Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - Why Women Were Taught to Distrust Themselves — And How to Take That Power Back with Meggan Watterson

Episode Date: April 1, 2026

What if the reason you don't trust yourself was engineered centuries ago — on purpose? In this episode, Dr. Mindy Pelz sits down with feminist theologian and author Meggan Watterson to uncover the deliberate suppression of women's inner authority and what reclaiming it looks like right now. Meggan draws on 30 years of scholarship — including the long-buried Gospel of Mary and the Acts of Paul and Thecla — to show that the most powerful women in early Christianity weren't lost to history by accident. They were erased because their message was too dangerous: that the greatest power doesn't come from institutions, hierarchies, or external permission. It comes from within. In this conversation you'll learn: Why women's self-doubt has roots in a 4th-century political decision What the Gospel of Mary teaches about the "spiritual eye of the heart" Why ending the war with your body is the first act of reclaiming your power Why rage is sacred — and why feeling it fully is healing What it means to "baptize yourself" in today's world If you've ever felt unworthy, silenced, or too much — this episode is for you. For more resources related to today's episode, visit the podcast episode page: https://www.drmindypelz.com/ep333   Connect with Dr. Mindy: Join Reset Academy Watch the episodes on YouTube Follow Dr. Mindy on Instagram Subscribe to Dr. Mindy's newsletter for tools and research on fasting, hormones, and metabolic health Connect with Meggan Watterson: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/megganwatterson/ Substack: https://substack.com/@megganwatterson Website: https://www.meganwatterson.com/ Disclaimer: This podcast is intended for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your diet, fasting routine, or lifestyle.  

On this episode, I bring you Megan Waterson. Now, get ready. This is a conversation, I promise you. I've never brought you. And I know I keep saying that. But this is an important moment in history that I think we need to start having some tough conversations. So let me give you a little background on Megan. And I'll tell you what you're going to hear in this discussion. So Megan is a renowned feminist Theologian. She has a Master's of Theology Studies from Harvard Divinity School, and a Master of Divinity from Union Theology Seminary at Columbia University. She created the House of Mary Magdalene, a spiritual community that studies sacred texts left out of the traditional canon. Her work has appeared in media outlets such as the New York Times, the Huffington Post, TEDx, women, and and Marie Claire. She's also, by the way, the author of two phenomenal books, Mary Magdalene revealed and the girl who baptized herself. So the reason that I brought Megan to you all is, if you haven't noticed, I have been really trying to help us all see a bigger picture when it

comes to our relationship to our body. Now, it might seem a little odd that I would bring a feminist Theologian to talk about a woman's relationship to our body. But I think what many of us have come to recognize in this current modern moment is that women have been taught to distrust our bodies. women, we have been taught to silence our voices. Women, we have been taught to move away from our instincts. And so many of you come to my platform to lose weight, to feel better, to have better brain clarity, to understand the feminine body that you're living in. And I can't teach you that without showing you the culture and its impact it has had on your belief around your body.

So in this episode, Megan and I take a deep dive into the Gospel of Mary, which if you're not familiar with the Gospel of Mary, it is part of what I will say officially now, and Megan confirmed it, has been redacted from the Bible that many people follow in this modern world. And there were some important voices way back in the time of Jesus, and Mary was one of them You're also going to hear her talk about Thetla, who is another important female figure during that time. And how these women trusted their own intuition, how these women taught that the divine feminine was within, not from without. So I'm going to ask you to listen to this conversation with an open mind. Some of you, maybe you were brought up in Christianity,

maybe some of you still are practicing Christians. I'm asking us to reevaluate every aspect of the world we're living in right now. Because one of the major things that was revealed to us in the Epstein files was the fact that there are systems at play that are meant to keep women and children suppressed. This is going to be not just a deep conversation. This is going to be an action-oriented conversation. I promise you by the end, this conversation is going to lift you up. But we need to go back into history to start to unwind how we feel about ourselves.

That's how powerful this conversation is. So if you resonate with it, please send it out into the world. But most importantly, I hope this gives you another note. it to really understand how powerful you are, how lucky you are to live in a feminine body, and why it's important now more than ever for you to fall in love with yourself. So Megan Waterson, I hope this hits in the deepest place it possibly can. We have a consistent theme around women throughout history, and that is suppressing our voices, suppressing our intuition, shaming our bodies, and what we're seeing right now in this moment

with the Epstein files, as horrible as it is, I have come to this acute awareness that this has been going on for centuries. So I'd like to start off with the question of how women feel worth and how we feel about our bodies and ourselves. Is it a personal, personal curation of our feeling for ourself, or is this a cultural conditioning that has women feeling so unworthy? So I am a feminist theologian primarily because I believe that our ideas of the divine directly affect the status of women and girls the world over and always have. So if it is actually encoded in what we are believing is divine, then that deifies the patriarchy. Say more.

Well, rather than exposing the patriarchy as an aspect of culture that really recast Christianity, which is what happened. If we take a brief history lesson right now, there's after Christ, right, and then before Christianity became the empire's religion, spanned hundreds of years. So Christ dies in the first century. Christianity didn't become the empire's religion. It didn't become a formal institutionalized religion until the fourth century. So for hundreds of years, if you called yourself a Christian, you were killed by the Roman Empire. Why? because Christians during those hundreds of years were challenging the unjust systems of power within the Roman Empire. Systems of power that said women were property, for example, right?

