Elise Loehnen: What We’re After (Solo Episode)

In today’s episode—my first ever solo attempt—I explain how my spirituality emerged out of a largely secular, nature-based childhood, how I learned to work with the forces of the universe, and what I think we’re after. (Hint: Wholeness.)

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On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good (coming 5/23)

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TRANSCRIPT

(Edited slightly for clarity.)

ELISE LOEHNEN: Hi friends. This episode is slightly different. It's a solo episode. I have never attempted anything like this before. In fact, I have deep ambivalence about it, and I only recently learned the etymology of ambivalence, which doesn't mean neutrality, which is what I had always thought, but it means having an equal attraction and repellent to something. And so I find myself here talking to you all and it's interesting, growing up the way that I did, I'm not a performer. I was never really a stage seeker or someone who imagined my life talking to other people. And in a way, I think podcast is my format and books obviously, because I get to be a voice whispering in people's ears and in my cozy hooded sweatshirt hiding.

But I think as I've talked about this in the past, that this is something that a lot of people can relate to, which is the difference between interior work or work that’s not really seen and then the fear that so many of us, particularly women have about bringing ourselves out into the world in a more visible way. This, of course, dovetails closely with the book that I've written, specifically the chapter about pride, which is really about how scary it can be to be seen, and obviously we have so many cultural examples, again, particularly for women. And for those who don't know, my book is called On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good. It's coming on May 23rd from Dial Press, Penguin Random House, and I have ghost written 12 books now. Many, many bestsellers across so many different categories. It's actually funny in summation because you would look at the books that I've ghost written or co-written and have no conception of who I am as a person. And I like that. That's the idea of ghost writing, really. It's an egoless project. You put yourself completely aside and your job really is to structure the thoughts and ideas of other people and to bring them into the world and ghost writing I love, and I will probably continue to do it throughout my career because it's really interesting to access other people's audiences and platforms, surely, but also their minds. And it's not always, nor does it necessarily need to be a Venn diagram. I don't always see the world in exactly the same way.

And I will add, this pastime, which I did as a secondary job while I had a full-time career, was in some ways a way for me to be in touch with that creative impulse in me without owning it or taking credit for it, or being a visible presentation of it in the world. And I'm 43 now. I'm at the age where I'm like, am I 43? Am I 42 or 44? I, I think I'm 43. I'm pretty sure. And it's taken me the first half of my life, well, hopefully what is the first half of my life? I hope I'm still here for several decades to feel even a modicum of comfort in standing aside or standing next to my work or standing with my work. And it took me a long time to get there. And that's not a path that I would necessarily recommend for everyone. I think part of the impulse of my book is to speed this along for women or to make conscious of the ways that we naturally suppress ourselves. And there are good reasons. I wanna be clear, that we do this. There are lots of good cultural reasons, the way that women are policed and shot out of the sky being one of them.

And this is what the chapter on Pride is specifically about, and then it obviously starts crashing into all of the other sins, which are in case you need a reminder, sloth, envy, pride, greed, gluttony, lust, anger. And I also include in the book a chapter about sadness, which was on the original list, but then dropped for unknown reasons. And I have, I have my theories about why, and we'll talk about more down the road. But when I think about my life leading up to this point and the way it's interesting, and this is why I also love podcasts and I'm so grateful that I've had the career that I've had where I've been able to follow my curiosity and follow my intuition. I was going to say instinct, but I think it's more of an intuition about what people need or what they're interested in or where we're going and how to provide context for that. Yes, I'm a very verbal thinker, but I'm also a systems thinker, I think. In talking to Temple Grandin, that's how I would assign myself.

I like to understand the whole picture and the full context because I think it gives shape or a grounding to our own individual experiences as well as where we are as a collective. And so early on, and it's funny, I mean I started my career at Conde Nast as a magazine editor, I worked at Lucky Magazine, rest in peace, which was a magazine about shopping. And it's funny because in some ways like that level of materialism is pretty far from where I find myself today. But I really, I learned so much working there and so much from the brilliant editor-in-chief, Kim France, who's has an incredible mind and she's an amazing writer. She was a music journalist and she really drilled into all of us several ideas. One, you have to figure out what makes it relevant and stop throat clearing and get to the point like what's the revelatory element of this handbag amongst a sea of handbags? What is it? And I know that sounds silly, but it was such a helpful tool because throughout my career I think it taught me how to really dig for the the jewel and to find it and elevate it and make it the point.

And then also, The whole premise of Lucky, which was quite revolutionary at the time, was to make a magazine for ourselves and our friends with the idea that friends of friends would also then like whatever it was that we were making. And Lucky Magazine at the time was like the most successful launch ever, even though everyone thought it was a magalogue, or they were quite disdainful about it, but readers loved it because they really found themselves in those pages. And it was totally different, it was an industry defining magazine. It was a blog, in some ways, before blogs. And so Kim taught me about the importance of starting with yourself and that you should never create content or try to put a message out in the world thinking about “Oh, her name is Emily and she lives in Atlanta, and she has 2.2 children” and that's typically how content was made or magazines were made. And Kim really defied that and started with where we were and I'm so grateful for that lesson. Not that it wasn't my natural instinct, but she really gave us permission to start there. And that's how I've led my career, if it's resonant for me, I'm thinking it's probably resonant for other people. If it's something that seems to be present amongst the women I know, then I'm guessing it's present amongst the women that they also know.

That's the other side of my ambivalence about doing a solo podcast. There's enough reassurance that many of us are sort of on the same wavelength or hitting the same vibrational tones, that I've built confidence in my career to follow that intuition and to keep pushing and going, and that there are a lot of people who are with me following that same instinct, and I just wanna talk about just briefly, what that's in contrast to, because we see this in our media world and how fractured it is because there's sort of two strains, there are more, but the way that I think about it is that you can either tap into the collective unconscious and move the conversation in that direction, or you can tap into an idea or theology about what's relevant. I was working on a roundup of books about narcissism for Oprah Daily, and I've been reading a lot of books about narcissism and the market right now is glutted with sort of self-published SEO driven narcissism book. So that's one example. It's like there's sort of a schism in what we're, and no offense to anyone who self-publishers, but these are certainly, they're written against the metadata they're written to fulfill a need, but more to take advantage of an opportunity, and again, not necessarily assigning judgment to that, but that's in my mind, the two ways that people do content. You're either feeding something that's showing up in the data or you are trying to stride in fresh lawns. And I try, of course, for the former, not because I care about what's next or new. It's not about hitting trends, it's about understanding or staying connected to that knowing or intuition about what people need and who might have that intelligence, knowledge, wisdom to share.

What I think is also follows the track of my life is, for anyone who's roughly my age, we've probably been through some things, some transitions, right? Some hard things in our lives, in a way that sometimes when I do an audit, you know, of the past decade and I have it pretty good, let's be clear, but when I do an audit, I'm like, wow. A lot of things have happened, and I'm sure many people who are listening can relate to this as in some ways, some positive, some negative, but nothing is ever binary like that. I think that's part of a midlife understanding, is that there's nuance to every situation. The things that you're supposed to feel incredibly happy about can feel like a bag of rocks sometimes, and to quote that Mary Oliver poem, “sometimes there's a great gift in a box of darkness” and part of life I think is understanding that emotional wave and learning how to ride it, to not only ride it, because I think so much of us are looking for more than managing at this point. We're looking for growth, another word that culturally has lots of baggage, but we're looking to get bigger, I guess, to get bigger, to feel, in some ways, more stable. And for me, it's been leaning on my curiosity as that central or core trait and when things happen that are in opposition to my desire to control everything that happens because I love certainty and fixity as much as everyone else, that has been my antidote is to stay curious.

