We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle - HOW GLENNON LOST HER MIND

Episode Date: September 6, 2022

1. “Weird Glennon” comes back to the pod and shares her #1 sanity strategy. 2. The rule Glennon and Abby set for their wedding week that made everything OK. 3. How Amanda stopped accepting assignments from strangers. 4. How Glennon discovered she couldn’t trust her thoughts – and found the part of herself she could trust. 5. How to know if your thinking is disordered, and how to reorient it to be more effective in your life, relationships, and world. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Whether you're doing a dance to your favorite artist in the office parking lot, or being guided into Warrior I in the break room before your shift, whether you're running on your Peloton tread at your mom's house while she watches the baby, or counting your breaths on the subway. Peloton is for all of us, wherever we are whenever we need it, download the free Peloton app today. Peloton app available through free tier, or pay subscription starting at $12.99 per month. And I continue to believe that I'm the one for me. Welcome to Weekend 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. Sorry, just the three of us. Three of us. We can make it if we try. I just do three of us.

So far so good. Today. Well, it's sort of the three of us, but it's sort of for us because today I am inviting weird glennon to speak on the pod. Okay, so you know there is this version of me that is a little woo! And I invited this weird self to the pod, the episode about my recovery and my relapse from my eating disorder.

So there is three of us here today and the three of us are me, Glenin. 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 Glenin. I was not aware that weird Glenin had not been on all of the pot.

No! 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 honestly. Okay, well then where does weird Glenn and Go?

Well, she's lonely and sad and she 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 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 gonna 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 world had already discovered about you. About themselves. Oh. 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. And with 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 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 to shine! I live here, y'all! Okay. Welcome, Glances. 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 it kind of began to inspire all from that time, which is that during COVID, we're still freaking in during COVID. Yeah, we're not in lockdown anymore. But in the heat of it, I started noticing there was a lot going on. I mean, the 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 meaning that almost like obsessive thinking about food and body stuff. And so it feels to me when that happens, 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, all these 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 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 criticizing you, and then another voice that's fighting the criticisms that you're holding of yourself. No, you have two voices criticizing you. One voice is criticizing you. In one way, the other voice is criticizing you for criticizing you. So that sounds awesome. Yeah, one time. 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 every day during that time to decide which one to listen to. 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 and 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- I didn't make you. Well, no, I mean, you suggested that. Let's go on a trip.

It was an invitation. 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 will 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 like 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 impact that. And it might not be true for you. I'm not saying it's true for every part of the world. 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 head.

I am retreat in my 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 piece comes. I have to drop lower. Well, and I just want to say before we move on. Yeah, that's the tear 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, just just like 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 Glennins experience. And we're talking about Glendon'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 disorder 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, 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 in the untethered, so everybody talks about this, right? This is just the one way he presented 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 batshit crazy. So singer calls it the inner roommate. Eckert told, 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 was talking to herself out loud like talk, 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, 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. 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 you like that girl? We don't like that girl. Oh my god. Do you remember when your mom said that shit to you and you were 10 wait, wait, wait, let me have this fake argument. I'm gonna have to wait. I don't want to go to that thing. I don't want to go to that thing. I hate my lips. 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 with that that other people or other things happening around. That's what struck it with me,

with it 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 a 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? Like, do you relate to that? Yes.

The idea that it's not like your mind is protecting you from problems. It's like you're wandering mind. That's its job. It's the find a problem. It's to find a problem. Mm. Mm.

I'm Jonathan M. Hevar. I'm a podcast producer and someone who likes fancy things. But I grew up working class. My parents were immigrants with factory jobs. And because of that, I think about class a lot. And I want to talk about it. That's what we're doing on my new podcast, Classy. And what did you all eat? You know, trailer food.

I was like, girl, we're not doing that anymore. You'll hear from people who told me awkward, embarrassing, and strangely intimate things about what class means to them. She said, you know, for the house cleaner, seeing and strangely intimate things about what class means to them. She said, you know, for the house cleaner, I hide the tag on the $6 bread. And I just thought, don't you think she knows that you're wealthy? You're hiding the tags from yourself. Classy.

A new podcast from Pineapple Street Studios. Available now. Wherever you get your podcasts. I get annoyed with things, but I don't turn them into problems. It feels like, what is the root when things upset you? It just, is it a control thing? Is it just like upsetting? My experience is that most people have an inner dialogue in their mind. And the Pad 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, 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, that's 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 sure it 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 we, that I have and untamed about the touch tree.

We were watching a survivor show or something, like some show where the survivor man lost in the woods. And I love those shows. 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 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, 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 to, I'm not gonna end up anywhere intentional. And that's like my brain. Yep. My brain is amazing. Yes.

I write books with my brain. I show up and do all the things. 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. 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 gonna figure out what next,

what we need next for our daughter. We're gonna write a thing, 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 gonna get weird gladdened,

but 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 there 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 brain to know 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. That's good. Then where are you? Where do you live in your body?

Like where's the you of the you? Here's the cool stuff. But let's talk about this for a second. So who are we? Who am I? Yeah. So this is where we get to where you two, where I drive you, that shit crazy, because have I for 10 years been such who am I? 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 I am because 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 Okay. Well, you actually, what am I 40 seconds? Okay. Whatever. 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 freaky. Because aren't you you the you when you are born? Yes.

The same you you are now 46 years later, isn't it the same you? So 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 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 gonna be the same you on your death bed.

You have always been in their peaking out. Like, what is the you that is peaking out, taking in all the world, noticing all of these thoughts, having all of these emotions, like experiencing the world, the you in there., having all of these emotions, like experiencing the world, the you in there, I think that's what singer calls it, like the you in there. 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, 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 and here, I think that it is confused my ideas of gender. Cause it doesn't live there. There isn't that form there. I bring my, the things that I was taught in condition to believe to the thing that I even see in the mirror.

Like, I don't know, it's all fucking weird. 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 at the atman, right? The the boot is 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 self-eir 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, 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 disorder thinking is less disorder 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 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.

Exactly. 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, 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 our angry and our yelling and our panicking. And there's one there who is solid, who is centered. Who is going gonna 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 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 stand or yoga mats, and 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. It's 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. I'm 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. I know this thing. Nobody else told it to me except for my own brain. 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 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. 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. 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. 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. There are words to it. That that is, is your soul, is your spirit.

Because you cannot notice a thing that you are Huh if you're watching a movie screen mm-hmm You are not the movie screen if you are noticing The thought Then you by definition are not the thought you are the noticeer of the thought mm-hmm, 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? Mm-hmm. If you are not your mind, because you can't be, if you say I'm thinking, I'm thinking, who is I? Uh huh, 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 the seat of the soul. When I hear the thinking, when I say, oh, I'm thinking again, and that's that, that, that, that's that, 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 piece 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 this is an afterlife, that it's an afterlife. I think that living in the mind is hell.

Mm-hmm. And what the mind does is it constantly decides, it's 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 safer or not. So you think about the first, the opening of the Bible. There was Eden. This is a poem about the human experience, okay, in Genesis. What nobody talks about is that, you know, the snake comes, talks 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. You're a human being. Don't worry about that one. Don't worry about deciding what's good and bad. Just live your happy life. Mm-hmm. They decide, I mean, you can see it anyway you want. I'm 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 at 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 and 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 eat, eat, eat, eat, eat, eat, eat, that place. Getting back to eat, eat, eat in or, or heaven. Yeah. 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. Like, I remember calling Lizzy the very beginning of working to get the Fit 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 is 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 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 randed out and then to realize I think, oh no, I'm in the roots. I actually just have a practical question because I think we've got some practical pod squadders. I have an example of how. Yeah, and how do you do this. And how are you very, um, not fancy, but as you're 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 who's talking.

We don't wear the schedule. Oh my God. And you said something, Gunn and 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. 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. But there is an insistence that I have to our pod waters in 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 Riesimson 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 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 know 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'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, you're 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 life saver. Like I don't know, it's 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 a good, you solo thing. That's really sweet. Yeah.

I don't know that's the thing. I don't know what it is for everybody. That's everybody's job. Physical 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 do I use to see? And 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, non-stop 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? Because then it's a little bit more self-reliatory. 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 it 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 scared controlling? Yeah, Mike is there controlling himself. 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, and then you get right size, which is what we call it in recovery, which is like,

your only real project is yourself. Mm-hmm, exactly. Literally the only, like this whole world, 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've all to always talk about on the the pad. And I think another way that this is liberating and freeing is that it just, it 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 in. 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, like, 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 backed 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 bang. Lean back. Lean back. This is not my business. Nobody's making sense here. These people weren't raised right. Ba-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a- 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

If this didn't make any sense to you, you can graduate fucking lay shits, all right You don't wanna hear from you. We 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, they're soulful moments. Let us know because we want more.

We love you so much. Thanks for hanging with us. See you next time. Bye, Glennon's Weirdest Health. I give you Tish Melton and Brandy Carlyle. I chased desire, I made sure I got what's mine. And I continue to believe that I'm the one for me And because I'm mine, I walk the line Cause we're adventurers in heartbreak So man, a final destination

And we'll stopped asking directions Some places they've never been And to be loved we need to be known We'll finally find our way back home And through the joy and pain That our lives bring We can do a heartache I hit rock bottom It felt like a brand new star

I'm not the problem, sometimes things fall apart And I continue to believe the best people are free. And it took some time, but I'm finally fine. Cause we're adventurous and heartbreak so mad A final destination with that We stopped asking directions So places they've never been And to be loved we need to be known We'll finally find our way back home

And through the joy and pain That our lives bring We can do a hard thing. This world finished her rose and heart breaks on land. We might get lost but we're only in that. Stop that skiing direction. Some places they've never been. And to be loved we need to be long, we'll finally find our way back home, and through the joy and pain that our lives bring. We can do hard things.

Yeah, we can do hard things. Yeah, we can do hard things. We can do hard things, is produced in partnership with Cadence 13 Studios. Be sure to rate, review, and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts, especially be sure to rate and review the podcast if you really liked it. If you didn't, don't worry about it.

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