Or women had as little rights as slaves. So these bands of Christians had to meet in private and in small groups, and they had what scholars believe now, they're referring to them as supper clubs, right? So that sort of sheds new perspective on the last supper. Because they had to meet in quiet, in small groups, otherwise they would be caught. And in these supper clubs, it was mostly laborers, slaves, women, those who did not have power within the Roman Empire. So then what happened in the fourth century is Constantine made a, this tradition, which was very small, unknown. He wanted to make Christianity the empire's

religion. And really what began to happen is it was recast as a patriarchal religion, but it did not begin that way. Okay. So how did it begin? Because in reading your books over the last week, one of my biggest ahas was, now that we all know the term redacted, I was like, wait, the Bible was redacted? Exactly. Exactly. Well, so during that recasting process in the 4th century, one of the most pivotal moments is when Constantine gathered together these male bishops and they decided which scripture would be considered

orthodox and which would be considered unorthodox. And all of the scripture labeled unorthodox became apocryphal. Now that word in Greek means of doubtful authenticity. So first, it's important to just name as a scholar these scriptures, there's nothing inauthentic about them. So for example, like the gospel of Mary, the acts of Paul and Thetla, the gospel of Thomas, the gospel of Philip, there's nothing doubtful or in authentic about them. They are as authentic as any of the scripture that were then codified. It's just that this committee, this group, and then series of councils that met over the centuries, and I'm grateful you know that word redacted, because that was also, there was a process also of editing out women and their positions of authority.

from what they even decided to keep. But a common theme among those scriptures that were labeled apocryphal or of doubtful authenticity were scriptures where there was a very clear woman in a position of spiritual authority, like Mary Magdalene or in the acts of Paul and Thakla, Fekla goes ahead and baptizes herself. So these are women who their encounters with the divine. allow them to be unleashed, allow them to encounter a power that exists within them, allow them to understand their worth is inherent. It has nothing to do with what they can provide or produce for the patriarchy.

Their brushes with the sacred set them on fire with a love that guides them from within them and allows them to become what before was not possible. And so when we look at this gap between when Jesus died and then when the Christianity began, I may not use the right vernacular, so crack me if I'm wrong. That was a span of hundreds of years. Yes. That's what you're saying. Now, when Christianity began, is that also the beginning of a patriarchal structure?

So Christians were practicing during those hundreds of years. It's just that that form of Christianity, I would argue, we have not tried yet. That form of Christianity was one where to say you are Christian means that you are brothers and sisters. You are one. And you are seeing each other as equals. So, for example, Perpetua and Felicitis, they are well-known martyrs in the third century who refused to refer to each other as Perpetua was wealthy and, you know, sort of upper class. And then Felicitus was a slave, but they referred to each other as sisters.

So they refused to adhere to the cultural expectations, the norms, the laws even. For example, FECLA refused to get married in the first century. And that was girls were ordered by law to marry because they were their father's property and then they would become their husband's property. So Thakla refuses and disengages from that. So there were Christians, it's just that, you know, Felicitus and Perpetua, they were killed by the Roman Empire. And Thetla throughout her story, she's, she, the Roman Empire tries to kill her multiple times. And she survives. But that form of Christianity was not patriarchal.

It became patriarchal under Constantine in the 4th century when it became an actual institutionalized tradition. Before that, it was more of like a spiritual equal rights movement than a formalized institutional religion. And so what do you think it was about these women that it became so important to leave them out of the scripture? Sure. Short answer is they modeled that we are only as far from power as we are from our own embodiment. That is the absolute most threatening aspect about both Mary Magdalene and Thakla is their stories model to us that actually power isn't outside of us in these institutions or in these positions, even of political power, it's actually within us. Power resides, the greatest, most ultimate form of power comes from within us. And that is something that's very dangerous to know and to be able to connect to.

If you're trying to control people, you do not want them to know that the most ultimate form of power exists within. Yes. I actually, so this concept right here is where I landed on after two weeks of deep in the Epstein files. And my passion for helping women reconnect to their body must have magnified by 10 times after those two weeks. And I walked away from watching the horrors, which is just so intense, and realizing if you wanted to connect. control a human, doesn't matter a man or woman, then the most logical thing you would do is make that human turn on itself. And then if you can make that human turn on itself, how about anybody else that is like that human, you put them in competition with each other. And all of a sudden I was like, oh my gosh, this is why they want us to look a certain way. This is why they want women to

compete with other women. Like there is a culture that has turned our brains into a place. Into prey. Perfect. Perfect. We need to learn how to pray, P-R-A-Y, the way that women used to pray when the world was on fire, which is to come more alive, right? Yes.

Well, you said two things that just literally there were like two. bondfires that just lit up within me because you talked about the worth which i want to talk about mary in relation to that and then turning on each other right so like inherently suggesting that women are less less worthy than men which is what became institutionalized within that became deified right that's that's what i mean when the patriarchy became deified it was oh now men are significantly of more worth, just their value, existence is of more worth according to the divine, right? Not just according to the patriarchy. It becomes like this deified reality rather than something that comes from the ego, something that comes from greed, something that comes from

ignorance, right? So, and with the story of Mary, Magdalene, by the sixth century, within the the church. So her scripture is considered apocrypha or of doubtful authenticity in the fourth century by the end of the fourth century. It's ordered to be destroyed. And then in the sixth century, even her memory is disparaged. Like the stories about her become known as the penitent prostitute. Right. So that has long since been debunked. That has been proven to have been a fiction from the very start, yet let's speak for a moment about how powerful, how intentional that is to call a woman in a position of power, to call her a whore, a prostitute that then allows the crimes against her to be diminished. And I see that exactly happening today, right now, with the Epstein file. in calling 14-year-olds

prostitutes, right? There's no such thing. There is no such thing as a 14-year-old prostitute. But that objective, the intention behind that is the same in calling Mary Magdalene a prostitute in the 6th century. It's to disparage their worth, their value in the world, and also to diminish the impact of the crimes done against the. them. That's right. So that's what I want to say about worth, but then also what you said about

competition is so important for us right now, this moment. Thank you. And it's part of why, you know, here's the two-headed serpent, right? Like this is the, because, or it's the flip side, it's the same, I'm getting chills. It's really, it's part of the same, uh, weaponization. Yep. To not only consider us unworthy and less worthy, right, to speak about the divine to be in positions of spiritual authority, to be in, you know, political, to have political power of equality. So not only that, but then we don't consider ourselves, right? You mentioned, like, turn it on ourselves. So we've internalized the patriarchal idea that women are inherently less worthy.

Just inherently. Like, even if we do all the things, all the most wonderful things, somehow we are still sitting here in our bedrooms, in our kitchens, we are doing all the things, and somehow we are still feeling unworthy. Right. And that's... Yes, like that's the root. You know, in functional medicine, we talk so much about getting to the root cause.

And I have sat with so many women who want to lose weight. And whenever I ask, why do you want to lose weight? Tell me what it is that's going to change. And they're like, I don't know, I just want to be the same weight I was in high school. And then I have to walk them down. I'm like, tell me how your relationships would change. Tell me what would happen when you look at yourself in the mirror. Tell me if your marriage and your career would change when you lose weight.

And then I get this long story of like how much better they would feel about themselves. And my next question is, could you create that now? Now. Could you find that love for yourself now? Yeah. Because all weight is is your body is putting the extra stuff. It doesn't know what to do with, the extra glucose and toxins. and it's storing it as fat to save your life.

And then you're looking in the mirror and you're judging yourself. And I just think that we need to have a bigger conversation of why are women hating their bodies? And then why are we comparing ourselves to other women? And as I fall in that thread back, it feels like I'm going back centuries like you were talking about. Right. Well, so that piece about the competition as well, turn us on each other. Because that's brilliant when you want to control a population.

So in the acts of Paul and Thecla, which was also labeled apocryphal and not codified into the New Testament, this is a story where it ends with Thecla, first of all, baptizing herself. So again, modeling to us that were uncontrollable, right? Paul, the apostle, doesn't baptize her. She asks for him to baptize her, and he tells her to be patient. And then she ends up during one of the many trials she faces. She is ordered to be put to death by wild beasts because she fights off this powerful politician who tries to sexually assault her in the street.

this all sounds very for 21st century not first century but yeah what in in in a show of ancient gaslighting she is ordered to be put to death rather than him having his bad behavior called out and so she's in the arena and she baptizes herself and after that moment after thecla goes ahead And really what she's saying for me, a modern theological take on it, feminist take, is that I know I am worthy. I don't need anyone outside of me to give me permission to speak on behalf of love. I know I am worthy as I am right now. Even in the midst of this empire trying to literally destroy me, I am going to baptize. myself and move forward with what it is that I know I'm called to do. And so she does. She goes

ahead and baptize herself. And then the scripture says, the women in the arena stand up. Now, what is so significant about that? This is a first century. Scholars date this text back to 70 AD. Wow. And, you know, of course, the arena would have been men and women. It would have had, it would have been filled with spectators. But, the scripture says specifically the women in the crowd stand up. Because after Thakla baptizes herself, it's like they recognize themselves in her. They recognize that they are not separate from her. That they, you know, they have been placed within this system of power that says, here, if you get married, you get a scrap. If you act.

quietly, docile, you know, if you only do what you're allowed to do as a girl, according to the world around you, will give you scraps of power. And in that moment, all the women decide to hell with scraps, right? Crumbs are no longer delicious. Like, we are breaking this lull, right? We're breaking out of this stupor that we've been in, that somehow if we act according to how... how these patriarchal norms wants us to will be safe. And they rise together. And that was still in there.

She's still, even after she baptizes herself, she's still fighting for her life, you know, with the wild animals coming at her. The women, which I feel like I can so identify with because it's so scrappy. It's so like what I would do if I were in the arena. They just reach in their pockets, whatever they happen to have on them,

from their baskets, whatever, they're throwing rose petals, nard, cinnamon, cardamon, and they lull the wild beasts to sleep. And they save tecla. So in that moment, what we're seeing is what happens when we unify, right? No amount of powerlessness is without power once we unify. So this is what I'm getting from this story is what does it look like right now for a woman to baptize herself and what is the modern day version of, and I just want to remind everybody that what is gone, what we have, the veil that has been pulled back is a structure that has been keeping. Systematically.

A system that is murdering and raping children. And if that doesn't bother you, I'm worried about you. Yeah. Yeah. So this is where after two weeks of. reading the Epstein files, I was like, okay, women are seeing this. What do we need to do to stand up? Because we've allowed the men to do the bleeding for so long. Right. So what does it look like in this day and age to baptize ourselves and to come together in that same way that you just

described of Thetla? Well, so one of the most important aspects is exactly what you were describing is ending the war that we have with being in our own bodies, ending that war. That's it. Ending that war. Because if you are exiled from your own body, you are not going to be able to connect to this ultimate source of power. It's keep us disembodied. Keep us starving ourselves, binging, purging.

Keep us in a constant battle of thinking we have to look a certain way, right? then we're not actually seeing out from behind our eyes. We're not actually having moments of true, blazing, inspiration and moments of unity, meaning when I'm referred, there's two forms of unity. So there's that unity that I just described where the women are literally putting their bodies on the line to say, not one more woman, right? I am not going to watch this woman be murdered. She is me.

I am not going to let, I am going to put my body on the line and I'm going to defend her and protect her. Then there's also the uniting of what I describe. Now, some people, the word soul or the word spirit or, you know, love, ultimate self, I don't know. Sometimes that can allow someone to disassociate or feel like, you know, that's beyond me or can't. But what I have to say is that. I've been doing this for 30 years, this research, this studying. And I think one of the most powerful reasons why these female mystics have been silenced, have been erased, have been disparaged as the virgin or the whore, right? Why, why we have been denied

these ancestors, these teachings, these, is because so much of what. what they're trying to teach us is that the divine isn't up out there, right? A male somehow in the sky or something outside of us, something we're not worthy of, something we have to be good enough and better in order to deserve, or what these female mystics remind us of is that love is at the core of who we are. And love is the most ultimate power. However you name that love, capital L, or for me it's, I feel like I encounter some aspect of my soul. That's what I feel like I encounter.

I've been meditating for 30 years. Meditation for me as a survivor is a form of tethering myself back into the body. It's been an act of love and an act of revolution to refuse to exist outside of my body, which sexual assault sometimes demands, right? We have to exist outside of ourselves to survive. And I have deep love and compassion for all of us that must. For me, meditation, it's never been about going elsewhere. It's always been about being further and deeper in.

So one of the many fascinating aspects about the Gospel of Mary for me is that, in her gospel, it's an ascension gospel. But ascension, many people think, well, oh, well, yes, she's trying to get up there somewhere, you know, as if the spiritual world exists on that hierarchical idea. Like there's somewhere to go. Right. Yeah, it's like, it's like movement upwards. Yeah. Interesting. That's not how the spiritual realm has ever, ever. existed because every single one of us has access to it, of course, at any point, always and forever. It's ever inward. It's spiraling deeper and deeper.

So the ascension is actually further up is farther in. It's farther in. And the deeper we go, the closer we arrive at this love that we think is outside of us or we think is somehow something that we're exiled from. And right here, it's, you know, it's like all of those great fables and legends and like the alchemists. It's like the treasures in the backyard. It always has been an awesome. Right.

And you've been out. We know that. Yeah. Right. Well, but this is where the whole thing around Les Wexner hit for me because he represents Victoria's Secret. Exactly. And I, you know, I mentioned before that I used to think I, the goal of being a female.

was to look like the Victoria's secret models. And, you know, this ties into capitalism that when a woman thinks her worth is outside of her or any human, but women are especially prey to this. If we think, oh, I'll be worthy if I put on this sexy lingerie and then my spouse will love me, we become very profitable for people. and we also become very controllable. So I know that we're a commodity. And so this is the thing that I deal,

and this is what I really want my audience to hear, is that when people come into my universe and they're like, I want to lose weight, okay, well, you need to then do exactly what you just said, Megan. I can show you the path, but you're going to need to stop looking outside of yourself for the answers. You're going to need to understand how crazy, powerful you are.

And for a lot of women, that's really scary. It's like they live from the head up. And you're now asking them to go into a body that they feel has been betraying them. And they don't have a relationship with their body. Right. Right. And really also, and I'll speak for. from my own experience, the deepest betrayal is the one that I perpetuated to myself.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And that is so deeply painful to face is to really, you know, heal that, heal that betrayal. But then, you know, my obsession and passion for the divine feminine really comes down. to this revelation that, you know, there's so many women over the decades who have said to me that, you know, when they go inward to meditate or when they sit still, you know, they hear a voice or they hear, they sense something about what they need to do or who they are or, you know, what's important to them. and then they don't listen to it, right?

Yes, what is that? They don't believe it. And they definitely don't believe it enough to take action on it. And this, I think that that piece is one of the most important healing moments for us right now. It's what we need to focus on. Yes. Because in that process, right? of the patriarchal version of Christianity in the 4th century deciding what is and isn't orthodox.

And in labeling these women, these figures, who should have really been foundational to Christianity. Mary Magdalene should have been seen as the teacher that Christ chose to give secret teachings to. He gave specific transmission to Mary Magdalene. She really should be held up right alongside Christ. And then Fekla, everyone should know. It's so rare for me to meet anyone who has heard of Fekla, even very devout people, but everyone has heard of Paul, you know. And so it's like we don't have that balance of the masculine and the feminine,

which doesn't just represent male and female. It represents the masculine and the feminine that exists within every single one of us, no matter our sex or gender. So there is a aspect within all humanity that created this idea when the feminine and the female was excised from the divine that somehow the feminine and the female. is not only less worthy, but less trustworthy. Oh, yeah. And what happens then is that what few people understand about the divine feminine is it's not just the female saints who were erased or the female aspects of any tradition. I mean, there's a female Buddha. There's so much of the divine feminine that's been erased and or redact.

in many of the world religions. But the aspect of it that has the greatest impact on us and that I'm most concerned with right now is the way that that then impacts us directly in not being able to believe that voice we hear within us because the divine feminine is the internal realm. It's not just about the feminine and the female. the feminine is also representing the contemplative side, right? We're most often with traditions and religions, we're thinking about sort of the external expressions of the divine.

The feminine expression is meeting the divine within us. That's the feminine side. And that's, we've lost so much of that emphasis, so much of that tradition. And for women especially, there's that double oppression because I absolutely have met with the queer community, you know, which I'm a part of. And that, but people of all sex and genders that really struggle with listening to the voice within them and believing it. Oh, yeah. You haven't been trained. We haven't been trained at all. to trust it. Yeah.

So it's there, but we silence it. I've noticed that so much, like the intuitive thought will come forward and then the logical will kick in and be like, no, no, no, you can't do that because of, right, so what do you think of the gospel of Mary? I know a lot of her teachings. I know you get all excited. I know a lot of her teachings are about inner worth. Yes.

So if you could be Mary spokesperson right now. for this moment. What would you want to bring out of that gospel forward that we can start to train women to find the divine feminine inside? So, okay, I'll, I want to quote from the gospel directly because I want everyone to actually hear her voice within the gospel. So at the beginning of the gospel, Peter says a few phenomenal things before he disbelieves are at the end. So ultimately we don't like Peter. But at the start, he says some phenomenal things.

He says, sister, he calls her sister, which is really beautiful. And also, that's pointing us towards that equality, that radical equality that the early Christians were practicing with each other. So he says, sister, we know the Savior loved you more than all other women. That's like a mic drop right there. Yeah, yeah. And then he says, I feel like it's like, don't tell anybody. I know. Well, and you can imagine those bishops like, we got to get rid of this. You know, this is not going to work. We know the Savior loved you more than all other women. And then Peter says, tell us the things that you know that we don't because we haven't heard them. So Peter, the rock, is admitting that there are things that marry a woman knows uniquely to the scripture that they, don't know and that they weren't told. And then Mary says, and this is one of my favorite lines of the entire scripture, I will teach you about what is hidden from you. It's just so beautiful. The first time I read it, I just like ugly cried. It's just so beautiful, so beautiful. And so

So then let's skip ahead to chapter seven. Chapter seven, you know, it's the most mystical chapter, and it's a seven, which I love. And it is this beautiful moment where Mary is describing this vision that she has of Christ. And within the vision, she says, you know, I saw you today. she's speaking to Christ, I saw you today in a vision. And then Christ says, blessed are you for not wavering at seeing me? For where the mind is, there is the treasure. But that word mind, it's translated into English from a Greek word noose, N-O-U-S. And that word actually, more accurately, is translated as the spiritual eye of the heart. It's not, it says mind in English, but that makes us think of

this and it's not intellectual thought. It is the awareness that comes from the soul. It comes from the heart. So Christ says, there where the mind is, there is the treasure. And so he's saying, there where the spiritual eye of the heart is, there is the treasure. So Christ says this in the gospel of Mary. And then Mary, which I think is unique to a woman, rather than, than like a male disciple, she doesn't try to pretend like she fully understands, you know, she like rolls down the window and asks for directions. She like wants it. She wants specific details. And she says, so is it with the soul or the spirit that I'm able to perceive this vision? Like what is it exactly? She's, you know, she wants to know with what human capacity or

aperture, am I able to perceive a vision? And Christ says it is neither with the soul nor the spirit, but the mind, again, he uses that word the Greek, noose, no US, the spiritual eye of the heart, which is between these two that sees the vision. Then it's, then the next several pages are missing in each of the versions of the Dawson of Mary. They've been redacted. They've been redacted. We all know what that's like. Because, because if we had the answer, the full answer to that, to Mary's question to Christ, we would all be able to receive visions and to trust the visions that we receive from within us. And that would make it so that really all of us are mystics because we can receive messages

information, visions of the divine directly from within. But those pages are missing. But what we do have is a sense that Mary was given specific teachings in order for her to be able to perceive Christ, right? To be able to see him. So this, if we take the gospel of Mary seriously, I love this. much. If we take the gospel of Mary seriously, when we get to Easter, right, and everyone's talking about Christ rising from the doom and who just happened to be there, right? Right time,

right place. Oh, oh, it's Mary Magdalene. She didn't just happen to be there. She was the one that Christ prepared to be able to see him because she had figured out how to see from the eye of the heart. Wow. That was beautiful. That was beautiful. Okay. So my next question then is, what do you think the strategy was for doing that?

How did she, how, you know, those pages were redacted. And yet we have an example of the divine feminine coming through her. Right. So what, how do we apply? that to today's world so we help women do what Mary did. So when the scripture picks back up, you know, after that phenomenal dialogue between Christ and Mary, when it picks back up, it's in the middle of this description of seven powers.

And the seven powers are aspects of, here's the way I describe it. that for me is the it lands. It's kind of like being human, we have an ingredients label, okay? Right. It's like we have these ingredients. If you're going to sign up to be human, you're going to feel darkness. You are going to feel desire. You are going to feel ignorance, right?

All these seven aspects of like what we sign up for. It's just if you're going to be incarnate, you are going to have to interact and and understand, perceive, like really be able to experience and recognize when you are in one of these, I refer to them as egoic state. So it's like these seven and they have all different variations depending on who we are and they have combinations.

Like I've never paid too much attention to like the actual seven. But what's really interesting is that in the future of the church, Mary is her gospel is fully erased, labeled apocryphal. Most of it is destroyed and buried. Mary is labeled as the prostitute. So she's demoted from the woman who Christ loved the most and someone who received spiritual teachings that the male disciples did not. She gets demoted to the penitimate. to the penitent prostitute. So we have this, but what remains is the seven deadly sins, right?

Now that's really fascinating because they are un-hithed. They're unconnected. There's no mention of that in the New Testament in any of the other scripture. There's just the reference of the seven demons in Luke, but there is no, there's no delinion. like the gospel of Mary. But in the gospel of Mary, they're just powers. They're not- Interesting. Demons.

They're not sins. They're just powers. It's just, it's something that we get overwhelmed by, right? Like the seventh is rage. Who can't identify with that, right? Yeah. Definitely. It's a rage that devours us.