I think it's funny, I have a very open mind, not so open that my brains are gonna fall out, to quote my friend Jennifer Walsh. But my mantra is, I don't know, and particularly in recent years after my sense of certainty has really been derailed again and again and again, to the point where I recognize the wisdom of uncertainty and the stance of curiosity of exploration rather than expectation to quote Carissa Schumacher. I think that that curiosity is, you know, my primary form of inspiration and I made a video about this recently, and this is something that Carissa has talked about. I don't believe we talked about it in our recent episode, but inspiration has two components, it has its accelerator, or this is the way I think about it, an accelerator and a break.

And intuition has inspiration, which is those moments when we're feel like we're really tapping into something or an ideas forming in us, gestating us that needs to come out, it might be an insight or piece of information about a situation, a place, a thing, a gut feeling, however you wanna conceive of intuition, a nod from God, a push, et cetera. Everyone has their own concept, I think, for understanding it. And then the break is discernment. And clearly we have a little bit of a discernment problem or underdeveloped discernment, culturally, and discernment is really important. Not only in terms of deciding what generally feels like it's more full of light than full of darkness, but also what feels right specifically for you.

And I think a lot of us have never learned how to run things through our bodies. Is that a yes for me? Is that a no for me? And to recognize too, when we're giving away our sovereignty to teachers, gurus, religious leaders, whomever it may be, to say again, like I'd say the stance for me at least, is open-minded curiosity, running my discernment, and making sure that my foot is on that pedal as well. Because, and this is a whole other topic, and maybe if this solo episode does well, I'll do a whole nother one on power. But really understanding, particularly in the context of teachers or information, like what is this? What energy is this also carrying? And is this safe and is this something that I want in my life before I let it in?

So if you guys haven't noticed, and if you listen to this podcast, this is all familiar language to you. But the other question I get all the time, particularly in the context of my book, On Our Best Behavior, is are you religious? And I'm part of that quite significant, I think it's maybe the largest segment of the population, I consider myself spiritual, not religious. I'm not affiliated with any belief system. And it's interesting too, how hard it is, even though it's so abundantly clear and it's present in everything that I do, and I'll talk a little bit more about what I even mean by spirit or what that means to me because I grew up in a pretty intellectual family, a materialist science doctor, nurse duo. My mother is a lapsed Catholic. She wouldn't even call herself lapsed, she would call herself recovering. She has a lot of fear about organized religion. She's probably would classify herself as almost intolerant about it. And there was a lot of fear when I was a child that somehow I would become born again, or, you know, that, that somehow I would fall into the grips of organized religion. This was like a palpable fear that my mother had based on some pretty traumatic things from her childhood.

And my dad is Jewish, although he's not observant. He grew up in South Africa by way of Germany, his father's German, his mother's Polish. They moved to South Africa in the thirties. And my father, it's interesting, he's a very intuitive doctor. He's retired now, but he didn't pass on a conception of God but wasn't stridently opposed to anyone's belief system either. And so I grew up going to some Jewish services in a Methodist church and I really loved the stories, but it was very intellectual for me. It wasn't a felt experience. I was like God seems kind of mean and wrathful and very judgmental and scary, and I didn't necessarily feel any connection whatsoever. However, I grew up in Montana, I had horses, and I felt a profound connection to nature and horses and animals. I felt like I could actually speak to horses very good, with horses or animals. And I had two revelations when I was a child. One, and this was a constant, and it sounds a like a very odd admission, but as a child I always knew I had this feeling of, ugh, this again? And I had a feeling of impatience about my childhood and irritation that I was back, and it's not that I necessarily understood a concept of having past lives. But this feeling that I had of like, I cannot believe I'm doing this again. And I just need to like get to the work. I need to get to the work, followed me throughout my childhood.

And I didn't really know what that meant. I just had that sensation throughout my life of, ugh, I can't believe I have to do this again. And then the other thing that I learned, it took me a minute, it took me until my twenties. But I was playing with these sort of the forces of the universe and I started to play with momentum. And it sounds quite obvious obviously, but it takes us a while because I think many of us grew up thinking, oh, you just, you work hard and you're seen and then you're elevated and people pick you for these things. And I didn't understand until maybe my late teens, early twenties that know the universe conspires with you. It doesn't select you, you're not special, but it conspires with you when you put yourself in motion. And so I started playing with that energy of moving into a level of activity or engagement. I would call it the opposite of passivity. I had to move myself out of what I would now classify as thinking again along certain lines of like, you do these things and then certain things happen to know actually there's like a level of, now I would call it spiritual engagement with the universe, but where this is an inner play, and it's not about being picked, it's not about being special, it's not about being the one, it's about moving into what's available for you, building momentum on that, and then paying attention and walking through doors as they open, and also creating, starting to develop that discernment. Is this a yes for me? Is this a no for me?

And I also did exceptionally well, I sort of peaked as a child in many ways. Like I was a nationally ranked freestyle skier, which is moguls. Like I was, I think first in the country when I was a kid, which sounds more grand than it was. But I was a very good skier. I was really advanced in math, I just did really well academically, which won't surprise you because I'm kind of a dork and I grew up in the country reading and teaching myself how to type really fast and all of these like things that I don't see my children doing. I'll just put it like that. I went to boarding school. I went to Yale. Et cetera. So I was a high achieving child and then it started to get hard and I wasn't getting things as easily as I had when I was a child. And that's when I really started, started to understand the universe and that what is not for you, it's not for you.

You can be sad, but acceptance is better. Doesn't mean that you have to like it. But there were certain jobs I didn't get, that at the time were devastating. And then I only ended up getting something that made far more sense, but might be significantly less prestigious, for example. And that's my first conception. Those early days were the first time that I really understood that I was working with something, I was working with some sort of democratic universal energy. This was not about me. This was about an efficiency, I almost wanna say of like, you can make this really more difficult through rumination and clinging and fighting, or you can start to get a little bit more flexible in the way that you engage with life and you not on the path of lease resistance, but you go where there's flow, you go, you move with life, and, you swim, but you let it provide direction in a way that will only make sense to you. And as I mentioned, I started at a magazine about shopping. I worked for Timeout in New York, which was an incredibly fun job. And something in retrospect that I needed because it taught me how to write incredibly fast. I was editing 14 pages a week, which when you move from a monthly magazine and you're editing four a month, it's a very different experience. With the internet at all is very different now, obviously. I worked at a very un-glamoreou internet company for a while, an incredible learning experience, but when I think about all of them, at the time I was like, I don't know if this makes sense, but this is where I'm feeling like I need to go and I'm moving into this phase. And then after, I was like, wow. That was an incredibly important lesson for me.

Typically, all really positive lessons, but like every time I could recognize in retrospect, oh, I'm being outfitted with a new school skillset, or I'm learning about a different facet of the world. That is incredibly useful and I would never have gotten this education any other way. And so, again, this goes to sort of my spiritual understanding, which only came to develop what you would consider sort of a more faith or religious aspect. Really, honestly, in the last six years, and I write about this in my book, so I won't go into it in too much detail. But my best friend died six years ago. He was my brother's husband, Peter, and I met him when I was a junior in high school. And he was one of my soulmates, certainly, and I'm not alone and feeling that way about Peter. He was a very special person, and I'm not a particularly sentimental person either, just for what it's worth.

And Peter died and really for the first time, it's funny, in my previous job, I had, you know, just sort of party trick played around, I'd spoken to some intuitives and I didn't own any tarot decks. Like I just wasn't who you might perceive me to be today. I was interested and curious, but there was no pressing need for me to feel like I needed to understand the darker parts of life things. I just wasn't there. And when Peter died, I met Laura Lynn Jackson. I had a number of experiences through people like that, but also on my own, where I really, was like, wow, there is something, the seen world is becoming more and more increasingly clear to me. I'm obviously very interested in culture and all of that programming, why we are how we are, and that was my first instance though, of really wanting to understand the unseen and how something I had ideas about, death or life, that needed to be overturned, but it just completely blew open. I had no fixed beliefs, but it completely blew open my mind in terms of, wait, hold on, if I'm still feeling Peter's presence, if he's still available to me in some way, what does that mean? What does that mean in the context of our experience here on Earth? What are we doing here? Where do we go? What I came to understand to be Earth School where we are evolving, learning, growing, and then we come back and we do it again.

