Elizabeth Lesser: Challenging Our Old Stories
Today’s guest is Elizabeth Lesser, bestselling author of classics like Broken Open, and co-founder of the Omega Institute, an internationally recognized retreat center, renowned for its workshops and conferences in wellness, spirituality, creativity, and social change. Throughout her life, Elizabeth has been somewhat of a doula for people in transition, for those who are looking for answers to some of life’s biggest questions—she helps them cross chasms, simply by pointing out the path
“The obviousness of something that has been with us forever and must change, is often the most painful part,” she says.
Lesser joins me today to talk about her newest book, Cassandra Speaks: When Women are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes, which interrogates the way in which our origin tales and hero myths, where men are the prototype human, continue to influence our culture. She reminds us that these old stories are only half natural, and challenges us to activate, fund, and educate the emotional and caring nature we all possess, to face our shadows in order to recreate an Eden in which there is room for everyone.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
Women, storytelling, and paying attention to the world within us…(time stamp)
Elevating the importance of the caretaker…(time stamp)
Changing systems, changing self…(time stamp)
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TRANSCRIPT:
(Slightly edited for clarity.)
ELISE:
As you and I were emailing before, your whole book, ultimately Cassandra Speaks is about the dearth of voices granted to women in history, and the way that our history is only told through the masculine. And what happens. And how that, in a way, distorts our lives to this day. It's such an obvious point, and yet something that's completely not considered. I love that moment when you find the canon essentially in your basement from your son's college days, and you're going through it, and it's disturbing, what's what we actually read about. And I have the same exact experience. So let's start there.
ELIZABETH:
Often the obviousness of something that has been with us forever and must change. You know, whether it's what the racial reckoning we're going through now, or men and women, the obviousness is often the most painful part where like, oh, come on, this is absurd. Don't you know, about X, Y, and Z? And then we carry on our merry way, like a culture in a trance. And then it takes really difficult times. It takes these difficult times to wake up. That just seems to be how human beings are wired. We don't want to change. We don't want to do the hard work to reverse the wheels of culture, or family, or our own life. And something comes. And then we're like, okay, now we have to change. And I keep hoping that COVID will be at least some little awakening for all of us, as a culture.
And I have to say regarding women, and what I've immersed myself in the past few years, writing the book, Cassandra Speaks and then talking about it so much. What's happened at the Olympics has been one of those points for me where I'm like, “Oh my God, I think really things are changing. I think I'm gonna stop only complaining and, and patting ourselves on the back, us women who have been working really hard for change. Because when I look at what Simone Biles did, and what the whole world has kind of risen up to support her. Now certainly, a lot of people have not supported her and have done the opposite. Tried to tear her down for challenging the warrior code, you know, always win, never admit your weakness, keep on fighting, only be the warrior. And in her own way, she said, “Hey, I can win all the time, and I can be the best, and I can show my strength all the time, but I'm also brave enough to say I'm a vulnerable, thin-skinned human being who sometimes needs to take care of herself.” And I would say that is demonstrating a true hero, a new hero. And I think the women's movement, and feminism, and all the work we've been doing about saying, it's not just about women getting our foot in the patriarchal world. It's about changing that world when we get into it. And that's what I see her doing. And that's, what's so exciting to me.
ELISE:
When I read your book. It's so deeply resonant with the book that I'm writing. They’re twins in some way, or maybe mine is an offspring of sort of this line of thinking, which is also that, you know, we, we often, and, and we're living in such strange times, right? Like these non-binary times when we're trying to sort of divorce ourselves from these ideas, and align ourselves with the concept of a spectrum, right, that we all exist on, where we're not codified as good or bad, or man or woman, you know, et cetera. We're in so many ways trying to move out of that framework. And yet we're still stuck in a lot of these, within the racial reckoning or within the reckoning between men and women. We're still stuck in this ideology of well, if more women are in charge, the world will invariably change.
