Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - How To Rewire Your Inner Dialogue And Re Regulate Your Nervous System Elizabeth Gilbert

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

A raw conversation about addiction, love, death, grief, recovery, and more. Elizabeth Gilbert is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of nonfiction and fiction books such as Big Magic and Eat Pray Love. Her new memoir is All The Way To The River: Love, Loss, and Liberation. In this episode we talk about: Ways that Elizabeth fostered dependency in her life  What Elizabeth means when she says "make other people into my home" The modalities and practices Elizabeth uses to ground in her daily life The definition of healthy relationships – and how to have them  Self-compassion Join Dan's online community here Follow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTok Subscribe to our YouTube Channel On Sunday, September 21st from 1-5pm ET, join Dan and Leslie Booker at the New York Insight Meditation Center in NYC as they lead a workshop titled, "Heavily Meditated – The Dharma of Depression + Anxiety." This event is both in-person and online. Sign up here!  Get ready for another Meditation Party at Omega Institute! This in-person workshop brings together Dan with his friends and meditation teachers, Sebene Selassie, Jeff Warren, and for the first time, Ofosu Jones-Quartey. The event runs October 24th-26th. Sign up and learn more here!   To advertise on the show, contact [e-mail] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris Sponsors:  Stitch Fix: Get started today with stitchfix.com/happier and get 20% off your first order when you buy five or more items. AT&T: Staying connected matters. That's why AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they will proactively make it right. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. How we doing? Today, we've got a conversation with an extremely well-known person who's going to get bracingly raw and candid in describing how she learned to change the way she talks to herself and to re-regulate her nervous system. You know Elizabeth Gilbert. She wrote E. Pre Love, the memoir that sold more than 15 million copies and became a movie starring Julia Roberts. Liz is also a very well-regarded novelist, a TED Talker, a popular substacker, and more. In this conversation, we really go there. She talks about addiction, love, death, grief, forgiveness, recovery, money, the concept of home, and how she conceives of God. She's got a new memoir. It's called All the Way to the River, and it's about her often incredibly tumultuous relationship with her partner, Raya Elias, who died not long ago.

Right now, the memoir, which hits shelves this week, is getting a lot of press. Some of it quite critical, among other things, some people are really keying in on how dark things got between Elizabeth and Rea. We do touch on that in this episode, but that's not really the primary focus. Instead, as always, my goal is to help bring you the most practical takeaways from Liz's experiences so that you can operationalize those insights in your own life. This episode, I should say, is part of an ambitious month-long series we're doing called The Reset. every week we're tackling one area of life where resetting maybe in order last week it was about resetting your nervous system this week it's about resetting your relationships specifically your relationship to yourself which is for many of us our most problematic relationship next week we're

going to talk about resetting your career after that we're going to talk about how to handle change and uncertainty non-negotiable and unpleasant facts of life before we get started with liz i just want to remind you that for our paid subscribers over at dan harris dot com you will get a guided meditation customized to the themes of this episode. We're doing guided meditations now for all of our Monday, Wednesday episodes. Today's meditation and all of the September meditations will be coming from Vinnie Ferraro. Today's is all about your craving mind, whether you're in the grips of an addiction or not. To some degree, we all have addictions in our lives because our mind really is wired for this craving.

And so Vinny's going to walk us through how seeing your craving. means you don't have to be your craving. Also want to say there are live meditations that we've been doing at dan harris.com have been such a hit that we're now going to do them every week, every Tuesday at four Eastern. The next one is a solo session with Vinny. That's on Tuesday, September 16th at Four Eastern. Again, all of this is available when you become a paid subscriber.

So join the party. Final thing to say, if you want to meditate with me in person, I've got two events this fall. The first is at the New York Insight Meditation Center. It's on Sunday, September 21st. It's a half-day retreat or workshop on the Dharma of Depression and Anxiety. You can do that one actually either in person or online. I'll be doing that with Leslie Booker, who's a great meditation teacher. And then the weekend of October 24th, I'll be doing meditation party, which I do every year at the Omega Institute in Upstate New York with my friends, Jeff Warren.

And this year, Afosu Jones Cortay will be with us. There are registration links for both of those events in the show notes. Enough out of me. We'll get started with Elizabeth Gilbert right after we get paid with these ads. Elizabeth Gilbert, welcome to the show. Thanks, dear. I'm so happy to see you. It's been 10 years.

Where does the time go? What even is time? What are we doing here? Exactly, exactly. So many big questions. Who let the dogs out? We could go on and on. Congratulations on your new book.

You have had quite a bit of significant. of the memoir format in the past, and now you've got a new memoir. Can you just give us the broad outlines of this new story you're telling about your life? Yeah, this is the story of my relationship with my best friend, Rea Elias, who I fell in love with when I was married to somebody else and kept that very secret from myself, from her, from my partner at the time, just compartmentalized it and tucked it away and tried very hard to act as though it weren't true. And then she was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer in 2016, at which point she was given six months to live. The bottom fell out of my life and fell out of my heart. And there was no way anymore to be

able to pretend that I did not love her the way I loved her. And so I left my marriage and we came together for a very short time that became one of the most intense experiences of my life for both of us. She ended up living for 18 months, but she relapsed into active drug addiction. She had been a heroin and cocaine addict in recovery for many years prior to that. And toward the end of her life, that drug relapse came. And she collapsed kind of into her most degraded version of herself. But I also collapsed into the most degraded version of myself, a codependent enabler, desperately seeking love from somebody unable to give it. And the book is about love. It's about death. It's about grief. It's about addiction of all sorts, and it's about ultimately recovery.

