When we started this project six months ago, we could feel the cliff-edge of the election on the horizon. We could sense that our footholds of community, reasonable conversation, and consensus reality were eroding. As veterans of spirituality and wellness spaces, we’ve always known that the reality has never lived up to the hype. But the intensification of conspirituality themes, incubating during lockdown into the peak fever-state of QAnon, has made this period especially demoralizing. What do we need now, on the eve of uncertainty? What will we need going forward?
This week, we take some time to explore thoughts and feelings about this menacing week, and how we’re contemplating and committing to the long haul through our work, relationships, and self-care. We’re joined by special guests Hala Khouri, Tara Stiles, and Lissa Rankin, who all offer their wisdom.
Show Notes
Lissa Rankin takes a stand with Rebekah Borucki
Heal at Last: the nonprofit aimed at democratizing healing
Alchemizing Uncertain Times Through Writing
10 New Age Beliefs We Need To Debunk If We Want To Be Social Justice Allies
The Psychology Of People Who Believe Conspiracy Theories
Mind Over Medicine — Lissa’s book
QAnon’s Predictions Haven’t Come True; So How Does the Movement Survive the Failure of Prophecy?
The Republican strategy for every Supreme Court nominee: Hide what you believe
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Conspiratuality 23.
Election resilience.
When we started this project six months ago, we could feel the cliff edge of the election on the horizon.
We could sense that our footholds of community, reasonable conversation, and consensus reality were eroding.
As veterans of spirituality and wellness spaces, we've always known that the reality has never lived up to the hype.
But the intensification of conspirituality themes incubating during lockdown into the peak fever state of QAnon has made this period especially demoralizing.
What do we need now on the eve of uncertainty?
What will we need going forward?
This week, we take some time to explore thoughts and feelings about this menacing time and how we're contemplating and committing to the long haul through our work, relationships, and self-care.
We're joined by special guests, Hala Curry, Tara Stiles and Lissa Rankin, all of whom offer their wisdom.
When I was 14, I would climb over the back wall to our school.
It was less than two blocks from our front door, but to get to the school entrance would have taken at least another 10 or 15 minutes to walk all the way around.
Sliding down off that back wall let me in right beside the workers' compound, where the groundskeepers, gardeners, maids, kitchen staff, and woodshop assistants all lived.
Big John was the head cook for all the kids who also lived in the, of course, much nicer accommodations of this Anglican church boarding school.
It was private and expensive.
And the main reasons my parents had scraped together the cash to send my brother and I to St.
Martin's was because it was one of only a handful of schools in South Africa that legally educated black and white kids together.
It was also the only one on the wrong side of the tracks where we lived in Rosettinville, a suburb of Johannesburg.
This was 1984.
Apartheid was in its 36th year and the explicitly white supremacist National Party had been in power that entire time.
Most mornings, Big John would be smoking a giant joint with his significantly large rear end sat on an upturned steel industrial drum looking out with serene eyes over the soccer field below the workers' compound.
He would talk with this skinny white boy for a couple minutes in his broken English after I said, good morning.
Our conversation usually ended the same way.
John would look at me with heavy-lidded, bloodshot eyes and ask, when do you think they're going to give Mandela the big chair?
Now just to be clear, he meant the throne, not execution.
Besides, the performed form was hanging in South Africa at that time, and through most of the 80s, the apartheid government executed more people each year than any other country in the world.
But Nelson Mandela was at that time 22 years into what would end up being a 27-year prison sentence for plotting to overthrow the government.
He was what they called a banned person, meaning I, in my 14 years, had never seen a photograph of him, never heard his voice, or seen any of his speeches in written form.
All of that was illegal.
Mandela was a shadowy and mythic figure, either the worst communist terrorist in South African history or the heroic president-in-waiting, depending on who you asked.
I would always shake my head and say, I don't know, Big John, but I hope it will be soon.
By the time I graduated, the armed struggle and fascist response had escalated.
There were bombings.
There were draconian state of emergency laws that forbade public protest and imposed massive fines and jail time, if you were white, for being involved in any progressive political organization.
Your plight was much worse, of course, if you were black.
The state controlled the media, one TV channel, one radio broadcast network, one version of the news, censored newspapers, and torture and jail time for any journalists deemed to be subversive and a threat to national security.
I filed papers that year as a conscientious objector.
A schoolmate one year ahead of me named Charles Bester was part of the first group of three boys in the country's history to refuse the two-year military service required of all white males.
My group, the second group, had 1,100 boys in it.
Charles, our hero, was at that time serving the mandatory six-year jail sentence.
I knew I was getting out of the country, with the British passport my mother had been able to procure for me tucked up my sleeve.
But it was an election year, an election for whites only, in which the white nationalist majority party was guaranteed to win.
I was old enough to vote, and on election day my dad came home from work and asked if I had gone to the polls yet.
I told him I wasn't planning to because it was a farce.
My father gave me that singular look, reserved for matters of the utmost moral principle, the look that perfectly blended a fiery emotional conviction with disdainful insistence on what was the right thing to do, and a physically palpable sense of how great the ensuing disapproval would be if defied.
You have to vote, he said.
You are voting for 10 black people who cannot.
He drove me there.
That was the only time I ever voted in my home country.
Two years later, I voted in an election in England, after witnessing my first free election campaign and seeing how any candidate with more than 5% in the polls was given equal time on television at no cost to make their case and then, for their trouble, would be mercilessly grilled by hard-nosed journalists.
The next year, I landed in LA during the Republican National Convention of 1991 and lay in bed, jet lagged, with the TV on, just stunned, both by the ridiculous circus of American politics and witnessing the beginnings of what would become the conservative Christian ascendancy amongst the GOP.
That should have been 92, by the way.
Nelson Mandela became South Africa's first black president in 1994, and I wish I could have seen the size of the joint Big John smoked that day.
The socio-political shadow of those formative years has never left me while riding the American ups and downs from Clinton to Bush Jr.
to Obama and now through the cursed times we live in.
Of course, I was emotionally ecstatic in 2008.
The resonances were so deep, seeing Obama take the big chair, even if behind bulletproof glass.
But this is the year I am most in touch with the memory of what it felt like to live under the turmoil of police state tyranny and an uncertainty that for me is infused with a lived reference point for how bad things can actually get.
I love America.
I came here because I wanted to live in Los Angeles since I was five years old.
I loved MLK and Woodstock and Kerouac and Ginsberg, Coppola and Coltrane and Hendrix and Farrah Fawcett and Bill Cosby and the melting pot sensibility that to the rest of the world at that time represented the best cultural experiment going.
Though I grew up in Johannesburg, I was born in Zimbabwe and was tickled when the government representatives from that country offered to come and be independent observers of America's next election after the contested debacle in 2000.
A pointed joke, ironic because of how often America had tried to supervise elections in post-colonial African states.
Now?
As the presidency in America has gone the way of the Cosby Show in my jaded psyche, and we stand at the edge of this new precipice, I can't help but be reminded of Trevor Noah's comments after the 2016 election when he said, I want to congratulate America for electing its first African-style dictator.
I can only hope that my countrymen has an equally memorable joke we can enjoy in five days time if and when this chaotic chapter is unequivocally ended with a resounding landslide against the apocalyptically incompetent incumbent.
I want to first correct something.
The conservative Christian movement, some would argue that it actually has been around since the founding of the country, but really it's the John Birch Society and then Roe v. Wade that created that.
And so when Jimmy Carter was president, that's when it was really being planned.
I mean, Reagan totally fit the mold of what they wanted to start to create.
You had 12 years of it going by the time Clinton got into office, so that movement has been around for some time.
I'm actually going to touch upon that in my talk.
Yeah.
I was sort of under the impression, again, as an immigrant, right, that Carter still had the evangelicals on the side of the Democrats.
Well, no, Carter is probably the truest Christian.
What does he do now?
He's in his nineties and he's out building houses.
Like he, his entire thing, he lives the gospels more than any Republican that's around today.
So, so reflect, and that's, that's the distance between the ethical Christian and living up to the morals of Christianity compared to the political conservative Christian, which is what we're dealing with today.
Yeah.
Well, to me, as a 21, 22 year old, it was lying in bed with jet lag, watching Pat Buchanan talk about lesbians and communists and the anti-Christian agenda of the left.
I played some part of Jimmy Carter's speech during one of my... Jared Yates Sexton had brought that up a few episodes ago.
And he brought up that speech, which is considered one of the darkest American speeches.
But what is that speech actually doing?
He's asking Christians to practice Christianity, and the conservative Christians got mad about it.
Why?
Because he questioned American exceptionalism.
He said, no, we're going to live up to our morals, and conservatives are like, no, we're not.
We're not going to do that, and so it's considered a dystopic speech when it's actually a call to action for Christianity, and we've never actually had a conservative since that time do the same thing.
At least not on that level of the presidential level.
I just gotta say that it's such a beautifully crafted essay, Julian, and sort of circling back to wondering How big John felt at the end of that and just missing him and also not being able to get a sense of how, you know, Mandela's ascendancy finally really landed for all of the people that you knew.
That's it's it's such an aching story, but thank you so much for sharing that.
That's really it was really awesome.
Thank you.
And one thing I'll add to that just in terms of the reality of Of being in that kind of police state censored state controlled media situation is the other thing I missed out on besides the you know the the yearning to go back and see black friends and acquaintances and say finally you got your way finally injustice has been overthrown was all the white kids I grew up with who I had no idea about the realities of apartheid.
Many of them had no idea that we were in the minority in the country.
And I would say to them from the time I was 9 or 10 years old, you will see one day you're going to get your comeuppance.
You're going to have to deal with the reality of this country.
And they would say, oh, you're crazy.
So that was another thing as I came into my adulthood of just being like, I wonder how those kids are dealing now that they're grown up.
Can I just ask you too about the status of Mandela as the band person?
You said that you didn't have access to, you didn't see his photograph, or obviously he wasn't on state television.
Did you literally never, did you not know what he looked like?
No.
You just, he was just a name.
Truly mythic.
So he, there's this bizarre This is a bizarre, bizarre parallel to Q, actually.
In a very strange way.
But the actual real freedom fighter, the person who actually is, you know, who is being muzzled or who must be silent.
But what an incredible... Now that would have been true for, obviously, all of his colleagues and all of his... Absolutely.
Okay, well that's a whole episode, I suppose, in figuring out how he maintained some kind of presence in the imaginarium of his followers.
Yeah, I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
The country was so effectively segregated that I don't know, amongst the real resistance that was happening when I was that age, how they were maintaining their sense of him.
But I know, by the time I got to university and was involved in protests that were illegal, Then I got to really, you know, get the sense of how much he lived in the In the yearnings and the imagination of the protest movement.
I'm wondering and that was the second thing that came up during your talk about the parallels between now because right now we have a whole contingent of the United States who doesn't think that racism exists that doesn't believe in implicit bias and that also thinks that and then and then on the on the flip side of that we have a whole liberal cohort
Who thinks that Biden is going to get elected next week and that things are going to start to go back to normal very soon, when that is not going to happen.
And so from both ends, you have this lack of imagination, really, because people just want To get back to somewhere where they feel that they were more steady.
And I wonder when when you were in it at that nine and ten and then in high school, do you see parallels right now with just people, the willful ignorance of the people around you?
Like how many people do you think recognized that privilege?
You said where they just that you were the minority, but you didn't act like you didn't feel like your general white people in South Africa.
Like, do you see parallels between then and now in that sense?
I see parallels.
I mean, I think the single most striking thing for me when I first came to live here was recognizing that it was still a segregated society, even though it wasn't on the legal books, right?
And so I think the parallels right now are between recognizing the reality of privilege and how Unaware people can be of what's really going on in the way that segregation made that the case and state controlled media made that the case in South Africa.
And also the fact that we're, it's a cliche to say at this moment in time, right?
That we're so polarized that people are just in their own reality bubbles and that the facts, the facts are not agreed upon.
My wife brought this up yesterday because she worked in hospitality and she still has friends who do.
Some of them, their hotels are open, their restaurants are open, so she communicates with them.
She was talking to her old boss yesterday, actually, and her old boss still works in hotels and helps to run the restaurant and the hotel, and a customer threw food at her because she was upset about something.
And what she said was that right now what you're experiencing in America, the people that are traveling are only leisure travelers who have a certain level of privilege because there's no business travel really.
And then a lot of people aren't traveling because of the situation.
So you have this sort of privileged class that's the ones that's going out to restaurants regularly and then traveling.
And it is creating even more of a nightmare for hospitality workers in that sense because they are so detached.
They just continue to live their life not realizing what is happening around them.
And that's creating a lot of strife.
And it's throwing people off.
And it's really a sad state right now.
The other day, I noticed a question on one of our Instagram posts.
Do you guys believe in anything spiritual?
I can't answer for Julian or Matthew, but here's what I know.
I've talked about fragments of my history in previous episodes.
Having not grown up with any faith, I decided to major in religion in college because I was fascinated by storytelling.
The notion that the Earth rests on a giant turtle, or that a blue-throated god is powerful enough to drink the world's oceans and hold the toxins in his throat to cleanse humanity, are indicative of the vast expanse of our imagination.
I never bought into any one story because then you're effectively saying the others aren't true.
Instead, I appreciated them for what they are, the whims of our mind projecting outward in a captivating manner.
Now just because there aren't really elephant-headed babies does nothing to diminish the power of the story.
You can both appreciate it for what it is and recognize it's not literal.
Writers have known that since the inception of the written word, and storytellers have known that for far longer.
Well, some of them at least.
After studying religion academically and then journalistically, I fell in love with neuroscience in 2005.
If you really want to understand an origin mythology, look no further than the creator of every religion, the human brain.
For anyone skeptical that the sciences are rooted in materialism and destroy the magic of the imagination, listen to this passage from V.S.
Ramachandran's book, The Tell-Tale Brain.
There is a widespread fear among scholars in the humanities and arts that science may someday take over their discipline and deprive them of employment.
A syndrome I have dubbed Neuron Envy.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Our appreciation of Shakespeare is not diminished by the existence of a universal grammar or Chomskyan deep structure underlying all languages.
Nor should the diamond you are about to give your lover lose its radiance or romance if you tell her that it is made of carbon and was forged in the bowels of the earth when the solar system was born.
In fact, the diamond's appeal should be enhanced.
Similarly, our conviction that great art can be divinely inspired or may have spiritual significance, or that it transcends not only realism but reality itself, should not stop us from looking for those elemental forces in the brain that govern our aesthetic impulses.
Now, let's be real for a moment.
Conservative religious believers in America have been playing a long game.
For decades.
They don't get caught up in the outrage of the day.
There's a level of discipline and group cohesion there that liberals have always lacked.
And we need to learn to stop getting caught wasting our time in ground skirmishing when there's a much larger war going on.
Nearly 20 years ago, I read an article about Christian universities specifically training young Republicans to become judges, lawyers, and politicians.
And we're seeing the manifestation of that training this week.
They couldn't have envisioned Trump back then, but they certainly exploited his victory by supporting him.
And so far, he's appointed 216 federal judges and three Supreme Court justices.
And those judges are chosen and vetted by a conservative religious think tank called the Federalist Society.
In the coming months, Roe v. Wade is going to be overturned, and Obamacare will be disassembled, with the pre-existing conditions clause overturned.
They have been training for this for a long time.
And while a civil war is debatable, civic unrest is unavoidable.
Now, this is the definition of karma.
Actions have consequences.
And we have to now live through the consequences of a concerted and powerful conservative religious movement that doesn't want women to control their bodies and doesn't give a damn if you can't afford health assurance.
Trump is not leaving office without doing even more serious damage if he's going to leave at all.
He's already signaled that he won't accept the results, and he will declare victory on election day even though the votes will not all be counted.
No magical thinking is going to change any of this.
Now, I know this episode is about self-care, and I'll conclude with an observation and my own practice.
First, to the question of spirituality.
If by that term you mean a spirit detached from my body, then no, I don't have the time or patience for such a belief.
There's no evidence that's the case, and decades of research showing it's not.
Magical thinking is partly what got us into this very real mess we're in right now.
And just because I don't believe in a spirit, or the idea that the stars lining up in a certain direction are influencing divine behavior, doesn't mean I don't appreciate the beauty of being alive, or the resilience of humans.
Now, if by spirituality you mean the spirit, that is the fortitude and discipline of trying to be a good and compassionate human being in your thoughts, deeds, and actions, then yeah, I'm all for it, and that is what I strive for.
Thing is, my self-care practices are not very marketable.
I eat a balanced diet, a bit of meat, a ton of vegetables.
I sleep eight hours a night.
I have a few drinks on the weekend and I regularly microdose cannabis edibles because it helps my anxiety.
I work out incessantly because I have my entire life and my routine is balanced between weightlifting, Cardiovascular exercise, which is mostly on a road bike, and mobility exercises like yoga, stretching, and gymnastics warm-ups.
I read every single day because I train my mind as thoroughly as my body, and I meditate on occasion and would like to do more.
And I try to be kind to myself and those closest to me.
And sometimes I fail, and sometimes I succeed.
I don't like violence, but I do know how to defend myself.
In general, I put a lot of weight on my shoulders, and the preceding practices around sleep, diet, and exercise help to balance that out.
Now, finally, here's the core of my practice.
As someone who has spent a lot of time in hospitals, as a patient and even an employee, and as someone who has previously battled anxiety disorder for a long time, I try to keep in mind how hard life can be and extend that feeling out to others.
That doesn't happen on a cosmic level.
It happens in everyday mundane reality.
For example, I don't text and drive and I use my blinkers because the roads weren't only made for me.
I wear a mask and I keep my distance out of respect for others.
My self-care is remembering I'm not the only self walking around this planet.
And in all of my years of religious study, I have never found any better advice than Rabbi Hillel's golden rule.
That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.
That is the whole Torah.
The rest is the explanation.
Go and learn.
And that's how I take care of myself.
You know, I don't want to crowd over all the wonderful things you said after it, but I do want to just say that I have multiple times referred to Ramachandran as my Elvis.
He is such a fan.
If you listeners have never read or watched him speak, he is one of the most He's a fascinating neuroscientist.
He is the man who realized that there's something called phantom limb pain, which is when you have an amputation, you can feel pain there because of the nerve endings in your brain.
And there are ways to actually, he created the mirror box which trained out of that.
And that really helped me because having had one of my testicles removed from cancer, I actually did have that pain for a while and it gave me some context.
Yeah, which was really weird.
But I mean, it's nothing to the effect of people who lose arms or legs.
I don't want to make that comparison.
But when you lose something, you actually feel it there for a while after.
And it took me about two years to stop feeling that pain there.
But you know, I didn't need a mirror box for that one.
But I highly suggest checking out his work.
Yeah, and The Telltale Brain is really his most accessible book.
His other books are a lot more technical.
The Telltale Brain is a brilliant set of essays, each tackling some different case that he solved.
He's often called the Sherlock Holmes of neurology because people bring their unsolvable brain injury cases from all over the world to him.
And he really just with his mind engages in a bunch of thought experiments.
It could be this, it could be that and figures out what is going on with them and how to address it.
He's incredible.
And he's a fantastically engaging speaker.
He rolls his R's.
He's got this very thick kind of Indian accent and he wears leather jackets.
And I met him once and was so amazed at how old and frail he actually was when I was standing talking to him because his personality is so larger than life when he's on the stage.
yeah - Yeah.
I was really happy, Derek, to hear all of your points of self-care because what I've noticed just from working with you over the last six months is that you do put a lot on your shoulders and you're extraordinarily disciplined and I often have the impression that
Maybe, I don't know, maybe that's something you left off the list, which is that it feels like you set very specific goals, and then you work to meet them, and I get a sense of dignity in that, that comes across.
And I also just, you know, for the listeners, we're on Slack, like, all day long, and, you know, I think on the same day that Derek published his book on psychedelic therapy.
He also posted a personal best record of a deadlift of 400 pounds or something like that.
But then if you send a message, he'll say, I'll get back to you in five minutes because there's X number of kilometers left in my ride.
And everything is, there's a little bit of the Bill's brain going on with Eric where if you had a personal assistant, and I'm wondering if you were ever late, if I could ask them that, you know?
Yeah, and then when we sort of get overwhelmed with trying to keep up with Slack, he's like, oh yeah, this is one of five Slack accounts that I'm monitoring.
Yeah, yeah.
And then the other sort of subtext here though is that Julian and I are both parenting and so there's a little bit of like humor over that too about what our babies are, you know?
Oh yeah, no, and I said I'm not having children because I think that would really throw me off.
I don't know how you guys do it.
Well, it totally does throw you off, yeah.
There's no question.
No, your life is over, as you know it.
There's no going back.
It absolutely throws you off.
There's no you, actually, to be thrown off anymore.
Regarding time, yeah.
My father would wake me up at 6am on Saturdays and Sundays because he thought that was sleeping in.
Yeah.
And so I had to get up to start to watch the cartoons.
I mean, he was a military guy, so he was that disciplined and that carried over.
When you guys aren't starting to record by 12.01, I'm ready on Slack to be like, hey guys, we're starting at halftime.
So, thank you for dealing with my neuroses around that, but yes, it's a way of structuring my life is important, but it's also stressful.
It is a hard balance, and you know, this episode, a lot of listeners have said, you know, you guys are always breaking things down.
How do you take care of yourselves and self-care?
We all have our methods and they do help, but that doesn't mean... I would never try to project an image of, I've got it all together, because that is just not true.
But we do these things that help to alleviate some of the stress of just trying to get by in this world we're in, I think.
Well, we appreciate your thoroughness, conscientiousness, reliability.
It's aspirational to me, so thank you so much.
And I wanted to add too that what you started off with in that piece, it's, you know, it's It's of the essence for me, that sense of recognizing that there is absolutely nothing about being informed by science or being committed to rationality that robs life and reality of its magic, of its wonder.
In fact, quite the opposite.
And I know there are many of our heroes that I'm sure all three of us share that have said that, but you said it really beautifully and the quote you marshaled to that cause was perfect.
Well, maybe at a certain point we could do a little discussion, maybe not this episode, on, we use the term spiritual bypassing an awful lot, and I often wonder whether there's actually a bit of a redundancy in the term, in the sense that I'm not exactly sure what
We are talking about collectively when we talk about spirituality and that so often because it's used to abstract ourselves or it's used to devalue our, you know, the wonders of our material existence, sometimes it seems like all spiritualities are kind of bypassing, you know what I mean?
It's like, so anyway, that's always struck me as a funny phrase.
Well that's why I added that part about like what you mean by spirit because at first I just had the no I don't believe but I there is a spirit that you can have and you can feel and again like what Julian just said if you understand the neurochemistry of this and how that How your nervous system interacts with your environment, which is not talked about nearly enough in modern spirituality, is that relationship you have to the environment.
I mean, Georg Farrestein was doing this at the end of his career, at the end of his life, when he was writing about green yoga, and why a true yoga is environmentally minded.
That's so important, and that's often overlooked to what I refer to as the magical thinking aspect of it, of just thinking that there are cosmic forces that are going to make everything okay at some point.
Because that really takes you away from the groundwork which has to be done on a daily basis.
Yeah, and I think when we do have time for that conversation, part of what will likely come out of it is how each of us think about questions like what is of the most value?
What is the purpose of your life?
What is it that you hold as sacred?
And how do you then relate that to awareness practices or embodiment or emotional intelligence, right?
And that so much of what gets passed around as spirituality tends to be a dumbing down or a disconnecting from the things that we probably identify as sacred.
So election-wise, I'm terrified for the U.S., and for the rest of the world, so there's that.
But from the point of view of our project here, the thing that I think we're going to have to track going forward is how the conspirituality to QAnon landscape is going to have to pivot in relation to the various outcomes.
So, we're going to link in the show notes to a great article in Religious Dispatches by Amara Singham in Argentino.
It's called, QAnon's Predictions Haven't Come True, So How Does the Movement Survive the Failure of Prophecy?
And this, it harkens back to a famous old 1956 study called, When Prophecy Fails, by a social psychologist named Festinger and a couple of his colleagues, and it detailed what happened to a 1950s doomsday UFO cult.
When the world didn't end as expected.
Now, with a Biden landslide, fingers crossed, QAnon's world won't end, but they will have to create even more elaborate stories around Trump's saviorship and Q's genius, and that will mean that the rhetoric will have to escalate and that the devotees will be further isolated.
Now, I also predict, and we'll definitely be tracking this, that the ways in which the broader field or, you know, football team of conspiritualists will have to intensify their propaganda, they're going to have to intensify their propaganda to match the rising death counts.
COVID is basically uncontrolled in the US, and in my opinion, that means that it's purpose-built for the uncontrolled charisma that runs this particular subculture.
The worse it gets, The more Northrop, you know, Sayerji, Zach Bush et al.
are going to have to deny and agitate and warn about authoritarianism, but then also they're going to have to ratchet up their promises of safe community and, you know, the fact that you can, you know, you should live free without masks.
So, the sunken costs are going to get heavier and heavier, and it'll be interesting to see who, if anybody, is going to be the first apostate.
Because at this point, the stakes are so high, you know, for somebody like Christiane Northrup to begin to walk back.
any of the claims that she's made or any of the positions that she's taken.
It would almost like be admitting to criminal negligence.
It would almost be like turning oneself in.
So those are my kind of election thoughts.
But this is a self-care episode, and we're going to transition into three excellent interviews that we all did.
You know, and I'm excited about platforming them today.
But, you know, when I think about how I'm caring for myself, to be honest, I kind of feel like an empty shell.
And I think part of this is, you know, just repression.
I think it has a male quality to it.
I think it has a white quality to it.
You'll hear in my interview with Lissa Rankin that she's talking about how she has dance parties with her teenage daughter in the living room.
And I heard her say that and all I could think about was how shy I have felt in the past around dancing.
I mean, I can get into it.
I can dance if I'm not too depressed.
And I come close to dancing when I wrestle with our four-year-old.
But part of feeling hollow around self-care is also about guilt, because I'm very aware of how much worse off so many other people are.
And this leads to, for me, a kind of dissociation from my own feelings around how everything is actually terrible and intense the world over.
So there's a part of me that doesn't really feel allowed to feel it.
There's also this distancing problem of abstraction and spectacle, and, you know, the barrage of headlines is always intense, always absurd, and just two things that, you know, stood out this week.
I mean, I know that technically anyone can be confirmed to the Supreme Court, but I missed the memo about Amy Coney Barrett never having tried a case.
and only ever having worked on civil cases before.
So she's even less plausible as a candidate than Kavanaugh.
Am I right?
Yeah, and she's been a judge for three years.
Yeah, so the stuff that we're, the bizarro, Pynchonesque world that we're going to hear about over the next 10 years coming out of this White House.
Anyway, it's like that stole away my capacity for wonderment in some other part of the world.
Like just seeing that imagery, and part of that is about my own exposure to media, but the abstraction and the spectacle of things is very difficult to manage.
and And it increases for me a sense of distance from myself and a potential for dissociation.
And I actually had this very strange thought yesterday, which is a very difficult thing to admit.
We had a cat who died last year.
He'd been with me for 15 years, and my family for about seven years, and he died in our arms, and we buried him together, and that was a really great experience.
But what's bizarre is that I kind of wish he had hung around until now and died this week, because I think if that had happened, I would have been able to focus my grief on something, like in my arms, because I feel like I need to have a really good cry, right?
So, with regard to self-care, I don't know.
I'm sitting here in my study surrounded by bookcases filled with yoga and meditation books and, like, I just hate every one of them.
I know all of that stuff and it's sitting there, however, like it's speaking into another world or to some sort of older self.
They all seem obsolete.
Also, you know, as per the Hay House episode that we did last week and for the bonus episode, I sometimes look at the rows of books and I think, even the good ones on those shelves are like bystanders for the books by cult leaders and abusers.
Even the good ones are like, hey, like I'm looking at, you know, Richard Freeman's Mirror of Yoga or something like that.
And I'm like, I liked that book once.
And I'm like, but wait a minute, you knew what was going on?
Come on.
So anyway, something out of those books got through to me in terms of self-care nonetheless.
But you know, I just, what I do to take care of myself just can't come from books or wise people.
Certainly not influencers.
I feel like if I took any advice from anyone, you know, I still I feel like I was taking advice from the somebody at the from the concierge at the Omega Institute or something.
That I was taking advice from an industry rather than an elder, which is its own problem.
I do have some elders in my life and I really treasure them.
But I think that's something that so many of us don't have access to.
But I still have the habit of looking for like the open moment, the freeing moment, but it has to be novel and it has to be stripped down and unpracticed and surprising.
So one of those moments would be like I'm cleaning up the kitchen And my phone is nowhere in sight, but I'm still, like, doom-scrolling in my head.
And then, for whatever reason, you know, there's a kitchen window that I'm looking out of.
I can see the leaves turning.
The sunflowers are totally dead, so they're standing there like tall ghouls, and they're quite beautiful.
And I'll hear an internal voice that says, enough, or wait a minute.
And then I can stop and feel things, and I hear them, and then specifically I can hear my kids talking, or yelling, and my partner.
And if I'm listening to her through the wall or the doors, she has this voice that's really like a heartbeat.
And so I let the words themselves just become sounds, and then I try to appreciate the bare facts of things.
You know, and I think that whatever we have to do, whatever stresses, this is how we're here and this is why I'm here, this is what I'm here for, this is what it sounds like right now.
And it also, it won't be forever.
The boys are four and eight and every hour is hurtling into the past and throwing them into the future.
Carrying with it the whole tidal wave of sensations and colors so I can stand at the sink and be pre-verbal and pleasantly stunned for a few moments.
happening maybe a few times a day and like Derek if I get enough sleep and exercise I don't feel so depressed that I can't function.
I also have a weighted blanket and my friend Theo taught me about stims.
She was on episodes 12 and 13 talking about lived religion, trauma recovery and QAnon.
So I have this very smooth stick that I picked up off of the beach at Manitoulin Island and I just I rub it in my fingers and I like that.
And just one other thing that happened that feels like self-care, but it wasn't something that I did.
I mean, I participated, but I think it fits.
Our eight-year-old is quite attentive and precocious, and so he finally asked the question, because he'd heard me talking about it maybe on the phone or in the basement.
He actually said, what's QAnon anyway?
And so this is not a question I expected to field from the eight-year-old.
My policy is to never not answer, and to never lie, or to make things better than they seem, but also to keep things age-appropriate.
So I took a pause and I said, it's like an online game that's really popular because it's both scary and adventurous.
And it's exciting because it's like a combination between a scavenger hunt and a Greek myth, but it has some very bad impacts.
And he said, like what?
I said, well, first of all, the game feels so real to the people who play it, they don't know that it's a game.
And the whole thing is based on the idea that there are really bad guys in control of the world, and that Donald Trump is going to save us from them, and that playing this game will help that happen.
And he bursts out laughing.
Perfect.
And yeah, and then I say, and okay, so yeah, do you like, so we have a few moments of, yeah, can you believe that?
And then I say, so one thing that the game designers did was to make the game more addictive.
They made it more addictive by filling it with gory fantasies that keep people horrified, but also glued to the screen.
And so people who get sucked into and addicted to playing this game come to believe some really harmful things.
And because they believe that the bad guys are super evil, they get obsessed with finding out more and wanting to stop them.
But the game has no ending, no answer, there's no final level.
So it's like a scavenger hunt where there are endless clues but you never find anything.
But the clues are really interesting and you never stop, and it drives some people literally crazy, making them suspicious and afraid, and a few of them have gone out into the world and acted violently because they've been so scared by the game.
So then he asked me who was responsible.
And I said, we have some names of some of the bad guys, but we're not sure what they want.
But really, they wouldn't have done so much damage without social media companies like Facebook allowing them to spread this stuff.
Why does Facebook let them do it?
Because the longer people play, I said, the longer they spend on Facebook.
And that's good for Facebook, which makes money by showing people commercials.
And when we're in the car, he hates the commercials on the radio, so that makes sense to him.
So in a way, it's like COVID, I told him.
People just get exposed to something that's really damaging, and then they pass it along to other people.
And the one thing we do know about it all is that everyone who gets sick needs to have good care and people around them that love them.
So his response was, after all of this, he took a pause, he took it all in, he said, wow, that's like really interesting.
I want to put a story like that into my book.
Because he's writing a book, of course, right?
I was about to say, I want to read this kid's book.
So that was one of the high points of my week, and it felt like accidental self-care, because I've run myself down for months now trying to understand this thing, and I feel I was able to explain it in a way that made it both empathetic, but also, this is the important part, workable for an eight-year-old.
So he grasped the problem, he got excited, and the world rarely feels like that.
So that made me, Happy and as I get older, I feel like I care less and less about myself and about how I actually feel and more about making the world feel workable for, you know, for our sons and for everybody else who is young.
And so, you know, I feel like if I got sick with COVID, Or something else, or if I came to the end of things, that the thing that would make me happiest would be to think about the creativity and industriousness of the sons.
And so yeah, that felt like a strange, serendipitous bit of self-care that just, I don't know, came from I was just absolutely captivated by that explanation, Matthew.
I was hanging on every word.
And, you know, there were all sorts of funny little quips that came to mind that would have been interruptions, but then I realized, no, this is, this is, I really want to hear how this all goes down in terms of that interaction.
I love in the entire piece that you just shared how you are identifying moments of real life in which there's a sort of coming to yourself, right?
There's a coming into mindfulness by any other name, right?
Of what's actually going on in the moment in your relationships and what it means to you in that moment.
But even more than that, just being there for it in a way that it feels like a
a sort of reflecting screen for for some some sort of some sense of of of what is happening and who you are and how it's it's not it's it's not connected to all of this sort of metaphysical twaddle that i think we've been critiquing um and it's it's it's much more bittersweet and humble and vulnerable and and loose-ended i guess is what i'm reaching for
Yeah, well, I also, I mean, I think the other thing that happened was that I, you know, I, a bonus episode a week and a half ago now, um, you know, was about the, the letter that I got from Richard Vaughn, uh, who was found dead actually last week.
So we got confirmation of that.
And, uh, so he, he likely died of suicide.
So I should have mentioned that as well, that that was kind of like an over, you Overlaying, you know, feature of the last couple of weeks for me.
But, you know, in contemplating his life, I mean, he was an amazing poet.
And the thing about, you know, really good contemporary poetry is that it actually, for the most part, it fights against the language that pervades uh, the new age and, you know, spirituality discourse.
Um, and it really does focus on the granular detail that is ambivalent and ambiguous and, uh, and, and must be interacted with to have meaning.
You mentioned a weighted blanket and I, it also struck me the heaviness of your talk, which if listeners think about what self-care entails, it was the whole time I was listening intently because it is, it fits the moment.
There was, there's a great Instagram feed called influencers in the wild, which is people shooting videos of people shooting influencer videos.
And so, but what's amazing about it, and I've also noticed this too, because I remember being in Rome on my honeymoon and seeing this exact thing happen where this woman and a Jennifer's boyfriend, friend, whatever, was shooting a video or a photo of her on a bridge, very scenic.
And Influencers in the Wild kind of captures the same thing where you'll see people who aspire to this lifestyle on a beach, mountain, whatever, and you'll see them putting on their best smiling face and doing all this stuff.
And as soon as it's done, the first thing you see is them, their entire demeanor changes, and they run over to make sure that they got the right shot.
And there's nothing happy about that moment or that transition.
And there was a New Yorker piece last year, two years ago, that was talking about all of the different facial surgeries that are being done in China by predominantly young women, but men as well, who are trying to contort themselves to look better on Instagram, so they're getting all these surgeries.
It takes, it's an average of 40 to 45 minutes that someone doctors a photo before they allow it to go onto their social media feed.
This aspirational lifestyle that you've so brilliantly captured or mentioned before, Matthew, about like the wellness selling aspiration.
At least from anecdote and from examples like I just gave, these people are not well mentally.
And if they're not going to come to terms with that, then what is their self-care protocol?
If they're just taking the sponsorships that they're getting from vitamin companies or skincare products or whatever it is, and then they're going out and selling that, but they don't feel good inside, what is it all for?
It's been very hard being in this industry for decades and trying to get across that the fact that I don't aspire to happiness, I just try to be content on a daily basis with life.
And you really nailed it when you said that there are a lot of people who are not doing, who don't have a place to live right now.
I was watching Lachodrome, which is one of the greatest documentaries ever, but it's about the gypsy musicians and the roads, and it's purely musical.
But you see how people live in other places and the abject poverty, and then you think about our problems.
And so, self-care takes on a different dimension at that point when you can actually start to be grateful for what you do have and not so caught up in what you don't have.
Yeah, spoken as the sort of stoic philosophical representative that I think we were signaling you were earlier.
That sense of perspective is so important and how to, one of the things I really liked about my interview with Hala that we're going to roll is
There's a way that I feel like she's really trying to do that dance between being really unflinchingly aware of the realities of our world, the realities of suffering and injustice and inequality and oppression, whilst also saying there's some place in there for taking care of yourself in such a way that you can be of service to others, right?
So that you're not just a burnt out shell of a human being.
Shortly after moving to Los Angeles in 2011, I visited the Krishnamurti Foundation in Ojai.
I remember looking across the vast field next to the parking lot and imagining the philosopher reflecting on life while doing the same.
Having read at least six of Krishnamurti's books, I always appreciated his no-nonsense approach to philosophy.
Earlier on in my life, I had read the works of Helena Blavatsky, so I was aware of Krishnamurti's connection to an ultimate abandonment of theosophy.
Then I came across Pushkin's new podcast, Into the Zone, posted by Harry Kunzru.
It's a show about opposites.
And how borders are never as clear as we think.
As a novelist with a keen eye for a good story, he takes the listener around the world to talk to philosophers and punk musicians, new age gurus and space explorers, and investigates the grey zone between life and death, public and private, and black and white.
And really, he touches upon some of the same topics that we do here at Conspirituality.
I highly suggest starting with The Guru of Ojai, where he talks about his family's own relationship to theosophy and how Krishnamurti effectively ended the organization.
I was also fascinated that as deep as a philosopher as he was, Krishnamurti was also a huge fan of spy novels.
Kunz re-humanizes him in a way that I had never yet heard.
You can subscribe to Into The Zone wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm delighted to have my dear friend and longtime colleague, Hala Khoury, with me here today.
Hi, Hala.
Hi, Julian.
If you're watching this, if you're listening to this, Hala probably needs no introduction to you, but I will just say she's been a yoga teacher for decades.
Hala has a master's in clinical psychology, just completed her second master's in community psychology.
She is an academic.
She's on her way towards a PhD in community psychology.
Hala has been a real pioneer in terms of taking the yoga community in directions that have to do both with trauma psychology and to do with social justice awareness and being more politically informed and politically active.
She's the co-founder of Off The Match Into The World.
And I'm really proud to say that she and I have done a lot of work together in the yoga community with training teachers around a lot of these sorts of related topics as well.
So welcome, Hala.
Thank you so much for joining me.
I'm so happy to be here, Julian.
Thanks for having me.
Absolutely.
So the episode today, we're really talking about self-care, but it's, of course, self-care in the context of the moment that we're living through right now, which needs, of course, no unpacking because it's one of these, you know, I was saying to someone the other day, it feels similar to like 9-11 or to the big earthquake that happened in 2004.
In that there's this unusual moment where everyone is having a shared experience.
Yeah.
And sometimes in moments like that, there's a heightened sense of empathy.
It's like there's a wall that comes down and we go, oh wow, we're all vulnerable and we all are feeling the effect of the same thing at the same time.
Whereas so often what's going on is everyone is, you know, on different timelines.
Everyone is experiencing different things based on the circles they move in, based on what matters to them.
But it's different than, say, the earthquake, if I think back to when that happened.
I don't know if you were in LA at that time.
It's different than that because it goes on and on and on.
You get to a point where there's emotional exhaustion and there's actually, I notice sometimes there's a desire to not even talk to people about it because it's like, yeah, we all know.
Yeah, how much more?
It sucks and we're struggling with it and we're all struggling in the same ways.
So it's this weird kind of juxtaposition.
The election is coming up.
Very, very soon, when this episode drops, the election will be like four days away.
I think many of us feel a sort of hopefulness about a deep sigh of relief that can happen if the election goes the way we want it to.
But at the same time, there's all of this sort of dramatic association from 2016 of going, don't count your chickens before they hatch, right?
And then at the same time, there's The reality of all of this conspiracy incursion into the spaces that you and I inhabit, into the communities that we're part of, a lot of it is very dark, far-right conspiracy stuff.
Some of it has other flavors about it, but you've been part of Making a stand against that.
And so I just want to open it up in terms of this first little section in terms of where you're at, how you're feeling about all of this, what you're observing.
You and I haven't really talked in any depth about that.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, I am at, you know, and especially as I know, we're trying to talk about self-care.
A lot of my self-care has been about like my media consumption, where I'm engaging.
And I think, you know, in the beginning I was like, You know, really wanting to call out all the misinformation, the disinformation.
I'm still fully dedicated to that, you know.
And I'm trying to not get too caught up in the drama of it.
Trying to remember, you know, that there's good human beings out there.
And trying to make sure that in this day of physical distancing, I'm not becoming immobilized to really taking in the nurturing of the connections that matter to me.
Because I can get really caught up As often happens when we're stressed, right?
We are hyper-vigilant to the bad, right?
So I just want to look for the information, the people, the beliefs that are wrong or bad.
And yeah, I am truly worried.
You know, I'm really worried about our culture, you know, and You know, I think that any time, whether it's psychologically or physically, change is about to happen, the resistance comes up really strongly.
So I'm trying to create a framework that doesn't bypass how shitty all of this is, but also can maybe frame it as Potentially.
Potentially.
We don't know, right?
The potential for growth that comes on the other side of that as well.
So, I've been trying, you know, I'm reading a really beautiful book right now called Healing Resistance and the author is asking us to think about the arc, you know, the arc of the universe, right?
Bends towards justice.
Right now we might not see that at all, right?
But the further we pull back, if I can think about the next 50 years, 100 years, 200 years, It's kind of like with trauma, right?
I might be feeling a lot of pain, but if I can feel my pain within the context of the room that I'm in, and the city that I'm in, and the world, there's something bigger that's holding our pain.
So, a lot of my work right now has been to acknowledge the pain of the moment, all the terrible things that are happening, and try to hold it within a larger arc of time.
That allows me to feel the pain and the possibility at the same time.
That's been a really important coping strategy that I'm trying to cultivate.
Powerful.
It's really beautiful.
I mean, what I hear you saying is part of what happens when we're confronted with overwhelming experience, overwhelming feelings, and everything that that sort of brings up in terms of how we react to that, we can get really Contracted and narrowed down and some of that is inevitable and some of it is appropriate and it all makes sense, right?
And yet there is some relief perhaps to be had in remembering a larger context and that there are possibilities and that life will continue moving and expanding and doing what it does.
And also as somebody who has enough protection right now that I can do that, right?
Like my partner is employed, right?
I'm not as employed, right?
I have a little breathing room because I'm not in a daily survival, right?
There's folks out there that are impacted by this in a way where they're in daily survival and there isn't the space to say, let me think about this in the long term, right?
So I think, you know, even though everybody's impacted, we're impacted really differently, and then our capacity is different based on that impact.
And so I think we all have different roles to play.
And so I feel like that's one of my roles.
Yeah, it's so interesting.
You know, in preparing for this episode, I definitely find myself wanting to dance along that line, right, between how do we talk about self-care in ways that really acknowledge its crucial necessity, But not perpetuating some of the same old sort of spiritual bypass or unconscious privilege sticks, right?
So in a way, it's like, okay, count your blessings, so to speak, but also recognize that there's a level of privilege and good fortune that goes along with being able to do that.
And I think especially for someone like you who's involved in activism, Thinking about that balancing act in really being focused on how to make a positive difference in the world, how to be fully open to the reality of suffering and injustice and inequality and oppression.
In a way that doesn't make you just completely burn out, so you're no good to the people you're trying to help, or to your family, or to love, or to yourself, right?
Yeah, and you know, oftentimes I will feel guilty, you know, if I'm okay, right?
Like how can I be okay when so many people aren't?
But then how dare I not?
Like if I can be okay enough, to then play a particular role, right?
To like hold a particular perspective.
How dare I not do that?
Like it doesn't serve somebody who's caught in survival trying to get food on the table for their family, for me to manufacture that for myself, just so that I feel somehow in solidarity, right?
We all play different roles, right?
And so I can get informed by making sure I'm really tapping into the experience of folks that are like caught in that day-to-day survival.
And then what is my role?
If I have energy left over because I'm not in that, I can utilize that energy to contribute towards making a difference, right?
So, we all have different capacities.
Some people, 100% of their energy is in staying alive right now.
And we need them doing that, you know?
We need them doing that.
Other folks are writing postcards, right?
Like, we all have different capacities and we have to collaborate right across those lines versus sort of compete or compare or judge.
That's the way I see it.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a refreshing message because I think that those other approaches can be quite prevalent.
Yeah.
Including judging, shaming.
This is the right way to do it.
These are all the things that you don't see that you're actually doing wrong.
It's such a, it's such, yeah, there's so much nuance in there.
Yeah.
With regard to the stuff that we cover on the podcast, is there any particular, I mean, not just that we talk about, but just that sort of area of the intersection of spirituality, politics, what we're going through right now with the pandemic politics, what we're going through right now with the pandemic and conspiracy theories, stuff like QAnon and how How that sort of impacts our approach to the election.
Is there any particular thing that has been up for you that's been impacting you more or?
You know, the thing right now that I'm really reflecting on is my own complicity in like perpetuating these dynamics of like us and them.
Now again, you know me, this is not about bypassing or any sense of moral relativism, but rather the ways that I kind of, I like, I can feel like, oh, I feel really better than when I see people espousing these beliefs.
Like I'm, I, you know, just like, you know, we often talk about, like, at Off the Mat, a lot of the work I do is, you know, when you're pointing fingers, you've got three other fingers pointing back at yourself, right?
And so the ways that I think that the general, the general tone right now is this very binary thinking, you know, you're either like a Democrat, you believe in wearing masks, this is a catastrophe, you know, or you're a Republican and you think it's a hoax, right?
Like there's, there's, there's like this strong binary versus, um, So my first thing is, how do I perpetuate that?
How am I consuming my news?
Am I consuming it in ways that just furthers my judgment and makes me feel self-righteous and good, even though I do believe and know that my side is correct?
It's based in science.
It's based in research, right?
And we can take it too far.
You know, we can get self-righteous and just feed the division.
We know how the other side is feeding the division, and it's much more fun to look at how they're doing it.
So, you know, I've been really trying to To take, to hold myself accountable to the level that I'm asking, I ask people to do.
And for me, my edge is that accountability in the face of people having a trauma response and espousing these QAnon beliefs, you know, trying to see it that way.
In the face of the reality of, you know, the powers that be, Russian interference, the bots, like there's a very real scheme to like take over our democracy.
But all, you know, what I can do because I'm not a politician or a decision maker, you know, my work is in culture change.
That's the way that I see my activism.
It's in like, how do we talk about this?
How do we not?
How do we support critical thinking, but not perpetuate the binary?
I think we can do both.
I think we can do both.
And that's been a lot of my thought process lately, is holding that stand, peeling away the unnecessary judgment that just plays into the emotionality of it all.
You know, I'm loving listening to grounded scientists and researchers talk.
We're able to just be like, let's follow the data.
Like, what do we see here?
And it doesn't have to be political.
So that's been a lot of my own inquiry right now.
And of course, like, Getting people voting, looking at the places where we can be, you know, what are the states we have to be focusing on and all that.
But, you know, for me, I feel like my work is in culture change and in trying to be public about holding a particular attitude.
That's, you know, we've lost nuance.
You know, when we're in a trauma response, it's very hard to have nuanced thinking.
So again, that my life allows me to be fairly regulated.
I feel like I have a responsibility to explore what that looks like, feels like and sounds like.
In our movement towards, you know, it's not even justice, just like reasonableness.
It's like the bar is so low right now.
It's so incredibly low.
Can we get our feet just back on the ground enough to start to look at the world and start to agree on some facts and begin having the conversations that have been just completely derailed?
Yeah, yeah.
When you talk about critical thinking but not falling into the binary or being more nuanced, it sounds to me like you're referencing having strong critical thinking and following the data whilst also maintaining a kind of open awareness of the humanity of the people who may be on the other side of that conversation, right?
On the other side of that Exactly, exactly.
Yeah, and it's so easy, you know, to, you know, for me to feel like sort of this caricature of like the QAnon person or the Trump supporter, you know, you know, and I, you know, I can watch sort of some of the comedy news shows I watch and who are they interviewing?
People that sound like complete idiots, right?
And then you think, oh my god, You know, versus like staying curious about sort of the more middle-of-the-road people who still are going to vote that way, who still support those ideas, but actually sincerely think they're doing something good.
And that's kind of more of where I want to try to focus.
Who are the people that are just sincerely confused and misinformed?
Totally.
Well, that's the thing, and I know this is not news to you of all people, but a lot of people when the QAnon stuff started to rear its head in the yoga world were so surprised.
How is this possible, right?
And so one of the angles I've been taking with that conversation is, well, You seem to think that people who are buying into far right wing ideas or conspiracy theories that are really unreasonable are not doing so with deep sincerity and a deep sense that their heart is telling them that this is the way to go and that their intuition is sort of this unmistakable guide further and further down the rabbit hole.
You can't just say to people, hey, come back, come back to your inner wisdom.
They're following their inner wisdom.
But they've gotten confused in some other area about what that inner wisdom really means, or how reliable it is, or what else they might be following as well, so that the inner wisdom becomes a little wiser.
But there's another aspect to it, which I know is the part that you would have been like, hey, it's not a surprise, people, which is that there's been an unconscious much more unpleasant, far-right, racist kind of underlying temperament within our society anyway that has largely gone unaddressed.
And so to say, oh, that could show up in the yoga and wellness space?
Maybe not such a surprise, right?
Yeah, I mean, and this is something you and I have been talking about for decades, right?
Like seeing the ways that that bypass shows up, that confirmation bias, the way that we'll leave sort of our Christian household, but then adopt a Hindu philosophy, right?
The ways that, you know, when we can exotify something, it allows us to even bypass the shadow of like our own roots even more.
And so this is inevitable, and in many ways, all right, now the cat's out of the bag, right?
We see what happens.
How catastrophic it can be to not be examining our beliefs in a critical way, to not be looking at our own traumas and our own, you know, the biases inherent in our culture that we all consume, we're all swimming in.
And this has been a big gap in a lot of spiritual communities.
And so, you know, again, I know that's been so much of the work we've done together.
And, you know, I'm pleased to say I don't have one personal relationship with somebody who's fallen for this.
Like, I'm like, okay, I have truly been drawn to people who are integrated.
I mean, extended maybe, but like nobody that I personally am connected to has fallen for this.
And I'm kind of like a pat on the back of like, okay, I've been saying that this is what's meaningful to me.
And those are actually the kinds of relationships, work relationships and personal that I've cultivated.
So to summarize, I was hearing three things.
I was hearing, in terms of self-care, I was hearing, be mindful of not just having an open passageway for all of this media to be coming at you all the time that is so overstimulating, so upsetting, right?
To be caught in some kind of pattern where you're thinking that you just have to keep taking it in, right?
Have some mindfulness about that consumption.
The second thing I heard you say is recognize that part of the trauma response is to get really contracted down into thinking this is all that there is.
This is going to go on forever.
There is nothing else, right?
What it's like to be able to step back enough.
And sort of reorient yourself in a way, right, to a larger reality, whatever that is, whether that's your house, your community, your relationships, the world we live in, the cosmos, the great sort of overarching narrative of humanity's journey towards more equality and justice and freedom, right?
And the third one that I heard you say is really Pausing and making it a practice to kind of hold space for the vulnerable humanity of people on the other side of whatever polarized binary you find yourself on politically, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, and, you know, the thing I talk about for me is, like, the goal is our collective liberation.
That means I have to want the liberation of Donald Trump.
Like, I have to want that, like, you know, especially the people that are deliberately perpetuating harm.
That's a trauma too, right?
In the veteran community, we call that perpetrator-induced PTSD, right?
That the worst trauma comes from what we actually perpetrate.
Because it goes against our deepest moral compass, right?
So understanding that the folks on the extreme have had to dehumanize themselves so much.
To hold a belief that dehumanizes others.
And if what I truly want is liberation, I need their liberation.
I need to hold them in my heart to the same extent that I'm holding the victims of the violence.
And if I don't, then our movement for liberation and justice is always going to be a band-aid.
It's always going to be a responding to harm.
And until we include those creating harm in our hearts, And think about why that happens.
We're never going to be free.
And so that's a real tough one for me.
And I would imagine for a lot of people, right?
Yeah.
It makes me think, I don't know the exact quote, but there's a Martin Luther King moment in one of his famous speeches about how when we succeed in fully liberating
The black man or black people, white people will find that they too have become unchained because we are in this dynamic together and it's harmful to all of us.
Absolutely.
And that's hard.
And that's been, you know, it's hard and it settles me more because living in a world where there are all these enemies that I have to protect myself against is very anxiety provoking versus the discomfort of asking myself, how do I include these people?
Like in my heart, that's a different flavor of discomfort, but it's, it's actually more settling.
It's more integrating.
Tara Stiles is the founder of Strahla, formerly Strahla Yoga, but she has expanded it to include Tai Chi, traditional Chinese medicine, and other healing modalities.
She is also the author of several best-selling books, including Yoga Cures and Make Your Own Rules Diet.
I have known Tara since about the time when STRALA first opened.
I remember watching videos of her when she was filming in her old apartment in New York City almost 20 years ago now.
And I became a fan of STRALA and we became good friends.
I taught at STRALA for years.
I was on the teacher training faculty at STRALA as well.
Even after I moved to Los Angeles, I would travel back to teach modalities in neuroscience, music, and yoga.
And for this episode, where we're talking about self-care, I could think of no one better to talk to.
One story I will always remember with Tara, her classes were very popular and there'd be 50, 60 people in the room and I would always be in the front row practicing right next to her husband, Mike, who, as you'll hear in our talk, has been very influential on her and they've been influential on each other and on their daughter, Daisy, as well.
And I remember, unlike a lot of teachers who would be at the front of class demoing poses and basically showing off, Tara always spent a lot of time near the back of the class with the students who needed the most help, who maybe weren't the most flexible or strongest.
And she would spend a lot more time with them where it was needed.
And I never forgot that as an instructor or as a human being.
She does have a new book coming out in December.
It's called Clean Mind, Clean Body, a 28-day plan for physical, mental, and spiritual self-care.
So since this is an episode about self-care, she took a few minutes out from her current abode out in nature as she, as I did, left New York City more recently.
And it was nice catching up with her for a few minutes.
Thank you so much for taking some time out today.
I always love seeing you, which has been a while, and talking to you in your beautiful new space there.
Oh my gosh, it's so great to see you too.
We're doing this episode on self-care because the election is next week and we realized that we spend so much time on the podcast thinking critically about the wellness industry, but we wanted to devote an episode to actually offering best practices on how people take care of their body and their mind and everything in their lives.
And the timing couldn't be more perfect because I see that in December you have your next book coming out.
I think I have all of them so far, so I'll add this to it.
Clean mind, clean body, a 28 day plan for physical, mental, and spiritual self-care.
So big picture, why did you decide for this to be your next book?
Oh, well, you know, I think one of the reasons why I just have loved you since I've met you is we always look at the problems and what's happening with the wellness industry and our lives at the same time.
And what I've noticed, and I've had a hard time finding other people to talk with about this, is how Fast the wellness industry has taken off and how kind of stressed out and disconnected we feel at the same time.
And being in New York City for so long, you see, this isn't to make fun of everybody, but you know, we all can kind of identify with run to a yoga class, get a green juice, go get a shiatsu session, go to the tai chi, do meditation.
And it's stressful to even think about the collection of all those things.
And once you start to get involved in wellness, you learn that your body needs time to digest just like everything else.
And of course, we know with food, you can't just go to the buffet, eat everything.
But with wellness, sometimes we just throw everything at ourselves and get stressed out and frustrated when it doesn't work.
So I wanted to share a little bit of my experience with that, but also simplifying.
Hopefully, you know, giving people this once and for all view of here's all the beautiful ancient wisdoms.
They're there.
You can take your life to learn about them, but don't stress out about collecting them as a collection of things more.
Take care of yourself with them and go slow and give yourself time to enjoy the practices that they offer you.
Yeah.
I remember when I left New York, you and Michael were even talking about it then, and it took you a few more years, but you did get out.
I mean, now that you have moved out of the city, do you feel more plugged in?
Do you feel less stressed out?
Uh yeah I mean right away I think nature just has that way of doing it.
You know yeah we always joked you know with yoga I always love thinking about yoga as nature and you know thinking around being in New York City looking out and seeing the the cars go by and the hustle and bustle of the street it's it's an extra challenge to decompress and that's why we need it but um you know so being in nature it is like a luxury it is kind of having that self-care all of the time but
You know, I think the struggle for me, definitely, but for everybody, is the phone, is the social media, is the, you know, I need to discipline myself to get up and breathe and take care of myself and not just go into this habit of, well, I can scroll through and look for self-care practices all the time, or I can identify something I actually want to do and carve out this time for It's a tough balance.
learning information with the phone, with the internet being plugged in in that way and not just kind of expecting it to happen because you're outside in the woods.
It's a tough balance.
I mean, my career is in social media and content.
And recently my wife left all of her social media because she just felt so overwhelmed.
She was having a real trouble striking that balance and she does feel better now being off of it.
But I mean, not all of us have that ability, especially if our careers are tied into it, which yours is in some level as well.
Now, I don't want to give away everything here because I want people to buy your book, but you have a four-week plan.
And I would love just the big picture of each week and what your mindset or practice is.
So, So we start with a mental cleanse.
Yeah, and for me, you know, and we talk about this a lot just as friends, you know, if your mind's not right, it doesn't matter what you do with your body, everything is working together.
And we know this when we read all of the science books and all of your work and things, we can understand it, but it's so easy to get superficial and go to the body first without thinking of your mindset.
So the first week is really about You know, organizing your relationship with social media, organizing your digital life, and deciding what that balance needs to be for you.
It doesn't need to be an all or nothing, or maybe it does need to be for a little bit of time, but just having some awareness there is really healthy and important.
And clearing your space, you know, I get into a little bit of feng shui and this book isn't to teach these ancient wisdoms necessarily in their detail, but just to show you don't need to be scared of cleaning your house and learning a little bit of what happens if you put something here and sweeping the area near your front door and just picking up your stuff.
In a way where it's not a chore and it can be part of your self-care practice.
You can enjoy cleaning your space and taking care of whatever amount of space you have as it is part of your own body and part of your own practice.
Well, you mentioned feng shui, but that was, I've mentioned this before with Strala, teaching there and practicing there.
I love the minimalism of the space.
And even now I see a couple of blankets behind you in that beautiful scene, but you've always had a really good ability to Just keep everything clear and let people's, I guess, imaginations take them where they will and let their practice dictate it rather than the imagery.
I think that's really important.
And the second week you move on to a spiritual cleanse.
So what is that for you?
Oh gosh.
I mean, honestly, in thinking about this part and talking with people, actually it brought up a story that I had a hard time figuring out the through line for in the book, but I think it's important.
It's actually a guy who used to come to the studio and he went in and out with his own well-being practices and he ended up passing away due to cancer complications.
So there wasn't really this, you know, beautiful, he got healthy and felt better, you know, our green juice transformation story.
But within his life, he had this beautiful moment in conversations with me and with friends where he wanted to have more spiritual connection in his own life.
And it really kind of transcended religion for him.
He wanted to hang out with people that made him feel good and spend time with people that, you know, he would have interesting conversations with and really have every moment out of life that he could.
And I really admired that from him because he was so close to death.
And I thought that was a beautiful way to maybe bridge the subject about spirituality and making it less scary and maybe more kind of non-denominational and outside of the sort of religious bubble that we get in with our kind of communities and culture and all of that, that you illustrate so well in all of your many works.
Keep him busy.
I mean, these ideas in your head, you have to get them down on paper or screen.
And I mean, I know that this next week is big for you because you've written cookbooks and diet and cooking has been such a big part.
So it's called Change the Way You Eat.
What is that about?
Yeah and you know we're obviously so obsessed actually we were just in town and there was a funny Halloween display with all of the diet books like the Adkins book and the South Beach and it was these you know skeletons and it said do not you know buy these books if you want to live in a way it was kind of a goof on you know we're so susceptible to just the next diet without actually noticing how we feel so you know what I love about Ayurveda for me
Honestly, it was a mystery and I thought that you had to learn how to fully become an Indian in order to do Ayurveda correctly when I was 21.
So in my research of this section, I asked what I thought was a forbidden question to experts.
I said, do you have to fully cook Indian food to do this properly?
And most people said, no, you can take the principles of Ayurveda and respect your own great grandmother's tradition and live with their circadian rhythm of the day and learn about these spices, but you don't have to fully cook these other dishes.
You can take this into what makes sense in your life and what foods work for you.
And I thought, man, why don't we all do this?
This is pretty cool.
So that's really what the Ayurveda section is about, not becoming That's an important point.
going to this cooking school of Ayurveda, but bringing it really into your own life and your own family's culture. - That's an important point.
One of the things with my science writing, and I think it is partly the future, is the individualized diet and protocols for the microbiome.
Because as I've mentioned before, being a 20 year vegetarian and starting to eat meat again, and then all of a sudden my panic attacks went away.
Wow.
And that was something that I wouldn't have found in any book, but by experimenting, I was able to figure out for myself.
And that's, again, something I've loved about your teaching is that you always, you prescribe that, you know, one of the, I truly miss, I mean, the hardest part of the pandemic has been not moving with people, whether I was teaching or moving with people.
And I always loved how the Strala classes had such a range of, you can call them levels of practice.
But it was always, everyone felt welcome there.
I wish we can open a social media space that felt like that.
That would be nice.
And the final one is, the fourth week has changed the way you move.
Yeah so this I think lends so much to you know trying to figure out in a laboratory way exactly what you you mentioned and how do you make yourself feel welcomed in your own body and really looking at movement not just from your your yoga practice or your fitness practice but how do you walk across the room and what are you doing with your body?
And are you picking up the groceries in the easiest way possible?
And really bringing in, whether you want to call it functional movement or efficiency, we have this ability to separate, I'm working, I'm working out, I'm resting, I'm on the couch.
And we can really move a lot easier in our bodies and be better to ourselves and mentally, physically, whatever we're doing.
And I think that can help us in our yoga practice as well.
And that's what I'd always love to share with yoga is, you know, if you can move well in your yoga, you can move well in your life.
So it's not about necessarily nailing that pose, but it's about moving well through the whole thing so you can be happy after the class is over, no matter what happens.
So that's really the goal, to really change your approach to movement so you're not stressed out when you're doing one thing and happy when you're doing something else.
Yeah.
One of the funniest moments I had with Michael was after we used to practice next to each other often, and I just commented how I wish I moved more like him, how fluid and loose everything was.
And he looked at me and he said, I wish I had more structure like you do.
Yeah.
But I've also noticed, I mean, obviously he's big into Tai Chi and I've seen more of your videos focus on that.
Has that become more of a way to move in your life?
Oh, 100%.
And you know, the funny thing, it took 10 years of being married to the guy for me to figure out that the ideas that I had in my head about yoga were Tai Chi ideas.
So I started, you know, just picking up books that he had on the bottom of some shelf somewhere and thinking, Oh my gosh, that's exactly how I feel about yoga.
And then, you know, it's not so different the form of Tai Chi.
And of course, there's different things to learn, but the principles can be the same.
And so I love that, you know, sort of Make a good connection with yourself, have a good body position, and then you can do anything.
You know, have that breath-body connection together.
And so often in yoga or in fitness or in anything we're doing, we're kind of moving around disconnected and then wondering why, you know, I moved the groceries over and I'm stressed out or I pulled my shoulder.
I'm playing with Daisy.
And if I'm not in a good body position, she's not going to be happy because my vibe is going to feel strange and it's not mystical or magical.
It's just that I'm in a funky, awkward position next to her or anybody else.
So, yeah, Tai Chi really just put a label and another practice onto, you know, the thoughts rattling around up there for so long.
So we're eight days out from an election and it's obviously a stressful time.
The election will not get decided next Tuesday, most likely, so it's going to be a stressful time for a while.
And for the last thing I'd love to hear from you is just how you're moving through this.
What is your practice, your daily rituals that's helping you to get through what I think is the most stressful time in our lives?
Oh yeah, I mean I 100% agree with that and Mike and I talk about it a lot.
We try to, you know, we want to be informed every day and look at everything that's happening but then we, you know, we put the phones away at night and just, you know, pick it back up in the morning but at least for that time to put it down.
For me and also for him we need to have time on our own when we're doing our movement practice and thankfully we're all together as a family so we can switch on and off with our work tasks and our daisy tasks and all of that so in the morning I take time for myself to do my meditation and yoga and whatever I want to do go out for a walk and just have that hour And in the afternoon, he takes his time.
And without that, if I miss that in a day, I just, I don't feel right.
And I know if many days went by with that happening, something bad would probably happen to me in the inside.
So yeah, taking that little bit of self-care luxury time instead of making myself kind of reminding to have those practices all the time makes all the time easier.
I was really happy to be able to sit down with Lissa Rankin, who is a medical doctor, New York Times bestselling author of The Daily Flame, Mind Over Medicine, The Fear Cure, Anatomy of a Calling, and also the founder of the Whole Health Medicine Institute.
She's done a number of national PBS specials and a bunch of TED Talks that have been very popular.
And her latest project is non-profit work that is committed to eliminating the public health epidemic of loneliness while bringing what she calls sacred medicine out of its current status as a luxury good for privileged elites.
And bringing it to anyone who needs it and is open to it, regardless of socioeconomic status, race, or gender identity.
And Lissa also has recently been super active in social media, supporting Rebecca Baruchi and other people who are trying to call for reform in the New Age publishing world.
And also she's written some amazing posts on the psychology of Lissa, your recent support of Rebecca Baruchi leaving Hay House carries a lot of weight.
You made a very supportive statement.
How is that going, and how do you hope it changes the spirituality publishing world?
Yeah, well, it's been a roller coaster of a week.
I feel really humbled by it, in part because I've had a lot of women in the wellness industry who are BIPOC leaders who have said, we gave up on you years ago.
Welcome back.
Thank you.
And I feel really touched that Yeah, that I lost them and that there's this sort of almost like very quick grace.
And I also feel very sort of tender and vulnerable and a bit raw around it because I really don't know how to get this right.
And I feel guilty of many of the things that you all have been talking about on the Conspiratuality Podcast.
So I sort of look back at, you know, my messaging from, you know, a decade ago Because I didn't grow up in the New Age.
I grew up in a very conventional medicine family.
My father was a doctor, a very religious family.
So there was religion and there was science and the New Age was suspect altogether.
It was, you know, charlatan nonsense from my father and the work of the devil from my mother.
I wasn't exposed to it at all.
So when I quit medicine in 2007 and kind of entered into, for the first time, the sort of mind-body-medicine world and I wound up in this landscape that was very bewildering to me.
And so I sort of took on some of the beliefs and rejected others and kind of did this little grab bag thing.
But I feel some shame really looking back and realizing that some of the beliefs that I sort of toyed with in my In my experimentation with my own spiritual path, we're really unempathic to some of the people in my community.
And rather than calling me on it or challenging me on it and helping me understand that that was not helpful, a lot of people just left.
And so there's this backlash right now where a lot of people that have gone full Q and are still in my community and are big supporters of Christiane Northrup, who wrote the foreword to my second book 10 years ago, are leaving by the hundreds.
Every time I post something, there's hundreds of people that unfollow me.
But then there's a whole influx of people that are coming back.
They're like, hey, nice to see you.
Glad to hear you're actually waking up and not woke.
Like some of your colleagues.
So I feel really touched by the conversation that you and Rebecca and I had the other night and the offline conversations she and I have been having.
And honestly, what was most touching was my sister, who's biracial, who stumbled upon it and was like, hey sis, I can't tell you how much this means to me.
That's a great part of the story.
When you said, I just wanted to follow up, when you said that you had taken on some of the beliefs as you had entered into the, you know, wellness landscape, and I suppose that coincided with you contracting with Hay House.
Did you feel you were taking on beliefs or did you feel like you were taking on a kind of discourse or a language that was just kind of in the air?
Was that clear?
Well, it was very, like I said, it's more like I was experimenting with things because I wrote Mind Over Medicine, for example, without Hay House.
They weren't, I didn't know Hay House.
I wrote a book about science that's You know, I was very bewildered that it got put in sort of new age healing technology because it's a very grounded book about science that I wrote without knowing anything about Hay House.
I never had an ambition to be a Hay House author.
They just, the book went to auction and they gave the highest bid.
And I realize now that it was because it's a book about science that validates Some of the belief systems that are part of that culture, but a lot of those belief systems are not part of my belief system because I come from a place of science.
But for example, I started experimenting with Advaita Vedanta beliefs and some of the sort of non-dual Eastern philosophy self-inquiry teachings of questioning your thoughts and your beliefs.
And I was seeing how that was playing out in patients of mine who I had these very anchored beliefs like cancer runs in my family or, you know, I'm going to be sickly for life or whatever.
So, I started engaging in the process of sort of challenging beliefs in myself and in my patients.
And, you know, you can take that to a level.
On one level, that's very helpful.
And on another level, it can become incredibly abusive.
And a kind of spiritual bypassing, which was not a term that I was familiar with until I came into contact with former cult leader Robert Augustus Master's work on spiritual bypassing, which was a big revelation to me when I first heard about things like blind compassion and premature forgiveness and, you know, anger phobia and sort of conflict avoidance dressed up in holy drag.
I felt really Yeah, I felt really ashamed because I had, I drank that Kool-Aid like big time and it felt really good.
It was very ecstatic.
It was a very sort of blissed out part of my spiritual journey, sort of full of magic and synchronicity and manifestation and whatever.
But you know, one of our, one of the BIPOC women in my community is like, is that manifesting or is that just privilege, sweetheart?
And I was like, oh man.
Like, I felt really busted.
So that's what I mean by sort of trying those things on, experimenting.
And I was meeting all the Hay House people.
I was sort of being groomed to be one of their leaders.
And so I was invited to all of the big conferences and they were doing two public television specials about me.
And I was, I really was given the star treatment.
So it was, it was very startling.
I met Bex many years ago, probably 2012, as part of that early kind of Hay House community.
And I just, you know, I'm embarrassed at how much better I have been treated than some of the other women of color.
And I do think we need to speak out about it.
We need to change it.
We need to get firm about it and demand that our industry speak about this and get really grounded in our activism.
Well, it's amazing that you're able to be so lucid about your own experience as it's kind of unfolding in real time.
This thing about, you know, Bringing Advaita Vedanta into the clinic, did you also have the sense that as you're helping clients question their beliefs about themselves that, oh, there's a scope of practice issue and maybe this is more suited for psychotherapy or something like that?
Like, did that, was there a guardrail there for you?
Was that helpful?
No.
No, well that's part of, I've been in therapy myself for pretty extensive therapy on and off for 10 years but really since my mother died three years ago.
So part of what I'm really realizing is kind of the boundary confusion that came from my own developmental trauma around boundary wounding in my childhood and so I was basically practicing psychotherapy without a license as a medical doctor in my integrative medicine practice because once I left the conventional medical world, I had an hour with patients and I realize now I was basically doing trauma work But I wasn't trained in trauma work.
So, I realized that quite quickly and I left that practice.
I haven't done direct patient care for 10 years.
And I wound up training with Peter Levine.
I trained with Richard Schwartz in Internal Family Systems.
I trained with Asha Clinton in Advanced Integrative Therapy, which is a type of energy psychotherapy.
But I'm not a trained therapist, and so I did feel sort of in over my head in that world.
And even the original draft of Mind Over Medicine, for example, I talked about I had an understanding of trauma and its relatedness to physical illness and the impact of healing trauma on the body and how sometimes when we heal trauma, the body does get better when conventional medicine has failed.
But I wasn't as trauma-informed then as I am now, so I just rewrote Mind Over Medicine.
I was grateful actually to have the opportunity to do that because I really needed to explain the work in a more trauma-informed way.
But yeah, it is a question about scope of practice and it's still confusing for me because I train doctors now and part of what I'm teaching them is that we need to actually, this needs to be part of the scope of our practice.
Well it really, I mean it says something about Your self-awareness along the path that you were able to sort of check your charisma that way, that at a certain point, you realized that you were not trained for what you had gotten into because everything in the Hay House world is going to push you towards not having any scope of practice at all.
And, you know, being able to speak to anything on any level and through any discourse, that's part of the sort of the discourse technique of the new age.
Yeah well from the beginning when I you know I had never taught workshops or led groups or done any of this work outside of the scope of one-on-one medical practice and so from I guess I had the Good luck or good fortune or intuition or something.
But from the beginning when I was teaching workshops, I always brought therapists.
I brought trauma therapists.
And honestly, they saved my butt.
Thank God for Anne Davin, who's a depth psychologist who came and helped me start many of my programs.
And so watching a trained therapist Do what they do, especially when we started having patients that were dissociating, that were having, you know, real spiritual experiences, but in an ungrounded way that was psychologically risky.
It became quite shocking and I've since seen many people in my sphere who are hosting extended long-term meditation retreats or doing trauma work badly and it's incredibly dangerous.
So I got quite scared.
I practice internal family systems I've been trained in it and I work weekly with an IFS therapist and so you know I have a part that I call my integrity police part and it's always on the lookout for other people who are harming others because of their own ignorance or malice and it also checks me a lot.
It's like Terrified now because I just did my first Zoom retreat with doctors and it was terrified that I would inadvertently hurt people because normally I have them in a room with a bunch of therapists and we're keeping a close eye on them.
So it's tricky.
It's tricky, especially right now.
Well, I commend you for, like, all of the checks and balances that you're throwing into your own path, so it's really good to hear about, and I just wonder about how many other people in your position are going to kind of come out of the New Age world trying to find those guardrails, and, you know, I hope you leave some indications.
Maybe this is a little book to write or something like that.
How to come out of this particular world and re-enter the one that is closer to consensus reality.
Well, it's tricky because, you know, I've been asked a lot for sort of consultation lately on, for example, what are the guidelines that we should be following if we're doing deep spiritual work or deep psychological work in the transformational space?
And I'm lucky because two of my teachers were in cults, I've been under the tutelage of a spiritual teacher who's a physician for 13 years.
And she's been an exceptional teacher, Rachel Naomi Remen, who's an author who wrote Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather's Blessings.
And Rachel has been hosting a spiritual circle of doctors that I got kind of scooped up when I left the hospital 13 years ago.
And so I feel lucky because from the very beginning, before I ever had any sort of public presence, I wanted to be a writer, but I had no I had no ambition to be in this role, but I wanted to be a writer and I quickly discovered that writing a book and having talent wasn't enough.
I wrote a book that 13 editors loved and 13 marketing departments turned down because I had no platform, which I'd never heard of a platform.
So I was lucky because from the beginning, Rachel was really schooling me in number one, how not to join a cult, and number two, how not to start a cult.
And I still worry about it.
I still worry about it.
You were asking me, how do you manage your charisma?
Right?
And I feel shy even talking about that because do I have charisma?
Well, I guess so.
But how do I manage it?
I go to therapy every week.
I have a circle of people around me that I ask them to hold me accountable.
And if I'm going off the rails or harming anybody, I want them to tell me and I'm in a mastermind of other people in my position that I started because I wanted checks and balances.
And I do try to learn more about boundaries and practice that.
And I'm very careful about who I endorse and who I ally with because my endorsement means something to people and I do have influence.
And so I feel grateful that I got to use that power and privilege to share it with Rebecca Baruchi.
And I'm really interested in using it to share it with other You know, black, indigenous, people of color, other marginalized communities.
And I feel like that's, you know, if people are in my position right now and they're not doing that, we need to have a conversation about that.
Because, yeah, it's scary.
There's been backlash.
You know, I get hate mail when I take a stand.
People tell me to stay in my lane.
Which makes me insane, and I was really grateful that the main medical journals have all come out recently, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine, to say racism is our lane.
We are in a pandemic.
Talking about health and mental health during this time is in my lane, but there are people that don't like it if I seem to be getting political.
Well, the other thing that's in your lane, just because of your following, your exposure, and the worlds you travel in, is QAnon and its impacts upon mental health.
And, you know, we're in the week of the election.
We know that the after effects of this particular fever dream are going to be with us for a long time.
What do you think People who have been wrapped up in the various layers of this electoral conspiratorial political chaos will need most if they're going to recover and return to security to a kind of normalcy.
Well, they're going to need a shit ton of empathy and an off-ramp.
So part of what's hard right now, I think, is that I notice in myself the triggers that I get when my community is using my platform to post Q propaganda, to try to convert me, to try to convert other people in my following.
And I've had to get really boundaried.
And I've never been somebody who has censored my Facebook feed.
I told people, I set a boundary and said, if you are trying to use my platform to promote a QAnon or conspiracy theorist agenda, you will be banned and people are violating that.
So I am, I've just gotten ruthless and I'm banning people.
But I also know that when people, people don't join a cult, they join a group.
They join something that feels like a tribe.
They join a place where they belong.
They join a belief system.
And, you know, if you suddenly set this really harsh boundary and they feel like you're being hostile and aggressive, then it doesn't feel necessarily safe for people to come back.
So I feel like part of what we have to be, yes, protect yourself.
Yes, set a boundary.
Yes, take a stand.
Yes, be firm.
Because, you know, people do burn bridges when they join cults.
But as you know from your cult research, The only way, like when a loved one or a trusted teacher goes down the rabbit hole, like if there's not an off-ramp, like a safe way for them to come out and say, oh my god, I made a mistake.
I've hurt people.
I've hurt you.
Wow, I've lacked empathy.
I wasn't caring enough about the people that are dying of COVID, or the Black Lives Matter protesters, or all of the people that have been hurt by systemic racism, and I've been using my spiritual bypassing or whatever, because I actually couldn't handle that much pain.
And I'm seeing that in my followers right now, and it feels so My empath parts are feeling like it's so fragile, it's so tender, that it's almost like a toothache.
Like if you breathe on it, it's the vulnerability of being able to say when people are reading things that I'm writing about spiritual bypassing, for example, and the damage that it does and how abusive it can be.
And how things like questioning your beliefs or the law of attraction or, you know, many of these sort of new age teachings, how they can be used as psychological manipulation in a way that's really abusive to people who have been legitimately victimized.
And when people are feeling the shame of recognizing that they've been complicit in that, and I know that because I've felt it, It's really uncomfortable, and that's why I think internal family systems is so helpful, because we can tell people, and I do tell people, okay, so you have a spiritual bypassing part, or you have a QAnon part.
It's just a part, and you also have a self that is the Imminent, divine, the god, goddess incarnate that is the real you, and you can be with that part empathically in yourself.
And then if I'm in that part, if I'm in that aspect of my being, then I can be in empathic relationship to people that have gotten lost down the rabbit hole.
And maybe you're still down the rabbit hole, but especially if they dare to come out, Like, you and I have been talking, and I think I have permission to say this, about Charles Eisenstein, who's one of my dearest friends.
And I have been sort of watching him and caring about him and listening to what you all are saying about him, much of which I agree with.
And also, how do we give somebody an off-ramp?
How do we give leaders or followers an opportunity to say, oh, okay, I'm going to change my I'm going to change my direction.
And if there's no safe way for people to leave their tribe, which, you know, people, if they've come into a Q community like Christiane Northrup, they love it there.
It's like going to grandma, and they're having tea, and it's all love, light, and rainbows, and there's a great awakening, and they're going into the fifth dimension together, and it's utopia.
It's this utopian story, and they're really bonded.
And if you're asking people to leave that, but you're not giving them a place where it's safe to come out and say, I made a mistake, I need help.
So I think if people do notice, you know, especially if you're close to somebody who has gotten red-pilled, to be able to make sure that there is an off-ramp and that if they haven't burned too many bridges and you can still keep your heart open, that you can help them get professional help.
and refer them to a good IFS therapist, or AIT therapist, or somatic experiencing therapist, or some of the trauma therapies that really work, if they're willing and they're open, and then help them find communities.
So for example, one of the things we've been doing in my community, because we've noticed that so many of the people that were following me were Hay House people, and they're lost and they feel so bewildered.
So we started a program called Alchemizing Uncertain Times through writing.
To use creativity and do IFS work with spiritual bypassing parts and parts that have been confused about conspiracies, but in a really loving way where we're putting people in breakout groups and we're dancing, we're singing and we're making art and we're doing writing.
But then we're also doing deep trauma work to try to work with those parts and give people some healing, but also a kind of off-ramp.
That's incredible to hear about.
It seems to me like any off-ramp really has to have an in-real-life component, if not being based in the real world.
Because when I think about what's at stake for influencers and their followers who have not only been overtaken or indoctrinated by QAnon, but have also gained a kind of identity, and as you say, bonding, group bonding with the process of the digital warriorship or saviorship that they're engaged in, like they're players in the game.
And to give that up, and to give that up online is much different.
It's much, the stakes must be much higher than What it would feel like to give it up in the context of, you know, a friend relationship where the bridge isn't totally burned.
There's still the opportunity to have coffee or to take a walk through the neighborhood or through the forest.
It seems like the social media component of QAnon is its most deadly weapon because it really isolates not only people somatically from the conversations that they're not really even having, but it also increases the stakes for leaving.
Like, you lose a whole bunch of friends and connections, you gain a whole bunch of friends and connections, But they're very thin, and yet I think I feel that most QAnon folks are holding on to them by their, you know, by their teeth.
By the skin of their teeth.
Well, the hard reality is that they're not friends.
They're connections, but they're not friends.
Because the minute you challenge any of the belief systems, you know, they love bomb you into the community.
It's, you know, it's a love fest.
In the classic sort of narcissistic love bombing kind of gaslighting sort of way.
But then the minute you begin to be curious or start to question the belief systems or introduce facts or challenge as I've been doing, like they will turn on you.
Super quickly.
So I'm grateful that I have the support that I have and the therapist that I have and the community of other influencers that I trust that I have because it could be incredibly scary.
I'm actually not afraid to destroy my career.
Because there are people that are afraid from what I just did.
I've been told, you're going to destroy your career in publishing.
I don't really care.
I mean, I am the sole breadwinner in my family, so I don't say that lightly.
I don't have another source of income right now, but I would destroy my career in order to do the right thing right now.
But I want to just really highlight in yellow pen what you said about the importance of this being in person.
Ironically, we were right in the beginning of the year, I was just filing for non-profit status.
for a program that we're calling Heal at Last, which was sort of the philanthropic arm of my work because I have a big social justice part and a real trigger around the commoditization of spirituality, the fact that the kind of healing work that I do is really a luxury good for mostly privileged white people, and to go and do a workshop with me at Esalen, you know, that's a very expensive thing.
And I've been wanting to democratize this work and find a way to bring You know, cutting-edge trauma healing.
Like, I pay several hundred dollars a week for my trauma therapy.
The people that need it the most cannot afford to do that.
And that, to me, is just not okay.
It's not covered by insurance, the kind of therapy that I'm doing.
Energy healing is not available in the insurance system.
Things like shamanic healing or spiritual teachings, meditation retreats, these are all luxury goods.
And so we've been putting a recipe together to try to do some of this work using IFS, using dance and energy healing and mind-body medicine and all of the things that I've been teaching for 10 years.
And we had $200,000 grants to get this started as a pilot program for in-person groups.
Kind of based on the 12-step model, like, you know, instead of people in recovery from addiction, these would be people maybe who identify as being in recovery from illness, injury, or trauma, who have not been served inside the conventional system.
And we had a whole team in place.
We had the IFS therapists and other therapists that were going to be our group leaders to host a pilot program all over the world with, you know, small groups in churches and community centers and yoga teacher training places and where it was by donation only just like 12-step and we had a recipe and a model and we're about to start a group leader training in March.
And of course, the whole thing fell apart.
So we're just now getting started to try to figure out how to handle this during the COVID era.
Because I agree with you.
That's part of what we're doing is trying to find an off ramp.
And we never that was QAnon was not on our radar as part of why this nonprofit would be needed.
But now more than ever, I feel like we literally need a A grounded circle of in-person people, maybe outside social distance with masks on, so they can see each other and ideally touch each other.
That's becoming increasingly tricky.
Well, what about you?
How are you taking care of yourself?
You're standing up to a big publisher.
You are realizing that your following is very much divided by QAnon.
You're in California, and on any given day, the sky might be red, and the air quality might be bad.
My power just came on two hours ago after being off for two days.
We're doing a couple of interviews this pre-election week, during which I don't think a lot of people are going to get a lot of sleep.
How are you taking care of yourself in such stressful times with such stressful materials?
And do you have any really simple advice?
Well, part of my self-care, and this sounds a bit paradoxical, but part of my self-care is my social justice work.
Because it feels self-caring to be doing something and not feeling helpless and powerless and watching my country go fascist.
I feel like If this country does become a fascist country and we repeat some sort of horrific holocaust, I want to at least be able to say, I took every risk.
I did everything within my power and privilege to prevent it.
But on a more personal level, I have been a creative person my whole life.
I was in a dance company when I was young.
I got my first book deal when I was 12.
I've been writing since I was 5.
I've been a visual artist since I was 20.
I used to have 10 galleries that represented my art and I've been making a whole series of encaustic paintings that are like a fire series.
They're all red and orange with molten beeswax and blow torches and it's like a pyromaniacs.
- Clostic is layers and layers of beeswax.
- It's layers and layers of beeswax.
Yeah, I wrote my first book is called- - And it's a medieval art form.
- It's from ancient Greece from 2000 years ago.
- Oh, it's not medieval.
It is Iron Age.
Yes, my first book is called Encaustic Art.
I interviewed 60 artists who work with the medium all over the world.
And so I've been doing a lot of painting.
I have a 14-year-old daughter who's doing remote school.
And so we've been painting and writing and dancing.
And honestly, one of the most self-care healing tools for me is music.
I was not allowed to listen to music when I was young because my mother was a fundamentalist Christian.
I was allowed to listen to like praise choirs and so the minute I went to college I started obsessively reading Rolling Stone and I have an alter ego I call DJ Zaza.
And so we've been making playlists and dance parties and my daughter plays the guitar and I'm a singer and so is my daughter and so it's like singing and dancing in the art studio while I'm you know teaching this writing class with other writers doing trauma therapy work and my IFS therapy is part of my self-care.
Every day I spend and this I feel embarrassed to say this because it's so part of my white privilege but every day I take my puppy and walk two hours on Stinson Beach With my feet in the water and my feet on the ground.
And then I go skinny dipping at the little nudie beach where I live and get my body cold and in the water.
And I feel like I've been sheltered in paradise.
I mean, during lockdown, it was only people who live in West Marin that were allowed to even be on the beaches and on the trails.
And I felt like we were hoarding paradise and I felt really guilty about that, but it was also incredibly nourishing to be able to just be outside all the time.
So you can see I'm a little brown because I'm outside all the time.
A little bit.
I get on the computer to do my social justice work and then I go outside because I, it's literally the only way I know how to tolerate this.
And I have a lot of, a lot of my spirituality is very animist.
I have a very sort of nature-based spiritual practice and I do my meditations and my movement in nature with a lot of earth offerings and ritual.
So, you know, my spiritual practices, my meditation, my yoga, these are all things that I've been doing outside and
Yeah, that's very nourishing for me, but I also realize, like, I feel so, such an empathic resonance and tenderness, and just, I feel awful about people that are sheltered in the projects and can't get to nature, and there's smoke outside, and, you know, the breeze here tends to bring the smoke inland, so we have good air right now, but the East Bay can be smoked in sometimes, so it's rough.
I'm not quite sure about this last question, but I'll just give it a try, which is, if you didn't have all of the resources that you've named, if you didn't have access to the outside, if you didn't have, you know, the beeswax to do the paintings, If you really had fallen on hard times, what do you think, and you were experiencing what the majority of the world experiences, what do you think you would rely on?
What would be the thing that would be stable and accessible to you?
Well, anybody can make art with a pencil and a piece of paper.
We just taught our doctors a healing method that Shiloh Sophia created called metacognitive drawing, and it's especially great if you're a parent working with children during these times because we can actually use art to draw our feelings and sort of use them as an oracle to help us understand ourselves and help our children understand themselves better.
And same with music.
Anybody, I mean, if you look at the indigenous cultures, if you look at really traumatized cultures, you know, there is singing and dancing, even in the middle of some of the most devastating traumas.
And I think what's hard right now is that so often we're having to do it on our own.
And singing and dancing on my own is not nearly as nourishing as when I'm in a community and we're around a bonfire and we're doing this together.
And I think things like, again, our being able to go into our inner world.
If anybody is not familiar with internal family systems, please, it's a total game changer.
It's all about how to It's the ultimate self-care to me.
People talk about self-love and self-compassion and self-acceptance, but how do you love the parts of yourself that hurt people or that hurt yourself?
How do you love your inner critic?
How do you love your narcissist part?
If you're somebody in a charismatic influencer position, every single one of us, I guarantee you, has a narcissist part.
Otherwise, we can't do this work.
So how do you love your narcissist part, right?
How do you love the part that maybe harms people because of your conspirituality?
And that would be in a way that makes them feel like they didn't have to act out.
Is that the point?
Well, I watched a prosecutor do an IFS session with a teenager who had murdered another teenager.
And the work was all about how do you love your murderer part?
Because all of those parts, you know, addict parts, the parts that we tend to demonize and make New Year's resolutions around, all of those parts think they're trying to protect us.
And the work really, and this is a very, this is the work anybody can do.
This work is about really going into your inner world and discovering how those parts think they're protecting you.
And discovering what we call the exiled parts, the really vulnerable, traumatized inner children that often feel hopeless and helpless and worthless and unlovable and terrified, especially right now.
And then you have all these spiritual bypassers say, the only virus is fear itself.
And that's terrifying to these terrified parts.
But we can actually go in and bring, and this is where our spiritual practice and trauma healing come together, we can bring our mature adult divine self as the parent to those protectors that think they're helping and let them know that we can do a better job helping those parts And then we can actually go to the really young parts, and it's incredible.
It's like a reunion.
Every time I discover an exile that I didn't know was in there, and it meets me, there's this incredible heart-opening Empathic connection.
And the little one is like so happy to see me.
It sounds like I'm a crazy person talking about all my alters, because IFS is based on the idea that we all actually do have multiple parts inside of us.
And if anybody has watched the kids movie, Inside Out, the Pixar movie, it's based on IFS.
The idea that we have all these little parts that are fighting with each other, that are trying to control us.
But if we have that self-leadership, which is the goal of every real spiritual teaching, every real spiritual practice, then that aspect of our being can be fully embodied and fully in presence with those parts of ourselves that act out, those parts that get very flooded with emotion, those parts that maybe are tempted to buy into beliefs like conspirituality to try to avoid those really uncomfortable feelings.
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