Pod Insights 10% Happier with Dan Harris How To End The War With Your Body | Sonya Renee Taylor About this episode New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers.
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"Radical self-love" — what it is and how to do it.
It is incredibly common for many of us humans, whatever our gender, to be at war with our bodies -- trying to live up to the people we see in the movies, on social media, or even the versions of ourselves in old pictures. This never-enough-ness can lead to an ambient level of self-loathing that can be incredibly destructive. That's where "radical self-love" comes in.
Our guest today is Sonya Renee Taylor https://www.sonyareneetaylor.com/. She is the author of three books, including The Body is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love. She is the Founder and Radical Executive Officer of The Body is Not An Apology. She has come to this work as a result of her own personal pain, as a Black woman inhabiting a body that she says does not conform to societal norms.
In this conversation, we talk about defining radical self-love (and why she believes it's our natural state), tools for cultivating radical self-love, and the connection between being OK with yourself and the larger society.
Full Shownotes: www.meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/sonya-renee-taylor-rerun http://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/sonya-renee-taylor-rerun
Additional Resources:
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Transcript 11,104 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:05 Dan Harris? It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:19 Dan Harris? Hello, everybody. How we doing? Some men, myself included, don't like to talk about this, but it is incredibly common for many of us humans, whatever our gender, to be at war with our bodies. We're trying to live up to the people we see in the movies, on social media, or even the versions of ourselves in old pictures. This never-enoughness, this insufficiency, can lead to an ambient level of self-loathing that can be incredibly destructive. Never mind what it can do to your relationship to food, which can be downright dangerous. Body image issues and eating disorders are frequently discussed among women, less so among men.
0:59 Dan Harris? We tend to hide our dysfunction behind life-hacky tactics such as performatively restrictive diets, absurdly hard workouts, etc. To be clear, in case I've created the wrong impression here, this is not an episode aimed solely at men, it's for everyone. That said, my guest today says straight white men are usually the most resistant to the antidote that she proposes to body and food-related dysfunction. And I will be honest, she occasionally uses the type of language that the old and more judgmental version of myself might have dismissed out of hand. But if you have those skeptical tendencies, do me a solid, curb them for a minute, and hear this person out. She has both wisdom and science on her side.
1:44 Dan Harris? Her name is Sonya Renee Taylor. She's the author of three books, including "The Body Is Not An Apology," "The Power Of Radical Self-Love." She's the founder and radical executive officer of "The Body Is Not An Apology," and she has come to this work as a result of her own personal pain as a black woman inhabiting a body that she says does not conform to societal norms. In this conversation, we talk about the definition of radical self-love and why she believes it's actually our natural state. We talk about tools for cultivating radical self-love and the connection between being okay with yourself and the larger society, or in her words, how we're messing up each other's lives because of our sense of not
2:25 Dan Harris? enoughness. Just to say, we first aired this conversation back in 2021, and we're bringing it back while our team takes a little time off over the holidays. This is a great time to engage with all of these ideas again, both during the holidays and as we move into the new year and get swept up in the whole new year, new you thing. So we will get started with Sonya Renee Taylor right after this.
2:48 Dan Harris? If you care about supporting independent media, and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy, and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low-stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit, and not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds, and they really do help.
3:29 Dan Harris? You will be supporting me and my team and our mission, and I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. If you care about supporting independent media, and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy, and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend.
4:15 Dan Harris? This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission. And I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. Real progress starts with action. As the executive director of the Honold Foundation, Emily Tietzworth, works to expand access to solar energy in communities around the world, supporting locally led projects that bring reliable power, greater independence and opportunity where it is needed most.
4:57 Dan Harris? On the podcast Planet Visionaries, professional climber and Honold Foundation founder Alex Honold goes beyond the headlines with Emily to explore practical solutions for a more equitable future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Sonya Renee Taylor, welcome to the show.
5:21 Speaker 01 Thanks for having me, Dan.
5:23 Dan Harris? I'm really looking forward to this. Let me start with some definitions. What is radical self-love? What is that?
5:32 Speaker 01 Radical self-love is our inherent sense of worthiness, enoughness, divinity. It is the source state in which we arrive. I like to think of it as like the human operating system before anybody starts tinkering with it. Like, we came installed with radical self-love. We already were fully connected to our own divinity, fully connected to the divinity of others. Like, we thought all humans were amazing. We thought the fact that we had feet were amazing. I say all the time, like, you've never seen a self-loathing toddler. You know, there's no toddler who's like, I just can't stand these thighs. Like, that's not a thing, right?
6:14 Speaker 01 Toddlers are in love with themselves. They think they're amazing. They think you're fascinating. And that's our original state, that relationship of actual joy and celebration inside of our beings and the beings of others. That's what I see radical self-love as.
6:30 Dan Harris? When you say divinity, what do you mean? I ask that because I'm what I call a respectful agnostic, but I think some percentage of the people in the meditation world come to it because they either don't have any, feel any connection to traditional religion, or they had a bad experience there. So when you say divinity, what do you mean? Is that a specific religion you have in mind?
6:50 Speaker 01 It is not a specific religion that I have in mind. The way that I connect to my own sense of divinity, one is that idea of source, right? Like regardless of whatever your theological or cosmological belief is, there was a starting point. There was a thing in which other things come forth, whatever that is, whether that was the Big Bang. But there is a process through which life gets created. To me, that experience is divine. And so whatever it is, that source that created flowers, that created the ocean, whatever it was that made that, that same source energy also created a sanya, which I think is pretty cool. And for me, that speaks to my idea of what is divine.
7:35 Speaker 01 Divine is whatever it is that creates this ecosystem of life, whatever things go into that, such that life keeps wanting to manifest itself, both through me and through the things around me. That's the experience of divinity that I'm talking about. And there are ways certainly that that correlates with religious philosophies, but I think it also correlates with things that are not religious at all.
8:01 Dan Harris? So it could be just nature as opposed to sort of a creator god of some sort?
8:06 Speaker 01 Absolutely, yeah. Whatever works for you. I'm not in, you know, I'm not here to tell people like, this is what this means. I'm much more interested in, can we drop into the experience of a thing? Less about like what the labels are that we've attached to it? What is the felt experience of that which is magnificent in the world? That which you find, you know, unfathomable in its beauty in the world? Can we feel that in ourselves? Can I sense my connection to that? That to me is divinity.
8:39 Dan Harris? Well, let's talk about how one does that because I think a lot of people listening to this would say, oh, radical self-love, sounds pretty good, I'll have what she's having, et cetera, et cetera. But how does one even begin to feel this?
8:50 Speaker 01 So I think that feeling it is a process of actually recognizing what we feel instead. Because if radical self-love is our inherent state, right? I use the word radical, literally pulling from the dictionary definitions of radical: inherent, foundational, thoroughgoing, and extreme, proposing drastic political and economic change. These are the framework by which I talk about radical self-love. And so in order to understand that, if it is inherent and I'm not feeling it, then the question is, what is in between me and that which is inherent in me? What am I feeling instead? What's the story that's living on top of it? And how do I begin to disengage that story? That is, for me, the way back
9:34 Speaker 01 to radical self-love. It's kind of like an onion. If radical self-love is in the center, there's a whole lot of layers that we've put on top that we actually have to start peeling away so that we can get back to that core bulb where new things grow from.
9:49 Dan Harris? Playing with the onion metaphor here. There may be some crying as you go through the layers.
9:54 Speaker 01 There's a lot of crying. I think it's really important for people to realize, I never propose that this is an easy journey. I think we should be leery and skeptical of anyone who proposes radical self-love is this light, fluffy, airy, fairy, just go to the day spa and, you know, take more naps with cucumbers on your eyes and you'll be at radical self-love. If that's what they're proposing, we are talking about a drastically different thing than what I'm talking about. Because in order to get to that inherent space, Becoming aware of where you have been, becoming aware of the thoughts that have been governing your life,
10:38 Speaker 01 becoming aware of the thoughts that have been governing your relationships with other people and the ways in which those are fear and shame and trauma-based and oppression-based. And having to confront that is deeply uncomfortable. However, one of the things that I propose is that it's already uncomfortable. Living in fear and shame and disconnection from yourself and disconnection from everybody else is already uncomfortable. So if you're gonna be uncomfortable, be uncomfortable in service of your own liberation. Be uncomfortable in service of your own growth. You know, and I think sometimes we settle for the discomfort that we're the most familiar with,
11:20 Speaker 01 rather than the one that gets us closer to what we most desire to be and manifest in the world.
11:28 Dan Harris? So in that spirit, can you say more about how we start peeling back the layers of the onion? How we do, I mean, is this the job of therapy? What are the modalities you recommend in this process?
11:39 Speaker 01 I'm a person who believes in a deep tool belt. I do everything. I've done a little bit of everything and I add all of those things. But I think if you want to break it down to its sort of simplest forms, the way that I talk about it in the book is it's a thinking, doing, being process. The first step is that you actually have to become conscious of your thoughts. You have to become conscious of the ways in which you are moving through the world. So the things that usually operate on autopilot, right? The, I'm gonna use a simple example, and I think it's really important. Sometimes I will use the example of weight because it's an easy one for people to understand. But I am in no way making radical self-love or the work that I do about just weight. The work that I do is about all the ways that we show up in our bodies and in our beings
12:24 Speaker 01 and all the ways that we are conditioned to believe that somehow that's not enough. So I just felt like that's important to say. So, but in this example, let's say it's weight. I go to the store, I try on some jeans, they don't fit. The immediate default response for me is that there's something wrong with my body. That's the immediate default response for most people, socialized female in the world. If something's wrong with my body, it's it's me. Oh, my gosh, I can't believe I've gained weight. What's wrong with me? Whatever that story is. And that happens so quickly that you never challenge it. You never say, hmm, where does that thought come from? What is that about? Why is it wrong for me?
13:05 Speaker 01 And not actually that, you know, the jean makers only make jeans cut this particular way that doesn't, you know, match my body. Why am I the first line of assault? And so, once I raise that to consciousness, oh, when something doesn't feel right about my body, the first place that I blame is my body. If something doesn't feel right in the world, the first place that I assign blame is myself. What would it look like if I stopped doing that? Now, here enters therapy, enters 12-step program, enters a smorgasbord of things, right? Like, I think there are all kinds of things you can do. There's also just you being in practice with yourself.
13:50 Speaker 01 Because this actually is just an activity of regular and consistent practice. I notice the thought, I interrupt it. Oh, I'm doing that thing where I always think that somehow it's me that's wrong. It's my body that's wrong. All right, what's a new story I can tell myself? What is a new option? And that's the doing piece. So we've gone from the thinking, I've interrogated my thinking, I've raised it to consciousness, and now that leaves me at choice. I can either keep going down that traditional pathway of self-blame, or I can say, what are the other options here? Okay, let me pick a different option. And it'll feel uncomfortable. It'll feel like, mm, I don't believe that yet.
14:33 Speaker 01 It'll feel like, mm, this voice that tells me the opposite is really, really loud. All of those things will be true. But what's actually happening on a scientific level, on a neurological level, is that you're creating new neural pathways. By the repetition of new behavior in the face of old thoughts, you create new neural pathways that then make it much easier to go to the new thought as default rather than the old one. And the repetition of that over time creates what I like to think of as a new way of being. That's the being-ness. That is, you know, when people are like, oh, my gosh, you just, you just really own yourself in a space. That didn't just show up one day.
15:15 Speaker 01 That's the practice of raising my thoughts to consciousness, interrupting them, choosing new action over and over and over again, so that I actually believe it now. It is who I understand myself to be.
15:30 Dan Harris? Training the mind is a concept that does land well for me, and I think will land well for this audience, because that's what we talk about on every single episode.
15:38 Speaker 01 Absolutely. My work centers on the body. And the reason my work centers on the body is, one, because we all got one. If I, I was like, what's the most unifying thing we can talk about as humans that we think is not unifying at all? That we think we have nothing in common with other people about? So much of the oppression and equity and injustice we experience in the world is based on our relationships with bodies, our own bodies and other people's bodies. And so, training the mind to think differently about bodies, about my own body, about what are the immediate judgments that come up in my body? What are the immediate judgments that come up in other people's bodies and that, about other people's bodies?
16:20 Speaker 01 And how do I slow that process and then retrain my mind to think something different? And also to notice all the places where input is happening that would have me deviate from the path of radical self-love? Where are all the messages? Where are all the external feeders that want to sort of keep me in that repetition of the, of my default thoughts?
16:47 Dan Harris? If I work... On RSL, Radical Self-Love for Myself, and we scale that up enough, would it go beyond fatphobia to racism?
16:58 Speaker 01 Everything.
16:59 Dan Harris? Sexism, all the isms?
17:00 Speaker 01 All the isms, all the obious. Because at the end of the day, they're about our bodies, right? Racism is about whose bodies, phenotypically, do we assign greater value to? Have we decided are more human than other bodies? Right? Homophobia is about how bodies desire, in which ways we experience desire in our body that we find acceptable or we find unacceptable. Sexism is about our assessment about gender identity and bodies, and whose bodies are valuable. All of it lives inside of what I call the ladder of bodily hierarchy. That we have said there are some bodies that are greater than other bodies, and that all of our assignment, our social assignment,
17:44 Speaker 01 is to figure out where we live on that ladder and to keep trying to ascend it, in one way or another. And that that ladder is what keeps oppression in place. Because I will always have to have someone below me if I am to be understood as valuable in the world, in the current social construct that we live in. The work of radical self-love is to say, the ladder is an illusion. The ladder is actually not real other than it is real because we keep trying to climb it. And if I stopped trying to climb that ladder, then what would happen? I'd be left with my inherent state, which cannot exist in comparison because it is already enough.
18:29 Speaker 01 It is already worthy. It is already divine unto itself.
18:34 Dan Harris? What do you mean by the title of your book, "The Body's Not an Apology"?
18:38 Speaker 01 That there are a multitude of ways in which we constantly are apologizing for the way we exist in the body. The origin of it came from a conversation with a friend who had a disability and who was afraid that she might have an unintended pregnancy. And, you know, I say probably everywhere I go these days that I'm the nosy friend. I will get in your business from a deep place of love.
19:04 Speaker 01 And so, in the spirit of that, I asked my friend about why she was having unprotected sex with this casual partner that she wasn't all that into.
19:15 Speaker 01 And my friend really answered me in this deeply vulnerable, deeply honest response. And she said, my disability makes it really difficult for me to be sexual already with like positioning and stuff. And so I just didn't feel entitled to ask this person to use a condom too. And my response without thinking, without, it wasn't a conscious response. It was a something from someplace else response was your body is not an apology. It's not something you offer to someone to say, sorry for my disability. And when I said that, something just resonated, rang in me so true about, I was like, oh, this is not for her. I'm the nosy friend, but I'm in my own business right now. Cause this
19:57 Speaker 01 was clearly a message for me and a message for the way in which I too have moved through the world, deciding that my, you know, big, dark, bald, neurodivergent body was wrong. And so here's the way I'm apologizing. I'm apologizing for my alopecia with these wigs I wear every day. I'm apologizing for my size with this girdle I put on every day. I'm apologizing for my blackness with this tone, this, you know, respectability tone in this sort of mimicking of white speech so that I'm seen as more acceptable in those spaces. There are all kinds of ways in which I'm constantly apologizing for myself, apologizing
20:39 Speaker 01 for this body and the way it shows up in the world. And if we got that there was nothing to apologize for, if we got at a cellular level, that this body is not an apology, how would it transform the way I move through the world? How would it have transformed the way my friend showed up for her own safety and wellbeing in that sexual situation? You know? And so, once I said it, I was like, mm, that's a thing. I don't know what it is yet. And I was, you know, at the time, I was making my living as a full-time performance poet. And I was like, oh, I guess it's a poem. I mean, I write this poem. And so I wrote this poem and it just kept making things. Every time I said it, it made something
21:23 Speaker 01 new. Till eventually it made an entire company and a movement and a series of books and all kinds of stuff. Yeah.
21:32 Dan Harris? I'm curious about you, because you shared a little bit of your story there, having felt like you needed to, either consciously or subconsciously, you felt like you needed to apologize for all these physical attributes, or psychological attributes. How well could you practice what you preach with radical self-love?
21:52 Speaker 01 That's a great uncomfortable question, Dan. Thanks.
21:57 Speaker 01 I, you know, I'm really grateful that these tools came through me. You know, and the book is a set of tools. So, the first edition of the book was a set of tools. The last chapter was 10 tools, things you can actually put into practice to help, you know, strengthen the core muscle of your own radical self-love work. And then that moved in the second edition to a separate workbook. I pulled out all of those tools, they're in a separate workbook. And now in the second edition of the book, it is, "How does radical self-love in these tools apply to the isms and obes? How do we use it to dismantle inequality in the world?" What I'm very clear about is that this offering came through me,
22:41 Speaker 01 but y'all, and when I say y'all, I just mean the collective y'all, humans, whoever buys this book, whatever, y'all are the refrigerator, and radical self-love is the refrigerator magnet that sits on my refrigerator so that I remember to look at it. It is so out in the world that it calls me back to it. And I was, I think I came to this earlier this year where I was like, "Oh, this is, for me, part of my own radical self-love practice, is that I have to put a thing out in the world that I then become responsible to doing. And that responsibility is what reaffirms my ability to live into it." And so, I was like, "Oh, all of this I made for the world is not actually for y'all at all.
23:24 Speaker 01 It's actually for me. It's for my own practice." And so, I've gotten pretty good at it. I mean, there are certainly places, and I think it's so important that we all remember, this is not a, it's not a destination. It's not like, "I have arrived at radical self-love, and never again is there a thought of loathing," Or discontentment with my own being, or any repugnant thoughts about other people's bodies. That is not how this works. Specifically, it doesn't work that way because that's not the world we live in. We are still contending with the world that constantly tells us that we should see ourselves as deficient and see others as deficient. And so we're always going to be contending with that outside voice inside of us. For me, what I have been able to manage to do in this work
24:09 Speaker 01 is I have some tools now so that I know how to turn down the volume on that outside voice. It's not as loud in my head. It doesn't speak to me as consistently. I don't understand it as my voice, which is, I think, one of the first places that we struggle with when we take up this journey is we hear that voice and we think it's us talking to us. And it's not us talking to us. It's the system talking to us. It's been talking to us since we came out of the womb. And now it just sounds really familiar. But it's not us. And so I can make that distinction very easily. And then when those thoughts do come up, I begin to engage in enacting those tools that I know will realign me with my radical self-love.
24:50 Dan Harris? You're reminding me of a quote that I first heard from a friend of mine, meditation teacher who comes on the show, Sebene Selassie. The quote is something to the effect of, "You think you're thinking your thoughts, but you're actually thinking the culture's thoughts."
25:03 Speaker 01 Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. Exactly. It's not, I mean, and I think that's one of the things that is really disconcerting for us in the beginning of this journey is we have to get in touch with how out of control we have been in our own lives. How we think we are controlling things. We think that these thoughts are our own thoughts. And I find it
25:30 Speaker 01 powerfully liberating when I realize that this wasn't actually me. Like, one of the things that I think gets us really stuck, particularly around issues of racism, white supremacist delusion, those sorts of things. And white supremacist delusion is the language that I always use when I talk about what other people call white supremacy, because I think it's important to name that it's not real. So I think that's why I use that language. But one of the things that when I'm talking to white folks who are interested in disengaging from that narrative, one of the places where they get stuck is, I can't acknowledge it, because if I acknowledge it, then I'm a bad person.
26:11 Speaker 01 And I don't want to be a bad person, because bad people lose loved ones, they lose jobs, they get disconnected from life, all of these things. And so I can't look at this part of myself. And if we just got clear that those ideas weren't ours to begin with, we didn't create them, they were given to us. And of course, they swarm and swim in our heads, because that's the world that we were birthed into, it becomes so much easier to go on ahead and let it in. What is that thought someone else gave me? Oh, I don't want that thought. Well, let me begin the process of returning that thing I did not want. But we can't ever return the thing we didn't want if we can't acknowledge that we have
26:56 Speaker 01 it in the first place. I think if we could put some space between, you didn't create it in you, but you are responsible for the fact that you've been carrying it around uninterrogated. That's your responsibility, and you can interrupt that part. I think that makes the journey so much easier.
27:12 Dan Harris? I have found that to be powerful, too. Very powerful, because I've had the same resistance to looking at my own isms and obias, because it's embarrassing, or because it maybe confirms some suspicions I had about being horrible, or whatever. But to know that I didn't create them, I didn't inject them into my mind, they were injected by the culture, it makes it much more tractable, workable.
27:36 Speaker 01 Yes.
27:37 Dan Harris? Along those lines, interesting to me that you have said that the population, from your perspective, that struggles the most with radical self-love would be straight white males. You're talking to one now. Why do you think people like me struggle with this concept of radical self-love?
27:59 Speaker 01 I think that the culture, society, has told straight white men, here is how you are valuable. And they have told that message of externalized validation throughout time, immemorial, that you are valuable by what you can conquer, that you are valuable by how much wealth you can amass, you are valuable by how strong you can become, how much you can dominate. That is the story of straight, white, male masculinity. It's also the story of most masculinity, unfortunately, in our societies, certainly in Western society. And so it is really difficult
28:42 Speaker 01 to trade that in for this unknown thing, for this thing that you don't have any relationship with, right, that you're not connected to. You're like, so wait a minute, I'm supposed to give up all the things that I've been told, make me a man, make me valuable in the world, make me necessary and essential in the world, for some language that we've been inherently feminized. So let's be clear. For an idea, love, that we have absolutely feminized. I have, there's an essay in a book that I just contributed in, edited by Brené Brown and Tarana Burke, called "You Are Your Best Thing." And it's a compilation of stories of shame and vulnerability and resilience from Black writers.
29:27 Speaker 01 And there's a piece in it by Mark Lamont Hill that I really appreciated. And in it, he talks about the only way that he understood to process any emotional output of any sort was sex or aggression, and that those were the two places where feelings got to live. I feel good, sex. I don't feel good, some form of aggression or domination. And I'm like, with such a limited access to one's own true self.
30:01 Speaker 01 There's nothing but havoc that can be wreaked from that. Like, that's just not, that's just not enough tools to do real life. And yet, that's what we've been asking men, and very specifically, straight, white, cisgendered men. That's what we've been asking them to use to navigate life. And so I think there has to be a deep sort of reemergence of what is possible inside of masculinity for men to really begin to move into their own radical self-love journeys. I'm seeing it, I'm seeing it pop up, but it's definitely a place where there's a lot of resistance and challenge.
30:38 Dan Harris? Yeah, man, I can't speak for my whole cohort here.
30:41 Speaker 01 Go on ahead, they ask me to do it all the time. Do it, Dan.
30:51 Dan Harris? All right, fine, I'm gonna speak for all the straight white men. That all sounds really true to me. I don't have any, I'm just basing this on my own lived experience, I don't have any data to back it up, but what you just described feels like it rhymes with what I've lived for nearly 50 years, for sure.
31:09 Speaker 01 I don't have no data either, I'm not a scientist, I'm a radical self-love evangelist. But what I know to be true is I know the world that I live in, and I know the outcomes and impacts of the choices and decisions that have been made, you know, to govern my life, and unfortunately, most of those are governed by straight, white men. The societies I live in, the choices and legislation and laws that get passed, all of those, created by straight, white men. And they tell me all that I need to know about the level of disconnection between radical self-love and the choices that get made in those spaces. And so that's how I know, because I actually have to live with the results of it, we actually all do.
31:53 Dan Harris? So this gets back to the societal aspect of your work, which is, as I understand it, you spoke about this a little bit earlier, but I think it's worth winging back to it, that if you can get everybody interested in radical self-love, including powerful, straight white men, who have been running big chunks of the planet for big chunks of human history, well, then people who love themselves tend not to be too aggressive and judgmental and hateful toward others.
32:22 Speaker 01 They seem to not kill people as much. They seem to not pillage and rape as much. They seem to not hoard and manipulate as much. Somehow, things get really, really better when we're connected to our own self-love. And I say that in this sort of flippant way, but what I really, really am getting at is that we have built a world on domination and aggression. We have built a world on greed and resource hoarding. We know what that world looks like. We are living in the ruins of it, or the, certainly what I experience is the real-time crumbling of all of those particular structures. I'm curious what it would look like if we decided to build the world on love.
33:05 Speaker 01 I'm curious what it would look like if we decided that love was the central place from which we made decisions, on a collective and on an individual basis. I'm willing to bet, what little bit I have, that we would have a really drastically different planet. And even if I'm wrong, nothing beats a failure but a try. And so I would like to see us effort in that direction and see what comes of it.
33:36 Dan Harris? Much more of my conversation with Sonya Renee Taylor right after this.
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35:48 Dan Harris? Let's go back to the tools here because there's a lot of things that you recommend. So let me just pick one of your ideas or practical recommendations. This is about body judgment and shame specifically. And you have these three key tenets that you call the three pieces.
36:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
36:07 Dan Harris? P E A C E S.
36:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, so there are three things I think that you have to sort of, again, raise to consciousness and begin to contend with in order to even begin to make some traction in this area. Making peace with not understanding, then making peace with difference, and then making peace with your own body. Making peace with not understanding gives us the spaciousness to contend with difference. Part of the narrative that we all receive is that we're supposed to know things and that when we don't know things, it's one of those places where we personalize that not knowing as some individual failing. And what that does is it forces us to make up stories that aren't true just for the sake of saying we know things.
36:52 Speaker 01 And whether or not that story is, you're wrong. In the case of homosexuality, right? The issue is, I don't understand how you desire in a way that is different than how I desire. And so the story that I create to make peace with not understanding in that sense is that you're wrong, is that you're an anomaly, an aberrant anomaly in the world and consequently should be judged and somehow are a threat to me. And that's how I understand this. As opposed to saying, I don't understand that particular way of desire. It's not real for me, it's not true for me, and I don't have to understand it. There's no need for me to understand it.
37:37 Speaker 01 It's not mine. Okay, so if I don't understand it and I don't need to understand it, then I can just allow it to be an expression of human variance. I can allow it to be an expression of the multitude of ways in which we are all different. We exist in a society that says sameness is better. Even the idea of assimilation is the idea that your difference needs to leave and your sameness needs to stay.
38:07 Speaker 01 And there's a part of that that is evolutionary. There's a part of that that comes from the fact that we needed to recognize in-groups and out-groups and which tribe was ours and which wasn't, and whether or not that would mean less resource for us or a warring faction we would have to deal with. All of those things are real historically, and they're not evolutionarily needed in the same way that they were when we were hunter-gatherers living in caves. And so what does it look like to intentionally evolve from a thinking that doesn't serve us in the same way? And so when we make peace with not understanding, it creates the space to make peace with difference,
38:48 Speaker 01 to not see difference as threat, to not see difference as avenue for scarcity, and instead to see difference as part of the natural kaleidoscope of our ecosystem, the natural variations of the world that we have. And we are down for that in the natural world. And then somehow, when it comes to humans, we're like, nope, those things have to go. And so I think there's an opportunity for us to disengage that thinking, to interrogate that thinking and shift that. Because once we do that, then we have the ability to be at peace with our own difference. And that difference is our bodies. Because so much of our shame and judgment about our bodies is, my body is different than what the world says is normal, right?
39:33 Speaker 01 My body is different than what society says is a good body, is a body higher up on that ladder of bodily hierarchy. If we can go on ahead and accept difference, then we can recognize and accept and embrace the difference that lives inside of us.
39:50 Dan Harris? I want people to read the book, so I don't want to have you give away all the tools. But can you just pick out a few that you think are particularly resonant that might be helpful for listeners?
40:02 Speaker 01 Absolutely. So tool number three is reframe your framework. And I think this is such an important tool because part of What happens when we are in this radical self-love journey, or at least before we begin it, is that we're in this story of how our body is the enemy. Our body is messing up. And there are small ways in which we do that, and then there are large ways in which we do that. And so what happens when we stop seeing our body as the enemy and start seeing our body as operating in solidarity with us? How does it shift the way that we move and relate to our bodies? I find that this tool is really helpful in conversations about gender identity and
40:47 Speaker 01 and for trans folks as well, who experience body dysmorphia and body dysphoria. And again, it's not so much a like, this is what it is. But instead is, what happens when I try on a new thought process? Right? It's not about whether or not I believe it. It's not about whether or not it's true. It's, does my perspective change or shift when I try on a new thought process? And if the new thought process is, my body is not my enemy. My body is working in solidarity with me. Then what decisions do me and my body make together in service of our most authentic
41:31 Speaker 01 existence, in service of our highest good?
41:35 Dan Harris? That's very interesting and worth dwelling on for a second. You know, when I hear you talk about that, it reminds me of, I don't know if you've heard of this person, but there's a person who's had a huge impact on me. Her name is Evelyn Tribole, and she's one of the progenitors of something called intuitive eating.
41:52 Speaker 01 Yes.
41:52 Dan Harris? And so she came on the show, and then I, for the last couple of years, worked with her personally. And I was one of these, you know, typical guys who was kind of like a biohacker and counting your macros and whatever, I don't know, counting your calories and all that other whatever, working out a lot and maybe playing with crazy things you cut out of your diet and all that. But it took me Talking to her until I realized that that was a pretty hostile attitude. I'm not saying you shouldn't take care of your body. I think you should. But when I talked to her, I realized that there was a lot of aggression that was self-directed there. And I hear a lot of overlap. And when you're talking about kind of, this is the one of the ultimate cliches here,
42:34 Dan Harris? but like, listening to your body, especially for Evelyn, she'll talk a lot about listening to your body. Are you hungry or are you full?
42:41 Speaker 01 Right.
42:42 Dan Harris? And that's a pretty, to use your word, radical way to orient toward when you're gonna eat.
42:47 Speaker 01 Absolutely, absolutely.
42:49 Dan Harris? So anyway, I throw that out there to see if that lands for you.
42:52 Speaker 01 So, I mean, I do know Evelyn and am familiar with Evelyn's work. And, you know, radical self-love aligns so much with things like intuitive eating, with things like Health at Every Size. And, you know, I'm really, I feel really grateful that the eating disorder community is one of the communities that, early on, latched on to this work and saw it as like, oh, this applies to what we do. And because, again, part of those dynamics in those situations are, I'm at war with my body. I must control my body, right? My body is a thing for me to manipulate, to strategize against, to figure out how to fix. As opposed to, I'm in relationship with my body and we want our well-being. We're on the same team.
43:36 Speaker 01 We both want to stay here as long as possible and as much wellness as possible. How do we create that together? And again, that's just such a different paradigm than the world that treats the body as this, you know, this machine that we are basically man the controls of and beat around and, you know, get to do our bidding. And I think that it's just a really harsh, just like you said, an aggressive way to be with oneself. And it creates an experience of consistent disharmony. We are always fighting our bodies. And I don't want to fight every day. I'm tired.
44:17 Speaker 01 I want sweetness, I want tenderness, I want some love. And how can I be the purveyor of that inside of myself? Again, how do I create in me that which I'd like to see externally? I create that by starting with the relationship that I have the closest to me, which is my body.
44:40 Dan Harris? Much more of my conversation with Sonya Renee Taylor right after this.
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45:25 Dan Harris? I interrupted you earlier when you were going to move on to another of the 10 pillars.
45:29 Speaker 01 I'm going to give you two more tools.
45:31 Dan Harris? Please.
45:32 Speaker 01 Two more tools. And they're the two most important tools. I tell people all the time, you could do everything I said. If you don't do these two things, you're going to struggle in your radical self-love journey. Tool number nine is being community. My work's dances between the world of personal development, which I find to be a world that misses the opportunity to shift and change the external world. It's like, hey, fix yourself and then forget about all the other things that happen out in the world and the social justice world. It's like, fix all the problems in the world, but forget that you are part of the world and they got there because of the ways that you move and think and behave in the world.
46:13 Speaker 01 My work is about how do we bridge those things, which means that we have to do away with individualism, with the notion that individualism is a valuable way of being. I disagree. Interdependence is a valuable and sustainable way of being. And the truth is, interdependence is the only way of being. And individualism is the illusion we've been selling each other because it's a great external way to validate ourselves. But it isn't true. The truth is, there is nothing that you actually have that did not require other humans' help to get there. That's just true. And so, being in community is how we make this work sustainable. You can do all the things all day long,
46:58 Speaker 01 and you are still up against an entire societal, cultural, political, and economic machine that has a deep investment in all of those areas, and you continuing to exist inside of the paradigm of not enoughness. It really is a very lucrative place for you to exist inside of these systems. And so, the idea that you can do this all alone is just silly. It's just not possible. And you'll find yourself back in the same loops again and again. But inside community, not only do we have reinforcement for the shifts that we're making and the changes that we're making, but we also then have the people power to express those shifts and changes
47:43 Speaker 01 on the structural and systemic level. So, it's necessary. In the book, I talk about it sort of as the, I use the example of the epidemiological triad, which made me really excited. I was like, I look at me using science. And so, the epidemiological triad talks about the ways in which, you know, pathogens pass in the world. And they require a host. They require the pathogen. And they require a mode of transmission. Media and how we engage is the mode of transmission. We are the hosts. And the pathogen is shame, is disconnection, is the belief in our not enoughness.
48:27 Speaker 01 And you only have to break one of those things in order to stop that pathogen from spreading. If we stop being the host, which means if we stop containing it in isolation, if we stop saying that it's just me and I'm gonna work and fix this all by myself, which actually just makes you a seal-type container for the pathogen to continue to grow and spread, right? That is actually keeping it intact. But like most diseases, when you expose it for any prolonged period of time, it dies.
49:07 Speaker 01 And so, there's a way in which when we expose our own journey of radical self-love in community, we begin to interrupt the contagious nature of body shame. And we start spreading the contagious nature of radical self-love. Because all of it's contagious. We're always spreading something. The question is, what do we want to spread? And in community, we can be spreading something different.
49:32 Dan Harris? Third, third tool that you were going to recommend to us before, before I let you return to your day in New Zealand, because I know it's just beginning.
49:40 Speaker 01 It is. The final tool, the most important tool, you could do everything. If you don't do this, you're going to struggle in your radical self-love journey, is tool number 10, give yourself some grace. The truth of the matter is that this is not an easy journey. This is not easy work. This is difficult work. It's confronting work. It's uncomfortable work. And you will absolutely find yourself back in your old loops, in your old stories. And one of the things that I think, because we are so indoctrinated, again, inside of this idea of like, getting it right, is that when we find ourselves back in our old loops, then we're like, see, I failed. Right?
50:22 Speaker 01 And then we have what one of my workshop participants called meta-shame. Now I have shame for having shame. Right? That's exhausting. That's a lot of shame. It's a traduction of shame. And I think what, what we can offer ourselves is, is the grace of imperfection on the journey. You know? I tell people all the time, I run an entire organization, I've written three books, all related to, only about, focused my whole life on radical self-love. And there are days when I do not feel like I like myself, and I don't like this body when I'm over it. And my work on those days is to love the Sonya that doesn't feel like she loves her
51:06 Speaker 01 body, until she loves her body again. I love you, Sonya who feels not enough. I love you, Sonya who feels like you're failing. I love you, Sonya who can't fit into this shirt you used to be able to fit into. I love you. And the more that I practice loving that Sonya, that imperfect, on her journey Sonya, the more capacity I have to return to that space of love. I invite that for all of us on this journey. It's the only thing that makes it sustainable.
51:36 Dan Harris? Let me go back into sort of my role, unasked for, of spokesman for all straight white males. So I can hear two skeptical arguments emerging from my straight white male reptile brain. One is, and I'll let you attack either or both. One is, oh, this whole "I love you, fill in the blank" thing is forced overly earnest, too treacly. I don't want to do it. The other is, if I feel like I'm enough, if I love myself, if I get over my insufficiency, I will be utterly ineffective and I won't be ambitious.
52:13 Speaker 01 I won't work hard.
52:13 Dan Harris? Yes.
52:15 Speaker 01 Exactly. Both of those I'm quite familiar with. The first thing that we have to do is just acknowledge where there's resistance and get curious about the resistance. Because the first scenario is just resistance. "It's saccharine, it's too sweet, I don't want to love myself." What does that even sound like, right? Like, if you let yourself just sit with the reflection of, "I want to love myself." Let yourself be with that, right? Because I think if we sit with that long enough, we start to be like, oh, there's something underneath that. There's a fear underneath it. There's a fear that I'm going to lose something. There's a fear that, again, that the external things that I have gained by not being in that relationship will be lost, right? I'm going to lose something. And let yourself be with that, right?
53:00 Speaker 01 Because the truth of the matter is, and this is, again, one of the uncomfortable realities of radical self-love, is you will lose something. In a world that has rewarded you for being disconnected from yourself, disconnected from others, and plugged into dominance and aggression as the way in which to assign your own value, divesting from that will cost you. And I am never going to pretend like it will not. It absolutely will cost you. And it's the reason why people cling to it. And what I want to invite in that space...
53:35 Speaker 01 Is choosing you.
53:39 Speaker 01 That's what I really want to invite is what would it look like to choose me? Because some of us have only ever had that option. And I think that's an important thing to remember is there's only so much cashing in on what the system says is appropriate or validatable that I can use. It expires at my fatness. It expires at my blackness. It expires at my woman. There are things that are immutable about me that the system will never, ever say is the top rung. And so I have had to figure out either to live in self-loathing about those things or to to recognize the system as a liar that is that is stealing something from me, that is stealing my wholeness, my connection to other humans and my connection to myself.
54:24 Speaker 01 And I invite people, particularly the folks who are at the top of that rung, the people who get rewarded the most for being the most disconnected from this, to take back your humanity. Because that's actually the thing that the latter asks you to exchange. Can you be less fully human with yourself and with others in exchange for all of these external prizes? And I believe that if we really let ourselves into ourselves, we want our humanity back. I can see it. I see it every single day that there are ways in which we all want the fullness of our humanity back.
55:09 Speaker 01 And I believe the radical self-love offers us that. That's question number one. Question number two.
55:17 Speaker 01 If the only thing that is making you ambitious is the idea that you are not enough.
55:26 Speaker 01 If what you have attained requires you to be less fully connected to yourself, I would offer that it's on its way to crumbling anyway. It is not sustainable. It is not sustainable because they are not asking you to pull from an inexhaustible resource. They are asking you to pull from an exhaustible resource that has limited amounts of of energy, time, and actual physical existence. And so if your ambition is only driven by an engine that is soon to burn out, it's gonna burn out anyway, love. I assure you that radical self-love makes you alive. It makes you alive to your purpose.
56:10 Speaker 01 It makes you alive to the things that bring you joy and excitement and enthusiasm. I am more ambitious than I've ever been in my entire life, and it's because I wake up and I talk about what I love. It's because I wake up and I'm clear that I am in alignment with what it is that I was put on this earth to do. There is no greater engine than that. I assure you, you will be more ambitious than you ever knew you were with radical self-love as the motor, rather than all of these external trinkets that the world is gonna offer you. And don't believe me, try it, and then let me know how it turns out.
56:47 Dan Harris? Well, speaking as somebody who's tried it to a, you know, limited but non-trivial extent, on the first question of, you know, is it, you know, it can feel forced or overly earnest, I mean, I guess for me, the two things that have helped get over that, one is seeing that there's sexism in the resistance, and that that sexism isn't my fault, just part of the conditioning. And the other is, yes, it is forced, but what would an alien think if an alien landed on this planet and went to a gym? Why are people systematically pick it up and lift it and putting down heavy things or running in place for 45 minutes?
57:27 Speaker 01 It's forced.
57:28 Dan Harris? That's forced, too. And so that's what we're trying to re-
57:34 Dan Harris? Program our inner dialogue. Yeah, it's gonna take some work. It's gonna take some exercise. That's what this is.
57:40 Speaker 01 Exactly, exactly. That's why I say you don't have to believe it. You just have to practice it. And the repetition of practicing makes it possible. It's the being part. All you have to do is think and do again and again and again. And eventually, that which you thought wasn't, becomes.
57:58 Dan Harris? Sonya, can you just tell everybody the names of your books and where you are on the internet and where we can learn more about you generally?
58:05 Speaker 01 Absolutely. So, the books are The Body Is Not An Apology: The Power Of Radical Self-Love and Your Body Is Not An Apology Workbook. Both of those are available anyplace books are sold. I also have a children's book called The Celebrate Your Body And Its Changes Too: The Ultimate Guide To Puberty For Girls. And that's also available anyplace books are sold. And you can catch my newest essay out in the anthology, You Are Your Best Thing. So that places all the book things right now. And that's actually not true. And there's the International Handbook of Fat Studies, which is an academic handbook, co-edited by myself and Kat Pazey. And that's also available anyplace books are sold.
58:48 Speaker 01 You can find me on the internets at instagram.com. I am Sonya Renee Taylor. I post things there, but I no longer do engagement on Instagram. So you can have a sort of, you know, it's like my Pinterest. I treat Instagram like Pinterest. But if you want to be in dialogue with me and community with me, I invite you to come over to my Patreon community. It's also Sonya Renee Taylor. I post videos. I do a series called What's Up Y'all? Where I'm just musing about the reflections that I experiences that I see in the world about inequity and justice, how we move forward with this radical self-love journey of ours. And I communicate and talk back and all that good stuff. So that's Sonya Renee Taylor at Patreon.
59:31 Speaker 01 And then you can learn more about my work at SonyaReneeTaylor.com. You can learn more about The Body Is Not An Apology and the work that we've been doing for a decade now at thebodyisnotanapology.com. All the things.
59:45 Dan Harris? Great. That was a succinct listing of all the things. Did I miss anything?
59:50 Speaker 01 No, I don't think so. Thank you so much. I feel like you were very thorough and you gave me just enough skepticisms to contend with, so to do some resistance training. So, yeah, no, thank you so much. It's interesting. I feel like you are on your journey and I'm curious and it would continue to be curious about sort of where are the things that come up as you continue to move further along because again, I always want to acknowledge that the people highest up on the rung, there's a lot to shift. It can feel like you're falling from a very high height. And so I applaud the folks who, you know, are the most comfortable in their
1:00:32 Speaker 01 position, still choosing to take this journey because at the end of the day, there's still something in them that is like, this can't be it. And, you know, I'm glad that you're on that journey.
1:00:42 Dan Harris? I have not experienced it as a falling, though.
1:00:45 Speaker 01 That's wonderful and important to note because I think that what keeps people from doing it is that they're afraid that it will be the experience of falling. But if what you're experiencing is, no, I just have a deeper, richer connection to myself. My life actually is joyful and easy. Those are the stories we actually need to hear. That like, I divested from some of these things and it's actually turned out great, is the story that needs to be out in the world. I think it's the thing that invites more people to take the journey.
1:01:14 Dan Harris? I just, you know, I feel like not kicking my own butt as much has made my, that makes my inner life better. And as a consequence of that, I'm nicer to the people around me. And as those relationships improve, my inner life gets even better and then I'm even nicer to the people around me. And so I just experienced it as that. I'm not really thinking about it in terms of the larger social structures, but that's where I wonder whether maybe I'm doing it wrong.
1:01:40 Speaker 01 Well, that's the invitation is to now begin to think about that. Okay, so I'm, I feel gentler and kinder to myself, which makes me gentler and kinder to others. Now, how can I begin to pull in these social structures? How can I begin to situate myself inside of these systems and see how, how would I move differently in those cases? What are the things that I can challenge here? Those are the place, because you're right. If, if it feels too nice and fluffy, you probably haven't challenged a system yet. So I invite you to go out and challenge some systems and see what resistance comes up, but also see what opens up. Because there's always a give and a take. Like I said, there will be something that's uncomfortable, but there will also be something that's really beautiful
1:02:20 Speaker 01 that comes. And I think getting, you know, getting into that field, playing in that arena is, is powerful because actually, the things that most need to move.
1:02:32 Speaker 01 It's your body and the bodies like yours that are going to be the most effective in the long term in getting them moved.
1:02:40 Dan Harris? Yeah, and to be clear, you know, we do a lot of stuff on this show and also behind the scenes at my company around the larger social stuff. And we've done a lot of work on the show around sexism and racism, body image. And yes, that is deeply uncomfortable. But to me, I experience it as it would be way more uncomfortable if I didn't have the self-acceptance, self-compassion, self-love aspect in it, where I can see that my, the ugliest aspects of my own mind aren't my fault, perhaps. They're my responsibility, but they're not my fault.
1:03:20 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:03:21 Dan Harris? And so it just lowers the shame quotient. So again, I don't experience any of this, even though I am looking at it from a systems level to the best of my ability, I still don't experience it as a loss or a threat. It's scary and it's challenging in some ways, but I still don't feel like I'm losing something as a consequence.
1:03:40 Speaker 01 That's perfect. Then to me, that speaks to the difference between what the illusion is for the people who haven't taken the journey and the reality once you're in it. And so that's what we need to keep hearing, is that actually when you, when you do this, it's all a net gain. It's all a net gain.
1:03:55 Dan Harris? It's an absolute pleasure to talk to you. I think what you're doing is fantastic. And thank you for coming on.
1:04:00 Speaker 01 Thanks, Dan. I appreciate you having me.
1:04:07 Dan Harris? Thanks again to Sonya Renee Taylor. Don't forget to check out her website, sonyareneetaylor.com. And as she mentioned, she's still on Patreon. And she recently started a podcast called Mundane Miracles, which you can find anywhere that you listen to podcasts. One last thing to say before I go, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show a reality. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.
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