The Tim Ferriss Show - #505: Elizabeth Lesser on Building Omega Institute, ADD (Authenticity Deficit Disorder), and Seeking The Emotion of Illumination

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Starting point is 00:05:15 No, I would have seen it, but I can't tell you that. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to interview world-class performers from all different disciplines, all different walks of life.

Starting point is 00:05:41 My guest today is Elizabeth Lesser. She is a best bestselling author and the co-founder of Omega Institute, the renowned conference and retreat center located in Rhinebeck, New York. I have a lot to say about Omega, and we'll visit that in the early portions of this conversation. Elizabeth's first book, The Seeker's Guide, chronicles her years at Omega and distills lessons learned into a potent guide for growth and healing. Her New York Times bestselling book, Broken Open, subtitled How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow, has sold almost 500,000 copies and has been translated into 20 languages. Her third book, Marrow, chronicles the journey Elizabeth and her younger sister went through when Elizabeth was

Starting point is 00:06:18 the donor for her sister's bone marrow transplant. And her newest book, Cassandra Speaks, When Women Are the Storytellers, The Human Story Changes, reveals how humanity has outgrown its origin tales and hero myths. We'll also find out if it's Cassandra or Cassandra. I never quite know. Elizabeth has given two popular TED Talks and is one of Oprah Winfrey's Super Soul 100, a collection of 100 leaders who are using their voices and talent to elevate humanity. She co-founded Omega Institute in 1977, a time when a variety of fresh ideas were sprouting up in American culture. Since then, the Institute has been at the forefront of holistic education, offering workshops and conferences in integrative medicine, meditation and yoga,

Starting point is 00:06:58 cross-cultural arts and creativity, ecumenical spirituality, and social change. Each year, close to 30,000 people participate in Omega's programs on its campus, and more than a million people visit its website for online learning. You can find her online at elizabethlesser.org on Facebook, Instagram, and on Twitter at Elizabeth Lesser. Elizabeth, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you, Tim. Thank you for having me. I'm thrilled because not only have I taken trapeze classes at Omega, but I have to tell you a story just to kick this off. I recall the first time I visited Omega in upstate New York, it was to take a class that you were offering with Jersey and Aniela Gregorek, who are two incredible

Starting point is 00:07:46 Olympic weightlifters, originally from Poland. Now, Jersey is certainly in his 60s, and they're just incredible human beings, the epitome of fitness. And while I was there, I took my first yoga class in one of your beautiful, beautiful structures. And I'm in the middle of taking this class. There are huge windows behind the instructor. And I spot a squirrel. And I start to think to myself, am I on drugs right now? Because that is the strangest looking, most gigantic squirrel I've ever seen in my entire life. And you can imagine what that was. It was one of your groundhogs. They're everywhere, these huge groundhogs. And it's just a beautiful location, a beautiful center, and you offer incredible programming. So I wanted to share that.

Starting point is 00:08:34 You would think that from my years of being involved in Omega and our curriculum that I'd be a true believer in everything, but I'm not. I like have a massive bullshit detector. But those animals at Omega from 40 plus years of us being on that campus, they are tame, sort of in the way you would imagine that animals around humans who are trying to be their most conscious selves would not be as afraid. You hear that sort of theory, but it's really been proven. The fox will just walk across and sit there and watch people, and those woodchucks are absolutely tame, and they're the bane of our gardener. They're huge. I had never spent time around woodchucks, aka groundhogs, and they're adorable. And you see people taking photo ops with them and so on. So it was quite the experience,

Starting point is 00:09:38 and I was thrilled to get edumacated on groundhogs. But let's back up and go back in time, and I am going to butcher this pronunciation, but could you please tell us who is Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan? And I suppose first you should probably say that name correctly. You're almost there. It's Pir Valiat Inayat Khan. Ah, that's not close. Pir is the name for teacher in Arabic Islam. And Pir Valiat Khan was, he died a decade ago, a Sufi teacher, Sufism being the mystical dimension of Islam. And when I was in college in New York City, it was that time in American history where like Eastern gurus were like washing up on the shores of America. And I was very much, you know, I was at Columbia, so it was the 1970s, a lot of social action, a lot of anti-war, civil rights, feminism.

Starting point is 00:10:51 I was very involved in that. But the more it got violent and just sort of to the far edge of my revolutionary self, the more I realized this is not working for me. And I became very interested in Eastern spirituality and Christian mysticism and all kinds of things. And one day I was walking across the Columbia campus and I heard this singing coming from one of the buildings. And it was a bunch of young people doing a circle dance, holding hands and chanting the different names of God in all these different religious traditions. And I thought, wow, this is what I want.ayat Khan. I had never heard of him. I knew nothing about Sufism. I came from a very intellectual, anti-religion, atheistic family. Our holy text was the New Yorker magazine. And anyone who... It was like an equation. If you

Starting point is 00:12:01 believed in God or if you had any spiritual longing in you, that meant you were not smart or you were not valid. But I was just like born a seeker. I was like always like going to mass with my Catholic next door neighbor. I just wanted some answers to this insane situation we all found ourselves in. So I discovered my first spiritual teacher, Pirvel Ayat Khan, and I got a deep education in the Sufi tradition, which, you know, Islam, if we think it's kind of foreign now, no one knew about it. And here was this erudite scholarly man who was half southern Indian, Muslim southern Indian, and half American. His mother was actually a relative of the founder of Christian science and had met this holy traveling guru, Pirvelayat's father, in that time in America in the 1910s, 20s, when there was a great awakening happening, Pirvelayat lived in Paris, grew up in Paris under the tutelage of his Sufi Muslim father

Starting point is 00:13:17 and his free-thinking American mother. He fought in World War II. He came to America at this time when all these hippies were interested in spirituality, but he was very interested in excellence, in discipline, in scholarship. And he was interested in all the world religions and holism and health. He was like a real polymath, a super polymath. And he attracted around him young people who were somewhat similar, kind of type A spiritual seekers. And that is my root tradition. And it was he who had the idea to start a holistic learning center, and he put myself and my ex-husband in charge of it, and that's what became Omega Institute. What an answer. You're good at this. I have been long looking forward

Starting point is 00:14:14 to this conversation, and you have proved that excitement to be well-founded. That's the cliff notes. The cliff notes. Well, there are a bunch of footnotes in that cliff note that I want to click on. First, just a confession. It's not really a confession. It's more of a disclosure because confession sort of implies something scandalous. I'm looking around me right now, and I have a collection of poems, which is titled The Gift, which is a collection of poetry translated, of course, of Hafez, who is my favorite poet, also known as a Sufi, and often considered, certainly by many, to be the sort of pinnacle of certain types of literature in the Persian-speaking world. And that led me to a number of books, including Tales of the Dervishes by, and I'm going to mispronounce this also, Idris Shah.

Starting point is 00:15:14 And if you had told Tim of not even 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, that I would be reading these things associated with even tangentially any monotheistic religion, I would have laughed. I would have then scoffed. But it's the mysticism, it's this direct experience that is so interesting to me. And I'm wondering what it was in you, if you could expand, that you were seeking. If you grew up in this family where the scripture was the New Yorker and to have an element or perhaps a seeking of faith was viewed as a rejection of rationality. These are my words, not yours, but I certainly have been myself a

Starting point is 00:16:00 militant atheist, no longer would consider myself such. What is it that you were looking for? And why was it that Pir Valiat, am I getting that right here? Khan was the first to really scratch the itch properly. Well, he scratched it and so did several other people simultaneously at the same time. Because as I said, it was a time in history where like yoga and mindfulness and Buddhism and Tibetan teachers and people from all over the East were arriving here. You know, some sort of karmic need in Western culture attracted this wave of Eastern philosophy. And all of these young people who had been, their doors of perception had been opened either through psychedelics or just this distaste for

Starting point is 00:16:56 1950s American rigidity, the generational culture change. I had an enormous longing in me. Sufis always use the word longing, that God is longing for you, and you are longing for God, God being not a being, but as you said, a mystical connection to the universe. Words fail here. Words really fail when you start getting into the realm of the numinous and mysticism. But I was always aware that what I saw and what was going on, it could not be everything. The answer to what was happening in nature, in energy. I just, as a little kid, I was just like a nerdy mystic kid. I was always like, what is going on here? And why won't anyone tell me? Where did I come from? Where do I go when I die? And what happens in between those bookends. Is there a good way to live? Is there a way to live with more connectivity to other people, communication? I was just massively

Starting point is 00:18:14 confused and massively curious. So when I had a chance to delve into these different disciplines. Another first teacher for me was Chogyam Rinpoche, who was a Tibetan master who came to this country and was absolutely perfectly geared for America. He was young. He had escaped Tibet through a very courageous crossing of the Himalayas with many thousands of his people, the Dalai Lama decided he was going to be one of the young Tibetan teachers who takes Tibetan culture to the West. He studied at Oxford, he came to America, he started Naropa, that institute in Boulder, Colorado. And he wrote what I consider to be my favorite spiritual book, which is Shambhala, The Sacred Path of the Warrior. So I learned Buddhist meditation from him. But what I learned from Pirvalayat Khan and why Sufism became my root path was he often talked about the emotion of illumination, that it wasn't just transcendence into a realm where there was no human emotion.

Starting point is 00:19:37 It was actually a way to bring your heart and your feelings and your awe and your ecstasy along with you on the path. You didn't have to become sort of a dried out Buddhist kind of emptiness. Sort of an enlightened, desiccated void. Yeah, a seeker of emptiness. He was a seeker of fullness and life. And he often talked about the emotion of illumination. And as a young kind of woman who just didn't want to let go of my femaleness, that really appealed to me, that I could be an emotional creature and a spiritual seeker. So if we go back to those very early chapters in the formation, the creation of

Starting point is 00:20:28 the Omega Institute, do you use the, the Omega Institute, or do you generally say Omega Institute and leave out the? God, I love you for asking that. It's one of my pet peeves. I always leave out the V, but most of the people who work at Omega now put in the V. And I'm just the titular head, so I can't say anymore. I leave off the V. Okay, I'll do my best. I'll do my best. I have a very close friend, Matt Mullenweg, who was one of the lead developers or the lead developer of WordPress, the platform upon which a lot of the 30 well, 30 plus percent of the internet is now based. And almost no one capitalizes the P in WordPress and it drives him

Starting point is 00:21:11 crazy. Similar. So if we look at those early, very early formative, let's just call it the first formative chapter of Omega Institute. What did the first draft look like? What did the prototype look like for Omega Institute? And how did you decide on what to include versus exclude? Hmm. Well, we had been living communally, Pierre Valliot-K Khan, I first spent my first couple of years in his presence as one of his students in California. And then he decided he wanted to start a commune. He wanted his students to not only live together, but also to test spiritual principles in the real world, create our own businesses, create our old economic system, families, how are we going to raise our kids? It was like a Petri dish for how would you walk

Starting point is 00:22:13 the talk? And so we ended up through very strange circumstances, purchasing an old shaker village on the north side of a mountain in the Berkshire Mountains, back on the east coast, on the New York side of the Berkshires, in a town called New Lebanon, New York. And this was the first settlement of the shakers, which was a community of Christian seekers who were also living their practice, being the change. And they built these amazing structures in different parts of mostly the Northeast, but also Ohio. And we ended up buying one. How we did it is a fascinating story, but you may not have time for that. You know, the benefit of long form is we've got nothing but time. Okay.

Starting point is 00:23:14 So I would love to hear more about these very strange circumstances. I guess you didn't go to shakervillage.com and buy what was for sale. That's my guess. Well, first of all, it was 1975, and we were living in Marin County, and we were living the kind of post-Summer of Love, spiritual seekers, California dream. And then suddenly, Pierre Valli had this idea, we need to go back to the land, we need to become self-sufficient, and we need to see if these things we're talking about, mindfulness and love, if they really work. So we're going to go do an experiment in living. And this was like 300 of us. And so one of the students in the Bay Area in our group was the wife of a man named Wavy Gravy.

Starting point is 00:24:12 Wavy Gravy was the master of ceremonies at the Woodstock Festival and really like an icon of hippie dome. And his wife was from the East Coast and her parents owned this summer camp in an old shaker village. And that is how we came to buy this huge tract of land and these amazing, huge, enormous buildings for dirt cheap because we had no money. And then everyone picked up and moved across the country and settled in these falling down buildings. And we proceeded to create a community of businesses and school and prayer and spiritual practice. And it was out of that that Omega Institute emerged because Pierre Valliot realized not everyone, in fact, almost no one was going to want to live Rechaffen, in charge of this idea he had, create a learning institute of holism. He was a great aficionado of the history of that time, that era, where it was the first example of the three Abrahamic religions coming together and influencing each other, mathematics, early science. And he wanted us to recreate the ancient schools of Alexandria. We had no idea what he was speaking about because he was just so highly educated and erudite and brilliant. But because Stefan was a doctor and I had gotten my college degree in education and I was a curious seeker myself, he put us in charge.

Starting point is 00:26:21 And of course, the first year we Xeroxed a few pieces of paper and invited a few teachers and rented a private prep school in upstate New York. And maybe 100 people came. Some of our first teachers were people who now are household names, but then they had no platform. Deepak Chopra, he had just left Harvard and was just starting his medical practice. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, death and dying expert. No one wanted to talk about death and dying then. African dance teachers, all sorts of different genres of learning that there was nowhere for them to teach.

Starting point is 00:27:06 So after that first year, we grew very quickly. We would grow in these leaps that we could barely keep up with. It was like Omega was this monster that we were running after. And for the first three years, we did not have our own home. We rented different spaces. The last place we rented was Bennington College in Vermont. And we had to use their food service, which was like sloppy joes and potato chips. And then just to appease us, they would have a bucket of raw tofu blocks at the end of the line kind of thing. Grab a handful.

Starting point is 00:27:48 Nobody knew what we were trying to do. You know, food as medicine, that was very new. Eastern spirituality, that was anathema to America. Yoga, mindfulness, alternative health. This was all far out on the fringes of American culture. Eventually, we realized we needed our own home. And without any real money or know-how, we bought this old Yiddish kids camp in the Hudson Valley that had been uninhabited for 10 years. All the pipes were burst. The electrical wires were down. We had like three months between buying it and opening.

Starting point is 00:28:32 Fortunately, our early students didn't care. Now people expect much more upgraded housing. At that point, people were like sleeping in rooms with bats flying around. So anyway, the early prototype was both highfalutin based on Pierre Valliot's intellectual prowess and just young scrappy people having to run a business. It's a business. And we needed to make this thing work financially so that we could hire people. We didn't pay ourselves for the first nine or 10 years. It was definitely a labor of passion. Wow. And we're going to make it past chapter one in your life of many, because I'm going to have so many questions. But I want to pause for

Starting point is 00:29:25 just a second, because you said something that I think is worth exploring, and that is, after a while, we didn't want to live communally either. So let me just bookmark that. And I think it's worth saying, or I believe that those who don't study history are condemned to repeat it. And there are many communities now, many movements, one might even say now, that rhyme with the movements and excitement, different breeds of excitement of the 60s and 70s. This includes the so-called psychedelic renaissance right now. I think people who are even remotely involved with that should study their history. And there's an increased, maybe related, increased interest in intentional communities and communal living. So I would love to hear why after a while you guys did not want

Starting point is 00:30:18 to live communally in the way that you had been? What were the issues? I'd say the biggest issue was that we were Americans born and raised on the milk of individuality and comfort. And neither of those things serve that well when you're trying to live communally. Now, I wouldn't trade like the seven years I lived that way for anything. I learned so much about humans and about the extent of our capacity to be in each other's space. But if you look at other cultures, especially tribal cultures, or even India, let's say, or China, this obsession with individuality and individual space is not as laced into the DNA of the culture as it is here in America or the West. It was very hard for me and for us, and I'm a pretty communal person. I like being around people. It was difficult to share decision-making about everything from how do we eat to what

Starting point is 00:31:28 constitutes good behavior among children. We used to have extensively long meetings about how much cheese can each child eat? Or can we each have a dog? Can we have pets? Oh, that's a good, yeah, it seems like a small thing or personal decision, but it's not. And these conversations, because we also believed in something, I highly dissuade you from consensus. Every decision had to be agreed upon to all 150 people, let's say, in the room. This would just go on forever and ever. So there's community living and there's community living. We were taking it

Starting point is 00:32:13 to a real extreme. A lot of people in a small place, everybody having kids and trying to create our own financial systems. So I would say, for me, there were a few things that made me unable to tolerate that anymore. One was when I had my kids, and I really just didn't want to share parenting that intimately with other people. And the other thing was, I just began to have these cravings for things like my own washing machine. More cheese.

Starting point is 00:32:50 I want 20 grams of additional cheddar, goddammit. Anyway, it's a beautiful instinct. And I think it's even a fantastic phase to experiment with. And it's antidotal. It's an antidote to excessive individuality, individualism, and you learn a lot. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Laird Superfood, founded by one of the kings of big wave surfing, Laird Hamilton and volleyball champion Gabby Reese. Laird Superfood delivers high impact fuel to help you get through your busiest days. I just had a bunch of their products this morning, about an hour and a half ago. I love their turmeric

Starting point is 00:33:39 superfood creamer and the unsweetened superfood creamer. Both can really optimize your daily coffee or tea ritual. So I combined it with pu-erh tea. A $10 bag will last you a long time. I basically use the unsweetened superfood creamer like powdered MCT oil. So if I'm doing intermittent fasting or any number of things, I will use that. And I use it at least I'd say four or five times a week. The creamers are packed with real plant-based ingredients like organic extra virgin coconut oil, coconut milk, and Aquaman. They come in flavors like cacao. And as I mentioned, turmeric, each serving is packed with a full range of MCTs, medium chain triglycerides to help keep you going from AM to PM. And I have spent time with, I've stayed at the home of Laird and Gabby, and they are one of the

Starting point is 00:34:26 most powerful couples I've ever met in my life. They've been on the podcast as well. So they introduced me to these products, and I've been hooked. For a limited time, Laird Superfood is offering you guys 20% off your order when you use code TIM20 at checkout. That's T-I-M-2-0. Check out lairdsuperfood.com slash TIM to see my favorite products and learn more. Once again, use code TIM20 to get 20% off your order. Go to lairdsuperfood.com slash TIM. Not to belabor the topic of curriculum, but I would love to just hear you comment on, in those early years, how you chose the teachers and the topics. Was it a reflection of your personal, and I use your as plural, but in terms of leadership and the founding team, was it a reflection of your personal interests? Did you poll or ask possible students what they would like to have, and therefore you

Starting point is 00:35:27 were guaranteed to have some attendance? How did you think about picking and choosing from the universe of possibilities? Because one of the challenges with lots of options is the paradox of choice, right? You have so many different possibilities within arm's reach, it can be very difficult to filter and select. How did you do that? It is difficult to filter and select. And a lot of what we offered, and I was in the early years the person who chose the most of the curriculum, we all had a hand in it. So a lot of it was just, what are we interested in? And this assumption that if we're interested in it, at least some

Starting point is 00:36:12 other people might be interested in it. But also this idea that the tagline of Omega is awakening the best in the human spirit. So I'm not an athlete, but I knew that for some people, awakening their best was athletics. That athletics was going to be the door to everything, to excellence, to getting in the zone, to experiencing a world beyond your own small, limited ego self, I knew that that was a gateway for many people. So I'm a very curious person. And I'm also look for connectivity everywhere. So like, I would like start experimenting for myself, let's say in yoga, which I loved, it was really my first experience of awakening the body through movement. And I thought, oh my goodness, I don't know shit about this. There are people out there who are making the body as their path. I don't know about this.

Starting point is 00:37:19 I better find out. And so I would research and read. And even though it wasn't necessarily my biggest interest, I wanted Omega to be truly holistic. And once you open those doors, as you say, where do you stop? Because we've had some pretty out there courses at Omega, out there teachers. And you can get so far out on the fringe that you're actually offering quackery and harmful things. So one of the first gates was that this cannot harm anyone. And it can't be like so out there that it's gonna ruin our reputation as a place that isn't even a little rigorous in its selection process. But somebody might disagree with that because we've had faith healers and people who believe that there are UFOs

Starting point is 00:38:21 and one of your favorite teachers, Terrence McKenna, who was a consciousness ethnobotanist, who some people might say was crazy. Mechanical elves, mechanical elves. It's hard for most folks to make sense of mechanical elves. Yeah. Inside joke. Right. But I would sit in, especially in our early years, I would sit in on as many of the workshops and conferences as I could, just so I could kind of ascertain, is this person whose

Starting point is 00:38:56 book we read a good teacher? Is there ethics here? Is there morality know, we had to draw some lines. Like if a person was exploring sexuality, but began to have like sort of orgies in the classroom, no, we're not doing that. We're not going there. Everyone must be clothed and no one is having sex. You know, we had to like draw some lines. If we're talking about medicine, you know, like consciousness medicine, we're not taking it here. We are a business. We have the health department coming here. We are going to follow

Starting point is 00:39:32 all the laws. So there were some ethical decisions and there were some just sort of, let's keep it a little tighter than everything. But boy, we experimented far and wide in the arts, in sports, in all sorts of ecumenical, spiritual, religious traditions. What do you mean by ecumenical in this case? Sometimes it means, I think, a collection of or multiple influences from Christian churches. But here, I feel like maybe you're using it in a different capacity. Yeah, I'm using it as not just Christian, but all churches. So multi-religious, let's not use that.

Starting point is 00:40:11 I might be using it incorrectly. So multi-religion and multi-mysticism and shamanism and indigenous cultures. And, you know, and there's been over these 40 years, there's been trends. It's been really interesting to see what trends come and go. I mean, on one level, there's nothing new under the sun. There are ways that different generations and different times people speak and learn in different ways. Yeah, it's so true. What was once old is yet new again. I mean, there's so many things that, at least in my lifetime, and certainly yours, move in cycles, and it makes for a fascinating study. Now, there are topics you can exclude or things that might

Starting point is 00:40:59 be harmful if we're taking the sort of Hippocratic oath, first do no harm for the selection of courses and teachers. And then there's assessing both the teachers and the students. And I'm going to use that as a segue to a word that I believe you coined that I'd love for you to explain, and that is innervism. Could you please explain what innervism is? I have always been an activist, meaning I'm very interested in what might make change to the suffering of humankind, whether it's political or social justice or environmental or feminism. I have one foot firmly in the activist aspect of my nature. But then there's the seeker and the mystic. And because the word mysticism or spiritual, they have a lot of trappings that you say the word spiritual to someone

Starting point is 00:42:01 and they think it's too woo-woo or mysticism sounds like, whoa, that's not me. So I came up with the word innervism. If activism is how you relate to the injustices in the world, innervism is how you interact with all of the layers of who you are, your psychology, your wounding, your mystical bent, your nature, your nurture, all the different parts that, you know, you're an internal family system lover. I know that you love that psychological school. There are parts inside of us. And how do you listen to them and determine which ones you want to listen to? And how do you activate them and put them in charge of a better life? So it's an exploration of your inner life and how to make it, like Pirvelayat always said, put your soul in charge of your life.

Starting point is 00:43:05 How do you put the best of your inner self in charge of your life? If I may, I'm just going to read, and you can please fact check me if any of this sounds suspicious, but a portion from an interview that I found in the course of doing research for this interview that's related to innervism, and it goes as follows. I began to notice that a lot of the people working for justice and peace causes were really angry people, people who had never taken care of themselves and were projecting their own stuff all over their issues. I thought, how are we ever going to spread peace and justice if we're not working on it in

Starting point is 00:43:38 ourselves? I want to walk this path in every part of my life, and that involves some kind of inner work. That's why I call it innervism. I want to work on my own peace of mind so I can be a real peacemaker. If we can match up what we want out there with what's going on in ourselves, we will be much better activists. So if that sounds like something that you might have said, I mean, even if it doesn't, I agree with it. I agree with it too. All right, perfect. And it makes me think of a few things. Number one, Jack Kornfield, who's been on this podcast and I consider a friend, likes to say something along the lines of,

Starting point is 00:44:14 remember your Buddha nature and also your social security number. I think there's sometimes a tendency to put the, let's just call it spiritual, although I want to come back to that word and help us to define it for you, at least share how you define it, the spiritual or the esoteric in place of some of the practical. And I won't mention names, but I was at a different retreat center once, and I was sitting in the cafe and I was drinking my yerba mate tea because it's a very acceptable way to get hyper-stimulated. And I was overhearing this conversation where this woman was complaining and complaining to someone else about all sorts of things, the landlord, the this, the that, the other thing.

Starting point is 00:44:56 And then her friend asked how she's doing, if she's thinking about moving. And she said, well, I'm really having trouble paying my rent, but I've just been really busy getting non-dual. And I thought, huh, that strikes me as a problem. But in any case, there isn't really a question there, I suppose. It's just an agreement with this type of framing. I think it's really important. In fact, about, oh, I don't know, maybe 15 years ago, 30 years in, I don't know, to our work, we really began to be tired of ourselves teaching this technology of inner awakening to the same people over and over. It's like, how many times do you have to wake up in the morning? You're awake, do something.

Starting point is 00:45:50 So we started, we called it internally, the movement from me to we. And we started inviting for free several weeks out of every season, nonprofit groups working at the front lines of all sorts of environmental social justice work to come for free with their entire team to Omega and to give them whatever they felt they needed in terms of self-care and lining up what was going on inside and within their team and their work in the world. And we have done this now with hundreds and hundreds of nonprofits, taking what we know and giving it to the people who can really use it. Because as you said, often you'll look at a group of people working for social change, and they're just so angry and they're not communicating well

Starting point is 00:46:45 amongst themselves. And there's a lot of ego at the forefront. And some of these spiritual technologies can not just help people be happier, but can serve the work we all want to do in the world. I certainly agree with that statement. And I think this is a good place to take a look at this word spiritual. And I'd love to hear you expand on your definition of that term. I think that, as you said, a lot of people have an allergic reaction to that term, not necessarily because they dislike the definition or the connotation, it's that in so many conversations, it can be very slippery and end up being a catch-all that doesn't really have a clear definition. On the other hand, for instance, you mentioned mysticism. I'm fond of that word because, to me at least, it implies a direct experience of the divine. And if you don't like that word divine, you could replace it with sacred, you could place it with nature. But it's a direct, subjective experience that isn't really subject to debate on some level. So I quite like the purity of experience that that connotates.

Starting point is 00:47:52 But spiritual, how would you define that for yourself or suggest people think about it? Well, I also prefer the word mysticism and the root of it being mystery. We dwell in mystery. No one has figured this out yet, folks. If they had, they would have bought it. Where do you go when you die? Can you communicate with the ancestors who passed over? How do we live a moral life? These are all mysteries that people have been exploring forever. So I love the word mysticism, meaning a way of approaching and relaxing into the mystery. Spirituality, you've got to go back to the word spirit, which is the indwelling nature of all things. Every morning, I pick a quote from a huge basket of quotes I have, and I try to live by it. This morning, I picked a line from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and he wrote, there lives the dearest freshness deep down things. The dearest freshness. To me, that might be spirituality.

Starting point is 00:49:10 Like, what is so fresh and dear and essential about anything? That tree, that bird you told me before we started taping that you were watching, that person in front of you, that fear of yours, that wound of yours? What is the dearest freshness deep down inside? Now, somebody might say, there is no dearest freshness deep down inside. It all just, it's, you know, the sort of nihilistic approach. So I can't really define spirituality for people who don't have some sort of connection to or faith that there is an essential consciousness that is fresh and dear, but that to me is what spiritual seeking is all about. So you mentioned earlier these non-profit groups and so on, frontline workers coming into Omega Institute, and that initiative being started to help those people take these tools and put them into action, right? And that

Starting point is 00:50:27 these practices are not necessarily solely for, or they are not necessarily for practice in the meditation hall, right? I can't remember who it was. It might've been Tara Brock or Jack Kornfield telling me the story of these various people in meditation retreats who would get pissed off, super pissed off about something. And they would say, I need to go to the meditation hall right now. And they would run back to deal with their anger in the meditation hall.

Starting point is 00:50:51 And just how, just such a hilarious and unfortunate image that that conjures because so divorced from implementing these things in sort of ordinary reality and building practices that can withstand reality. So I'd love to talk about your sister's bone marrow transplant and how some of this awareness has been translated. And specifically, I have a note in front of me, and I don't have any more context than this, but the quote, do no harm and take no shit meditation. What is this meditation?

Starting point is 00:51:28 And how did it come about? Well, I found a needlepoint with that slogan, do no harm, but take no shit in my sister's study office after she had died. She's my little sister. And I come from a family of four daughters. And Maggie, my youngest sister, was the most, you know, like if there was a favorite, adorable one who everyone loved, it was Maggie. And she was a nurse practitioner and an artist and a very tough customer. She thought just about everything I did in my life. She called it woo-woo voodoo.

Starting point is 00:52:11 She was a Western medicine. You know, she lived in Vermont and her patients were all the rural poor. And she just had very little tolerance for the woo-woo stuff. We had a loving yet so different relationship, and there were times like in all siblings' lives where we weren't the kindest to each other. And when she was diagnosed with a very serious lymphoma and the only thing that would save her life was a bone marrow transplant. And for any of you listening who know about the science of blood cancers, the really serious ones are you will die within weeks if you don't treat it. And bone marrow transplants almost kill you in order to save you. And so siblings are the ones who are most likely to have a good match,

Starting point is 00:53:09 DNA match of the stem cells that is found in the bones, in the marrow. And so each of our sisters were tested and I was the one who tested as her perfect match. We lined up 10 for 10, which is considered a perfect match. And this was exciting, but also mystifying to all of us since Maggie and I were so different. And when I studied up on the science of bone marrow transplant, what can happen once the donor's bone marrow gets into the patient is that the patient can reject it or the donor's cells can attack the patient. They call it rejection or attack, attack or rejection. And that's the actual word, medical term. And when I heard that, I thought to myself, well, that's what my sister and I have done our whole life. We've attacked each other, we've rejected each other. And since I believe in the mind-body connection, if you're nervous and stressed, you can get a cold,

Starting point is 00:54:20 your immune cells can be diminished by your stress. I thought, well, if every cell in her body after the transplant is mine, because that's what happens in a bone marrow transplant, they kill all of her blood cells and every bit that is reproduced comes from my stem cells. It's a little more complicated than that, but that's the basic science of it. And I thought, well, like if they're all my cells, I certainly want to work on our ancient rejection and attack, because maybe we could teach ourselves how to get along. And so I suggested to my sister, should we do some therapy together? Which for her was like so anathema to what she's all about. But when you're about to die, you'll do anything.

Starting point is 00:55:13 You'll jump out of a plane. This was her jumping out of a plane going into therapy with me. And we did that. And we worked on our relationship very quickly because we didn't have much time. It was amazing. We called it our soul marrow transplant, not a stem cell transplant, but a soul marrow transplant. And we did this clearing with each other where we looked at the assumptions we had made about

Starting point is 00:55:42 each other over our many years of being sisters. And we cleared them with each other. Did you mean that? No. What did you mean? It was amazing. We fell so deeply in love. And she lived for a year after the transplant. She called it the best year of her life because she was able to kind of start doing that same work with other people, like letting go of assumptions and coming into cleaner, fuller relationships. After she died and I was going through her office, I came across that needlepoint, framed needlepoint, do no harm and take no shit. And do no harm is the Hippocratic oath, which she was a medical practitioner.

Starting point is 00:56:26 But then she was also someone who was very aware that nurses often take a whole lot of shit from the medical professionals above them. And so she and her fellow nurses loved that slogan, do no harm, but like know who you are and have a strong backbone and have some boundaries. And it reminded me of a very common Buddhist practice. You see the iconography of the Buddha or Quan Yin with one hand, the right hand up in a stop mudra gesture, like you're putting your hand out like stop. And then the left hand is a cup. It's the gesture, the mudra of compassion. It's you're holding all the suffering of the world in your hand and transmuting it into care. And then there's the other hand, which is saying stop. And it felt to me like it was a good

Starting point is 00:57:27 way to describe what that meditation, that Buddhist meditation is. It's like, you can be so open to the suffering of the world and of your own heart. Keep your heart wide, wide open. That is the path of the sacred seeker. But if you don't have a strong backbone, and that's why you see in meditation, the posture of a strong back. If you don't have that strong backbone and that ability to say, no, I have boundaries. I know who I am. I am valid. I belong here. If you don't work with those two things together, you either become too hard, you know, that stop can just make you so rigid and hard and kind of like an asshole. Or if you're too open and too sensitive and too soft, You just get run over because that's what happens. So that is to me like a noble

Starting point is 00:58:27 meditation, do no harm and take no shit. First of all, I just want to express sincere condolences for your sister. I can't imagine losing my younger brother and I can only imagine how hard that must have been. And secondly, I'd like to revisit that clearing that you described. I've read you speak about ADD, but not as we might commonly think of ADD, authenticity deficit disorder. And I would love to hear you explain what that is and then also give any advice to those who might want to have clearing conversations with people close to them and work on ADD, authenticity deficit disorder. Well, authenticity is one of those buzzwords like spirituality that has, you know, some people

Starting point is 00:59:29 don't like that word, or it's been overused, or there's this idea that all you have to do is be yourself and then everything will just work out, forgetting that there are other people out there who may react to your authentic self in the most loving way. So I just want to put a caveat on the idea that all you have to do is work on uncovering your authentic self. But ADD, all of us have this ever since childhood, these scripts that we have to fit in, that there's a way to be and that there's something about the way you are that isn't right. I mean, if you ask almost anyone, I tend, especially recently having written this book about women to focus more on the imposter syndrome and ADD in women, but I know men have it too. A sense that there's something fundamentally wrong with me and I got to hide it and I have to

Starting point is 01:00:36 correct it by being like all those other people. And we get these scripts from our parents, our school. If we're a person of color, there's the white supremacy way to be. If we're a woman in business, we need to be more like the warrior man. Men have to be a certain way within relationship. like confusing scripts that keep us from finding, well, who am I? What is my gift? And how can I be that in the world? And the way that related to the conversation I had with my sister, these sessions, we only did three of these sessions with this wonderful therapist who walked us back and back and back into our childhood. And what we uncovered was that each of us thought the other one didn't really value,

Starting point is 01:01:38 like, or see us. We felt judged. And without taking the time ever, because none of us are taught this to say, is this what you think about me? Is this what you need me to be, to be loved by you? Instead of checking it out, we did all sorts of weird things, attacking each other, rejecting each other, feeling hurt, lashing out, never having those

Starting point is 01:02:07 essential conversations of, how do you see me? What do you need from me? What is going on in our relationship that's keeping us from connecting? How do we meet each other in each of our core authenticities in a way that creates love and a creative relationship. So we needed that help. And there's, I'm sure you know this, and listeners, you all know this too. There's some sort of bizarre magic that happens when we put down what Rumi, the great Sufi poet, calls the open secret, this secret that we're all carrying around that we don't live up to what other people, who other people are, that we're somehow flawed.

Starting point is 01:02:56 And all kinds of weird coping mechanisms come from that. When we put that down, when we just show up with the other person, am I enough? Oh, yeah, you're enough. You're enough. Stop trying to be something else. You're okay. And you find that enoughness in each other. It's like a freaking miracle. And it's not that hard. But it's scary. You know, I write about this in my new book. I was asked after 9-11, a lot of people were asked, social workers, therapists, mindfulness teachers, to go and do a lot of the first responders had to take these PTSD courses, and they didn't have enough teachers. And so I was leading mindfulness

Starting point is 01:03:46 meditation classes for first responders in New York City about six months after 9-11. I did it for maybe, I don't know, three months. It's a short course in teaching basic mindfulness skills. And everything was going fine with these guys who I absolutely adored until I tried to bring the idea of mindfulness into being mindful in our relationships with others and really getting down into what's going on for you in your soft heart. That was no, they were not going to go there. It was terrifying. It was easier for them to go into a burning building on 9-11 than to get soft with their wife or their colleague or their friend and to say what they needed, to apologize, to express fears and wounds. So it's a courageous act to bring your authentic self into a relationship. And it takes some training and some help. So I would say, let's say you have someone in your life you'd like to do some of this exploration with forgiveness, acceptance, explanation, seeing, hearing, I would say, get some help, do it with a witness, a coach or a therapist, because it can go south

Starting point is 01:05:16 really quickly. And so commit to it. And don't do it with someone who doesn't want to do it. You cannot drag someone onto the dance floor. There has to be some shared interest in this idea. I'd like to throw out a question and an idea just because I've seen it play out in my own life. And it may seem counter to what you just said, but I think that it's very case by case. And that is, in preparing for this and reading about ADD, in this case, authenticity deficit disorder, there were a few examples in interviews of questions that represent these open secrets that you then ask your sister, such as, and please let me know if any of this is incorrect, but when I got divorced, why did you reject me in the time I needed you so much? Or for a while, you barely let me in your home. What was that about? These are big questions and open secrets, like you said. And I have, in my experience, sometimes found that not value necessarily in dragging someone to the dance floor, but just in the asking of the question, there can be help that unburdening, but just the asking of the question,

Starting point is 01:06:47 if that makes any sense, the releasing of that open secret. And I would be curious to know if that resonates at all, or if you have found that to be true at all in your experience. I think it's so critical and such a beautiful revelation. One thing I've really feel I've learned better since that work with my sister and just getting older, there does not have to always be resolution. There often just has to be the questions. It's like you don't have to pull out every single stick from the cleared out river. You can just pull out a few so that there's a little more movement and leter with so many different psychological and mystical and medicine traditions like going for it and I'm going to clear out every stick in the river.

Starting point is 01:07:55 And I've really loosened up on that. It's like, do a little bit, give it a really good try, work on your ego's need, though, to control everything. And just see what happens little by little and then throw it up to the fates. I certainly got a big download about what you just said in that work with my sister. Such a beautiful story. And certainly such a sad story. Do you have any recommendations for people related to grieving? This is something I have a number of close friends who've lost their parents and struggled incredibly to process those experiences. Not to say there is any easy way, nor should there be an easy way, but we seem to really lack any structure. Certainly, I think there's a dearth of meaningful rituals related to mourning in the secular United States, and I'm sure elsewhere.

Starting point is 01:08:59 Do you have any suggestions, recommended resources, anything for those who are grieving? Hmm. I love the words grief and mourning. I think grief is just a sign of how well you loved. Grief is like a badge of honor. You loved. You are a lover. And of course, you're going to grieve, depending on how much you give of your heart when the object of your love is gone. It's going to hurt. And part of consumer culture is that we look for closure, which is one of my least favorite words. I'm just into keeping it open, keeping the heart wide open. Because if you shut down to pain, you shut down to joy, we all kind of know this intellectually, that the heart is a big muscle and you keep it wide open, you're going to feel everything.

Starting point is 01:10:06 And it's very understandable that we'd close down the heart. You get wounded as a child, you shut down, but then you shut down to everything. So one thing is to buck the system that says your mother died, you should go back to work in three days. Like in the old country, you would wear black for a year. And you'd see the woman in black walking in the town square and you'd say, oh, oh, give her space, give her room. She's mourning. Or you sit Shiva in the old Jewish traditions for a year or just cultures, indigenous cultures where the underworld, the underworld of darkness and loss and feeling,

Starting point is 01:10:59 these are like sacred places to go into. And we've lost that because it's not productive to grieve. So instead, you swallow it and you end up really not being productive at all because you're drinking too much and eating too much and working too much just to cover the wound. So it's both to me a structural social thing that we don't give time for grief and loss and mourning, but it's also an individual's courage to feel it all, all the way through, and to ask it to have its way with you and teach me, and to wear it as a badge of love, to wear your grief proudly and not to think you have to have closure. So many excellent points.

Starting point is 01:11:49 And I'll just add that one book that really helped one of my friends after the loss of his father was On Grief and Grieving, Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler. And he said that he wished he had read it before the passing of his dad, that it would have actually served as incredible preparation. It would have been very helpful preemptively. And so he recommended it to me and many others just based on that experience of his. Yeah, I recommend lots of books on grief and death, you know, that there's a wonderful Sufi saying, or maybe it's a Buddhist saying, I don't remember, die before death, and then do whatever you want. It's all good. So really owning that we all die, we all lose, and making friends with that. Hema Chodron, a Buddhist teacher I've studied with a lot, she calls mindfulness unconditional friendliness. That's great. Are there any books that come to mind offhand that you would or might recommend?

Starting point is 01:13:27 There's one by a Catholic mystic. He's no longer alive. Henri Noyen, N-O-W-E-N. And I think it's called On Grief. It's a small book, and it's a beautiful book. And that book by Kessler and Elizabeth Cooper Ross is also a wonderful book. It is Henri N-O-U-W-E-N. I'm sure that if we do a quick search for grief, the book may be The Blessing Hidden in Grief. That's at least one essay that he has written, but certainly people can... Oh, it's something like Letters of Consolation, something like that? Yes, there is also a Letter of Consolation. Yeah, that's the book.

Starting point is 01:14:25 And so we'll link to all of these in the show notes as well for everyone at tim.blogs.podcast. One more note, and then I want to ask about the new book and explore that a bit. I think we may have to do, if you're open to it, a round two. I am so enjoying this conversation and taking furious notes just for myself, which is always exciting for me, that the first is just to touch revisited often from, of all things, a very famous track coach named Henk Kreigenhoff. I'm not pronouncing that correctly, but what else is new? And his quote was, and his athletes performed spectacularly. One, Merlene Joyce, who's considered queen of the track. Merlene Joyce, Adi, had 23 combined medals at the Olympic Games and World Championships. That's just one athlete.

Starting point is 01:15:29 And his quote was, do as little as needed, not as much as possible. And I think this is really helpful to keep in mind when you are quote-unquote doing the work because there are points of diminishing returns and there are also costs when you are sort of constantly whipping your back. I love that. That's a fantastic quote. It's so true. It is not something that I learned until somewhat recently. And I think it's really important. And there are diminishing returns and there are problems that you create by excessive anything. Yeah. White knuckling is not a free lunch. Not to say you shouldn't do things that are uncomfortable, but if you become obsessed on constantly do things that are uncomfortable, but if you become obsessed on

Starting point is 01:16:25 constantly doing things that are uncomfortable, guess what? Your life is going to be consistently very uncomfortable, which isn't always the ideal. And it makes it actually sometimes quite difficult to be unconditionally friendly in the mindfulness sense that you mentioned, which I also love so much. Your new book, and let's start with my weakness yet again, can you please pronounce, I've heard both, I have friends who pronounce these differently. So how do you pronounce, is it Cassandra Speaks or Cassandra Speaks? Well, I don't really know either. I chose Cassandra because Cassandra sounded affected. I'm very affected to begin with, so I need to stem the tide here a bit.

Starting point is 01:17:12 Cassandra speaks, when women are the storytellers, the human story changes. What is the genesis of this book? Writing takes a lot of effort. It takes a lot of time. It's a huge commitment. Why this book? About 20 years ago, I curated one conference at Omega. I've curated many conferences on so many different subjects. And I often I'll do a conference based on what seems to be making people uncomfortable. That's funny, given our little bit of last conversation. But what makes people kind of, whoa, wake up and say, why does that make me uncomfortable? Yeah, the proper dose of discomfort.