It's a rage that wants revenge. It's a rage that wants revenge. is egoic is is wanting us to react to somebody else's rage towards us with rage and return that's that's the that's being trapped in the egoic cycle now what we can sort of understand if if we put the whole gospel into um its context is that christ is saying we want to get to a place place where we release these egoic states. We become aware of when we are trapped in one of them. And we rise, right?

We allow soul or love to overwhelm us again so that we can see again from the eye of the heart. So it's about... So it's an expression. Express it. Exactly. Rage is holy. Rage is incredibly sacred.

It's true you don't want to act on it. When you go to take action, you want to act from that place of love. But you want rage to inform you about what you care most about. About, you know, for example, if you're angry because someone has harmed you, that's you becoming so aware of how much you love yourself, right? Like you care if somebody harms you. How dare they? because you are sacred. So that rage is important.

And also in the acts of Pauline Thakla, this beautiful moment of sacred rage, Thakla, when she's brought before, after she tries to protect herself from getting sexually assaulted by that powerful politician, when she's ordered to be killed by wild animals in the arena,

it's the women in the crowd who yell out unholy. judgment. So when they're outraged and they're yelling unholy judgment, Thaklun knows she's not alone. She's not alone in this, that there are others that are with her. So that's a moment of showing us how sacred rage is. It's just you don't want to act from that rage. That's the difference, right? You want to feel it and release it, but then move from love. What would rage look like right now? Because I think that to me, rage is the next level of anger. And it, to me, rage is, is, is, it does have an action oriented.

Yes. Yes. So to it. More than angry is, oh, I'm angry. Yeah, but rage is like something's moving through me. It's galvanizing. Yeah. That I can't stop anymore.

Yeah. And so what would it look like right now? Because I've thought a lot about that with rage. Like, do we need to get all these women to start screaming into their pillows? Do we need to have, I saw, I saw something on social. the other day about rage art therapy. But I think in order for us to move forward at this moment, I think rage has to be step number one.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's so important, especially from those of us who were really inculturated into purity culture or the church saying, especially women, you know, that we have to be good. And it's interesting, the gospel of Mary doesn't refer to God as God. God is the, of course, masculine male version of the divine, of speaking of the divine, because there's also goddess. There's God or goddess. The gospel of Mary refers to the divine as just the good, capital G, good.

And what's interesting is that Christ explains in the gospel of Mary that we come from the good, that we pertain to it, right? It is something that is inherent in us. So goodness isn't performative, right? We don't have to. Thank you. Please note everybody. You don't have to perform to be good, is what Megan just said. You are inherently good.

You're inherently good. You're already there. You come from the good. So the good is an aspect of us. So I think that I have one other, I have to speak directly to any woman who has, encountered sexual assault, rage is so healing, is so incredibly healing. For me, I didn't even begin to start to heal until I could express and feel and know and act on my rage. So rage is incredibly galvanizing. And it also, in that rage, I encountered. I encountered.

how much I cared about the little girl I was, you know, and how much she deserved and still deserves. And so rage is so, it's like a clarifying fire that washes through us and realigns, you know, it kind of breaks all those bonds and connections to these allegiances we've had for power that is not worth. of us performing for it. And it sort of allows the field to be clear again

and allows us to understand that we can tether our worth to something within us, right? To a memory, to an idea of who we are, to just even this idea of the spiritual eye of the heart, whatever it is, but no one outside of us

gets to dictate. that worth. Right. We, it's an, it's anchored within us. Yeah. And I think rage really allows us to get there. Right. And we, I just want to point out that for what I've heard from a lot of women, what I've experienced as a woman, is that, you know, our culture doesn't like angry women, doesn't like rageful women. In fact, one of the, one of the messages I've had to really overcome in my recent years was, that I was told by teachers, parents, adults growing up that I was too emotional. And so. I got that all the time.

You got that too? Yep. I was too much. Too much. Yeah. So I think that we, when I look at everything that is going down right now and we connect that back to everything that you're saying, I also spent a lot of time studying the witches in Salem, Massachusetts, which also, by the way, was women turning in women and women not

behaving. I think we're due for a couple, for a good old-fashioned rage party right now. And I keep trying to figure out how do we gather women and let women do that because it can feel really awkward. But I recently, I've said this on a couple of podcasts, I recently had, I was actually in the middle of a guided psychedelic journey a couple weeks ago and I screamed my head off for a long period of time and it felt like when you have to pee and you finally get to pee that's how good it felt. I was it was so healing so I want every woman to have that. Yeah I see that is the only response to a world that is literally insane. I mean, what, and, and a world judging us saying, saying we're too much, you know, we're too much. I think we're the, the exact amount that is

challenging a structure of oppression, a systematic, um, structure that devalues our worth and dismisses the harm done against us. I think we are. the exact amount of rage and muchness that seeks to undo that and bring about the world that every single one of us can imagine. I haven't met a woman yet who doesn't already know exactly what that world feels like, what matters, what our priorities are. We know how to bring about a world. it's it's detaching from this one right it's yeah there's a moment at the beginning of the acts of

paul and thakla that i think is really important for all of us what feckla's conversion story right like everybody's heard of paul the apostle's conversion story where he's blinded for three days and three nights tecla's conversion story is she just sits still for three days and three nights and refuses to speak to anybody. Her mother and her fiance who are wanting her to still be a commodity in this unjust system in the first century that considers her

to be a piece of property. They're trying to get her to respond. She refuses to move. She refuses to say anything. She absolutely will not go on with life as is. She's refusing to participate. There it is.

the oppressive life that was handed to her. She's saying, I'm done. I'm done. And I love thinking about if every single woman listening to this right now sat down, not for three days. I'm saying three hours. That would cause like massive mayhem. And the whole world around her would fall apart in three hours.

Because most women I know are juggling absolutely everything. Everything. Everything. And if we put it all down and we said, nope, this is not a world I'm going to contribute to anymore. I'm not contributing my time, my love, my labor, my effort, my sex, my input, my intellect, none of it. I'm sitting still and I'm refusing to go on with life as is. And for me, I feel like that's what happened with the Epstein files. Because on a very real level, I've always known that this was true. Yeah, me too. And I can say that with absolute certainty. I always knew that this was true. And it's not like conspiracy.

It's not like I ever, I'm saying, I was not surprised by any of this. And at the same time, there was that feeling of like, okay, here, the veils have lifted. The world has ended. Like I will not participate in the world that created this. I will not. Yes. You know, that that world has ended and a part of me divesting from that world that created that reality of girls being so devalued.

What has happened for me within my own world is that I refuse to discount or disbelieve the voice that I hear within me. Yep. Oh, yeah. From here on out. Okay, I hope everybody heard that because I did my own self-inquiry in the same way. I was like, it was like, I feel like, again, a veil was pulled back with the Epstein files, and I was like, oh, shit, that's who conditioned my brain? Right. Wait, this went into science, this went into education, this went into health care, this went into politics, spirituality. like this sick sex trafficking ring has controlled all of these systems.

It's a mindset. And I have, I've been letting these systems dictate my own freaking happiness. That's how we're controlled. Yes. That's how we're controlled. Yes. And then I was like, okay, Mindy, moment by moment, you need to figure out how to unhook yourself from this system.

Yes. And it's so subtle. And that's, that's it. with the rage. Like you reminded me of the rage, the reason why it's so terrifying is that when a woman is raging, she's uncontrollable. And that's why she's so terrifying to culture is that we're so used to being presented as completely controlled and in control, right?

And a woman who is raging is out of control. Well, that's exactly what we need to do is we. is we need to be uncontrollable. We need to figure out our own unique ways of becoming absolutely unhinged, uncontrollable. We cannot be commodified. We cannot be controlled. That really is a blessed answer to these times right now. Yeah.

What do you think that Mary and Thetla would be doing right now after they read the Epstein files? I mean, I would, I think, I don't know. I mean, I really have been meditating on this. I've been studying, I have this document I saved that I titled How Women Pray When the World is on Fire. And I've been studying how women have protested peacefully. throughout history in very impactful ways

like scrappy again scrappy like the women in the arena from the acts of Paul and Thakla scrappy but really powerful like Mary Maloney she rang a bell every time Churchill tried to speak after he

disparaged the suffragette movement and he said something about you know women trying to vote you know and and said something horrible about women. And so Mary Maloney, wherever Churchill went and tried to speak again. She blew a whistle.

See, that's creative. She rang about so loudly that it drowned out his voice. So it's like I've just been looking at ways. I think they would figure that out. I think they would figure out a very impactful way or like Julia Butterfly when the Redwood Forest was going to be. You know, she climbed up into the tree Luna. And she sat there and she refused to move.

she saved Luna from being forested. It's like those, it's, it's something that we can do. It's very accessible and yet impactful and it's peaceful. And yet it has this really powerful message along with it. I love that. I'm, you know, I'm reaching out to everyone. I'm asking like the ugly duckling, you know, I'm going up to every. and saying like what do we do because you know in 2016 we marched and we marched and we marched

and what did that for us we have been marching but i think it's really it needs to be this both and which we've been speaking towards it's like it's also internal you know like the realm the revolution won't be televised that that whole message was that really it's it begins with within us like we have to free ourselves from the patriarchy internally. We have to get out the internalized patriarchy. We really have to heal and be speaking from that place of knowing. That word knowing, it's in Greek, it's really phenomenal because the word in its original form is nosis. And it's how these gospels are referred to. Many of them are referred to or they've been sort of couched altogether as Gnostic Gospels.

Because they focus on this capacity for us to go inward and know and receive answers directly from within. But that word nois in Greek, it means knowledge gained from direct experience. So this isn't something that, you know, you can read a book and then no. it's it's something that again going back to the embodiment you know it because you encounter it directly within your body like you you feel it it's it's more than feeling you you sense it you and i use the word no but when i'm saying i know it i'm not talking about my intellect i'm saying i know it from the bones i know i know and i feel like in this moment

I mean, why do we have these scriptures now? They were buried for thousands of years. Why do we have them now? I think we need them now. We need them now. We need the other half of the story. And it's these teachings that are guiding us back. Again, I will teach you about what is hidden from you.

Well, what's hidden from us is this capacity for us to know, as in experience directly from within us, which again can only happen if we're fully in our bodies. And I think that this moment is about that. It's not just about the external actions. It's about this capacity to go inward and to really be guided and anchored to how love wants us to move. And love is the ultimate power. Like love is going to show us a new way to protest, a new way to unite. And I love what you're saying about the embodiment. In my clinic for years, I had the Gandhi quote, be the change you want to see in the world. Because so many people who were in poor health felt like victims to their doctor, to their genetics, to their food system.

