E215 - Elizabeth Gilbert: Love Addiction, Telling the Truth & Hearing Your Inner Voice

Elizabeth Gilbert joins me for her first public conversation after a six month sabbatical, a stretch where she stopped writing, producing, and planning so she could simply be available to life. Liz is the author of "Eat, Pray, Love", "Big Magic", and her memoir "All the Way to the River". In this conversation she speaks openly about the daily practice of two-way prayer that guides her choices, her recovery from sex and love addiction, and the story of loving her partner Raya through terminal cancer and active drug addiction. What We Dive Into: 1. Liz describes feeling trapped many times in her life, most painfully while caring for Raya through cancer and active addiction. Each time, the only way out was the truth she least wanted to tell, and naming where she was lying, hiding, or manipulating is what finally set her free. 2. Recovery taught Liz that no partner, payoff, or praise could fill her sense of scarcity around love. Sitting with the part of her that wailed for someone else at three in the morning, and promising to stay anyway, slowly built a secure attachment to herself that no other person could provide. 3. Liz no longer believes everyone must create, but she believes everyone is invited. Success can never be promised, yet telling the story within you will change who you are by the end. As AI grows more capable, the lasting reason to make things may be the one our ancestors had: it is pleasing. Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself. https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com ✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS: Waking Up: Get your 14 day free trial!https://www.wakingup.com/knowthyself Try LMNT & get a free sample pack https://drinkLMNT.com/KnowThyselfUse code KNOWTHYSELF for up to 43% off sitewidehttps://www.mudwtr.com/knowthyself ___________ 00:00 Intro 02:30 The Call to Stop 08:30 Listening for a Higher Voice 19:25 How to Recognize the Ego 26:05 The Public, Private, and Secret Self 29:12 Writing From Healed Scars 33:43 Love and Secrecy With Raya 41:10 Codependency and the Truth That Frees 47:06 Generosity With Strings Attached 53:43 Searching for Enough Love 1:00:42 The Inner Child Left Unchecked 1:03:29 Life After Seven Years of Recovery 1:11:46 Redefining Creative Living 1:19:42 Buried Treasure and Ancestral Joy 1:22:44 Ideas as Living Entities 1:30:16 Creating Without Assurances 1:33:44 The Discipline Behind Inspiration 1:38:56 Art Scars and Reclaiming Play 1:45:32 Creativity in the Age of AI 1:50:43 The Practice of Two-Way Prayer 1:55:13 Asking for Our Instructions 2:01:26 Five Days in Darkness 2:06:21 What It Means to Know Thyself ___________ ✨MORE FROM ELIZABETH GILBERT ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elizabeth_gilbert_writer ↳Substack: https://elizabethgilbert.substack.com/ ↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GilbertLiz ↳https://www.elizabethgilbert.com 📜MORE FROM KNOW THYSELF ↳Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9l ↳Apple: https://apple.co/4iATICX ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ ↳TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andreduqum ↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/knowthyselfbyandreduqum/ ↳https://knowthyselfpodcast.com/ 👁️MORE FROM ANDRÉ ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@andreduqum ↳Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/know-thyself-podcast ↳Book recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We all start with this beautiful innocence and these beautiful unmet needs, but they can make us into really dangerous people who hurt people. Sex and love addiction, which has done me in so many times. My will was like, I want this person at any cost. And God's like, OK, at any cost, go for it. Here comes the cost.

• 0:18André Duqum?

  So what happened with you and Raya?

• 0:19Speaker 00

  Um, we were secretly in love with each other, but she was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer and given six months to live. And so she got addicted to cocaine. But God's got jokes. She lived actually for 18 months. And then now you're a hospice patient who's also a drug addict. And then she died. She was doing her drug, but she was my drug. There's no way out. It turns out there always is, and that is to tell the truth. For me, that's what it means, know thyself. I will never abandon you. I will never turn my back on you. You excavate yourself. You find a lot in there. You find a lot of darkness, but you find a lot of light, too. What if somebody told you, you're not a good singer? This person is a good dancer. You're not. This one is the writer you are not. Creativity is taken from you.

• 1:02Speaker 00

  And for some people, that's the end of the story. I can absolutely promise you that if you sit down and tell that story that is within you, you will be a different person. Don't you kind of want to know who you'll be if you actually do that then?

• 1:14André Duqum?

  And if somebody wanted to do it tomorrow morning, what would they do?

• 1:18Speaker 00

  Oh, well, yeah, you got to.

• 1:25André Duqum?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know Thyself Podcast. Our guest today is one of the world's most decorated authors, most notably Eat, Pray, Love: Big Magic, her memoir, All the Way to the River, amongst many others. She is somebody that is incredibly inspiring to me. The way that she lives her life courageously, authentically, shares how to unleash your creativity. And it's been a long time coming. I'm so excited to have you. Liz Gilbert, thank you for being here.

• 1:51Speaker 00

  Hi, I'm so happy to be here. We did it.

• 1:55André Duqum?

  We did it.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:56André Duqum?

  You made it.

• 1:56Speaker 00

  We made this occur.

• 1:57André Duqum?

  Yes.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  Or it didn't stop it from occurring.

• 2:01André Duqum?

  I'm honored that I'm one of your first back off of your sabbatical that you're just coming off of.

• 2:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, actually, this is the first thing I've done public facing in six months. After the first time in my life I've ever like dropped working and talking and producing and even creating. So, so I don't know if I remember how to do this. Let's see. We might just have to have a normal human conversation.

• 2:26André Duqum?

  We can always just, yeah, let's just plan on that.

• 2:30André Duqum?

  What was the, what was the impetus for the sabbatical?

• 2:32Speaker 00

  Um, oh, well, let's just get right into it. Um, I, uh, I take my direction from a higher power who I call God. I do that every day in this practice that I've done for years that's called two-way prayer, where I ask on the page, like first thing in the morning, what, what do you want me to do? And who do you want me to be today? And where do you want me to go? And, um, and then I just write the answer and then that's what I do. And that's been like that for quite a while now. And about two years ago, that voice started saying, we have to plan for you to stop.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  You've been going really hard forever and you've never stopped and you've never paused. And if you don't stop, something's going to stop you and you won't like how that feels. So, um, let's orchestrate that. And, and it's going to take a minute to plan because, you know, like a life is sort of like a, it's like an aircraft carrier. It's like moving at this trajectory. You can't just stop it on a dime. Like you've got to sort of slow it down. So I spent a year and a half. We, that voice told me to set the dates from the beginning of March till the beginning of September of this year and just start telling everybody in my life, I'm out. Like, don't, don't plan anything. Don't count on me for anything.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  And I've been enforcing it with, just ferociously, because things arise that are really tempting and, um, or that other people really want me to do. And I've just been really firm, like, absolutely not. And, and also part of the instruction for that sabbatical was, uh, and I think this is interesting because when I told people I was on sabbatical, the first question everybody asked me was, what are you going to do? And that's the culture that we live in and the times that we live in. And the whole point of a sabbatical is that you don't, you don't do anything. And, um, and a friend of mine was like, you're never going to be able to do that. You're going to come out with a novel written by the end of it. But in fact, I've disciplined myself to not create and to not produce and to not generate anything,

• 4:44Speaker 00

  but to just go every day where the day took me. And, um, and no traveling either, no big adventures, no learning how to master another language, no getting in the best shape of your life. Like, all of those things that we would fill if you were given a vacuum, typically we would fill it with that. So I've been sleeping in, um, walking my dog a lot, going to do whatever my friends want to do on any given day, driving people to the airport because I have time. Just being available to life and it's been incredible. And as reluctant as I am to come out of it, it's nice to be here today talking to you. But, um, it's a little hard to, to think about rejoining the world of any kind of purpose after this. It's been really nice.

• 5:29André Duqum?

  Hopefully, this is a smooth.

• 5:30Speaker 00

  I know, this is a good one.

• 5:31André Duqum?

  Entry point.

• 5:32Speaker 00

  This is a good one. This is, I can tell this isn't going to be too jarring.

• 5:35André Duqum?

  Yeah, we'll keep it warm, inviting.

• 5:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 5:38André Duqum?

