Know Thyself - E215 - Elizabeth Gilbert: Love Addiction, Telling the Truth & Hearing Your Inner Voice

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

Elizabeth Gilbert joins me for her first public conversation after a six month sabbatical, a stretch where she stopped writing, producing, and planning so she could simply be available to life. Liz is the author of "Eat, Pray, Love", "Big Magic", and her memoir "All the Way to the River". In this conversation she speaks openly about the daily practice of two-way prayer that guides her choices, her recovery from sex and love addiction, and the story of loving her partner Raya through terminal cancer and active drug addiction.What We Dive Into:1. Liz describes feeling trapped many times in her life, most painfully while caring for Raya through cancer and active addiction. Each time, the only way out was the truth she least wanted to tell, and naming where she was lying, hiding, or manipulating is what finally set her free.2. Recovery taught Liz that no partner, payoff, or praise could fill her sense of scarcity around love. Sitting with the part of her that wailed for someone else at three in the morning, and promising to stay anyway, slowly built a secure attachment to herself that no other person could provide.3. Liz no longer believes everyone must create, but she believes everyone is invited. Success can never be promised, yet telling the story within you will change who you are by the end. As AI grows more capable, the lasting reason to make things may be the one our ancestors had: it is pleasing.Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS:Waking Up: Get your 14 day free trial!https://www.wakingup.com/knowthyselfTry LMNT & get a free sample pack https://drinkLMNT.com/KnowThyselfUse code KNOWTHYSELF for up to 43% off sitewidehttps://www.mudwtr.com/knowthyself___________00:00 Intro02:30 The Call to Stop08:30 Listening for a Higher Voice19:25 How to Recognize the Ego26:05 The Public, Private, and Secret Self29:12 Writing From Healed Scars33:43 Love and Secrecy With Raya41:10 Codependency and the Truth That Frees47:06 Generosity With Strings Attached53:43 Searching for Enough Love1:00:42 The Inner Child Left Unchecked1:03:29 Life After Seven Years of Recovery1:11:46 Redefining Creative Living1:19:42 Buried Treasure and Ancestral Joy1:22:44 Ideas as Living Entities1:30:16 Creating Without Assurances1:33:44 The Discipline Behind Inspiration1:38:56 Art Scars and Reclaiming Play1:45:32 Creativity in the Age of AI1:50:43 The Practice of Two-Way Prayer1:55:13 Asking for Our Instructions2:01:26 Five Days in Darkness2:06:21 What It Means to Know Thyself___________✨MORE FROM ELIZABETH GILBERT↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elizabeth_gilbert_writer↳Substack: https://elizabethgilbert.substack.com/↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GilbertLiz↳https://www.elizabethgilbert.com📜MORE FROM KNOW THYSELF↳Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9l↳Apple: https://apple.co/4iATICX↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/↳TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andreduqum↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/knowthyselfbyandreduqum/↳https://knowthyselfpodcast.com/👁️MORE FROM ANDRÉ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@andreduqum↳Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/know-thyself-podcast↳Book recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list

We all start with this beautiful innocence and these beautiful unmet needs, but they can make us into really dangerous people who hurt people. Sex and love addiction, which has done me in so many times. My will was like, I want this person at any cost. And God's like, okay, at any cost? Here comes the cost. So what happened with you and Rea? We were secretly in love with each other,

but she was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer and given six months to live. And so she got addicted to cocaine. But God's got jokes. She lived actually for 18 months. And then now you're a hospice patient who's also a drug addict. And then she died.

She was doing her drug, but she was my drug. There's no way out. It turns out there always is, and that is to tell the truth. For me, that's what it means, know thyself. I will never abandon you. I will never turn my back on you. You excavate yourself.

You find a lot in there. You find a lot of darkness, but you find a lot of light, too. What if somebody told you? You're not a good singer? This person is a good dancer, you're not. This one is the writer, you're not. Creativity is taken from you.

And for some people, that's the end of the story. I can absolutely promise you that if you sit down and tell that story that is within you, you will be a different person. Don't you kind of want to know who you'll be if you actually do that thing? And if somebody wanted to do it tomorrow morning, what would they do? Oh, well, yeah, you got to. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast.

Our guest today is one of the world's most decorated authors. most notably, eat pray love, big magic, her memoir all the way to the river, amongst many others. She is somebody that is incredibly inspiring to me, the way that she lives her life courageously, authentically, shares how to unleash your creativity, and it's been a long time coming. I'm so excited to have you. Liz Gilbert, thank you for being here. Hi, I'm so happy to be here. We did it. We did it.

Yeah. We made this occur. Yes. Or it didn't stop it from occurring. I'm honored that I'm one of your first back off of your sabbatical that you're just coming off of. Yeah, actually, this is the first thing I've done public facing in six months. After the first time in my life I've ever dropped working and talking and producing and even creating. So I don't know if I remember how to do this.

We might just have to have a normal human conversation. We can always just, yeah, let's just plan on that. What was the epitist for the sabbatical? Oh, well, let's just get right into it. I take my direction from a higher power who I call God. I do that every day in this practice that I've done for years that's called two-way prayer, where I ask on the page, like first thing in the morning, what do you want me to do and who do you want me to be today and where?

do you want me to go? And then I just write the answer and then that's what I do. And that's been like that for quite a while now. And about two years ago, that voice started saying, we have to plan for you to stop. You've been going really hard forever. And you've never stopped and you've never paused. And if you don't stop, something's going to stop you. And you won't like how that feels. let's orchestrate that. And it's going to take a minute to plan because, you know, like a life is sort of like a, it's like an aircraft carrier. It's like moving it, this trajectory. You can't just stop it on a dime. Like you've got to sort of slow it down. So I spent a year and a half, that voice told me to set the dates from the beginning of March till the beginning of September of this year and just start telling everybody in my life, I'm out. Like don't plan anything. Don't count on me for anything. thing. And I've been enforcing it with just ferociously because things arise that are really tempting and, um, or that other people really want me to do. And I've just been really firm like, absolutely not. Um, and, and also part of the instruction for that sabbatical was, uh, and I think

this is interesting because when I told people I was on sabbatical, the first question everybody asked me was what, what are you going to do? And that's the culture that we live in and the times that we live in. and the whole point of a sabbatical is that you don't do anything. And a friend of mine was like, you're never going to be able to do that. You're going to come out with a novel written by the end of it. But in fact, I've disciplined myself to not create and to not produce and to not generate anything, but to just go every day where the day took me. And no traveling either, no big adventures, no learning how to master another language,

no getting in the best shape of your life. Like all of those things that we would fill if you were given a vacuum. typically we would fill it with that. So I've been sleeping in, walking my dog a lot, going to do whatever my friends want to do on any given day, driving people to the airport because I have time, just being available to life. And it's been incredible.

And as reluctant as I am to come out of it, it's nice to be here today talking to you. But it's a little hard to think about rejoining the world of any kind of purpose. after this. It's been really nice. Hopefully this is a smooth entry point. This is a good one. I can tell this isn't going to be too jarring. Yeah, we'll keep a warm, inviting entrance back into the dizzy heights of the social space. I've taken very short stints like that. I have friends that have taken longer ones and have heard and felt that it's surprisingly hard to do nothing. Was that, did that come up for you? Was it challenging? Yeah, I kind of felt like I went through

withdrawal for the first month. I felt depressed. and scared. I felt scared. Like, that was the main thing that I felt was fear. And that's such a good indication that the way I had been living had some sort of manic addictive quality to it, that if it's taken away, it's frightening. I felt purpose anxiety. I felt relevance anxiety. Am I going to still, will people forget that I exist if I'm not out there? they're beating down their doors telling them that I matter. You know, like if I say no, I mean, you may know this feeling too. If I say no to something, will that be the last opportunity that that thing ever exists?

Will people be offended? What am I going to do? Like literally, what am I going to do with my days? And then I kind of eased into it and I learned how to do some things that I didn't know how to do. for instance, I now know how to sleep in. I grew up on a farm and I grew up in a really high performance family and in a really high performance culture. And I have typically woken up every day at 4.30 or 5 o'clock in the morning like I got shot out of a can and already feeling like I was behind. And so now I'm sleeping until like 10 o'clock in the morning. I'm like, what? Half the day is gone.

and all the important stuff has been done, but it's been really restful. I ended up getting a lot of healing from some physical stuff I had going on. Yeah. Wow. And I didn't write, I didn't create, I didn't generate,

and the world didn't fall off its axis, and birds didn't drop dead out of the skies, and rivers didn't run backwards, and I think I need more of this. I think so many people can relate with that bug we have in our head that ties our worth with continual improvement and performance. It's like we're in this cog and who are we if we're not outputting something of externally verifiable, measurable value in the marketplace, you know?

And if you do stop, you have to stop in order to improve yourself in some way. So go learn how to be a better meditator or, you know, like, yeah, or like train for a triathlon. But what if you don't have to do that? Yeah, if you don't have a project, then you become the project. I'm curious about the texture of that voice and that practice that you feel like you get guidance from, that you call God, that we all have different names for. That has a bigger intelligence that we can't always track in the moment of where we're being guided. It feels like for me, as I read your work and I look more into your story, you've had these various moments where you've made a practice of creating space to hear. hear something bigger than your own sort of ego comparative of what you want, but like what does

kind of life want of you? Yeah. What have you learned about what happens when you listen to that voice years down the road? The more I, and I want to be careful of my language here, I also really want to be careful about what I mean and don't mean when I say God, because that is a word that is very traumatizing for some people, especially people who grew up in high demand religions that they maybe barely made it out of with their lives or who experienced abuse or were abused by that word or threatened by that word. So I always want to say, like, if you don't believe in God, whatever God you don't believe in, I also don't believe in that God, so we're good. And I'm good with whatever God you do believe in. But I don't know what else to call.

it. And that word doesn't feel traumatizing for me. That word feels warm and nourishing and loving and present for me. And it isn't any measure in any way the God that I was taught about when I was a kid. It's much more amusing and amused, allowing. Like, I don't have a commanding God. I have a God who lets me do whatever I want off into my own peril. It's like, oh, you want to do that? Okay, you can do that. Let's see how that goes. And most of my life has been like, what happens if I stick this fork in the outlet? And God's like, try it, you know? See what happens when you put your fork in that outlet.

Like whatever that outlet might be or whatever the fork may be. And so I don't have a punishing, commanding, forbidding God. I have a God who wants me to have every kind of experience, but who also doesn't want me to suffer and has direction for me to minimize suffering. And I find that the more I'm in alignment with that guidance, the more I don't do what I'm, it's suggested that I not do, and the more I do do do do, the suffering drops away, the anxiety drops away, the neurosis drops away,

and the terrible consequences drop away. So it's almost like, I think of this God that I listen to is card about this lantern holder, who's just sort of one step ahead of me saying, I would suggest that you put your foot here, and I would suggest that you put your foot there, and I would suggest that you, I would suggest you don't go in that direction. I would suggest you go a little more in this direction.

And one of the hardest things for me to put down, as I was getting sober and learning how to trust that voice more, was, it's funny, you made a psilocybum joke when we came in, like, it was ayahuasca and mushrooms, you know, all psychedelics. I love that shit. And I was like, surely I don't have to put this down, you know, when I get sober. And I would negotiate with that voice.

And that voice said, no, you don't have to. You can do whatever you want. I've always let you do whatever you want. But you're asking me what's going to be best for you. And my suggestion, loving you and knowing you, is that you see what happens if you don't alter yourself at all. And just come with me and let's do life with no. with no alteration to it.

I want you to learn how to be here in this reality in this video game rather than constantly trying to get out of it. But you can do it, but you don't have to listen to me. And I know well enough to know, it's not going to go well for me

if I don't listen to that. There's some reason that that voice is saying, maybe don't do that. And so the more the more that I am in alignment, like other things drop, you know, like, anxiety, other anxieties that I thought I would carry forever drop, shame that I thought I would carry forever drops, dependencies that I thought I would never be able to get rid of

are suddenly, like, taken. And the path just gets lighter and lighter and lighter. So, yeah, there's no reason to not go that way that I can see. How does it show up for you? I know you obviously have a devotional kind of writing practice. Does it appear to you in the same way your own voice in your head appears to you? It's filtered through my brain, but it's not my voice. And I think interestingly and tellingly, I would not be able to even describe what that voice is. I just know that it's God. You know, like be still and know that I am God.

Like I just, it's so obviously is. And what I think is interesting is that I've loved God for a long time and I've believed in God for a long time. I think I always did, even growing up in a family that didn't. But I never trusted God. I always felt like I was on my own here in the universe. And now there's this like deeper trust. but the voice is it's just for me

you know it's just for me and I think I can tell that it is that and not my will because of the instant release of anxiety it's like oh we're home you know literally like oh thank God okay I don't have to

I don't have to know what to do I don't have to plan I don't have to strategize I don't have to hustle. I don't have to be vigilant. I'm good. I'm just, I call it the warm vanilla-pudding hum of well-being. No big sharp highs.

I can't do highs anymore because I can't take the calmedowns anymore. So no big sharp highs, no big huge dips, just like... Warm vanilla. Warm vanilla pudding in the belly. It's good. It's just like, and that's like I just want to... I always think of Keith Rich. saying, like, you can keep the rock, I'll take the roll, you know?

Like, that's sort of how I feel like, I don't want the rock anymore. She's like, I'm in the role, I'm in the role. And I think that's the only way that it can work for me, that I can be in the role. Because my mind will want to rock out. But it doesn't end well when it does. So it's just a notebook. It's just a notebook. But I used to think that God was like unreachable and unknowable.

You know, just, I believed in the concept of God, and I love the concept of God, you could never know God. And God's like, I'm literally right here. Like, nothing is more knowable than me. Ask me anything. You know, like, let's talk. Like, there's no barrier here. We're good. Like, I'm not abstract and I'm not mysterious.

I'm very clear. And I'm very straightforward. All you have to do is ask with an open mind and I'll tell you. And it's like, oh, I thought you were a mystery. God's like, no, you're a mystery to yourself. I'm the least mysterious thing in the entire universe. You make mystery where there isn't any. You know, that's what my ego does.

What's been your journey from that voice, strengthening that connection to hearing that in a moment of practice to seeing that throughout your day and all your relationships as opposed to a singular practice in the morning? Has that been an evolution? What does that look like? Yeah, it's been an evolution to where more, it's more, I can access that. I can just do like a little spot check and be like, yes, no, maybe.

Red light, green light, yellow light. And even, I don't know, like even an example, I was my dog, I have a little dog who were very bonded and she hardly ever has to be in her leash. She's always just right at my feet. And I, the other day was walking and lost her, which is very rare. And it was only for five or ten minutes, but, you know, instant panic, coyotes, bears, dog nappers, you know, trap, car accident. Like where, you know, and I just did a little, and God's like, she's fine. You know, she's fine.

She's okay. She's coming back. Just give her a minute, you know, and she came back. And so it lowered my anxiety. It's like, really? Yeah, she's okay. So there's, or if like I'm in a car with somebody who's driving dangerously, I'm like, are we good? I was like, yeah, you're all right.

You're right. They're going a little fast, but they're all right. And then other times it'll be like, no. I was kayaking with a friend of mine in Panama who's not a very strong swimmer and we were out on open water and it was really beautiful. And all of a sudden that voice just said, turn around now. that's enough. You've come out, you know, you're deep enough out in the water, go back. And I don't even need to know or want to know what would have happened had I continued, but I trust, I'm like, we're going back now. Why? Because we are. Because that's enough.

Enough side of me. Yeah, because we are. Let's go. Wrap it up. So, yeah, it's just, and it's not me making, you know, I just think so much in my life. I was so, anxious. As a child, I used to, when I got a wish, you know, on a birthday wish or something, I always had the same wish, which I think is really disturbing for a seven or eight year old to have this wish, but it just shows how much anxiety I was living in, but the wish was I wish I always knew what to do. Because the world felt really, really scary, and it felt imperative in my home and in the world that I never make a misstep. And I feel like in a way that, that childhood prayer has been answered. But I'm not the one who has to know. Just next right step here, next right step here, you're good. Over the years of being able to develop that trust and that

capacity to listen, I think it's inspiring because a lot of people, myself and I'm sure everyone who's listening, urance for that level of attunement and guidance and what feels like reassurance. and at times when checking in internally I think we have many patterns and fears that can masquerade as a voice or reason that we can start to delineate the texture and the way that you express that God or this intelligence or life or love

it feels like inherently kind reassuring what other things have you noticed are like singularly that thing not grandiose. So I can know my ego by a couple tells, and one is grandiosity. And one is self-hatred, which is another kind of grandiosity, weirdly. And the narcissism of despair, you know, like I'm uniquely fucked. In the rooms of recovery, they call it terminally unique.

But it's like, I am particularly and especially doomed, you know, Like, my ego wants to be important in any way. If it can be important by being the most fucked up one, it'll take that, you know? It's a great dating profile description. Uniquely fucked. You seem fun. We should hang out. Are you also uniquely terminally fucked?

You know, and I'm not, like, I love in the rooms of recovery. They say you're just another bozo on the bus. Like I am just another bozo on the bus. And also very special and precious. But, like, not uniquely fucked and not uniquely important. either, you know, and then control. Like, I think in order for me to deepen that trust, there's something that God asks me in return, which is to drop control. I say that as if it's easy, especially as somebody who's always been very controlling, because that also comes out

of fear, obviously. But, like, I'll give an example. When I came into, and I write about this in my book, about being, I identify as a sex and love addict. The book is about that. It's about addiction of all kinds, but it's especially about, in my case, intimacy addiction and sex and love addiction, which has done me in so many times because my will was like, I want this person at any cost. And God's like, okay, at any cost. Here comes the cost, you know, here it is. And when I first came into the rooms of recovery, I was negotiating with God and saying, like, if I enter this program and I do all the steps and I get a sponsor and I do the the work perfectly, will you give me one more great love story in my life? And the answer came very clearly, I have no such promise for you. Like, I also don't negotiate. That's another way that I know. Yeah, like, I also know it to be God because God doesn't need to negotiate. And God's like, I don't work, I don't like broker deals, you know. And I don't make you assurances of what the few will hold, I'm just asking you if you'd like to come with me. And will you come with me

with no need for any assurances? And when you come to me, will you come to me not holding anything behind your back? Like any of your old methods of control, any of your old methods of manipulation, any of your old methods of survival, any of your old wishes that you've got hidden from me? Like, how about just open-handed, put everything on the divine fire and walk, and just walk toward me and don't bring anything with you. And will you still do this program with that same level of commitment if I don't promise you another great love story? And search yourself for the answer because if the answer is no, don't bother doing the program and don't bother. Let's not, why are you even doing this? You know? And so I think that the God that I know in love often asks me to put

things down as much as to come. It's like drop that, drop that, put that down, put that ambition down, drop this outcome. And that's also how I recognize it. Because my ego won't let go of anything. I mean, my ego won't let go of anything unless it has claw marks in it from how hard I've been holding on to it. Right. So like, so a voice that says to me, put that idea down, put that dream down, put that ambition down, put that grandiosity down, put that self-hatred down, put that wish down could only be a higher intelligence than mine. So I think I recognize it by that as well. It's kind of the opposite of manifesting. Yeah. Yeah, because you have an agenda. It's kind of the opposite of a vision board. It's like, put the vision board down. Put the manifestation down.

Yeah. Put the agenda down. Put the dream away. I mean, this is so hard in this culture to say let go of the dream. But there's a dream that I dream bigger than any dream I've ever had, which is serenity. and I can't have the dream and have an attachment to the dream and also have any serenity. So I kind of have to let the dream go. It's powerful because I feel like so many things we declare that we want, things that we give with subtle expectations or expecting of a return, quote unquote, surrender, yet still not. Right.

You know, there's still an expectation of an outcome. And I think the more of God to read through your life story, through your journey of love and addiction, and the pursuit, which is of many addicts at different points, of finding that sense of peace and solace and serenity through the faulty means of a never-ending perpetual stream of stimulus from the external, right? Right. in some form, coming to then go into recovery. And I can't but help think, because there's so much I want to dive into it. It's so beautiful to read all the way to the river. And the amazingly courageous vulnerable shares throughout, I'm like, wow, this girl's, she's no joke. She's willing to lay it all out there.

I think that's so scary for us to even be seen a little bit, let it, let alone to like lay out your secret self, so to speak. Could you share a bit of that? Is it Marquez's kind of framework of the three selves? Yeah, Garcia-Marquez said that every person has three selves, a public self, a private self and a secret self. And I remember sharing that with a really wise friend of mine years ago who said, oh yeah, you have to have a secret self. Because if for most of the people, if their secret self came out, it would destroy not only their public life, but their private life. Private life meaning like the intimates around you. Like if people really know what you were doing, you know? Like if everyone knew what everyone was really doing, like the threat

to yourself would be so extreme, which is how we become secret keepers. And often keep secrets even from ourselves. Like there's stuff, you know, there's engines running in my ego that are, you know, behind doors that I can't even see, like, that are governing me that I can't even see what I'm up to. And it's not easy to work around all of that. But, yeah, it's, it didn't seem like there would be much of a point in writing this book if I didn't lay out the secret self.

especially because I'm also writing about my relationship with my partner, Raya, and I'm writing about her drug addiction, which was a very obvious, like drug addiction and alcoholism and substance abuse can become a really obvious iteration of the damage that's happening inside of our secret selves. And I wrote about the degradation of her drug abuse and what I witnessed in that when I went through that with her. but I have my own way of medicating my misery and it's not quite as obvious as like heroin and cocaine but it's it can be just as deadly and that is my desperate need for somebody to love me at any cost including somebody who's in drug addiction and can't even take care of themselves

and I'm expecting that person to somehow be my salvation. I feel like I got off your question a little bit, but what's the point really? And there's a, I wish I could remember who it was. Some memoirists said she got accused once of oversharing, and she was like, well, what do you want in your memoirist and undersherer? The whole point is that. And also, the God of my understanding said, do it. Like, tell the story, tell the whole story. don't tell part of the story.

Don't do any image management in this book because it won't be of any service to anybody. And Rayo was so good. My partner was so great at being transparent and vulnerable when she was sober. And I took inspiration from her as well. She could be such an incredibly open book. And I think she would have wanted the book

to be as honest as it is. I know she would have. I think we can all relate to that never-ending. image management, which is perpetually exhausting. Yeah. So exhausting. It's exhausting. Do you see it as a goal of sorts to align those three selves?

Like the public, private secret, do you think that they should be different? Like, I'm curious what the voice of GOD, notorious GOD. Bernie Wilson says that. It's so good. would say there.

Well, there's such a, you have the right to privacy, you know, and there are, I'm going to quote, I think my friend Cheryl Strait here who said that when you're writing a book, you should write from your healed scars, not from your open ones. And so by the time I sat down to write this, I was writing from a place of healed scars. If I had written this book immediately after Rea died, that would have been writing from an open wound. And if I had written this book when I was six months sober, that would have been writing from an open wound. But to write it five years sober, to write it seven years after Raya died, there was enough time and enough processing. Enough of the processing of my secrets in a safe container, which is what 12-step provided for me.

And the 12 steps themselves have that baked in where it's like you're going to do a complete and fearless moral inventory. You're going to go through your past with a fine tooth comb and find every instance where you ever harmed anybody and find those people and make amends to them. You're going to, you're going to look for every place that you're being selfish and controlling and self-centered. You're going to stop lying. You're going to, like, all of these things are like the ongoing work of being sober, being what Bill W., the founder of A.A., called emotionally sober, which is very different from just not using anymore. Like, emotional sobriety is about taking that complete accountability for yourself every single day. And I remember telling a friend of mine that I was doing that, that I was in step four and five, which is, for me, took over a year of really excavating, like, where was I harmful? where did I lie? Where was I self-centered? Where was I manipulative? Where did I have a hidden motive?

Who have I hurt? And I remember she just said, I'm so glad I don't have to do that. And my feeling was like, I'm so grateful I get to do this. Because this stuff has been governing my behavior for the last 50 years and like hurting me and hurting other people. And I don't want to keep doing this. Like I don't want to, I want to break the patterning of how I have been. I don't want to operate the way I've used to operate. And at the time that I was doing that, if you had told me someday you're going to write a memoir where you're going to talk about this process, I would have been like, you must be smoking, roofing, tar.

There is no way. I would want anybody to know any of these things about me. But once that was done, and the story of Reya was still lingering in my mind, then that's when my higher power was like, and now I want you to talk about this publicly. but not while you're doing it. You know, like, give yourself some space in there to work that stuff out. Hey, everyone. I wanted to share a new partner and resource that I love, and I'm so stoked to be partnering with.

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codependency in the many different behavioral conversations relationally. Could you, and I know it's a long journey and story, but explain what happened what happened with you and Reya? Uh-huh. So Reya Elias was a writer, an artist, a filmmaker, a hairdresser. I met her in the year 2000, which is so long ago now.

And feels like a different country. Like the world feels like a different place than it did then. And I was in my first marriage when I met her. Somebody sent me to her for a hair intervention. You wouldn't know it. Now I've got a buzzed head, but I used to have really difficult hair. And now I have really easy hair. And she fixed it.

And we became at first just hairdresser and client. There's also a weird intimacy in that relationship. Oh, for sure. It's like a confessional booth. Like you tell things to the person doing your hair that you might not tell to. It's like a bartender or a cab driver. Like it's a safe person to kind of talk to. And she was very good at that kind of intimacy.

So we became closer over the years. and then we became social friends, and then we became very good friends, and then we became best friends, and then we became something, there was a transition into something that just now I see it as love mixed with dependency, but she became the foremost person in my life.

And at that point, I was in my second marriage. This is all over the course of like 13, 14 years. And that became very inconvenient, because I loved and still love the man that I was married to very dearly. But yet Raya was the person who I relied on for everything. And we fell in love with each other for some reasons that were very healthy and some that weren't. And I think that's a difficult thing to parse through, and you certainly can't know it in the moment. I fell in love with her strength.

She was formidable and fearless. I mean, she really genuinely presented as somebody who was fearless. I can be very frightened of people. People, to me, are kind of terrifying and understandably so. And I always walked into every room feeling like I have to manage, I have to like manipulate and manage everybody in the room. And she just walked into the room and owned the room and would say the thing out loud that nobody else had the courage to say and just felt like she could handle people

in a way that made her feel like a very safe. attachment to me. And when I was around her, I felt a level of safety that I had never experienced in my life and could not generate within myself. And so, of course, I became dependent on her because she was the only person who could bring me the vanilla pudding hum of well-being just by walking into the room. And she became dependent on me in other ways. There are ways that I'm extremely courageous that she never had courage in. I'm very creatively brave. I will do anything in creativity. I'll write anything, I'll sing anything, I'll create anything, I'll draw anything, I'll put it out in the world, I don't care. And she had a lot of hangups around creativity.

So I became kind of her creative, like doula, and she became my interpersonal doula. And when we were firing on all cylinders, it was an incredible, beautiful partnership of friendship. But there were secrets in it. We were secretly in love with each other, and nobody was saying that. I didn't want to leave my marriage. She didn't want to blow it up. My husband knew, and he didn't want to say anything. There was all this stuff that nobody was talking about. And, you know, the universe hates secrets. It just hates them.

And eventually they all come out. And so what happened was that she was diagnosed with terminal, pancreatic, and liver cancer and given six months to live. And when that diagnosis arrived, when that day arrived, the bottom fell out of all of our worlds, my husband, her, mine. And it was no longer possible for me to, pretend that I didn't love her the way I loved her. And the idea, I had a sort of vision of her dying and never, her never knowing what she was to me and me sitting at her bedside, watching her

go and never having said, I love you in what I meant by I loved you. And that felt so hideous and wrong that I had to speak the secret life into my private life and then into my public life and say I'm leaving this marriage to be with my best friend, not as her best friend, but as her partner for whatever time she has left. And for a little while, we had an amazing run of it. You know, we were so in love and we had kept that secret for so long and now we got to be in love publicly and privately with each other. And it was amazing. And also the kind of glamour of death, you know, the fact that we knew we had such a short time together just heightened everything and made everything sexier and more romantic and more wild and more free. And all constraint was

lost because it's like, why bother holding back on anything if you're only going to be here for six months? Yeah, most people romanticize. If you have a year left, what would you do? We got to have it. We were told we had six months. And we were like, bucket list galore, like everything, like no limits on anything. Um, including. including the idea that she had at some point to reintroduce cocaine back into her life as somebody who had been an addict in recovery. And I got to say at the time myself and everyone around her was like, why not? You know, like, why not? But God's got jokes.

She lived actually for 18 months. And it's one thing to go on a little cocaine bender when you think you only have a month to live. It's another thing to become re-addicted to the drug that destroy you and then not die. And then now you're a hospice patient who's also a drug addict. And that became where we went to. And she went to descend it to the lowest version of herself, which was like a really manipulative, cruel user. And I went to the lowest version of myself, which is selfless in the worst possible way,

not selfless in the way of generosity, but selfless in the way of I have no self. And I only live to serve you, the user. in whatever you need, and I will let you violate me in any way, financially, emotionally, spiritually. And I will become somebody just walking around with a begging bowl, hoping that you will give me some affirmation of myself so that I can feel that I exist. And so we both got to see each other at our absolute most degraded. And it was grim. It was really, really grim. And then she died.

and then I had to process what was that that just happened who was that? Was that the most trustworthy person I ever knew who was the person I knew for 17 years to be an anchor and a rock or was that was I just played so hard

and that became the beginning of my recovery? What was it like on the journey from saying let's send it for six months to then see the addiction come in and change the person you loved to an extreme where you don't like you you know you love them but you no longer like the person at certain points and yeah and they're about to die and there's that emmeshment and all like all that what happened in that process of how you related and how that changed it was hell um you know and then i think a definition that i would think of as a good definition from

hell is endless suffering that you can't get out of. You know, I mean, that's people who promise hell to you are promising that. You know, there's going to be a place of endless suffering that you can't get out of, which for a lot of people is actually what this realm feels like. And for a lot of my life, that's what this realm has felt like. So we went to hell. And I was so trapped. I felt so trapped because I couldn't do an intervention.

I couldn't say if you keep doing these drugs, you're going to die. She was hard to die. She had no reason to stop. And nobody, I mean, she was a bull when it came to, like, she was titanium when it came to being a drug user. I mean, she was a low bottom addict. So, like, we're talking thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars of cocaine and everything else. and all of the manipulations that go along with that. And how could I say no to funding that

when she was saying this is the only thing, the way that I cannot experience pain, which I believe was actually what she was experiencing, that it was the only way to not experience pain. She was being cruel to me and vicious and dark, She wasn't sleeping. That's the thing cocaine does. So she was hallucinating. She was still thought she was the baddest ass bitch in the entire world. So she's like completely helpless and vulnerable and a drug addict but still like wants to control the world. And I still want that person

to complete me. Like that person is supposed to look at me the way she used to, say the things she used to say, promise me and assure me, soothe my anxiety, sedate me, make me feel all the things that she used to be able to make me feel. And because of the fact that she couldn't do that anymore, I came to hate her during that time. Because she was my drug. She was doing her drug, but she was my drug. So when she started doing her drug, my drug was ripped away. And I behaved the way addicts do when you take their drug away. Like I went, like ugly, like ugly and cruel and resentful.

I mean, it's a nightmare. Co-dependency is awful. It's just absolutely awful. And I couldn't see any way out. And I've had this experience a number of times in my life where any time I have ever felt trapped and caged in hell, and I've felt that a number of times in my life, where I'm like, there's no way out,

there's no way out, there's no way out. I've gotten myself ammeshed in something and there's no way out. It turns out there always is and it's always the same way and it's always the last thing I want to do. And that is to tell the truth. It's always the key out of hell. It's always the key out of hell. It's like there's a truth I'm not telling. And the truth that I wasn't telling was I can't do this. Like I can't do this. I don't want to do this. I have to stop. I can't be living with this active drug addict. It's killing me. And I was afraid that if I told that truth that I would die, that she would die, that, you know, it's horrible.

But, I mean, every single time I've ever felt trapped, God's like, you know what you need to do. Like, you know what you need to do. You know there's only one pathway out of hell and it's honesty. Where are you lying? Where are you hiding and where are you manipulating? and what are you willing to give up in order to tell that truth and get free? So the truth will set you free.

It just has its way with you first. And I'm always like, not that. It's like Dorothy, you know, in the Wizard of Oz where they're like, you just have to get the shoes from the witch. It's like, not the shoes from the wit, not the broom, you know, like, not the broom, like not that, not my biggest nightmare. Yeah. But that's how it works for some reason in this realm.

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You don't even have to send the product back. So just go to drinklmn-tt.com slash know-liself to try it out. links down in the description. I hope you enjoy. Back to the show. The way that you describe your increasing amount of awareness into this dichotomy, as you kind of refer to it as a divine crowbar in some context, you know, where life will continue to repeat these experiences to show you where you're still stuck, where you're not free, where you're putting outsourcing your love, all of those things. And I know it's been an arc, even with eat, pray, love, like you had a, or, you had a, or, an awareness of this within yourself.

Yeah. And even after selling 25 plus million copies, which there's a lot of books, it's a lot of books. And there's also a lot of money. And I heard, I read that in 2008, you would like go around and just offer shopkeepers

and small businesses checks. Like, can I write you a check for, can I give you money? And from the outside in, that looks like incredibly generous. and I'm sure was well received and really appreciated. But talk to me about that place, that bitter aftertaste of giving from a sense of lack or giving from a sense of expectation.

Well, yeah. It's so hard. Because like you said, it looks like generosity. And I am generous. And I like being generous. And it feels good to be generous. And a lot of times I don't know I had an expectation until that expectation wasn't met. And then I find out in the aftermath like, oh, I did have an X. I did have a string attached.

I just didn't know I did because I thought it was so obvious. I thought it was so obvious that you wouldn't do that thing that you just did, you know, like, or that you would take that money that I gave you and you would obviously do this with it, right? Like, obviously you would use it to better your life. You would obviously use it to get well. You would obviously spend it on your kids and not on a new car. You would obviously like, you know, like clearly that's what you would do, you know. So the resentment is the bitter taste, the bitter after taste. So I can tell when I'm in resentment that I've overgiven, that I said yes when I meant no, or that there's an expectation that I'm hiding from myself about what I'm supposed to get and

return for what I gave. And typically, I mean, I could, for me, it's just, I'm a love addict, so it's like you're supposed to love me. It was actually really funny when I was on that bender giving money away like crazy in 2008, because that's when all the big checks came from E. Pray, Love, and it, like, blew my circuitry. I never expected to have that kind of money, and I didn't know what to do it. I didn't think I was worthy of it. And it seemed like a great idea to just give it to everybody. So I just gave it to everybody. And some of those people, it really did help. And some of those stories were really good. and some of those people, it just enabled, and a lot of those relationships it destroyed,

and we created dependency modes where then they came back for more and more and more and more and more, and then I had to cut them off, and now they hate me and I hate them. Like there was all sorts of stuff, not every case, but it's shown light in dysfunction in various different ways. But there was a woman in my town

who owned a coffee shop, and I heard that she had started her coffee shop on credit card debt. And I was like, oh, no, that's terrible. Let me go pay off her credit cards. And then she can just pay me off with no interest because she's like taking out basically loans at 23% to open up a coffee shop. That's crazy. And she's a single person and like, I don't like that for her.

And so I went to her, I mean, I barely even knew her. I went to her and talked to her and I'm like, I'd like to give you, you know, $20,000 to help you pay off your credit cards. And you can, starting next year, let's take a year off. And then you can just pay me back on a schedule and no interest. And it'll save you a lot of money and it'll feel good for me because I don't like knowing that you're, you know, in this situation. And she was like, okay, thanks. And I didn't get the payoff of her like, oh my God, you saved my life.

Oh my God, you're amazing. She just said, okay, thanks. And I'm like, okay. That's kind of wild. And I like, she was so incredible. And I wrote her a check for $20,000 and gave it to her. She's like, thank you. I appreciate that.

And I walked out with no payoff. Like, I didn't get high off being the one who was the savior, right? So I walked to me. I'm like, that feels weird. And I don't know why that feels weird. Then she very steadily paid me back. And then, like, no drama, no anything. And then after a couple years, I had enough people who owed me money that I hated the feeling.

So I went around town and I just said, forget about all those loans I gave you guys. Just like, don't pay me back. Just keep it. Like, we're good. And then I went to her shop and I'm like, forget about that loan. Just like, you can keep it. It's no big deal.

Don't worry about it. And she's like, okay, thanks. And once again, I didn't get that. She didn't, you know, and then I like ordered a coffee and she's like, that's $3.50. And I was like, you're incredible. Like, you are not, you will not give me anything. Like, you are not working for me.

energetically, you know what I mean? Like, you just are in your own vibe. And like, and that's when I saw how much I was relying on the reaction that people gave me of being a savior to get a sense of heightened meaning. And that's why now I'm very, I have to be really, really, really careful, like to still give, but to, like, I think it's healthier for me to give in boring ways, like to give to an organization where they're like, send me a form letter. They're like, thanks for helping out. Rather than me getting fond over, which is a way of feeding the vacancy within me, yeah, I don't get the payoff anymore. So do you still want to give even if you don't get the payoff? Or did you just want the payoff?

You know, it's like how honest are you being here about what you're expecting to get out of this? She didn't even give me a hug. You have $20,000. But I still think of her as this kind of saint in my life because she just showed. up to reflect back to me like this is what you think you need and this is what I'm not going to give you. Yeah. Do you still want to give me anything? And it's like, well, this is a very interesting exchange. Yeah. No, that's wild for many reasons. Yeah, she was a great, a great master. I love that you have that perspective. And it was a big mirror, right? So what, that vacancy that you

described. What is it specifically about being Lizzie that you felt like in this earth school you needed to learn a lesson around? I'm sure you spent time thinking about this. Like, what is it specifically about your wiring or your makeup that you needed to learn lessons in this particular way, if that makes sense? Yeah, I think I showed up for this round of curriculum to do a deep investigation into where love comes from and where it's dangerous to seek it and what it is and what it isn't. And these are not easy lessons. And I don't know whether it's karma or genetics or childhood trauma or some mysterious combination of all of them. But my thing has always been there is not enough love for me in this world. This is a, this is a, this was a loveless

place. I, and the feeling I also always felt like I came from a place where there was infinite love, and this is fucked up here. Like, this isn't, there's a real shortage of it here. And, and I got to go get whatever there is of it by any means necessary. And, and as much of it as I can get is still never going to be enough. And that's the addict brain. Like, there's not enough. There wasn't enough cocaine in the world for Raya. There wasn't enough love in the world for me. And I know that because I've been loved and I've been loved unconditionally. There have been people in my life who have loved me a great deal. And it does not fill that vacancy. It's not enough. It's not enough. So where do I get it?

Like, where do I get it if I can't extract it from others? And also, even people who have loved me and who have loved me well and deeply and tenderly, like, sometimes they have to, like, get up and make a sandwich, you know? Like, sometimes they have to go to work. It cannot be their full-time job. Even somebody who might say that they would want it to be their full-time job, and I would be very suspicious now of anybody who said that they wanted, their full-time job to be to love me. That's a person who's not well. But they can't,

even if they want to. They can't. And when I came into the rooms of recovery and was told that the program that I was in for sex and love addiction, that the solution is that you must love yourself, I was so pissed off. I was like, I don't, I don't want that to be the answer. You know, like I want you to teach me how to be better at getting love from other people. I don't want the answer. Why does the answer always have to be that you have to source it from within? And as somebody who grew up in a household where, and I think my mother would not mind me sharing this, because I think she believed to this day that this was the way to parent and is proud of it,

but like, you're on your own was kind of her parenting motto. Like, two have been told as a very early child, like, you're on your own. like you figure it out. And then to be told as a suffering adult, you're on your own, you figure it out. And it's of course not true that I am on my own. Like I have resources in people who want to help me and I have resources in a God

that is actually the unblinking eye of that love. And but I didn't want that to be the answer either. You know, I'm like, don't have it just be God. I don't want to be loved just by God and just by me. You know, and there were nights when I was going through withdrawal and sex and love addiction where, like, this part of me was like kicking, just kicking and being like, you have got to get somebody here. Like, you know how to do this.

Like, go out there, get somebody, and bring them here. There are not enough people in this bed. There's only one person. This is not enough. It's three o'clock in the morning. This is not okay. I don't care who it is and my history has shown that I don't

often care who it is I don't care who it is a body another human being somebody, anybody now here and for most of my life I've obeyed that command

you know and then have had to pay the consequences of like now what are you going to do with and about this person who's here who you may not even like who might not even like you now what are you guys going to do. You've done this thing. And those withdrawals in early recovery were a time where I had to learn

how to just be deeply present to that suffering, screaming. I call it the Siberian baby. It's like a baby on the tundra of Siberia just wailing into a snowstorm and nobody's coming. And it's like, and that baby would say to me, like, you're not enough. Like, you are not enough to comfort me. It has to come from another person. And I don't even want to hear about God. Like, that's not even a thing. You know?

And I would just have to learn to, like, sit and rock with that child and just say, like, I am aware that I am not enough. And I am aware that you don't believe in God, but we're the only ones here. And we have actually got you. We have actually got you. and we're going to sit with you through this night and tomorrow night too and the next night and for however long this lasts

and you don't have to get well for us to love you you don't have to do anything better anything different we see you we love you we're here and it's like fuck you bring somebody else and I'm like I'm aware I'm inadequate and yet I love you and I am here

and I am with you and apparently we're supposed to be together because here we are and and that's how that void started to be filled. And that, that creature, that like, gollum inside of me started to trust that I was going to always be there and that God was going to always be there. And I'm a much safer person for myself and for everybody around me when I provide that. Because if I don't provide that, Gallum's going to make me go find it. And that's not going to go well for anybody.

I love the gollum I know poor thing do you see the do you see the the gallum as like Lizzie as like your inner child how do you kind of actually

contextualize it when connecting to it I think it's Lizzie but Lizzie the inner child at the time of my childhood was innocent and addiction

is when that innocent child filled with unmet needs metastasizes into something that can be actually monstrous. And so I have a lot of love and sympathy for her, but also unchecked and allowed to govern and allowed to call the shots. She is a really dangerous person for me and for all. Nobody is safe if that person, if that being is in charge.

And that doesn't mean that that being should be starved of love, in fact, must be loved and can be loved. But it's, you know, we all start with this beautiful innocence and these beautiful unmet needs, but they can make us into really dangerous people who hurt people. And that hurt is real. And that a men's process that we go through in recovery is, where you look at the unclouded mirror and you're like, holy shit, look what I do. Like, look what I do when I'm in that state and look at the wreckage that that causes in so many ways. Hey, everyone, one thing that reliably brings me a sense of joy in the morning is starting my day

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How have I been in recovery for seven years and never heard that? Oh, that is so good. You can never get enough of something that almost works. Please remind me to write that down before I leave. Only if this was recorded, yeah. Got you. Wait, you're recording this? They do just disappear.

Rip off my mic and leave. I didn't agree to be recorded. I thought we were just talking with your phone. friends with a lot of electronic equipment around. What? I'm glad. I hope it does feel that way. They kind of do dissolve after a certain moment into the conversation. But it's interesting because it is more obvious when you have an external object or drug that you're addicted to.

And it's just like elusive, inner, invisible, dynamic, relational thing. I think it's easy to justify our way out of our own neuroses. Sure. You know. But from reading your story and just getting to see how it got increasingly more clear that there was your part to play in the dynamic that was unhealthy, to say the least. At what point did you get going to recovery? It was a year and change after Ray died.

It was right before COVID, 2019. Okay. Right before COVID. And then COVID time, and you decided to stop seeing people, like romantically as well after that. Yeah. And how are you now? So you're just coming out of your sabbatical, but this has been a long seven-year journey. Yeah.

Well, I'm, you know, I sometimes like to compare, like, where I was and where I am. And I think one of the ways you can kind of, I can kind of gauge how I am. is that what I needed seven years ago in order to be propped up versus what I need now. And so at the time that I first came into recovery, for instance, at that time, I've been on and off anti-anxiety and anti-depressive medications for my whole life, and I leave it to whoever is listening to this to know what is best for them on that. I'm only speaking of my own experience, but at that time I was on Zoloft. I had a prescription for Xanax running all the time so that if I needed an emergency,

like if I could not manage my anxiety and my emotions and needed that, I could have that. I had a sleeping pill prescription going at all times. It didn't mean that I took those pills every night, but I had them. And I took them most nights. and I had a therapist that I went to twice a week, and I had a couples therapist basically on retainer, who I had gone to over the years with various people, and he'd be like, hi, Liz, who do we have today?