And I would always say, no, you, same kind of thing like you're saying, right, you have the power to heal yourself. you be that change that you wish you you be the person you wish had had been treated differently in those situations. So you're really giving me a deeper perspective of the work is on us first. And whenever we tend to see injustices in the world, I think we want to lash out at the other person. And I want to speak specifically to maybe the other person who thinks different from you politically. This is not where our effort it should be. Our effort should be going into our own selves and saying, I'm now, like you've said, going to unhook from this patriarchal energy that has taught me to distrust myself and to distrust my sisters. And where have I been infected? And this is the

inquiry I have done for the last couple of weeks. I will probably continue to do it. But you will catch yourself. And it can be in little things like picking my phone up and deciding I want to order something from Amazon. When I all of a sudden realize I have an independent bookstore that's only three miles away, get in the car and support the family owned business. And get off Amazon. Or maybe it's talking poorly about another woman when all of a sudden you realize that, oh my God, wait, I was taught to be in competition with this other woman. I think we have to to do exactly what you're saying where we've got to go in like mary was saying and go into the eye of the heart and then from there we can come out in a new way right and and the the sort of

modern secular take on baptizing ourselves is giving ourselves the authority to take action once we're aware and aligned with how love or the true self wants us to move so it's sort of of a both and it's not that we're not going to physically show up in places that make an impact that hopefully create seismic change it's it's the microcosm and the macrocosm it's both it's both and we need we need we need to find a new way of changing the system and i think it begins within and it comes from within and then we act in the way that love we're wants us to act. Rather than moving as a reaction, moving, you know, in the ways that others have shown us how to, you know, protest or take action, we really have to come up with a new way.

Like a power with, and that's really what it means to sort of move from within. It's like we're, we're all participating in this power with a shared power. And I think, I think the other thing that can be helpful for people listening that I've found is I start to look for where am I seeing power over and where am I seeing power with or power together? So like when I was going through the Epstein files, the Olympics were going on, and I saw this beautiful phone call that Madonna made to Amber Glenn. One of that because she was, and I was like, they're sharing, there's shared power. There is. And I just keep training. my brain to focus on that. Yeah.

Power within and power together. And it's almost like we were asleep. And I personally think the Epstein files woke a lot of us up. And now we need, right, we need to go looking for the world we want to create and the world we want to move away from. And if you use the terminology, oh, that's power over. Oh, wait, there's power within. There's power together. I'm finding. that I'm finding my way into the new world that women can create now. Yeah, that's such a beautiful way to put it. And I think, you know, to bring it back to the supper clubs or the small groups that were meeting up, you know, underneath the watchful eye of the Roman Empire,

something that's giving me so much life right now is my own little local supper supper club. Like I really recommend, you know, just getting together with even two or three other women. And, you know, it's like the, the intenser, the times, the harder we need to come together and be together and support each other. And it's, it's, there's something so magical that happens, when we come together. But I think the most important aspect is that each one of us leaves every time when we come together more grounded, more embodied, more empowered. We remember that every time we speak for ourselves, we are also speaking on behalf of this collective.

Right. Nothing is ever about just. me. It's about everything I do. I'm knocking on the door also for my sister. You know, so it's this collective. And we always meet at least once a month. And that is something that I would say is really important for every woman right now in this climate. And it's a consciousness raising. I mean, we've been doing it literally forever, always. But it goes all the way back at least to the first century. Yeah. Yeah, one thing I also did that was really cathartic is my friends who I know had sexual trauma or abuse after the first wave of files came out, I called them.

And I'm like, hey, I'm here. I don't know what you're watching or listening to, but please know, I'm here with you. And that felt, that felt really anchoring to be like, we're all witnessing something right in our face that is so horrific and triggering. And as women, I love the petals, the rose petals that we're thrown in the peckles. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, like, I know you're struggling and I will sit here and throw rose petals at your feet. Yeah.

I'm with you. It's the withness that's so powerful. It's that sense of because abuse always equates to isolation. And so that counter. look over here or look over there. Right. Like distraction. Distraction.

And there's no accountability. So for you to directly reach out and acknowledge this is really happening and this is really triggering, I see you, I'm with you. You're not alone in this. Yeah. And then, you know, the next level to that is. and you did what to children, I can't stay quiet anymore. That's where my mama bear came in. Okay, we knew this was going on against women, but you did what?

Okay, now I can't go to sleep again. So I really have continued to express to my following, to my friends. I think this moment can be fuel for real change if we do some of the principles we're talking about here. We cannot go to sleep. We need to feel the rage. We have to band together. Or, you know, future generations are going to be having this conversation that will look exactly the same. Yeah. It's just going to keep going on. We have to be our own saviors. We absolutely have to be the ones that we've been waiting for. That is the moral of this story. I have been saying that with health for years. I'm like, nobody's coming to save you. Nobody's

your doctor, the big pharma, it's not coming to save you. No one's going to save yourself. Yeah, unless we do. Yeah. You know, the other thing that I really thought about when I read your books was, well, shoot, I've taken some arrows. As my books have gone out into the world, I can only imagine the arrows that you've taken. All of a sudden, my arrows seem very light.

So I hope you just keep speaking boldly because I do believe that the time for this message, to come out is now. And I hope people see that. Thank you. It means a lot to me. And it means a lot to me that you're acknowledging that. And yeah, because this is work that has been actively suppressed and silenced. And so to have other women lifted up is everything for me. It means so much. So thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. Where can people find you? What are you up to if people are like, wow, that woman, I want to go be a disciple of hers. Where do they go find you? So I am on Instagram and Substack, and my website is Megan Waterson.com with all my

retreats and ways to meditate and get involved. Yeah, and I'm going to put a shameless plug in for your books because I love books. And both of them, Mary Magdalene revealed and the girl the back. baptized herself, just phenomenal. So thank you. So thank you. And I hope we meet in person someday and keep raging. I'll be over here raging with you. Yes, we're together now. Yeah, appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, We'd love to know about it, so please leave us a review, share it with your friends,

and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.