  Enters back into the dizzy heights of the social space. I've taken very short stints like that. I have friends that have taken longer ones and have heard and felt that it's surprisingly hard to do nothing. Has, was that, did that come up for you? Was it challenging?

• 5:54Speaker 00

  I kind of felt like I went through withdrawal for the first month. I felt depressed and scared. I felt scared. Like, that was the main thing that I felt was fear. And that's such a good indication that the way I had been living had some sort of manic addictive quality to it, that if it's taken away, it's frightening. I felt purpose anxiety. I felt relevance anxiety.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  Am I going to still, will people forget that I exist if I'm not out there beating, beating down their doors, telling them that I matter? You know, like if I, like if I say no, I mean, you may know this feeling too. If I say no to something, will that be the last opportunity that that thing ever exists? Will people be offended? What am I going to do? Like literally, what am I going to do with my days? And then I kind of eased into it and I learned how to do some things that I didn't know how to do. For instance, I now know how to sleep in. I grew up on a farm and I grew up in a really high performance family and in a really high performance culture.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  And I have typically woken up every day at 4:30 or 5 o'clock in the morning, like I got shot out of a cannon, already feeling like I was behind. And so now I'm sleeping until like 10 o'clock in the morning. I'm like, what? What? Like, half the day is gone. All the important stuff has been done, but it's been really restful. I ended up getting a lot of healing from some physical stuff I had going on.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:34André Duqum?

  Wow.

• 7:34Speaker 00

  And I didn't write. I didn't create. I didn't generate. And the world didn't fall off its axis and birds didn't drop dead out of the skies and rivers didn't run backwards. And, um, I think I need more of this.

• 7:51André Duqum?

  I think so many people can relate with that, like bug we have in our head that ties our worth with continual improvement in performance.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  Hundred percent.

• 7:58André Duqum?

  Where's cog and who are we if we're not outputting something of externally verifiable, measurable value in the marketplace? You know?

• 8:09Speaker 00

  And if you do stop, you have to stop in order to improve yourself in some way. So go learn how to be a better meditator or, you know, like, yeah, or like train for a triathlon. But what if you don't have to do that?

• 8:24André Duqum?

  Yeah. If you don't have a project, then you become the project.

• 8:30André Duqum?

  I, uh, I'm curious about the texture of that voice and that practice that you feel like you get guidance from, that you call God, that we all have different names for.

• 8:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:38André Duqum?

  That has a bigger intelligence that we can't always track in the moment of where we're being guided.

• 8:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:45André Duqum?

  It feels like for me, as I read your work and I look more into your story, you've had these various moments where you've made a practice of creating space to hear something bigger than your own sort of ego comparative of what you want, but like, what does kind of life want of you?

• 9:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:02André Duqum?

  What have you learned about what happens when you listen to that voice years down the road?

• 9:08Speaker 00

  The more I, and I want to be careful of my language here. I also really want to be careful about what I mean and don't mean when I say God, because that is a word that is very traumatizing for some people, especially people who grew up in high demand religions that they maybe barely made it out of with their lives, or who experienced abuse, or who were abused by that word, or threatened by that word. So I always want to say, like, if you don't believe in God, whatever God you don't believe in, I also don't believe in that God, so we're good. And I'm good with whatever God you do believe in. But, but I don't know what else to call it.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  And that word doesn't feel traumatizing for me. That word feels warm, and nourishing, and loving, and present for me. And it isn't any measure, in any way, the God that I was taught about when I was a kid. It's much more amusing and amused, allowing. Like, I don't have a commanding God. I have a God who lets me do whatever I want, often to my own peril. It's like, oh, you want to do that? Okay, you can do that. Let's see how that goes. And most, most of my life has been like, what happens if I stick this fork in the, in the, you know, outlet? Like, that's, and God's like, try it, you know? See what happens when you put your fork in that outlet? Like, whatever that outlet might be, or whatever the fork may be.

• 10:37Speaker 00

  And, and so I don't have a punishing, commanding, forbidding God. I have a God who wants me to have every kind of experience, but who also doesn't want me to suffer, and has direction for me to minimize suffering. And I find that the more I'm in alignment with that guidance, the more I don't do what I'm, it's suggested that I not do. And the more I do do what is suggested that I do, the, the suffering drops away, the anxiety drops away, the neurosis drops away, and the terrible consequences drop away. So it's almost like, I think of this God that I listen to as kind of like this lantern holder,

• 11:20Speaker 00

  who's just sort of one step ahead of me, saying, I would suggest that you put your foot here. And I would suggest that you put your foot there. And I would suggest that you, I would suggest you don't go in that direction. I would suggest you go a little more in this direction. And when I, one of the hardest things for me to put down, as I was getting sober and learning how to trust that voice more, was, it's funny, you made a psilocybin, psilocybin joke when we came in, like, it was ayahuasca and mushrooms, you know, all psychedelics. I love that shit. And, and I was like, surely I don't have to put this down, you know, when I get sober? And, and I would negotiate with that voice. And that voice said, no, you don't have to. You can do whatever you want. I've always let you do whatever you want.

• 12:04Speaker 00

  But you're asking me what's going to be best for you. And my suggestion, loving you and knowing you, is that you see what happens if you don't alter yourself at all. And just come with me, and let's do life with no, with no alteration to it. I want you to learn how to be here, in this reality, in this, in this video game, rather than constantly trying to get out of it. And, but you can do it, but you don't have, you don't have to listen to me, you know? And I know well enough to know, it's not going to go well for me if I, if I don't listen to that. There's some reason that that voice is saying, maybe don't do that.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  And so the more that, the more that I am in alignment, like, other things drop, you know? Like, anxiety, other anxieties that I thought I would carry forever drop. Shame that I thought I would carry forever drops. Dependencies that I thought I would never be able to get rid of are suddenly, like, taken. And the path just gets lighter and lighter and lighter. So, yeah, there's no reason to not go that way, that I can see.

• 13:17André Duqum?

  How does it show up for you? I know you obviously have a devotional kind of writing practice. Does it appear to you in the same way your own, your own voice in your head appears to you?

• 13:31Speaker 00

  It's, it's filtered through my brain, so, but it's not my voice. And, and I think, interestingly, and tellingly, I would not be able to even describe what that voice is. I just know that it's God. You know, like, be still and know that I am God. Like, I just, it so obviously is. And, and what I think is interesting is that I've, I've loved God for a long time, and I believed in God for a long time. I think I always did, even growing up in a family that didn't. But I never trusted God. I always felt like I was on my own here, in the universe.

• 14:12Speaker 00

  And, and now there's this, like, deeper trust. But the voice is, hmm.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  It's just for me, you know? It's just for me. And I think I can tell that it is that, and not my will, because of the instant release of anxiety. It's like, oh, we're home. You know, literally like, oh, thank God. Okay, I don't have to, I don't have to know what to do. I don't have to plan. I don't have to strategize. I don't have to hustle. I don't have to be vigilant. I'm good. I'm just, I call it the warm vanilla pudding hum of well-being. No, no big, sharp highs. I can't do highs anymore, because I can't take the come downs anymore. So no big, sharp highs, no big, huge dips, just like-

• 15:12André Duqum?

  Warm vanilla.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  Warm vanilla pudding in the belly. It's good. It's just like, and that's, like, I just want to, I always think of Keith Richards saying, like, you can keep the rock, I'll take the roll, you know? Like, that's sort of how I feel, like, I don't want the rock anymore. It's just like, I'm in the roll, I'm in the roll. And I think that's the only way that it can work for me, that I can be in the roll. Because my mind will want to rock out. But it doesn't end well, when it does. So it's just a notebook, it's just a notebook. But I used to think that God was, like, unreachable and unknowable, you know? Just, I, I believed in the concept of God, and I loved the concept of God. You could never know God. And God's like, I'm literally right here.

• 15:59Speaker 00

  Like, nothing is more knowable than me. Ask me anything, you know? Like, let's, let's talk. Like, there's, there's no barrier here. We're good. Like, I'm not abstract, and I'm not mysterious. I'm very clear, and I'm very straightforward. All you have to do is ask, with an open mind, and I'll tell you. And that's like, oh, I thought you were a mystery. God's like, no, you're a mystery to yourself. I'm the least mysterious thing in the entire universe. You make mystery where there isn't any. You know, that's what my ego does.