Starting point is 01:17:57 And so this was putting the words women and power together. Like, what if I create a conference called Women and Power? And we just explore that. So I invited just like four or five different speakers. One was Anita Hill. And the Clarence Thomas hearings were still fresh in the American mind where Anita Hill had been brought into the hearings and she accused Clarence Thomas, who was up for becoming a Supreme Court judge, the first black Supreme Court judge, and she accused him of sexual impropriety. And she was treated very poorly. And he, of course, was appointed the judge. And she really put the word sexual harassment on the map. to explore what happens when women become powerful. How does the world react? What happened to you? What's going on when we put these words together? And it was so explosively popular. Hundreds of people came. I was surprised. I thought maybe like 50 people would come. So I repeated it the next year and the next year, like by the third year, there were 2000 women and a smattering of very brave men in the audience in a ballroom in New York City in a hotel. winners to activists and artists and the first woman astronaut and just any woman who's a maverick

Starting point is 01:19:47 and breaking the mold and asking herself, what do I do with my power? And can I do power differently? And does that have anything to do with me being a woman? These were the questions we were asking, and I would give a keynote every year to start it off. And I thought, actually, when my daughter-in-law said, why don't you just take all those speeches and turn them into a book? I knew better that it wasn't going to be that easy because books are never easy. In fact, they're horribly hard. And I said, yeah, maybe I'll do that. And I started work on it and I sold it to my publisher and I got the contract. And then so much happened in the culture around women

Starting point is 01:20:33 in the three or four years I was writing, the Me Too movement, Trump, things like that, intersectionality, Black Lives Matter. It was a really difficult writing project to write about the old myths, the old origin stories from the Bible and the Greeks and all the Western traditions that have painted women in one way. The old power books, I went back and read Machiavelli and Sansa and different business texts that describe what leadership and heroism look like. And I just spent these years exploring the research in how women lead.

Starting point is 01:21:16 Is it different? How women do the innervism work so we don't just, you know, Nietzsche says, be careful when fighting monsters, you don't become one. That there was so much going on with women getting into the corporate world or into leadership. And then like nothing was changing. Who cares? So that was the exploration. And that was the genesis of the book.

Starting point is 01:21:40 Why Cassandra? Where does that name come from? Cassandra was a mortal princess in Troy. And Troy and Greece were always having wars. And she was so beautiful. She was the youngest and most beautiful daughter of King Priam, Queen Hecuba in Troy. This is all Greek myth. These are not real people. These are the myths. Just like Adam and Eve, they weren't real people. So these are stories that inform us through the ages. Cassandra was so alluring that even the gods wanted to have her.

Starting point is 01:22:21 And Apollo, son of Zeus, wooed her by offering her a gift she couldn't refuse. She didn't understand that the gift came with the payment of being his concubine. But she wanted this gift, which was prophecy. She would see into the future. She would know what was going to happen. And then she would tell her people in Troy. And so she could inform history. So he gave her the gift. And then she would not sleep with him. So he cursed her. He didn't just take the gift away. He said, Cassandra, you will know the future and you will tell the future, but no one will believe you. And so as I was reading and studying that story and other Greek stories, I was watching the televised trial of those hundreds of girls who had been molested by Dr. Larry Nassar. You know, he was the doctor for the Olympic Committee and Michigan.

Starting point is 01:23:26 Jimnastics. Jimnastics, yeah. And over 30 years, he had been claiming to do medical treatment on hundreds and hundreds of girls and young women, but really, he had been sexually molesting them. And they would tell their mothers and fathers. They would tell their coaches. They would tell their university, the Olympic Committee. And no one would believe them. Year after year, they took the word of this one man over these girls. And finally, some of the girls started speaking out and speaking out.

Starting point is 01:24:02 And there's the judge who was assigned the case in Michigan, Judge Rosemary Aquilina, just someone everyone should know about. She defied normal courtroom procedure, and she allowed any girl who wanted to speak for as long as she wanted to speak to tell her story. The trial went on for days and Dr. Nassar had to sit there and listen to every single girl tell her story. And before each girl spoke, she would say, I hear you. I see you. Your words matter. Leave them here with me and then go out and live your life. And they were believed. And I would watch these little girls' faces. And by now, some were women, because some of these girls were molested at like

Starting point is 01:24:51 nine years old. And their whole countenance would change with the experience of telling their truth being validated. So I decided of all the stories that I unpack in the book, whether it's Eve or Pandora or literary women, I decided to call it Cassandra Speaks because it really speaks to me of women know something of great value, just like men do, but our stories and our instincts and our values and sort of our, because of both nature and nurture, what we care about has been determined as second-class behavior, like the caretaking roles. They're not very important compared to a CEO or a fireman. The things that we hold dear and know how to do have been invalidated so that we don't even trust ourselves. We don't trust what matters to us matters the most in the world. And that's why I named it Cassandra, so that we would all start telling our truths and demanding to be heard and validated.

Starting point is 01:26:11 Sounds like a lot more work than just stringing together a bunch of speeches and very worthwhile as a project. I would love to come back briefly to the Nietzsche quote that you mentioned. I can't remember the exact quote, but in fighting monsters, we must be careful that we do not become monsters ourselves. In your reading, it also sort of ties into, and this is going to form into a question, Gloria Steinem has a quote, which is, when we do acquire power, we meaning women, we might turn out to have an equal impulse towards aggression. Do you have any thoughts on whether or not that is inevitable if we have an equal impulse towards aggression? Or do you have recommendations for trying to mitigate that possibility for women as more and more women gain power to help prevent abuses of power?

Starting point is 01:27:10 Well, this really did become, as I was writing, the question I was grappling with, especially as you look at many women who gain power. You look at some of the women who are in Congress now and you think, really? You want that story? That's the story you want? How's that different? So where I have landed is it's not so much that women have less aggression. Actually, I think we do because I'll go into that right now. We are both nurtured and natured beings. And if all you want to do is look into the research of hormones, and the effect of estrogen, and testosterone, and progesterone, and we most women do have more estrogen. And if you talk to people who have gone through transition, trans people, you know, men who get flooded with estrogen and how it totally changes their experience and vice versa. suddenly wanted to become a lightweight boxer because there was so much aggression and wanted to know how to channel it. So there are distinctions between women and men and there's great variety. So it's very hard when writing about all women and all men, but in general, there's less aggression in women. There was this there was this study done in the 30s and

Starting point is 01:28:47 40s. Walter Cannon, he was the one who came up with the word fight or flight. So they did studies on human beings, brought them into the lab, what happens under simulated stress situations, measured the hormones, measured different chemicals in the blood. Oh, under stress, all human beings fight or flee. Well, in 2007, Shelley Taylor, a scientist at UCLA, realized only men were used in the laboratory. None of those studies were done on women. And that's the way most studies, medical studies, psychological studies were done in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, all the way up until the early 21st century. So she brought women into the lab and she did a lot of research into studies done on female animals. And she came up with the term in a wonderful book that people, I think, should read called The Tending Instinct, Shelley Taylor. She came up with the phrase, tend and befriend. Under stress in these laboratory experiments, women's instincts were more to tend to the most vulnerable in whatever,

Starting point is 01:30:08 the tribe, the clan, the family, the organization, the business, or befriend. Women, you come home from a hard day at work, you're feeling really pissed off and angry, you call three or four of your friends and you talk it out. And you feel these circles of befriending, helping you sort things out and finding new ways to deal. That's the befriending circles. So under stress, women often will tend or befriend. So the human instinct is not only to fight or flee. Yes, everybody has the fight or flee, but everybody also has the tend and befriend. And it's not a question of women good, men bad.