And that's when this experience that I had as a child, I was like that's why I always had that sensation of like, why am I back? Why am I back? I thought I was done. And so it really started with Laura, this interest and consciousness, this wanting to understand the different dimensions of energy and the tuning in of different frequencies. And so she gave me an incredible gift in that moment and then simultaneously as I started to look for signs and just open myself up more to communication from the universe, which a shift, again, I knew I was working with the universe, but it was more of an internalized experience. And so with this next evolution, I was turning myself out a little bit more, tuning in a little bit more but even the way that I came to Laura was like a weird nudge from the universe by way of an email that showed up in my inbox flagged. I'm just giving you an example of like a technical or like a physical manifestation of a universal moment of being like, pay attention to this.

And similarly, in my previous job, I used to, and I still do, I guess, almost every galley press copy of any book that's sort of remotely part of my wheelhouse. And there was a book on my desk and I looked at it and I was like, that is not for me. And then I couldn't put it on the giveaway pile. I just couldn't put it on the giveaway pile. And I kept looking at it and I picked it up. It had been blurbed by Glennon Doyle. This is probably before Untamed. I hadn't read Glennon at that point, but I was like, oh, this is sort of interesting. And I just picked it up. I just opened it and it was Mary Magdalene Revealed. It was by Megan Waterson, and it was a dramatic retelling of the story of Mary. It's a part memoir, and Megan is a Harvard Divinity School student, theologian, feminist, and who's become a really dear friend. And essentially the book is about her own pathway through Christianity and the recognition that Mary Magdalene, you know, represents this missing element. The Gospel of Mary Magdalene is one of the gnostic gospels. So in the fourth century, when the New Testament was canonized by the powers that be in Rome, a bunch of gospels, really beautiful gospels, were kicked out and essentially ordered to be destroyed. But the belief is that various monks preserved copies of these gospels and buried them. And it's only in recent centuries, really in the last century that these gnostic gospels have been discovered. And there are, I believe two partial copies of the Gospel of Mary that have been recovered.

The same pages, I think, are missing from both, which is really interesting. And Elaine Pagels, who's at Princeton, wrote The Gnostic Gospels, in I think 1979. It was a bestseller. It's also a brilliant book, and this was like, I don't, for some reason this cracked open something in my mind and I recognized like, oh, religion. Christianity, these systems of belief. And obviously now I've gone quite deep, not, I'm not a theologian at all and I'm not particularly interested in the gospels. We'll get to that. But, I recognized that, oh, religion is something that humans have made and there's this original text, these original wisdoms, that are still sort of floating in the ether, and the way that it's been passed down to us is a very different version than how it was potentially intended, or what the original impulse was, which is just interesting to me.

This is the way that society and faith have converged and then crafted all of these containers that we've taken wholesale. Right? And I bring up Mary Magdalene because you know what she talks about in her gospel, and for anyone who doesn't know, it's worth reading Megan's book or Cynthia Bourgeaul on Mary Magdalene, it's really historically actually fascinating because what The Gospel of Mary is talking about, and a lot of this is in my book as as a cultural container, but what she's talking about is that God is an inner experience and her gospel is Jesus talking to her post resurrection, explaining essentially the path back to oneself. And he talks about, you know, do not look to any law giver, there is no such thing as sin. A lot of really incredible statements. And the thesis of this gospel is everything that you have is inside. This is an internal experience. And don't do anything that's adulterous to your nature essentially. And by that he meant that's sort of in disobeyance to who you to really are. It's your job to figure out who you really are. That's how I interpret this gospel, which is beautiful and completely different than I think how religion has been passed down to many of us. And again, I think because I didn't grow up in any tradition, I have a slightly different perspective.