• 16:34André Duqum?

  What's been your journey from that voice strengthening that connection, to hearing that in this moment of practice, to seeing that throughout your day, and all your relationships, and, as opposed to a singular practice in the morning? Has that been an evolution? Has, what does that look like?

• 16:51Speaker 00

  It's an evol-, yeah, it's been an evolution to where more, it's more, I can access that. I can just do like a little spot check, and be like, yes, no, maybe? Red light, green light, yellow light? And, and even, I don't know, like, even in example, I was, my dog, I have a little dog who, we're very bonded, and she hardly ever has to be in her leash. She's always just right at my feet. And, and I, the other day, was walking and lost her, which is very rare. And, and it was only for five or 10 minutes, but, you know, instant panic,

• 17:30Speaker 00

  coyotes, bears, dog nappers, you know, trap, car accident, like, where, you know? And, and I just did a little, and God's like, she's fine. You know, she's fine, she's okay. She's coming back, just give her a minute, you know? And she came back. And I, so it lowered my, I like, it's like, really? Yeah, she's, she's okay. So there's, or if like, I'm in a car with somebody who's driving dangerously, I'm like, are we, are we good? God's like, yeah, you're all right. You're all right. They're going a little fast, but they're all right. And then other times, it'll be like, no. I was kayaking with a friend of mine in Panama, who's not a very strong swimmer. And we were out on open water, and it was really beautiful.

• 18:11Speaker 00

  And all of a sudden, that voice just said, turn around now. That's enough. You've come out, you know, you're deep enough out in the water, go back. And I don't even need to know, or want to know, what would have happened, had I continued, but I trust, I'm like, we're, we're going back now. Why? Because, because we are. Because that's enough.

• 18:34André Duqum?

  Enough, Sid.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. Because we are. Let's go. Wrap it up. So, yeah, it's just, it's, and it's not me making, you know, I just think so much of my life. I was so anxious, I was so, as a child, I used to, when I got a wish, you know, on a birthday wish or something, I always had the same wish, which I think is really disturbing for a seven or eight-year-old to have this wish. But it just shows how much anxiety I was living in. But the wish was, I wish I always knew what to do. Because the world felt really, really scary. And it felt imperative, in my home and in the world, that I never make a misstep. And, and I feel like, in a way, that, that childhood prayer has been answered.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  But I'm not the one who has to know. Just, next right step here, next right step here, you're good.

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• 20:26André Duqum?

  Over the years of being able to develop that trust and that capacity to listen, I think it's inspiring because a lot of people, myself and I'm sure everyone who's listening, urinate for that level of attunement and guidance and what feels like reassurance. And at times, when checking in internally, I think we have many patterns and fears that can masquerade as a voice of reason that we can start to delineate the texture. And the way that you express that God, or this intelligence, or life, or love, it feels like inherently kind, reassuring. What other things have you noticed are singularly that thing?

• 21:11Speaker 00

  Not grandiose. So I can know my ego by a couple tells, and one is grandiosity. And one is self hatred, which is another kind of grandiosity, weirdly. And the narcissism of despair, you know, like I'm uniquely fucked. In the rooms of recovery, they call it terminally unique, but it's like, I am particularly and especially doomed, you know? Like, my ego wants to be important in any way. If it can be important by being the most fucked up one, it'll take that, you know?

• 21:48André Duqum?

  It's a great dating profile description.

• 21:50Speaker 00

  Uniquely fucked. You seem fun. We should hang out. Are you also uniquely terminally fucked? You know, and I'm not, I'm not like, I love in the rooms of recovery. They say you're just another bozo on the bus. Like, I am just another bozo on the bus and also very special and precious. But, but like, not uniquely fucked and not uniquely important either, you know? And, and then control. Like, I think in order for me to deepen that trust, there's something that God asks me in return, which is to, to drop control. I say that as if it's easy, especially as somebody who's always been very controlling, because that also comes out of fear, obviously. But like, I'll give an example.

• 22:35Speaker 00

  When I came into, and I write about this in my book about being, I identify as a sex and love addict. The book is about that. It's about addiction of all kinds, but it's especially about, in my case, intimacy addiction and sex and love addiction, which has done me in so many times because my will was like, I want this person at any cost. And God's like, okay, at any cost, here comes the cost, you know? Here it is. And when I first came into the rooms of recovery, I was negotiating with God and saying like, if I, if I enter this program and I do all the steps and I get a sponsor and I do the work perfectly, will you give me one more great love story in my life?

• 23:16Speaker 00

  And the answer came very clearly, I have no such promise for you. Like, I don't, I also don't negotiate. Like, that's another way that I know, yeah, like, I also know it to be God because God doesn't need to negotiate. And God's like, I don't work, I don't like broker deals, you know? And I don't make you assurances of what the future will hold. I'm just asking you if you'd like to come with me. And will you come with me with no need for any assurances? And will, when you come to me, will you come to me not holding anything behind your back? Like, any of your old methods of control, any of your old methods of manipulation,

• 23:58Speaker 00

  any of your old methods of survival, any of your old wishes that you've got hidden from me? Like, how about just open-handed, put everything on the divine fire and walk, and just walk toward me? And don't bring anything with you. And will you still do this program with that same level of commitment if I don't promise you another great love story? And search yourself for the answer, because if you, if the answer is no, don't bother doing the program. And don't bother, let's not, why are you even doing this, you know? And so I think that the God that I know and love often asks me to put things down as much as to come, it's like, drop that, drop that, put that down,

• 24:42Speaker 00

  put that ambition down, drop this outcome. And that's also how I recognize it, because my ego won't let go of anything. I mean, my ego won't let go of anything unless it has claw marks in it from how hard I've been holding on to it, right? So like, so a voice that says to me, put that idea down, put that dream down, put that ambition down, put that grandiosity down, put that self hatred down, put that wish down, could only be a higher intelligence than, than mine. So I think I recognize it by that as well. It's kind of the opposite of manifesting.

• 25:12André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah, because you have an agenda.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  It's kind of the opposite of a vision board. It's like, put the vision board down. Put the manifestation down. Put the agenda down. Put the dream away. I mean, this is so hard in this culture to say, let go of the dream. But there's a dream that I dream bigger than any dream I've ever had, which is serenity. And, and I can't have the dream and have an attachment to the dream and also be, have any serenity. So I kind of have to let the dream go.

• 25:43André Duqum?

  It's powerful, because I feel like so many things we declare that we want, things that we give with subtle expectations or expecting of a return, quote unquote, surrender, yet still not. There's still an expectation of, of an outcome. And I think the more of God to read through your life story, through your journey of love and addiction and the pursuit, which is of many addicts at different points, of finding that sense of peace and solace and serenity through the faulty means of a never-ending perpetual stream of stimulus from the external, right?

• 26:26André Duqum?

  In some form, coming to then go into recovery. And I can't but help think, because there's, there's so much I want to, I want to dive into. It's so beautiful to, to read All the Way to the River. And the amazingly courageous, vulnerable shares throughout. I'm like, wow, this girl's, she's, she's no joke. She's willing to lay it all out there. And I think that's so scary for us to even like be seen a little bit, let it, let alone to like lay out your secret self, so to speak. What, could you share a bit of that, is it Marquez, kind of framework of the three, three selves?

• 27:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, Garcia Marquez said that every person has three selves, a public self, a private self, and a secret self. And, and I remember sharing that with a really wise friend of mine years ago, who said, oh yeah, you have to have a secret self, because if, for most people, if their secret self came out, it would, it would destroy not only their public life, but their private life. Private life meaning like the intimates around you. Like, if people really knew what you were doing, you know? Like, if everyone knew what everyone was really doing, like, the threat to yourself would be so extreme, which is how we become secret keepers and, and often keep secrets even from ourselves.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  Like, there's stuff, you know, there's engines running in my ego that are, you know, behind doors that I can't even see, like, that are governing me that I can't even see what I'm up to. And it's not easy to, to, to work around all of that. But, yeah, it's, it didn't seem like there would be much of a point in writing this book if I didn't lay out the secret self. Especially because I'm also writing about, I'm writing about my relationship with my partner, Rea, and I'm writing about her drug addiction, which was a very obvious, like, drug addiction and alcoholism and substance abuse can become a really obvious iteration

• 28:39Speaker 00

  of the damage that's happening inside of our secret selves. And, and I wrote about like the degradation of her drug abuse and what I witnessed in that, when I went through that with her. But I have my own way of medicating my...

• 28:57Speaker 00

  Misery. And it's not quite as obvious as like heroin and cocaine. But it's, it can be just as deadly. And that is my desperate need for somebody to love me at any cost, including somebody who's in drug addiction and can't even take care of themselves. And I'm expecting that person to somehow be my salvation. I feel like I got off your question a little bit, but. But what's the point, really? You know, like, and, and there's a, I wish I could remember who it was. Some memoirist said she got accused once of oversharing. And she was like, well, what do you want in your memoirist and undersharer? The whole point is that.

• 29:39Speaker 00

  And also, the God of my understanding said, do it. Like, tell the story, tell the whole story. Don't tell part of the story. Don't do any image management in this, in this book. Because it won't be of any service to anybody. And Rea was so good. My partner was so great at being transparent and vulnerable when she was sober. And, and I took inspiration from her as well. She was, she could be such an incredibly open book. And I think she would have wanted the book to be as honest as it is. I know she would have.

• 30:13André Duqum?

  I think we can all relate to that never ending image management, which is perpetually exhausting. Yeah. So exhausting.

• 30:22Speaker 00

  It's exhausting.

• 30:23André Duqum?

  Do you, do you see it as a goal of sorts? To align those three selves? Like, the public, private, secret? Do you think that they should be different? Like, I'm curious what, what the voice of, of G O D, notorious G O D, Barry Wilson says that. Would, would say there.

• 30:49Speaker 00

  Well, there's such a, you have the right to privacy. You know? And, and there are, I'm going to quote, I think, my friend Cheryl Strayed here, who said that when you're writing a book, you should write from your healed scars, not from your open wounds. And so by the time I sat down to write this, I was writing from healed, a place of healed scars. If I had written this book immediately after Rea died, that would have been writing from an open wound. And if I had written this book when I was six months sober, that would have been writing from an open wound. But to write it five years sober, to write it seven years after Rea died,

• 31:31Speaker 00

  there was enough time and enough processing in, enough of the processing of my secrets in a safe container, which is what 12 Step provided for me. And the 12 steps themselves have that baked in, where it's like, you're going to do a complete and fearless moral inventory. You're going to go through your past with a fine tooth comb and find every instance where you ever harmed anybody and find those people and make amends to them. You're going to, you're going to look for every place that you're being selfish and controlling and self centered. You're going to stop lying. You're going to, like, all of these things are, are like the ongoing work of being sober,

• 32:14Speaker 00

  being what Bill W., the founder of AA, called emotionally sober, which is very different from just not using anymore. Like, emotional sobriety is about taking that complete accountability for yourself every single day. And I remember telling a friend of mine that I was doing that, that I was in step four and five, which is, for me, took over a year of really excavating, like, where was I harmful? Where did I lie? Where was I self centered? Where was I manipulative? Where did I have a hidden motive? Who have I hurt? And, and I remember she just said, I'm so glad I don't have to do that. And my feeling was like, I'm so grateful I get to do this. Because this stuff has been governing my behavior

• 32:58Speaker 00

  for the last 50 years and like hurting me and hurting other people. And I don't want to keep doing this. Like, I don't want to, I want to break the patterning of how I have been. I don't want to operate the way I've used to operate. And at the time that I was doing that, if you had told me someday, you're going to write a memoir where you're going to talk about this process, I would have been like, you must be smoking roofing tar. There is no way. I would want anybody to know any of these things about me. But, but once that was done, and the story of Rea was still lingering in my mind, then that's when my higher power was like, and now I want you to talk about this publicly. But not while you're doing it.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  You know, like, give yourself some space in there to, to work that stuff out.

• 33:47André Duqum?

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• 34:31André Duqum?

  you wouldn't love what they have going on there, too. The quality is just creme de la creme. That's wakingup.com/knowthyself. Or link in description, as always. I hope you enjoy. Back to the show.

• 34:45André Duqum?

  So you opened up a bit with your own version of addiction and seeking solace through codependency and the many different behavioral compensations relationally. Could you, and I know it's a long journey and story, but explain what happened? What's, what happened with you and Rea?

• 35:07Speaker 00

  Uh huh. So Rea Elias was a writer, an artist, filmmaker, a hairdresser. I met her in the year 2000, which is so long ago now. And feels like a different country. Like, the world feels like a different place than it, than it did then. And I was in my first marriage when I met her. Somebody sent me to her for a hair intervention. You wouldn't know it now. I've got a buzzed head, but I used to have really difficult hair. And now I have really easy hair. And she fixed it. And we became, at first, just hairdresser and client. There's also a weird intimacy in that relationship.

• 35:49André Duqum?

  For sure.

• 35:50Speaker 00

  It's like a confessional booth. Like, you tell things to the person doing your hair that you might not tell to a, it's like a bartender or a cab driver. Like, it's a safe person to kind of talk to. So, and she was very good at that kind of intimacy. So we became closer over the years. And then we became social friends. And then we became very good friends. And then we became best friends. And then we became something, there was a transition into something that just, now I see it as love mixed with dependency. But she became the foremost person in my life. And at that point, I was in my second marriage. This is all over the course of like 13, 14 years. And, and that became very inconvenient

• 36:33Speaker 00

  because I loved and still love the man that I was married to very dearly. And, but yet, Rea was the person who I relied on for everything. And, and we fell in love with each other for some reasons that were very healthy and some that weren't. And I think that's a difficult thing to parse through and you certainly can't know it in the moment. I fell in love with her strength. She was formidable and fearless. I mean, she really genuinely presented as somebody who was fearless. I can be very frightened of people. People, to me, are kind of terrifying and understandably so.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  And I always walked into every room feeling like I have to manage, I have to like manipulate and manage everybody in the room. And she just walked into the room and owned the room and, and would say the thing out loud that nobody else had the courage to say and just felt like she could handle people in a way that made her feel like a very safe attachment to me. And when I was around her, I felt a level of safety that I had never experienced in my life and could not generate within myself. And so, of course, I became dependent on her because she was the only person who could bring me the vanilla pudding hum of well being just by walking into the room. And she became dependent on me in other ways. There are ways that I'm extremely courageous that she never had courage in. I'm very creatively brave. I will do anything in creativity.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  I'll write anything, I'll sing anything, I'll create anything, I'll draw anything, I'll put it out in the world, I don't care. And she had a lot of hangups around creativity. So I became kind of her creative, like doula. And she became my interpersonal doula. And when we were firing on all cylinders, it was an incredible, beautiful partnership of friendship. But there were secrets in it. We were secretly in love with each other and nobody was saying that. I didn't want to leave my marriage. She didn't want to blow it up. My husband knew and he didn't want to say anything. Like, there was all this stuff that nobody was talking about. And, you know, the universe hates secrets. It just hates them. And eventually, they all come out. And so, what happened was that she was diagnosed

• 38:42Speaker 00

  with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer and given six months to live. And when that diagnosis arrived, when that day arrived, the bottom fell out of all of our worlds. My husband, her, mine. And it was no longer possible for me to pretend that I didn't love her the way I loved her. And it, the idea, I had a sort of vision of her dying and never, her never knowing what she was to me. And me sitting at her bedside, watching her go and never having said, I love you, in what I meant by, I love you. And that felt so hideous and wrong that I had to speak the secret life into my private life

• 39:25Speaker 00

  and then into my public life and say, I'm leaving this marriage to be with my best friend, not as her best friend, but as her partner, for whatever time she has left. And for a little while, we had an amazing run of it. You know, we were so in love and we had kept that secret for so long. And now we got to be in love publicly and privately with each other. And, and it was amazing. And also, the kind of glamour of death. The fact that we knew we had such a short time together just heightened everything and made everything sexier and more romantic and more wild and more free. And all constraint was lost. Because it's like, why bother holding back on anything if you're only going to be here for six months?