I'm not sure if I'm remembering this correctly, but the first time we met, I think was 2008 or nine, and I came to your house in New Jersey and was interviewing you about Eat, Pray, Love, which at that point had already been out for a while and was really, really successful. And I think I may have met Rea in the house at that time. There was somebody you introduced me to who was an artist, a friend of yours and you were kind of helping her and working with her and I think it was her. It was her. Yeah. I remember that well. I'm remembering that there was some moment of a joke where she made some reference to a time in her life when she was, in her words, on the island.

And you said, you said something like, Fire Island, you know, Staten Island? And she was like, no, Rikers Island, Rand. Rikers Island, Dan. And I remember us having a laugh about that. But yeah, yeah, she was there that day. So at that time, you were friends and you were married to a man, if I remember it correctly, about whom you wrote a book called Committed, which was about an exploration of marriage to this gentleman. Am I piecing this all together correctly? You're piecing it together pretty well. That book Committed was about me trying to work out my tremendous ambivalence and fear about getting married for a second time. to somebody who I loved very dearly, and the gentleman to whom I was married was the guy that I wrote

about in E. Pray Love, who Javier Baudem played in the movie, the Brazilian man who I met when I was traveling for E. Pray Love. And neither one of us had any interest in ever getting married again. Both of us had had divorces that we had experienced as very scarring. But the only way that he could get citizenship and residency in the country was through marriage. So in a way, our hand was sort of forced. And I wrote committed as a way of trying to write my way through. my inherent discomfort with the institution of marriage. And I think we talked about that too. Yes, we did.

During the time that we talked about Big Magic. I remember you saying, like, even after writing this whole book about marriage, you don't seem to be a big giant fan of it. And I'm like, it's a hard thing to be a fan of as a woman when you do the sociological and historical research into how that institution has traditionally turned out for women, which is not awesome. So, yes, I was married at that time, and Rayo was just my own. my beloved friend who, as you recall correctly, she was a filmmaker and an artist and a writer.

And she was working on a memoir and living in this church that I had that I was lending to artists at that time that they could do work in. I see. Okay. So I think the last time I saw you was, I interviewed you one other time about Big Magic, your book on creativity. And this was before all the stuff that went down with Reya. So Reya gets sick in 2016. You divorce Javier. Bardem's acting inspiration and you start this intense journey with Raya that you write about in this book. I'm just trying to get the timeline correct. You got it.

Yep. Okay. I want to hear much more about her, but I want to start with you because you've said something there about yourself that I want to unpack. And I have a quote from you that I think is right in the same neighborhood. You've described yourself as a sex and love addict, a romantic obsessive, a fantasy and adrenaline addict, a world-class enabler, and a blackout codependent. Can you just say more about all that? I don't know how to describe it better, but, you know, that's definitely the encapsulation.

You know, these are all terms that I've only sort of recently been able to pick up and apply in a way that started to help me make sense of my life and my history and behaviors that I've had for my entire life that have constantly ended with me essentially driving myself over a cliff about somebody again and again and again. I'm 56 now and I've been aware for 35 years that there was something wrong with me in the way that I did intimacy, especially romantic and sexual intimacy. And it's not as though that was a problem that I didn't notice. I mean, there's no one on earth who would have looked at a spreadsheet of my romantic and sexual history. and said, this is the emotional thumbprint of an emotionally stable and healthy person.

It's like one relationship after another, constantly overlapping, always ending in shame, pain, and drama, desperately changing my entire life to suit the life of the next person that I was with, altering myself in all sorts of ways to become more pleasing to whoever I was with. It's a line actually that ended up in Eat, Pray, Love in the book and the movie, but somebody said to me, you know how some owners end up looking like their dogs, you always end up looking like whatever guy you're with, like whatever music you're into changes. Like, you know, I was just this permeable person trying to lock down intimacy, but always ending up in the same sense of self-abandonment as ever.

And I didn't have words to describe it until six years ago when a friend of mine who was in a 12-step recovery program for alcohol addiction said, you know, there's this 12-step recovery program for sex and love addiction. and it's very similar to A.A. and N.A. And I've been watching you do this to yourself for decades and always with the same result. And it seems to me like it might serve you to go check it out. And entering into those rooms and hearing, you know, just like any addict, entering into the embrace of a recovery program. And suddenly the thing that you're the most ashamed of, the thing that always leaves you bewildered and baffled and confused. destroyed is the thing that everybody in that room has. And there's this tremendous sense of home. You know, like, I'm just hearing my story being told by person after person. I thought this was

just a me thing. I didn't realize that there were terms for this, that there's a program of recovery for this, that there's hope that I don't have to keep doing this forever and ever, and that I might actually be able to live a life that's not only a life of dignity, but also I would say a life that's in integrity to my true nature, because underneath all of that trauma-based dysfunction, I truly believe that my real nature is a deeply kind and generous and loving person who wants to be of service and would never want to harm anybody. But that desperate need for what we call in the rooms of recovery, lava, love, attention, validation, and approval from whoever I could get it from made me into somebody who was often manipulative,

often secretive, and who left quite a trail of wreckage, not just in my own life, but in the lives of others, which also just ratcheted up the shame. And then made me want to act out more to cover that all up. So yeah, those words that I use in the book to describe myself, sex and love addict, blackout codependent. Blackout codependent to me means just like any addict. I wake up one day, And I'm like, how did I get in this relationship that is so insane? I wasn't even present to me entering into this. I don't even know how this started. How am I paying this person's bills suddenly?

Like what just, you know, and a Skid Row enabler, whatever I have to do and give you to earn your love approval and validation, I will do much to my own detriment. So, you know, I didn't want to write a book about Reyes drug addiction that didn't also address this. I don't think it's really possible to be in an incredibly dysfunctional relationship with an active addict unless there's something going on with you that is also not well. That's where we came to. Philosophically and practically, I guess, is it your view that it makes sense to go back and unpack some of the causes that led to this, what you're calling love addiction? Or is it better just to focus on the practical fixes moving forward. So there's an expression I love in the rooms of addiction recovery that says,

discovery is not recovery. And what that means to me is I can know everything about why I'm like this. And I could have written a doctoral thesis by the time I was 30 years old called why I act like this. But it didn't stop me from doing it. You know, just like any addict, you can know why you do it and that's not going to stop for me. maybe a more emotionally stable person might be able to transform their life based on information.