You know, like, who have you dragged into here today who you want me to change so that you can be happy, you know? And I'd be like, please meet, you know, new... My resident couples there? Yeah, exactly. and I had a shaman who I did like, you know, ayahuasca and various other journeys with. I had like a staff basically of people, and that's not even including my most recent victim who I had who I had hauled in as my lover partner. you know, like you're responsible for making everything okay person.

And I don't have any of that now. And I just, like I'm just hanging out. Like I wake up, I wake up and I have a day, you know, and I'm not on any, oh, and I was drinking. I forgot about that. And I was drinking. And that's gone. And the antidepressants and the anti-anxiety medication is gone. And the sleeping pills are gone. And the therapist is somebody who I might check in with like every few

months. If I'm like, can I get a tune up on this? The couple's therapist is not needed. The shaman is gone. The plant medicine is gone. And what remains is this person who's able using the tools of recovery and the guidance of a higher power to navigate herself today, like just for today, and who's just here, seeing what this conversation is about. I haven't been in a romantic or sexual relationship since I came into recovery. That's not what my recovery program is about. it's not part of sex and love addiction to say that you can never have sex and love again.

I have a lot more love in my life than I've ever had, but it's coming from a community of people rather than from one person, which I think is safer for everybody. Like one person's not my plug, you know? And actually in the rooms of recovery that I'm in, it's mostly women, and there's a line that a woman said once that I think is incredible,

where she said everything I ever thought I was supposed to get from one man, it turns out I can only get from a community of women. So that love is kind of dispersed among a bunch of people who are all emotionally available, but who are all also emotionally responsible, meaning that every one of us are taking responsibility for our own lives, not for each other's lives, but we're available to help. And I haven't been interested in bringing a relationship at that level back into my life. And when I check in with God to be like, do you want me, do you want me out there on these streets?

Like dating, God's like, L.O.L. No. Not you, honey. Like other people I might. And God's like, if I need that from you, you'll be alerted. And it will come through two-way prayer. And it will come from me. And I'll tell you how to do it. It's not going to be your idea.

You know, but for today, no, you're great. You're great. white, like, let's not, this is good. Like, you want to test and see how crazy you still are? You want to take the ride? Like, you can, but I wouldn't advise it in my case. So, so that's where I am. And it's funny, because a year ago I would have said, I'm also more creatively productive than I've ever been. And that's true, because I wrote three books in the last six years. But now suddenly I'm questioning whether that's even a virtue. Because I think as things fall away that I relied upon to prop myself up, to make myself feel

like I was a special person, I think my creative production is part of that. And so, because I always had that, it's like everything else can fall away, but I'm still a really good writer, and I'm going to prove it now by writing a really good book. Maybe I don't need to, you know. So it's interesting. I have fewer dependencies than I've ever had. And I think that's probably a measure of my wellness. Doing okay.

Today. I think you're crushing the game. I don't want to crush the game. I want to stay right in the middle of the hurt. I was crushing the game in the past. You know what I mean? It's like I'm fucking crushing life. You know, like I got a movie,

out. I did TED talk. I got it like crushing the game. The game was crushed. Now you're loving the game. I thought I was crushing the game, but I think it did crush me. Well, okay, so I want to zoom in on the evolution then of your creativity. So many people have come into your world and into your work because they feel like,

and they can probably relate to the quote that I've heard you share also from the Gospel of Thomas. You know, if you bring forth what's within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don't bring forth, what's within you, what you don't bring forth will destroy you. And we all have this creative aspect of self as we are a creative being. To varying degrees, we've allowed that to give room and to give space. And you've been such a guiding light for so many people to give permission, not that it's necessarily yours to give, but to invite that reminder. And all of the many different things will navigate.

navigate on the way there. So how do you define creative living now, perhaps how you did differently 20 years ago? Oh, that's such a good question. I was about to just spew out what I always spew out. But let me actually think about that. Wow, what's arising is you don't have to do this. and I think 20 years ago I'd have been like you have to do this I think I had a I used to say

why do I care so much about whether people are creating or not I used to be a little bit over-invested I think in whether other people were creating and doing the thing that was within them

I think I took it personally if people weren't you know I was like I want you to have this experience I don't want you to come all this way and not have this experience. You got to make something, whatever it is. Maybe you don't, you know, but you can if you want to, and you're allowed to if you want to, and it doesn't have to, it doesn't have to, it doesn't have to then turn into something huge.

and that's good to know because it might not, you know. You can't make people want the thing you made. You just can't, like, no matter how well marketed it is, and I am here to attest that that is true, because I have never been able to replicate E. Pray, Love. So you cannot make E. Pray, Love happen twice. Like, you can't, maybe can't even make it happen once, right? But you get to play with the materials and the inspiration of the world.

You get to. And that can look like anything. It can look very, very, very, very small. And it can look very, very big. But nobody is excluded from that invitation. I think that's how I would say it now. whereas I think 20 years ago I might have been like if you don't do this

it's going to kill you you've got to do this and I'm not sure that I know that to be true and I do know that my beloved friend Martha Beck recently wrote a book called Beyond Anxiety and she did a lot of research on neuroscience with this

and what is being shown and was able to determine that the opposite of anxiety is not calm. The opposite of anxiety is creativity. So when you're anxious and you're trying to calm down and it never works, doing even the slightest, tiniest creative thing, baking something, coloring a coloring book, singing, moving your body in some interesting way, like, reduces anxiety. and it turns out that fear and creativity are operating from different parts of the brain. I'm doing theater right now acting like I know what I'm talking about, but this is what I've been told. But apparently, from what I've been told, fear and creativity are a toggle switch.

So when the creativity toggle is operating, the fear isn't. And when the fear one is up, the creativity isn't. And so it's a little bit of a seesaw. So it does appear that it's very good for you. to create. But I'm not sure that I would now say that everybody has to do it. But I would still say everybody gets to do it.

What's something in your life that would maybe be otherwise a small one day in acting your day that you've transformed into a little bit of creativity? I make these little collages now. So I sit in a lot of my 12-step meetings are on Zoom because a lot of 12-step recovery went on Zoom during the pandemic.

And I travel so much that I love these Zoom meetings because I can get to them. but I am not I really like making art and I don't know how to draw and I have a really like even if you see now I I like vibrate and it's I've always vibrated like a hummingbird I'm a little hummingbird exactly so I'm like a little shaky so I have a shaky hand I have a terrible handwriting and I have a terrible line for drawing so I'm not precise and and but I have I actually do have like an artistic eye for what is pleasing. And I like to put things together in a way that's pleasing. So I make these collages. So I go to like home goods and to thrift shops and I buy really cheap frames or I buy really, you know, like cheap mass produced art that they sell at like marshals for like if you're decorating an Airbnb and you just need some like generic Eric art. So I'll buy those, or I'll go to thrift shops and buy art, and then I'll modify it and do

stuff to it and embroider in it and like paste things in it and make, and they're really pretty. They're really, really pretty. And my higher power, notorious GOD, has told me that I'm not allowed to sell them. And I make them a lot like I'm not, that God's like you have to have something in your life that's a creative output that is not associated with the marketplace. Do you even share them? I give them way. Okay. But like, do you post them or like?

I put pictures of them sometimes on substack. But I, but I, as an illustration for like my substack newsletter, but I'm not, I'm not supposed to sell them. So, not assuming somebody would want to buy them, but like I could see myself going down a thing where I'm just like, I make art now, you know, like, and I'm having a display that I'm not, I can't. So I give them to people. So like my favorite waitress at the diner that I go to when I'm home visiting my parents,

I noticed that she had this beautiful fern tattoo, and so I made one for her that was like, you know, I wrapped it up and brought it to her, and I'm like, I made this for you. And I got inspired because there's a little girl in that town, and in that diner that I go to, the walls are covered with her art. She's six years old, and her mom told me that one day she woke up and said, I just want to make art for all the people I like in town.

And so she draws art, and then they go to the bank, and she gets one to the bank tell her, and she gives one to the person at the post office. And I was like, I 100% want to do that. Like, I 100% want to make, like, little pieces of art and walk around town and give them to people. And so that's what I do. So that's my, that's been my creative output. And I have nothing left to show for it because I've given them all away.

So, and they're pretty. They're really, really, really pretty. And they seem to make people happy. I'll see these. I'll show you some pictures of them, like, very nice. Oh. Yeah. I know you've spoken at length.

then a lot of us can relate when we put so much pressure on our creative passions to become profit. It can pervert it or put so much pressure on it that distorts it into being something. And so it's an interesting thing to navigate. But we did talk about how we are innately creative beings. And I've heard you share how we are walking repositories of buried treasure, right? Can you say more in regards to that? Like how much do you feel like there is within us that we have yet to give experience? expression for. Oh my God, so much, right? I mean, I've talked about like doing a complete and

Frile's Moral Inventory and 12th step. Like you, you know, you excavate yourself. You find a lot in there. Like you find a lot of darkness, but you find a lot of light too. A complete inventory includes like all of your grace and all of your kindness and all of your care and all of your humor and all of your weirdness and all of your unique beauty. I mean, we don't even know what's in here. You know what I mean? Like we're operating at such a surface level of it. Like, there's so much, there's so much.

And then there's also a friend of mine just shared something with me that I thought was so beautiful about ancestral joy that she was getting these down. from her female ancestors who have all like suffer, suffer, suffer, suffer, suffer, going all the way back to Eve, right? Which is like a lot. Ancestual trauma. Yeah, like ancestral trauma. And like her, she was doing meditations where her ancestors were coming to her and

they were like, we weren't just trauma. You know what I mean? Like we also had a good time. Like we also loved who we loved. We also loved to sing. We also loved to dance. We also created. We sewed.

We knitted. We cooked. We like, we also loved the sky. in the morning, you know, we also loved, like, the warmth of a person. We also loved our animals. Like, there was a lot that we loved, and we have, we, because of the trauma, had a lot of unspent love and a lot of unspent joy that we also passed along to you. We didn't just pass along our darkness. Like, if you could spend some of our joy, that would be great, because we didn't have a lot of opportunities sometimes to spend it. If you could spend some of our love that we didn't get to express,

that would be really wonderful. And if you could spend some of our creativity, and sometimes I think that creative talent is some sort of ancestor who was like, I didn't have the chance. Like I also was a really good musician. I didn't have the chance. I didn't have the chance. Could you do this kind of for me too?

So there's so much delight to be expressed as well. Yeah, what is it? Les Brown said the richest place on the planet is the graveyard, like all of the buried ideas and expressions that never got to come out. And how much is just stored in there, genetically, ancestrally. Yeah. And I think one really big transformative idea that you shed a lot of light on is on the nature of ideas themselves as like living entities. First, do you really believe that?

Like they are living entities? Kind of in the old Socratic, like, Stoic kind of Greek, concept. exception. Yeah. Yes. And most creative people that I know experience it that way. Regardless of having grown up in whatever empirical culture they grew up in, most people, when you talk to them about where they got their inspiration, it came to them. Like, they will use the language, it came to me. Like, then it came to me. Suddenly they had this idea. It came to me. Like, even people talking about mathematical formulas and scientific ideas are like, it came, you know, it came to. It came to. You know, it came to. to me. You might know the story about how Henry Ford figured out, and he was totally right, that there's this liminal space between sleeping and waking when you're very, very, very open. And I find when I'm working on a book, I write very early in the mornings, and I will wake up. And the second I'm like in that kind of gray veiled space between sleep and awakening,

the solution is instantly in my mind for the narrative problem from the day before. To the point that I will keep a notebook next to my bed because I'll just hear the words. I'm like, oh, there it is, there it is, there it is. And I'll write it down and then go back to sleep. And forget and wake up and be like, ah, somebody gave me this, you know, in the middle of the night. And Henry Ford used to try to game that by, he would go to sleep with like, he would take these little mini naps with like ball bearings. in his hands and there would be metal trays underneath him so he would sit up straight and just like go into kind of a meditative state and then when he dropped the ball bearings they would make

a noise that would wake him up just enough that he'd be in the liminal space that he could catch an idea so he was trancing himself in order to try to to catch these ideas so yeah i literally feel like ideas and inspiration are spirit um their external spirit that's looking for a human collaborator and there's all kinds of evidence and I've had it in my life and every creative person I know has had it in their life where like an idea hits two people

at the same time who don't even know each other and like there's all sorts of magical ways that that gets evidenced but I remember being on MPR when Big Magic came out and the very nice MPR reporter was kind of trying

to save me from myself and was saying like you talk about magic I know you don't mean magic I know you mean that it feels like magic I'm like bitch I literally mean Like, no, like, thank you for trying to not make me look stupid on NPR, but like, I'm talking about magic. Like, I'm talking about magic, which I believe in.

And I 100% believe that it is, like, coming to me from an external source, yes. And a lot of people that I know who are a creative experience in that way. Yeah, likewise. Because you also shared how they, like, ideas will find the swiftest conduit to earth. what happens when you ignore an idea that comes to you? What does that do to a person? What happens to the idea? I want to be careful because I don't want to like fill anybody with dread, you know,

or with a feeling that like, oh, I lost mine. You know, I have a friend who says, I used to think that life was a train that I got on the wrong one. You know, I used to think I got on the wrong one or I got in the wrong seat on the wrong train and the other trains were passing me by and I was supposed to be on those trains. And she said, I used to just feel my whole life

was just missed train transfers and she's like, I don't feel that way anymore. I don't think you can get on the wrong train. And, excuse me, I know that, like, Rob Das said that. He's like, you can't do this wrong. Like, you can't miss it. your life. There's no such thing. You didn't make a mistake big enough that you missed your life. You marry the wrong person, then you get to go on that train. Like, you get to go on

marry the wrong person train and have that adventure. And that adventure is going to bring you to something that you could only get by getting on the married the wrong person train. Like, favorite person that you love dies, you get to go on that train ride. And that's going to bring you to your destiny. Like every single decision you make is going to bring you to your destiny. You can't miss it. You can't miss your destiny. Don't worry about it. Like take a left, your destiny's there. Take a right. Your destiny's there. Create your destiny's there. Don't create your destiny is there. So I don't want to like fill anybody with this sense that there was this moment that you had this opportunity for this great idea and you missed it. And so you are now terminally fucked.

Like that is not what I believe. First of all, I think there's more. you know, I don't think the universe is like scant on ideas you know, or like or opportunities or notions or inspiration. I think there's plenty. I think there's plenty.

And I think there's still more in you if you want. And again, you don't have to. You can just hang out. And then you can have hangout destiny. And that's also fine. Like I really am at a place where I'm genuinely believing that you can't do this wrong.

But the idea of, you will go find someone else. Like, 100% will. And, like, you will wake up someday and open the New York Times and somebody wrote your book. Like, I've had that happen to me. Everybody I know has had that happen to them at some level. So, and that's okay. There's another one.

And then they get to have that journey. You know, good for them. But there's something when you do, you know, catch the butterfly, so to speak, or this lightning bolt of inspiration happens where when you do follow it and pull on that thread, you surely learn a lot about yourself in that process, if that is so, the train that you hop on, right? Yeah. That's for you.

Yeah. And I find the topic of multiple discoveries, incredibly fascinating how that really happens. I know Michael Jackson was like interviews saying, I say up late into the hours, because if I don't catch this idea, then Prince will get it. I love that. I 100% love that.

I 100% love that. And I think so many of us do feel, I love the reminder you, gave and a lot of us feel... But timeout, look how Michael Jackson and Prince both died, right? So that urgency might also not be great. Totally. Just saying. No, 100%. You know? Yeah, I think we glamorize the highlight real of someone's success without the real suffering they endured and ended their life with. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. Sorry, I interrupted you, but I just had to say, like, maybe we don't want to go that hard.

But I think on most people's conception of what a life well-lived is, is both self-realization and self-actualization, like living your life in expression to what you most value and the ideas that are correlated with that. And you give this distinction around genius, which I think is fitting here. Because not to say that we all want to become a genius, but we all would like to discover what is our genius or the genius that will have us.

So what do you think is what happens after a life of following these ideas and letting them take you, so to speak, what can come up? I'll give you an example. A lot of times what I see, because I do a lot of events and people have questions, and there are certain questions that come up again and again, and that's how I know that it's in the collective zeitgeist. It's our shared anxiety. And one of the questions that people have is, like, I have this idea.

and there's almost like a energy cost-benefit analysis that they're doing on it, which is like, I want to write, I'll just use book because that's what people come to me a lot with. I want to write a book, but it's going to take a huge amount of energy, and it may end up being nothing. Like, how, why? How and why should I do that? going back to the thing we shared at the beginning of this conversation of God saying to me, will you come with me even if I make no assurances?

Every one of my books has also said that in a way. Like, will you come with me even if I make no assurances? And it's very hard to answer that question in some sort of promising way because I don't want to ever promise anybody that they're going to have any success because that's so impossible to promise. and I know we all want to think we can manifest everything, but I'm not sure that we can control outcome. And so what I will say is I can't promise you

that you're a good writer. I have no idea. Like, you don't know. I don't know. Who knows? I've also seen books written. I'm thinking of two, particularly in my mind, that people that I know have written books

that I thought were freaking great that never got published. And so I can't even promise you that if your book is great, and like I threw all my weight behind trying to get those books published and could not make it happen. And like it's bewildering to me. I'm like both of these books are so much better than 90% of the books that are out there. So you might be a good writer and you might write something that's better than 90% of the things out there and it still might not be published. It might be published and it might not sell. It might be published and it might get terrible reviews. It might be published, and you might get canceled.

It might be published, and your family may never invite you to Thanksgiving dinner again because of the things you revealed in that book. You might get sued. Like, I don't know. Any version of a lot of those things have happened to me, you know, and like have happened to a lot of people that I know. So I can't promise you anything except for I can absolutely promise you that if you sit down and tell that story that is within you, by the end of that, you will be a different. person than you were at the beginning of that experience. At 100% you will be altered by it. And don't you want to kind of know who you become?

Like, can that be enough of a reason to do something? Like, don't you kind of want to know who you'll be if you actually do that thing? And if the answer to that is yes, then that has to be enough. That has to be enough. Because nothing else is assured. Most people astonished with your work have no idea to the degree, and neither do I, of the dedication and devotion and commitment that was required to do the work. As Picasso's quoted, you know, inspiration exists, but it must find you working, right? So talk to me about the effort that's required to arrive at a place of those effortless, magical moments of insight.

Well, yeah, you've got to prepare the field for the seed, you know? Like, oh, it's funny, there's something I mean that's resisting talking about this because I'm coming out of sabbatical and my whole body just went like, I don't want to talk about discipline, but I'll talk about discipline. For me, what it looks like, for me, what it looks like is like I become a Marine. I become a Marine. I am like it's the only way I know how to do it and it doesn't mean that's the only way it needs to be done but this is the only way that I've known how to do it um it has to be for me all right we're gonna get up it before dawn we have to get up before everybody else like for me I I want to be up before the world starts annoying me um and knocking on my door and demanding my attention so that's early

and most of my books are really heavily researched, whether they're fiction or nonfiction. And so there's usually two to three years of research before I even begin. Big Magic wasn't like that because I had been living researching it for so long that when I finally decided to sit down and write it, I'd actually collected all of these books about the history of creativity. had like a whole wall of books about like creativity and creative process and the associations of creativity and depression and schizophrenia

and like the neuroscience of creativity and one morning I looked at that and I was like I will jump off a roof if I have to read any of these books. I know what I want to say about creativity and I'm just going to sit down and say it and that became big magic. But most of my books are very, very heavily researched and through this intricate note card system

that I have involving like index cards and shoeboxes and files, it's very autistic. and very like train scheduling. Like it's very nuanced. And then when I actually sit down to begin writing the book, I clear my life away. Like I let everybody know you're not going to see me for at least three months. And it's kind of like I'm a monk, kind of like I'm a Marine.

I cancel everything in advance. I like lay the groundwork. And I begin. And it's a little bit like swimming the English. channel in one breath for me. Like I just sit down and I'm like, we're going to do this until it's done. And nothing else matters. And nothing else does matter for me when I'm in that state. It costs me a lot physically. And it costs me a lot of like life that I'm not experiencing because I'm shutting out life. A lot of invitations that I have to say no to. A lot of fun things that other people are doing.

A lot of connection. But it's the most fun. once it starts. And I'm always like, why am I doing this? Why am I doing this to myself? But once it starts, it's, when I'm in the vibe of that, there's no, it's, I feel more like myself than any other time except probably when I'm in prayer. And I think actually for me, writing was the first experience that I had of feeling like an intelligence beyond. Something is guiding it, something is moving it. my rule when I first begin is because it's so hard to get into it is I write by the clock, not by the word. So I'll just say you've got, you have to sit at this chair for one hour and you're not allowed to stand up and you're not allowed to look at the internet. And you just have to be present to this project for one hour.

And at the end of the hour, when the timer goes off, you're allowed to get up and leave. And that's considered a good hour of work regardless of what was created. But then once I get going in the zone, it's magic. like magic starts happening time drops away three hours have passed and it feels like two minutes all the stuff that they promised a meditation would do like starts to happen like real and like i write better than i can you know um like at the beginning it's definitely me writing but then things happen where i'm like that's much better writing than i than i can do something else is doing this now something else is moving this this whole thing and that's extremely thrilling um and very energetically tiring but wonderful

It's the best But I don't want to do it for a long time now Because I'm enjoying not being at that level Of vibrating at that level Yeah I think Thelonious Monk said The Genius is the one most like himself And you said you feel like the most like yourself When you're in that pocket

To your own monk version Yeah Yeah both versions of Monk Yeah, Lizzie Monk And I'm curious What do you think? about the what it reveals about what we actually really loved and were naturally drawn to repeatedly as a child and how that's an indicator potentially of what will make us most come alive as as an

adult well children intuitively do all this stuff you know um like they dance they sing they make up stories they do theater they draw um they do all that stuff they just do it they just do it like they know to do it, they know that it's theirs, they know they're allowed to do it. Most of us can point to an exact moment in childhood where that lack of self-consciousness was taken away. And that's what Brunee Brown calls art scars and everybody has them, where somebody told you, the teacher said, like, you're not a good singer, so you stand in the back and just move your mouth during this point. And like for some people, that was the last time they ever sang, you know? up until them they didn't know that you had to be a good singer to sing.

They just sing, you know, and then it's like, oh, now I don't sing. You're not a good dancer. You're not a good draw. Here's this person in the class is the one who's the good artist. And that's when the sorting hat starts, you know, where it's like, this person is talented. You're not. This person is a good dancer, you're not. This person is a good singer, you're not.

This one is the writer, you're not. And creativity is taken from you. And for some people, that's the end of the story. you know and we live in a culture that separates people out that way where it's like these people are creative and these people are producers and consumers and if you're not if you don't get to be in the creative class then they're just stuck producer and consumer and but like i've lived in like i've traveled and lived in cultures where that is not the way where there's no such thing as somebody who doesn't dance like when the community gets together everybody dances when the community gets

together everybody sings. Like I used to live in Bali next to a, like one of the community buildings where people would come and like have these, these huge, you know, orchestras and singing and drums and chimes and everything. And like, no one's like, oh, Danny doesn't, you know, like, oh, Karen doesn't do that because she doesn't have good pitch. It's like, no, everybody does that. And there's something that's been determined that collectively happens when people sing together, their hearts co-regulate, their breathing co-regulates. It's good for you. All of this stuff is really good for you, and it's fun, and it's meant to be fun.

So to cast yourself out of that because somebody in fourth grade made a disparaging comment about your version of that is really a tragedy. But you can reclaim it at any time, I believe. What's the single most useful thing you could someone. could do in your experience to reclaim it? A group, I think. You know, we have this version of the artist as like the great man living in the Garrett apartment in Paris. And I kind of do that, play that role when I write to a certain extent. But I had a long time in my 20s where after college, I decided not to go to graduate school. I don't have a graduate degree or an MFA in anything.

I knew it would cost me too much. I didn't have the money in it. I didn't have the money. I didn't want to go into debt. And somehow I had some intuition that I'd be better off, not in a room with a bunch of other people trying to find their voice. But I created a group. And for reasons that are lost to history, we called ourselves the fat kids. I cannot remember why. And there were six of us.

And it was some people I went to college with and some people that I worked with and knew from my bartending and waitressing who wanted to write. And we met twice a month for like four or five years. and we brought what we were working on, you know, whatever we wanted to write. And everybody, we took turns where it was one person's week and they would bring something that they were working on. And my first book was pretty much written that way because there wasn't a lot of other motive to do it. Nobody was knocking on my door and saying, we heard there's a good unpublished writer living here. So I had to create like a reason to do something.

And so the reason to do something were these deadlines that we had in the group. And yeah, my first novel, too, was, like, largely written with the help of the fat kids. It's like in the acknowledgments of my first novel, it's like, thanks to the fat kids. Out of context. Yeah, out of context. Just no explanation of what that means. So even the most private art forms, I mean, I think of writing as maybe the most private. you can still get help from other people.

You're not supposed to do this by yourself. So if there isn't a group, make one. Like invite people. I've been doing this thing at my house, and I share this idea with anybody who wants to do it. I have these days called Quiet Art Days, and I live in an old church, so it's a very inspirational space anyway.

But I invite like five or six women over, and the rule is this. we do this 30 minute breath meditation and then we do 30 minutes of listening to this recording of sound bowls. So like an hour of breath meditation and sound bowls and then the next two hours nobody's allowed to speak

and you can go take a place anywhere in the house, bring anything that you're working on. The only rules are no speaking and nothing electronic. So no laptops, no phones and I lay out all sorts of art supplies and you can just play with the art supplies. You can take a nap. You can go for a walk

you can draw, you can paint, but you can't talk and you can't be on the internet. Wow. And so we spend essentially three hours in silence, one hour of the singing bowls and then two hours of the creativity, and then we break the night, like do a gong, and then we eat dinner together and talk.

Or you can leave. If you're just in the vibe and you don't want to break it with speech, you can just go. I want to come. It's really good. So you don't have to wait for, somebody to make things like that. You can invite people into creative spaces with you,

and it's less lonely and less scary. I think we're seeing this return to the imperfection of the human creative pursuit and music and art and everything as AI is continuing to grow. What do you think is the danger of letting AI take over your creative expression? It's so tempting, right? Because it's like, it's going to get, like somebody said it's going to be like a year in a year or two. AI is going to be able to write a novel that's good. You know, and I'm like, I bet it'll be sooner than that. And somebody asked me, like, how do you feel about the fact that AI could write a better novel than you someday? And I'm like, there's already people who can write better novels than me.

Like, that's been my reality, my entire life. Like, every single creative thing that I do there are people who do it better, you know, who I think do it better. So that can't be a reason to not create is that there's. some intelligence that can do it better. That already is the case, right? So I'm not going to compete with AI if I don't compete with Ann Patchett. I can be friendly with AI the same way I'm friendly with Ann Patchett. So I'm sure it's tempting. But I think you'll miss the fun, right? I think it's sort of the question is like, what are you doing this for? Are you doing this to be the best at it? Or are you doing this to have the experience of it?

And so, yeah, AI could do it for you, but then you don't get to go on the ride. You just get to operate the robot. That doesn't seem as much fun for me. No, and yeah, as they're getting more and more capable, there is something particular with AI music that I noticed, just the perfection of the voices that it generates is like immediately I can tell it's AI that feels devoid of we want to be moved by stories

that are authentic right and so it's like a machine generating a thing that sounds great which some of them sound really cool and just like books I'm sure that'll write were really beautiful I don't know I suppose there's do you feel like what makes it magical is that it came from somebody who was in a process of discovery and it was authentic in that or do you do not make it so precious. I think that is precious. Yeah. You know, and I think that is magical. And, you know, I think AI will get so good that it'll make music that doesn't sound like AI. Yeah. You know, it's only a matter of time, you know, and it will write, I mean, already some, I can't remember who, some poet did an experiment where they said write a poem like me, and then they wrote a poem,

and they put it on the Internet and said, which one do you think I wrote? And most people chose the AI one. And he was like, it's better than mine, you know, like, and you were fooled, like you thought I wrote this. So, this is going to really put our feet to the fire as to why we create. You know, like, I have a friend whose kid is in music school at NYU right now, and he's like, the only ones who are going to be left doing it are the people who just love doing it. because all the other reasons are going to fall away. You're not going to be, who knows, you're not going to be able to make a living from it anymore, or the robots will do it better, or like, whatever.

There'll be all kinds of, all of those external sources going back to our original conversation about seeking the external. Like all of those external forces might just go away, and then who's going to be left making something with their hands, somebody who wants to make something with their hands? And what's going to be the reason to bother doing it? The same reason our ancestors did it because it's pleasing. You know, it's pleasing.

I get most of the art that's ever been made in the entire world was not generated. Nobody made any money from it. Like, you made it because it was pleasing. It was beautiful to make. My grandparents were dust farm depression era, Swedish Lutheran dairy farmers, like the least woo-woo fanciful people in the entire world, and both of my grandparents made beautiful art. Everyone did.

They didn't have mass media. So what do you do on those long, cold nights? Like when all the chores are done, you make something with your hands. And my grandmother made these quilts that are like works of art. Her descendants have them framed on their walls. And my grandfather did woodworking that was more beautiful than it needed to be for a guy who had no sentimentality.

You know, like, why did he bother to make something more beautiful than it needed to be? Because it was pleasing to him. And I think in the end, that's what it's going to come down to. Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. I think we're already seeing it be highlighted

across the board. And I'm curious, just to kind of wrap a bow and kind of full, come full circle within this conversation. You started sharing more about your two-way prayer and that practice that you have. Are you doing that every morning still? How long does that take usually? Half an hour, 45 minutes.

And if somebody wanted to do it tomorrow morning, what would they do? Oh, well, if you can get on substack and go to, I have a substack called Letters from Love, and there's instructions there on how to do it. There's a community. Going back to the idea of we can do this in community, there's a community of people doing it. And you already told me you were going to do. Yeah. Yeah. But I can, but I can say, you know, I can say where this came to me. I now have found out that it's called two-way prayer. I didn't know that it was called something when I started doing it 20 years ago. It came to me in my time of the lowest depression I've ever been in my life after the end of my first marriage. When I had no tools, I had no spiritual. spirituality. I was just out there rough in it, you know. And one night, one sleepless night, a voice that I now would call God came to me and said, just get out of bed and get a notebook and write yourself everything you've always wanted to hear somebody say to you because I was so lonely

and I was so heartbroken. And I did it. And that voice, and I, you know what you've always wanted to hear somebody say to you, write that down, like to yourself. And so for me, it'll be different, maybe for other people, but mine was, I'm not going anywhere. Like, dear Lizzie, I'm here with you. I am not going anywhere. I am not leaving. I'm here. And you don't have to do anything to earn that. And you don't have to, you can't lose it. You can't. earn it, you can't earn this love and you can't lose this love. This is your inheritance and you've always had it. And I was with you at the moment of your birth. I'll be with you at the moment of your death. Everyone can come and go. Everybody else can leave. I'm with you. I've got you.

And you don't have to impress me. And you don't have to get better because I was in a real depression at that point. Like you don't have to get well. You can be this fucked up forever. You can be this low, you can be this depressed, you can be this ashamed. You cannot improve. And I will love you entirely. We can live in a box under a bridge yelling at people when they walk by. I love you. Like, I love being with you there.

Like, you are my love. And that will not alter. And if you need to stay up all night tonight, because you can't sleep, I will sit with you and I will just repeat this. And that's where it came to me. started doing the practice. And then I found out that there's this thing called two-way prayer, which is that. You know, one-way prayer is like beseeching God. Two-way prayer is listening. It's like, I'm going to ask you a question, you give me the answer, and I write the answer down. So you can do that. You can just write your name. It actually really helps. I've learned if you use

a nickname, an affectionate nickname, it softens your heart toward yourself. So God calls me Honeyhead and love and um little one and lizzie like these are all softening nicknames so you can use a softening nickname and then you just write what you wish somebody would tell you you just write what you need to hear or you'd listen to see if you can hear what love would want you to know and that's available to everybody and i was telling you before we started the interview that one of the things i find most amazing now on that substack is there's 200,000 people there are now doing this, is that when people share their letters, there are some people on there who have never had any experiences of being loved, like people who grew up in such extreme abuse,

such extreme neglect, and they have access to this voice. So you didn't have to have someone model for you what it looks like to love at this level, to experience love at this level. And that's really good news, because a lot of us never got that. So you can have it anyway. And I think that's the really magical thing to know. So beautifully said, could we try a little exercise? Maybe, like, this is a two-way prayer in and of itself. Maybe I'll ask

a question and you can channel the GOD. How about you ask and you channel GOD? Okay. Because it'll be my answer and I'd rather hear yours. Yeah, but I want to hear your answer. Okay, how about you ask a question and we sit for a minute and then see what we heard?

Okay. Great. What comes to mind is a soul that's about to incarnate into Earth school. What are the instructions? Oh, gosh. It just, what did you hear? You already got to hear something? I got mine. Okay, well, let it read.

But why don't you ask yours? And maybe keep it specific, what are your instructions? Ask it like you came here and incarnate it to Earth School. What are your instructions? Do you want to say yours and then do you want me to think on it first? I think before I say mine, you should think. I already know. Anyway.

Yeah, yeah. What are my instructions I incarnated here? Yeah, mine, I feel like I got mine. Mine is stay close. Stay close to me. Stay close to this voice. Mine was love everyone. Same same.

Same, same. Stay close. Stay close. Do you know what? You might be an extrovert and I might be an introvert. Because I've also heard that like if you're in, even though I present very extroverted and my answers are always about in here. Yeah. And yours was out here.

So even if you're like a quiet and private person, your love might be this. And that's an sort of extroverted version of that, love everybody. And mine is, stay close. It's here. Yeah. Yeah, no, it also feels like that's a bit more intimate. Yours is almost an instruction for you in relation to God. Mine is almost my relationship to the external in the sense.

So basically what you just said. Yeah, exactly. But the right answer. And not hard to find, right? Yeah. I was thinking it was going to take a, it would be a longer feel. I'm telling you. This is the thing.

This is the thing. God's like, I'm not a mystery. I'm here. Like, what do you want to know? Yeah. You know? And if your intentions are pure and you really want to know, the answer will be there. Yeah, I say it so often that when you get quiet, what needs to be heard grows loud.

Yeah. And it seems like this practice of yours has been getting to that space of quiet and seeing what wants to be heard. and I could only imagine what would happen on a civilizational level if everyone had that as a practice. I know, right. And I had that connection and stayed close to that because we feel so alone. Like the loneliness epidemic is so real. And when you build that relationship with something that isn't impermanent, you know, it feels like you always have something to be with the lean on.

I think that there have probably been cultures where everybody was that connected, where that was prioritized. You know, maybe I'm glamorizing cultures I don't know anything about, but I feel like, I feel like that had to have been the case, especially for cultures that lasted a really, really long time. You know, like, I've been spending a lot of time in Connecticut where I grew up and I never thought I would go back there because I was like, I've got to get out of here. but I found I've come back 50 years later, no 40 years later. And I've been spending a lot of time in the Connecticut woods and getting very curious about who was here, you know, because there were people there when my ancestors came from England to New England, and those people are mostly not there anymore.

And it's just very moving to find out that there. were people in those woods for 12,000 years. Not like 12,000 years ago, but for 12,000 uninterrupted years. And the fact that they managed that land and themselves well enough that that was preserved and taken care of so beautifully makes me think that they had to have been in some deeper communication than we are. Oh, for sure. I mean, anyone who's gone camping for a couple days, let alone 12,000 years generationally. What does that do to what does that open? Exactly. So, yes, I think it's, but we are still human and we do have, we are divine as well. And we're distracted and we're afraid and it's a scary moment and we're divine.

And the answers are not far away. I went to do this five-day darkness meditation retreat last year. Oh, me too. Did you? Yeah, I did like in Oregon. In Oregon? Yeah, in Oregon. Sky cute? Yeah.

Oh, nice. Great. Love that for us. Okay, so you know. So you know. Well, maybe you've got to have a different experience, but what I found out was there's, you can take everything else away and that voice of love is still there. Yeah. It's the only thing left.

And that was such good news. I was like, oh, this is great news. Everything else can go. And this is still here. What drew you into that? Because I feel like that, it takes a special kind of person to want to go into the void. I know. My friend Margaret was like, you're such an idiot.

She's like, give me a couple thousand dollars. I'll lock you in a closet in the house and give you food. Like, you're such a sucker. Margaret, it's more complex than that, Mark. I'm like, there's more to it. And there is. And I love them. at Scott, like, they really do take care of you in a way.

You know, it's a, I had a friend who did it and talked about doing it, and it was a full body, yes. Like, there's things in my life that I hear about and I instantly know, like, oh, that's one of the things I came to Earth to do. And she said that she had done it. And I was like, oh, that's one of the things I came to Earth to do. I like, right, I forgot that that was on my list. Like, you're supposed to do that, you know? It was just a full, automatic, absolute yes. And, yeah, did you?

Enjoy it? Enjoy is not really the right word. Enjoy is a weird word. Are you glad you did it? For sure. I was just intrigued. I know a lot of people go in there trying to like seek a certain answer maybe or I don't know what. But I was just like I want to see what happens just when your sensory world is pulled out from underneath you.

And then it's just you and your consciousness floating in the void. What happens? And what happens to your sense of time and space? And it was powerful in a different way than like a meditation or repossina retreat has been for me for sure. But I'm super glad I did it. And it was very, it was like it was similarly like one of those things where it was kind of like I want to see what's there. I want to peek around the corner and see what that. And I think it has deepened my relationship to the unknown, the void, being uncertain.

and stillness in general. Yeah. What were you doing in there? Did you journal at all? Oh, I didn't bring anything in. I knew if I had access to writing, then that's such a security blanket for me. And I can always find God on the page in two-way prayer.

So I was like, but what if you didn't have that? Like, what if you didn't have a notebook? What if you didn't have a pen? What if you didn't have light? What if you didn't have, could you still find it? and so yes the answer is yes well it found me

yes it found me actually what happened is a lot of things happened but what happened that was interesting is I thought I was going to be really good at it because I was like I meditate a lot I like myself I don't have any enemies in my mind anymore I don't think I love being alone

I'm not afraid of the dark I'm not claustrophobic this is going to be great and I was like let's go like shut the door let's go and the minute they shut the door I freaking freaked out so hard like I did not like I went mental I was like wow

like I did not like I just wow okay like my body went crazy my mind went crazy I panicked like I think I had a full panic attack yeah I was like whoa I did not see that coming and then I heard I'll just say God's voice say let the wild horses run

so just don't fight this, like just let this run out, like let your brain run out, let your body shake, like whatever has to happen. So it was just like thought, thought, thought, thought, thought, thought, thought, thought, you know, like just this completely disordered mind and this completely disordered body. And then one of the thoughts I had was, what if God isn't real? And what if this thing that I speak to every day that brings me such peace and calm and directs my life is just a figment of my imagination and does not exist, never did. There's nothing but void. There's never been anything here. We are alone in the universe, and I had like the biggest existential free. I was like, you know, like, I'm not going to be,

you know, like, ah, you know. And then God said, that's the one thought I'm not going to let you entertain while you're in here. You can go anywhere you want while you're here, but not that. Because first of all, it isn't true. And you're going to scare yourself to death with that. And it's not true. I'm, I'm right here. So, and secondly, you're not going to do well in here. without a God for five days. And you're not going to do well out there without a God. So that's it. That's a non-starter for a conversation.

And I was just like, oh, thank God. And then that's when it began. And I was like, okay, you're here. And you're always here. So we're good. And I guess that's what my soul came here to learn. So you couldn't be alone if you tried. go in the deepest, darkest hole.

You're not alone. You're not alone. In the complete void, even. There is no void. I'd be remiss if I didn't ask, what do you think it means to know that self? Oh, what comes to mind two things. One is serenity.

I think that people who know themselves and have accepted themselves. and have no notes. Like, no notes. I just love you. I've got you. I'm with you. There's a serenity that is maybe the side effect of knowing myself.

The reward, if I want to put it in those terms, and I'm not sure I do. The impact. But for me, what it means personally, so I'm metapausal, which means my self. sleep has been weird. I mean, that doesn't mean that for everybody, but for me, it means that my sleep has been weird. And so, like, three nights. I have these nights where I just, it's like, we're not sleeping. It's like, it's like it's a talent I used to have. I'm like, I thought I used to know how to do this. Like, you just lay down, you shut your eyes, and you go to sleep, and it's like, no, not anymore.

Like, this is interesting. And there are times when I get frustrated with that, and then I get fearful with that. I'm like, tomorrow's going to suck if we don't sleep. So just like three nights ago, I was having a not-un-sleeping night, and I was doing all the things I know to do that help, and none of them were helping. And I took a bath, and I ate a banana. You know, and I chanted, and I, like, you know, sprayed some lavender in my face. I don't know. And my body's just like, bitch, we're not sleeping. And I had this anger at myself, this, like, little wave of anger at myself.

Like, you should, you should sleep. and then the next thought I had was I just put my hand in my heart and I said I will never turn my back on you I will never turn my back on you I've done it in the past and I won't do it again for me that's what it means know thyself is like I will never throw you away

I will never abandon you I will never turn my back on you and it's just a commitment that I have to myself So if this is going to be a sleepless night, then we're in it together. You know, so we're going to get up and read, and that's okay. And if tomorrow's a hard day, then I'll love you then too. And that's something that I did come to Earth School to learn, because I was not pre-programmed to intuitively have a sense of affection toward myself.

I was pre-programmed to have a tremendous sense of shame to feel like I could never be good enough, could never get it right, could never earn enough, could never have enough love, could never, like just constant self-improvement project that never ends. And so to have come now at the age of 57 to a place where I'm like, little sister, I'm never going to throw you away. I'm never going to turn my back on you. And this is just fine. Like if this is what we do, if this is just what it is, then this is great and I'm happy to be here with you and that

has taken a long time to get to 57 years and who knows how many lifetimes but just for today we're good here and that's all there is you've really become your own best friend yeah my own secure attachment

for somebody who has a very severe attachment disorder I am my own secure attachment No small feet. No small feet. If I can do it, if I can have a secure attachment to me, anybody can do that. I know that to be true because I have a very severe attachment disorder. So if I can have just a day where I'm okay in my own company, that's amazing.

And that's available to anybody. Liz, I'm so honored you're gracing us with your presence after a good period of just hanging out. Hanging out. Yeah, it's such a great joy to be able to do this show. And then you get exposed to so many people's work. And then your job is to dive into their story and their genius and all the things. And then you get to meet them and feel like you get a new friend at the end of it. And yeah, I throughout this whole conversation, I felt your commitment to your own authenticity and like saying what is true, what feels true, and not what's just performance, but like what is actual presence in this moment.

And so thank you for being here. Oh my God, it's a joy. Yeah. Thank you for what you do and for who you give the mic to and for being so curious and for being so lovely. Oh, thank you. Appreciate you. I appreciate you too. Well, uh, congrats on almost, it's almost a year exactly of all the way to the river,

which is now available on paperback. Do a little promo? Thank you. Yeah, of course. And that's it. Do you have any other last words? No, I think we did it. We covered everything.

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you for easing me back into this and making it easy. My pleasure. Thanks to you guys, too, for everything you do. You're welcome back anytime, whatever you want.

And for everybody that. listen to this episode of the Know Thyself podcast. Let us know how this episode was uniquely impactful. If you did that two-way prayer with us, what came through to you? I'm curious to see what came up. Right in the comments. Hey everyone. In case you didn't know, we have an online community. It's amazing. It's called the Know Thyself Collective, and there are three main things on the inside. First, each month I host a two-hour live call with a featured guest. Think of it like this podcast, except you're in the room with us. We go deeper.

We take live questions. And when you join, you get the full archive of every past call. It's basically like a second podcast. Second, you get a full companion guide for every podcast episode of this show with key takeaways, transcripts, journal prompts, and more. Third, but not least, we host community calls every two weeks to meet each other and put all of this into practice together. It's 29 a month.

And if money is ever the reason you can't join, just email us. and will take care of you. If you feel called to practice this stuff alongside people asking the same questions, go to Know Thyself Collective.com or use the link in description. I hope to see you there.