• 40:09André Duqum?

  Yeah, most people romanticize. If you have a year left, what would you do? You, you guys actually.

• 40:13Speaker 00

  We got to have it. And we were told we had six months. And we were like bucket list galore, like everything, like no limits on anything.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  Including the idea that she had at some point to reintroduce cocaine back into her life as somebody who had been an addict in recovery. And I gotta say, at the time, myself and everyone around her was like, why not? You know, like, why not? But God's got jokes. She lived, actually, for 18 months. And it's one thing to go on a little cocaine bender when you think you only have a month to live. It's another thing to become re-addicted to the drug that destroyed you and then not die. And then now you're a hospice patient who's also a drug addict. And that became where we went to. And she went to, descended to the lowest version of herself, which was like a really manipulative, cruel user.

• 41:07Speaker 00

  And I went to the lowest version of myself, which is selfless, selfless in the worst possible way. Not selfless in the way of generosity, but selfless in the way of, I have no self, and I only live to serve you, the user, in whatever you need. And I will let you violate me in any way, financially, emotionally, spiritually. And I will become somebody just walking around with a begging bowl, hoping that you will give me some affirmation of myself, so that I can feel that I exist. And so we both got to see each other at our absolute most degraded. And it was grim. It was really, really grim. And then she

• 41:48Speaker 00

  died. And then I had to process, what was that that just happened? Who was that? Was that the most trustworthy person I ever knew, who was the person I knew for 17 years to be an anchor and a rock? Or was that, was I just played so hard? And that became the beginning of my recovery.

• 42:12André Duqum?

  What was it like on the journey from saying, let's send it for six months, to then see the addiction come in and change the person you loved, to an extreme, where you don't, like, you, you know, you love them, but you no longer like the person at certain points? And

• 42:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:34André Duqum?

  And they're about to die. And there's that enmeshment and all of that. What happened in that process of how you related and how that changed?

• 42:42Speaker 00

  It was hell. You know, and then I think a definition that I would think of as a good definition of hell is endless suffering that you can't get out of. You know, I mean, that's, that's, people who promise hell to you are promising that. You know, there's going to be a place of endless suffering that you can't get out of, which for a lot of people is actually what this realm feels like. And for a lot of my life, that's what this realm has felt like. So we went to hell. And, and I, I was so trapped, I felt so trapped, because I couldn't do an intervention. She's a, I couldn't say, if you keep doing

• 43:24Speaker 00

  these drugs, you're gonna die. She was hard to die. Like, she had no reason to stop. And nobody, I mean, she was a bull when it came to, like, she was titanium when it came to being a drug user. I mean, she was a low-bod of an addict. So like, we're talking thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars of cocaine and everything else. And all of the manipulations that go along with that. Like, and how could I say no to funding that, when she was saying, this is the only thing, way that I cannot experience pain? Which I believe was actually what she was experiencing, that it was the only way to

• 44:06Speaker 00

  not experience pain. She was being cruel to me, and vicious, and dark. She wasn't sleeping. That's the thing cocaine does. So she was hallucinating. She was, still thought she was the baddest ass bitch in the entire world. So she's like, completely helpless and vulnerable and a drug addict, but still, like, wants to control the world. And I still want that person to complete me. Like, that person is supposed to look at me the way she used to, say the things she used to say, promise me and assure me, soothe my anxiety,

• 44:49Speaker 00

  sedate me, make me feel all the things that she used to be able to make me feel. And because of the fact that she couldn't do that anymore, I came to hate her during that time. Because she was my drug. She was doing her drug, but she was my drug. So when she started doing her drug, my drug was ripped away. And I behaved the way addicts do when you take their drug away. Like, I went, like, ugly. Like, ugly and, and cruel and resentful. I mean, it's a nightmare. Codependency is awful. It's just absolutely awful. And I couldn't see any way out. And I've had this experience a number of times in my life,

• 45:27Speaker 00

  where any time I have ever felt trapped and caged in hell, and I've felt that a number of times in my life, where I'm like, there's no way out, there's no way out, there's no way out. I've, I've like, gotten myself enmeshed in something and there's no way out. It turns out there always is. And it's always the same way. And it's always the last thing I want to do. And that is to tell the truth. It's always the key out of hell. It's always the key out of hell. It's like, there's a truth I'm not telling. And the truth that I wasn't telling was, I have, I can't do this. Like, I can't do this. I don't want to do this. I have to stop. Like, I can't be living with this active drug addict. It's

• 46:12Speaker 00

  killing me. And I didn't, and I was afraid that if I told that truth, that I would die, that she would die, that, you know, it was horrible. But, I mean, every single time I've ever felt trapped, God's like, you know what you need to do. Like, you know what you need to do. You know there's only one pathway out of hell, and it's honesty. Where are you lying? Where are you hiding? And where are you manipulating? And what are you willing to give up in order to tell that truth and get free? So the truth will set you free. It just has its way with you first. And I'm always like, not that. It's like, it's like Dorothy, you know, in The Wizard of Oz, where they're like, you just have to get the shoes from the witch. It's like, not the shoes from the witch, not the broom, you know, like

• 46:54André Duqum?

  Not the truth.

• 46:55Speaker 00

  Not the broom, like, not that, not my biggest nightmare.

• 46:58André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 46:59Speaker 00

  But that's how it works, for some reason, in this realm. That's how it works.

• 47:06André Duqum?

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• 48:09André Duqum?

  The way that you describe your increasing amount of awareness into this dichotomy, as you kind of refer to it as a divine crowbar in some, some contexts, you know, where life will continue to repeat these experiences, to show you where you're still stuck, where you're not free, where you're putting, outsourcing your love, all of those things. And I know it's been an arc, even with Eat, Pray, Love, like, you had an awareness of this within yourself.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:39André Duqum?

  And even after selling 25-plus million copies, which is a lot of books, it's a lot of books. And it's also a lot of money. And I heard, or read that in 2008, you would like, go around and just offer shopkeepers and small businesses checks, like, can I write you a check for, can I give you money? And from the outside in, that looks like incredibly generous, and I'm sure was well-received and really appreciated. But talk to me about that place, that bitter aftertaste of giving from a sense of lack, or giving from a sense of expectation?

• 49:16Speaker 00

  Well, yeah. It's so hard. Because like you said, it looks like generosity. And I am generous. And I like being generous. And it feels good to be generous. And a lot of times, I don't know I had an expectation, until that expectation wasn't met.

• 49:33André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  And, and then I find out in the aftermath, like, oh, I did have an, I did have a string attached. I just didn't know I did, because I thought it was so obvious. I thought it was so obvious that you wouldn't do that thing that you just did, you know, like, or that you would take that money that I gave you, and you would obviously do this with it, right? Like, obviously, you would use it to better your life. You would obviously use it to get well. You would obviously spend it on your kids and not on a new car. You would obviously, like, you know, like, clearly, that's what you would do, you know? So

• 50:12Speaker 00

  The resentment is the bitter taste, the bitter aftertaste. So I can tell when I'm in resentment that I've overgiven, that I said yes when I meant no, or that there's an expectation that I'm hiding from myself about what I'm supposed to get in return for what I gave. And typically, I mean, I could, for me, it's just, I'm a love addict, so it's like, you're supposed to love me. It was actually really funny when I was on that bender giving money away like crazy in 2008, because that's when all the big checks came from April 11. It blew my circuitry. I never expected to have that kind of money, and I didn't know what to do with it. I didn't think I was worthy of it. And it seemed like a great idea to just give it to everybody.

• 50:56Speaker 00

  So I just gave it to everybody. And some of those people, it really did help. And some of those stories were really good. And some of those people, it just enabled. And a lot of those relationships, it destroyed. And we created dependency modes where then they came back for more and more and more and more and more. And then I had to cut them off. And now they hate me and I hate them. Like, there was all sorts of stuff. Not every case, but it's shone light in dysfunction in various different ways. But there was a woman in my town who owned a coffee shop, and I heard that she had started her coffee shop on credit card debt. And I was like, oh, no, that's terrible. Let me go pay off her credit cards.