And that's one of the things that makes addiction so cunning, baffling, and powerful because I'm accustomed to being a really smart person and I'm accustomed to let me find out everything there is to find out about this thing and then I will become the master of that thing. And that just kept not working. The entire book committed that I wrote, part of the motive for me to write it was to if I can understand from a historical and a psychological and a cultural standpoint, everything there is to know about the history of marriage, I will become divorce proof. Like I will immunize myself against the kind of disaster that I tend to always end up in.

And of course that didn't work. So for me, dissecting the past, and I've done a lot of that too, I've sat in therapist office for decades talking about myself and my family history and my trauma. It's not to say that those things are not important, but they never stopped me from my pattern. They never stopped me. And the only thing for me, and I always want to just bring this back to like, I'm not a spokesperson for any particular program. This is a memoir about my own experience, but for me applying the same guidelines to these behaviors that an addict and 12-step would to any other addiction and going through those steps was the only thing that's actually created a kind of transformation of consciousness for me.

I was actually having this conversation. I just got finished with my annual 10-day meditation retreat, and I was talking at the end with my teacher, Joseph Goldstein, and we were talking about this very question, what does therapy useful for and what is it not useful for? And I think where we landed is a certain amount of visibility into the causes and conditions that produce whatever mania, you know, is dogging you. And we all have one or two or three of those. A certain amount of visibility helps. But then you need a bunch of tools.

Yeah. And so if you're just wallowing in the past, it can give you understanding, but no relief. I agree. And that comes from somebody. I have a lot of respect for people who are in the therapy business and who are, you know, helping folks. And certainly for me, I think it's been a important part of my journey, especially in my 20s and 30s, to just have a sympathetic person to talk to is something that is historically really beneficial for humans. A kind and intelligent person who will listen with undivided attention was, I think, a really big part of my evolution as a person. But man, it didn't break the patterning of my behavior. You know, I think this is just coming off the dome, Dan, and maybe this is sort of what you and Joseph were speaking about.

If you're going to compare how old therapy and psychology are compared to how old some of these spiritual practices are, you know, one of them's got legs. You know, like psychology is pretty new. And meditation and prayer are ancient. and people have used those tools for a really, really, really long time to calm and settle their nervous systems. The concept of surrendering your life to a power greater than your own is also an ancient, ancient concept that multitudes of our ancestors used long before there were therapeutic systems to learn how to regulate their own nervous systems and maybe become better people. Yeah, to me that makes sense. I will say something, I suspect you'll agree with this, but just for any therapists in the audience who's feeling defensive, there are obviously many good therapists go way beyond the exploration of your past traumas and do talk about practical tools, especially in like cognitive behavioral therapy. And so there are many kinds of therapists, many kinds of therapy, and many of them do both the excavation and the sort of innovation around behavior, change, et cetera, et cetera. But I was just a lot. curious for you where you fell on all of this. I do want to spend quite a bit of time talking about

what you learned in recovery because I think that's really the meat of what I would like to talk about. But before we get there, do you mind if I dwell a little bit longer in the problem itself? You can dwell anywhere you like to. This is your podcast. Yes, but it's your life. It's okay. I just wrote it all down and put it all out there. So yeah, go for it. Ask whatever you like. Okay. Apparently you did some work on the brain chemistry of love addiction. I'd be curious to hear what you learned. It's a process addiction. Process addictions are different than substance addictions. So your substance addictions are, you know, nicotine, alcohol, cocaine, where your body creates a biological dependency on a particular substance. Process addictions, I'm not the world's

greatest expert on this. I dabbled in it just enough to feel like I could see myself in it and be like, oh, that makes sense. That's what it feels like. So process addictions, I don't actually need external brain-altering chemicals to drive me into states of insanity. I've got a pharmacy inside of my brain that produces these at a rate that is apparently up to 10 times higher than what we might call a normal person. So somebody with a process addiction gets addicted to a certain activity, because that activity stimulates the release of certain hormones in their brain that feel good, essentially, and that feel so good that you want more of them. So gambling is a process addiction, shopping is a process addiction, skin picking. Food is a sort of gray area, I think, as to whether

people think of it as a process addiction or substance addiction. But for me, the high that I would get on somebody's attention, and I've done, plenty of substances legal and illegal. There's nothing I've ever encountered that can touch that in terms of how wasted I can get on somebody who I'm obsessed with. And when I become addicted to that person's attention and they withhold it, the withdrawal that I go into has historically brought me the closest to suicide that I've ever been in my life. So if I become addicted to a person and to the feeling that arises in me. And then when my body, just like any other addiction, gets accustomed to these heightened levels, like jacked up levels of hormonal release, of adrenaline and cortisol

and various other of the love drug chemistries that are dumped into my brain. So my body is going to get more and more accustomed to though. And I'm going to need a bigger and bigger hit to get the same feeling that I got initially. And whatever I have to do to get that, I will do. No matter how degrading, no matter how demeaning, no matter how much it ends with me, like begging and, you know, just the absolutely most undignified things. And when I feel like that person is withholding that from me, I crash hormonally, psychologically, and spiritually. And that is the worst. That is the worst. And I'm no longer able to function. I'm no longer able to make logical decisions. my behavior becomes more dangerous.