And that is probably true. I don't want to diminish the power of that. But it's still, as you said, if it's just women picking up the patriarchy, and wearing the patriarchy, we’re as capable of being as toxic as the most toxic men. And similarly, there are men who are not toxic at all, who are like deeply in their feminine are deeply nurturing and caring. And so there's this part where you write, “Just because women were not given the chance to add their voices to the storytelling doesn't mean we haven't colluded with the storyline. And just because women have the potential to think differently, doesn't mean we will.” Then you talk about how we've been honed for more caring and collaborative instincts, et cetera, but that we still have these baser instincts. And this is what my book is about how much shame we have about those baser instincts and how much we try to squash them.
And you write “Egocentrity is genderless. It is critical that women are honest about this, that we are self aware and that as we try to change the world around us, we also pay attention to the world within us. If we think it's only an outside job, or we insist that only others must change: men, those of power and privilege, whole systems, we will repeat history and be corrupted by the very power we have the opportunity to transform.” And I think that's so, like that is the nut, you know, and we've seen it happen where women have ascended through the ranks and then been perverted by this proximity to power. And then we tear her down and start, you know, it's like the same toxic cycle. We've just lacked….I don't know the right word. Like the ability to be more subtle about what it is that we're actually talking about. And to recognize it as an energetics, really more than the body.
ELIZABETH:
Right. This is when, why, when I started writing about that very subject, you just brought up. We don't just wanna get foot in the door. We wanna change the world when we get in there. It is a very complex, fast-moving, fascinating, depressing, hopeful subject. Everyone has different ideas about it. People would say to me, “You're a spiritual seeker. You talk about oneness. Why are you dividing it into men and women? Why are you still talking about women?” Or people who are more into gender fluidity now? Like this is a binary way of looking at the world. Elise, I'm sure you're dealing with this. There were several times when I was writing the book, I actually tried to give the advance back to my publisher because I was like, I can't, there's so many pieces moving. But eventually, I realized that each one of us is adding an important ingredient to this soup that's bubbling right now in the culture.
Thank God for the people who are exploring non-binary sexuality. It's like so exciting to me that one day eventually humankind will do what Dr. Martin Luther king asked us to, to see each other just as individuals, regardless of race, and gender, and culture, and country. One day we'll get there. But we are not there. And as long as women are paid less for the same job, raped when they get into to the military, afraid to walk in the streets. And as long as our culture still lives by the male credo, primarily, I'm gonna talk about women. And I'm gonna talk about women as people with both DNA differences, and hormonal differences, and culturally put upon on differences. It is nurture. It is nature. It is both. And that's my contribution to this wide-ranging, exciting topic of who are we without the framework of man, woman, black, white. But at the moment, what I'm talking about is in this book, at least how do these old stories that we are fed along with our cereal as little kids—Adam and Eve, Cassandra, Pandora, lots of American and European literature—these stories where men are the prototype human. Women either serve them, or are killed by them, or are foils for them. How does that still affect us? And how does that affect human culture?
ELISE:
Years ago, I had the chance to interview Mary Beard and for people who are listening, who aren't familiar with her, she is sort of a legendary historian, British woman who is fascinating and hilarious. She made the point, which was, you know, going back to the Odyssey, sort of like the first early records it's Telemachus tells his mother essentially to shut up, you know. He's going on and on, and she's sort of tries to divert the conversation, and he tells her to stop talking. And that's the paradigm, right? Like that is the, that is, as you say, the, the programming or one of the beginnings of the programming that continues to this day, which we become subconscious of. And I'm glad you brought up nature and nurture because we often conflate the two, right. And/or, take where we are today and ascribe it to nature as like, this is how it always was. This is the natural order of things. And there's so much, there's so many false sticky myths that have traveled with us through the millennia.
Like you talk about Dean Snow's work, and the fact that when they actually went and assessed cave paintings, which they had assumed were primarily one, war stories, but also that they were painted by men. Actually the hands were many of the hands were women. Or when they started to like exhume, look at these burial sites for ancient warriors and reassess them using more modern technology. I think it was like in the Amazon, 10 of the 26 graves—the warriors were women, 10 of them. And so we have, we've just be so stuck in this idea of, well, men are, are aggressive warrior, hunters with clubs who go out and make the world. And women hide in these caves, and caretake, and pick some berries. And that's not true. And as we evolve, we're recognizing that more and more, but we still can't let go of the, the story of that, of the idea of that. And then sort of perpetuate this idea that that's how we need to continue to hold ourselves in the world.