• 51:41Speaker 00

  And then she can just pay me off with no interest, because she's like taking out basically loans at 23% to open up a coffee shop. That's crazy. And she's a single person, and like, I don't like that for her. And so I went to her, I mean, I barely even knew her. I went to her and talked to her, and I'm like, I'd like to give you, you know, $20,000 to help you pay off your credit cards. And you can, starting next year, let's take a year off. And then you can just pay me back on a schedule and no interest. And it'll save you a lot of money. And it'll feel good for me, because I don't like knowing that you're, you know, in this situation. And she was like, okay, thanks. And I didn't get the payoff of her like, oh, my God, you saved my life. Oh, my God, you're amazing.

• 52:25Speaker 00

  She just said, okay, thanks. And I'm like, okay.

• 52:28André Duqum?

  That's kind of wild.

• 52:29Speaker 00

  And I like, you're so incredible. And I wrote her a check for $20,000 and gave it to her. She's like, thank you, I appreciate that. And I walked out with no payoff. Like, I didn't get high off being the one who was the savior, right? Like, so I walked away, I'm like, that feels weird, and I don't know why that feels weird. Then she very steadily paid me back. And then, like, no drama, no anything. And then after a couple of years, I had enough people who owed me money that I hated the feeling. So I went around town, and I just said, forget about all those loans I gave you guys. Just, just like, don't pay me back, just keep it, like, we're good. And then I went to her shop, and I'm like, forget about that loan, just like, you can keep it. It's no big deal, don't worry about it. And she's like, okay, thanks. And once again, I didn't get that, she didn't, you know?

• 53:14Speaker 00

  And then I like ordered a coffee, and she's like, that's $3.50. And I was like, you're incredible. Like, you are not, you will not give me anything. Like, you are not working for me energetically. You know what I mean? Like, you just are in your own vibe. And like, and that's when I saw how much I was relying on the reaction that people gave me of being a savior to get a sense of heightened meaning. And that's why now I'm very, I have to be really, really, really careful, like, to still give, but to, like, I have to, I think it's healthier for me to give in boring ways, like, to give to an organization where they're like, send me a form letter. They're like, thanks for helping out, you know?

• 53:58Speaker 00

  Rather than me getting fawned over, which is a way of feeding my, the vacancy within me. Yeah, I don't get the payoff anymore. So do you still want to give, even if you don't get the payoff? Or did you just want the payoff? You know, it's like, how honest are you being here about what you're expecting to get out of this? She didn't even give me a hug. You gave her $20,000. But I still think of her as this kind of saint in my life, because she just showed up to reflect back to me, like, this is what you think you need, and this is what I'm not going to give you.

• 54:33André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 54:33Speaker 00

  Do you still want to give me anything? And it's like, wow, this is a very interesting exchange.

• 54:39André Duqum?

  Yeah. No, that's wild, for many reasons.

• 54:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, she was a great, a great master.

• 54:46Speaker 02

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• 55:47André Duqum?

  I love that you have that perspective. And it was a big mirror, right? So what, that vacancy that you described?

• 55:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:55André Duqum?

  What is it specifically about being Lizzie that you felt like, in this earth school, you needed to learn a lesson around? What, I'm sure you spent time thinking about this? Like, what is it specifically about your wiring or your makeup that you needed to learn lessons in this particular way, if that makes sense?

• 56:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think I showed up for this round of curriculum to do a deep investigation into where love comes from and where it's dangerous to seek it, and what it is and what it isn't. And these are not easy lessons. And I don't know whether it's karma, or genetics, or childhood trauma, or some mysterious combination of all of them. But my thing has always been, there is not enough love for me in this world. This is a, this was a loveless place. And the feeling, I also always felt like, I came from a place where there was infinite love, and this is fucked up here.

• 57:02Speaker 00

  Like, this isn't, there's a real shortage of it here. And, and I gotta go get whatever there is of it, by any means necessary. And, and as much of it as I can get is still never going to be enough. And that's the addict brain. Like, there's not enough. There wasn't enough cocaine in the world for Rea. There wasn't enough love in the world for me. And, and I know that, because I've been loved. And I've been loved unconditionally. There have been people in my life who have loved me a great deal. And it does not fill that vacancy. It's not enough. It's not enough.

• 57:44Speaker 00

  So where do I get it? Like, where do I get it if I can't extract it from others? And also, even people who have loved me, and who have loved me well and deeply and tenderly, like, sometimes they have to like get up and make a sandwich, you know? Like, sometimes they have to go to work. It cannot be their full-time job. Even somebody who might say that they would want it to be their full-time job, and I would be very suspicious now of anybody who said that they wanted their full-time job to be to love me, that's a person who's not well. But they can't, even if they want to. They can't.

• 58:26Speaker 00

  And when I came into the rooms of recovery and was told that the program that I was in for sex and love addiction, that the solution is that you must love yourself, I was so pissed off. I was like, I don't, I don't want that to be the answer. You know, like, I want you to teach me how to be better at getting love from other people. I don't want the answer. Why does the answer always have to be that you have to source it from within? And as somebody who grew up in a household where, and I think my mother would not mind me sharing this, because I think she believes to this day that this was the way to parent and is proud of it.

• 59:07Speaker 00

  But like, you're on your own was kind of her parenting motto. Like, to have been told as a very early child, like, you're on your own, like, you figure it out. And then to be told as a suffering adult, you're on your own, you figure it out. And it's, of course, not true that I am on my own. Like, I have resources in people who want to help me, and I have resources in a God that is actually the unblinking eye of that love. And, but I didn't want that to be the answer either. You know, I'm like, don't have it just be God. I don't want to be loved just by God and just by me.

• 59:51Speaker 00

  You know, and there were nights when I was going through withdrawal in sex and love addiction, where like, this part of me was like kicking, just kicking, and being like, you have got to get somebody here. Like, you know how to do this. Like, go out there, get somebody, and bring them here. There are not enough people in this bed. There's only one person, this is not enough. It's 3 o'clock in the morning, this is not okay. Like, I don't care who it is. And my history has shown that I don't often care who it is. I don't care who it is. A body, another human being, somebody, anybody, now, here. And for most of my life, I've obeyed that command, you know?

• 1:00:35Speaker 00

  And then have had to pay the consequences of like, now what are you going to do with and about this person who's here? Who you may not even like, who might not even like you. Now what are you guys going to do? You've done this thing. And...

• 1:00:51Speaker 00

  Those withdrawals in early recovery were a time where I had to learn how to just be deeply present to that suffering, screaming. I call it the Siberian baby. It's like a baby on the tundra of Siberia, just wailing into a, into a snowstorm. And nobody's coming. And it's like, and that baby would say to me, like, you're not enough. Like, you are not enough to comfort me. It has to come from another person. And I don't even want to hear about God. Like, that's not even a thing, you know? And I would just have to learn to like, sit and rock with that child and just say, like, I am aware

• 1:01:32Speaker 00

  that I am not enough, and I am aware that you don't believe in God, but we're the only ones here. And we have actually got you. We have actually got you. And we're gonna sit with you through this night, and tomorrow night, too, and the next night, and for however long this lasts. And you don't have to get well for us to love you. You don't have to do anything better, anything different. We see you, we love you, we're here. And it's like, fuck you. Bring somebody else. And I'm like, I'm aware I'm inadequate, and yet I love you. And I am here. And I am with you. And apparently, we're supposed to be together, because here we are. And, and, and that's how that void started to be filled.

• 1:02:14Speaker 00

  And that, that creature, that like, Gollum inside of me, started to trust that I was gonna always be there, and that God was gonna always be there. And I'm a much safer person for myself, and for everybody around me, when I provide that. Because if I don't provide that, Gollum's gonna make me go find it. And that's not gonna go well for anybody.

• 1:02:41André Duqum?

  Aw, I love the Gollum.

• 1:02:43Speaker 00

  I know, poor thing.

• 1:02:45André Duqum?

  Do you see, do you see the, the Gollum as like, Lizzie, as like, your inner child? How do you kind of actually contextualize it when connecting to it?

• 1:02:53Speaker 00

  I think it's Lizzie, but Lizzie, the inner child, at the time of my childhood, was innocent. And addiction is when that innocent child filled with unmet needs metastasizes into something that can be actually monstrous. And so I have a lot of love and sympathy for her, but also unchecked, and allowed to govern, and allowed to call the shots. She is a really dangerous person, for, for me, and for all. Nobody is safe if that person,

• 1:03:37Speaker 00

  if that being is in charge. And that doesn't mean that that being should be starved of love, in fact, must be loved, and can be loved. But it's, you know, we all start with this beautiful innocence, and these beautiful unmet needs, but they can make us into, into really dangerous people, who hurt people. And that hurt is real. And that amends process that, that we go through in recovery is where you look at the, like, the unclouded mirror, and you're like, holy shit, look what I do. Like, look what I do when I'm in, in that

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  state, and look at the wreckage that that causes, in so many ways.

• 1:04:26André Duqum?

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• 1:05:07André Duqum?

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• 1:05:33André Duqum?

  In recovery, some recovery circles, I think, they say, you can never get enough of something that almost works.

• 1:05:39Speaker 00

  How have I been in recovery for seven years and never heard that? Oh, that is so good. You can never get enough of something that almost works. Please remind me to write that down, before I leave.

• 1:05:51André Duqum?

  Only if this was recorded, yeah. Got you.

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  Wait, you're recording this?

• 1:05:58André Duqum?

  They do just disappear.

• 1:05:59Speaker 00

  Rip off my mic and leave. I didn't agree to be recorded. I thought we were just talking with your friends with a lot of electronic equipment around. What?

• 1:06:14André Duqum?

  I'm glad, I hope it does feel that way. They kind of do dissolve after a certain moment.

• 1:06:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:19André Duqum?

  Into the conversation. But it's, it's interesting, because it's almost, it is more obvious when you have an external object or drug that you're addicted to, and it's this like, elusive, inner, invisible, dynamic, relational thing. I think it's easy to justify our way out of our own neuroses, or like, you know? But from, from reading your story, and just getting to see how it got increasingly more clear that there was your part to play in the dynamic that was unhealthy, to say the least. What, at what point did you get, go into recovery?

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  It was a year and change after Rea died, right before COVID-2019.

• 1:07:06André Duqum?

  Okay, right before COVID. And then COVID time, and you decided to stop seeing people, like, romantically as well, after that?

• 1:07:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:17André Duqum?

  And how are you now? So you're just coming out of your sabbatical, but like, this has been a long, seven-year journey.

• 1:07:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, I'm, you know, I, I sometimes like to compare, like, where I was and where I am. And I think one of the ways you can kind of, I can kind of gauge how I am, is that what I needed seven years ago, in order to be propped up, versus what I need now. And so, at the time that I first came into recovery, I, for instance, at that time, I've been on and off anti-anxiety and antidepressive medications for my whole life, and I leave it to whoever is listening to this, to know what is best for them on that. I'm only speaking

• 1:08:06Speaker 00

  of my own experience, but at that time, I was on Zoloft. I had a prescription for Xanax running all the time, so that if I needed an emergency, like, if I could not manage my anxiety and my emotions, and needed that, I could have that. I had a sleeping pill prescription going at all times. It didn't mean that I took those pills every night, but I had them. And I took them most nights. And I had a therapist that I went to twice a week, and I had a couples therapist, basically, on retainer, who I had gone to over the years with various people. And he'd be like, hi, Liz, who, who do we have today? You know,

• 1:08:48Speaker 00

  like, who have you, who have you dragged in here today, who you want me to change, so that you, you can be happy, you know? And I'd be like, please meet, you know, new-

• 1:08:57André Duqum?

  My resident couples therapist.

• 1:08:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And I had a shaman, who I did, like, you know, ayahuasca and, and various other journeys with. I, like, I had a, like, a staff, basically, of people. And that's not even including the, my most recent victim, who I had, who I had hauled in as my lover partner. You know, like, you're responsible for, for making everything okay person. And I don't have any of that now. And I just, like, I'm just hanging out. Like,

• 1:09:38Speaker 00

  I wake up, I wake up, and I have a day, you know? And I'm not on any, oh, and I was drinking. I forgot about that. And I was drinking. And that's gone. And the antidepressants and the anti-anxiety medication is gone, and the sleeping pills are gone. And the therapist is somebody who I might check in with, like, every few months, if I'm like, can I get a tune-up on this? The couples therapist is not needed. The shaman is gone. The, the, the plant medicine is gone. And what remains is this person who's able, using the tools

• 1:10:22Speaker 00

  of recovery and the guidance of a higher power, to, to navigate herself today. Like, just for today. Like, and who's just here, seeing what this conversation is about. I haven't been in a romantic or sexual relationship since I came into recovery. That's not what my recovery program is about. It's not-

• 1:10:48Speaker 00

  Part of sex and love addiction to say that you can never have sex and love again. I have a lot more love in my life than I've ever had. But it's coming from a community of people rather than from one person, which I think is safer for everybody. Like, one person's not my plug, you know? Like, and actually, in the rooms of recovery that I'm in, it's mostly women. And there's a line that a woman said once that I think is incredible, where she said, "Everything I ever thought I was supposed to get from one man, it turns out I can only get from a community of women." So that love is kind of dispersed among a bunch of people who are all emotionally available, but who are also emotionally responsible, meaning that every one of us are taking responsibility for our own lives,

• 1:11:32Speaker 00

  not for each other's lives, but we're available to help. And I haven't been interested in bringing a relationship at that level back into my life. And when I check in with God to be like, "Do you want me? Do you want me out there on these streets, like, dating?" God's like, "LOL, no. Not you, honey." Like, other people I might... And God's like, "If I need that from you, you'll be alerted, and it'll come, and it will come through to a prayer, and it will come from me, and I'll tell you how to do it. It's not going to be your idea, you know? But for today, no, you're great. You're great. Why, like, let's not... This is good. Like, you want to test and see how crazy you still are?

• 1:12:17Speaker 00

  You want to take the ride? Like, you can, but I wouldn't advise it in my case. So that's where I am. And it's funny, because a year ago, I would have said, "I'm also more creatively productive than I've ever been." And that's true, because I wrote three books in the last six years. But now, suddenly, I'm questioning whether that's even a virtue. Because I think, as things fall away that I relied upon to prop myself up, to make myself feel like I was a special person, I think my creative production is part of that. And so, because I always had that. It's like, everything else can fall away, but I'm still a really good writer.

• 1:13:01Speaker 00

  And I'm going to prove it now by writing a really good book. Maybe I don't need to, you know? So it's interesting. I have fewer dependencies than I've ever had. And I think that's probably a measure of my wellness. Doing okay today.

• 1:13:21André Duqum?

  I think you're crushing the game.

• 1:13:24Speaker 00

  I don't want to crush the game. I want to stay right in the middle of the herd. I was crushing the game in the past. You know what I mean? It's like, I'm fucking crushing life. You know, like, I got a movie made out of it. Like, I did TED Talk. I got a, like, crushing the game.

• 1:13:40André Duqum?

  The game was crushed, now you're loving the game.

• 1:13:43Speaker 00

  The game crushed me. I thought it was crushing the game, but I think it did crush me.

• 1:13:50André Duqum?

  Well, okay, so I want to zoom in on the evolution, then, of your creativity. So many people have come into your world and into your work because they feel like, and they can probably relate to the quote that I've heard you share also from the Gospel of Thomas. You know, "If you bring forth what's within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don't bring forth what's within you, what you don't bring forth will destroy you." And we all have this creative aspect of self as we are a creative being. To varying degrees, we've allowed that to give room and to give space. And you've been such a guiding light for so many people to give permission, not that it's necessarily yours to give, but to invite that reminder.

• 1:14:32André Duqum?

  And all the many different things we'll navigate on the way there. So how do you define creative living now, perhaps how you did differently 20 years ago?

• 1:14:44Speaker 00

  Hmm, oh, that's such a good question. I was about to just spew out what I always spew out, but let me actually answer... Let me actually, let me actually think about that. Wow, what's arising is you don't have to do this. And I think 20 years ago, I'd have been like, "You have to do this." I think I had a, I think I had a... I used to say, "Why do I care so much about whether people are creating or not?" I used to be a little bit overinvested, I think, in whether other people were creating and doing the thing that was within them. I think I took it personally if people weren't, you know?