The only rule I'm breaking in my family is by being interested in all of this, although my brother was also a comparative religion major, so there's that. But I'm not criticizing anything that's been sacred to me or my family. I'm just curious about what I perceive to be actually a cultural institution. And the reason that I say that I think it's a cultural institution is 1) I think that religion is so inherent to who we are as a people and as a world that it is a cultural institution. It's it's part of us, whether we subscribe to it or not. It is in our language, it's in our belief systems. And again, this is beyond conscious awareness. So 1), it's cultural, but I also in my own evolution of faith, as I've followed and read a lot of wisdom teachers and various who are essentially all saying the same thing, whether it's L.V.L. who's a Sufi, mystic, or Carissa who channels Yeshua, and yes, that's Jesus or Christ Consciousness, or Cynthia Bourgeault, who's an incredible Episcopalian priest or father Richard Roar, is that the call right now, particularly in this strange moment in time, is to recognize that there is some sort of animating impulse, God, the universe, nature, Allah, whatever you wanna call it, that it's not something that can be necessarily compartmentalized. God is in everything. God is in all of us, and there's no sort of like penance. There's no, oh, you go to church or temple and then here's your ordinary everyday life. What all of these people are saying is essentially, this is who we are. It's like an undeniable reality. It's not a question of like what you believe in or how adherent you are to your faith. This is just, there's a divinity baked into all of us and, the and also that there are all these false binaries or these systems set up as oppositional.

I've been listening to a lot of physicists on Krista Tippett's podcast, On Being, like Carlo Ravelli. And they might all say that they're atheists, but what we're learning about the universe and maps is essentially an explanation of some of these…they're saying the same thing as the mystics, I guess is what I wanna say. There are these mystical laws and rules that you'll find in all of these sacred ancient texts that we are now finding the maps to articulate. Our scientific container is expanding to understand you can put quantum physics in this category, et cetera, and we're all just using different language to describe what's happening in the world. But what's happening in the world is what's happening in the world, I guess is what I wanna say. And my path has really been to understand how those unseen forces, whatever you wanna call them, interact and how, what they're asking of us and how do we move them? How do we live them and how do we co-create with them and how do we bring them down and into into our lives? And I know that sounds kind of heady, but. I have a feeling that many of you will know exactly what I'm talking about. So it's not so much for me. My faith, my spirituality isn't so much like this is my belief system. It is more a question of having faith that there are forces, powers, energies, beyond the seen world that are benevolent, loving attempting to sort of help us on our higher path to move the collective along. And there are also denser, more energetic forces at play, too.

I don't know about evil and I don't believe in places like heaven and hell. But there are lots of forces in the universe, I guess is what I would say. And I think that the benevolent, loving, light-filled ones are the more powerful ones. I wanna just read you guys a quote by Allen Watts, which I think is the best summation of the difference between belief and faith, he wrote in The Wisdom of Insecurity, “whether one believes in God or believes in atheism, 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 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, let's go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.”

So I think that's so stunning and that's why I think of myself as a person of faith and why my mantra is, I don't know. Because to presume to know, to presume that I can order the universe or understand all of the powers at play, or that I understand or know or can predict with absolute accuracy, everything that's going to happen or that we live in some sort of mechanic, materialistic world, is insane. And for me there is far greater comfort in understanding that sometimes staying in that place of curiosity, openness, and exploration, rather than expectation is the safe place to be. And also, as mentioned, having had hard things happen in my life, sometimes things that we would never choose are the things that needed to be needed to happen and that these things happen for us, even though in that cafeteria line, they're not the entree we would've ever picked. And again, that's a nuanced idea. I'm not suggesting that anyone, that someone near to you dying is happening for you. But to go to that Mary Oliver quote, “there can be a gift in that box full of darkness.”

But I recognize why that level of order and certainty is very reassuring, as is this idea that you do a certain amount of things and you end up getting your reward, your just reward at the. But as we all know, that is not life. Life is not a simple math problem. It's not algebra. It's far, far more complex. And I think staying because we don't need any more nihilists, right? But staying in that place of unreserved opening to life and to letting it unfold and recognizing that today is not a good judgment on the value of today, but that it's really only in retrospect that we can look back and understand why we took the path we did and the wisdom inherent in that, and the detours and the cul-de-sacs. Very few of us hit it out of the park. That's the space that I try to occupy. And when things don't happen that I want to happen, I, instead of going immediately into victimhood or fear or anxiety, I just try to go back to this like, that's interesting. I guess that wasn't for me. Maybe something better, maybe something different. I'm just gonna say in a place of, of faith, and it's not Pollyanna-ish either. It's just. A, this is beyond me. And holding on and trying to be certain is only going to cause me a lot of pain as I come to understand the limits of what I can control, which isn't honestly very much.

I can't even make my kids eat a full breakfast. Let's be honest here. I'll close just by saying that one of the other things that I've been writing about a lot and thinking about a lot is this idea of spirituality versus religion. And I've heard a lot of people answer that question and they'll say something along, you know, religion is a set of beliefs. Spirituality is a practice of faith and I think about it as religion is sort of what we do and spirituality is what it is to be, and there are a lot of these false binaries that I think we're being asked to confront currently. Like the binary of masculine and feminine, which a big, that energy is a big part of my book, On Our Best Behavior, as well.

We're asked to consider that there's no binary between shadow and light. It's a whole other topic that I would love to talk to you guys about, that one of the ones that I'm playing with right now is it doesn't exactly fit, but it does in some ways is this idea of wellness and wholeness and how I think culturally and, and there's a lot of really wonderful parts of this move towards wellness, I do not wanna devalue or criticize that at all. But in this move towards wellness, it's almost becoming religion. Whereas I think we're being asked, or at least I feel called to stay in this place of seeking wholeness, which to me is the path within that construct that's focused on being and focused on self, self-acceptance and focused on recovering parts of myself from shadow and feelings that there's not more for me to do, now is the time where I am trying to learn how to be. That's another big nut to crack, but something that I'm really interested in particularly because, well, that's my whole career and also in the space that I still occupy. And it goes back to this idea of discernment too because, and this tendency that we have, and it goes back to Mary Magdalene and what she's preaching, which is, it's so much easier, and it certainly goes back to the whole theme of my book, which is that in that quest for certainty in that desire to sort of do the right thing or get to the end or, be good, we want some sort of exterior authority, some system of belief to confirm for us that we're following all the steps and checking everything off the to-do list. And that's a fallacy, certainly.

I just feel like continually, we need to remind ourself that we need to be in this space of spirituality, of Mary Magdalene, of the work of wholeness. No one can do that for us. No one, and no one can tell us exactly what that looks like for us or what needs to be done to achieve that.It is deeply personal, internal work. And yes, I think we all have our own individual faith, our own individual sense of God, power, energy, universe. And that's great. I think that's the point. I think it's like all of these things are internal processes that, yes, there's ease and when they become sort of cultural ideals, there's some value to that, certainly. But then we have to remember like it's never out there that we're gonna find the answers that we need. It is only in here and we have to sort of deprogram or de-train ourselves from thinking from that type of thinking: If I just do all of these things, I'll be, well, if I d just do all of these things, I'll be good. If I just do all of these things, I'll certainly go to heaven or my life will work out exactly as planned and instead move to that internal co-creative place where we learn to both co-create with the world and God, I'll use that word and come to understand and collect all parts of ourselves.

I guess, too, what I'm ultimately saying is that there's no binary of faith or belief either. There's really no way to do this right. And I think you could say like the most atheistic science scientist, many of these incredible physicists are still captivated by the same wander and awe and probably the same, I don't know, mantra. And again, I don't know, it's just a place to rest really, honestly. It's a place to rest outside of certainty. Try it. You might find it deeply, deeply comforting, even though it promises to resolve absolutely nothing. I'm gonna leave you all with a quote from David Foster Wallace from This is Water, he says: “Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true. The only thing that's capital T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.” I'll see you guys next week.