And that's what I've been doing my whole life, just doing that with one person after another. Just to say that sounds really brutal, and I'm sorry that you have had to deal with that. Thanks, Dan. It has been, and the thing of it is it hasn't just been brutal for me. One of my favorite teachers is Byron Katie, who has this line that I love,

and I really feel it in my own life, that she says nobody is safe from me when I need them that much. And as a person who would love to treat people with compassion and with true love rather than vampire squid tentacles, it hasn't ended well for anybody involved with me either. And like many binges, it sure can begin in a really exciting way. And it's not going to go well. It's not going to end well for them either. And that's just as awful for me as experiencing my own abandonment of self and my own degradation is to see the chaos and the suffering that I've brought to others.

Yeah, my friend Evelyn Triboli often talks about something she calls the toilet vortex. You're kicking your own ass and then you take it out on other people. That makes you feel even worse and then you're even more terrible to other people and then down you go. and what I'm hearing from you is a classic toilet vortex. That's a great term for it. Yep. Coming up, Elizabeth Gilbert talks about some ways that she foster dependency in her own life, what she means when she says that she makes other people into her home and the modalities

and practices that she uses now to regulate her nervous system and change the way she relates to herself. Well, in terms of, you know, and this is this tough stuff, nobody being safe from you and you need them that much, you know, you do talk in the book about using your money and energy to save people in order to foster a kind of dependency. Yeah, that worked out very tidily in my life because I made a lot of money for me, pray love. So if you take these unheeled tendencies for love, attention, validation, and approval, and then you add. had a great deal of money to it, I could suddenly be an even bigger influence in people's lives. You know, I want to be careful to not pathologize every single thing I've ever done, because there is also at the heart of me a true generosity and a true wish to see people do well. And also, I'm somebody who has always, even as a little kid, sharing was very intuitive.

to me. Like, of course you should have this toy too. The better angels of my nature instinctively lean towards sharing and giving and trying to create space for other people. Where it gets shady, and I can very specifically talk about what happened with Rea was that, you know, this was somebody who was a friend of mine who was going through a really tough time in her life. And I had this space, this church in New Jersey that I owned that I was wanting to make into an artist's residency, because I know from my own experience how incredibly valuable it is when you're trying to create to have a quiet and safe space where you can go away from your normal life, and I wanted to be able to offer that to people. And so I offered it to her. She came out there for a few months,

and during that time, and this is somebody I'd known for years, we got to know each other a lot better. I gradually began to realize what an extraordinary person she was. I also began to experience this sensation that was unfamiliar to me, which was that whenever Rea was in the room, I didn't feel anxious and afraid because Rea was a very powerful stabilizing force. She had a great gift in my nervous system of being a great co-regulator. She was very courageous in the places where I am not. I am very courageous in the places where she was not. So she did not have a lot of creative courage and I have like infinite creative courage, but I have a lot of fear. of interpersonal relationships and handling unstable people and dealing with conflict and that kind of

stuff terrifies me. That was a breeze for her. I have never met anybody who was more comfortable walking right into the white hot center of whatever conflict or issue was going on and unblinkingly looking at it in the face and being like, dude, let's talk about this thing that's happening here. and her tremendous power to diffuse people, to go to honesty with people, to handle situations that for me just felt impossible, meant that whenever she was in the room, I'm like, I'm safe, Ray is here. I had never experienced that feeling with anybody to that degree before. And once I felt what that felt like, I didn't ever want her to not be in the room. You know, and here's where the shady, dicey bit comes in. instead of being honest about that and having some very difficult conversations with my husband

at the time about that, with Reya, with myself, I was like, I'm just going to bury this information. Nobody needs to know about this, but I'm going to move heaven and earth to make sure that Rea is always here. I'm going to offer her free housing. She can stay at that church for as long as she wants. I'm going to dangle all sorts of enticements in front of her, travel, anything that she would like, oh, she needs a car, here's a car. Essentially, and it's an ugly word, but it's an ugly truth, bribing, using whatever means I had to bribe her to just always be there. And that is not, call that lots of stuff, but you can't call it integrity. And it's also manipulating somebody else's life for a need that I had because I could not meet that need

myself. Yeah, well, I think it's a kind of baller integrity that you're able to talk about it now. And I do want to say that from a Buddhist standpoint, I don't sure where I stand on this, but I think I sympathize with it. We are all essentially good, but the world comes in and papers that over, especially when it comes to addiction. Addictions can co-opt the best part of you, in your case, generosity, warmth, openness. And we don't know each other well. and we met you a couple of times, but I certainly felt it in both of my encounters with you. And addiction can come in and co-op that and warp it and weaponize it.

And it sounds like that's what happened here. Oh, yeah. Addiction will weaponize whatever it needs to weaponize to get the need met. I got actually sort of misty-eyed as you were saying that because I was, there's a line in the big book of A.A. At the beginning of the book where they talk about how 12-step recovery works. And they quote a doctor from an alcoholic treatment facility. in the 1930s, I mean, addiction recovery is woefully poor treatment for that over the history of the

world. I mean, most addicts for most of history have just been doomed. So in the big book of AA, this doctor is quoted saying to someone who had found recovery and had actually come out on the other side of desperate alcoholism against all odds. And he had said, if you had come to my hospital, I would have turned you away because people like you are too heartbreaking. That is a line that has always really moved me. Addicts are so heartbreaking. And the reason they slash we are so heartbreaking is because of exactly what you just pointed out that you know this person to be at their heart very good and decent and loving and honest. And then this addiction takes them over. suddenly they become the most untrustworthy, manipulative, lying.

And one of the things that I loved about Raya was one of the lessons that I learned from her in our 18 years of friendship prior to becoming romantic partners was she had this almost infinite capacity to accept and forgive people for where they were, meet people exactly where they were and without judgment, accept them there. She used to say to me, talking about her own life, until you've stolen money from your father's wallet when he was in the hospital, dying of cancer, so that you could go downtown and buy crack, until you've stolen your father's car to sell it for cocaine when he was dying, you don't know what it means to need to be forgiven. and she had been forgiven by her family for that and a lot more.