ELIZABETH:
And what I'm also interested in, is the women in the caves, caretaking and picking berries. I am interested in making caretaking as important, if not more, in fact, more important than the warrior. I don't want the story going forward to be: Now, women can be the warriors too. Not, not that I'm a naive person who thinks there's never a need for warriorship, but I want elevate, sort of like Simone Biles did, this idea that we constructed an entire culture and meaningfulness around warriorship, and exploration, and being first, and going forth. And the women were being nice and taken care of the little kids and getting the food. Hell yes, I want taking care of the kids, and getting the food, and taking care of the whole culture to suddenly be what a superhero does. We have extracted, and explored, and fought, and weaponized so much that we're gonna kill ourselves. And I would really like the tendency within all humans, but more so in women, of being the caretaker to become the new, super power that all humans want to make primary in their being, get educated for, have budgets for. To me, that's what feminism needs to be about now. Not so much as empowering women to go forth as the warrior. That’s okay, some people will wanna do that. But changing the entire value systems of our culture.
ELISE:
Yeah. But I would argue, changing the value systems of our culture, but going back to what our, maybe to more align with what our value culture used to be. Because again, it's like when you go into, and I am not an anthropologist, but it's, from what I understand, it's more gathering, less hunting. Hunting was rare, energy intensive work. And that it really was about gathering foraging. And this was something that men and women did together, and that there was more of a partnership model that was a more equal distribution of labor. And that men were not precluded from participating in the care taking and nurturance of life. We've also created this very dangerous paradigm for men around what it looks like to be a male, that to, so to go with your sort of feminism and again, to almost divorce it from gender, it's like, we need more of the feminine, like the feminine principle to animate all of us.
ELIZABETH:
Another interesting way of playing with that idea… in the 1930s, I think it began, a scientist at Harvard asking the question, “What is the human response to stress and strain and friction and conflict? What is, what is the response?” And he would bring subjects into his lab at Harvard and simulate stressful situations and then measure their hormones and blood for what happens under stress and strain. And he came up, Walter Cannon was his name, with the line “Under stress, human beings, either fight or flee.” And we, we all agreed with the storyline: fight or flight. That's the instinct that humans have under stress. We either aggress or we detach, not just run away, but also just sort of emotionally detach. And a UCLA scientist, psychological doctor, Shelly Taylor in the early two thousands. She and her colleagues made this discovery that the only people brought into Cannon's lab were men because up until very recently, most medical research was only done on men.
You know, we've read about this with heart disease that women and men have very different ways of showing that they're having a heart attack. But it's very recently that women have even been tested for, or what are your symptoms when you have a heart attack? So Dr. Taylor replicated those lab situations, she brought women in to the lab and replicated did the same work that Dr. Cannon had done. And she found out when she measured their hormones and blood chemistry, that yes, sometimes women have a fight or flight reaction, but more likely their hormones show that they have something that she called “the tend and befriend instinct,” under stress under conflict. Under friction, women's instinct is to tend to the most vulnerable in the community to take care of them or to be a friend. And what she meant by that is under stress. You know, you've had a hard day, you come home, you call like three friends, you're you don't, you're not gonna believe what happened to me, blah, blah, blah, talk, talk, talk, you get it out of your system.
You cleanse your system through befriending others, and creating circles of befriending. Something women are great at. So both of these things: tending, befriending, talking, forming tight knit groups of support, they have never been valued. They've been like, oh, that's what girls do. That's what women do. But actually half of the culture's primary response to stress is tending and befriending. And if we valued tending and befriending and gave it as much, let's say the tend and befriend instinct, meaning childcare, elder care, teaching frontline workers dealing with trauma, as opposed to warriorship. Let's say they got the same budget as the military. Or split the budget with the military. And we all felt proud of ourselves, men and women, for our tend and befriend nature. And like we said, we say to little girls, you can be anything a boy can be. We would say to little boys, you can be anything your sister is. Can you imagine saying that to your little boys? You can be anything a girl can can be in the binary world of like girls tend to nurture more. Boys tend to be more aggressive. But if we started valuing deeply the tend and befriend nature, I think life would change for, as you say, for men too, men are, are sinking under the weight of the, you always have to be buff and warriorship.
ELISE:
No, it's such an interesting example though, too, because then you get into this question of these very two different responses to stress, and what has been conditioned, versus what is a genetic fact. So you think about men feeling like those are their only options because that's how they've been conditioned, versus women feeling like that's how they have to behave because those are their only options. But then it's sort of an interesting example of the, again, the binary thinking that we get into where it's like, well, men are just like that. And women are just like that. And we certainly index in those ways, but it's curious to think about why and when that happened. Because also, you know, we have all these myths about, oh, well, men are better at science and men are better at math. And that's, those are actually really, it's not true. Like the, the data around gender differences when they study children are very tiny, like not, not valid—but yet, we acculturate in those directions. Right. So you look at those fields and they're populated by men, but there's actually…men are actually competent poets, or artists. Or artists vice versa.
ELIZABETH:
I know. As I said at the beginning, it's like, there's no, it's not black or white. And in a way that's even more hopeful to me because it means that if we value, let, let's call it the tend and befriend instinct. If we start to value it, people will be at choice to nurture it within themselves. Women will be at choice to nurture the more aggressive part of themselves, which I certainly am so grateful that I have been able to do that. And that I've put down a lot of the shame. Certainly not all of it. But I can say proudly. Yeah. I'm aggressive. Yes. I go for what I want. Yeah. I know my own mind, and I lead, and sometimes people just have to listen to me, even though they're not gonna like me. I have had to work so hard on all those things I just said to you, like so much shame around it so much training. And men when they are free to say, yeah, sometimes I'm really weak. I need to ask for help. I love to talk with my male friends. I need my friends. When men are free to do that and we can all work against this conditioning. It'll just be so much more fun to be a human.
ELISE:
Narrowing it down to women, when you talk about aggression or learning how to be assertive, which is which as you said, can make you unlikable, which is sort of one of the worst condemnations of women, right. There's so much ad hominem: “I don't like her,” when really it's sort of, there's something about that behavior. Maybe that makes you uncomfortable. You know, oh, if Elizabeth is asserting herself at this meeting, I don't like that because maybe I won't allow myself to assert myself. Right. So it's, again, that conditioning of slapping each other down. How do you, as sort of one of the wise women in the culture, how do we, and I love this idea where you talk about activism and innervism, but how do we start to recognize what that is within ourselves, so that we can address it, heal it, metabolize it, rather than feeling like it's appropriate for me to cut you down, slap you down, quote, unquote, sort of be the police force of the patriarchy and put you in your place, which I think women frequently do to other women.
ELIZABETH:
Do you experience that? Do you experience frequently being bullied by women who are terrified of, of internalized patriarchy or wanting to be seen as one of the guys. Do you? Because I hear that a lot and that's not been my experience. Has that been your experience?
ELISE:
At times, certainly. And when I've spoken to other women, particularly, and more I grew up in media, which is obviously very, you know, there are a lot of women I'd say early days of being at magazines was slightly terrifying. Like you see a spectrum of women who can be not supportive. Not all of them. I guess what I've would say is that I have worked for men. I feel like I was sexually harassed at every job where I worked with men until I was 18. And maybe at that point I became scary enough that I was left alone. But I have worked with, and for men and really enjoyed it since then, in a way that does not subscribe with this idea of men. Like I've felt very, very, very supported by my male mentors. So yeah, I think it's complicated. I think women, you know, we can at times be the most amazing sort of examples of what it, it means to be a full-spectrum person. But I certainly think that there's a lot of competitiveness, and there's scarcity, et cetera. So I've heard from a lot of women with sort of the stories of, I hear that all the time, particularly lawyers, anyone who's working in, finance people who have felt very oppressed by women.
ELIZABETH:
I'm gonna answer it in two ways. One is that when men are strong leaders and demand a lot from their employees or their colleagues, or have like a harsh voice, or shut down things, they're often seen as lots of strong leader. When women are, there's a double standard, she's being bitchy, she's being mean she's not supportive. Sometimes that's a lens through which I like to look at it. Sometimes though, you are absolutely right. The scarcity of place for women within business, sports, military, whatever organization we're talking about, and our internalized patriarchy. And I will explain what I mean by that. It’s so fierce that we, as Nietzsche the philosopher said, be careful when fighting monsters, you don't turn into a monster. We can so easily turn into the monster because we're so used to fighting. That's all we know.
So you, you said that I write in Cassandra Speaks about activism and innervism. I made up that word innervism because sometimes when you talk about like self-help, or spiritual work, it sounds so woo woo, and flimsy. And I wanted to give some backbone to inner work. So I called it innervism, which is about really looking at yourself honestly, really saying, what am I bringing to this problem myself. Because truly, the only person I have a lot of control over is myself. How, even as I'm working actively to change systems, how can I change myself? It's not one or the other, and you're never gonna change yourself so fully that, oh, now I can go into the world, but it's hand in glove working on both at the same time. And you know that, you know that better than anyone being in the work you've been in, that self work is not just about chanting Ommm, and going to a spa.
It can be so hard, and distasteful that you just don't want to do it. The Jungians call it shadow work, where you turn around and face your shadow, all the dark parts that of yourself that you just don't want to admit that you have in you. And so I think for women in the world…here's what my internalized patriarchy has looked like. And here's like the checklist I always say to myself. First of all, I start with my body. It's like, how do I feel about my body? What am I still doing about my body that has been fed to me about what a woman's body should be like, whether it's weight, wrinkles, aging, boobs, waistline, feet. You know, I recently went to a foot doctor because I was getting to the point where I could barely walk. I have an old running injury and my ankle was just so bad.
The first thing he said to me was, you are wearing shoes, a full size, too small. And you’ve been doing it your whole life. And I wanted to say, no, they fit me. He's like, no, they don't fit you. And I thought back to Chinese, ancient Chinese women and foot binding, where men thought it was erotic for women to have these tiny feet. So they like did this brutal business of wrapping women's feet in rags and turning them into bloody messes. So the women could totter around, adorable, helpless. And I looked at my shoes in my closet. They're like heels. And they're all too small. I'm like, this is over. I'm in my sixties, for goodness sakes. You no longer are seven shoe. You never have been. Get some shoes that fit you. And they should not have heels that when you walk in New York City, you are killing yourself.
So that's one little thing about the body. What internalized patriarchy is keeping me from loving my precious body, living in it, taking care of it, so that I can be strong and balanced in the world. Okay. That's one thing. The other thing is this idea that women don't support each other. What you said. We have to support each other. I could cry. We have to support each other. It is this idea that cat fight, it's women fight. There's something kind of almost sexy and amazing in men's eyes about women fighting with each other. Like it's internalized patriarchy, too. That there's not enough room for all of us. That powerful women act like the guys. Yeah. I got invited out to the dinner with the guys, you know, and she stayed back and she has kids and she has to take care of them. It's like enough, enough of this.
There's a beautiful book that's gonna come out next year called The Bonobo Principle about these monkeys, the bonobo monkeys, that actually are a matriarchal society. And she's calling on us to be bonobos, to support each other. Okay. There's that? Then there's all the negative gender stereotypes I look at in myself. She's bad at math. I'm bad at math. I can't crunch the numbers for that budget. I don't how okay. That's bullshit. I can learn. And I must learn. So financial literacy is really important for me to confront internalized patriarchy. And then raising girls and boys, like telling our boys, see how your sister is playing with dolls. She's training herself to be a mom. You can train yourself to be a dad because real men are good dads. So you can be anything your sister can be. If, of course, your girl is playing with dolls and your boy isn't, maybe it's switched.
But most of the time, it isn't, let's be real here. And then holding men responsible for, you know, Gloria Steinem said, “Women are not gonna be equal outside the home until men are equal in it.” Women are not gonna be equal outside the home until men are equal in the home. Holding our men accountable to being dads. If we're married to a man, or with a man, being dads, cleaning the dishes, it's not brain science to wash a pot well. And not having to be asked, like not emotionally babysitting the family and the world. Expecting that of men. And then lavishing men with praise when they are doing it. And not, you know, sometimes we have a double standard. We want our men to be sensitive. And then when they are, it scares the hell out of us. Because we also want them to be the White Knight. We don't want them to be weak. That is a shadow thing I've had to look at in my marriage, very closely. I'm asking my husband to talk more, to be more sensitive, to be more available in the home. And then sometimes when he is, it scares me. Wait a second, who's going to, who's gonna be strong all the time for me. You know, that's something we have to look at. So those are some of the checklist for internalized patriarchy.
ELISE:
The book that I'm writing is about the ways in which we are, the internalized patriarchy, what we police in ourselves and police in each other. And then the larger construct of the book is the Seven Deadly Sins. And not with this idea of religion, because they're actually not in the Bible, which I didn't realize. But as this cultural conditioning, so Gluttony, Lust, Greed, Sloth, as I started to evaluate each one in the context of women, I was like, oh, these are all things that I wrestle with, in a way that I don't see men wrestling with in the same way. But what's interesting in light of what you just said about men and being White Knights, and an aversion to their weakness, is that for a long period of time, there was, there were originally thoughts that came out of the fourth century, Evagrius Ponticus who also sort of maybe created the Enneagram, which is interesting, but there was an eighth and it was sadness.
And then it was kicked off the list. And when I think about sadness, which of course makes me think about your book Broken Open. That's the one that I think men grapple with the most, this idea that they are not allowed to admit defeat. They're not allowed to accept sort of the inevitable cycling and decay and destruction of life. Women aren't great at it. But we have an aversion, a cultural aversion to men being in their emotional selves in a way that completely cuts them off from half of the experience of life.
ELIZABETH:
That's why when I saw Simone Biles bow to her sin of sadness, let's say, her mental health. And I saw so many men athletes come forward and say, thank you, Simone. I too, me too. This is a me too movement for men. Me too. I am weak. I can be depressed. I don't always wanna go out and do the vault because I could paralyze myself. But this, this, you know, the, the Spartan credo, the very military life is fight. This is it's this credo that's that our whole culture has lived by. We all are supposed to always be in the fight. And sometimes putting down the fight is the biggest courageous move you can make. And that's so hard for men. So very hard. And I do think women will show the way in this. If we do it as you say, in a way that doesn't shame men, but helps men the way many men have helped us now come into our more aggressive natures. Good aggression, good competition. I've had men really help me too. We can help men escape “the man box” as Tony Porter calls it, who's an amazing man. And has, does amazing work the man box. He was a football player and escaped the man box.
ELISE:
And it's required because it's sort of that one again, it goes to sort of the thesis of the story of like we're acting out some of these old stories in a perpetual way that no longer serves us and is no longer survivable, right? Like this idea of, as you were saying, dominance, aggression, fighting, war, mining, extracting…our planet, this planet will not be able to support. Our planet will survive. We won't survive. And we need this gigantic shift in the way that we think about actually let's take care of what we've already created.
ELIZABETH:
Yeah, lke, could you tell that to like Bezos and all the jets, the three of them I'm, I'm oddly forgetting their names.
ELISE:
Branson and Elon Musk
ELIZABETH:
The three of them, like, could you take, I think the combined amount of money they're sinking into this is many billions. Billions. Could we take care of what we've screwed up, here instead of, you know, when asked all three of them, why are you doing this? Besides saying, I've always wanted to, as a little boy, they also say, well, we're gonna need resources from somewhere else. Could we learn to live with less? Could we, could we take care of this planet? Could we come up with alternative forms of energy or, you know, and live by them and make the hard decisions. If you know them, please talk to them. I don't know them.
ELISE:
I don’t know them either, but I agree. It's like such a nihilistic vision and such an abandonment vision. And it sort of speaks to this like, oh, we'll just go conquer something else. This colonize Mars in a way of like, no, that's what we've been doing. And no version, does this have a different ending? Like we are in this collective memory, still healing from sort of our barbaric acts over time and what we've done to each other, how we've enslaved each other, how we've oppressed each other. And we need to move forward in a completely different way with this different energy of, of care, nurturance, safety, and security. We could just address sort of the basic safety and security—we certainly could do it in America. We're rich enough. If we could create that basic social net required so that people don't feel like they're one paycheck away from living in their cars. I mean, like we've created a culture where we are living on top of a pit of snakes, right? And it's like, who's gonna fall off? Like it could be me. And it creates an irrational fear for many of us who certainly have enough, but it drives this, this feeling of, I don't have enough. It could be me as we watch each other. It's like gladiators, it’s crazy.
ELIZABETH:
And I dare say, a lot of it has to do to go back to the beginning of what we were saying. Are these old stories we think are, as you said, well, that's natural. Well, it's not natural. It's half natural, but there's a whole other part of our selves that we could activate, and fund, and educate, emotional intelligence, social-emotional learning, taking care of the earth. These are things that live in every one of us. And if we value them, and bring them out, and don't go off to Mars and colonize our own shadows, as opposed to Mars. We could do it. And I think we are doing it. It's somewhat of a race, but I actually am an optimist. And I think we're gonna, we're gonna recreate Eden in a way that is there's room for everyone.
ELISE:
No, I absolutely agree. I am optimistic. I have faith in our ability to, in our creative abilities and our ability to form connections, to prioritize what matters. I think we have to be pushed to the very edge in order to change and evolve. Clearly, you know, it's not sort of our natural instinct, but it is, it requires the innervism that you're talking about, which is, I agree with you. It's sort of that idea of like, oh, I'm gonna go meditate in a cave. It's like, really? No, you're not. You're gonna go and engage in the suffering of life. Like that's really what innervism is and not engaging it in a way where it's like, oh, it's everyone else's fault. And if all of these things were different, I would be happy, and I would be carefree, and everything would be great. It's understanding your own relationship to those things that agrieve you, which it is very hard work.
ELIZABETH:
Yeah. Beautifully said.
ELISE:
Going back to, in, Broken Open, you talk about that Rumi quote where you write, “Rumi tells us the moment we accept what troubles we've been given the door will open and sounds easy. Sounds attractive, but it is difficult. And most of us pound on door to freedom and happiness with every manipulative ploy save the one that actually works. It's true. We would rather find any way than the only way.”
ELIZABETH:
It is a strange little hookup us humans have.
ELISE:
Oh God, but hard work is required, but we can do it. We can do it.
ELIZABETH:
And it's the best work. It's the best work. You know, I've done lots of work in my life and all have given different fruits, but the work of taming my ego, and accepting life on its own terms, and not swimming so hard against the current of what is, instead of just relaxing into the mystery of this amazing situation. We find ourselves in that's the work that has brought me the most delicious fruit.
ELISE:
Yeah. And that as you, you also quote, have that amazing Joseph Campbell quote, “People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” And nobody wants to be on permanent vacation or in Mars, let's be honest. It is in a perverse way, but I know you'll know what I mean, like fun to figure this, like, this is what life is about. Like figuring this out. It's not about bon-bons and being in a cave. It's about the actual engagement with life and finding our way forward.
