#770: Elizabeth Gilbert — How to Set Strong Boundaries, Overcome Purpose Anxiety, and Find Your Deep Inner Voice

Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to interview people from all different disciplines, all different walks of life to tease out the habits, routines, thoughts, lessons learned, and so on that you can apply to your own lives. My guest today — one of my favorites. Elizabeth Gilbert — she is the number one New York Times bestselling author of Big Magic and Eat, Pray Love, as well as several other international bestsellers. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Penn Hemingway Award.

Her novel City of Girls was named an instant New York Times bestseller, a rollicking sexy tale of the New York City Theater world during the 1940s. You can go to Elizabethgilbert.substac.com to subscribe to Letters From Love with Elizabeth Gilbert, her newsletter, which has more than 120,000 subscribers you can find here on Instagram at Elizabeth underscore, Gilbert underscore writer. But first, a few quick words from our lovely podcast sponsors who make products and services that I use.

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Get this out of the two. I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. I don't see the question. Now I just see an appropriate time. I'm a cyber netty organism living this show on metal and the scale. This is so nice to see you. Thanks for taking the time. It's so nice to see you. It's so nice to be back talking to you. I love it.

We both did something quite similar. You went back and listened to our last conversation, which I just had a blast recording with you. And I went back and I read all of the summary notes that I had from that last conversation.

And before we started recording, you mentioned a few things. One that the very last thing that you mentioned in that conversation will dovetail nicely into some of what we'll talk about today. And that'll be just a bit of foreshadowing for folks who won't go into that first.

But secondly, I asked if you had any particular hopes for this recording and asked what would make it a home run or time well spent. And one of the things that you said and this is supposed broadly what you said to is you had no cherished outcome. And I like that phrasing and I was hoping to hear you expand on that a bit because I think it might be good medicine for a lot of what else me.

Oh, God. I mean, it's already a home run just getting to sit here and talk to you. And I know it hasn't been easy for our schedules to figure out when we can do this. So I'm just happy and relaxed to be here. And I'm also not concerned that you and I will ever have any trouble finding things to talk about. So that was part of it. But the no cherished outcome is actually a line from a translation of a Celtic poem.

And it's called the Celtic poem of approach. And as well as I understand it, these are lines that were spoken when you're meeting new people. And when you're moving out of one area into another tribes area or you're going to be interacting with people in a new way, this is this beautiful poem of approach that I really love. And I'm probably not going to get the whole thing right. But it says something like I will honor your gods. I will drink from your well.

I bring an undefended heart to our meeting place. I will not negotiate by withholding. I am not subject to disappointment. I have no cherished outcome. And how do you apply that then to your own lives? What led you to hold on to that particular piece? It's my highest aspiration that that poem and that spirit is the foundational agreement of all my friendships. And I say those words. I have no cherished outcome a lot to my friends.

And I hope that I mean it. And when I start feeling hurt or resentful or excluded or misunderstood, I'm like sometimes the only way you can find out that you had a cherished outcome is when you didn't get it. Like sometimes I discover that where I'm like I think I'm just easy breezy and I'm just hanging out and then I'm like, oh, I had a secret hidden cherished outcome because something didn't happen that I wanted. And now I'm all like bent about it.

So now I get to examine my resentment and ask myself whether I really want to honor. I have no cherished outcome or whether I want to solve. I seem to be better at no cherished outcome in friendships than I am in romantic relationships, almost the minute relationship becomes a romantic relationship. I have a list as long as my arm of cherished outcomes and all the sudden I can be disappointed and all of a sudden I don't bring an undefended heart to our meeting place.

But with friendships, which I have over time discovered to be actually the true loves of my life, I seem to be a little bit better at taking responsibility for myself and trying not to put outcomes on people. Why do you think that is that there is such a difference for you between the number of cherished outcomes you might hold in romantic relationships versus friendships.

Because at least culturally speaking here in the US, there aren't as many stories or scripts related to friendships versus romantic partners. Or would you explain it a different way? I think that my thing has always been, and this is why it's been so interesting for me being single and celibate by choice over the last five years.

There's nobody to blame, which is so great. And I think that it's that the minute somebody is attached to me as my partner, I do this weird outer body thing where I hold them responsible for whatever mood I'm in. And so if I'm feeling great, it's because they're the greatest. And if I'm feeling terrible, it's because they're the worst. And it's so unfair.

And one of the really beautiful and educational things about spending a lot of time alone is like, oh, these mood cycles and these depressions and these euphoria are happening. This is like a weather system that's happening that isn't related to anybody. And it turns out all those years when I was analyzing those poor people in my relationships and holding them account to account for the fact that I felt kind of not right.

You know, it was like, oh, I haven't been with anybody in five years and I felt not right when I woke up this morning and there's no one to pin it on. It's so great. I love it. It's like, I love not having anyone to pin it on. I hate pinning things on people, but I don't seem to know how to not do it once we're in a romantic relationship. She come with a warning.

Yeah, a lot of lot in life. She come with a warning. So I have quite a few followers, but I'm going to try to put them in some semblance of a coherent order.

So my first question related to that is how do you think about responsibility or ownership for yourself in the sense that, or I should say, rather what prompts that question is, I was having a conversation with an executive coach recently, Jerry Colonna, actually, who is, I think, very good at what he does, former, very top tier investor, who has a lot of questions I returned to one of which is how are we complicit in creating the conditions we say we don't want.

But in this good question, it's a really good one. It's a really good one. But the one I wanted to apply here was more a comment he made to me because I was talking about taking a radical ownership of things and seeing my role and just about everything. And he said, well, taking responsibility for everything can be as bad as taking responsibility for nothing.

And so I'm wondering when you wake up and the weather system is dark and stormy, how do you work on yourself without picking on yourself, if that makes any sense? Oh, such a good question. God, I love that question. How are you complicit in what can you say it again? Yeah, how are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don't want? Well, another word for that is, who are you blaming your life on today?

Well, I think the only honest and humble answer that I can give to that question is I don't know. And I don't know where that line is. But it's easier for me when I'm not in a relationship. And it's simpler for me to say, okay, I can take some accountability for my own weather system.

As you say, I don't want to beat myself up about having weather. And I have to constantly remind myself that, I mean, I think the most compassionate thing that I say to myself where I hear said to myself all the time from a more loving presence is it is a very difficult thing to have a human incarnation.

This is not an easy ride, even a good life is a hard life. And it's so weird. It's so profoundly weird to be a consciousness dropped into a particular body dropped into a particular family, arriving at a particular moment in history, like with it's so strange. I think I probably I'm sure you I don't want to project this on you, but maybe you had this experience as a kid.

Like I haven't remember as a kid looking at myself in the mirror and being like, I'm in here. Like it's so weird. What am I doing in here? And all of that is out there. And I'm in here. Some things inside of this experience and it's really hard. So I think you have to start with that, you know, who told you you were supposed to get it right straight out of the gate. Like who told you you were supposed to get it right seven out of seven days or that you're constantly supposed to be improving.

Like a fortune 500 company constantly, you know, going in this upward angle direction, a certain percentage every quarter. There's billions of systems operating within your body alone, hormonal systems and chemical systems and viruses and bacteria is like we're such a complex mechanism so hard to figure out how to operate one of these things.

And then just when like I do really well in solitude, like I can get this thing humming, like I can get this machine and this mind and this heart, where it is like we are at a beautiful home. But the instant you throw another complex human mechanism into my field. You know, then I've got to like adapt to their chemistry into their like it's hard. I don't know. And I think it's hard is a really good way to start with self compassion.

So that it's hard you you did a retake a few moments ago where you said one of the things that I say to myself and then you corrected then said one of the things that I hear. Why did you change that? Because I believe that I am loved beyond measure by magnificent complex amused God who has given me power over practically nothing.

Really like very little that I have control over but what tiny amount I have control over is extremely important it reminds me of something friend of mine who is a physicist said one time that very little of the universe is matter very little but what there is is very important.

It's it's like that I think with control and power like I have very little control have very little power even over my own mechanism and my own being but what little agency I have I think it's important to use it well but anyway I talk to that presence all the time and I am in a nearly constant dialogue with it and I hear it talking to me.

So that's why I say I hear a loving presence saying it's really hard it's really hard like I'm not telling you this should be easy how long is up in the case is that development the last handful of years decade has been true since you were a kid.

It's deep and I think one of the things I'm so lucky about my friend Rob Bell once said to me so lucky you didn't grow up with an enforced religion and I'm so fortunate about that I went to church like a nice little mellow New England church most Sundays as a kid but I don't recall anybody talking about God that much like it was more of a social gathering like I think New Englanders are a little bit.

Redisson in terms of being too heavy on the message you know like we sang songs and made crafts and I don't remember it having very much to do with God but I had a God awareness that was very powerful in me and I remember going to the national cathedral on a school trip when I was 10 in Washington DC and I grew up on a farm so I grew up with very rustic architecture and to go from.

I mean that cathedral did what cathedrals are meant to do to be the old peasants to me you know like I was I just put me into an ostrac state and I remember going coming home and wanting to replicate that state and trying to figure out if I could build a cathedral in my bedroom with like stuff for my dad's wood shed and my mom sewing kit like I really did try to like how do you make that how do you make something that feels like that.

And I think writing for me and my pursuit of writing in the arts was always driven by this sense of awe and wonder and mystery that something was moving through me that was probably my first direct communication with it but for the last 20 years I've had a practice nearly every single day of writing myself a letter every morning from unconditional love which is kind of a God presence so bit more specific the unconditional love thing because I think God is more than that but that's what.

But that's where I also hear direction and guidance and humor yeah I need I need a very funny God I'm not going to do well with a God that's too serious. I got to think some funny like who thinks I'm adorable and funny like I I need that I can't be to beat up by a higher power how did you start that practice when did it start or even begin germinating it started in desperation when I was in my going through my first divorce.

It was 30 and the well laid out planned life that I had created very obediently like I had done just what my culture had told me to do I got married at 24 and worked hard and bought a house and made a plan to have a family and then instead of having a family had a nervous breakdown like quite literally everybody was moving in this one direction and my entire

intellectual spiritual and physical system collapsed which I now know I now see that as an act of God I now see that there is sort of the Dow you know that there is a force that was trying to communicate to me this is not your path. I will kill you before I let you do this I will kill you before I let you be a suburban housewife I'm not allowing it like I will make you put you in so much physical pain that you're going to have to notice that this is not.

The life for you but I was also in so much shame of failure and letting people down and like we just bought this house like I just felt like the biggest asshole in the world I don't know why I can't just get in line and do this thing that everybody's saying to do anyway that marriage ended and then I threw myself into another relationship and that ended and I was like I don't know how to orchestrate my life at all and nothing here I am 30 years old and nothing is what I had planned it to do.

I had planned it to be five years ago and I was in the deepest depression of my life and I didn't have much of spiritual life at that point but I remember waking up one night and just shame and getting an instruction I mean that's the only way I can explain it and I comfortable with that language because I often have that happen in my creative life where I'm told what to do this is what you're going to focus on here's what you need to do now and I was given this instruction and it came in as clearly as I'm talking to you and it said get it.

Get up, get a notebook and write to yourself the words that you most wish that somebody would say to you because there was a great loneliness that I was feeling too as well as the shame and that letter began you know what that letter said was I've got you I'm with you I'm not going anywhere.

I love you exactly the way you are you can't fail at this like you can't do this wrong I don't need anything from you this is a huge thing to hear I don't need anything from talk about no cherished outcome I don't need anything from you you don't have to improve you don't have to do life better you don't have to win you don't have to get out of this depression you don't have to ever uplift your spirits you could end up living in a world of depression.

Living in a box under bridge and a garbage bag spitting at people and I would love you just as much as I do now the love that I have for you cannot be lost because it's innate it's yours I have no requirements for it and if you need to stay up all night crying I'll be here with you and if tomorrow you have a garbage day again because you've been up all night crying I'll be there for that too I'll be here for every minute of it just ask me to come and I'll be here with you

and the astonishing thing was that it like even talking about it now I can feel the impact that it has on my nervous system to hear those words even in my own voice and it was the first experience I'd ever had with unconditional love I'd never heard anybody say like you don't need I don't need you to be anything you don't have to do better like this is fine this is great you on the bathroom floor and a pile of tears and it's not great it's great that's fine we love you just like that

and that's so nourishing because it's so the opposite of every message that I've ever heard and so I started doing that practice and it's taken me through I've never had difficult times in the last 20 years but I've never gone as low again as I went at that time because this is the net that catches me routinely before I can get that low and that voice doesn't change

all right this is this is getting into the juicy bits but I love to wait around and so to follow up you've helped a lot of people now draft or attempt to write similar letters and I'm wondering a few things you can answer these in any order you want or you can take in a different direction one is if there are ingredients that seem to work better than others

because everything seems to take practice maybe these letters and no exception the second is do you find that people with some religious orientation or spiritual orientation towards a greater power have an easier time writing this in other words if the letter is from this power to yourself almost versus being from another version of yourself to yourself does it differ in impact

I found out that what I was doing there's a name for it and it's actually a long spiritual tradition for people to do things like this but there's it's a practice that's very common in 12 step recovery and it's called two way prayer so it's essentially two way prayer so I call it love but sometimes I call it God for a lot of people that word God is a weapon I mean especially people who grow up and what are called high demand religion

or who grew up in really oppressive religious cultures or abusive religious cultures or for whom they simply cannot stomach that word like obviously don't use that word but two way prayer so one way prayer is what most people are taught as prayer which is a supplication get down on your knees and I had done that in my life and like beg for help but sometimes you spend so much time begging for help you're not actually listening

yeah to be saying markota ear the polo yeah, I was like Margo. Margo. Margo. Margo. Margo. Margo. Margo. Margo. Margo. Margo. Margo. Margo. Margo. Margo. Margo. Margo. Margo. Margo. You know God's like could I just can I get can I can I just there's something I want to say and so I would suggest if people are interested in this. in this, you can look up to way prayer because there are a lot of people teaching it. And they have

made a sort of, what are you saying, is there like a practice or like a instructions. Like they have found that certain things work really well. So I'm sort of quoting from kind of to way prayer theory on this. The first one is that you can open up the channel by reading something. So go to a quiet place, although at this point I've done it so long, like I can do it in an Uber, you know, but like go to a quiet place and read something that to you feels holy. So it doesn't have to be any

official religious text. Poetry works for me better than scripture. So the poems of Hafiz or Rumi or Mary Oliver or Walt Whitman, you know, I kept like letters, song of myself from Walt Whitman, which is essentially just a big letter from Walt. You can just open that up to any page and you read some of it. And I feel like those writers had direct access to the divine and they left the door open when they died, right? So you can just draft in on the sense that they create. So you read

something that opens your heart in some way. And then you ask one question and one question only, it's not a debt position. And it's not a dialogue because the ego always wants a dialogue. Like the ego always wants, I feel like if I could reduce my ego down to two words, it would be yeah, but like it's always got to follow up question. It's like, well, yeah, but you say, yeah, but you say that you love me, but yeah, but you know, and it's like part of the reason that two way prayers

so beautiful is that you ask the question and then you stop talking. You get your opening statement. You're opening statement is dear love, what would you have me know today? And then the other thing that I've seen suggested into a prayer practice and this kind of came intuitively to me, but I see that it's taught this way when people teach it is the first line back to you from the divine should be an endearment and affectionate nickname, my love, my child, my sweetheart, my little one.

I hear a little one a lot, my little one, my angel, honeyhead. I've seen some of my friends have like tiny turtle penguin cheeks, you know, like some sort of like endearment stuck imagining what penguin cheeks are like, there are doors to the conversation. You know, and that's very hard for some people because the idea of turning towards yourself as though you are worthy of endearment can be really hard for especially perfectionists and the most driven among us like you didn't

earn. How did you earn sweet love? You didn't earn that, but this is a kind of love that doesn't have to be earned. So you start with that. And then so the way I did it the first night I did it was I literally just wrote what I wish somebody would say to me. And that's pretty straightforward as an instruction because you know what you wish somebody would say to you. You know, like you know how you want to be loved. You know how you want to be loved. It's right there like you know what you're

dying for. We all know what we're dying for. Whether it's mother love or the missing father or the partner or the like somebody who's just like I've got you. I see you. I see you. I love you. You're amazing to me. I see that you're suffering. I'm with you and you're suffering. And then you just you just write that. But over time what I think people will find one of the biggest questions people have is like well it's just feels like it's just me writing to me. It feels super artificial. I

don't feel like I'm hearing God's voice. I don't feel like I'm believing that there's this eternal source in the universe that's completely loving and unconditionally it doors me. I just feel like I'm doing this exercise of just writing words to myself and that doesn't feel spiritual and it doesn't feel rich and it doesn't feel real. And the question I have heard is what's so bad about that? What if it is just you? What if all it is is just you writing to yourself from a kind

or voice within you? Wouldn't that be worthy enough to be slightly life changing besides the terrorist who lives inside your head constantly telling you how you failed? Like why not change the channel in your own head? And if that's all it is and what if God is just the most loving voice inside your own head? This makes me actually flash back to our last conversation because we have some proof for this in a different form which is morning pages from the artist Wayne Julia Cameron.

Just getting your monkey mind on paper even if it's actually the terrorist can be incredibly powerful. And one of my friends I remember he tried it for the first time for a week and he said he's very high functioning works with a lot of household names I won't mention but he said this is the closest thing to a magic trick a real world magic trick that I've ever come across. So that question what if it is just the kindest voice in your head I think is helps to diffuse maybe the pressure that

people would apply to themselves when trying this for the first time. And as you were talking about the very first example you gave I was thinking and I think this might have been Chip Conley could have been someone else who said this to me but that happiness is reality minus expectations

and I was like there are a lot of ways to play with that collection of variables one of which is saying hey you've already passed the grade you could be under an overpass and that's acceptable that's okay right you don't have to be that Fortune 500 company compounding it x percent per quarter. Thank God. Yeah. Because you know those people and I know those people and I don't know that it's such a gentle loving life that they leave. Yeah I think I know one of them intimately.

At least somebody kind of assumes that's the baseline minimal acceptable outcome right is life just doesn't seem to work that way it's not linear even if you are improving over time but applying that pressure sometimes handicaps seem proven in the first place. So question for you this occurred to me and it may be a dead end but I'm wondering have you seen any difference in how men approach this or have challenges with it versus women or no difference?

Is it kind of the ubiquitous set of challenges when you look at the number of friends listeners readers etc who have attempted this? It's hard to know because women tend to follow me more than they do but I've invited a number of men so every week so on my sub-stack I I share a letter from love that I've written and then I invite a special guest to do it and I've

invited a number of men I'm thinking right now about my friend Arche Cooper who's such an extraordinary guy he grew up on the south side of Chicago in an absolutely bullet and drug-ridden ghetto black underprivileged underserved he's the subject and the producer of a gorgeous documentary called

a beautiful thing and he wrote a book by the same title and when he was in high school with like no future some guy showed up in his high school hallway with a rowing machine and was like I want to start like a first black rowing team or the first black crew do any of you guys want to do it and he

was like yes I absolutely want to do it and he now has become this ambassador teaching rowing all over the world in South Africa and and his letter from love that he shared is one of my favorite ones that I've ever that I've ever seen his letter was addressed to that little boy who he was who

saw more violence before he was eight years old than most people on tours of duty in Afghanistan and how tenderly that child needed to be treated and watching him you know this like athlete this motivational speaker this great leader like turned toward himself or have loved turned

toward him in such a tender and intimate way was so moving but he was open to it he allowed that vulnerability to come through just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show about three weeks ago I found myself between 10 and 12 thousand feet going over the

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Tim for 20% off there's something that I've learned in ifs internal family systems that are being just gonna bring that yeah I mean his mind is working it all works with an ifs 2 but but there's one of the things they say in ifs a lot is a prepositional change how do you feel towards

yourself versus how do you feel about yourself mm-hmm may I just give a little bit of context for folks so ifs for people who don't know it's somewhat strangely named so the internal family systems can be thought of as and please fact check me I didn't episode with dick shorts for people who

are interested but parts work in the context of different parts of yourself so you might have protectors you may have exiles these aspects of yourself that you have pushed away or compartmentalized in some way and you facilitate dialogue between and among these different parts for the purposes of

of therapy and it can be very very powerful so i just wanted to give you a little bit of context beautifully described yeah i've heard it described as group therapy for one and he actually dicks were to founded it started off as a group therapist and when he started

individual therapy he was like oh this is just like group therapy we've got voices yelling at each other inside this person who don't know how to communicate with each other right so yeah that's a really beautiful summation of what it is but the difference between even i mean try it

to actually can you feel the difference physically between if i ask you how you feel about yourself and how you feel towards yourself that's totally different right because toward yourself i'm taking a friendly observer perspective there's an built-in empathy right and how do you feel about yourself

also is so familiar linguistically that it overlaps with a lot of the negative tracks that i already have had my head whereas how do i feel towards myself that's not a construction i use so it it benevolently hijacks the whole thought process instantly you know you ask me how i feel

about myself i'll show you a list of everything that needs improvement you know and i'm wired to constantly be self-improving and i'm sure you are too how do i feel toward myself i'm like oh man you're tired like you've got this jess cold you've had for seven weeks you're finishing

this project that's huge you got a lot on you like honey yeah it's hard you're having a hard like it's hard suddenly it's like i'm a very different person toward myself let's actually hop from that i'll mention one thing then i want to hop to something related which

is self-friendliness and how you think about it how others might think about it i just want to say a connection with ifs and also a number of other workshops and seminars that i've done i have not written a letter from love in the way that you describe it exactly but i did write a version of it

that sounds actually very similar to the last example you gave and this is done in a fair amount of parts work is you know what would you say to x which could be i'm making this up but like fear of inadequacy at what age right how old are you five year old Tim okay what would you say to five

year old Tim so i have written letters to a younger version of myself and found it to be incredibly powerful i mean this was years ago that i did it and it still sticks in my mind i remember a lot of the language that i used but the question of self-friendliness sort of broadens and includes a

lot of what we've been talking about already could you speak to self-friendliness in whatever way makes sense do you yeah i mean we always talk about self-love but that's kind of lofty and i think you could just start by a little friendlier you know i'm here like just how about the common

courtesy you would show to a stranger on the subway like let's start with that like just common human decency so there's a story that i'm so moved and disturbed by it so Sharon Salisberg do you know Sharon Salisberg the meditation teacher so she met the Dalai Lama and she's written

about this she met the Dalai Lama on his first visit to the west and she was in a group of people who were the first Americans North Americans to meet him and it was at a time when nobody really knew who he was he wasn't like the rock star who he became use the sub-scure Tibetan monk and

of course it took place somewhere in California and there were some academics in the room and some spiritual writers and teachers and meditators and this sort of elect group of people who were coming to meet him and he was speaking through translator because he didn't speak

machine-lush at the time and somebody in the room asked him what Tibetan Buddhism and his teachings have to say about self-hatred and how to combat self-hatred and don't you know that man had to talk to his translator for like 15 minutes and kept asking for the question to be repeated

he didn't understand the question he kept thinking that he was mishearing the question because he kept saying wait who's the enemy who's the person that you're having trouble with and of course being like Calvinistic Westerners in the room raised on scarcity and you know you're never

enoughness an original sin everybody in the room was like no I am the one I hate you know and he was like this doesn't even make sense like what you're saying doesn't even make sense and and when he finally grasped not only that he understood that person's question and what they

were talking about but that everyone in the room shared this problem he was so devastated and he said I used to think that I had a really good understanding of the workings of the human mind but this is new to me and this is very disturbing like this is not okay and essentially after

that he said this is where we're going to start and then that's basically what he became his mission in the Western world and it's interesting I was talking about it with Sharon Salzburg the other day and she was saying in Buddhism they say you know that one of the things that if you want to

evolve is that you have to be less precious to yourself you have to think of yourself as being less precious but she said in the West we have to we haven't even gotten to the point where we think we're precious yet to let go of it like first she's like I think we first have to find our

preciousness and then we can let go of it and then we can evolve but if we don't even know that any of us anything about us is precious that's already a problem and when the Dalai Lama started teaching people how to love themselves he would say talk to yourself the way your mother would talk to you

and then he found out about some of our moms and he was like okay grandmother like he was just scratch that he was like has anybody ever said a kind word to you you know like it was you know and it really spotlights this sort of terrible dysfunction that we all kind of collectively have grown

up and have you found other ways to counteract that outside of the letter writing or any other practices or recommendations for people who are experiencing this many of whom are experiencing it secularly right they may experience it in the absence of a religious upbringing as it be the

case for me any other recommendations or thoughts you just made me realize I didn't answer your second question about whether people who have some sort of religious or spiritual basis find this easier not necessarily because some people still are praying to what James Joyce called the

hangman god and you're not going to get a letter of unconditional love from the hangman god you're going to get a list of complaints about things that you need to do better so sometimes those people have a really hard time doing it there's one man I asked to do this to write a letter from love and

he's a very well-known figure in the world that I'm trying to think how to not identify I'm not going to say more than that but he's somebody who's very admired and is very good and he had the most surprising response of people who have said no most people say no because they're either afraid

that they're going to ask love to show up and love isn't going to show up and that would be more painful than not asking or they feel like it's too vulnerable to expose themselves like this he said no because he said I have a feeling I know what unconditional love is going to say to me

it's going to say you're trying too hard and you're doing too much and you don't have to try this hard and do too much but I don't want to be let off the hook because I want to keep aspiring to go further and higher and I don't want to hear a voice that tells me that I'm okay just the way

I am I'm afraid that will make me stop and I was like oh honey who hurt you oh dear you can still do things but might it not be nice to also hear that something loves you even as you're aspiring you know anyway it was just that was interesting sorry but you had a second question yeah the

other question was I suppose related and that is outside of writing this letter you've described what other approaches or habits anything at all have you found helpful or seen helpful for others in counteracting self antagonism right so fostering self-friendliness in other words

boundaries is what comes to mind and some really hardcore ones like makes me think of our mutual friend Martha Beck yeah who you've known a lot longer than I have but tell me what made you think of her for that well the integrity cleanse yeah just checking in I know we discussed it last time but setting a time where to check in every 30 minutes to see if you're lying and if you're if you want to even be in this conversation right if your sister's like yeah are you coming over

for the baby shower you're like oh I'd love to beep beep beep like no actually I really have zero interest there are people who I am not skilled but this is how I word it because I don't want to keep it on me I'm not skilled enough to be able to hold my serenity when I'm around them

I lose the hard earned peace that I try to generate every day through meditation and through two-way prayer and through the way that I live I'm constantly trying to bring myself to a level of kind of humming nicely along and there are certain people who I managed can't do it and I think

my younger self was spiritually ambitious enough that I was like if you were better human being then you would be able to jujitsu your way through this or you would compassion your way through this or you would accept your way through this and I'm at an age now at 55 where I'm like no I just can't

do I can't like I come home sick when I'm around those people like I lose my attainments when I'm around those people and it's not friendly for me to be around people who are cruel and when I'm around people who are cruel I become unwell and I also then have to use something to like I get

started like I get like there's certain people I'm around them and I'm like I want to have a drink like I want to have I want to have a drink call a phone number I shouldn't dial like start smoking and driving fast you know like this dysregulates me so much and it's just it's not kind

to myself to put myself in those situations again and again so how do you or how have you created boundaries or put those relationships on probation or otherwise I'm trying to you know trying to think how to describe it that doesn't get too revealing too too much personal stuff I'm not here

to say it's easy but I do feel a sense of stewardship toward myself and you know I mean it's hard I'll tell you this I did an event with Rachel Cargo the great writer and civil rights activist a couple years ago and somebody in the audience asked us you guys both seem so calm and chilled you

have difficult people in your life and I started laughing so hard I rolled literally rolled off my chair and I was like yeah yeah and she said no I don't and I was like wait what and I was like leaning in I'm like wait a minute break that down and she said no I don't have anybody in my

life currently who's difficult because I won't do that to myself anymore and here's the zinger this is somebody with a tremendous sense of self value and self-friendliness she said the followup question in the audience was somebody said what about people who you have to deal with and you have

to have them in your life because like they're in your family and she said I'm thinking as hard as I can and I cannot come up with a single name of anybody who is entitled to be in my life no matter what their biological relationship is to me and that's a radical position to take

and Rachel Cargo lives a radical life and that's somebody who is really prioritizing her own well-being and she was like I've blocked my mother for several years at a time because she was too destructive she's like I've got siblings I haven't spoken to in years because they're too

disruptive and they're not entitled to have me in their life just because we were born into the same family that's intense boundaries so I will say only that I've done stuff like that I've decided that not everybody's entitled to have me in their life just a practical tactical question since

that's where my brain sometimes goes do you slow-fade that person you just start like first you respond after 24 hours then it's a week then it's two months then it's never or do you have a conversation you text them and you're like hey love you but or is there some approach to you?

I'm going through a list in my head I'm like how did I do that one how did I do that one some have been done I would say elegantly which to me means honestly but I think again you can keep it on the eye and just say like I noticed that I become so dysregulated after these encounters

that I can't do this anymore this is too dysregulating for me I can't do it I'm out and at times where I'm super dysregulated I will say I'm not well and I need to go get well and I'm going to go take some privacy because that's also true like I can get so dysregulated

that I become unwell I'm thinking of a couple other people where I very honestly said like I'm in a place in my life right now where I need a lot of solitude and a lot of silence and if that changes I'll let you know and then there's some people who I just stopped responding to

because they're being I kept running through the scenarios of like how it would open an honest conversation about this going it would be like not good I don't have any reason to think that this would go well like this is going to be a firestorm and I think I'm just going to leave

but it isn't easy but I'm a lot healthier since I've done that I think it's easier when you're older too because I think you get used to like you don't keep everybody in life you know you think as a young person you can't you can't right there's an ebb and flow even if you wanted to you couldn't

and it makes me think of maybe bonsai's not the right example because I do think of them kind of as little torture trees but but pruning as opposed to accumulating right curating as opposed to collecting and I think as you get older you just realize okay there is at least as far as we know in this corporeal body and then to the story yeah not generating more time and some people just consume more life energy than they contribute I mean I always say some people are medicine like when you're

with them when you come away from them you feel like you've gotten a dose of medicine and some people need medicine and when you're with them you feel like they rated your pharmacy and some people need to be institutionalized like it's beyond that it's just like I can't do I can't do anything

with this year you know one thing I have noticed is that I don't like holidays I don't like the ritual of like big holiday gatherings and I've let my family know that that I'm like I love you guys and I'm gonna come and see you any day of the year except these days so I'll come and see

you in early December I'll spend a week we'll have a great time like well I want to have one on one time with you I want to sit at the table with you I want to go for walks with you I want to go for bike rides with you I'm not coming for Christmas why is that I'm so curious and just as someone who

you picked my one in favorite holiday oh do you love that's so wonderful which is fine and great but I'm curious what is it about the gathering cherished outcomes cherished outcomes meaning that you need to pre-fill like you need to perform man there's some I feel like there's so much on the

table and it's like the meal even it's a kid I've got it's so stressful and like everyone's so tense and it's like why do we have to do this and the answer is you don't have to yeah but the people who love it should do it mm-hmm yeah for sure I just sit by the fire with my dog and drink hot

chocolate so it's not very stressful no I actually like spending holidays alone because they're quiet days when you're alone the phones are not ringing and working emails aren't coming in like some of my happiest days have been holidays that I spent alone I enjoy have you always been

comfortable with solitude or extended periods of being alone is that always been the case to mix but I love my own company except for when I'm in some sort of super disrupted mental state and then it's very painful to be with myself but lately like in the last 10 years it's my favorite person

hang out with and I live alone and I love living alone and I love waking up and being like here's our day like what do we want to do it's so how do we want to spend this and I'm a writer I chose to be a writer it's a very solitary it's a solitary time and I love that like my most joyful moments

of my life have been alone with my work and I remember hearing Michael Shea von one time say I'm super social too like I have a lot of friends and a lot of people who I love and care about but I'm always happy to go go back to being alone anyway I heard him say one time and he's got

four kids I think but he said you can love your books but they can't love you back and I thought oh my books love me back like my work loves me like it is a love story in two directions like it is a beautiful love story writing those books and I feel that there's something very alive

and connected in that that isn't just me so for people who can't see and even for people who can see video your hairstyle has changed since we last spoke how do that come to be what is is there a significance there I've buzzed off my hair gosh about nine months ago and I have been wanting to do

this for 20 years and dreaming about doing this for 20 years and I can't tell you how many times that in my hairdressers chair and been like just take those clippers and just buzz it off just but like just take it off just take it off like I just want to be free I want to be free and I never had

the courage to do it and I had a lot of reasons for why I couldn't do that as a woman what if my head has a weird shape what if I mean I'm a public figure what if I'm out there with a bald head I just I always was like when I get older I'll do it when I get older I'll do it and then I had

this amazing awakening and it was last year I went to an event in New York and there are a bunch of people there who were in their 40s 50s and 60s and this is New York City so it's like one of the most progressive places in the world and I looked around the room and all the men all of the men

had clipped like shaved or buzzed hair and they looked great like yours like they looked great like there's a bunch of like silver foxes they all have lines in their faces they looked fantastic and all the women had long or longish versions of some sort of complicated hair

that I you know I know hair so I know what it costs to have that hair I know the character treatment you had to have for that hair to look silky I know the dye job that you had to pay for I know the how much those highlights cost I know that only 2% of women in the world are blonde

and that 45% of the women in that room were blonde including me you know and I was like thinking about Dally Parton's line where somebody said to her one time do you ever get offended at dumb blonde jokes and she said no because I know I ain't dumb and I know I hate blonde

and it's like I ain't blonde and I ain't dumb but I'm spending a lot of money to and I just had this really reckoning moment where I thought why are we doing this why do I have to do this and so many of the most amazing reckoning and liberation moments of my life have been

these moments where I was like oh I don't have to buy into this anymore just because I've been trained and taught and conditioned my entire life that I have to buy into this I'm opting out I'm taking my toys and I'm leaving and I thought I can just like get mad about the patriarchy and say

that there's an unfair beauty standard for men and women or I can just claim the entitlement that these men have and just get some buzzers at CVS and clip my own hair and like never think about my hair again and that's what I did so do you did it yourself I did it myself yeah and I do it myself

every week and it's like this is the last money I'm ever spending on my hair it's gonna say no we can trade no we can trade tips I know it's so great and I was like oh my god the freedom like I wake up every morning I'm like my hair's perfect like I jump in a river jump in a lake jump in

a notion get off get up a plane it's never not perfect it's amazing and I can't imagine any reason to ever have hair again and it's part of I don't know I just think it's part of this amazing thing about becoming a free woman and a middle-aged I am culture's nightmare I'm a middle-aged

childless husbandless woman like I'm basically a bog which like just like living rattling around in a house by myself talking to myself watering my plants shaving my head and it's so cool it's so exciting because I never saw a woman like this when I was growing up and I never heard of a woman

like this I only heard cautionary tales about how tragic and sad unmarried divorced or widowed women were and I'm all of those I'm unmarried divorced and widowed so I'm like the trifecta and these have been the most creative spiritual and wild years of my life we were exchanging various

ideas potential topics before this conversation in shorthand because of course I want to talk about things fresh without knowing the answers I'm going to get relaxed woman a relaxed woman as a radical concept what is this how many have you ever met oh boy not see no it's not it's not

I mean I haven't got that many relaxed many there yeah but like you know I think it would be a truly revolutionary thing what are the characteristics of a relaxed one what does that look like well first of all I want to say that this is like why I think it would be revolutionary mm-hmm so let

me start with why mm-hmm when I think of the words that are commonly used to describe the women who we all admire badass fears tough resilient brave strong or in the brine brown realm vulnerable open-hearted you know it like I aspire to be all those things and I admire all those women how are all those things but none of that feels revolutionary to me because women have always been all those things like you have to be all those things as a woman in the world you have to be resilient

you have to be strong you have to be badass you have to be fierce to survive as a woman my ancestors were all that your ancestors were that or we wouldn't exist since not a revolution it's not a revolution what would be a revolution would be a relaxed woman because I never saw one growing up

I saw angry tired women and I saw some relaxed men but I saw angry tired women and I was on the pathway to becoming an angry tired woman and that's when my body revolted and was like no no no no no no no no no no no we're not doing this we're going in a completely different direction

so how do you not be an angry tired woman that's a really big question and I think when I talk about this with groups of women I always say you know I think we have to be careful because there's some part of us that thinks it would be irresponsible not to be angry and it would be

irresponsible not to be tired because I mean just look at the world and how much it needs us and on the personal level and on the political level and and how much there is to be angry about and how many of us were violated in our bodies at various times I mean there's there's a

million reasons to not be relaxed and yet the question I have is if you were to you step in and this is a question I always asked to women if you were to think of the biggest shit tornado going on in your life right now whatever it is the hardest thing you're doing whether

it's your activism or your family or your work or a medical issue or a bankruptcy or an addiction issue like whatever it is or a problematic family member and if you were to go into that same exact shit tornado tomorrow and not one external thing changed but you were relaxed would you be more

or less effective at handling it martial artists know that the most relaxed person in the room wins the fight you know like actors know this artists know this like this is where the flow happens athletes know this and so I think for me I've narrowed it down to three things that I need

for me for my system to be relaxed and it's boundaries priorities and mysticism and if I don't have those three things I'm super stressed and I would say that the mysticism is the most important but the boundaries protect that so boundaries what was number two priorities yeah priorities and

then mysticism and women are not taught that they're allowed to have priorities men are taught that they're allowed to have priorities but women are supposed to prioritize everybody and everything and you feel really guilty if you're not prioritizing everybody and everything and I always suggest that you should maybe have like four priorities like four or five and there's nothing like tragedy to kind of make it clear what your priorities are to like when my partner reo is diagnosed with terminal

cancer it became very clear to me very quickly who I cared about and what I wanted to be doing with my time and I remember opening my inbox the day I found out that she had six months to live and seeing like this huge list of emails and I just deleted them all without responding to them because

I was like the reason that these emails have been sitting in my inbox for months is not because I'm too busy it's because I don't care I don't care I'm not the three words that women are never allowed to say like a woman is never allowed to say I don't care okay you're not too busy you just don't care I don't care I feel like if I care I'll get back to you immediately like this is what I've learned about my inbox like same with my text messages like you will hear from me immediately

if I care yeah like if I don't it's because I don't care and it's okay you can't care about everything or you just don't care enough in the hierarchy of your priorities priorities right so like who are your priorities what are your priorities what do you actually care about do you have the courage to say like no so boundaries priorities and then mysticism is the only thing that will actually relax my nervous system and that is getting really quiet and connecting through two-way prayer

through a letter from love and through deep meditation because I can't just live on this planer I will lose my shit the plane of the apparent and the real and the material and the Newtonian physics it's like too stressful and I need to have access to a deeper perspective to be able to be relaxed

enough to actually say and mean I have no cherished outcome like right to the point of saying like whether I live or die I have no cherished outcome can I be that relaxed can I be relaxed I've not to know what's going to happen can I believe that some other thing is orchestrating this and my

involvement might not be necessary in every single moment this is a hard thing for women is that the key ingredient of the mysticism for you because they're different forms for sure that mysticism can take I mean you mentioned how fast you mentioned roomy I mean you have different let's just

call it subsections of various religions that are associated with mysticism like Sufis in that particular case is that potential of a larger power orchestrating things so that you don't need to be involved in all the details the key component of this third leg of the stool the mysticism

or other other aspects to that well there's love so we have to then go back to you don't have to win this right you're not going to be graded I think I often hear in those prayers and meditations is we've got all the time in the world and that's the exact opposite of the stress

that I was raised under the vice grip that I was raised under short amount of time extremely important to win no errors can be allowed you know so got all the time in the world we got all the time in the universe what's time plenty of time it'll happen or it won't like whatever the thing is

and that actually also happens to be true that it will happen or it won't like even we know that our best laid plan sometimes it's like I guess this wasn't the thing that was supposed to happen but then there's also where my body goes into a deep hum that I used to only be able to get from

substances or love of another person settling me that deep deep like okay everything is okay here the thing that always works for me is a voice saying to me you don't even know what you're looking at you don't even know what you're looking at and it just pierces my certainty because my

certainty is one of the things that makes me so anxious and this is a very convincing virtual reality that we live in you know it's very very very convincing but the mystics and the physicists seem to agree that it might really not be what we see and what we're perceiving I went to an event in

Brooklyn a couple years ago in hard to Nobel Prize winning physicists talk about the nature of reality and it was so wonderful to hear this Nobel Prize winning scientists say the more I look at reality the less I understand it and all I can say after all these years of studying the nature

of reality is that nothing is what it appears and that what we used to think was natural law is that best some very local ordinances we really were like five Einstein's away from even having the right questions to ask to even know what we're looking at here and just because billions and

billions and billions of people have the same senses and look at the world and come to the same conclusion about what they're seeing and agree doesn't make it true and that settles me and it shouldn't it's kind of like the rugs and the floor and the ground are being pulled out from

under you completely and that shouldn't be relaxing but I find it deeply relaxing because then the stakes suddenly become a lot lower and it's like all right well since I don't even know what this game is that I'm in let me do what I can and let the rest of it go and it doesn't mean quit the game

you're still in the virtual reality game play it nicely but play it knowing that you don't even know what you're looking at yeah I'm still thinking of your correlation that you drew between certain D and anxiety which seems very astute and that most people would steer away from they would

rather be unhappy than uncertain because uncertainty equals in a lot of minds and this is true for me at times too hidden risks but it also depending on how you kind of play the game in which poetry you read and so on it also opens the door to the possibility of unexpected surprises good surprises

good things big sense to me I've had I've had a similar settling experience I mean it's sometimes enhanced so I can't recommend that to a broad audience well no no no no I get it you know and like that's why people get enhanced because there's that sense of like oh wait a minute this

is bigger and more complicated and I'm part of this but I wow you know like Steve Jobs' last words wow wow wow like whatever he saw in those last moments wow wow wow I'm thinking of a relative of mine who I said one time would you rather be happy or right and they said how in the world

can I be happy if I wasn't right and I think that it's actually quite the opposite for me like probably wrong human history and not trying to book title I mean just look at my life I have a long history of making decisions that are very bad for getting what I wanted and then finding out

this is another thing that I find is really wonderful about middle age like I've gotten what I wanted a lot in life and it almost killed me so I'm not so interested anymore in what I want I'm good at manifesting what I want and I'm good at almost dying for me what I want you know so maybe there's

a better question to be asking then what do I want have you any thoughts on candidates for that better question what would you have me know what would you have me know I mean that's a really good one this makes me wonder how you choose and I've wanted to ask you this for a while I don't

think we got into it in our prior conversation which is how do you choose projects how to spend your time where to allocate your limited life force because there's what do you want which is where a lot of people would start yeah although that's a pretty it can be nebulous in a handicap

in way because that could take you in all sorts of different directions but how do you choose your projects things to spend time on I'm kind of a hard-ass about it yeah great so part of the thing I've noticed that people tend to get stuck on sometimes is that they get this inspiration right so

inspiration comes first and inspiration is the breathing in of God right so like something even the most empirical scientific atheist people in the world when they talk about where an idea came from they say an idea came to me like they say that like they they don't even know they're saying

that but that's their reporting accurately what the feeling is because that's what everyone I've ever met who's had an idea it's the Eureka moment it's like oh I just heard saw felt an inspiration and I know the difference between something that comes from me and something that comes to me talking

about prepositions again and I think most creative people do as well like oh this came to me right and then it can feel like an assignment or it can feel like a challenge and it's like now I want to make this thing but a place where I think people get sidetracked and distracted it's very very

similar to meditation like meditation spirituality and art have so much in common so this may sound familiar to people who like maybe you've had this experience you start working on this thing that was this inspiration and a couple weeks a couple months into it a couple days another

idea comes and that idea seems more interesting the one that you've already invested some time into and then you're like but I don't do this thing this thing is like fresh and exciting this is the really really cool thing right and then you go and do that one and then another idea comes

and then it's like you know you're dealing with this melee so oftentimes people say like to me I'm working on a book and I'm halfway through it but I've got this other idea that I think is way better and this book feels really stale and it doesn't have any life in it and I always say like

okay well I give you permission to quit working on that first project but only if you have a proven track record of ever being able to finish a thing that is so smart yes right because then it's legit it's like no I've got this better idea but do you have 30 unfinished things because if you

have 30 unfinished things now we have a problem and I have those same things happen to me like I'm a third of a way a quarter of a way fifth of a way in a project and and then something so much more interesting comes along and I'm like but I know enough to know it comes dancing it's like a dancing

girl like it just comes across the stage the hottest girl the dance the hottest girl the dance she showed up and you're like and you've been married for two months you know and you're like oh I've been married for two months in the hot but what I know is that if I abandon my let's call

it wife this project that I've been working on for a few months to go off with the hot girl in a few months she's gonna be just as boring and stale and then a new hot girl's gonna come on and I'm never gonna complete anything so you know stick with the one you came to the dance with

and if I've got multiple ideas and I'm not sure which one I'm beginning I actually have a sort of like a team meeting and I make the ideas make proposals to me about how they want what do you this is like project based IFS totally it's like I'm the angel investor and these ideas are like you

know we want your time and money for this and I'm like what are you what do you have for me why should I invest my money in time and you and a lot of ideas when I challenge them like that disappear into the ether because they're like I don't know something about birds you know like they don't like

they haven't I'm like you haven't thought it out you know and then some other ideas like no I want to write about this very specific thing and it's gonna take that you know I'm like okay so this one's got their act together so when the bird idea is more formed come back like come back when

you're ready come back when you're ready to be real and not just to be tantalizing me with like so I'm a real hard-ass about it I don't mess around I don't let these ideas push me around I love it are there other ways that you to quote the late Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks he had this amazing

line that is stuck with me which is something along lines of the key mission is to separate an opportunity to be seized from a temptation to be resisted something a lot of us and and I'm wondering how else you navigate that right with the multiple ideas because maybe there are cases because you

have a track record of finishing things maybe there are cases where you get three months into something and you're like you know what this is not what I hope it could be and there's this other thing and I want to switch planes mid-air but how would you think about or how do you think about

distinguishing between those two I've never done that you've never done it I've never switched planes mid-air oh you haven't okay so when you start a project you basically have done the hard-ass due diligence up front they're like no this is high conviction I never thought of that

yeah I mean it's so this is like the mystery of a human brain or a human system because like in my personal life I'm so flaky and in my professional life I'm so clear it's amazing I think the universe gives us certain things that are sort of easier for us than other things but

yeah because it takes me so long to do a project because my projects whether they're fiction or non-fiction are so heavily researched driven and you know it can take three or four years to create one of these books and so the last novel that I wrote city of girls I was thinking about that

book for 10 years before I started it it was at those meetings for 10 years you know like and the next novel that I'm planning to write I've been thinking about probably 15 years but it's coming more into views so there's some that are kind of on the horizon that are coming in but I think

of air traffic control they're they come in in order something is feeding them to me in order and I don't know what that something is but one at a time I can't do to I can't do to it at a time what do you think contributes to that certainty in the professional realm as I'm listening to and

thinking about everything you've said in this conversation and also the review of the last conversation but strikes me that feeling like you have more than enough time a voice is told you there's more than enough time relieves you of the perceived obligation to choose the best thing

because you're running out of time that's just pure speculation in my part second is feeling like there's a source you are hearing from versus having to independently make an ideal decision may also give weight to the things as they come in as you put it through this air traffic

control I'm just wondering what else might contribute to the clarity there may be some interpersonal simplicity compared to dealing with other messy humans I don't know yeah anything else that you think contributes to the clarity and the not switching plans mid air I think part of it

is that I enjoy it I enjoy the work and I never identified as a tormented artist I've identified as a tormented person but I've never identified as a tormented artist art has been creativity has been the place where torment drops away so the question of course is why and I think once again

I would probably have to say I don't know but I think I'm getting a big smile on my face as I'm thinking about this but I'm thinking like why shouldn't we do the thing that is so pleasurable why shouldn't that be a clue as to the thing that you're supposed to be doing that you're on the

right track because you know long before I became a meditator I had so much trouble meditating for years but I would start to write and hours would drop away and I would not be aware of time so writing gave me the thing that meditation promised but I could never have happened in meditation

until very recently where like time stops or changes and I'm here but not here so that's just so pleasurable but the other thing is like sometimes I feel that it's a mandate and I can't talk about the book that I've just finished it's coming out next year but I can say that it's the hardest

thing I've ever written emotionally and when I was doing my two-way prayers every day in the morning during this especially the really hard part of writing it and I have a really loving higher power like I have a higher power who's constantly letting me off hook for lots of stuff

that I do not have to do you know it's like you do not have to be involved in this like you don't have to be part of that chaos thing that's going on like you don't have to be part of this family gathering you don't have to rescue this person you don't have to like I get a lot of you don't

have to use you don't have to you don't have to do this you don't do that throughout this entire process of this book because I was struggling every morning when I wrote it out on the page that voice would say I can see how hard this is for you and I can see what this is cost the toll that this is taking on you to tell this story and I can see that you want to stop too bad. I've given

you 47 hall passes and this is not going to be the 40 years. This isn't one of them and sucks to suck get back to work I'll see you on the page you know I know you're tired I know you want to take a day off you're not having a day off you know and and I think the trust that has built up

between me and that higher power over the decades largely because of the things that I am let off the hook for has made me think it's it goes back to the original part of the conversation where I said like I'm loved beyond measure by a god who has given me control over practically nothing

the wisdom to know the difference is one that I cannot find but I get instructions of like this isn't yours we don't need you in this story we don't need you involved in this situation we don't need you speaking up about this thing we don't need you doing this we need you doing this

however yeah so and the reason I don't want you up and all this other stuff that's going on is because I very much need you in this and so I want you to bring your full attention to this and if that changes you'll be notified you'll be notified of something that happens a lot on the

pages of two-way prayer for me I mean I've gone through periods of time where I didn't have any creative ideas at all early pandemic I was like wow this would be a great time to write but I actually don't have anything that's ready to go and I remember writing into a prayer saying should I be

working on something right now and instantly came the answer when we've got something for you to do you'll be notified and I don't like well what do I do until then and they're like hang out like hang out be present to the world it's amazing walk around look at stuff you don't have to be

on duty at every moment but when you have to be on duty you really have to be on duty and I think part of the aspiration that I have to both be a relaxed woman and teach and model that to other women is this is the opposite of what women have been taught wait what if I'm not on duty all the time

what if I'm only on duty sometimes and I have to follow a deep inner voice that tells me when that is and what that is and everything else you all can take care of yourselves and that's something that we as women are not taught that we can ever say like I'll do it I'll do it

so I want to actually ask a question that is following up on something in our last conversation and I would say I've definitely put it in the category of me time in a sense which is relatively artist way by Julia Cameron so if I remember correctly I'm looking at notes so

hopefully I'm getting it right that e-Pray love would not exist without the artist way that's a true statement I'm wondering which pieces of it because I don't think we got into the specifics but what pieces of it really made that the case and I for instance one homework assignment that

I've never done from the artist way I'm so embarrassed to say that but it's true is the artist's date I've never done that and so as an example I'm wondering was that a part of it you know is that a part of it for you the artist day is hard yeah it's hard I still have trouble figuring that I want

out sometimes so here I can tell you exactly one I can tell you exactly so one of the things that she does so cleverly in that course is that she keeps asking in the same question like 90 different ways so there are all these questions each week that you have to answer and then there's the

morning pages so there twist and turn them like if you could have three talents what would they be if there were three places in the world that you could visit what would they be if if there was something you wish you had studied what would it be she's coming at it like from 20 different

directions and then there's this point that comes late in the process where she instructs you to go back and read everything they've written and start looking at what keeps showing up because I think one of them mysterious and magical things and weird things about our brains like the secrets we

can keep from ourselves where it's like I didn't even know that about me so when I went back and read Italian was on every page and I was like apparently I really want to fucking learn to speak Italian and I would not have said that that was like a massive priority of my life but apparently my

soul knew that it was an instruction because it was like Italian Italian I kept seeing Italian and I was like why Italian you know it's not useful unless you are in Italy yeah it's not like Spanish like we're spoken across the globe or why why why why and why is not a spiritual question and

never brings a spiritual answer so it's kind of useless but I just went with it and I was like okay and my one of my artist dates was to sign up for Italian glasses without knowing why just because it kept showing up on the page so I did six months of Italian glasses like night school for divorce

ladies at the Y and I loved it so much and I started watching movies in Italian and I started I had no plan for anything I was going to do with it and then I was like well we I want to use this Italian like I want to go to Italy and speak this language but I also have been studying meditation a lot

lately and I want to go to India I also want to go back and then like out of that was born April up so it took me by surprise as much as as anything and maybe you've had that experience in your morning pages where it's like I didn't even know that like I can hide things so far from myself

that I can't even find them that's true for my phone too you mentioned that why is not a spiritual question and doesn't give you spiritual answer something along those lines could you elaborate on that okay anytime I howl into the void any question that begins with why I do not

get an answer I will not be answered I can do two-way prayer from now till god leaves Chicago from now till time gets better and I guess why why why why why and I will not be given an answer that's much more satisfying than what an adult would tell a toddler like at some point I'm just

because because I said so because is I wrote a poem once called the shortest conversation I ever had with god and it's god calling why oh sorry me but why which is again the ego and god because is but there are other questions that I can ask and I do get answers so if I ask questions

at begin with how instead of why how do you want me to move through this I will be given direct instructions who do you want me to serve in this situation who do you want me to be in this moment answers very clear what do you want me to do next that's a really good one that's a big

one in a what's the next intuitive action what's the next right action what would you like me to do right now which is often like get a glass of water you know turn the phone off but why and I think that goes back to you don't even know what you're looking at I think that goes back to we're five

Einstein's away from even having the right questions together right answers but but why is it turns into a black hole that I just fall into and it's this great echoing silence yeah I can be stepping into the quicksand of blame and finger pointing even if that's fingers pointing back

yourself which it often is it makes sense and I was asking you about choosing projects I want to ask you about anxiety specifically purpose anxiety what is purpose anxiety um you're smiling so I see you already know no I don't I don't I mean I can I can I can I can write there in the title

yeah based on the words I can imagine right you can work it out in context yeah I think I can work it out well I mean the story that most of us were taught was some variation of each of you was born with a one unique offering special spark there's only yours and only you can

deliver on that thing it is your job it is your job to find out what that thing is that only you can do meanwhile there's what almost eight billion people on the planet so already here's some pressure because it's got to be something that no one else can do which is

going to be unlikely because there's a lot of us and you know you should find out what that is very young and then you should become the master of that thing and you should devote the 10,000 hours you know way before you're out of adolescence you should already be

pouring yourself into this purpose that you are here to serve and you should become the very best at that thing and then it's not enough to become the best of that thing you have to monetize it and it's not enough to monetize it you also have to create opportunities for others and make sure

that they're also being served by this purpose and if all of this sounds exhausting you were not off the hook even when you die because you must leave a legacy and you must change the world so no pressure but that's it that's it you must change the world and it's like I think it's very

male I think it's very capitalistic it's very self centered it's very like yeah you only must do this thing that only you can do and the world must be altered and like they must know you were here you must leave your mark on the world and I think the world at this point is like I wish maybe that you stopped leaving marks on me like maybe we could use a little less of that and I hardly know anyone who doesn't suffer from purpose anxiety and I know people who are living lives that look from

the outside like they have achieved tremendous purpose and it's a scarcity anxiety so they're up at night wondering if they've done enough have they done the right thing have they left enough of a legacy is this where their energy should have gone it's a theology that is going to leave you

unsatisfied because there's no way to know that you have achieved it and you and I both know people who like are so admired and they're so stressed and they're so unsure about themselves and they feel like they've done it all wrong and they don't know whether they there's a never enoughness to it

that feels a lot like capitalism there's just how much is something you've JP Morgan testifying before congress and them saying like how much money is enough sir and him saying a little more you know it's the same with purpose it's like when will you know that you've made a big enough

impact a little more and what would be the opposite of a purpose driven life would be a I think a life of presence it's also focused entirely in the future constantly and I don't think there's any way that you can live a relaxed or really truly rich or meaningful life if you're constantly

thinking about your fucking legacy yeah but it's like that's it you know you're like how much did I make how much did I leave how much did I impact meanwhile like the world is happening and you're in it and you're missing it I'm reflecting I can't recall the exact you might actually know the

attribution here and I don't know if it's a fictional quote or not but there's some I want to say this huge statue and in the desert that is deteriorated over time and it's half buried and the inscription reads something like I am Aussie man and ideas lord look upon my works and my works

and tremble yeah yeah yeah it's like yep yep that's where it's all headed on the side of it's was along similar lines I often think to myself my here I know these guys are talking about legacy and they gals too but a lot of the guys that I'm it's surrounded by a lot of guys yeah

and it's no reading books and so am I about you know whether it's like Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan or Titan about Rockefeller whatever might be hoping to glean things from these lives and Alexander the Great tell me his last name like what was his full name nobody like nobody can tell me

it's a great do you know I mean his middle name was thought yeah yeah yeah exactly and it's like we're the very least thinking about legacy differently but one thing I am curious to do here your thoughts on is how do you blend in your life do you try to blend presence with other

ingredients for what you deem a life well lived and I'll tell you a story so the story takes place at Omega Institute and I love Omega Institute and I've spent time there in upstate New York and they have amazing classes the one place that they have consistent Wi-Fi is in the cafeteria

coffee shop area where people eat their meals or something so I would sometimes go because I was spending time in upstate New York beautiful campus amazing groundhogs everywhere so I would go sit in the cafe and I would write and I remember this conversation happening next to me so I

wasn't getting any work done but I was you're dropping on this conversation and it was this man and this woman and the guy asked the woman you know I you know I know you've been looking for a job for a while do you find a new gig and she's like no I've been really busy being non-dual oh my god

oh that's like a New Yorker cartoon that's so good okay so there there is maybe a shadow side of presence which could be a lot of naval gazing and maybe that's totally fine and in the grand scheme of things it doesn't make a difference but for yourself personally recognizing that presence

seems to be very additive to one's life are there other ingredients fit you way can I first tell you a story yes please okay so I want to tell you a counter story about a purpose driven life okay but I like your question on and I think this will lead into it

nicely we'll see we'll see if this works so I was in Los Angeles several years ago for a speaking event and I had a free afternoon and I was wandering around Venice Beach and I looked across the street and I saw that there was a guy standing on the top of a ladder painting the awning of

his storefront and I instantly was able to see that the ladder was not steady and I have a very severe ladder sensitivity because I grew up on a farm yeah and my mom was constantly telling me like go out your father's ladder like because my dad was always doing jackass things on the ladder

in the farm so just I'd know nothing else to do I know where else to be and I was the perfect person for the job to cross the street and just hold the guy's ladder and I probably held his ladder for 45 minutes that day and he never saw me because he was doing his thing but I felt

better because I was like I just to make sure this guy doesn't fall today and I'm here and that's a nice afternoon and it was lovely and then when he started to come down and I felt like he was at a safe level I just peeled off and he never saw me and I never saw his face and we never had any interaction but we had this beautiful little exchange and as I was walking away because I was thinking about purpose anxiety and I was thinking what if that was the entire purpose of my life?

Just that moment. Just that moment. Not things like that like try to be kind of people but that that's particular moments that they were like however this thing works it's essential that that guy not fall off his ladder so we're going to need in like sector 7 you know block D on this date we're

going to need somebody to you know really be alert and notice that and we're going to have to send them in have the proper training put around a farm have her like grew up with a father who does jack how are we going to get it L.A. maker writer give her a career have her have her read like

every single other thing I was doing in my life was just killing time until the moment when I was needed and maybe I'm not needed again after that and I would challenge anybody to prove to me that that isn't true because nobody can because nobody knows what's going on and nobody even knows what they're looking at so yes you could go a little too far into that and you could just smoke weed all day and be like are we just a paperweight in God's desk you know we're like ask questions like that but

but I think presence is the greatest gift that you can give to yourself into the world and I think that that line that I so often hear in meditation and on the page when I do two a prayer of you'll be notified is the very opposite of a purpose driven life because a purpose driven life is some

sense that I'm going to forge I'm going to like hack through this forest and make this trail it's going to be named after me and this is what I'll be remembered for and it's so self centered and you'll be notified is a much humbler position to take but it requires a great deal of listening

and it requires like also lately I've been doing these one day a week without my phone because I want more moments like that where I notice somebody on the ladder because I'm not on my phone and I'm super addicted to my phone it's like no I'm not throwing shade against anyone who's addicted

to their phone we all are you know like in a front that I don't stare at my phone 90 million hours a day I do but like that's why I take Thursdays off from it it's because I don't want to miss what's actually happening and I want to be present to the notification when it comes how did you

choose Thursday is it because you might be social on Friday in the weekend yes okay you know Monday's like too much going on Thursday just felt like a day that the world could maybe break that so I'm gonna play doubles advocate and defend folks who maybe in the purpose driven

lane for the moment because I agree that at face value very self-absorbed self-centered however do you think it's possible and this is a leading question so I may go nowhere but that you're more comfortable with death and mortality than a lot of people and that that insecurity uncertainty fear of death maybe that others have to a greater extent leads them to think about these things

more than you. Wow that's such a did not think that was going to be the second half of the question and I also want to say here's the thing about purpose like if you actually are one of those people who from forever has known exactly what you're supposed to be doing and you did become the master of

it and you have monetized it and you are leaving the legacy and like you have what I like to call not a problem right right yeah keep going great like you're you're doing great like but if you have your own muscle crates the shallow things seems to be working for you like but if you're

berating yourself because you feel like there was something you were supposed to be doing maybe they just need you to hang out until you get notified of something that could be as small as holding the ladder I just want to say and that maybe the future of the universe dependent on that ladder being held that day we don't know but your question about death I don't want to get cocky about like oh dear oh death but it's not a fear that lives in me and I know it's

a fear that lives in a lot of people much much much more afraid of people not liking me than I am of dying and that's what I have to suffer with more is like to try to figure out how to disappoint people and say no to people and set boundaries of people that they can survive it and I can survive this is like my work in this lifetime but death to me it doesn't keep me up at night it's not I'm not an argument against it I went with my partner Ray all the way to her death and I was afraid of the

death there were things around it that were scary but has that always been the case when did that fear drop away I'm afraid of pain don't get me wrong like I'm not interested at all being in suffering maybe that's why I'm not afraid of death I'm like well that seems better than

suffering so what's so bad about that so I don't know I come from like really pragmatic people my mom's a nurse my dad's a farmer like I saw a lot of death growing up my mom worked with the dying a lot by the time it came it seemed like it was such a relief for everybody like there was grief

but also people were like shredded by end of life stuff and she sat in a lot of dying people's houses from you know weeks and months on end and you know dying and struggling and then there was this like exhale of death okay now that person has safely been delivered into death that's the feeling I

felt when Ray had died like those of us who were taking care of her and she had a pretty raucous death but those of us who were taking care of her was like we safely got her there we safely got her dead no that's a strange thing to say but like it was hard yeah she was really willful

it was a difficult death but then the moment of the death the instant after the death there's such a such an incredible thing like something happens it isn't what it was like something leaves and then the look that was on her face after she died of like absolute delight absolute delight we

were all a gas not like what what why is she so happy she looks so happy so peaceful it feels like going home to me this place feels a lot weirder to me than death like this planet bananas you know like having a body I mean that's why I used to love to do psychedelics so much before I stopped

doing all that stuff it's like who wants a body like who wants to be incarnated like oh god it's so awkward so no life feels scarier to me than death how did you choose to create your newsletter how did that make the cut for you how did that come in two things one is I'm trying to get off of

the nicotine crack pipe booze bottle that is social media yeah and it's not easy to get off it because I feel like social media is like a party drug that like started off as really fun and now I heard somebody say so beautifully about social media I wish I could remember who said it

everyone's now everyone's abusing it and no one's getting high anymore like the fun like like everyone's addicted to it and the high is gone and I'm looking for ways I love connection I loved that feeling at the beginning of social media that we can all connect with one another yeah

before everyone started peeing in the pool oh my god you know before everyone started propping up Putin and it's like wait what pool party is this like what just happened to democracy like we've just discovered that this thing is very very very dangerous and venomous and so

I've been looking for another place to go to be able to to have dialogue with people and sub-stack so far has been a really good spot for that it's like a reverse technology so could you explain how that works because I think a lot of people thinking of a newsletter they're like well

hold on a second how does interaction work in that type of format you can comment so there's like so I send out a newsletter once a week it's essentially like a 90s technology it's basically a blog so it's like a high-end blog so people subscribe and then a newsletter goes out to them and

there's video attachments and things and then you can comment and then people can comment on each other's comments so it's very similar it looks very similar to what social media looks like but because it's a subscription it keeps the haters out because it's self-selecting and I've been

on this thing for a year and have had not one problem with any incredible I know it's incredible I mean it's also like a self-selecting thing because this is a group of really lovely people who are doing this beautiful project together so that's how I decided to go over there. What could people expect if they went to Elizabeth Gilbert dot substack dot com to subscribe to

your newsletter? Well every week I will talk to you and I will talk about this process of learning how to write and speak to yourself towards yourself from a place of friendliness and love in order to combat this just awful virus of self-patured that we also need to be so infected with

that comes also with perfectionism and black and just bringing a different voice into the cacophony of voices in your head and I'll read one of the letters that I've written to myself from love and then there'll be a special guest and the special guests are really the best part

because it's everybody from like act like Tony Colette did one and Colin and Doyle did one and musicians and poets and artists and writers but then also like random people who I meet and I meet them in my travels and I'm like you are radiating so much light

that I want to ask you why are you so lit like why are you so bright and shiny and what is that and what would love have to say to you if it could speak to you and people who I meet and find inspiring there was a young woman who I met in Denmark this year I was on tour and so she had read

my book Big Magic and because of that book she was Japanese and she's an engineer and she worked on a construction site in Japan but she'd always wanted to be an artist and she started making art again after she read Big Magic and then she took the leap and she quit her construction job in Japan

and saved her money and moved to Denmark and is going to graphic design school and her art is gorgeous and I was like hey will you do a letter from love because obviously there's something moving through you that's really special and I would love to hear what love has to say to you

through you and so it's like every week you'll get a special guest I've had children do it my friends 11 year old son who was going through a really hard time being bullied at school he wrote one and it was beautiful and love said to him not everybody has to like you you don't have to be

everybody's cup of tea that was literally in this 11 year old kids you don't have to be everybody's cup of tea like we love you he felt there was a we it's really interesting a lot of people when they write the letters the voice that comes to them operates as a we like it's some sort of consortium

of like ancestors and spirits and guides and it's like your team like there's this feeling that people are getting where they're like do I have a team like I seem to have some sort of a team that wants to love me so I've had developmentally disabled people do it and access love there's

this amazing artist named BJ who in my town in New Jersey there's this arts collective for developmental disabled people and he did a song about himself called I love BJ three different ways that's like one of the greatest songs ever heard this basically just him talking about what how lovable he is

so that's what you can expect and then if you're a subscriber you can post your own letters from love each week and what's happening in that community is that people are creating collectives and friendships with each other they're having meetups and cities around the world

and they're starting to become like it's the kindest corner of the internet I truly think and slowly I feel like it's dissolving and breaking down the walls of self-hatred it's what we're doing over there I love it and people can go to Elizabeth Gilbert dot sub stack back home we'll put that in

the show notes as well that's the best place to direct people yeah I mean I'm on social media about who cares anymore that's where my heart is my heart is in the sub stack newsletter and after years of doing this privately in my own space and then starting to gradually teach it in

workshops I finally feel like I'm ready to like really bring this to anybody who wants to try it I love it I know I said that but I'll say it again it's solid cause solid mission it's my purpose this is your purpose purpose that follows the presence

is there anything else Lizzie you'd like to say any request you'd like to make my audience comments public complaints about my podcasting style anything at all that you'd like to say before leaving me the chance to make the public complaints about your podcasting style I've been crawling

out of my skin I'll send you a bunch of notes no I just I just want to say can you imagine that something might love you there's a quote that's often misattributed to Einstein it wasn't Einstein it was this 19th century philosopher named Frederick Myers and his friend asked him

if there was one thing that you want to know more than anything if you could ask the Sphinx one question what would it be and Myers said it would be this is the universe friendly and it's often misattributed to Einstein saying that Einstein said that the most important question

you could ask about your life was is the universe friendly or not he didn't infect say that but he did answer the question in his own way because he was examining that as well and he said subtle as the Lord but malicious he is not I hate to gender God but anyway I think it is a really

interesting question to live in for your entire life and it's a really interesting question that I ask myself when I'm in moments of great trial here on earth school which as you know I've already expressed my belief is a very difficult curriculum and it's like is this a friendly

universe or is this a malicious universe and if it's malicious then life is pointless suffering and if it's friendly the suffering might have a point and if it's friendly what might the point be and where can I find that and how do you want me to move through this now assuming that it's friendly

how do you want me to move through this terrible looking thing um and so the question I think that I'm constantly bringing to people especially when they say I try to and it just feels really weird and uncomfortable to say kind things to myself I'm like yeah because you've got decades of training

of saying garbage things to yourself and anytime you try to do something new it's going to be hard and it's going to feel awkward and it's going to feel it definitely doesn't feel normal because normal is your history's greatest garbage can you are just a pile of worthless not you know

like it's you have never done enough you'll never be enough you should be ashamed of yourself who do you think you are I mean that's the normal dialogue but Annie Lamont calls radio k-fucked that's funny and most of our heads at all the times and what about our negative bias thinking

is always trained toward worst possible outcome but could it just as likely be that you are loved and lovable as despicable and somebody who should be ashamed of themselves why not and why not try it on try it on like a pair of boots and take it for a walk and then do it again tomorrow and see what it does to your mind thank you Liz I love spending time with you I love spending time with you Tim you are such a delight you are just such a delight I never know where we're going to go

and I'm always so happy about where we went it's a fun adventure always talking to you so thank you and I really appreciate it I really really appreciate the time and the thoughts and the wisdom and the reflections and to everybody listening as always we will have the show notes links to everything including Liz's substack at Elizabeth Gilbert dot substack dot com you'll be able to find all that at Tim.luxlux.com podcast and until next time be just a little bit kinder than necessary not just

others but to yourself and as always thanks for tuning in hey guys this is Tim again just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet Friday would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a half and two

million people subscribed to my free newsletter my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday easy to sign up easy to cancel it is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week it's kind

of like my diary of cool things it often includes articles on reading books on reading albums perhaps gadgets gizmos all sorts of tech tricks and so on they get sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them

and then I share them with you so if that sounds fun again it's very short a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend something to think about if you'd like to try it out just go to tim.log slash Friday type that into your browser tim.log slash Friday drop in your

email and you'll get the very next one thanks for listening way back in the day in 2010 I published a book called the four hour body which I probably started writing in 2008 and in that book I recommended many many many things first generation continuous glucose monitor and cold exposure and all sorts of things that have been tested by people from NASA and all over the place and one thing in that book was athletic green so I did not get paid to include it I was using it that's how long

I've been using what is now known as age one. Age one is my all in one nutrition insurance and I just packed up for instance to go off the grid for a while and the last thing I left out on my countertop to remember to take I'm not making this up looking right in front of me is travel packets

of age you want so rather than taking multiple pills or products to cover your mental clarity got healthy now with energy and so on you can support these areas through one daily scoop of age one which tastes great even with water I always just have them with water I usually take a first

thing in the morning and it takes me less than two minutes to honestly taking less than a minute just put in a share of model shake it up and I'm done age one bolsters my digestion and nutrient absorption by including ingredients optimized to support a healthy gut in every scoop age one in

a single sort of travel packs I mentioned earlier also makes for the perfect travel and pain and I'll actually be going totally off the grid but these things are incredibly incredibly space efficient you can even put them in a book frankly I'm in there kind of like book

marks after consuming this product for more than a decade I chose to invest in age one in 2021 as I trust their no compromise approach to ingredients or saying and appreciate their focus on continuously improving one formula they go above and beyond by testing for 950 or so contaminants

and impurities compared to the industry standard of 10 age you want is also tested for heavy metals and 500 various pesticides herbicides I'm starting paying a lot of attention to pesticides that's some story for another time to make sure you're consuming only the good stuff age one is

also NSF certified for sport that means if you're nothing you can take it the certification process is exhaustive and involves the testing verification of each ingredient and every finished batch of age one so they take testing very seriously there's no better time than today to start a new

healthy habit and this is an easy one wake up water in the shake or bottle age you want boom so take advantage of this exclusive offer for you my dear podcast listeners a free one-year supply of liquid vitamin D plus five travel packs with your subscription simply go to drink

a G one dot com slash Tim that's the number one drink a G one dot com slash Tim for a free one year supply with liquid vitamin D plus five travel packs with your first subscription purchase learn more drink a G one dot com slash tip if you ever use public wifi saying at a hotel or coffee shop

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