Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 458: You Don’t Have to be Miserable While Doing Important Work | adrienne maree brown

Episode Date: June 6, 2022

Our culture has oddly conflicting views about pleasure. In this episode, author adrienne maree brown explores the importance of pleasure and how it changes your experience of the world. adrienne maree brown is the writer-in-residence at the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, and author of Grievers (the first novella in a trilogy on the Black Dawn imprint), Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation, We Will Not Cancel Us and Other Dreams of Transformative Justice, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and the co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements and How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office. She is the cohost of the How to Survive the End of the World, Octavia’s Parables and Emergent Strategy podcasts. adrienne is rooted in Detroit.In this conversation we talked about:What is pleasure activismThe role of sex and drugsWhy we should say yes moreHow to be in touch with our sense of “enough”The role of gratitude The line between commitment and detachmentHow she defines authentic happinessHer self-description as “a recovering self-righteous organizer,” and why self-righteousness actually leads to powerlessnessContent Warning: Discussions of sex and drugs. Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/adrienne-maree-brown-458See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, everybody. Our culture has some oddly conflicting views on the subject of pleasure. On the one hand, we're obsessed with it. Look no further than the thriving gambling alcohol and porn industries. On the other hand, we also seem to be opposed to pleasure from murky, perhaps, puritanical reasons. My guess today is here to argue that pleasure is incredibly important, not only for your personal well-being, but also because when you experience more pleasure, that changes

how you are in the world. So there are geopolitical consequences here. Adrian Marie Brown is the author of a book called Pleasure Activism, the politics of feeling good. She's the writer and residence at the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, and she's the co-host of several podcasts, including How to Survive the End of the World, Octavia's Parables, and Emergent Strategy. In this conversation, we talked about what, in her view, pleasure activism is, we talk about the role of sex and drugs, why we should say yes more, how saying no, however, can help us to our yes, how to be in touch

with a sense of enough, the role of gratitude, the line between commitment and detachment, and how she defines authentic happiness. We also talk about her self-description as a recovering, self-righteous organizer and why self-righteousness actually leads to powerlessness. Heads up if you've got kids around, there's some talk of sex and drugs as noted. Also, there's a little bit of background noise at a few points. That's what happens when you record in a pandemic. Before we jump into today's show, many of us

want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course

over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm all one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. Hey y'all it's your girl Kiki Palmer I'm an actress singer and entrepreneur.

On my new podcast baby this is Kiki Palmer I'm asking friends family and experts the questions that are in my head like it, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcast. Adrian Marie Brown, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Dan.

What is pleasure activism? for having me then. What is pleasure activism? Pleasure activism is the way we reclaim our whole selves, our capacity to feel, contentment, happiness, satisfaction, joy, particularly for those of us who have legacies of trauma and oppression. It's the work we do to reclaim our capacity to feel the good things. And there's also a component of it that is making justice and liberation the most pleasurable experiences we can have. And it's all rooted in the work of black feminist lesbian icon

Audrey Lorde, who wrote an essay that was published in 1978 called the uses of the erotic as power. So a lot of it is really, what does it mean to live an awakened life a life where you can actually feel your yes and be guided by that? All right, so there's a lot you said there that's very interesting and worth pursuing. Yes, I think so. I agree. We think of fighting for justice, even if we disagree on what justice looks like. I think many of us would agree that it's probably not on our list of things we do to derive pleasure per se. It's a serious, noble, grave pursuit.

So how could it become pleasurable? Well, there's levels. So one of the levels is acknowledging for those of us who are in movement spaces, if you've ever been to a massive, large, massive protest, something that you're doing right by your community, that you're standing up for something that matters, there's actually an immense pleasure to belonging, especially belonging on what feels like the right side of history. And there's a huge pleasure in community. And a lot of us can feel that. But then, yeah, when we get to the work of justice, it's like, oh, now we've got to put on our serious faces and our serious analysis. And one of the things my work has taken me a lot of different directions. But I spent many, many years as a facilitator

of movement spaces. So people would call me and say, Adrienne, you need to get our vision together. Can you help us figure out the timeline for how we're gonna pull off our work? Can you help us move through a conflict? And my job was to be like, how do I make this? One of the most pleasurable experiences that they could have that it feels so good to be with each other, that they will keep

showing up for work that is hard. And I always think of facilitation that way, trying to make it as easy as possible for people to do the hard work of changing the world. And that work is going to be hard no matter what. There are aspects of life that are going to be hard, that are going to include suffering, or stress, loss, grief. That's what we're given as human beings,

but we get to determine how we show up for it. We get to determine how we structure the time that we have together. And I'll give a small example, which is I was working with a team once that was trying to build trust. And I decided to add celebration intentionally to how we held the space with each other. So it looked like getting into relationships where every time we made a decision of any

sort, like we're to go for lunch, we would start playing 90s R&B music and everyone would take a dance break because we're just like we did something like we did something together and just getting to see each other laugh and dance and shift state in that way not just be these serious opponents trying to move through a territory but actually comrades in relationship and community it brings pleasure. And maybe another thing I'll say about this is there's a lot in here that's actually about satisfaction. So when we're trying to change the world, if we can't be satisfied, if we don't know

what it feels like when we're actually satisfied, it's really hard to tell if we're actually experiencing a victory or not. And I'm really excited and curious about figuring this out. I think because we don't feel satisfaction or don't know how to feel it, we often settle for what I call fall solutions. And just a framework I learned from movement generation. They do a beautiful climate work. But we land in fall solutions.

Things that are like, okay, well, someone says, this is what they can offer us. And we settle for it. And we can't even feel inside of us like, this is never going to satisfy us. It's not what we actually need. Just using the language of, for instance, climate protection doesn't actually save the earth.

So I have jokingly, but not totally jokingly, been saying like, we need to stop settling for false, the fake orgasm of climate policies. We need to actually tune in to what is truly satisfying for us and for this planet we live on. How do we do that? There's a lot of practices. So inside the book, pleasure, activism,

I list all these practices for starting to get back in touch with being able to feel yourself and notice what you're feeling. I talk about getting back into nakedness, like really starting to get back in a relationship with your own skin, your own body, what you can feel. There is the practice of semantics, or the study of the body and its wholeness, which I studied for about 10 years intensively. And a lot of it is really learning how to discern feeling in the body

and to be able to handle feelings in the body. Like, it's not a crisis to feel. I'm not totally overwhelmed. I'm not running away from my feeling, but I just see it as data. You know, it's like, this is really good data. I feel afraid, what do I need to pay more attention to? I feel joy, who is with me in this joy

that I want to build deeper relationship with? So being able to feel, being able to be with ourselves from the inside out and then in relationship, a lot of the pleasure practices are actually being able to be more honest about what we need and more honest about what's impacting us, especially those things that are impacting us in ways we don't want to participate in. I'm amazed at how many people block their own pleasure because they just don't speak

up to say they don't like something or they rather it would be a little different. And a lot of that is tied into privilege. There's some people who feel really comfortable speaking up about how they think the world should be. And others, we've been socialized to think it doesn't matter what we want it to be or no one wants to hear that. So some of it is just like retraining ourselves

to speak up in a way that acknowledges we all have these ones and needs. And ultimately, we want to make the world work for as many of us as possible. That seems like no small task being able to speak up if you have been socialized not to or, on the other hand, how to lift up the voices of people who might otherwise not contribute if you're in a position of power that allows you to do that. That requires both communication skills. I would imagine an understanding of power dynamics generally. Yes, exactly.