And so she used to say mercy is what I owe because mercy is what saved me, mercy toward myself and other people's mercy toward me. And I mean, I think at the end of all of this carmic and psychological and cultural and traumatic and the abuses that pile up on us that distort us and distort our thinking and often turn us from people who are good to people who are bad or who do, things that are bad. I hope that throughout this entire book, I hope that the book is shot through with mercy and with a sense of our shared innocence, because that is ultimately how I see it and how I see us. Well, I agree with you on that. There's one aspect of this love addiction that

particularly leaps out at me, and I find it poignant personally. I don't have a lot of all my thoughts together on it, but I'd be curious to kind of talk it through with you. And it's this issue of home. You say that you have a long personal history of not knowing where home and security can be found and then make other people into my home. Maybe just explain what you mean by that. So without getting into too much biographical detail only because, as I say, early in the book, there are stories I don't tell because they involve other people. And I didn't want this book to be, an expose of anybody but me and Rea. I had Rea's permission to write this and my own permission to expose us, and also being very careful to not assign blame, which is unhelpful and unskilful

as part of my evolution of consciousness, right? Home growing up did not feel like the safest place in the world. And it also didn't feel like a place where I was always welcome. to return to. I think my parents would very clearly say that and very clearly own that, that especially my mom's feeling was you raise your kids, you teach them all the skills they need, and you send them out there in the world and they must never come back. You're done. Your work is done goodbye. And that's how she was raised. My mom left home at the age of 15 and she was raised on a hard-scrabble farm in Minnesota with seven other siblings and very few resources. And the deal was stop using your parents' resources as soon as you can and start contributing or get out. And so

looking for home has been a kind of theme of mine for my whole life, looking for home geographically, but looking for home in another person's heart and looking for who is the person who's going to say you belong here and you're welcome here and we love you here and you always have a place here. Who can give me that? Who can give me that to an extent that essential fundamental spiritual homesickness will ease?

And I certainly have tried to make other people into home for me. And I've tried to become home for others and give people homes. I mean, that's how Ray and I met. I gave her a home. I'm like, here, you give me a home and then you be my home. How's that for a deal? I'll give you a home and then once you enter that home that's actually mine,

then you will provide me with security in return, which is something that worked till it didn't, like many strategies. Like I said, I don't have like a thesis on this home question, but it is really, and I know this. This is a conversation about you and your memoir, but I'm going to hijack it just briefly because I think it's relevant. And I mentioned earlier I was on a meditation retreat. Every time I go on retreat, which is every year, I'm hit with this huge bout of homesickness. And it's not necessarily for my current home.

It's, I don't know, it's like being a drift or a moored in the universe in some way. And it reminds me of being a kid when I was desperately homesick at summer camp. And I recently found some of my letters home and they were just like a lot. I'm not going to call you guys anymore because I get too upset or, you know, nobody here at this camp would understand what it's like to be homesick. I'm afraid to cry, all of this stuff. And you really see like the me before toxic masculinity set in and armored me up. But the thing that I was puzzling over on this most recent retreat is what meditation helps you see is everything's, changing all the time. We are in a universe of constant epic flux. And yet we have this yearning

for security for home that's really deep. And I don't know how to square those two things. And yeah, that's as far as I've gotten with it. And I'm just throwing it back at you to see what off the dome thoughts emerge. Just first of all, yes. And that is our experience. here on this planet. And I can tell you how I see it. You know, this is not, cannot be empirically proven, but this is how I've come to understand it and how I've come to remedy it. And again, this is one woman's experience and not a prescription for anybody else. I don't think this earth is my home. I think I'm visiting here. And I think that essential fundamental homesickness, the depth of it and the poignancy of it and the constancy of it is about missing where I come from.

And where I come from, I believe, is the great everything, the all, the unity, the Tao, God, the mystery, the creation itself. What works for me in terms of figuring out how to be here in this place that can feel so foreign, And by that I mean incarnated in the awkwardness of being in a body, of being consciousness embodied. It's so awkward. It's so weird that the way that you and I have to communicate is we have to like flap our throats and create sounds that, you know, that hopefully the other one will understand. Like it's like so, it's so rudimentary. It's like where I come from, everything is known.

these kind of struggles to communicate, these struggles to connect are not what we're burdened with, you know? And I write about this a lot in this book, and I live from this position, that this is Earth School. Earth School is an academy for souls, and we come here like your parents sent you to summer camp. You go there to learn stuff.

You go there to have experiences. You go there to, as Mark Twain said, a man who picks up a cat by the tail learns something he cannot learn any other way. We come here to be, to be, incarnated to just pick up all these cats and try to figure out how to make sense of things and how to how to evolve. And certainly the Buddhists would say you come here and you do that curriculum again. Like if there's a curriculum that you were not able to master on the last go round, your spirit's going to come and incarnate again and you're going to try it again. And you're going to meet

those same souls that you had trouble with last time and you're going to try it again. And like, can we do this differently this time? This time I'll be your mother. This time I'll volunteer to play the role of the torturer and you play the role of the victim and let's see how that feels. Like, let's try, you know, it's just trying on all these different costumes to have all of these different experiences. And where I feel home now is when I am in the deepest, quietest communion with that source that I choose to call God, but I don't get hung up on that word. And I know there are a lot of people for whom that word is really traumatizing and really upsetting. I'm conscientious about that, but this presence of where I came from, who I came from, and what I came for. If I can directly connect with that, there's some settling that happens where I'm okay.

I think of it now as like docking, docking into that source and as much as possible being in union with it makes me able to then undock and come back out here and float around as a disembodied. soul in a weird monkey suit in the body of a great ape, trying to figure out how to deal with all the other ones around here. So that's home for me. For me, home has got to be a spiritual answer because to me it's a spiritual question. What modalities do you use to dock? There's a number of them. I was talking about this the other day with somebody in saying at my, I'm 56 now, I think I said that already, but like writing is my part-time job. Like writing and teaching and traveling, those are all my part-time jobs.

Being a family member is a part-time job. Being a friend of my friends is a part-time job. My full-time job is trying to keep my nervous system regulated. And it is a full-time job for me. It's a big job. It requires hours a day of practices. When I do those practices, I'm okay. And when I don't do them, I'm not okay.

So meditation is one of them. And I do mantra meditation the way that I was taught at the ashram in India where I studied. So I just used that kind. And this really interesting thing called two-way prayer that the early founders of AA used. The first 100 people who got sober in AA were offshoots of something called the Oxford group that was this little spiritual movement that was happening in the United States around that time. And they relied very heavily on this practice called. two-way prayer. And two-way prayer is different from the prayer that I was taught as a kid or what I

always thought prayer was. So I always think of prayer as like sort of me pushing my voice, my will, my desire, my fear, putting words around it and asking for help. Traditional prayer for me is mostly about me asking for something. Two-way prayer is this very simple practice where you clear the space, you do a little bit of meditating, you read something. that feels sacred to you. So for me, that would be reading a little bit of Whitman or Mary Oliver, Rumi, Huffe, reading something that to me feels like a gateway to the divine. And then I open up my notebook and I write, Dear God, what would you have me know today? And then, without overthinking it, you allow what I call God to tell you what it wants you to know. So instead of me saying to God,

please give me what I want. I say to God, what is essentially what is your will for me today? And what I download in that practice are my instructions for the day. It's like, here's the memo. Here's where I need your attention. Here's where I need your focus.

Here's what I need you to not do today. Just as important. And here's the love that I have for you. That's my docking station that I do every morning. I have it right here, but this is the notebook that I use and it's just, you know, I've got thousands of these now,

pages and pages and pages of a one-sided conversation where it's not my voice other than what would you have me know today. The rest of it is what I call God. And that's the most important thing. Going to meetings and the 12-step recovery programs that I belong to, making sure that I get to a meeting every day, doing service, service has become really important. That's a big hallmark of 12-step recovery is that service keeps you sober. And I was really angry when I first heard that because I was like, as a codependent, I'm like, I've been serving everyone. Like, all I fucking do is serve. Like, who's going to serve me?

Like, who's going to take care of me? And the fact is, it was not true that all I was doing was serving. A lot of what I was doing was manipulating and people pleasing and trying to get my needs met through all sorts of weird bargaining. So true service coming from a selfless place is very different from that and actually does heal me. yoga, moving my body, breath work. But if I added up, it's probably two or three, sometimes four hours a day of practices that I do that make me okay, that make me sane and make me sober. And then the world doesn't seem like a foreign place to me, and it doesn't seem even hard.

It just seems like a term they use in the rooms is God, GOD stands for good orderly direction. So once I've gotten my good orderly direction, then I can go out in the world and my life becomes manageable where it used to not be. So just to be clear, it sounds like when you use the word God, you are not picturing the dude on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. No, although if that's somebody's God, that's fine with me. I tend to be very accommodating of what anybody thinks of as God and also what anybody thinks of as not God. My friend Rob Bell has a great line when he said to atheists and agnostics. He's like, first of all, your atheism is the only logical response to religious tyranny. It's a very sensible response to religious abuses and religious tyranny and religious contradictions. It's a very logical thing in many ways to become an atheist.

But he always says whenever he talks about God, don't worry if you're an atheist or an agnostic. The God that you don't believe in, I also don't believe in. Like whatever God you don't believe in, I also don't believe in that God. But to me, what I call God is this infinitely loving, ever-available presence. And that presence has no issue with me as I am. And that's what I really needed more than anything. It's not what James Joyce called the hangman God, the judgmental God. When I first made contact with that source, for years, all I heard was, I love you. I love you. And there's nothing you can do wrong enough to lose that. You can't escape. You're doomed to be loved by me. There's no amount of failure that you can have that will cast me

away or push you into exile. And you don't have to transform. This was the most reassuring thing. As somebody who's made my whole life into a self-improvement project, that voice said to me, you don't have to become anything different or better than what you are for me to love you. And so much of my love addiction is about gazing into somebody's eyes and trying to figure out what do I have to become to get this person to love me without leaving. The God of my understanding is like nothing. No notes. You are perfect.

You are absolutely perfect. And not only are you perfect, so are the rest of them that you're encountering. there is nothing wrong. And I heard a friend of mine once say, God loves me exactly the way I am and far too much to allow me to stay that way. And that's kind of what I feel like my evolution has been is that I'm loved unconditionally by a God who's like, to me, you are perfect exactly the way you are and I also see you suffering. I can help you not suffer if you come with me. It's sort of like, come with me if you want to live. Isn't that the line from Terminator? Like Terminator 1, I'm like, come with me if you want to live. Come with me if you want to live. And I will help you

and make sure that you are not so crushingly alone. And I have needed from the beginning, I have needed a love that doesn't blink. Like I have needed a love that's not afraid of my darkness that isn't going to go anywhere and that doesn't run out of patience for me, doesn't get disgusted by me, that I can't wear out. Because ultimately I wear everyone out, but I don't wear out. this God. This God's like, I've got nothing but time for you. And we can sit here all day talking. There's nothing you can do to annoy me. And that's been deeply, deeply, deeply healing for me. And that, what Father Gregory Boyle would call that no matter whatness of God, of the God of your understanding, that is what you're saying is synonymous with home. That's home. And that's going

to be home in every lifetime I have. I mean, this is just. just my own version of the cosmos, but that's always home. And I'm going to forget that. And I'm going to look around at this incredibly enticing, distracting, seductive, dangerous, wild planet that we're sharing and be like, surely home is here somewhere, or I'm going to find a person and decide that they're going to provide me with that, at which point I very tidily turn them into my God. That is a very dangerous thing when I start doing it. that. You don't want to be in the room when I take someone off their pedestal that I put them on. It's like, I'm going to set this whole thing up. I'm going to pedestalize you and I'm going to

deify you and I'm going to make you into my omnipotent and omniscient creator. And then if you fail me, once I've done that, it is going to be so ugly because my come down is going to be so hard. I'm not going to be able to handle it. And then somebody's going to have to pay. You know, and that's what I don't want to do anymore. Coming up, Liz and I will talk about how to define what a healthy relationship is and how to actually have one and the massive towering, evidence-based benefits of self-compassion. So if you're able to access a God who doesn't get sick of you, who loves you no matter what, and you're getting that, you know, I might argue internally. Are you then able to have healthy relationships? Yeah, and let's talk about defining what relationship means.

So every one of my relationships becomes healthier when I source my security from that presence, rather than trying to source my security from any number of people, friends, family members, lovers, partners, coworkers. I mean, you name it. There's nobody that I wouldn't try to turn into my God and make into my higher powers. So all of my relationships have improved as a result of that. But are you able to be in another romantic relationship? It's not on the table for me at the moment. Again, this is just me. But as part of my recovery from sex and love addiction, I did the 12 steps and I go to the rooms of recovery. And I worked with a sponsor to create, something that's called a sober dating plan. And a sober dating plan is something that I wrote

in conjunction with my sponsor and with my fellows with their help where I look at my history and I create a document that's essentially best practices for Liz that sets up various boundaries around behaviors that I traditionally do to try to make sure that I don't do those behaviors. So one of the things, for instance, on my sober dating plan is like no two-week-long first. First dates. First date is an hour and a half long and it is not two weeks long that ends with the person moving in with me because that's my move, right? So instead of that, we will go have a cup of coffee in a public place for an hour and a half. And then if we want to see each other again, that won't be for another week because it's essential that I go home and remember that I have

an existence outside of this person and remember that I have friends who I love and that I have a life that I love and that I have a pet who I love and a home that I love and work that I love. Part of my dating plan too is we're not going to be obsessively texting 75 million times a day. We'll set a date. I'll see you at the date next Saturday for another hour and a half. And then I'm going to go home again. Not allowed to move anybody into my house for the first year. I don't introduce people to my family five minutes after I've met them. So there's all sorts of restrictions. I'm not going to be with somebody who's already in a relationship with someone. That's something I've done many times. I'm not going to be with somebody

who's unavailable. I'm not going to be with somebody who's still shattered over the last relationship that they were in. And they have not yet healed from that. And I'm going to step into that and think that I can fix it. You know, there's all sorts of boundaries. So I have this thing at the ready, should the day arrive when my intuition and my higher power say it's time for you to couple up with somebody, but that has not happened yet. And in fact, every time in two-way prayer, when I ask, God, am I supposed to be dating? Am I supposed to be with somebody? The answer is, LOL, no, L.L. No. It's so instant. It's like, oh, no, no, no, no, honey, no. And that answer may change someday. And if that answer changes, then I've got a program, I've got a sponsor, I've got a

dating plan and I've got tools that I never had before that I hope will keep me and others safe. And I've seen people in the rooms of recovery use those tools and end up being able to be in relationships that are not traumatizing. It's not easy for people like us, for people who have minds like mine and behaviors like mine and histories like mine. It's not that what I witness is no one finds it easy. I mean, relationships I think are not easy for. for anybody. But if you've got these tendencies and this history and this deep attachment wound, it's especially hard. But what I understand for my life is that I've been deep in the paint in these compulsive behaviors since I was 15 years old and have been deep in distorted thinking

about myself and about my body and about who it belongs to since long before that. There was never the only break I ever took in my life where I wasn't engaging with sex and romance was the first nine months of my eat, pray, love journey. But then I met somebody who showered me with love, attention, validation, and acceptance, and that became Javier Brodem, right? It's like that that was just this very short period of time. Other than that, I have never, ever, ever until now been able to be on my own. I'm just learning myself through these last few years of celibacy. And and living on my own, it's way too soon. Like the idea of introducing somebody into this at this point would be so premature because

I'm just learning how to stabilize myself. I'm just learning what I like after years of contorting and bending myself to adapt to whoever I was with. I'm learning what my own rhythms are, what my own patterns are. My creativity is blossoming beyond anything that I have ever experienced because I'm not pouring hours and hours and hours of my day into attention and focus and service on somebody else. And so I've been able to write three books in the last six years, which is amazing. It used to take me five years to write a book. My friendships have bloomed. And it's not just

new friendships with healthier people, although that has happened too. It's this realization that I had all these friends who I was paying so little attention to because I was always strung out on some enmeshment or codependency or romantic drama and I was giving my friends the crumbs of what was left of my attention. Suddenly I'm like, oh my God, Jenny's been here the whole time. You know, like Jenny and I have been best friends since we were nine. You know, like this is a 50 year friendship and she's amazing, you know, and it's like, let's go to Mexico together for a week. Like, let's have an adventure. Like so all of these other relationships are, are growing up because of the fact that so much of my attention was on the one person I was with,

there's a line I love about addiction that says addiction is giving up everything for one thing and recovery is giving up one thing for everything. Love addiction was my thing. It was my one thing. It was like the giant redwood that just took all the resources and all the energy and all the light and all the rainwater. And whoever I put in that position, I gave like 100% of myself to. Removing that, the entire ecosystem is blooming and blossoming. And it's a whole different world. I think the word, and people listen to the show will I'll probably be sick of me saying this, but the word in Tibetan for enlightenment roughly translates in English to a clearing away and a bringing forth. And it does sound like when you clear away your addiction, you're bringing

forth everything else. You have to go through withdrawal. And that's the piece that I think I was never willing to do, which is why I was always overlapping one relationship after another. I can't bear the withdrawal, and so I'm going to go get another drug in a different person. And withdrawal for me was a time of great sacredness because I had to learn how to sit with my own essential fundamental discomfort. and not reach for anybody or anything to take the edge off of it. Shortly after I came into recovery for codependency and sex and love addiction, I also gave up alcohol and I stopped doing drugs and I stopped altering my mind in any way.

I got off the antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication I was on. That sort of just sort of drifted away. There was this sense of like there's no barrier now. There's nowhere to hide. It's just me and me. And it's just me and me and God. And there were many nights where I had to sit up with myself as though I were a colicky baby and just be like, honey, I see how much discomfort you are in.

And I know what you want to do. Because other parts of me were shouting like, we don't have to be alone. Like it's not hard. As long as you have no standards, it's very easy to get somebody to be here like in the next hour. You know, like there's like you do not have to be alone. And I was able to reparent those parts and say, like, I know why you want that. You're not in trouble for wanting that. I know everything about why you want that.

And I also agree with you that that would work because we have experience that shows that in the immediate moment it would work the same way that having a cigarette would get rid of your nicotine craving or having a drink would get rid of your alcohol craving or having some sugar or buying something new or like all the multitude of things that we do. to not have to feel. But it just kicks the can down the road where there is this grief and this sorrow and this discomfort that needs to be felt. And you can feel it now or you can feel it later. Why don't we just do now? And sometimes those feelings felt nearly unbearable. I'd be pacing all night with myself like I was my own baby. I'm like, all right, we're going to take another bath. We're going to watch another

episode of the Great British Baking Show. We are not going to do anything tonight that harms us or anyone else. And the day is going to break on another sober day tomorrow morning. And one day at a time, this is going to get easier. And then one day, that pain's not going to be there. This is my last question. And I'm sensitive to your time because we're almost out of it. You're calling this, and I hinted at this earlier, you're calling this God. But to me, as a relentlessly and probably to a fault, secular person who needs proof for everything, What I'm hearing is the scientifically validated concept of self-compassion, the ability to channel your own innate goodness,

your own capacity to be a great friend and mentor, and direct it back toward yourself. What am I missing? I don't know that you're missing anything. And certainly anyone who can do that won't be missing anything. And you get to call that whatever you want to call it. It doesn't even need to be seen as a spiritual practice. And this is something I often share with my sponsees when I teach them how to do two-way prayer.

And they say, how do I know this isn't just me that this voice that I'm writing on the page is compassionate, infinitely loving patient voice that's coming out on the page. How do you're calling this God? How do I know this isn't just some kinder, wiser, older version of myself? and the answer to that is can't know, don't know, can't know. And also what in the world would be the difference between the highest, wisest, kindest voice in your head and God's voice. Why would those not be the same thing? Why would that not be where that would be found and why would God not speak to me in my own voice? There's a line that I, the ashram in India, where I studied used to say, God dwells within you as you.

And that's so different from what I was taught. growing up in a Protestant tradition of an externalized God. And there's also the beautiful line that that which you are seeking has also been seeking you. And for a love addict, what could be a more romantic story than we've been trying to find each other for ages? You know, like the part of me that is God has been trying to find God and the part of God that is God has been trying to find me. Another term I loved that I learned that the ashram was something that they called the splendor of recognition, which is the moment when those two things, which are essentially the one thing, meet.

And there's this splendorous recognition of, oh, right, I am of God. And God is of me, and this is all the same thing. So I don't see that you're missing a thing, Dan. I just think it's the same Maharashi, the great Indian saint, used to say there are two questions that you can ask that will get you to enlightenment.

And it doesn't matter which one you use, just pick one. One of them is, who am I? and the other one is who is God. And eventually you're going to find those two questions are just going to meet. And that's when your enlightenment is complete. So either road will take you there

because it's a circular road. You're just going to run into yourself and you're going to bump into God and you're going to be like, as the poet Hafiz said, God and I have become like two fat men living in a small boat. We keep bumping into each other and laughing.

You know, like that's the encounters that I feel like I'm having now. and it's answering so much of the homesickness and the longing and the craving to be loved that not only do I feel like at just for today, I just have to keep it in the day as an addict, not only do I feel just for today that I don't need to go out and hustle that from another human being, I feel that it would actually be a tremendous disruption to something beautiful that's happening that's just beginning. It's so nice to talk to you again and to see how far you've come. It's great. And your work and your candor is going to be really helpful to many, many people yet again.

Before I let you go, can you just remind everybody of the name of your new book? It's called All the Way to the River. Is Javier Bardem going to play some characters? I don't think there's any male characters in the book. Okay. Okay. That's such a funny question. No, I don't think there's going to be a movie about this one. But thank you. And it's good to see you, too, Dan. and I follow you and see the journey that you've been on as well, and it's beautiful.

Thank you. I appreciate it. Look at us growing up. Thanks again to Elizabeth Gilbert. Always awesome to talk to her. Don't forget, if you want to dive deeper into the themes we explored in the episode, we now do guided meditations that come with every episode. Today is all about how to deal with your craving mind, whether we're addicted or not, we all have these craving minds.

And Vinnie Ferraro, who's our teacher of the month, is going to show you how to work with your craving mind. And don't forget, speaking of any, he'll be doing a live meditation in Q&A Sesh on Tuesday, September 16th at 4 Eastern. We're now doing live meditations every week. As I mentioned earlier, I've got two IRL events coming up this fall, one at the New York Insight Meditation Center on September 21st, and then another the weekend of October 24th at the Omega Institute in upstate New York.

We call that one meditation party. Links to sign up are in the show notes. Finally, thank you so much to everybody who worked so hard on the show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer.

And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.