Good Life Project - Elizabeth Lesser | Doing Power Differently

Episode Date: September 17, 2020

Elizabeth Lesser wants to set the record straight. The one that started all the way back with Adam and Eve. The origin story that positioned man as firstborn and favored and women as second-born and scorned. The mythology that seems to exist in nearly every faith, tradition, culture and history about the “place” of women in relationships, family, society, business, power and the world. Lesser decided it was time to do some myth-busting, some reconciliation and some reimagining about what this world, on every level, might look like if truth found its way into the narrative and power were more evenly distributed.As the co-founder of the iconic Omega Institute, recognized internationally for its workshops and conferences in wellness, spirituality, creativity, social change and women’s leadership, Elizabeth has been gathering people from all walks of life to explore the intersection between gender, power, equity and impact for more than 40 years. She has presented at TED, was named to Oprah’s Super Soul 100, and is the author of several bestselling books, including Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow, and Marrow: Love, Loss & What Matters Most, which first brought her onto the podcast a few years back and also led to the gift of her friendship since. Her newest book Cassandra Speaks: When Women are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes (https://amzn.to/3hXAyrg) is a powerful and compelling dive into the stories society has told about women and power, along with a rally cry and a reclamation to tell a different story and build a different world.You can find Elizabeth Lesser at:Website : https://www.elizabethlesser.org/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/elizlesser/-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest today, Elizabeth Lesser, wants to set the record straight. The one that started all the way back with Adam and Eve, the origin story that positioned man as firstborn and favored and women as secondborn and scorned. The mythology that seems to exist in nearly every faith, tradition, culture, and history about the place women hold in relationships, family, society, business, power, and the world. And Lesser decided it was time to do some myth busting, some reconciliation, and some reimagining about what this world on every level might look like if truth found its way into the narrative and power were more evenly distributed. Elizabeth has been our guest on the podcast before as the co-founder of the iconic Omega Institute, recognized really internationally for its workshops and conferences in wellness, spirituality, creativity, social change, and women's leadership, she has been gathering people from all walks of life to explore the intersection between gender power, equity, and impact for more

than four decades. She has presented at TED, was named to Oprah's Super Soul 100, and is the author of several bestselling books, including Broken Open, How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow, and Marrow, Love Loss and What Matters Most, which first brought her onto the podcast a few years back and also led to the gift of a friendship between us. Her newest book, Cassandra Speaks, When Women Are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes. It's a powerful and compelling dive into the stories society has told about women in power, along with a rally cry and a reclamation to tell a different story and build a different world. So excited to share this

conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. We'll be right back. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. It's so good to be hanging out with you. So we've been friends for a number of years now and it kind of kicked off the last time that you and I sat down in the studio to have a conversation. And at that point, it was a bit about sort of your quote backstory and also a book that had just come out around your sister and how you lost her. But in the years before you actually ended up being a bone marrow donor for her and that there was this really kind of fascinating dynamic of you and her quite literally not figuratively sharing blood and how that transformed.

It sort of opened a door to you both stepping into your relationship in a different way. The intervening years have been interesting to say the least. So as we sit here having this conversation, sort of late summer heading into fall, and you're also the co-founder of this incredible place called Omega Institute, which has been around for, I believe, the better part of 40 years up around Rhinebeck in New York, where some of the most incredible teachers of thought and faith and spirituality and philosophy and psychology have come. And you have been, for many of those years, sort of the convener and facilitator. And this facility, as much as people invest in coming there, also is sustained by the goodness of a lot of people.

And I'm curious if you're open to sharing, as we move into this time and you look at an organization and just an incredible retreat center like you have, how has this recent experience been for you? And what's spinning around in the understanding of the community and the center and how it flourishes and the challenges these days? Well, because I have been part of this organization for, as you say, a little more than 40 years, and I started it in my early 20s, it is my life. It's my archetype of the world. So I see issues around organization and government and power and education. The backdrop for me is always this one big job I've had. I've done other things. I'm a writer. I used to be a midwife. But my main reference point about how humans work together is this one small organization, Omega Institute. Every season, we have about 30,000 people who come through our doors and we have a large staff of several hundred people. And so that's where I've kind of cut my teeth on what it means to run a place, to lead, to be in business, to help, to educate, to awaken consciousness.

And so it's been a struggle. It's been a financial and organization struggle from day one. We were a group of kids, hippie kids in the 1970s, late 1970s when we started Omega. And then we evolved over these 40 years into a real established place of organization and education and retreat. But it's always been a struggle, a financial struggle, as most well-meaning organizations where a nonprofit are. Then COVID-19 comes. All of a sudden, every struggle we've had has been magnified. We had to shut down. Every organization in New York State that gathered more than 50 people had to shut down. Health Department, the New York State government, Cuomo. So we did. We shut down, and our entire stream of revenue shut down. So here we are now,

very small staff. We've had to furlough almost everyone, questioning how do we change? How do we meet the times? We're freaking out. We're upset. We're angry. We cry. but also because we claim to be a place of consciousness, we're asking ourselves, okay, COVID, you shaman, you, what have you come to teach us about how we have to change in order to meet the times? We hope we're going to make it. We don't know if we are, just like our brothers and sisters in education and restaurants and artistry and concerts, like everyone is saying, how are we going to survive and change? Yeah. I mean, it's interesting the frame that you brought to it, our shaman COVID,

you know, a lot of the programming that I have seen you and the amazing crew at Omega bring in over the years has been in some way touching into Eastern philosophy, a central tenet of which, no matter what the quote denomination is, is always this notion of holding everything lightly, of more allowing than grasping. It's interesting to attend a workshop and to explore these ideas and to kind of reflect on how it unfolds in your own life and what changes you might want to make when you go home. But then to actually experience this at scale where this institution that has been there

for four plus decades is now profoundly a fact And the invitation for you to sort of say, okay, in this bigger context, how do we do that? It's got to be intense. It is intense. And it's, you know, it's the rubber meeting the road. You can have all sorts of philosophies, whether it's the Eastern philosophy of living in the moment and not fighting it and going in the direction the river's flowing, or other spiritual, philosophical, psychological frameworks, which I've studied, the shamanic work of allowing the difficulties of life to literally kill what was, so a new phoenix can rise from the ashes. It's one thing to talk about these things. And it's another to be in the fire. We're in the fire now, literally. Much of the

world is burning. We're in the political fire. We're in environmental fire. We're in a health crisis fire. So these are the times, I mean, I like to say to myself when I wake up freaking out, which I do almost every morning, you were made for these times. These are your times. Other people, other generations, ancestors have had their times. You've had a lot of easy times before this relative to much of history and many peoples already in the world today. These are our times. What are we going to do? Yeah, such a powerful sort of reframe. When you wake up in that space, and I'm raising my hand,

I occasionally wake up there also. Are there any specific, I'm curious, are there any specific questions or prompts or practices that you have learned to drop into that help you step back into that frame of possibility? Hmm. You know, I do the most simple practice that I learned from my most main root teacher, Pir Valiat Khan, who was a Sufi teacher, Sufism being the mystical dimension of Islam. And you see this iconography in Sufi paintings. I take my right hand and I put it on my heart.

And I breathe into this space, which is always softer, more open and more curious than my wackadoodle mind, which is spinning out every negative story known to humankind. And I just go into the well of my heart and I breathe and I feel and I try not to be afraid of those feelings because those feelings have information in them, whether it's grief or anger or love or inspiration. And I just live there for a little bit. And it's like dipping into a well and bringing up fresh water. And I just do that many, many times during the day. I love that. It's so simple and yet effective.

I have a similar practice. I place one hand over my heart and one hand over my belly. And for some reason, there's something energetic that happens to me. I feel like there's some connection that gets made where my nervous system just really rapidly down regulates. I don't know how to explain it. I'm sure there's some subtle energy explanation or even modern anatomical explanation. But I do find that that almost physicalizing this thing brings me back into a more balanced state. Yeah.

So you have spent a lot of time at Omega and I have been there. And there's this incredible and pretty big open dining area where everybody convenes and the conversations are rich and people are smiling and hugging and eating. And then there's this, not secret, but there's another smaller dining area kind of back through some doors where some of the visiting teachers and presenters and facilitators will often take a little bit of respite while they're dining as well. And you write in your new book, Cassandra Speaks, about this moment where you enter

the room and you see an older classics professor in the corner, and it leads to a conversation and a story that leads to something much bigger. That room, we call it the faculty dining room. And over the years, I have had incredible conversations in that room with, you know, especially watching the interplay, like maybe an African drummer talking with an NBA basketball player, and both of them are there for different kinds of workshops, but they meet and they connect. And businesses have been formed between teachers there and teaching partnerships. And I've just been like a fly on the wall of these amazing conversations. And I've also raised my children at Omega every season, every summer. They've had quite the education. You could have them on and see what they'd say about it. And that particular story you know, basically brown rice and tofu in those days.

And they didn't want to, they wanted to ride their bikes down to the little country store and get hamburgers. And I was arguing with them. And finally, they won, of course, and went out into the summer day. By the time I finished talking with them, everybody in the room had left except this one woman who was part of a conference on reframing mythology for our times. And there were Jungians and she was a classics professor and a witch. And I was looking at her and was horrified because I had lent her my sweater the night before when we were organizing the conference before it started. And she was wearing it and she was dribbling soup all over it as she ate and read a book. And she looked up and saw me and motioned me to come over. And I sat down and started this conversation with her, which led to a whole lot of different things I started doing at Omega around women and women in power and women in leadership. She told me the story of Cassandra after I told her I was very frustrated being the only

woman in leadership at Omega, being in meetings all the time, feeling that no matter what I said or wanted or what I thought the priorities of the organization should be or what I would see would happen if we didn't do what I wanted, and people not listening to me, the guys I was leading the place with, just sort of dismissing me out of hand. And I was very frustrated. And I started complaining to her, and she said, your tone, young lady, your tone, you're whining. You have to remember Cassandra. Do you remember Cassandra? And I said, not really, not, you know, trying to go back into my high school mythology reading. She told me the story of Cassandra, who was a Trojan princess. And all the men were after her because she was the most beautiful daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba. And she was wooed by Zeus and by Zeus's son Apollo and the gods and mortals. And Apollo promised her the gift of clairvoyance, which is what all the mortals wanted, the gift of clairvoyance.

She could see into the future. And she said, yes, I want it. That's how he wooed her. So she got it. But when he tried to have sex with her, she refused. She didn't understand that was part of the deal. And he spat into her mouth and put a curse on her and said, you will remain a clairvoyant, someone who can see the future, but no one will believe your predictions. And so ultimately, she saw the Trojan War, she saw the death of her family, she saw the ruination of her nation, she would say it, she would cry it, and no one would believe her. And she ultimately was driven mad by knowing the truth, especially the truth about violence and war, but not being believed. And so this professor said to me,

you got to change the ending of that story. You know something in your bones, and many women do. You do see what will happen if we continue on this route. And people are not going to believe you, but you've got to find your voice. You have to find a different voice and say what you know and enact what you know. And that's when I started creating conferences for women. I called them Women in Power because it made me uncomfortable to put those words together, women, power. And I wanted to understand why. The first conference I organized at Omega, I invited

Anita Hill, who had just recently spoken truth to power, Eve Ensler, the creator of the vagina monologues, and several other women leaders. It just took off. I thought I would be doing one conference. And 15 years later, we still do those conferences with women leaders in all disciplines from around the world. Yeah. I mean, when you first get reconnected with that story of Cassandra and decide, okay, so yes, let me step into this. And let me, you know, part of the way that you actually step into it is by saying, let me step into this. And let me, you know, part of the way that you actually step into it is by saying, let me convene women from all around the world. And then many of the leading voices in this conversation around women in power, I guess part of it along the way also

is as you start to realize that, you know, this story of Cassandra really is a very modern day story. That story also is not the only story. When you start to dive into almost every faith tradition, spiritual tradition, philosophical tradition, cultural and societal tradition, you find stories that ring with the same frame of women and what their, appropriate role is in society and sometimes what they have done to society because simply because of their existence. Things like the story of Eve, the story of Pandora and many others, which you write about and in religious texts all over the place in translations. And it's when you think about the fact that that has been the frame for so many, not just years, but generations and eons. And then you decide I need to do something about that.

I'm curious about your thought process about, okay, so what can I do that will rise to a level of being an effective counter to this vast sea of negative context that has existed across the entire world for generations and generations? That's a very wonderful question. You know, each of us has what we can do. I often feel so inadequate to the immensity historically and present. I think we all do. And I have the kind of personality that just won't stop. I want to keep doing, you know, I felt that when you talked about the earlier book I wrote, the last book I wrote, Marrow, about being my sister's bone marrow donor. Even after I had my bone marrow taken out and put into her, I still was the kind of person of like,

now what can I do? Now what should I do? It's not enough. So I have that energy in me, but I think all of us who care about the world have some degree of wanting to do something. And one thing that's helped for me is knowing I can't do everything. I can do what God gave me the talent to do. I am first and foremost a writer. That's my set point. When I feel crappy, I write and I try to make sense of the world and write the world through writing. So besides convening those conferences, I decided to write this book about, as you say, I call it fake news from history about women. Humans learn and live through storytelling. That's how we learn. That's how we decide what our values are. We're seeing a lot of stories right now being dismantled. The story of racism, it is so set in our cultural storytelling, the supremacy of one race over another. This is a story. This is not truth as in scientific truth about human brains and beings and bodies. This is a story that human beings

have cooked up. And stories are actually stronger than anything else. Religious stories, mythological stories, cultural stories that we tell ourselves and that stick to us. So in terms of women and storytelling, we have to first know the stories and then we have to understand that somebody told them. They are not the truth. Sorry, biblical literates, and I'm sure I'll hear from you. But they were told the story of Eve, second in creation, first to sin. You would not believe how many old stories have that line, whether it's Pandora, who was the first mortal woman who opened the box and let sin out into the world, or it was Eve who listened to the snake and, oh, that poor innocent Adam just followed her and then they were exiled. There are stories everywhere in literature, movies, myths, cultures believe that women are second class citizens

and also people not to be trusted, like Cassandra was not trusted. Do not trust hysterical women who are ruled by emotional craziness. And one of the chapters in the book, I go into the story of Galatea and Pygmalion. Galatea was the statue that the sculptor Pygmalion made because every other woman in his Greek city, in his mind, was a prostitute. Any woman, any living woman was so tainted in her sexuality, just I guess for having a vagina, so alluring to men that he locked himself in his studio and built a lily white statue that was pure. And he fell in love with her and she came alive through his love and she was perfect and untainted and we women and men suffer from that idea that real women are somehow tainted and the image that men create of women that we're supposed to live up to physically and emotionally. I mean, there were times in history, Greek times, Roman times, Victorian times, where women were actually given hysterectomies because they were thought to be crazy.

And Hippocrates said that women had something called uterine fury, that our uteruses held this fury. And that the only way to cure a crazy woman, and a lot of times women were called crazy for wanting to like speak or vote, they were given hysterectomies. And this isn't that long ago. So yeah, those are the stories that stick to us. Those are the stories going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is?

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required, charge time and actual results will vary. So many of these stories speak to you. You hear them and they were written so long ago. And yet the fundamental concepts are as valid and as present and as infuriating now. But I think back then they were infuriating to women. And a lot of the men who were actually writing those stories and then the tellers of those stories probably found them to be completely fine, maybe even comforting, which is kind of horrifying to think about. And it does feel like we are in this moment of awakening and reckoning and re-imagining and creating new stories. The story of Pygmalion

Galatea, really, it's built into that as this conversation around perfection and the quest for perfection and how it affects all genders, however you identify. All of these old stories affect all genders. I'm a feminist, but to me, feminism has gifts for everyone of all genders because all feminism is saying women are these full creatures with so many gifts like men. I mean, if women had been the only ones to tell the stories and to set the values and the rules, we would have lost out on the genius of the male of the species. It's really a rebalancing that we need, not a, okay, now we're going to have 100 years of only women telling the stories. It's a rebalancing. We've got the male story. We've harnessed so much brilliance and genius from the male inclination to build and invent and grow.

And we need the female voice now, desperately. I happen to believe if we don't, humankind may not make it. I guess part of what spins in my head when I hear that, and this is a curiosity, is when we use the words male and female, man, woman, we're also in this really, I think, interesting evolutionary moment where we are starting to realize that those identifiers are no longer necessarily encapsulated in the physical form, in the physiology of a being that different people identify across the spectrum of male, female, fluid, non-binary, gender non-conforming. And I wonder if you have been sort of like thinking about how this spectrum, this evolving overlay relates to the ideas that you've been exploring. I've not only been thinking about it, I've been obsessing about it because it's a very dicey time to write a book about women and to even use the word women. I am so enthralled and grateful for what I see happening about gender fluidity. And I feel it's completely related to what I think and write about. Now I am of a certain generation. So when I see my younger friends

and my kids and people of the generations coming up so much more at home with this idea of gender fluidity. I realize, okay, I'm an older feminist and teach me. I'm in a state of learning about that. But I also know in my bones and from a lot of research I've done, sociological research, historical research, medical research, research about hormones, research about businesses and how women lead. I believe strongly enough that there is a predominant trait in women that is different from predominant traits in men. But in order for us to allow gender fluidity to blossom, we have to first validate many of the values that live in women that have been devalued. So if you look at the research about women in leadership, just look at it right now, the women leaders in the nations that are dealing the best with COVID-19. The best leaders are women.

And if you read, which I have scores of research done about how women lead in corporations, governments, school boards, families. There is something in women that instead of the kind of reaction to stress, which is to fight back, it's something called tend and befriend. Women have this stress response of tending and befriending as opposed to lashing out, isolating and using violence. to include, not to go back to those old power texts like Machiavelli or Sun Tzu or the other militarized idea of what power is. So yes, fluid gender is something that I believe in 50 years will become more the norm. But right now, part of that movement is for women to believe in what we know in our bones and to activate it in the world. Yeah. I mean, I am, I like you, I'm just curious and open and excited to see the evolution of all of these ideas and how it unfolds. And like you, also see the value of rooting some of the conversation in what we know has come before and seeing how that really starts to dance with the evolving ideas and how

they inform each other. One of the things that you just mentioned is these ideas of who tells the story of power. And traditionally, the story of power has been told by men in a masculine, dominant, violence-led, very hard, action-oriented, adversarial way. And there's a line in Cassandra Speaks that says, tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are. And I thought that was fascinating. Tell me more about this. Yeah, that's a quote from a Spanish philosopher. Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are. And that quote, I repeat over and over in a little chapter called Know Her Name.

And actually, today, the day that we're taping this, has a lot to do with that statue that I saw in Central Park. I'll tell you the story that I tell in the book. I was in New York City and I walked across Central Park. And I've walked across Central Park so many times as I know you have and many of us listening have done. It was a regular business day and people were rushing around and I had some time to get from where I was going. And I went into the park and I looked at a statue that I've probably looked at a hundred times and I noticed, that's weird. That's a statue of six or seven young men, one of them holding a dying bloodied comrade. And it was a World War I statue. I thought, yeah, so many statues are about soldiers. Then I walked a little farther and I got to the entrance, one of the big entrances of the park where, where he just like destroyed the city of Atlanta during the Civil War. He was a Union soldier general. for the person who started rounding up Native Americans and putting them in reservations and

killing those who wouldn't go in and killing all the remaining buffalo herds so that he would starve the Indians who would not go into the concentration camps. And I'm like, why does General Sherman get to sit in the park? Why do we pay attention to him? And then later I read that of the 27 statues in the park, in Central Park, there were none representing living women. Mother Goose was represented and Alice in Wonderland and a few nymphs and angels, no living women. And I thought, isn't this strange that we memorialize violence? You know, there's this line from Seneca, vivere militare est, to live is to fight. And that has been the credo really for humanity and power, to live is to fight. And almost all of the statues in that park

and parks all over the world are military, where we honor the soldiers. And I thought, you know, my background being in midwifery, what if there was a statue of a woman, huge, bronze, her legs spread wide, delivering a baby, and it was bloody like those soldiers were bloody. And I could just imagine people thinking, ew, no, that's disgusting. Why? Why do we honor the blood of war and not the blood of birth and the strength of women? Tell me what you pay attention to, and I will tell you who you are. This morning in Central Park, they unveiled the first statue that honored real women. And it was a seven-year fight that women worked really hard together to get this statue of three of the founders of the women's right to vote, the largest nonviolent revolution in this country. And it's there now so that people can walk through the park and go,

who were those three women? What did they do? How did they do it? Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are. I think very often we walk through life, right? Not really focusing on how many of these things enter our consciousness. You walk through the park and you will pass any number of things. You walk into a bookstore, you walk by stores, you see something like thousands of different advertisements or impressions. And then the stories that are told in all forms of media and in books, they leave an imprint. Whether we realize

there is often the superficial story or the superficial experience, and then there's the deeper message, there's the iconography, there's the context that I think our subconscious mind receives, but we don't always consciously perceive. And yet it adds up. It has this cumulative effect. And in this particular case that you're describing, part of that effect is how we each understand power and whether we have it or don't or how it's wielded or what is the appropriate way to wield it. And I love the idea of creating statues

or any other experiences that allow you to just viscerally understand the dynamic and the expression of power differently through a different context and the sort of hyper-masculine violence-oriented way to lead. Yeah, for women and men and everyone, I think if you took a sampling of men and said, do you think that credo, vivere military est, to live is to fight, do you agree with that? And most men would say, please, no. I've been branded by it.

It's hurt me. It's squashed a lot of my ability to be intimate. I'm afraid to be vulnerable. I don't want this anymore. I'm with you. I'm with you. This is why I don't think the book I wrote or so much of the work being done now, Me Too and other feminist movements, they're not about women. They're about humanity. They're about rounding out what it means to be human. Yeah, which is interesting because when we started our conversation, you used the word humankind, which was in my mind as soon as I heard it. I translated that as that is an intentional choice not to say mankind. You know, it is sort of like the broader basket of humankind.

Okay, so let me ask you a question about this. So Cassandra Speaks is a fantastic book. I read it. I loved it. I devoured it. So much of it resonated so deeply. The cover is pink, which on the one hand, I love. I actually love the cover. But I wonder if we're talking about the way that people are gendered and what we're told is

appropriate and non-appropriate. This is a book that I think people who identify as men should read as much, if not more, than people identify as women. And I wonder if that sort of like went through your mind at all when sort of thinking about, okay, so how do we, what's the wrapping that we put on this that tries to draw in as many people as we can? You would have loved being a fly on the wall when I was at HarperCollins back when we were all allowed to meet together, back in... In before times. It was January of 2020 when I'd finished the book and we were in the editing process and designing the cover. And I am so lucky to be with that publisher because they allowed me to have a lot of influence on the cover and things like that. A lot of times authors don't.

So they had brought me a bunch of images for the cover and they were kind of like angry, you know, like raised fist and like feminist classic. And I was like, no, no, absolutely not. This is a book about writing a brave new ending to the fake news from history. All of us, people who identify as all genders, how do we write new endings that are about love and equality and a blossoming of a new kind of culture. And the young woman who was the art director, my editor said, why don't you read a passage from the book right now? And I started reading this passage, which is a letter I had written for real, to a Canadian psychologist, internet phenomenon, Jordan Peterson, who mourns the feminization of our culture, as he calls it, the loss of the male military vivere-est way of seeing the world, you know, that men are built to lead and

women are built to be the kind people who raise the children, basically. And I had written a letter to him about why can't we bring that spirit of kindness into leadership? Why is it that kindness belongs here in the kindergarten room and violence belongs here in leadership? Cannot we bring that spirit of kindness that you value so much in the home out into the world? I started reading that and I looked up and this designer, young woman, was crying. And then we went on to have this conversation about her own Cassandra experience, her own experience on a daily basis at home and at work. She was like, I didn't really know that's what the book was about. And she went back and a few days later came up with this cover of the old statue of Cassandra breaking out of her role. It is the statue of Cassandra for real in this field of electric neon flowers and a

neon pink red behind her. And my first reaction was like, no, no, not pink, not pink. It's too stereotypic, but everyone else loved it. They were like, no, it's bright. It's saying, claim who we are. Claim that vibrant heart and that re-flowering, actually, I really love the cover. And it spoke to me as does the whole book. And then the old cranky copywriter slash person who has been studied in the process of influence was saying, okay, so what I was always taught as a copywriter is that you enter the conversation and the experience that somebody is having in their head, and then you slowly shift the conversation over time, but you meet them where they are, and then you move them to where you want them to be. And then I thought, well, yes, and, but the fundamental idea of this book is that you don't adapt who you are and the way you want to bring yourself and your ideas to the world based on some notion of how somebody else says you're supposed to do it or is correct. So it was a really fascinating inner dialogue for me as I was sort of spinning what I imagined might've been the process behind it.

Yeah. The whole process of writing this book has been a lot of inner dialogue and a lot of outer dialogue with women, women leaders, the amazing women I've gotten to work with through Omega's Women in Power conferences. The last Women in Power conference we held was in the fall of 2019. And one of the speakers was Tarana Burke, the founder of the Me Too movement. And this was as the Me Too movement was really in a pinnacle moment. And I gave the first keynote and it was all about Cassandra because I was in the tail end of writing the book. And there sitting backstage was our current Cassandra,

Tarana Burke, who had been talking about sexual abuse and sexual harassment for 20 years, and no one listened to her. She was a Black woman telling the truth, and no one had been listening to her. And finally, the world was paying attention legally, culturally, sociologically. Me too. It was the movement at that moment. And I was so nervous to be speaking before her. She's a very powerful person and powerful speaker. When I came off stage after giving my speech, she grasped my arm and she said, can I have a copy of that? Can I have that speech? That's everything. That's everything. And that gave me the courage to finish the book, to know that these old stories had relevance to the young new leaders who were pushing us forward. So those are the people I leaned on as I was getting the courage to finish the book and to do, as you say, to claim a way to do power differently and to know that it's our time to do that.

Yeah. Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk.

The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, Charge time and actual results will vary. One of the other interesting conversations that you explore is this sort of dual path of

reclaiming power. You are a lifelong activist. You have been the advocate since you were a little kid. I know this about you. You've always been the one who, you don't ever turn away from something. If you see something is wrong, you speak up and you have your entire life. And it is very often been about, okay, so how do I, if I see injustice, how do I be a part of reclaiming or reorienting around justice? If something's not right, I'm going to speak up and speak truth to power. You make this really fascinating distinction between what you call activism and innervism, and how this sort of like you have to have both of these scripts running in parallel to be really effective at this quest to reimagine power. Tell me more about this. I came up with that word. I made it up.

Maybe other people use it too. I don't know. Innervism. Because as you said, I've always responded to activism as something that lives in me. But even more so, I've been an innervist, meaning I've worked on myself. The know, the philosopher Nietzsche says, be careful when you're fighting monsters that you don't become one. And we all know this, how you get into positions of power and power is seductive and power corrupts. And at Omega, I've had the privilege to meet so many people who work in the consciousness field, who work in peace activism and women's rights and environmental rights. We started doing, a long time ago, free retreats for people working in the activist state. We would bring peace activists and allow them to

do their nonprofit organization meetings for free at Omega and many, many organizations for many different spaces. And I started to notice, wow, some of these peace activists are like the angriest people I've ever met. Some of these women feminists who are talking about doing power differently are just awful, you know, or I likewise, I would notice some of our meditation teachers, or our consciousness work teachers, or our relationship work teachers, like the relationship teacher who was on his fourth marriage, or the monk who was discovered in his room having sex with a student. All of the myriad contradictions that live in the human heart and this tendency we have to claim that we are something, and yet we're really not.

We're talking it, but we're not walking it. And that's very human. We don't have to be perfect, but innervism asks us to look at the parts of ourselves that we're fighting in the world. It's called in Jungian work shadow work. So shadow work is when you are so angry and upset about something and you think to yourself, okay, for a moment here, I'm going to look at how that actually

lives in me. So let's make that real for me, let's say, in the feminist space. I claim I want men to be sensitive. I claim I want men to awaken the feminine in them, just as I am awakening the masculine in me so that we can become just human. But then if my husband isn't strong and isn't the dude saving the day, I shame him. I get mad at him. I want him to be everything. That's unfair. And I think many women, we do that. We're caught in the old story too, where we see men as a certain way and women as a certain way. And we're trapped also, and we're not bringing it home into our personal relationships. And until we can do that, until I can do that, and we all can do that, we're not doing the whole work. The whole work is about making it real in relationship on the smallest level in our own hearts and in our shared experience with other

people. Yeah. It's interesting that you offer that. One of my curiosities is sometimes I wonder whether people orient towards activism as a coping mechanism, partly because of their beliefs and they are fueled by advocacy and a quest for justice. But I wonder sometimes if that can sometimes show up as a coping mechanism or as a mask to let me feel like I am somebody who takes action when you know that there's plenty in our own lives that we need to look into and work on and grapple with. But as long as we feel like we're that person out in the world, making waves and making a difference and pursuing these things, it almost, it gives us enough of that feeling like we are the X person, the good person, the right person, that we kind of feel like maybe we give ourselves a pass on the personal work side.

It's a both and. It's not like I will be an activist when I am a perfectly realized human being with no contradictions in my personality. If we do that, nothing will ever change. On the other hand, look what's happening in our country now. Both sides of this enormous gulf politically actually feel they are right, actually feel they want the best for this country. Yeah, sure, there are some people on both sides who are hateful and want the worst for the other side. But most people, if you stop and ask and get out of the otherizing and the demonizing, I actually did this as an experiment.

I did a TED Talk about it called Take the Other to Lunch, where I started taking people I vehemently disagreed with politically and socially to lunch. If we both agreed at the beginning, we weren't there to change each other's minds. We were there to see the human in the other person. When I did this, a lot of activist friends of mine were very unimpressed. How could you take someone who doesn't believe in global warming, someone who thinks

homosexuality is a sin, someone who thinks women should only be in the house, how could you go to lunch with them? What is the point? And the point to me is to avoid where we've gotten to in this country, where we could go into civil war, where both sides begin to revert to violence because we're not seeing the human in each other. To me, that's what innervism is. Innervism is healing the wounded parts of the self that wants to lash out and scapegoat others. And instead, to be able to live soul to soul with other human beings. Yeah. And part of what you call for building on that is really, you know, what you're really calling for in the book is a revolution, a revolution of the way that we describe, we tell the story of, and then we, I don't even want to use the word wield power because I think this revolution, it was interesting to hear

you also describe it as not just a revolution of structure, but a revolution of values. Yeah. Tell me more about this. Well, it goes back to that quote we talked about earlier, tell me to what you pay attention, and I will tell you who you are. You could say, tell me what you value, and then I'll tell you what your culture will become. So, let's say women had been the storytellers with men. A lot of what women value, whether it's nurture or nature, that will never be proved, whether it's all hormones that make women be a certain way, or the fact that we were reduced to certain roles of mother and housekeeper. It

doesn't matter to me at all anymore, whether it's nature or nurture, because we will not ever solve that riddle, because culture had its way with us already. Done. But for whatever reasons, there are values that live in women right now that we need to pay attention to and move to the front of the priority rulemaking structural changes we're going to make. For example, why don't we have child care? Why isn't child care more important than the military? Why aren't we putting all our money into education and early childhood education so that women who have to work now, It's not even like a couple of women from the suburbs want to work. We have to work. We are working.

Who's taking care of the children? Why isn't that our number one value? And I assure you, if there were more women in the Senate and the House than men, child care would move to the top of our priorities. Why aren't we tending the garden of the earth? Why do most of our dollars go into a militarized nation? Now, of course, there are many women who agree with that, but most women given a chance to lead from our deepest self and allowed to change the structure would, I believe, have some different values that would shift up to the top. And those are values that it feels are sorely needed to be integrated into the fiber of

culture, society, relation, and power, especially at this moment in time. It's a good place for us to come full circle as well. So I've asked you this question once before, but it was a number of years ago. And I'm always curious if the question evolves over time with a guest that I'm fortunate enough to bring back. So as we sit here in this container, a good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? To live a good life is to live in the marriage of the opposites that live within every human being. As we were saying, to be an activist, to be an innervist, to be feminine, to be masculine, to speak, to listen.

It's that constant prayer. To me, I'm always in a state of prayer. May I marry the opposites within me. And so something new and spectacular can blossom, something different. And may humanity always be interested, not in either or, but both and more. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible.

You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com. Or just click the link in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode. And then share, share the love.

If there's something that you've heard in this episode that you would love to turn into a conversation, share it with people and have that conversation. Because when ideas

become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised.

The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die.

Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk.