We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle - (BEST OF) If Your Mind Won't Be Quiet, Listen to This

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

If you've been living inside your head lately, this conversation is for you.  Glennon, Abby, and Amanda talk about the exhausting mental chatter that keeps so many of us anxious, overwhelmed, and disconnected from our lives. Glennon shares the surprising shift that helped her stop trusting every thought she had—and start finding a steadier place beneath the noise. - Why you are not your thoughts - Glennon's #1 sanity strategy - The "touch tree" practice for staying grounded - How Amanda stopped accepting assignments from strangers - The wedding-week rule that changed everything for Glennon and Abby Follow We Can Do Hard Things on:  Instagram — ⁠https://www.instagram.com/wecandohardthings⁠

Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. I know where the hardest place to live is, and it is in my own head. It's a haunted house. The thoughts never stop. The judgments, self-judgments, self-judgments never stop. The attempts to control never stop. The catastrophizing never stops. The thoughts, the thoughts, the thoughts they try to solve tomorrow next year, next decade, before I've even had my first cup of coffee. Living in my mind feels like I'm constantly losing my mind. But what if the problem isn't that I'm losing my mind? The problem is just that I'm living there, that I'm living in the wrong place. If you've ever wondered about that, this conversation is the one you need. Because in it, you're not getting polished Glenn in. You're getting weird glen. You're getting weird

You're getting the voice that is really speaking inside me when I'm saying on the outside the things I think I'm supposed to say. The one who really only thinks in metaphors and talks about touch trees and inner roommates and questions everything she ever knew about herself. Weird Glennon is here for you today. This conversation came after one of the hardest mental health seasons of my life, after a relapse, after realizing I'd spent decades trying to figure out which voice in my head to trust, only to discover that maybe I did. didn't need to trust any of them. Instead, I had to find this kind of quieter, steadier place underneath all that mental noise. Today we're talking about how I learned to stop trying to win the battle inside my own mind. Amanda shares how she stopped accepting assignments from literally everyone. Abby reminds us of the simple rule we gave ourselves during our wedding week that

changed everything. We decided this, that we weren't going to wait for everything to be perfect so we could be happy. We were just going to decide to be happy and then everything would feel perfect. For that week it worked. I can't promise it worked after that, but it did work that week. If you've been living entirely inside your head lately, if your thoughts have gotten louder than your life, if you've forgotten there's a wiser, steadier part of you beneath all that chaos, come hang out with us today. Let's go. Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. And today we have just the three of us. And I am so happy about that.

I love our guests so much. And I also miss just this time with the two of you. From just the three of us. Three of us. We can make it if we try. Just the three of us. So far so good. Today.

Well, it's sort of the three of us. But it's sort of four of us because today I am inviting weird glasses. Lenin to speak on the pod. Okay. So you know there is this version of me that is a little, ooh. And I invited this weird self to the pod, the episode about my recovery and my relapse for my eating disorder.

So there is three of us here today, and the three of us are me, Glennon, me, Abby. and sister Amanda. But there's also kind of four of us because I just want to be clear that today I am inviting my weird self to the pot. Okay, weird Glennon. I was not aware that Weird Glennon had not been on all of the pots.

No. Yeah. No. I also wasn't. It's not. I come and I bring my most sane, organized self, like most logical self to. this podcast. Okay. Well, then where does weird Glennon go? Well,

she's lonely and sad and she hasn't, doesn't get to speak as much. And we're joking around, but not really because actually I have noticed that that is something that as much as I absolutely love doing this podcast, it's one of my favorite creative things I've ever done.

I do miss my weird self because I feel like that self comes out more in my writing. The untamed, unbridled, crazy, weird, a little bit insane self that comes out, didn't like when people are dancing wild or like in poetry or like just the feelings inside of you that explode and you can't really put into words until you really try and the fire

comes out of you. Today, I am going to get a little weird. Okay. And I'll tell you why, because I've been wanting to discuss this topic with you all for a while, which I don't even know what to name this topic. Okay, so that's great. I think what it is, a self-discovery that I think maybe the whole rest of the world had already discovered. About you? About themselves. But it's something that I discovered about myself, about six months ago, that I think has saved my sanity more than anything else I've ever tried,

including talk therapy, including all of it. It's all important, but this is one thing that sort of shifted my ability to stay grounded and find a little bit of peace. And I thought that maybe now would be a great time to talk about it just because I have been hearing from so many friends and so many pod squatters about how this is a really fucking tough time for everybody. Why? Why? Why? What could you ever mean?

Why? Well, the continued horrific state of the world and our country and the lack of, I think the lack of feeling safe anywhere. Yeah. You know, I really think that's what's hitting people and there have been so many people throughout the course of history who have not been or felt safe. and now that lack of safety is expanding to all kinds of other people who have historically had more privilege. And we're just at a time where everyone feels terrified, rightfully so, and unsafe. And so I thought that's a bit of a mental health rock bottom. And so I'm going to take the Pod Squad back to a recent mental health rock bottom that I had. And maybe it can be

of service. I can't wait. When the whole world gets anxious, it's my time. Time to shine. I live here, y'all. Okay. Welcome, Glenn says. So as the Pod Squad knows, and if you don't know, go back and listen to episode 70 and 71. So I recently shared that after almost 20 years of food, basic food sobriety, meaning I wasn't binging and purging anymore, I had a relapse, a bulimia relapse. And so I talked about that then and got a little weird.

And so I want to tell you a little bit more in detail of how I kind of began to unspiral from that time, which is that I started noticing there was a lot going on. I mean, untamed had gone crazy. I felt like expectations of me were just like through the roof and Chase was leaving for college and the COVID of it all. And those are all reasons, but I've never really needed a reason to spiral into disorder thinking. But I did. I sort of started to notice weirder than usual thinking, meaning that almost like obsessive thinking about food

and body stuff. And so it feels to me when that happens, like there's kind of like two voices in my head, or maybe they're both the same voice, but they're saying opposite things. So the one voice, I wake up in the morning, and it's like just exploding in my brain. And it's like, what did you eat last?

night, how do you feel? How is your stomach? What can you eat today based on what you eat yesterday? How do you're, all these like ridiculous questions. And then there's another voice that's like, what the hell is wrong with you? Like, why are you still thinking this way? This is a total last, total waste of energy of brain space, all of it. Shut up. Stop being such a loser. So you have one voice that's criticizing you. And then another voice that's fighting the criticisms. Yes. That you're holding of yourself. No, you have two voices is criticizing you. One voice is criticizing you in one way and the other voice is criticizing you for criticizing

you. So that sounds awesome. Yeah. Fun times. One's crazy and the other one's shaming my crazy. You're crazy for being crazy. Yeah. You're crazy for being crazy, right?

So I was in a battle every minute of every day during that time to decide which one to listen too. I felt like I was in the middle of a battle to figure out which one was me, which one I should follow, which one was sane, which one was insane. So during that time, you made me go away for a couple days just to like try to get a grip. And- Well, I didn't make you. Well, no. I mean, you suggested. I was like, let's go on a trip. It was an invitation. Yes. Yes. And so we went to this place and I went into a bookstore and I picked up this book called The Untethered Soul. Okay. And I have read this book before, maybe like two or three times before. And there are just times where a message can hit you exactly the time that you need it, exactly the moment

where you can understand it in a way that you couldn't understand it before or didn't take hold. And the message of this book just took hold for the first time, which I realized, and we'll talk through how throughout this unfolding of the book. But I realized that I was always trying to decide which voice in my head to trust that I've always thought of my sane self and my insane self. And my sane self was trying to keep my insane self in check in my head. I had this like ridiculous, nonsensical, traumatized, conditioned patriarched voice. And then I had my untamed voice. And they were at battle and I had to decide. But what I realized through reading this book,

and it took kind of this true mental rock bottom to grasp the message that was, I don't have a crazy voice that I have to ignore and a sane voice. that I have to listen to in my head, all the voices in my head are crazy. And I have to listen to none of them. Okay? And we'll unpack that. And it might not be true for you. I'm not saying it's true for every pod sweater.

All I'm saying is my experience that I know that this is true for me, that it was no longer, I'm going to be in this battle all day and decide which side I'm on in my side. head, I am retreating from battle. This place in my head is not me. I'm living in the wrong place. I'm trusting my thoughts to define me, to keep me safe, to make any sense of this world and of my life. But actually, that's not where the sense comes, right?

That's not where the peace comes. have to drop lower. Well, and I just want to say before we move on. Yeah. Let's hear your reactions to that so far. Yeah. Two things. One, we are not doctors or experts or people who pretend to know anything about anything.

I pretend to know a lot about things just so. Yeah. But I just want to. Sister does. You and I don't know shit. Sister knows a lot. But I just want to say that like this is Glennon's experience. and we're talking about Glennon's experience and we hope that people can relate in some ways.

It may not work for you, but I'm sure it's working for somebody in your life. I'm sure this is going to be true for somebody in your life in some way, shape, or form. Right. And I'm just saying I've always been a good example of the extreme. And then people can find themselves like somewhere along the spectrum. But what I do think is that I'm talking about disordered thinking. And I think everybody's thinking is disordered in terms of order being making sense. Right, because you said you have a taming condition voice and an untamed voice and you're trying

to figure out which one is you. But that's not what I heard and what you were saying. I heard that you have this voice that is this conditioned trying to show you how you're missing the mark of what the condition world tells you to be. And another voice that is berating you for your need to meet the standards of your conditioning. Neither of those are untamed. You're either acquiescing to the standard that's been given or you're being berated for trying to acquiesce. Both of those are equally shaming of you.

So I start reading this book and it's talking about the important beginning of it is that it asks you to consider the place from which you've been living your whole life, which is like in your mind. So I would like to have a conversation between the three of us of what it's like to live in your mind. Because to me, what Michael Singer and the untethered soul, and everybody talks about this, right? This is just the one way he presented it in that moment spoke to me, but people have been talking about this for millennia, right? But this idea that you have this voice in your head or it could feel like a million voices to you or whatever. But you have this voice in your head that you think is you.

And that voice spends all day trying to make you bad shit crazy. So Singer calls it the inner roommate. Eckert told the story, I think, in a new earth about how he was walking on the street. And he saw this woman who we would have all considered mentally ill. And she was talking to herself out loud, like, you know, having conversations like with people who weren't there and people were avoiding her on the street and all the things. And then he realized, he was looking into the mirror later that day and he was having this back and forth in his head about something or other, some made-up scenario. And he realized, oh, my God, all she's doing is

vocalizing what all of us do in our brain all day. We are all having those crazy conversations with people who aren't there. We're talking about things from the past that don't make sense. We're bringing up trauma. We're arguing with ourselves all day. We're talking. We're arguing with ourselves all day. She's just doing it out loud. And when someone does it out loud, we call it crazy. But isn't that what we're all doing? Yeah, I mean, I don't do it nearly as much as you. I want to like get down to like really what it is. Give us an example. Okay. Well, what Singer says in the book is like to do a daily experiment. So just actually do a thing where you personify the inner roommate of your mind. Pretend that person was beside you all day. Okay. So what that, what would happen if that inner roommate became personified.

and followed you around all day. It would be like, do we like that girl? We don't like that girl. Oh, my God. Do you remember when your mom said that shit to you when you were 10? Wait, wait, wait, let me have this fake argument. I'm going to have, wait, wait, I don't want to go to that thing. I don't want to go to that thing.

I hate my lips. God, don't trust them. Don't trust them. Do you not have an inner narrator that constantly just tries to describe the world outside of you and constantly is deciding who's good and who's bad and what's right and what's wrong all day long? No. Oh, my God. I know.

This is why she's happy. I understand what you're, saying. I think that mine is often about myself, so I get that, but I think I related to singers work more from the perspective of constantly being bothered about other people or other things happening around. That's what struck it with me, that when he said the moment in front of you is not bothering you, you are bothering yourself. about the moment in front of you. Oh, yeah.

That's good. It's not personal. You're making it personal. How every single thing that was happening, my neighbor acting a certain way. Yeah, your husband is like making dinner too slow or somebody's making a noise next to you. Or like you're constantly saying that that's so annoying. You're judging, judging, judging, judging everything. Whether it's yourself or somebody else or scenario, the singer says you are locked in there with a maniac.

If that person that was talking to you all day was your friend, you would not listen to them. You would think that they were not like a trustworthy person. He says, you will never be free of problems until you are free of the part of you that has so many problems. Has your mind ever not had a problem? As soon as the one is solved, isn't there another? Do you relate to that? The idea that it's not like your mind is protecting you from problems.

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Is it just like upsetting? My experience is that most people have an inner dialogue in their mind. And the pod squad will have to tell us. Like, I believe that most people, that this is what most spiritual traditions are based upon, that we have a place called the monkey mind. That it was called a bunch of different things. But it is our constant hamster wheel of thinking, thinking, thinking. And what it does is it narrates the world outside of us. It tells us she's coming.

I'm walking down the street. That's a tree. That's a dog. It's controlling things. It's saying, that's bad. That's good. That's bad. That's good.

That's right. That's wrong. To keep itself safe. And just to make it practical, someone is playing music. That is just a thing that's happening. Someone is playing music. But if your mind is interpreting it in the terms of making it personal, that person is disrespecting me. That person is disturbing my family. That person is whatever. You're giving it a meaning to you that is different than the actual thing is that that person is playing music, right? So it's whatever the meaning that you assign to things, that you are making them mean things that could be true or could be not true, but that is your thinking mind that is doing that. Interesting. Yeah. And I think we trust our minds because we are in a culture that tells us

powers in our brain and everything's valued there. For me, it's about where I am identifying who I am. That story that I have an untamed about the touch tree. We were watching a Survivor show or something, like some show where they were lost in the woods. And the Survivor Man was telling us the Watchers that when you find yourself lost in the woods, that the number one thing you have to concern yourself with is getting found. Okay. but you also have to survive. So the number one thing you can do to make sure that you get found is to stay in the same place,

in the exact same place. But you can't do that if you also have to survive because you have to find food and water. So Survivor Man said, the best strategy to get found but still survive is to find a touch tree, which is like the most big, glorious, recognizable tree in the forest. and you stay at that tree, right, each day, but then you go out from that place and come back to that place. Go out a bit and come back to that place. You venture enough to find your food,

but not too far that you get lost, you come back to the touch tree. So to me, that's living well, is figuring out who am I, what is my touch tree that I keep coming back to over and over and over again. so I don't get too far gone. Because we get lost when we make our touch tree a goal outside of ourselves or a relationship or an institution or even ambition or whatever it is.

We get lost. If our touch tree that we don't keep coming back to is in ourselves, the question becomes which self? Because the beauty for me is I have suffered with all different kinds of mental illnesses throughout my life. So I kind of know inherently that my mind is not the safest place to come back to you, that it's not the selfiest self of me. That it's an excellent tool. And Singer describes this really well in his book.

For me, a good example is it's like a GPS. So if I get into a car, I can tell the GPS where I want it to go and it will take me there. But if I get into the car and just like let the GPS take me wherever the hell it wants, wants to, I'm not going to end up anywhere intentional. And that's like my brain. Yep. My brain is amazing. Like I write books with my brain.

I show up and do all the things. Like I'm not saying I don't trust my brain. But what I'm saying is I don't trust my brain to lead me intentionally. I trust myself to lead my brain intentionally. If I sit down and say, here's what we're doing. We're going to figure out what next to do about reproductive justice. We're going to figure out what next, what we need next for our. daughter. We're going to like write a thing. Like my brain can do that. Yes. But if I leave my

wandering brain to lead me, I am fucked. There's no order there. The way I describe it is what I have discovered now, this is going to get weird glutton, but like there's no God there. Meaning, there's no like trustable, intentional order or structure. It's just random chaos. It's like going on the internet. The internet is the world's mind. So when you start scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, looking for some order, looking for, looking to make sense of things, good freaking luck. That's not what the internet is for. It's just a bunch of people yelling voices. And the only people that are giving any order to it are algorithms meant to control you, which is what happens in our brain with our conditioning. Yes. So going into my brain to look

for making sense of thing. Like knowing what to do, knowing what, like is the same as scrolling through Instagram trying to find order. I see. So what? Intentional mind, yes. So giving your mind a job, giving your brain a job something to do is good. Because we have to do that.

Like I've got to get my chores done. You've got to write things and we've got to do things. Like that's good. Then where are you? You. Where do you live in your body? Like, where's the you of the you? Here's the cool stuff. Right. Let's talk about this for a second. So who, who are we? Who am I? Yeah. So this is where we get to where you two, where I drive you bat shit crazy. Because have I for 10 years been sex? Who am I? I am. I am what. I have never been able to put, that's why I ended untamed with the I am and then all the words and the I am, I am, I am.

my challenge has always been, I don't understand what I'm supposed to put after that I am. That is true enough. Because, like, I am a woman. I literally don't know what gender is. I don't feel solid in that definition. Okay. I am, I'm 45. Okay. Wait. Actually, what am I? 46? Okay, whatever. But my point being that it keeps changing. So I can't be that. I can't be anything that's not like true all the way through. Interesting. Age is kind of a weird thing because it's always changing. It's not, it doesn't define you in any way. Like here's what freaks me. Because aren't you the you when you are born?

Yes. At the same you are now, 46 years later, isn't it the same you? So here's an, here's a freaky thing. Think about this. So think about you when you were seven or seven years old. Okay. You're seven years old. Like don't you think of your.

yourself as a different being, but actually the you that is you inside you right now, like you Pod Squad are like what you're looking out into the world right now. That's the same you that was looking out into the world through your little eyeballs from inside of your consciousness when you were seven. And that same you inside of you looking out through your eyeballs right now, experiencing the world is going to be the same you on your deathbed. you have always been in there peeking out. Like what is the you that is peeking out, taking in all the world, noticing all of these thoughts, having all of these emotions, like experiencing the world.

The you in there. I think that's what singer calls it. The you in there. Yeah. Who is that? Because it's not a body. This is why in scripture it's like, the you in there, the soul, the spirit, whatever people are talking about and they're talking

about consciousness is beyond race, beyond gender, beyond age, beyond class. Because it's just a consciousness. Yeah. When I think about the you in here, I think that it is confused my ideas of gender. Because it doesn't live there. There isn't that form there. I bring my, my, the things that I was taught and conditioned to believe to the thing that I even see in the mirror. Like, I don't know. It's all fucking, this is weird and awesome. The spirit, soul is not touched by any of that. So I don't know how to describe this any other way.

So, I mean, this is just like what the Atman, right, the Buddhist self, the heaven, the soul, the spirit. This is what everybody's talking about. in every spiritual tradition, that there is a self that is selfier than the brain. There is a true self that is unpolluted where there is a God there, where there is a knowing and a divinity and a peace and an order. The blessing of struggling with mental illness is you're forced to find that a little bit more because this is so clearly not safe. But what I'm saying is I don't think it's super safe for anybody.

Even if your disordered thinking is less disordered than mine, if you don't have like obsessive or compulsive thoughts, your mind is still disordered. Just by definition of that word. There's no order there. It's more obvious for somebody in your perspective because you work on it. That's why I feel like we should learn from people at the extremes more, really. Like instead of dismissing people who struggle with mental health, like really learning. for everybody from what their brains are doing. I think that there's a lot of people that are miserable.

Right. And it's because they live and reside in their brains, which are making them miserable. And when you think about it, it's so simple. I loved what he said when he said, we are trying to fix what's out there instead of making it pleasant in here. Yes. It's almost like we are working so hard on overdrive with our brains to try to figure out how can we apply what we know from our brains to make it better out there when if we just

reoriented our efforts to make it pleasant in here. What happens out there wouldn't affect what happens in here. And that sounds very dangerous, frankly, from an activism perspective and from a change-making perspective, because the last damn thing we need is everyone who feels it's pleasant in here and doesn't need to fix what's out there. But the way that he talks about it with, it is not to accept what's happening out there without acting, but it's acting from a place of peace. So if it is pleasant in here, we are actually able to have a sense of peace to make more fruitful our actions that we have on the world. So in essence, like not making things right so your mind can be at peace, but to be coming from a place of peace so that you can make things right.

That's right. You think about a room full of people of activists where there's a huge problem, like a life, a world-threatening problem that this group of people are in charge of fixing. And there's a week to figure it out. And there's a bunch of people at that table. And most of them are freaking out and are angry and are yelling and are panicking. And there's one there who is solid, who is centered. Who is going to be the one that everybody is like that one?

let's follow that one. It is not so you don't affect change. It's so you become effective in change. And the reason why it's important to do this episode right now is because people's minds are freaking out. Because it makes sense. And so it's more important than ever for people to retreat, sink down, get lower, find this other place so that they can come to the problems of the world. world with power and peace instead of panic. I think it's dangerous to be like, I get what you're saying completely and to not, oh yeah, we all just stay on our yoga mats. That's what I'm saying at all. Yes, of course. I'm saying things are wild and hard. And so it's more important than ever that we find a place of peace and power. How do you do that, though? I don't know. All I can tell you is when my mind starts up and starts telling me all of the unhelpful things.