There's so much for me, so much of pleasure activism has been, can I awaken my eyes to more perspectives than just my own? Can I consider that some of the things I've been taught as how the world is and taken for granted might actually be wrong? Can I see ways that I might have caused harm or that some aspect of my existence might be causing harm and a lot of times we get stuck at the level of intention, right? Like why didn't intend to cause harm? I don't intend to be taking up all the resources.

I didn't intend to take all the positions of power, but in my work, I've really focused on how do we move past intention to impact? And I always say when I come into any group, any room, I always say you can assume good intention, but we want to attend to impact. We want to really spend time paying attention to what actually happens and how it actually lands on people, not to cultivate fragility, right? But to just be with what is, it's like, oh, the person who has the most power in the room, they might be enjoying what's happening very much because it was shaped for them. And how do we start to live in a world where we ask each other what shape would work for the majority of us, what architecture

would work for the majority of us, what governance structures would allow the majority of us to actually participate and be in it with each other. And you suddenly end up with quite a different world. and you suddenly end up with quite a different world. I'm going to take a risk and say, what's that? These series of thoughts that are coming up as I listen to you talk about this, it sounds like it's a lot of work. I'll say this, somebody who's generally had

quite a bit of power earned, mostly unerred and is used to sort of bulldozing along. And I can imagine I'm out of London this. And so I'm kind of asking the question to be deliberately provocative. For others who might hear what you're saying and say, like, how can you get anything done if you're so careful in considering all of these aspects of every single dynamic that might be at play when you're just trying to decide, like, what's for lunch? Well, I will say this. I think it operates in the realm of trust to a certain degree. So,

when you're first learning to trust anything, yourself or someone else, at first it's slow work and it takes time because you're trying to shift your lens and shift your attention. So, just like with anything, you know, with learning to ride a bike, there was a moment when it was hard and you had to really pay a lot of attention in order to get it right and make sure that you weren't running into every fence that you passed by. Same thing when you're learning to drive.

There's a while period where you have to like, okay, hands on the 10 and 2, you have to really pay attention to every move. But then there's something that unfolds when you start to be like, oh, my norm, because I'm practicing, it started to just pay more attention to who I'm in relationship with, not assume that anyone is just there to serve me,

but actually think about us all being in relationship with each other. And relationships are hard, especially at first, until trust gets established. Once trust gets established, things start to move very quickly. So I tell folks that when you're in a new relationship and you're trying to figure out, like, why did you make that decision? It doesn't make any sense to me. That's a phase of relationship. And hopefully you move from that phase into the next phase. Or you're like, I knew you were going to make that decision. You make decisions like that. And I trust you to make

those decisions. And before long, maybe you even have a shorthand. Or with the bike, you just jump on, you don't even think twice. And you forget to put your helmet on. You jump in the car. And it's almost like, yeah, I'm listening to a podcast at the same time because I can handle that because the driving is so innate So I think with any skill set with anything that takes awareness at first It's just a matter of time. You know, we put in the practice. We learn a new skill and I think right now It would actually save people a lot of hard work and time That comes when things explode because these dynamics haven't been named or addressed

or held responsibly. So people are getting called out, people are getting called in, people are getting fired, people are getting held accountable. There's all this stuff that's happening that isn't actually super necessary if folks would just sit down and say, okay, there's something I got to learn here. There's something to me that does need to shift here and how can I get in right relationship with that?

Let me see if I can sum up the conversation thus far and then you'll tell me if I'm in the realm of accuracy here. The pleasure, it sounds like you are defining that word in a broad, capacious way pleasure. And in this particular area of communications, relationships, power dynamics, there may be some pretty hard work at the beginning, but if you do the work to create the trust, you'll ultimately get to a point where working together is a source of pleasure. Yeah. I mean, have you ever had that experience in a team? Oh, yes.

And I've had the opposite experience, most of it, my fault, where the trust doesn't exist because somebody's being a jerk. In this case, that somebody's, an initials are Dan Harris. Well, and it's interesting, right? Because if you're socialized to think that, especially the way we're socialized our own leadership, right?

It's like, I'm just supposed to lead. and the further I get along in that leadership work, the less kind I actually need to be, the less I need to listen, the more everyone else needs to listen to me, the more everyone else needs to do what I want them to do. And the whole US structure of society is really rooted in that, right? That the higher up people gain power, the higher up people go in a governance system, the less they have to truly attend to the human aspect of the people that they're working with and the people that are supposed to be in service too. And so we end up with such huge disconnect. So we end up with stuff happening where we're like, there's no humanity in that or

it doesn't make any sense. And I think that's tied into this. It's like, oh, that's because we think that power means abdicating the social responsibility of being in community. Instead of, I think, what it should be, which is the opposite of that, right? Just like, oh, I step into leadership because I'm interested in doing that labor. I'm interested in doing the work of figuring out how this group or this team can be in really healthy, communicative, good relationships with each other. And I try not to think of this introduction this way, but I do think that this will be one of the long-term impacts of

feminism, just changing up who holds power, who holds these relationships. Without a lot of assumption, I'm like, and it'll look like this, because all women lead in one way. It's not that, but I do think that changing up who holds power starts to automatically necessitate having more models for what it can look like to hold power. And can you relate that back to pleasure? Yeah, I can. So I will say this, for me coming into a space

as a black woman who's queer, who's fat, who loves Beyonce, I'm a Virgo, I'm an auntie. There's so many dynamics to me and I really love myself. I really love myself. I love my life and I love the people I get to work with. I have structured my entire work life towards pleasure. I only work with people that I deeply respect and adore and who I trust deeply. So this week, I was the founder of this institute and I ran this institute for a period of time. And then through relationships of trust and pleasure, I was able to hand them over,

hand most of the work over to other people, and my work now is just to write, which is the thing in life that gives me the utmost pleasure. And this week, a facilitation training happened, and I created that facilitation training from what I had learned. They ran it this week without me for the first time, and the deep, deep pleasure that comes from knowing, oh, I created something that was useful enough that people wanted to recreate it, coherent enough that people could do it without me. And I trusted people enough to truly step back so that they could

actually hold leadership. I'm not looking over anyone's shoulder. I haven't even been sitting in on the training. I'm hearing little updates and news from the folks who are running it, but fundamentally, mostly, I'm trusting them. And I get to see the pleasure that they have in getting to step into leadership, that they have and getting to do innovations of their own making. And I'm not sitting there being like, no, not that innovation. I'm like, yes, bring that because I'm not the only person who's experienced in facilitation. So that is one kind of pleasure that can come in the workspace and come from trust and come from billion relationships in a just way. There's also the pleasure of knowing

that every single person on my team is earning what is a really fair living wage. They can really live abundant good lives on what they're making. And I'm not as the founder making more than anyone on my team. And that feels really good to me. That's a pleasure, right? So there's things like that. It's structural. And the pleasure comes both from being in right relationship with each other and being in right relationship with our larger values about the world. This just seems to make sense from a neuroscientific standpoint. I mean, we know the brain is a pleasure seeking machine, so it makes sense if you're going to create your own system of motivation and a system of motivation for others to work through

the pleasure centers of the brain. Exactly. I identify as a post-capitalist and a post-nationalist and one of the reasons for that is because I really track how capitalism is structured to make us keep seeking pleasures without necessarily experiencing satisfaction. And when we do that, we just become consumers. You know, we can spend our whole lives consuming what someone else tells us will bring us pleasure. In this model of pleasure activism,

instead of having that pleasure be externally defined, we are learning how to feel from within what actually gives us pleasure, what actually gives us satisfaction, what actually feels like community when we're in it. And from that place, we find a liberation follows pretty quickly. Because it's like, I am learning what enough is,

I don't have to be in a constant wheel of labor, labor, labor. You know, trying to prove my worth, trying to prove my value, trying to consume whatever someone tells me will make me more beautiful, more happy, more thin, more this, more that, because from within, when I'm defining it myself, I find what matters to me is different. What matters to me is being in really solid, trustworthy relationships with people, doing work that I feel matters where I can see my impact in my lifetime and where I can see how I'm contributing to a longer lifeline of success and continuation of my species. These things are very satisfying, you know, and then I'm like, I want

all people to get to do that kind of work, right? I really wish that for people that I'm like, you may call it purpose, you might call it something else, but I want people to do work where it's like, I'm so satisfied that I got to contribute to this in my lifetime. I'm interested in this post capitalist thing. So are you skeptical about financial inducements as a source of pleasure? Well, what I'm skeptical about is more who holds power in these systems. So, in the US, we have a racial capitalist system, and much of the wealth that feeds into that system was extracted from land that had been stolen or from people who had been stolen. And I'm like, I don't know how a system that was

started in that way can be transformed into a space where justice happens. And so far, I haven't seen that happen. It's also something like, and this has been true for me since I was very young, that it does not make sense to me that competition would be the best way to innovate and create the world anew and create solutions that work for lots of people. I think it can work sometimes, you know, used sparingly throughout this pandemic. I've been fascinated to watch more and more communities that I'm in relationship with get skilled at mutual aid and really think, oh, instead of hoarding the resources that I have access to, why don't I think in

terms of how do I make sure I have enough? And then how do I redistribute the rest of it in community? And I've been doing that very actively. So looking around and seeing who in my community can easily thrive during this time, can pivot their income streams and make it work and who's struggling with that. And if I'm doing okay, how do I spread that around so that everyone gets through this period to the next opportunity, whatever that looks like? And I think a lot of people have had to do that, even though they might not have sat and had a whole economic analysis around it, I think a lot of people have contributed to collaborative funding and collaborative distribution of wealth in order to get through

this pandemic. So that kind of thing, you know, when I say post-happiness, I think there's other economic practices that could work for us. I still think money, it works as an incentive for people to labor, but I don't know that it always ties in, and I think often it doesn't tie in to actual satisfaction. So that's why we see people who have a lot of wealth in a constant state of accumulation. And for me, I'm like, I am very in touch with my enough, what enough is. And I have a constant practice now when I get something new, I go through and get rid of two things that I already have. You know, I'm like, that's enough. So it's been a practice I've had for a few years now that if I am moved to get something new, then I make room.

You know, I go through my closet and I'm like, okay, what am I done with? What have I not worn? What have I outgrown? What can I let go of? Because I really have that sense of like, I can only wear so many things in a day, in a year. I can only use so many of these things. And especially if they're still in pretty good shape, I'm like, someone else could get some use out of this. But that's because I'm in touch with my enough.

So it doesn't mean I never consume, but I consume with a sense of, I don't need constant accumulation. I want some delights, some joys. I want my needs met. How do you get in touch with what is enough, even for myself, I can see creeping and completely irrational insufficiency in my own mind. So how do you do that?

Well, it's a constant practice. I won't say that I've got it perfected. I will say, I think about some stuff in very finite ways. So I remember when I first started working as a facilitator and a consultant and it was my first time moving out of salaried work. So I was just hustling. Like I was working non-stop. Anything people asked me to do, I was a yes, because I never knew where the next check was going to come from. And I just, it was kind of panic working. And then I sat down with someone who was kind of a socially

justice-minded financial advisor. And she was like, well, what do you actually need? Which I had never asked myself before. And we sat down and kind of figured it out. Like, what is my life cost? What is my rent? Do I have car insurance? What is what do I need to travel? What do I need for delight and joy? You know, it's my pleasure budget. And just kind of touch with like what I needed. And then like, what would I need for retiring well, and what would I need to be able to take care of myself, or what would I need if I was gonna be dependent on others,

but still wanted to have something to offer that. It was just like a really wide-ranging conversation about what would be enough for my life, and it transformed my relationship to work, because I realized I was working in such a way that I was kind of shortening my life by overdoing everything, but it was for stuff that I didn't even necessarily need. And so I got very tangible in that realm. And then for the rest of my enoughness, it's a constant practice I'm paying a lot of attention to.

I'm actually looking at it as I'm healing from sort of disordered eating patterns for my life. One of the things I'm really tuning into, I've been reading a lot of Tick-Not-Hons work on this. He wrote about how to eat and savoring. I really have been leaning into, I really have been leaning into, ah, what does enough feel like in my body? Can I feel when I've had enough? Like, can I tell which bite is enough? And that practice has been really illuminating that my mind and my stomach are up to very different things.

And I love that. Actually, I love that it's like there's great data coming from my body at all times about what enough is if I just tune in. Coming up Adrian talks about her meditation practice defines erotic aliveness and explains what she means by your know makes way for your yes. Oh, we also talk about sex after this. Life is short and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time here on Earth? And what really is the best cereal?

These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is Short with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions like, what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you. But I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs. And sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers.

We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times. But if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it? Follow life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or Wondering Out. Yeah, you brought up Ticknot Han, the recently deceased Zen Master.

It just gets me wondering whether your mindful eating slash intuitive eating practice, your kind of financial practice for lack of a better term around figuring out you're enough. Is all of that supported in any way by meditation or other contemplative practices? Oh, yes. I think it's all mindfulness. You know, it's all mindfulness. So I meditate daily. I start my day with meditation and I meditate a few times usually throughout the day as well. So I have found, you know, after lots of different experiences,

that it works really well for me to do several short sits, several short periods of quiet and turning inward throughout my day. And I've done also like several meditation retreats and sitting, you know, just really sitting with myself, sitting with my quiet self and my dear friend Janine Denovaj is always telling me there's human being without human doing. So just how are you being right now?

And I find a lot of mindfulness practice as I'm traversing emotional territory. I'm like, oh, what would it look like to not try to control this feeling, but feel this feeling and be with this feeling? And I think in that mindfulness practice, I have found a lot of liberation for myself because I'm like everything benefits from the quality of attention that we bring to it. One of the principles of emergent strategy, which was kind of the first book I put out by myself, was what you pay attention to grows.

And I started to come into contact with, well, what does that mean as a modern human being with access to social media? Am I growing social media? Did I grow political conditions that I don't believe in because I was looking at them with despair? How am I contributing my attention? And some of it is still mysterious to me, but what I do know is that when I tune into something,

mindfully and ask, what are my values and how can they show up in this moment? My behavior can actually shift pretty rapidly. And I think that that's my core mindfulness practice. I think the Buddha said something about that, like whatever you think about and ponder becomes your life. Let me see if I can look that up. I'm mangling the quote, my apologies to the Buddha.

Yeah, mangled away. But the essence of it is that, right? It's like our thoughts can become our reality. What we focus on, what we obsess over. I said in the book, I'm like, this is some very ancient thing. And it's true. And you can see that it's true.

You can see where people's attention is all on worst possible, worst case scenarios. And that they keep bringing their attention there until they kind of manifest that. I've seen people end great relationships that way because they just can't stop thinking about what could go wrong. But I spend a lot of time thinking about what is the world I want to co-create with others. And how can I, with my mindfulness practice, with my writing, with my singing, with my music,

with my heart, with my facilitation and mediation, with my abolition work? How can I bring my practices into a deeper alignment with that world? I found the quote, whatever you frequently think and ponder upon, that will become the inclination of your mind. Yes, Buddha be knowing. There's 2600 years of contemplative practice behind you. Exactly. That principle, which you described as a principle of emergent strategy, can you define

that? Yeah, so emergent strategy is not shell level, the essence of it is just about how we get in my relationship with change. And I wrote it looking at emergent theory, complex science theory, reading a lot of science fiction, especially Octavia Butler, reading Margaret Wheatley's work, reading Joanne Benius' work, and thinking about how can we, as a species, learn from all the other species on this planet about how to be in a better relationship to change, because change is constant. And so far, we keep trying to resist or control that. Instead of being with what is, we are trying to manipulate something into being. We have this planet that is abundant, just right for us. And we keep trying to manipulate it into something else, extract more and more from it.

We're doing great harm. So what's that? It's like, how do we get in right relationship with change? And how do we harness change to move in the direction that would yield the most justice for the most people? Yeah, if you said before it would have been knowing he talked a lot about change as well in permanence as a non-negotiable law of the universe exactly Well, I was just gonna say that in social justice movements. That's where I cut my teeth and where I learned a lot about this I Was amazed at how often we're trying to change the world without actually changing ourselves.

So another one on my mentors was Grace Lee Boggs, who was a Detroit-based activist, and she said that we have to transform ourselves to transform the world, that all the structures and belief systems and antiquated ideas and harmful ideas, they all have some roots in us. Like, we have to be willing to look inward as much as we look outward in that struggle. And I took that to heart. So whenever I get angry at something I see in the world, I not only think about what is the effort outward I need to make, but also what is the effort inward. Where is that war mongering still alive in me? Where is that punitive nature still alive in me? Is there some part of me that's thinking I'm superior to anyone else? Is there some part of me that

needs to relinquish power over? Things like that. Seems like a pretty good defense against hypocrisy. Yeah, it works. It helps. You know, I think one of the implicit or explicit sources of reluctance around activism is a sense of like, oh, are these people self-righteous? But it sounds to me like you're saying a way to avoid that is to make sure that you examine whether or not

whatever you're fighting against is in you too. Yes, I think this is key. I definitely am a recovering self-righteous organizer. So I definitely spent years pointing all of my fingers and blaming attention outward. But what eventually occurred to me was it was actually quite a powerless position and a frustrating position. All your attention is on others and you can't control them. So that you don't actually have a say over what they decided to practice or not practice. And I didn't want to spend my whole life in that kind of powerless position. So part of it is also stepping into my own power as a human being.

And I'm like, well, this is all in me as well. And especially if I want to speak meaningfully to how we get past some of these things, I have to be willing to examine it in myself. If I'm saying to a person who has power, you can relinquish some of these things. I have to be willing to examine it in myself. If I'm saying to a person who has power, you can relinquish some of it and you'll be okay and actually you could be happier, I have to know that. I have to have some sense of it in myself and living into that gives you a, I don't know, there's just a sense of peace. Like, when I talk about emergency strategy, when I talk about pleasure activism,

when I talk about the ideas that I've gotten to play with and forward, I've practiced all of them so much that I no longer feel I need to argue about them. They just feel like, oh, okay, that makes sense to my system. And I don't have to convince anyone. I'm always inviting people to practice. I'm like, if you practice this,

you'll most likely notice that it works. And if it doesn't work for you, maybe something else will. But I've had good results. When people come in direct contact with the ideas, when they try to take these practices on of tuning into increasing pleasure and erotic aliveness in their own lives or tuning in and paying more attention to the teachers in

nature and the cycles of nature and what their relationships of interdependence look like. They find that they're living much richer lives where they have more agency and they can feel a lot more impact in their lifetimes. And that's satisfying. I get very random messages of successful people saying, oh, this hurricane came and we were able to evacuate more like a flock of birds. I'm like, cool. That sounds exciting and really useful for this time. You use the word erotic again. So let me go back to that because it was one of the things I had made a note to follow up on from early on in our conversation.

You referenced Audrey Lord and the notion of, I believe, reclaiming the erotic. Can you describe what you mean by the erotic and how it can be reclaimed and how we can have what you call erotic aliveness in our life? Yeah, so the erotic is, in one life. Yeah, so erotic is, and one of the ways that Audri-Lorah talked about it was that sense of what we can feel from within outward. So you feel it from literally within your body. It's like I can feel the pulse of aliveness,

I can feel the pleasure of aliveness, I can feel an erotic pull towards something that I long for, desire, something that's for me, meant for me, feels like it's meant for me. And I'm always trying to be careful with this because often when I'm introducing the ideas to people, their mind goes instantly just to sex and drugs. And those aren't not part of erotic aliveness, but I feel like they often take center stage and they're not the only realm of erotic aliveness.

So I often point to other examples of cultivating erotic aliveness, which is first cultivating like what makes you feel, literally feel most alive. And for some people, it's playing with their kids. For some people, it's the endorph kids. For some people, it's the endorphin rush that comes after a great workout. For some people, it's the experience of falling in love. For some people is the experience of taking a new

lover. For some people with something else, right? But it's something that they're like, I know when I have this experience, I can feel my whole self. I feel my body awakened, music can do this for people in big ways. So that aliveness, that's like, yes, this, this is for me, this is something I really want to do, that I'm really enjoying, I can actually be present in. And this is why mindfulness is so important because this is so important because we have a very numbing oriented society. We're being numbed often, we're being given news over and over again in ways that make it hard to actually tell what's happening around us. And our bodies, our relationships with others, you know, we're trained,

at least for girls, like I grew up reading magazines telling me all about how to please someone else with my body and almost nothing about how to actually feel anything that was happening in my body. And when I realized, I also have a body. And I also can experience pleasure in it. There's things that I really want and don't want. It was such a liberation. It was so exciting. And I realized that that yes that I can feel in my body

at an erotic level for, say, a lover or an experience of pleasure, I can also experience for an experience of what we might call work. I can also experience that when I'm spending time with my dear friends and I can drop in and really be like, there's nowhere else I need to be. I don't need to be in the past or the future. I really want to be in the present moment. And maybe that's another way of understanding the erotic is like the present, really being

able to land fully into the present and feel it at the level of your nerves of your cellular structure. Again, a broad, capacious understanding of if we started with pleasure and now we're talking about the erotic, which I appreciate. You used another word there that I had meant to circle back on, which is yes. I believe your phrase is yes is the way. Yes, it's the way. Yes, is the way. Can you unpack that? Yeah, so one of my somatic teachers,

Stacy Haynes, I remember her standing in the classroom with us and saying, you know, the body learns on yes. And so often we're trying to teach people with nose, telling people like what not to do, how not to behave, what not to wear and stuff like that. But we find that when the body is trying to learn a new skill set, it learns on yes. And when we're trying to move towards changes often, if we can tune into what our yes is, it'll get us further than if we can just tune into it.

I don't want this. I don't want that. I don't want this. I don't want that. It's like, okay, well, then what do you want? And for a lot of people, the most liberating place they could start any change process would just be to ask themselves that question every day

for a few months. What is it you actually want? What is your system say yes to? Like, who does your system say yes to every time you see them? For me, my sister's kids, every time I see them, they come running and barreling into me, like almost all knocked me over because they're all getting giant now.

And I fall apart, I'm so completely overwhelmed with my joy and love for them. And I wanna give them everything. I get it so easy for me to say yes to them, to say yes to any of their needs. And in that way, I know I'm meant to be a quality part of their lives. It's easy to give to them. I feel the same way with my writing practice that like many people,

there's a number of skill sets I have. I could build a career in a lot of areas, but there's nothing that compares to what happens when I sit down to write. It's a true yes in my system. And as I'm getting lost in building a new world, or as I'm getting lost in exploring a new idea, I will often just literally say, in my computer smiling, you know, I'm just like, I can't believe this is my life. This is such a huge yes. I know that this is what I want to do. And part of what I want to cultivate in the world is an accountable yes that can guide people in life.

So we stop living our lives based on like, here's what someone else said is possible. Here's a career you could have. You could muddle through for 60 years and then retire and have a few years of yes in your life before you die. I'd rather see so many more of us and I think this is possible. We could get to a world in which this is how everyone orients is like try a bunch of stuff when you're young and figure out what produces that yes in your system and let that be your work and it might be many careers inside of it but let your work be guided by that.

Hmm. This is it. This brings me joy. I feel meaningful. I feel purposefully. Yes. This is for me. One of the things I've been writing about recently

is my reluctant embrace of a cliche. Super personicity about language and in particular, cliche's. But there is a lot to be said for listening to your heart, which might be another way of saying that would be just sort of like knowing something in your bones, listening to your gut, your viscera, et cetera, et cetera. We've lots of language for this, but there is an intelligence that I think lives south of the neck.

And what I'm hearing you say seems to be in line with that. That's right. So actually, majority of our intelligence lives below the neck, right? So we think about what our heart knows, what our guts know. We think about all the nerve endings that are wired through our entire system. And for a lot of people, our intuition, or there's a sense of like, oh, this is the way. This is right. This is wrong. I can tell that I can't trust the situation.

Our gut often isn't touched with like, when we do need to pay more attention, and it might manifest as a sense of fear or nerves going up. There's tons of data. And particularly for those of us with trauma histories and trauma backgrounds, you've probably read Bessel Vanderklaug's work, the body keeps the score, but there's all this incredible wisdom being unveiled, which many communities have known about for a long time, but it's getting now the sort of research thumbs up of approval. There's all this data in the body. The body is communicating to us all the time.

It stores traumatic experiences for us to process later. It holds on to what we have learned. It's all in the body. And if we start to respect the body as a source of deep wisdom, deep knowing, and let it actually guide us, we can find ourselves living lives of pleasure, delight, enjoyment, right relationship, and authenticity, and even accountability because, again, we're listening, rather than repressing all that data that's coming to us from the body all the time.

I completely agree with that. And there's something I've struggled with a little bit, which is Malcolm Gladwell wrote a link about the wisdom of our ability to size things up quickly. There's a lot of literature that I find quite compelling on listening to the data from your body as you've been discussing. We know that bias can live in quick reactions to bias that can be really damaging to whole groups of other people. And I wonder if you have any thoughts about how to disambiguate the good messages from

the harmful ones? I mean, a lot of it is being in those political practices and being in relationship with others. So when you said that, one of the things that comes to mind is when we talk about what happens with police in this country, what will spark someone to shoot a gun can be really shaped by how they were trained to think about race and supremacy and who's dangerous, who's a terrorist, who's a thug, who's a criminal. So starting to have like a real curiosity like what was I shaped to think about other people who was I told to trust and who was I told not to trust what bodies was I told our human what bodies was I told

are not human or don't deserve human treatment and all of us have been told things about the bodies of those that are cultural lineage or our folks consider other. If all of us can get in some different relationships around that, then we can start to see the patterns. And some of us, white folks, particularly people who are raised in a white supremacist world view, actually hold really dangerous perspectives around this. So there's really incredible programs. There's a program called the Catalyst program. There's a program called Surge. There's books now. There's a lot of

resources for people if they're like, I'd really like to shift that training shift that belief system. It's possible now in ways that it might not have been before. But it's not necessarily possible to ever fully eradicate those things. And that's where relationship can help so much when you're in relationship across difference, when you're in relationship with people who look and were raised and how whole different beliefs than you, that can help to rewire your system. And I tell folks that like really look at are you in a very monolithic community? Are you in a monolithic world?

Are you in a world where everyone kind of looks like you and believes what you believe? You may not change that in your lifetime. You know, that might be what feels most comfortable to you, but you do have to be accountable for how that might shape your worldview and shape what your body is doing. And I find it does help to get into classes like yoga,

I key to other classes that just help you feel your body from within outward. And I also wanna uplift the work of my friend, Princess Hemphill, who recently started a program called the Embodiment Institute with a whole team of folks here in Durham and North Carolina. But they posted something that's basically an embodiment, self-guided training.

So it's like, you can walk through this process, it's a bunch of little webinars, and you can walk through this process to kind of awaken your embodiment. And as you awaken that, you'll get more data on what your biases might be, what you think of your own body, if you even trust your body or not Because part of what you're trying to do is build trust with a body that has been trained to send you some messages that might not be right

So this is again like the intuitive eating. I'm like well You know at first just like my body only wants pizza Right and then as I listen, I'm like, Oh, every time I eat that, I experience massive inflammation throughout my whole system. Maybe my body is actually sending me a second message that's equally important. Can I hear it? I think the same thing can happen with those biases. It's like, there's an initial fear reaction, maybe. And then attuning in, where is that fear coming from? Am I actually in danger? Am I with someone

who's trying to cause me some harm? Or is that my programming? Because I can reprogram that. Well said, picking up on our discussion of yes, another of your principles has to do with its opposite. No, you say, you're no, in parentheses, your boundaries, makes the way for your yes. What do you mean by that? Yeah. Well, a lot of times when I talk to people about creating any kind of changes in their lives,

the thing I hear back is they don't have time. There's no time, there's no space, there's no energy. And what I hear with that is, ah, you haven't figured out to say no. You haven't figured out how to say no. You haven't figured out how to say no to the things that are sucking up your time and maybe wasting your time. And once you learn how to say no,

you literally make more room for the things you wanna say yes to. So that's on one level. But then on another level, there's an aspect of this that's like, if we are so used to saying yes to everything that comes our way, especially yes to ways we think we're going to be valued by others. So a lot of us do this. We're like, I don't want to go to this event, but

they really said that I'm the most valuable person that they can have there. And I'm the only one who can give the talk that they want. And you my ego is being stroked and so I said yes It's not what I want to do, but I said yes now. I'm speaking personally, okay? This is my experience for years. I was saying yes to stuff that I was like I don't really want to do I'd rather be writing I'd rather be writing writing is a thing I really want to say yes to, but if I say yes to facilitating this meeting or if I say yes to giving this speech,

then I'll see these immediate results of people giving me accolades or telling me that I'm valuable. I had to learn to say no, no, that's not the thing I want to do. No, here's some other options. No, no is a complete sentence. Learning to say no is how I have actually made this space

for the kind of writing I need to do, which is prolific writing. Like I, and the kind of person who, if I'm given room to write every single day, I will have something that needs to flow through me every single day. And it'll something that needs to flow through me every single day. And it'll flow in lots of different forms, but I can only make room for that if I'm able to say no

to stuff that doesn't bring me alive in the same way. And some of it's really good offers. Now I always tell people this too, because it's not like it's like, people will offer me trash. And I want to go do this and I'm like, no, sometimes I was like, wow, that is a really, really exciting offer. It might even be a really exciting career or some massive move, but it's not my yes.

It's not my yes. And I remember different thresholds in my life where I had to walk away from something that everyone else wanted me to say yes to, but I could feel from within. I'm like, that's not what I want to do. There's something else that I'm called to. Well, that takes real courage. Sometimes I have not been able to muster it myself. It's courage at first, but it's also like there's some surrender. There's a surrender like there's something I'm meant to be doing and How quickly can I get to that thing when I talk to young people?

People younger than myself. So I'm 43 to young people, people younger than myself. So I'm 43. When I talk to people younger than me, that's one of the things I always emphasize. So I'm like, there is something that you are uniquely suited for. And you can't hear it if you're hearing what other people want to use you for. It's really hard to hear it. And especially if you're good at anything. You know, people will be like, oh, you're good at that. Just do that.

Right? But nowadays you can be good at anything. You can YouTube it, figure it out. You can be good at it. So we have to have more reasons, more distinctions. You mentioned earlier that when you use the word pleasure, many people go right to sex and drugs. Let's go to sex and drugs. Let's go to sex and drugs. Let's talk about it. So you write a lot about sex, casual sex, sex workers, sex in the Me Too era, strategic celibacy, porn. There's a ton of this in your book, given that we don't have endless time.

What pops to mind right now as the most important thing or things to say about sex within this conversation about pleasure pleasure having geopolitical consequences being good for your activist life. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things is to not forget that you have a body and that you can be in relationships that line up with your beliefs, that you can be in relationships with other people, liberated relationships with other people, that align with what it is you believe in the world, what you wanna see change in the world.

So this is one of those areas where you can see a ton of contradiction or folks are like, I am a feminist, but when I am in a sexual role, all of that falls away and I move into something very, very different and I maybe surrender my power or I let someone use me in ways that I don't actually feel that comfortable with, but it's an area of a lot of mystery still. And it kind of astounds me.

Part of the reason I wrote pleasure activism was because I kept finding myself in rooms full of the most powerful people that I knew who didn't know how to talk about the sex that they were having and who were pulling me off to the side and telling me stuff. I was like, what, you know, like, how are you engaging in practices like this? Why don't we know how to do better by ourselves and our bodies and our relationships? And because the Me Too era was happening, I had started a column with Bitch magazine, and I ended up writing a lot, actually. I was surprised by what all wanted to be written

about how to practice pleasure, activism, and relationship to others. And one of the main things I learned was, and this is, I wish I could provide this kind of sexual education space for every human on earth at a very younger age than it was given to me is that your body is really your sovereign space. It is your sovereign territory and it is a sacred space and you get to determine who you're going to share it with and you get to determine what you're going to do with it. And you're the only one who can decide what feels good in it and what feels not good in

it and who you want to touch and who you want to hug and all those things. If I had a different career than the one I have now would probably be doing sex education with kids because I feel like there's a way that the stuff gets left out that they don't get told this and it leaves them vulnerable for harm. We all are left vulnerable for harm if we are not given the tools to determine what actually feels good to us. And that's left in the realm of whoever is the first person to touch us, you know, and hopefully they touch with good intention, but a lot of people don't have that good intention. And I just know too many people, especially women who are in their 30s, 40s and 50s, before they really understand the miraculous pleasure that is possible in their body,

that they can access themselves and that they can choose to share with others. I think what I heard you describe there in part was using your know as a way to make room for your yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. It surprises me that people's expectation is that their first sexual experiences will be with others. Like if I was designing these systems, it would always be you start with yourself and you really get to know your own body, the worth of your body, the magic of your own body, the possibility of it. You get to ask questions and be curious and you just get to know it first before you're

expected to share it with anyone else. After the break Adrian talks about how her relationship to drugs has evolved over time, the pleasure that comes from riding the line between commitment and detachment, gratitude practice, and her definition of authentic happiness. Keep it here. Let's talk about drugs. What are your attitudes there? I'm a huge fan of responsible use of drugs. And I have benefited greatly from this in my own life. I have used drugs as spiritual healing technology. I have used drugs for pain relief. I have used drugs to ease social anxiety.

I have used drugs that created social anxiety. I have used drugs that created social anxiety, you know. And I think that it's again, one of these areas where you can see how the dedication we have to capitalism kind of muddles this water. So like right now, we have tons and tons of people who for years were providing the medicine of marijuana to their community and were locked up for it and are still behind bars for it, but the culture is shifting and now a lot of white folks are making tons of money on the weed industry, right? So there's things like that that really, for me, I'm just like, oh, there's a lot to do around how we liberate this medicine, these medicines from the systems of capitalism that

try to control them and make a profit off of them in unjust ways. But then I think just talking about it, I was lucky. One of my first jobs was a place called the Harm Reduction Coalition. And so I got to learn a very non-judgmental approach to drug use and to a very database approach. It was like, you want to know the drug, set, and setting. What is the drug you're using? What is the mindset you're in? And what is the physical setting you're in? And is the drug a safe one? Is it possible to use it safely? Do you know everything

you need to know? Is the setting a safe place to use it? And there's been amazing work in our lifetimes around creating safe injection sites and other spaces for people to use things. And then your mindset, you know, which is one of the most liberating things for me is now I don't use any drugs or alcohol. If I'm trying to shift my mind state, right? Like if I'm like, I'm feeling sad or depressed or something, I don't try to shift it with substance. I sit with it. I usually meditate. I pose in tarot cards. I try to get more in touch with what's happening with me. That way that I can use the medicine is if I'm in physical pain or if I'm in

a state of needing to relax. And I find that it's really helped me to move away from the numbing technologies that can be associated with a lot of drugs into a presence. I will often go for my swim a little high. And it's like, oh my gosh, the miracle of being in this water. It really just helps me to just even be that much more present. And that's something I try to offer people a lot when it comes to drug stuff is how can you use any medicine to become more present and more attuned and more empowered around moving towards

happiness. Yeah, at Buddhism there, there are the five precepts and one of them is don't use intoxicants in a way that leads to heedlessness. And these precepts are in pretty flexible units up to you to interpret them, but it sounds like you're using intoxicants in a way that leads to the opposite of heedlessness. Yes, yes. And I've used them the other way, right? There was a period of my life

where I would take ecstasy every weekend and go party and dance, and it was probably very heedless. It was also delightful. I don't look back on that period with judgment. I was young and I enjoyed that, but I have found happiness, the real deal happiness, like happy, satisfied, contentment in your life is truly better than any drug I've tried.

And knowing that, learning that, figuring that out, it has felt like this, yet I mind triggers something. I'm like, oh, that is not the feeling you're looking for. Right? Like, I really want to feel my aliveness. I used to use drugs a lot in intimate time in order to like, loosen my inhibitions. And it was really helpful for a while.

I'm a fat woman. There was a lot that I kind of had to overcome to really learn to love my body as it is and recognize my innate sensual goddess self. And so I use those, you know, drugs for a while to help me get there. Now I'm like, oh, I'd rather be present because I want to feel every sensation. I want to feel the presence of the lover. I want to feel it all. So it's like being in a relationship with it where you're very mindful. I think that's the key, right? Because even if you are like, okay, I have had a lover where you're very mindful, I think that's the key, right?

Because even if you are like, okay, I have had a lover before who was very clear that they're like, I need this because of my trauma history. This is how I can relax into intimate time. Okay, great. It was really mindful. It was really clear and it really worked to create a possible intimacy for us. Okay, so I think the key is like, what are you up to? a possible intimacy for us. So I think the key is like, what are you up to? There's something you say that I want to ask you about before we run out of time because it really piqued my interest. You say the deepest pleasure comes from riding the line between commitment and detachment.

You know, I think this probably also deeply aligns with Buddhism. Really, it's about detaching yourself from the outcomes of your labor or your effort. I think of it as detaching myself from permanence around whatever I'm making. So even as I'm writing a book, I can foresee a time when that book will no longer be in print or will no longer exist. But I pour myself deeply into the writing of it, deeply into the experience of writing and learning what the book wants to tell me, and trusting that the people of my time, even if only one other person comes across it, it will be of some service to my time and to my place.

And I just relinquish any control over what those outcomes might be. And I don't know if you saw, there was a show station 11 that recently was going on. So it's like an apocalyptic show, and I won't give any spoilers away, There was a show station 11 that recently was going on. So it's like an apocalyptic show and I won't give any spoilers away, but there's an aspect of it that centers around a piece, like a comic book that basically there's only like one or two copies of in a post-apocalyptic setting.

And it's everything hinges in some way on the relationships around this thing. And I found that so delicious, right? That's like, when you're writing something, you don't know how it's gonna be received. You don't necessarily know what'll happen with it. And nowadays we live in a world where like, something will be like,

it's a New York Times bestseller. And then later you're like, that's because they wouldn't bought all the copies and did that or whatever. It's hard to know, like, what is the value of a piece of work or piece of writing. But I find that you cannot go wrong if instead of focusing on some expected outcome, you focus on doing the practice

really mindfully and really what I think of is in a devoted way. So I romance my writer's self. When I sit down to write, I put on music, I've got candles off and going, I try to create a quiet space. If I can't do that, I at least give it the time. You know, I'll tell people like, hey, I need 10 minutes to just go inward

and get this idea through me. Like, I'm very dedicated. And not being attached to an outcome allows the truth to come through. I'm not trying to control anybody or predict their responses. I just want to be in the writing. I want to let it come through me as clearly as it can. I think for any work that people are doing, if you can relinquish the idea that you can foresee the outcome and instead do the work in the best possible way you can, I think there's a lot of satisfaction and ultimately better work emerges from that.

But I can imagine being a challenge, say you're working on climate change and you're trying to shoot for a specific emissions goals, how would you not get caught up in the end result? Well, I think the climate change is actually a great example of this, because we can put our very, very best effort forward and still have a meteor fall out of the sky next year. Like fundamentally, we want to be alive and we want to operate with the earth in such a way that shows we want to be in right relationship. And I'm really into getting in a deeper and more authentic and more loving relationship with

the planet and all of our practices. But I also recognize that there's an aspect of our survival as a species on this planet that is not in our hands. Right? So what we are trying to do is how do we mitigate the part that is in our hands? How do we mitigate the parts we understand? How do we orient towards them? And even now numbers have been out there for years. Here's what we have to get to. It hasn't motivated enough people to actually get us there. So if we were tied to the outcome in which the only thing that will work is telling people the number we're trying to reach,

well, we would feel like a failure. Instead, my orientation is it's never a failure, it's always a lesson. Maybe instead of throwing all these numbers at people, we need to try different organizing strategies. And when you're tied to outcome so intensely, you sometimes can't tell that something isn't actually working the way you want it to and you can't make the adaptations you need. Part of what I'm interested in all the time is, how do we stay adaptive, how do we stay in a relationship to the work, if I'm doing my best work,

and it doesn't go the way I thought it might go or it doesn't change the world, I can pivot, I can try another experiment, but really it's setting a spirit of experimentation instead of experience of declaration and dictation. It's going to be like this. I guarantee it. And even try it at your family dinners. I always tell people I'm like, you don't have to start with the hardest, biggest thing. Just try when you get together with your family the next

time to just show up your best, like, set down the expectations. Here's how we always do it. And just see what can happen if you show up. Like, I'm not attached to the outcome. I'm just attached to showing up as my best self with these people I love. What is a radical gratitude spell?

To win a read it to you? Sure. I have this radical gratitude spell that I wrote, and I'm a spell writer. I love writing spells, casting little spells, putting my intentions into the world through words, and the radical gratitude spell that I wrote was a way of greeting someone, a stranger,

calm, rad friend, who's also trying to work for a liberation. So I say, you are a miracle walking and I greet you with wonder. In a world which seeks to own your joy and your imagination, you have chosen to be free every day as a practice. I can never know the struggles you went through to get here, but I know you have swum upstream and at times it has been lonely. I want you to know I honor the choices you made in solitude and I honor the work you have done to belong.

I honor your commitment to that which is larger than yourself and your journey to love the particular container of life that is you. You are enough, your work is enough. You are needed, your work is sacred. You are here, and I am grateful. So the point is, or one of the points at least would be to not just have gratitude be some diffuse vague goal, but quite specific. Yes. Yeah. Am I right about that? Yeah.

Absolutely. I mean, I'm a big fan of gratitude as much as possible all the time. So I'm always trying to look in my own life at like where can I bring more gratitude in? I think gratitude is directly tied to abundance. If we don't know how to experience gratitude, we can often struggle to recognize when we're in a state of abundance, when we're experiencing a state of abundance. So I love a gratitude practice. I especially love offering gratitude to the people around you, the people who work with you, the people who make your life go. I love a gratitude practice. I especially love offering gratitude to the people around you,

the people who work with you, the people who make your life go. I love a gratitude practice and getting very specific about it as detailed as possible. Last question from me, there is a principle on your list of principles that strikes me as maybe kind of the bottom line, even though it's not the last of the principles, but strikes me as like a perhaps the central rally and cry, but you'll tell me if I'm overstating this. The principle is when I am happy, it is good for the world. Yeah. One of the misunderstandings I think we have is that we are individuals, that we're moving around the world as individuals in our own little

bubbles. And I think the truth of the matter is that we are entities, collective entities. We come into the world born into someone else's hands. And almost everything that happens in our lives is either a direct collaboration or an indirect collaboration, right? You either know the person who got the eggs from the chicken or you went to a store where someone who knows them made sure that that connection was made. And even if you live out in the wild in nature with no connection to any other humans,

you still are reliant on whatever stream you get your water from. You still are in relationship to the creatures, the plants, the animals that sacrifice their lives for your well-being. So I think once you get to that place, right, and it's like, oh, we're all interconnected, and we all benefit from happiness. So each one of us who's actually able to attain authentic happiness, that means happiness that is not caused through harm of another happiness that can be felt through the system,

happiness that is not a temporary sort of gratification. Right? Like, something that's gonna be gone tomorrow, I got these new shoes and, now I need the next pair, right? But true happiness, when you sense that in others, it lights you up. For most of us, it lights us up. This is why some people respond to children the way they do because children are often in a very direct relationship to happiness. And it's great. It's good for the world. It's good for everyone when we see people who achieve that happiness and that peace. And it's great. It's good for the world. It's good for everyone when we see people who achieve that happiness and that piece and it creates a model that other people can look at and say, ah, that's possible.

It's possible in my lifetime and we can demystify it. I feel like that's part of my life's work is demystifying joy. I love that. And when the rubber hits the road, there really is no difference between I and the world. You are a part of the world. You are the world. You're of the world and in it. Yeah. Is there something I should have asked you but didn't? No, I feel really satisfied. Can I push you to plug your books and maybe where we could find you on the internet for people who want more from you, where and how can they get it? Where can they get it? Yeah, so I have, I think all of my books

are available through AK Press, and I always tell people by direct if you can from them, they're a really sweet, small press, and have allowed me to publish anything my heart desires. So AKPress.org is a great place to actually get books. And then I have dedicated my Instagram page to making memes, not making memes, but sharing them. And I've become quite the meme curator. So I really try to make my page a place of joy and laughter and kind of a tender reflection of what's happening in the world

right now. So it's just Adrian Murray Brown on Instagram and the Marie is spelled M-A-R-E-E. So that's the way to find me in the world. And we'll put links to everything in the show notes so you can click on those links. Adrian Murray Brown, thank you very much for coming on. It was and I'm not being cute here. It was a pleasure. It was a pleasure for me to, Dan.

I'm glad it was enjoyable. Big thanks to Adrian. Thank you as well to everybody who works so hard on the show. Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justine Davy, Kim Baikama, Maria Wartel, Samuel Johns, and Jen Poient. And we get our audio engineering from ultraviolet audio. We'll see you back here on Wednesday for a brand new episode with the delightful Dharma nerd Pascal O'Clair.

He's a great meditation teacher. We're going to talk about a Buddhist list. We have never covered here on the show. We're going to talk about the aggregates. That's coming up on Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad-free with 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts.

Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey.