It just doesn’t make sense anymore. No. And I think more and more people are waking up and realizing how things are becoming very distasteful and don’t make sense anymore.

ELISE:

I think about this too as a writer and how powerful AI is just and how wild it is. And anyway, who am I? What am I if people can replicate how I write, which is based actually on ... I was just reading a newsletter today from Susan Kane and she was saying that because AI was trained on writers like C.S. Lewis who use this three part, three clause and lots of MDASH’s, this is how I write. This is how I learn. So the MDASH, I guess, is a signature of AI, the connected clauses and three part. Anyway, it was fascinating because I’m having my own confrontation with it. And then as I think it through, two, it’s okay. And I obviously have lived my own experience. What I do is synthesize or think across different categories of thinkers and pull things together in new and novel ways.

And I’ve exercised my brain through almost 50 years of doing this, which isn’t so replicable. And I think that people will come to me, not because I’m like, “Here’s a bunch of knowledge,” but to see the hand, right? To see the hand in it, what you’re saying, “This is how I’m putting these things together.”

JANINE:

And I just want to thank you for your curiosity. I mean, I think your curiosity knows no bounds and you’ve gone down many different streets and many different speakers and all of that, but it’s formulating a picture. And that’s what I’m saying is that we’re all talking about the same thing. We’re all in our own different ways, we’re all going back to the same thing. And I think humanity is soul searching. It’s coming back to itself. It gave its power away so freely to so many people in the middle ages to the church, in modern ages. There are other institutions of power that have held us in subjection. And I think that the inner self really needs to wake up now.

ELISE:

Yes. Yeah. And what makes me uniquely human and why am I incarnated in this body and what am I here to do? And what’s my specific plan and contribution, that karma to clear, whatever it is, the gifts to bear. Notice, I love this conversation in part because people who listen, you’re doing it where you’re like, “Itching might say this, “ or whatever, these common languages that are different language to describe the same phenomena, the same patterns, the same emergences. And it’s also wild. I think it’s undeniable that every part of this planet is going through its own events and yet simultaneously it’s the emergence of these strong men, right? The Putins, the Netanyahus, the Ayatollah, the Trumps. Yeah. Right? So it’s this collective pattern of-

JANINE:

Those are the 19s. Those are the ones who have got 1910 in soul positions, in ruling positions. Those are the 19s that are hanging on for dear life to an old system that is just as integrating before our eyes. And while it can be very fearful for people, I always want to just try and lift people into hope that there is a cycle to this. And this is not the end. This is so not the end. We might feel like we’re on the brink of another major world war, which I don’t personally feel that we are. I think it will be scuppered just in time, but we’ve been through these cycles before. We’ve been through these fears before, but when as a humanity do we eventually transmute it and understand that just for today, the sun is still shining, the grass is still glistening, the birds are still singing, and Gaia is still moving and we’re working.

Yeah.

ELISE:

Well, it’s interesting too, and again, I’m not a geopolitics expert, so let’s be real here, but watching- Yes,

Absolutely. ... what’s escalating in the Middle East and trying to understand the implications for oil and gas and data centers and what’s happening with energy and why this looming World War III is so threatening to the global economy. And then going back to this Gaia karmic debt, it’s also this forcing factor of look at our dependence on these non-renewable energy sources and the dependence of our economy when there are other options, when clean is so much cheaper. And so I also am like, is this it? Is this mechanism that’s erupting and exploding because this is not a supportable system and we know that, but this has just been holding us by the throat? I don’t know.

JANINE:

I wanted to reference something that Pam Gregory said. She spoke about the 1993, which I’d never heard of, but I was quite fortunate by it. It was called the 1993 Disclosure Project. Yeah. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard about it. Nope. It was founded by Dr. Steven Greer, and what he attempted to do was to disclose suppressed information on UFOs and non-conventional energy technologies. I am absolutely of the opinion that there is a non-conventional energy technology that is as clean as anything that will run our cars that has been suppressed. And this whole big drama about oil and all of this is just lip service for something that’s actually there. And Pam was talking about something about this, the disclosure project possibly coming to light in July this year.

ELISE:

Fascinating.

JANINE:

Pam, I hope I’m quoting you correctly, but- Watch your space. Those were my notes I made. And it’s interesting, I didn’t believe in extraterrestrial life, I think until about seven or eight years ago. I thought, what nonsense? There can’t be such a thing. But the more information that’s coming to light, the more I feel like we are being supported. It’s not a threat. We are being supported by universal wisdom, things that are outside of our planet that are trying to come in.

ELISE:

Yeah. I just had Avi Loeb on the podcast too, who’s an astrophysicist at Harvard. He runs a Gemini program and he’s been talking about these and I can’t remember the name of the latest one, these interstellar objects. And people are so quick to say, “This is a comet. It’s a naturally...” And they’re not behaving like comets. And his point is, I

JANINE:

Think

ELISE:

We can’t rule out that this is extraterrestrial technology that might be billions of years old. We don’t know what it is, but it does feel like this converging, and it feels like people are ready. I don’t want to say new interests, but the amount of people, and you know this because you read for people who I think everyone would be surprised to know, rely on these systems. And I’m always like, “You don’t understand how many high profile CEOs, tech people are just one phone call away from their person.” But it feels like in the collective that suddenly there is just, and it’s been going on for a minute, but that people are like, “Okay, this is weird. I concede there’s something happening beyond just our hands and the hands of some maniacal world leaders.” There’s something emerging, a destruction of something old for the emergence of something new.

And I think too, I don’t know if the Epstein files are shaking South Africa the way that they’re shaking so many countries in Europe and here, although we have yet to see sort of the perp walk that we desire, I’m confident in time it will happen, but it feels terrifying and I’m like, it’s exposed. It’s pulling the root system out of the ground that you always knew was there because you could sense it and then to say it feels terrifying and yet it’s exposed. It’s all coming up to be healed.

JANINE:

It’s terrifying. It’s devastating for the victims, but it’s so exciting at the same time that all these things are surfacing. It’s like it’s all coming out of the mud and it’s in plain sight now. And we need to know what’s going on in the world. And this disclosure report holds thousands and thousands of records of pilots, of commercial airliners that have made testimony of things that they’ve seen that are not explainable. And I just think there’s been so much suppression to keep us in some kind of subjugation that the more these things are revealed and the more it comes out, the better it is. South Africa is an interesting one because the exposure has been happening to us for the last 30 years already and the worms have come out the cans and we’ve seen it all. So it’s not a very new thing here.

It’s something that’s really taken place. And that was the other thing I wanted to mention to you. The chakras in our body, there are chakras all over the universe that correspond to the chakras in our body. In Africa, Egypt is the throat chakra, which is voice, and the whole of South Africa is the solar pexus chakra, which turns out all the racial hatred and tension for the entire universe. So our country was involved in doing that job for the universe for many, many years. And when everybody spoke about 2012, when there was going to be this awakening or the world was going to end and all of that, what was actually happening is that the portals started turning and opening and that the karma has gone back to where it came from. We are no longer doing this for the world here. Things are peaceful here.

People generally are getting on. There’s still a lot of inequality, financial inequality in the country. There’s still instability, but the stories of white monopoly capital and these things that were thrown around so flagrantly from about 2010 to 2019, it stopped and it’s kind of gone back to the monarchy. It’s gone back to the US, it’s gone back to the UK. It’s in so many different format. And this is also an interesting phenomenon that’s happening at the moment is that these portals are opening and they’re doing different things in the world in exposing and in cleaning out the debris from under us.

ELISE:

Yeah. That’s beautiful. I write about South Africa a bit in my next book and in the context of the system called Spiral Dynamics, because it was deployed there and used by DeClerk and Mandela during that transition, which obviously they won a Nobel Peace Prize for that. And Mandela in particular is like one of the greatest spiral wizards who’s walked the planet, but that transition avoiding a civil war, I mean, it’s an incredible achievement that I think is also a harbinger of what transitions to new models can look like at that highest path versus the lowest path, right? That seems to be our preferred option. Yeah.

JANINE:

Absolutely. And what I just want to say to people is that I honestly feel the fear and I say to them, “Just dip into the news just for a second just to see what’s going on and then pull out because it’s too much. It’s just actually too much for all of us.” We’ve all got very dysregulated nervous systems at the moment. It’s too much information. Obviously, we need to be concerned for our brothers and sisters across the planet and all of that, but we also need to be able to transcend the fear and rise up into our individuality and into our purpose as a humanity and where we’re going.

ELISE:

Yeah. And there’s this, I think in the context of what you were describing earlier with this sort of explosion of farmer’s markets and handcrafted artisanal goods and

JANINE:

It’s

ELISE:

This global consciousness and awareness then regrounded into the garden that we can tend and reach into this local action. We’re seeing a lot of beautiful moments of that here in the US and in Minnesota and so on and so forth. You take care of your neighbors, you take care of your land, you take care of your family, you take care of your community, and that might be the edge of what you can reach, but that’s enough. And that amplified across many of us is quite powerful.

JANINE:

I’m so pleased it’s happening there because it’s happening in many areas and we’re moving towards community led governance. That’s the future. As you say, we can’t be prescriptive, but in an ideal world, we’re going to need to start siloing and coming together as communities to manage our areas. And I’ve noticed here in South Africa, there are no services. So local communities are getting together and the one guy fixes the potholes and the other guy switches on the street lamp because no one else is doing it. So they’re formulating little communities to look after and to mow the lawn on their little islands and all of that. It’s because they’re proud of their city. And if the government’s not going to do it, then silos are starting to do it. And I think that’s one of the biggest, I’m probably going to get crucified with saying this, but no government is coming to save its country or it’s people.

ELISE:

No.

JANINE:

And the sooner people realize that your government is not coming to save you, the sooner you will start galvanizing in smaller communities and start looking at community led governments. Yeah.

ELISE:

Well, I think we’ve had this childlike dependence, which is completely understandable and I’m grateful for the shared services that we have through taxpayer dollars here in the US. And yet we also recognize how all of those things often fall so short. And yeah, being in LA, being in a fire community, it hasn’t happened to the extent that I had hoped, but what was seemed clear was, guys, no one’s checking our brush clearance. This has to be a community response and we need to pull resources and hire firefighters to come and clear. And this is on us. So I hope, I mean, in a small way that this-

JANINE:

And to set up clothing for displaced people and all of that, I mean, when I watch things like that, my heart is full. I mean, to see that, and that’s humanity, that’s humanity coming forward and doing its thing and it’s glorious in all its-

ELISE:

Yeah. And there’s such a desire, such a desperation really to serve and show up. And I think we all want that so badly to feel the impact of our own personal power in keeping each other safe and cared for and loved. And all right, if that’s what’s coming, I’m here for it.

JANINE:

We’ve just got to go through the final purge. I think we’re, as I say, it’s summiting, we couldn’t see what was on the other side of this mountain and now we’re coming down the other side and we’re starting to see what a new day could actually look like. And this is exciting is that, and I’m finding people are waking up now very quickly. COVID was supposed to do that, but unfortunately COVID finished and we all went back to our selfish ways and we were driving around hooting with road rage and everything. So then we had to have a whole level of another stuff happen in order for us to transmute and to try and to find the kindness and to find the humanity again.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, 100%.

JANINE:

And to support Gaia in her healing.

ELISE:

Yes. And it’s interesting, I feel like COVID, we were so quick to be like, “We don’t want to talk about COVID anymore. And we’re in the post COVID period and stop.” And then I’ve had so many conversations just this week with people who are like COVID and I think it’s generated a lot of mass psychosis, et cetera. And now it’s time we got to go and understand what happened to us.

JANINE:

And I was saying to my husband the other day, I said, “Prior to COVID, I remember when we used to have friends round, there was so much gait here, there was so much happiness. And yes, we got a little bit drunk and whatever, but we were happy.” And I find now post COVID, we’ll have a lunch, but I can sense it. There’s like an iron curtain that kind of hangs over it. So you don’t fully have fun and you don’t fully, because it’s almost like, what if tomorrow we’re going to lockdown or ... And I’m not saying that that’s the thought process. I’m just saying that I feel that our joy has been muted so badly by the PTSD of COVID, that we don’t enjoy our interactions with others and we don’t party the way we used to party. And I don’t think it’s just because I’m getting old.

I think I enjoy a good party, but it just doesn’t feel appropriate at the moment. And I’m hoping for that day when it does feel appropriate, when we can return to the 1970s Woodstock where it’s free love and it’s not the horrible Woodstock that happened thereafter, but the beautiful Woodstock where people just enjoy themselves.

ELISE:

Yeah. I think that we’re in a period of protracted grief and mourning and we don’t know what to do with it, but that feels bad to feel good and yeah, we have to manage that because we got to find our joy, maintain our joy.

JANINE:

Absolutely. Absolutely. And so just to sort of close this, I just want to say that the 2000s is a wonderful era that we’ve just entered into. It’s full of divine intervention. Two is that everyone says they see 11, 11s. One and one is two. It’s the angelic realm. We have moved into a beautiful, beautiful ... We’ve moved from a very one dimensional world into a multidimensional, colorful world, but we haven’t grasped a hold of it yet. But what it promises and what it could be is just so lovely compared to where we’ve come from. And I can’t wait to see our children’s leadership and to see what they do with this, because they were born of the century. They’re the ones that have got the twos in their charts by virtue of the fact that they were born in the 2000s. And that’s

ELISE:

My hope. I love that. All right. This was so fun. I’m so glad we finally managed to make this happen. Thank you. And I’m going to hit you up soon. I got to see what’s going on. I need a tuneup.

JANINE:

Well, and I know you’ve said it publicly now, so I know I can say it publicly, is that you are no longer a lazy layabout that you were in your past lifetime. You are moving in the world and doing your karma, and that for me is the most exciting thing is to see karma in motion. You are not lazy in this lifetime. So thank God for that. And thank God you took up the mandate and the call and that you’re busy in your life doing wonderful things.

ELISE:

Thank you, Janine. It’s too funny when you said that. I almost fell out of my chair back in the day. So funny. That’s true. My karma, what to overcome in this lifetime was that I was a lazy, indolent, slothful. Yeah, it was just a layabout guys. And so when she told me my karma, laughed out loud, it was a moment as I was explaining to her sort of my structure and my life. And I’d learned about her. I’d heard about her for years from friends, and it took me a minute to get on her dance card, and it took us even longer to set up this recording. I’m so glad we did because I find her just wise and soulful and the context in which you learn your individual year against the broader unfolding is a really good map. Again, it’s not about being told what will happen.

It’s about here’s what the energies that are available to you, here’s what’s possible, here’s how to harness those energies to the greatest benefit of your design and your work’s design. But yeah, it’s not a sit back session. It’s like a working strategy session to understand what’s emerging and how to move through it. All right, friends. That was fun. I will see you next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you.

It’s not too late to sign up for my retreat with next month at Omega: We’ll be gathering from May 25-29 in upstate New York to go deep on identity death, purpose birthing, and what wants to come through us (in the best way, I promise). Come join us!

When people talk about gratitude practices, I find myself gritting and grinding my teeth. There’s something about being told to say THANK YOU that brings me back to my childhood—I’ve never been someone who enjoys being told what to do. While I totally get that we need to teach our kids manners, there’s something shaming about enforcing thankfulness. After all, gratitude feels best—on the receiving end, at least—when it’s not commanded or from obligation, but is real, felt, and genuinely expressed. (Internally, performing a script doesn’t feel particularly good either.)

But when gratitude is real, or literally heartfelt, we know from study after study that it’s one of the most powerful practices in our toolkit. Sharing it with people in your life—like writing that letter to your second grade teacher, sending a quick text to a friend to tell them how much they mean to you, sending a note after a dinner party, trading jokes and appreciation with your morning barista—meaningfully impact not only your day, but can echo out like a skipped stone. Feelings are contagious—and appreciation is one that is worth spreading.

But more than being something that feels good, or brightens days, or makes you feel seen, gratitude is an attitude. Gratitude is how you ground and orient yourself not only to your life, but to the universe as a whole. How do you accept, with thanks, whatever comes your way? Do you hold every experience—whether it’s what you would choose, or its absolute opposite—as a gift? Not to be a Pollyanna, or toxically positive, but more like Job: God gives, God takes. And regardless, thank you.

I’ve been thinking about gratitude—and that phrase from Job, in particular—because I spent the weekend buried in Rachel Goldberg Polin’s book, When We See You Again. It’s as devastating and beautiful as you would expect, and it’s also right-sizing. (I can’t talk about the book until it publishes (April 21), but please support Hersh’s family and pre-order a copy.) It asks of the biggest questions in life: Can one stay in relationship with gratitude despite getting alternately pummeled and blessed by life?

That’s a big and hard question and I think it’s overwhelming to contemplate on the daily. And it can feel difficult to mount a practice that doesn’t feel treacly and maybe a little lame in the vastness of this request. And so here is a small shift, one that I learned from a Carissa Schumacher transmission last year, that reminds me of what I value, and reorients me into a place of gratitude. Here we go: I swap I have to, for I get to. It’s that simple. I repeat this to myself on the mat during early morning workout sessions (hello WLDCAT) while doing an interminable number of leg lifts, or more than 60 seconds of a plank (or to be honest, 20). I repeat this to myself when I’m battling rush hour traffic to deliver one of my kids to school. I repeat this as I’m getting on the phone to have a hard conversation. I repeat this every time I’m feeling overwhelmed by podcast prep or book notes or just life being life. I get to. It’s an honor, even when it hurts.

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