The funny thing is we think our mind is reminding us of stuff, right? Like, oh my God, I'm going to forget that. But if your mind's telling it to you, you already know it. That helps me a lot. It's like, oh, no, I can recall this. Like, I know this thing. Nobody else told it to me except for my own brain. Yeah.

So got it. Good. Right. But also, like, when that starts, there's this thing that happens where I get lost in it for a little while and I forget and I'm, I am the thoughts again. So you know how when you're reading a book and you're trying to concentrate and you're like, and then you realize, wait, I've been turning pages for five pages. I don't have a freaking clue what just happened. That's what happens in life. You're in it.

You're with your people. Imagine your life is the book. Okay? Your lover, your dog, your problem, your challenge, your work for the day. That's your book. And then you get lost in your brain for a while and you miss the whole thing. That's how, of course, I only have to, I can only compare it to reading. But like, that's how I know I'm lost.

I'm gone in my brain. I've missed the last five pages. of my life. I try to be intentional about the products that I buy for my family. So when it comes to laundry, I choose all free clear detergent. You all know this about me. I'm always thinking about the small, everyday choices that add up to how we take care of ourselves and the people we love.

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join midi.com. That's join midi.com. First of all, one of the things people talk about the most in terms of mindfulness. This is called mindfulness. I hate that word so much. I'm actually trying to be mindless. Yeah, it's confusing. I'm trying to lose my mind. I understand what it means. It means be mindful of your environment and not your thoughts, but your thoughts are in your mind, so I find it very confusing. I would prefer to call it like soulfulness. Yeah. Right? Like how to live from a different experience. The idea is if you even notice your thoughts, if you even say, oh, thinking, there I go again, thinking. And there are words to it. That that is, is your soul, is your spirit. Because you cannot notice a thing that you are. If you're watching a movie screen, you are not the movie screen.

If you are noticing the thought, then you by definition are not the thought. You are the noter of the thought. Okay. You can't be the subject and the object at the same time. Okay. Got it. So if you're able to say, ooh, look, a thought passing, that helps your system to know by definition, that thought is not me. I am the one who is noticing the thought. Yes. Exactly. So then what is that I? If you are not your mind, because you can't be if you say, I'm thinking, I'm thinking. Who is I? Where does that thing live? Who is the I? That's your consciousness, right? So Singer has a new book out and he calls this the three ring circus. Like our challenge in life is that we are trying to figure out this three ring circus, the three rings are the world,

everything that's happening on the outside, our emotions and our thoughts. And we are watching all of those three things, but we are not those three things. What we are is the spirit that witnesses all of that. Yes. I think of it as like being in a seat, which is interesting because some people call it like the seat of the soul. When I hear the thinking, when I say, oh, I'm thinking and that's thoughts, that's, that's, that's. And I haven't told my brain to do that. So my brain's just doing its job. It's just like churning, churning, churning. It can't be trusted. It's not bad. It's just not good. It's not making any sense. It's lower than the mind. I know it's lower. I know it's further back. I know that the second I drop from it, there is a piece that is not the same kind of peace as telling myself a bunch of happy mantras.

here comes weird me, okay, again. But what I seriously believe is that this is what the Bible is getting at. The kingdom of God is not out there. It's not out there. We are talking about heaven and hell. That it's an afterlife, that it's an afterworld. I think that living in the mind is hell. And what the mind does is it constantly decides,

it tries to protect you by judging and controlling everything. What it's doing is constantly trying to divide experiences, people yourself into good and bad, good and bad, good and bad, good and bad, good and bad, so that you can make yourself safe or not. So you think about the first, the opening of the Bible, there was Eden. This is a poem about the human experience in Genesis. What nobody talks about is that, you know, the snake comes, talks to Eve. There's this tree that God says, don't eat from that tree. That tree is the knowledge of good and bad. And God says, don't worry about that one.

Your human being, don't worry about that one. Don't worry about deciding what's good and bad. Just live your happy life. They decide, I mean, you can see it any way you want on this pod. As for me and my pod, we believe that Eve was framed. But regardless, they eat from the tree of good and bad and they are cast out of Eden. And I feel like judgment. going into your brain and constantly deciding what's good and bad and trying to separate right, wrong, good and bad, judge, judge, judge, judge is the fall.

It's like being cast from the spirit, the heavenly place that knows all as well that can just accept an act and not be afraid is the Eden. That's the touch tree. That's the spirit. And when we go into our judging minds, that's the fall over and over again. So for me, it's constantly getting to that place. Getting back to Eden or heaven. I think that's what people mean when they say, like, it is well in my soul. Or even so, it is well.

Or everything is wrong and everything's all right. I remember calling Lizzie the very beginning of working to get the separated families back and just being in this hellacious place of all the things we were learning and listening to me over and over again, nothing is okay. And there's a place where everything is okay. And it wasn't that that made me less of an activist or it made me less effective. It's what allowed me to continue without losing my goddamn mind. Yeah. Losing my mind is how I did not lose my mind. There's a centuries old tradition of this in America. I mean, enslaved people that was the whole basis of their spirituals.

I will not be moved. It's the whole idea of active enslavement and torture for generations. And just like a tree that's planted by the water, I shall not be moved. It's the layer below the layer of experience. I mean, it's why that spiritual was used in the anti-nuclear movement and the peace movement. It's that in order to be effective in order to sort of, survive in order to fight for something different, you have to go below the experience that you are being subjected to to get to the place where you know that you are a tree planted by the water,

that there is dignity and that you deserve more and that you're unmoving in that space. Because if you just react to the world, according to the way the world is reacting to you, you will just be in spin cycle forever. And getting back to that tree thing. It's like the difference between thinking you're the branches and like being broken and being moved by every wind and being rained on it to realize like, oh, I'm the roots. I actually just have a practical question because I think that we've got some practical

pod squatters. How? I have an example. of how. Yeah. And it's very, very, not fancy.

But as you were talking, I was thinking about, do you remember the week of your wedding? And I flew down there and it was like, y'all had a place to get married

and some outfits and not much else. And I was just like, oh my, okay. We don't have place cards. We don't know, we don't know who's talking.

We don't, where's, schedule. Oh my God. And you said something, Glennon, that I have never forgotten. You said, this is where we're coming from. It's not everything is going to be perfect so we will be happy. It's we will be happy so everything will be perfect. And it's not this idea of being happy makes it perfect. It's that your focus was on the happy. And when you were happy and receiving your experience from that perspective, you would experience everything as perfect instead of waiting and holding your breath to see if everything in your wedding turned out to be perfect so that you could be

happy. That's right. Yeah, that's good. And I think there's a touch of that that we need people to bring ferociously and relentlessly into their lives right now. Yes. Which especially not except for, especially people who want to be effective for the long term in making change in our country, in our world, especially those people. And I don't think for us right now, I think we're going to be happy so everything's perfect might be a stretch at this moment. That was our wedding week.

Right. But there is an insistence that I have to our pod squatters and each other that now is the time that we double down on finding our roots, that we double down on getting to this part of ourselves where even though nothing is okay, we are okay. Like Monica Ray Simpson says, what we are fighting for is liberation. and we're not asking for anything anymore because it is already ours inherently as human beings. So when we come to this, for example, reproductive justice fight, we're not asking for a goddamn thing. There's a lot that's going to be on our list of demands as we fight forward. But we already have the dignity. We already have the essence of what we need.

So we need to act as if it is ours now. Because that is the place you're coming from. That is the tree planted by the water. Like, y'all are having a fit over here and talking nonsense on the court and talking nonsense in your little committees that you've set up in your little Congress. But we shall not be moved. We know who we are. We know what we came into the world with. And we are acting from the place of that dignity moving forward.

And so we're not waiting to see if we're okay from y'all. You'll hear from us with our demands. But we're not asking if we're free in this world. We are acting as if it is so. And you will see if your authority is derived from a free people as you try to control them. But if you don't come from that place, then you are looking to the folks to tell you whether you're free. Can we have it? Can we have peace?

Can you decide? Give us peace. Let's wait till the next election. Let's like, let's give some more. We will do all that shit. But like, let's vote. Let's do all. like, let's see if we can have peace.

Let's see if we can have our bodies. Let's see. Let's see. No, like there's a way of each day. And I think that's what it is, is like each day finding that liberation and peace for which we also fight. It's creating the truest, most beautiful thing now in your life. And the how people do it all different ways. Some people meditate, and that is a way, there's no nirvana there as far as I can find it.

But that's just a way of noticing your thoughts. So you don't try not to think. You just practice noticing. Noticing your thinking. So then you can do it more later during the day. So you don't get as lost because you've practiced for that 15 minutes being like, there's my thought, there's my thought. There's my thought.

And the one who says, there's my thought, that's who you actually are. Right? So it's a practice of returning to that touch tree so that you can do it further down during the day. Yoga for me is a goddamn lifesaver. Like, I don't know. the only place that I feel truly safe and loved and all of the things, it takes me right back to that soul spirit place. That's sweet.

You're doing it on your own. I know. That's like a you solo thing. That's really sweet. Yeah. But I don't know. That's the thing. I don't know what it is for everybody.

Because me, being physical is how I get into where I can learn how to get free from the monkey mind. Yeah, so it's different for everybody. What about you, Sissy? I think the thing that I'm working on with this is this idea that whatever's happening is going to be happening whether I'm tortured about it or not. And again, to say that allowing it to torture me actually just depletes my resources in my effort to make things not terrible. but this idea that responding to all the moments in front of you bothering you is exactly like accepting assignments nonstop from the world and strangers all day, every day

for the rest of your life. And the place that I would like to get to is not accepting those assignments, but deciding what my own agenda will be instead of constantly being in reaction of like, oh gosh, that person did this. What does that mean for me? And how do I fix it? So the idea of when a problem is disturbing you, not asking what should I do about it, but asking what part of me is being disturbed by it? Yeah. Because then it's a little bit more self-relevatory. It's a little bit more, ooh, that music is being played loud by my neighbors. Not what do I do about it? Do I run over there? God damn it. I'm going to talk to John about it for a

hour and a half because I'm so pissed. Like not what do I do about it, but what part of me is being disturbed by this? Is it just the idea that someone would be doing something that may affect me? Like, is it just the, like that part. My scared controlling self. My scared controlling itself. So it's just, it's more interesting. And it's, it's deciding which assignments you will take instead of just taking on the agenda of the entire world and you never know what's going to be thrown at you. And then you get right size, which is what we call it in recovery, which is like your only real project is yourself.

Exactly. It's literally the only, like this whole world thing, like your only project you can ever work on is yourself. And this is why Singer points out that that's the difference between a worldly person and a spiritual person. We think of worldly as like money and power and whatever and spiritual is like deep. But actually, when the problem arises on the outside, the worldly person thinks this is something out in the world I need to change. And the spiritual person thinks this is something in myself that's being bothered by this. This comes back to so much of control and love and what we all

to always talk about on the pod. And I think another way that this is liberating and freeing is that It just takes a lot out of off your to-do list. When you recognize that that's the way you work, the way thoughts and brains work, it relieves you, or I should say me, because this is where I come from, but it relieves me of the need to punish people for being who they are. Yes. And it also relieves me of the need to bring it full circle to your two voices of punishing myself for being who I am.

Yes. So when you can just, when that can just be what it is and you don't need to make it different, you just need to observe it and decide what assignments you'll take, it takes a hell of a lot off your to-do list and it relieves you of the need to punish yourself for being exactly who you are and thinking what you think. Yes. If I could make it real in the world, this is what would it be for me. I remember walking into a room with the kids a little while back and they were all fighting all of them. And I for a second was like, okay, here we go. I got to figure this out. I got to go in and I got to like figure out who was right and do the whole thing. I noticed that they hadn't seen me yet. So I just backed out of the room.

I just back the hell out of that room, walked away, went to my room, got a book. Knock yourself out. Knock yourself out. And that's the way I feel about my brain. Like, I get there, and then I'm like, oh, and then I just back out. Lean back. This is not my business. Nobody's making sense here.

These people weren't raised right. Yes. Amen. These people were not raised right. excusing yourself from the need to raise yourself because you weren't raised right y'all. No. No. Hot squatters, we weren't raised right. And that's why the voices in our head cannot be trusted. And so your next right thing is to lean back. If you do find any of these like slices of peace, can you tell us just how like seriously? Just if this made any sense to you, God bless you.

And if this didn't make any sense to you, congratulations. All right? We don't want to hear. You don't. You don't need to call in and brag and be like, I don't know what you meant. Nobody wants to hear from you, Linda and Abby, with your quiet brains. The rest of you, if you find any of this spirit moments, these soulful moments, let us know because we want more. We love you so much. Thanks for hanging with us. See you next time. We are proud to say that we can do hard things is an independent production brought to you by us. Treat Media. Media makes art for humans who want to stay human.

And you can follow us at We Can Do Hard Things on Instagram.