We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle - What to Do With Rage: Meggan Watterson

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

Meggan Watterson joins Glennon and Abby for an urgent, unfiltered conversation about how to stay human in infuriating times. They discuss sacred rage as a form of love, why trusting our inner knowing matters more than ever, and what it means to stop waiting for institutions—or men—to tell us we’re worthy. They also unpack the moment we’re in—from the Epstein files and Deepak Chopra’s presence in them to the misogyny behind the U.S. Men’s Hockey Team’s comments about the women’s team—and ask what women do when the systems meant to protect people fail. Plus: Meggan shares the historical acts of resistance inspiring her right now, the story of Mary Magdalene and believing women (and ourselves), and the question guiding her days: How do women pray when the world is on fire? For more We Can Do Hard Things with Meggan Watterson, check out:  Women’s Voices So Dangerous They Buried Them About Meggan: Meggan Watterson is the author of The Girl Who Baptized Herself and the Wall Street Journal bestselling Mary Magdalene Revealed. She is a feminist theologian with a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and a Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University. She leads a global online spiritual community, The House of Mary Magdalene, to study the scripture left out of the Christian canon like The Gospel of Mary and The Acts of Paul and Thecla.  Follow We Can Do Hard Things on:  Instagram — ⁠https://www.instagram.com/wecandohardthings⁠ TikTok — ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@wecandohardthingsshow⁠

Yes. Hello, hello. Hello, hello, hello. Well, Pod Squad, we have back the Megan Waterson, who I just emailed last week on a particularly, actually, they've all been particularly infuriating days. So who knows which one it was and said, please God, just come onto the pod, sit with us. I think I asked you to go feral with us because you had used that word. I was telling Abby that all I know to do right now and what I want to do is just gather the people that I have long trusted who feel like they've been preparing us for a long time

for a moment like this and just sit with them unprepared and unguarded and just ask them, how are you? How are you doing? What are you doing? What are you thinking about? How are you getting through? And you're the first person that I knew we had to talk to. And before we get started, I do want to say that we were privately listening to the sound check you just did. And Pod Squad, I need you to know this. So our incredible producers, Allison and Marissa and Jen, they get on with the guest and they say, okay, tell us what you had for breakfast. And the point is just to listen to the noise that comes out of their mouth. And most people just say bacon, one, two, three, four. So five minutes ago, Marissa said, so Megan, just tell us what you had for breakfast. And she said,

well, I was making my son an egg. Scramble eggs. Scramble eggs. And I kept thinking of eggs and Mary Magdalene and how she pointed to an egg. And I think what she meant by that pointing was that it is all within us. And that is what I think is important is that it is all within us. That was Megan's sound check. Okay. Yeah. I'm ready for this conversation for sure. Megan, how are you? What are you thinking about right now? I really am thinking about how everything comes from within. And I do think that that's why Mary Magdalene was pointing to the egg. And I feel a very particular kind of rage. The reason why I said my rage went feral is because I believe my rage now. I believe that it has always been so well informed. It was my body telling me exactly how much work we have to do.

But also in particular, you know, that had to do with Deepak Chopra and the fact that he's in the Epstein files. And, you know, for those who have read a lot of the files, as a survivor, I felt like I had to read some of them for the sake of the survivors. and when I read the ones that Deepak wrote, there was this validation for my anger, for the rage that I had, I've long since had for him for the hubris of thinking that he needed to teach us about the divine feminine. That alone, you know, I was already in fuego a long time ago, but then to read his comments to Epstein. And my voice is shaking now because I'm trying to get to the email and I'm not going to repeat exactly what the email was, but it was about the littlest one. You know, Epstein's the littlest one. And, you know, I can't comprehend how the world hasn't ended

for everyone. I don't understand that. My world has ended. And after I read that email, I described it, you know, my day was like, I was a very tiny, unproductive hurricane. I was channeling the rage, the creative energy, right? This is the rage that love inspires. I was channeling enough rage to literally reconfigure the world. But I also couldn't make my bet. You know, It was that kind of situation. And I just felt like my entire nervous system couldn't handle the idea of not doing anything, you know, this idea of moving on from the person who is named more than Christ is named in the New Testament, right?

Telling us to just move on. My nervous system was only calmed by making a list. So what I did that day is I started making a list because, you know, you have long since told us what breaks our heart are who we serve. And I went into seminary because of trafficked girls. You know, that population pregnant teens is why I went back and sort of went into the whole question as to where did women's voices go within Christianity. I went back to seminary for pregnant teens. They were referred to as prostitutes at that time, 14-year-olds, right? There's no such thing as a 14-year-old prostitute. Same as the girls in the Epstein files.

The actual prosecutors prosecuted this as that they were prostitutes, their children. And that was, you know, I am prostrate, like I am on my knees in gratitude for Amanda to going into the files and really helping compile, because I couldn't go near them. after reading that one email about the littlest one. I couldn't go near them again. And then Amanda went into it. And her conversation with Brad Edwards then, the attorney, you know, when he brought up that word, prostitute, it's just everything lit up for me.

Again, back to Mary Magdalene, because this is what the church called her, right? A prostitute then somehow devalued her. And the only thing that made my nervous system okay that day was beginning this list that I titled, How Women Pray When the World is on Fire. And I started researching what have women done throughout history in peaceful protest when the people in power are saying, you do not have power and we are going to take your rights? What have women done? So that was the only thing that started calming my nervous system.

And I found some really amazing, amazing moments in history. First of all, there was this woman, Abby, it may have been a reincarnation of yours or a previous incarnation of yours. Well, because your middle name's Mary, which I love. And I only... Well, my first name is Mary. Your first is Abby? Okay. All right.

So I'm Mary Abigail. Okay. So this was definitely you. Listen, see if it sounds familiar. In 1908, there was a woman named Mary Maloney. And when Churchill dared to disparage women who were fighting for the right to vote, right? He disparaged the suffrage movement. Mary Maloney grabbed a bell.

And she followed Churchill wherever he went. And whenever he tried to say something, Mary started ringing her bell and drowned out everything he was going to say. Yes. Oh, my God. It's so creative and it's so powerful. And what ended up happening is that she annoyed the hell out of everyone. And he, of course, was only speaking to other men and people in positions of power. And so they were like, who is this Mary?

What is, like, what is she about? And so it ended up really raising awareness about the fight for women's right to vote. Then there was the mothers of the disappeared in Argentina, 1977, when their young adult children were being disappeared in the middle of the night by the reign of terror. They started gathering together, wearing white scarves, and just demanding that this government be held accountable for the disappearance of their children. There was Julia Butterfly Hill, who was when I was a budding eco-feminist and really considering joining her, this was like in 1997. She stayed in a redwood tree named Luna for almost two years to protect it from being logged. So she just stayed up in that tree. There's the women of Liberia mass action for peace.

They joined together Christian and Muslim women, and they protest wearing all white in front of the presidential palace to end the Liberian civil war. They just refused, you know, like Thakla at the beginning of the acts of Paul and Thakla, they refused to go on with life as is. And that's absolutely where I am. Like my nervous system can't, I can't not be utterly changed. by this. My world has ended and for me I am actively creating the circumstances for the new world to come about. I have to only focus on that and I don't know what my action is yet. You know, I love that Florence Welch right now has everybody's scream tour because I feel like screaming is a form of prayer right now and Abby I just want to say as a survivor it

does something to my nervous system. You know, for you to have stood up and left the Wasserman agency, it's like at the beginning of the Gospel of Mary, there's this beautiful passage that for me is an articulation of love. It's every nature, every modeled form, every creature exists in and with each other. That to me is, that's love. And when you stood up and you refused to be a part of that agency as a direct action that love was inspiring you to do. I'm connected to you. You're connected to me. You are demonstrating that fact that we exist in and with each other.

And it calmed my nervous system. It changed me, you leading in that way. And that's on my list, how women pray when the world is. You're on my list. That's really sweet. And, you know, I actually, I've thought a lot about this because I've been, we've actually traveled the world since this all happened. And there are people all over the world that recognize me and are saying, they're not saying like, congratulations on soccer. They're like, what you did really was so important.

And thank you so much. And it's just like, we do have more agency than we think. we just do and even if it is in a smaller way maybe you're not a public person but we all can do something in order to not keep living in the same fucking world that we live in like and this is what you're saying it's so beautiful we can not do something before we do something what i loved about your statement when you left waserman when you said i don't know what my next steps are i just know where I can't be. And I felt like that was so important. It was vulnerable, but it also was about accountability for other people. Because what people tend to decide is, well, I guess I'll do something

when I have everything figured out, when I know my next steps, when I know where I'm going. And I don't know that this is a time for that. Like this is a time what Megan, you're saying is, no, no, no, I'm going to stop my world, whether or not I know where I'm stepping next. I am detaching myself at least from this monstrous nightmare that I have always known was present. And Megan, that's why I feel so deeply connected to you is because as a person who has, and I'm not going to say a lot of this right because it's still spinning, but who has sat in therapy for 40 years where people, and there's so much I love about therapy, but where basically the message was like, everything's okay.

and you're just going to have to understand that everything's okay somehow. And here are your strategies. I have always been like, okay, I guess I have to pretend to believe you. But I have always known that everything was not okay. I have always known that was horseshit. I have always known that just maybe because I'm particularly safe in my home with my, does not mean that anyone else is safe. Just because I could, you know, protect my peace doesn't mean that that's the definition of what pieces for me, that peace is about continuing to make yourself vulnerable until more people have peace, that I knew that these motherfuckers were doing this shit in every locker room, in every meeting, in every back end, that I knew that they were profiting off of women

and then turning around and raping them behind their backs, that they were laughing in locker rooms, that they were using the feminist movement to make money and find a place. And then the second they're in private, they are laughing at us. The indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter. We all knew this in our bones. And so now is the great ungaslighting of women. Now is the time where before maybe we were saying, oh, God, can we trust ourselves? What is this rage? Maybe more meditation. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Maybe more retreats, maybe more, like, no more retreating, as my sister says, the rage now is out. It's outrage. It no longer stays inside of us and eats us alive. We unleash it like dragons. And so when you're talking about the women, you know, what about the troubles in Ireland?

That was all the women, the mothers saying enough death, enough death in Protestants and Catholics coming together and saying that's enough, we're marching. And also, let's tell us. people just in case they don't know what you're talking about with is a Deepak Chopra piece of shit. It's so funny when I'm talking about these guys now, I'm using was all the time. Like they're gone. But that's our power. Deepak Chopra is some kind of like fraudulent wellness, self-appointed guru that claim to talk about the divine feminine, I guess. I don't know. I've never met him, seen him, been in a room with him. I've always felt utterly repulsed by him. But you knew. Again, it's that validation.

Yes, yes. He's found all over the Epstein files. One of the most interesting things that he said directly to Epstein was, God is a construct. Little girls are real. So that's who Deepak Chopra was. And what's so fascinating for me is that the majority of his followers are women. And that's really, really important for us to look at, you know,

and to sort of understand then, okay, how did this happen? How did he become a spokesperson for the divine feminine? Right? For me, it really is important for us to understand that if we claim our worth, we will know our power. And the men have positioned themselves as gatekeepers to the divine via the patriarchy, That's right. What teachers like Mary Magdalene and Thecla, whose scriptures, of course, were removed by the empire when Christianity became patriarchal, what they revealed to us is that there are no gatekeepers.

So if the divine is directly accessed from within us, when I use the word power, what I'm really meaning is love, right? The ultimate source of power is the love that we can source inside of us. can keep it from us. It is unconditional. And we are told the absolute opposite, that it comes from outside of us. We have to prove that we're worthy of it. And the church positioned itself as the gatekeepers to this worth that we have to fight for, prove that we're, and these two figures in history that were erased systematically, Thecla and Mary Magdalene, they both understood that our worth is inherent. It's eternal and it's internal. So when I see the iconography of Mary Magdalene holding the egg and really feel this sense of everything comes from within, it's this reminder that that

ultimate source of power, love, exists within us and we've always been innately worthy of it. If we think we have to earn or prove our worth and it exists outside of us, then we can be controlled and manipulated. That's right. If we believe we're not worthy, then we think we have to follow certain rules. And I think what makes an action like Abby is so powerful is it models to us that we don't have to follow any rules given to us by a system, an unjust system of power telling us that we're unworthy of this access to the divine, which actually exists within us. And so, you know, this to me is a sea change moment.

This has always been true. But it's like now we can see with intensity and clarity the hypocrisy, the maddening hypocrisy. I mean, I have always said our ideas of the divine directly affected. the status of women and girls the world over. I've always said that. And I feel like Chicken Little. You know, I feel like Cassandra, I feel like I've been screaming that for like 20 years.

You know, our ideas of the divine affect the status of women and girls the world over. And now I feel like there are those with the ears to hear it. And that level of relief is just so powerful. It's like, I'm not just screaming. that alone, you know? Yes. And it's like the worthiness that's internal, I also feel like whatever is tied to that is the discernment, the knowing is internal, you know, was part of my spiritual upbringing,

biblically taught to me that whenever I had an instinct about something, whenever I had a question about something, whenever I had a feeling about someone that I was wrong, that I was not to trust my own understanding, that my heart was wicked, that God worked in mysterious ways that I was not to question that when I felt something from inside me, that was wrong. And the answers were outside me. And I think that is also how a bunch of women end up following Deepak Chopra is that along the way, they had a million knowings with that creep. They had a million knowings, but I since being from this world, understand ignoring every single bit. I feel like we are returning to a moment where women are returning to themselves,

where they are saying, I actually don't have to explain shit to you about how I feel. I just feel something and I don't want to be near you anymore. Without explanation there, it's like something really returning to instinct, to intuition, to body, to getting out of constructs that other people have made for us and that also being within and enough. Okay, I promised I report back after trying IM8. And here is the update. I originally started daily ultimate essentials because I wanted something simple that supported my body without adding another complicated routine.

Inside, you're getting 92 nutrient dense ingredients, vitamins, minerals, adaptogens, COQ10, MSM, and pre, pro and postbiotics, all working together to support how your body runs day to day. Go to I-M-8health.com slash hard things and use code hard things for a free welcome kit, five free travel sachets plus 10% off your order. That's I-M-N-E-H-E-A-L-T-H-H-H-T-H-T-H-C-com slash hard things. Code hard things for a free welcome kit, five free travel sachets plus 10% off your order. I-M-8-health.com slash hard things. Code hard things. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

There's a big shift happening in how companies hire right now. More employers are focusing on skills instead of just degrees or job titles. Because when you hire based on real capabilities, you get stronger performance and a faster path to the right fit. Well, if you're an employer who's adopted skills-based hiring, the best way to ensure that your applicants have the right skills is ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter recommends smart screening questions to help you hone in on that perfect match for your role. And right now, you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash we can.

What makes it so effective is how fast it connects you with qualified candidates. You can easily add screening questions to focus on the highest quality applicants. Let ZipRecruiter help you find amazing candidates with the skills you seek. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And now you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash we can. That ziprecruiter.com slash we can. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. Okay, so magnesium comes in many forms, and each form supports the body in a different way.

Most supplements only include one. Qualia magnesium plus combines 10 highly bioavailable forms of magnesium. Magnesium plays a role in hundreds of processes in the body, supporting deeper sleep, Sharper thinking, muscle recovery, steady mood, and healthy energy metabolism. I started taking Qualia magnesium plus because I wanted better consistency in my sleep and recovery. Experience the most trusted magnesium for purity, potency, and performance. Plus, it's non-GMO, vegan, and gluten-free, making it a choice you can feel good about. Go to qualiaLife.com slash hard things for 50% off.

And here's a bonus. Use the code hard things for an additional 15% off your order. That's Q-U-A-L-I-A-L-A-L-A-L-A-L-A-L-A-L-A-L-A-L-A-L-A-L-A-L-A-L-R F-D-R-T-R-E-N-R-E-N-B-A-L-A-L-R-A-R-R-B-E-R-E-R-BOR-BOR-BOR. And she asked me this unbelievable question that was so good I kind of left my body. So I have no idea how I answered it like for the documentary. But I have super low bar for myself in situations like that. It's pretty much just don't pass out, you know, because it's like, it's so unnatural being in a, you know, a studio.

And it's just so intense for me. And I know what that costs me, you know, to try to do something like that. So I was just like mercy for myself, just try not to slowly slip out of the chair and pass out on the floor during the, the interview, but she asked me this question that was so good. She said, if you could say one thing to Pope Leo, what would it be? And so again, I have no idea what I actually said, because I sort of left my body. But I've been thinking about that ever since she asked it. And what I finally came to was the one thing I would say to him is I believe Mary. And the reason I would say that, if it could only be one statement, that's the most important statement,

is that I think that there is a direct connection. Within the gospel of Mary at the end of it, the disciples don't believe her. Peter asks her to tell them what she knows that they don't, because she's a woman, because Christ loved her more than all other women. And then at the end of it, he doesn't believe her. He says, are we to think that the Savior gave her secret teaching? a woman and didn't speak openly so that we would all hear. And then he says, surely he did not want to show that she is more worthy than we are.

And it's like, yes, Peter, actually, that's exactly what Christ wanted to show is that Mary is as worthy as you are. But he doesn't believe her. And Andrew chimes in is like, yeah, her teachings are really strange. And then it's only Levi who comes to her defense. And he says, if the Savior considered her worthy, who are you to disregard her? So there's that worth. And I think there's a direct correlation between the fact that the disciples don't believe Mary within her own gospel, that what she's saying is true.

Then the church by the sixth century labels her the prostitute, which she never was. And then here we are in the 21st. 21st century, and we still don't believe survivors. Like, to me, there is a direct correlation. We still don't believe Mary. Mary Magdalene, for the majority of people around the world, is still the penitent prostitute, even though that has long since by scholars and by the church itself been established as a fiction.

She's still the penitent prostitute, and her gospel is still considered apocryphal of doubtful authenticity. To me, there's a connection. There's a direct connection. And I believe Mary and I believe it matters that we still don't believe Mary. Yeah. And I think when you're saying, I believe Mary, I'm also hearing you say, I believe Megan. Like, I think we almost miss the boat when we are saying, they must believe us. They must believe us. Because I think what has to happen first is, I I must believe me. We must believe us. It is like we learned young. There's like strings that are connected between our inner selves and our outer selves. And we became so scared of our inner selves who were raging and questioning and feeling and railing against all of it that we cut the

strings and we handed them to somebody else outside of ourselves. And we said, you move my face. You move my, you feel for me. You tell me what you. And then we became fucking puppets. It disembodied puppets because we disconnected ourselves from our inner selves and we gave the strings away. And now we are going to have to rest those strings back from outside of ourselves and reconnect it to our inner selves and start believing the questions and the feelings and what happened to us and the stories and stay connected and keep believing. I think that there's going to be a lot of folks who are listening to this that haven't connected all of this to the rate. yet because a lot of us might be feeling a little bit lost in that there may have been, I won't say easier acceptance to what was like the way of the world, the world order of for me growing up in sport, right? Like I just knew women's sports was not as popular as men's sports.

So I was just like, all right, I'm just going to run uphill. I'm going to just, this is what I'm going to do for my life. But there was some kind of internal acceptance to feeling inferior to men. And it wasn't until I was 36 years old standing on a stage when the rage finally came. And it was when I was at the SPs and I was getting the same icon SPie Award from ESPN, the SPN, the SP nationally televised award show for sports. I was getting the same award as Kobe and Peyton. It wasn't until I walked off that stage, knowing that the three of us were walking into three very different retirements, that I actually let myself feel rage. I think that so many of us don't want to express or even feel rage because it feels counterintuitive in some ways to

love. And so I just want to acknowledge anyone out there who might be seeing all that's going on in the world with the Epstein files and our government and all of the all of it and feeling so confused and kind of muddled up and bottled up it is okay that you haven't found the rage yet but i want to invite you because it's a vulnerability it is letting yourself admit to yourself that this is something you've been carrying kind of silently. I mean, this is going to make me cry a little, but like, the locker room, the laughter, you know, like, I think of myself as somebody who can just, like, brush it off. And I think we've been doing it for so long.

And I keep giving men the benefit of the doubt, especially male athletes, the benefit the doubt, well, they just don't know and this is just what their locker rooms are like. And there's just something about the most recent men's hockey locker room incident where they were laughing about the women's hockey team also being invited, needing to be invited to the fucking state of the union that they declined, thank God. But like, their laughter, fuck you. And also our women's hockey team and also are women's soccer team. And also our women's soccer team are way more fucking successful than your fucking little baby teams. Like, what are you talking about?

Laughing at us? Are you laughing because there are, like, quote unquote, less fans in your eyes? Because we make less money in your eyes. Like, no, this is not okay. And so I just want to say, like, if you haven't yet gotten to rage or let rage in, walk in the door, it could be time. And I just want to acknowledge that like it is it is hard and vulnerable to let that in. And it's also love. I think women are told not to be angry.

But Christians are told not to be angry. But it's somehow less spiritual. Yeah. That's right. And isn't that convenient? Yeah. If I were a guy planning a church where I plan to screw everybody over, I would think they might get pissed.

And then I would say, I'm going to write down that getting pissed is a sin. That is exactly what I would do if I were trying to control a person. group of marginalized people. I would decide to teach them and beat them over the head with the idea that their rage is unholy so that they suppress it. Now, our dear friend Andrea Gibson, before they died, told their friend who was grieving and feeling all kinds of anger and discomfort, they looked at them and said, I want you to consider everything you're feeling as love. All of it, the anger, the rage, the discomfort, the style of it. It's all love. And that, that, you're is how I feel about this moment. I feel like the people who are most filled with love are the people

who are most filled with rage right now because only people who are filled with love reject hate so strongly. Only people who are filled with love are stunned by hate. If you are stunned, confused, angry, that is because you are filled with love. And I also feel like right now, the crazier you feel, the saner you are. Yeah. I don't want to be. near anybody who's doing okay right now. Yeah. Good God. Devils. Right? Like, if you're okay, I am away from you right now. So if you're not to the rage, I guess, allowing it is a beautiful thing to consider. And if you're in the rage, labeling it correctly as righteous. It's sacred. It's sacred. Yeah. And it's really important you mentioned that, you know, the entire system and structure

our idea of what it means to be spiritual, what it means to be divine, was created by men. So that's really, really important to pay attention to. So being submissive, being quiet, being secluded, denying our body, starving ourselves, like all of these ideas of what it means to be spiritual, I think we need to really question. And sacred rage is listening to the voice of love. We need to allow it to inform us. We have to listen to it. We don't want to act on it, but we have to listen to it.

And we have to allow ourselves to know that the source of this rage is love. It's because we know love. That's why we're so enraged. And we have to be okay with the wilderness for a minute, I think. I mean, I know that one of the internal terrors of this moment is losing every faith in every structure that we had before. and this has been a deconstruction for people over time, and some people are further ahead than others, but there are a lot of people that had faith that really thought that our political system was, for the most part, some good guys and bad guys, and that, you know, all of that is gone for a lot of people.

Faith in the political system of our country has gone. Faith in religious institutions with the silences and the cover-ups and the abuse and the complicity is gone. Anybody, I don't know anybody personally who had faith in the wellness. industry, so I don't know how that faith was created, but certainly that's over. I mean, the amount of people who have professed to be in service of others and have been hurting people behind the scenes and how many people have been quiet about that. If it doesn't cause a mass exodus from that industry, it should. Honestly, a lot of people's families, I mean, I have a lot of friends who are married to men who are maybe not in the Epstein files, like maybe they're not child

rapists, but their silence and lukewarm nothingness about this, where are the good men? I guess I keep hearing that they exist. People keep telling me that. But where the fuck are they? The fact that they are not out in the streets, the fact that they have called themselves protectors, branded themselves as protectors for so long, where the hell are they? Women are married to these men having to sleep in bed next to them, where really, the most they can muster themselves to do is to tolerate their wives' activism.

Where's their rage? Where's their organizing? Where is the effort they can find to make a fucking fantasy football team with their buddies? And the organization and care they can put into that, where is that sort of organizing to protect the women and the children and the humanity in their lives? Any thoughts, Megan Waterson? Yeah, we are the ones who are going to save us. That's what is being fully revealed to us.

And many of us have known that. But for me, we've already won. Let me explain it in the sense that, and Abby, I need your help with this. Because like, what was that moment where somebody ran the fastest or the most? It was like a mile, but it was like in a time that no one had seen before. Pre-fontein. Pre-fontein. And, yeah, at Nike in Oregon.

What they do? They just ran so fast? He was trying to break the mile record. Okay. And then more and more people did it, right? Yeah. Once that happened, once it was modeled, so for me, it's like what is falling, what is what we can allow ourselves to completely unplug from is the Christianity that was established in the fourth century under the patriarchy, right? So when that falls, what becomes visible is the Christianity that existed before it.

And what I want to say is that spiritually for women, we've already seen ourselves unite. We've already seen ourselves beat an empire. We've already triumphed. It's in the acts of Paul and Thetla. It's just that Thetka was erased and her scripture was deemed of doubtful authenticity. But we've already seen it happen where women come together, women who represent the ones who have the least amount of power, and they prove that there is a power greater than an empire built by men that exist in the heart of a little girl who is loved, who is fully loved, which means an entire arena of women. When they see Thakla claim her worth, right?

Which comes from within. Everything comes from within. They watch her model that no one can control her. no one ever could control her. She claims her worth. She baptizes herself, which to me means, okay, she decides, I don't have to wait for Paul to figure out that I'm worthy of being baptized. I can claim my worth within me, and I can baptize myself and give myself the power and

the authority to lead. So the women in the arena see Thakla do this, and they're like, I am being controlled by the ideas of what I'm allowed to do because I'm female, because the world around me sees me as less than. I don't have to be controlled. I'm not controlled. In this moment, claim my worth, I can stand up. So they stand up. They start throwing in really scrappy.

Like, it's so relatable because I feel like this is us now. Just whatever they happen to bring with them to the arena, right? Wouldn't we do that? Like what's in our pockets and our pockets? baskets. It's like they just start, I've got this Instagram account. I've got this neighbor. I've got this attitude. Like, what do we have to bring? It's Mary Maloney with her bell. It's so scrappy. It's so scrappy. It's like, this is what we're going to do because this is what love does when it's empowered. We do whatever we have to do. We're not going to be do what we're told to do anymore. That's done. That's ended.

That world is over. We're going to do what we have. We're going to do what we have. We're not going to be do what we have to do to move the way love moves. And so they start throwing cardamon and rose petals and nard into the arena. And they help Fecla save herself. But she baptizes herself first. And that's that part which I feel like coming through you is so powerful that you're saying we have to believe ourselves. We can't wait for somebody to say, you are worthy of being believed. We have to decide right now that we are and have always been worthy of being believed. We have to decide that we are going, we're not going to wait for men to believe us, right? To believe survivors, to believe Mary. We are going to decide right now that we are going to go ahead and believe in

each other instead. Pod Squad, one of the things that we have talked about incessantly together is how the current representations and use of religion in our systems doesn't match our values. Right now we see white Christian nationalism threatening the safety and well-being of our neighbors, stoking hate against our LGBTQ community and working as hard as they can to restrict reproductive rights. In times of deep division, we remember that our faiths call us to love our neighbors. And we mean all of our neighbors, immigrant families, LGBTQ youth and people seeking abortion and reproductive health care. Sacred, the spiritual alliance of communities for reproductive dignity, is a home for people of faith organizing for a better future. Sacred believes that we are called on by our faith to support those who need it most and to organize around reproductive justice for all.

Learn more about how you can help Sacred build a better future rooted in faith and justice. at sacreddignity.org slash neighbors. Thanks to our friends at Gatorade for sponsoring this episode. Okay, I have to tell you about something from a brand I'm pretty familiar with that I think all of our listeners must try. It's Gatorade lower sugar. And it has everything you need for hydration. It's all the Gatorade electrolyte you love and 75% less sugar than Gatorade Thirst Quencher.

I spent most of my life thinking about performance, but taking care of your body isn't just about performance. It's about having the energy to show up for your life. Whether that's training, traveling, being present with family, or doing the hard emotional work we talk about here, hydration matters. And what I love about Gatorade Lower Sugar is that it has 75% less sugar and all of the electrolytes of Gatorade Thirst Quencher. There are no artificial flavors, sweeteners, or colors.

Try Gatorade Lower Sugar today. It has the electrolytes Gatorade is known for with 75% less sugar and no art. artificial flavors, sweeteners, or colors. You can find Gatorade Lower Sugar, online, or in stores near you. Right now, AI feels like that tool everyone knows they should be using, but most business owners are stuck, wondering where to even start. NetSuite isn't some separate experiment. It's your entire business platform powered by AI. Financials, inventory, commerce, HR, CR, CR, CRM, everything lives in one connected ecosystem. And when you're data actually talks to itself. AI stops being all talk and starts being useful. It handles repetitive

work, highlights what deserves your attention, and gives you clarity to make faster, more informed decisions. Suddenly, you're not digging for answers. You can see them. You know where your money stands, what's driving growth, and how your inventory is performing. It's AI that works inside your business, not alongside it. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get our free business guide demystifying AI at net suite.com slash hard things. The guide is free to you at net suite.com slash hard things. NetSuite.com slash hard things. Did she baptize herself? I'm thinking about the horse in the cart here. So you are saying she baptized herself first and then the women started throwing the, okay. Exactly. So please Pod Squad listen to what Megan is saying. What she is saying

is we are not waiting for the guys to tell us what's appropriate to do. But we are also not waiting for our fellow women, our sisters, to deem us worthy of speaking. We have to do it first ourselves. They need to see us do it and then they will join us. Yes. But it is each of our responsibilities first to say, I am here, I will move how love requires me to move, not how the system requires me to move that was not built on love. And it's okay to overreact for a while. Can I put a pin in this one for a second? We've been underreacting for centuries. So if you're on the fence and you're like, is this too much? Do it. Apologize later. This is time for this. We're going to have to, even the scales by leaning heavy on the overreacting side for a while. You reached out to me

when you were reading the girl who baptized herself and you said, I'm only on page five and I'm already crying. I've wondered if it can be articulated, if you're okay with sharing. What made you cry? She's crying right now. Thinking of it. So you know my villain origin story, which is I didn't cry for 20 years. And it was like a joke in my family. And I would try to fake cry sometimes so that I appeared to be human, funerals and stuff. To me, crying is what happens when something finally feels true enough, it doesn't have to do with like sadness or happy. I can't attach it to a particular emotion. It's when I'm in the presence of something that makes me feel like, like I was never crazy. That's your thing. I think that's a lot of people's thing. I know,

but that's for sure your thing. Yeah. Is this unraveling that? Yeah. So it was just being in the presence of something that felt true enough. And also, I think any woman who has been in the church for long enough and over and over and been just non-existent, like not being able to see your own story or your own self anywhere, when you're in the middle of a big ass mystery and somebody finally walks in, like, you're in a courtroom. Okay, I talked to Abby about this. I've been writing about it recently, but like your whole life, you're like in a courtroom and you're, you're on the stand as the defendant. You've put yourself there and you're also the judge and you're also the jury and you're everybody, right? But you yourself is on stand and it's, you're constantly

just trying to solve the mystery of yourself. And somebody just like walks in the courtroom with a smoking gun. Like somebody just walks in the courtroom and it's like, this is the evidence that you've been missing. Like you can get a. off the stand. You're free to go. That's what the tears were. And those kind of tears feel really holy to me. It feels like a baptism. And throughout the reading, I watch her read all of these books. And every couple of pages, she would just go, just like intense gratitude sent your way. So I just want you to know that too is like there is so much love and gratitude for you to do the work, to get it into the form that you did and to then give it out into the world, gratitude.

And to feel the way you feel, like to sitting with you that you would cry, that you would refuse to move on, that you would say the world was over. And that is because you're not a zombie. Like, for real. That's because you have not allowed yourself to be so disembodied that you can be numb to all of this. So I think your work is not just in the book. books. It's like the way you show up in every single room you're in. You are like a great on gaslighting of people. It's just so powerful to me because there's such divine reciprocity because that's who you are to me. It's like you seeing me, you know, I really have felt crazy. And to be told by major media outlets that what I write is not real theology, you know, that level of like

trying to be disparaged, it takes like this level of keeping on, of persevering. But then when you have somebody outside of you who sees you too, I would have kept going till my last breath, doing what I do and saying what I say and trying to write what I write. But like to have somebody who really sees me, it makes me weak because it's like we're in this together. And, you know, that word Darshan, it means to see and be seen by God. Or like in Les Mis, my mom and I actually had to be taken out of Le May Ms because we cried so hard. We were disturbing the audience and we had to be asked to leave. But it's because of that one line to love another person is to see the face of God.

Like that's the level of like, you know, that infinity symbol, like that seeing and being seen. And I wanted to ask that question because I wondered if that was the case because that is what you also give to me. So it's like that divine reciprocity is just so powerful. So powerful. Well, you baptized yourself. Like this is important, I think, in this moment, too, to think about how women can show up for each other because the institutions kept telling you that your theology wasn't real. You were like, okay, Paul, I'm just going to go ahead and baptize myself and write what I know is true. Because there's another path where you just argue with Paul for the rest of you.

I know plenty of people. Right. You can waste your entire life. deciding that you're going to keep engaging with the institution that has disavowed you, and you're going to keep trying to convince them that you should be baptized instead of disconnecting yourself and baptizing yourself, which is what you did. And then I threw cardamom at you. Right? Yeah, that's exactly it. So that is, please God, for people who are listening, like, now is the time that if there is a woman who is showing up

who is embodying this, who is doing her work, who has baptized herself, and who your nervous system knows is real. Throw cardamomom. Do not allow this time. This is not a time for internalized misogyny, which is what is planted by those institutions to take hold. We have to resist that. That does not mean support every woman. I am over that. You can see, look at Pam Bondi. Like, do not support every woman. Right. Look at Christy Gnome. Like, these are puppets.

These are vampires. These are people. They've internalized the patriarchy. Yes. They are water carriers for the patriarchy. It is not about that. You know when you are in the presence of a woman who is imperfect but is fighting the good fight. You know it.

Throw cardamom at her. Oh, Megan, Megan. What are you doing, like logistically? I need to know. know this. Realistically, like, yeah. How are you actually making it through the days? Are you staying grounded in anything?

Do you have anything to leave us with it is actually logistical? First of all, that repetition that we've been emphasizing that we have to believe in ourselves, that we have to be able to go inward and really validate what it is that we're feeling. So that's absolutely been a practice and especially as a survivor with how triggering it is being grounded, trying to stay grounded, which for me has meant I do this soul voice meditation, which really helps. I've been telling myself, you know, just as Abby said, I don't know what's next, but there is next. The only thing that calms my nervous system is that out of this list, you know, I'm compiling how women pray when the world is on fire, there will be an action. Like, I am,

I am promising myself that because, and I want it to be when I have returned to love, and I know it's the way love is asking me to move, but it was also, I was sort of being hard on myself and thinking, like, we'll do it. Like, just, just do something, you know? I'm like, I totally get that. I'd so get that. anything, like do something, do something. And in going back to the acts of Paul and Thetla, it's interesting because it comes from the collective.

What I can do is continue to give myself the power in the agency. I can believe in myself. I can believe in Mary. I can ground myself in that knowing that love is going to lead me. But I also think it's not like there's going to be

one person who leads and then we all follow like Lemings. You know in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in the seventh season, when Buffy goes back into that cave to the male shamans who gave her the power, and she's like, uh-uh, no, I'm going to reclaim the power, source it directly inside of myself. This is very similar to Thakla. When she takes back her power from all the sources that had given her her slayer power, it was this kind of these male shaman.

She called it back. And then she realized that actually every little girl was a slayer. Like she awoken all of the slayers by calling her power fully back to herself. It's some sort of collective like that. It's going to look like that where we awaken in this way that we have never seen before. Where love reaches where it has never been before. Like where we are acting from a place of unifying, we haven't demonstrated yet. because I think the most hopeful thing for me is that these stories that were erased,

the Gospel of Mary, the Acts of Paul and Thakla, those are stories of what happens when those who have the least amount of power remember that power has always come from within us, right? The truest source of power is love, is our direct connection to the divine that has always come from within us. So we already have those stories. And those are the stories that remind us of the original roots of what it meant to have a brush with Christ. It was to fully empower you.

It was to fully remind you that you are meant to confront and stand up and be a voice of love in face of those unjust systems of power. That's what it meant to be Christian before the 4th century. So the hope comes from the fact now those are in print. People are like, well, what is the acts of Paul and Thetla? It's in mass print now. My feminist theological endeavor was to bring it back from a racial. Like, you can buy it on Amazon now. It was this obscure scripture that was really hard to get a hold of.

And now anybody can read that. Anybody can read the Gospel of Mary. And these are examples of moments when we remembered that true as of power exists within us. You know, there's a lot about the last being first. Yes. And the first being last in the gospel. And I want you to just look carefully and feel at what we're told is winning and what

we're told is losing. And then I want you to judge for yourself when you think about it and you look at your body. Is power a bunch of guys in a locker room laughing at women and going to sit in the room at the state of the union while a rapist speaks for? from the pulpit and lies through his teeth in that den of vipers? Or is it the women who said, no, thank you, and are going to party in Las Vegas with flavor, flave? Like, which one looks like the kingdom of God? I think we need to really pay attention to what we are told is winning

and how it feels in our body. Who's winning there? And have we already won? And do we still, Does winning look like saying no like they did? No thank you to that. It's being in that space, not this. And creating something full of life and beauty is that winning. Yes. And for me, it's just echoing, you know, the tale of two Christ. It's like there's, is Christ this blonde hair, blue-eyed shepherd with a staff telling women what they can and cannot do with their bodies? Or is, Christ, this liberator, this Middle Eastern immigrant, liberating women from the illusion that anyone outside of us could ever dictate our worth. That's right. Amen, Megan Waterson. We love you. We are with you.

We will throw cardamom at you forever. And nard. And rose petals. Rose petals, rose petals, oils, all of it. What is Nard? It's such a weird word. What is it? It's what Mary Magdalene, it's an oil.

It's what Mary Magdalene anointed Christ with. So let's anoint each other. Let's go. Let us enraithes forever. We love you, Megan. I love you. I love you. I love you.

I love you, love you. Thank you. I love you, love you. Bye. We Can Do Hard Things is an independent production podcast, brought to you by Treat Media. Treat Media makes art for humans who want to stay human. And you can follow us at we can do hard things on Instagram and at we can do hard things show on TikTok.