ELIZABETH:
And this belief, this experience that life may not always be able to be easy and happy, but that word, Joseph Campbell chose deliberately “rapture,” rapture is a very erotic word. It's like fully alive, fully open. And if you fully open, you're gonna open to the sorrow, too. Rapture has sorrow in it because sorrow is in the world. So it's being open to the experience of what it fully means to have an open heart. When your heart is open, you feel the grief, you feel the pain, but you feel the joy, and you feel the rapture. And we can't just have plastic happiness where we're always happy. You know, I'll often lead workshops or I used to, when people could sit next to each other, and the hardest nuts to crack, the hardest folks to finally relax into our group were the people who wanted to convince everyone that they were always happy and fine. Everything is great. And I would be very, very patient with those people because I knew eventually that cracks, and that's what I mean by the word broken open. Something has to crack to let the light in, and to join the humans, I call them bozos on the bus. All of us, half-baked, struggling humans riding along on a bumpy road. But when you say, yeah, that's me, that's me, suddenly you've got friends and you, you join real life.
ELISE:
Yeah, exactly. You know, you, you start that book talking about, again, going back to Rumi with this idea that we hide our secret underbellies from each other, and then create this distorted version of reality where it's like, how come she's figured it out? Like she's doing this all. Because when we don't share, everyone has a story, you know, without fail, you could stop any person on the street, and they would tell you their about their grief. Right. And yet we, we never really accept that. We think we can, as you say, like sort of have an amulet to guard against the inevitability of decay and change and things falling apart.
ELIZABETH:
Media has made this even harder because every, the airbrushed world of people, you know. I had to really stop going onto Instagram and Facebook that much because the curated lives that people put up there it's, it's so unhelpful. It is. It's just like, look where I, when am I vacation? And here's my perfect child, and here's my new decorated this. And for, for me, for all the work I've done on myself, it still makes me have the FOMO, the fear of missing out, and the sense of like, oh, I didn't go on that vacation. I don't have enough money to do this. Or my house doesn't look like that. It's and then when we do share just the general befuddlement of being a human, and the non-curated look at our backyard with the turned over yard chair, and people are like, oh, phew, it’s not just me.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, absolutely. We create a lot of distortion and a lot of anxiety and fear when we pretend. But then there's also the performed authenticity, which is like the next version of right. It’s the worst.
Oh, thank God for people like Elizabeth Lesser, who not only sort of bring really interesting thinkers together to provide insight into life, but also help us recontextualize our own experiences here. If you've never, Cassandra Speaks is great and fun, and just one of those aha books where you're like, wow, I actually hadn't thought about the fact that the canon is essentially all white men, or that the Noble Prize, which sort of is what suggests where our thinking should go collectively is pretty much only awarded to men. It really starts to make you think about the fact that we really don't, still to this day, do not listen to women. And that that's okay. You know, I think often there's accountability demanded of women in terms of how exclusive are you being and are you being perfect about this? And yet we still don't demand or require that at of men.
We don't expect them at all to be inclusive in the same way. I think that's really pretty interesting and something to think about, and then, you know, for Broken Open, I think for anyone who's going for any, through any sort of transition, and you can argue that we're all going through transitions all the time, it’s just such a beautiful book and part also because of the quotes that she pulls together that give context to the chapters. And just the, the fact that the whole book is really about the cycle of life and how things do fall apart and we need to understand and accept that. Not so that it, we can necessarily make it easier, that's not the point. But so that we can accept it. Because I think so many of us rail against it, spend a lot of energy, contesting, the sort of fallibility of life, and then are sort of, you know, forget that we need to then pick ourselves up and, and keep going.
And she also has, there's a lot of conversation in the book about, you know, as she writes: “How much you get from staying stuck and the way you see yourself in other people. How much you have invested in making someone else wrong so you don't have to accept your own culpability. How you idolize others so that you don't have to claim your own power, take a stand, be your most noble and radiant self.” I love that because what I also see us doing, and I certainly do this as well, is like this idea of guruizing other people, or assuming that other people will figure it out for you. And, and yes, this is a collective right. I'm not gonna solve climate change, but it is this idea of owning my part in this and expressing that part in it in the same way that we all need to do, rather than just sitting back and letting others be authorities in our lives, or giving them, giving them responsibility for the way that we live or the choices that we make.