Starting point is 01:30:54 It's this imbalance of what we have called heroic and leadership, which is all the fight or flight without much of the tend and befriend. I mean, imagine, just like think of some of the statues you see everywhere. I once made a study of this. I walked through Central Park and I made a note of every single statue in the park. And I think there's something like 59 statues and like 50 of them were soldiers, were young men holding each other with blood and General Sherman on a golden horse. And just everywhere it was soldiers and generals. And I thought, now, what if there was a statue of a woman giving birth with lots of blood and pain and her helpers all around her? That would just seem so weird, wouldn't it? Like,

Starting point is 01:31:55 oh, don't show that. But it's what you pay attention to as a culture and name heroic that everyone then wants to be like, which has put tend and befriend type people at a disadvantage. And also once you do get into powerful positions, that's how you feel you need to be. And it goes against your authentic core. So I'm less interested in women getting into power and more interested in validating and valuing and calling heroic the tend and befriend instinct. I think that's an outstanding objective. What impact would you hope this book to have? I mean, looking back six months, 12 months, several years after publication, is it a culture-shaping effect? Is there a particular hope that you have of any type?

Starting point is 01:32:52 I mean, certainly you just named in high-level terms one such hope, but does anything else come to mind for you? I think a lot about, like, I have three sons, and they all have children now. And they are the most heroic fathers. They are in there with their kids on attend and befriend level, just as much, sometimes more than their wives. Their wives have jobs, they work hard, they make money. So do my sons. But there is a true expectation that parenting is shared. That would be one of my great hopes from the book that, you know, how we always say a girl can be anything a boy can be, but we rarely say a boy can be anything a girl can be. I would like that statement to have a lot of clout that like a boy would feel enormous pride

Starting point is 01:33:59 to have his tend and befriend nature developed. That a man would be proud to cry and share and talk and all the things that are considered, oh, women, you talk too much, you're too emotional. That the qualities of emotional intelligence would be really cool and hip and dudes would want them. Just to build on that, this may be in the chapter called In Praise of Fathers. There's a line, I actually believe that full-hearted fatherhood might save the world. Why is it needed? And that might seem like a silly question, but I'm wondering, and perhaps a better way to ask the question is, what does full-hearted fatherhood mean compared to what we more commonly find?

Starting point is 01:34:50 Well, one, it's not a sense that you're babysitting, that you're giving your partner, this is assuming it's a heterosexual couple, that you're not giving your wife some time off. It's an assumption that if women can penetrate the old world of male work world and make money and work and be outside the house, that men can make equal interior changes that allows them to actually want and need to father as much as women want and need to mother. And more than that, I mothered pretty fiercely, and I lost a lot of traction in the work world because of it. But I always knew someone had to take care of the kids. And that was falling on me. I would like to live in a culture where not only is it expected of mothers, it's also expected of fathers, but it's also expected of the society so that we have childcare and that we have parental leave. And that because

Starting point is 01:36:15 it all starts with the kids in the home. That's where it all starts. Gloria Steinem, you quoted her. She said, oh, I'm forgetting it fully, but if we want to have justice outside the home, we have to have it in the home. If we want to have freedom outside the home, we have to have it inside the home. So it's full-hearted fathering to me is knowing that it's a masculine, valid, that there's a lot of muscle and all the, I don't know, you could probably come up with better adjectives, but I want care and love to have equal amounts of muscle. Pete Elizabeth, just a few more questions, and then certainly we can save room. I have many pages of additional questions left over, which is good news. So perhaps we can do another conversation at some point. But let me just ask a few more.

Starting point is 01:37:34 And the first is absolutely metaphorical. But if you had a huge billboard, conversely, if you just want to send something to every person's smartphone, if you want to think about it that way, upon which you could put a phrase, a quote, an image, a question, anything like that, what might you put on that billboard? Oh, wow. That's asking a lot. I'm like a quote slut. I have so many quotes. I think it would probably be not either or, but both and more. That's fantastic. That is excellent. And the last question is, do you have any closing comments, questions you'd like to pose to my audience, requests you would like to make of them in the river, that to work hard, to pursue excellence, but to be forgiving and gentle. We're all bozos on the bus. We're all tripping over ourselves. And it's okay. It's okay. It's all right.

Starting point is 01:39:13 Elizabeth, Elizabeth Lesser. What a superstar. You can be found at elizabethlesser.org, all over social, including Facebook, elizlesser, Instagram at elizlesser, Twitter at elizabethlesser. Your newest book is Cassandra Speaks, subtitle one, Women Are the Storytellers, The Human Story Changes. Of course, everyone listening, you can find show notes, links to everything we discussed at tim.blog forward slash podcast. And Elizabeth, what a treat.

Starting point is 01:39:36 Thank you so much for taking the time today. Thank you for having me. And to everyone listening, thanks for tuning in. And until next time, be gentle on yourself. We're all bozos on the bus together. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend?

Starting point is 01:40:09 And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared

Starting point is 01:40:32 with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Allform. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you've probably heard me talk about Helix Sleep and their mattresses, which I've been using since 2017. I have two of them upstairs from where I'm sitting at this moment. And now Helix has gone beyond the bedroom and

Starting point is 01:41:09 started making sofas. They just launched a new company called Allform, A-L-L-F-O-R-M, and they're making premium, customizable sofas and chairs shipped right to your door at a fraction of the cost of traditional stores. So I'm sitting in my living room right now and it's entirely Allform furniture. I've got two chairs, I've got an ottoman, and I have an L-sectional couch. I'll come back to that. You can pick your fabric. They're all spill, stain, and scratch resistant. The sofa color, the color of the legs, the sofa size, the shape to make sure it's perfect for you in your home. Also, Allform arrives in just three to seven days and you can assemble it all yourself in a few minutes. No tools needed. I was quite astonished by how modular and easy these things fit together, kind of like Lego pieces. They've got armchairs,

Starting point is 01:41:53 love seats, all the way up to an eight seat sectional. So there's something for everyone. You can also start small and kind of build on top of it if you wanted to get a smaller couch and then build out on it, which is actually in a way what I did because I can turn my L-sectional couch into a normal straight couch and then with a separate ottoman in a matter of about 60 seconds. It's pretty rad. So I mentioned I have all these different things in this room. I use the natural light finish, which is their lightest color, and I dig it. And I've been using these things hours and hours and hours every single day. So I am using what I am sharing with you guys. And if getting a sofa without trying it in-store sounds risky, you don't need to worry. All Form sofas are delivered directly to your home with fast, free shipping, and you get

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Starting point is 01:43:11 That's allform.com slash Tim and use code Tim at checkout. This episode is brought to you by Tonal. That's T-O-N-A-L. Tonal is the world's most intelligent home gym and personal trainer. That's the tagline from their website, folks. So it gives you the one-sentence summary. By eliminating traditional metal weights, Tonal can deliver 200 pounds of resistance in a device smaller than a flat-screen TV. It mounts right on your wall with no floor space required. I've had one for a few months now after a number of close friends recommended Tonal to me,

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #505: Elizabeth Lesser on Building Omega Institute, ADD (Authenticity Deficit Disorder), and Seeking The Emotion of Illumination

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #505: Elizabeth Lesser on Building Omega Institute, ADD (Authenticity Deficit Disorder), and Seeking The Emotion of Illumination

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