• 1:15:29Speaker 00

  I was like, "I want you to have this experience. I don't want you to come all this way and not have this experience. You got to make something, whatever it is." Maybe, maybe you don't, you know? But you can if you want to, and you're allowed to if you want to. And it doesn't have to... It doesn't have to, it doesn't have to then turn into something huge. And that's good to know, because it might not, you know? You can't make people want the thing you made. You just can't, like, no matter how well marketed it is.

• 1:16:13Speaker 00

  And I am here to attest that that is true, because I have never been able to replicate Eat, Pray, Love. So you cannot make Eat, Pray, Love happen twice. Like, you can't, maybe can't even make it happen once, right? So, but you get to play with the materials and the inspiration of the world. You get to. And, and that can look like anything. It can look, it can look very, very, very, very small. And it can look very, very, very big. But nobody is excluded from that invitation. I think that's how I would say it now. Whereas I think 20 years ago, I might have been like, "If you don't do this, it's going to kill you. You've got to do this."

• 1:16:58Speaker 00

  And I'm not sure that I know that to be true. And I do know that my beloved friend Martha Beck recently wrote a book called Beyond Anxiety. And, and she did a lot of research on neuroscience with this and what is being shown, and was able to determine that the opposite of anxiety is not calm. The opposite of anxiety is creativity. So when you're anxious and you're trying to calm down, and it never works, doing even the slightest, tiniest creative thing,

• 1:17:37Speaker 00

  baking something, coloring a coloring book, singing, moving your body in some interesting way, like, reduces anxiety. And it turns out that fear and creativity are operating from different parts of the brain. I'm doing theater right now, acting like I know what I'm talking about, but this is what I've been told. But apparently, from what I've been told, fear and creativity are a toggle switch. So when the creativity toggle is operating, the fear isn't. And when the fear one is up, the creativity isn't. And so it's a little bit of a seesaw. So it does appear that it's very good for you to, to create.

• 1:18:22Speaker 00

  But I'm not sure that I would now say that everybody has to do it. But I would still say everybody gets to do it.

• 1:18:29André Duqum?

  What's something in your life that would maybe otherwise a small one day in action in your day that you've transformed into a little bit of creativity?

• 1:18:37Speaker 00

  I make these little collages now. So I sit in a lot of, a lot of my 12-step meetings are on Zoom, because a lot of 12-step recovery went on Zoom during the pandemic. And I travel so much that I love these Zoom meetings, because I can get to them. But I, I am not, I really like making art, and I don't know how to draw. And I have a really, like, even if you see now, I, I like vibrate. And it's, I've always vibrated.

• 1:19:04André Duqum?

  A little hummingbird?

• 1:19:05Speaker 00

  I'm a little hummingbird, exactly. So I'm like, a little shaky, so I have a shaky hand. I have terrible handwriting, and I have a terrible line for drawing. So I'm not precise. And, and, but I have, I actually do have, like, an artistic eye for what is pleasing. And, and I like to put things together in a way that's pleasing. So I make these collages. So I go to, like, Home Goods and to thrift shops, and I buy really cheap frames, or I buy really, you know, like, cheap mass-produced art that they sell at, like, Marshalls? For, for, like, if you, you're decorating an Airbnb, and you need, just need some, like, generic art.

• 1:19:50Speaker 00

  So I'll buy those, and, or I'll go to thrift shops and buy art. And then I'll modify and do stuff to it, and embroider in it, and like, like, paste things in it, and make... And they're really pretty. They're really, really pretty. And my higher power, Notorious G O D, has told me that I'm not allowed to sell them. And I make them a lot, like, I'm not, God's like, "You have to have something in your life that's a creative output that is not associated with the marketplace."

• 1:20:18André Duqum?

  Do you even share them?

• 1:20:19Speaker 00

  I give them away.

• 1:20:20André Duqum?

  Okay, but like, do you post them, or like?

• 1:20:22Speaker 00

  I put pictures of them sometimes on Substack. But I, but I, as an illustration for, like, my Substack newsletter. But I'm not, I'm not supposed to sell them. So, and that's assuming somebody would want to buy them. But like, I could see myself going down a thing where I'm just like, "I make art now." You know, like, and I'm having a display, like, I'm not, I can't. So, so I give them to people. So like, my favorite waitress at the diner that I go to when I'm home visiting my parents, like, I noticed that she had this beautiful fern tattoo. And so I made one for her that was like, you know, I wrapped it up and brought it to her, and I'm like, "I made this for you." And I got inspired, because there's a little girl in that town, and in that diner that I go to, the walls are covered with her art.

• 1:21:04Speaker 00

  She's six years old, and her mom told me that one day she woke up and said, "I just want to make art for all the people I like in town." And so she draws art, and then they go to the bank, and she gets one to the bank teller, and she gives one to the person at the post office. And I was like, "I 100% want to do that." Like, I 100% want to make, like, little pieces of art and walk around town and give them to people. And so that's what I do. So that's my, that's been my creative output. And I have nothing left to show for it, because I've given them all away. So, and they're pretty, they're really, really, really pretty. I, and they seem to make people happy, so...

• 1:21:39André Duqum?

  I'm going to see these.

• 1:21:40Speaker 00

  I'll show you some pictures of them later, they're nice. Yeah.

• 1:21:46André Duqum?

  I know you've spoken at length and a lot of us can relate when we put so much pressure on our creative passions to become profit. It can like pervert it or put so much pressure on it that restores it into being something. And so it's an interesting thing to navigate. But we did talk about how we are innately creative beings. And I've heard you share how we are walking repositories of buried treasure.

• 1:22:09Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:22:09André Duqum?

  Right? Can you say more in regards to that? Like, how much do you feel like there is within us that we have yet to give expression for?

• 1:22:18Speaker 00

  Oh, my God, so much, right? I mean, I've talked about like doing a complete and fair moral inventory in 12 step. Like you, you know, you excavate yourself, you find a lot in there. Like, you find a lot of darkness, but you find a lot of light, too. A complete inventory includes like all of your grace and all of your kindness and all of your care and all of your humor and all of your weirdness and all of your unique beauty. I mean, we don't even know what's in here. You know what I mean? Like, we're operating at such a surface level of it. Like, there's so much, there's so much.

• 1:23:02Speaker 00

  And then there's also, a friend of mine just shared something with me that I thought was so beautiful about ancestral joy, that she was getting these downloads from her female ancestors who have all like suffer, suffer, suffer, suffer, suffer, going all the way back to Eve, right? Which is like a lot.

• 1:23:19André Duqum?

  Ancestral trauma.

• 1:23:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, ancestral trauma. And like her, she was doing meditations where her ancestors were coming to her and they were like, we weren't just trauma. You know what I mean? Like, we were, like, we also had a good time. Like, we also loved who we loved. We also loved to sing. We also loved to dance. We also created, we sewed, we knitted, we cooked, we, like, we also loved the sky in the morning, you know? We also loved, like, the warmth of a person. We also loved our animals. Like, there was a lot that we loved and we have, we, because of the trauma, had a lot of unspent love and a lot of unspent joy that we also passed along to you. We didn't just pass along our darkness.

• 1:24:02Speaker 00

  Like, if you could spend some of our joy, that would be great, because we didn't have a lot of opportunities sometimes to spend it. If you could spend some of our love that we didn't get to express, that would be really wonderful. And if you could spend some of our creativity, and sometimes I think that creative talent is, is some sort of ancestor who was like, I didn't have the chance. Like, I also was a really good musician. I didn't have the chance. I didn't have the chance. Could you, could you do this kind of for me, too? So there's so much delight to be expressed as well.

• 1:24:38André Duqum?

  Yeah, what is it? Les Brown said the richest place on the planet is the graveyard, like all of the buried ideas and expressions that never got to come out.

• 1:24:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:48André Duqum?

  And how much is just stored in there genetically, ancestrally?

• 1:24:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:54André Duqum?

  And I think one really big transformative idea that you shed a lot of light on is on the nature of ideas themselves as like living entities.

• 1:25:02Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:25:03André Duqum?

  First, do you like, do you really believe that? Like, they are living entities? Kind of in the old Socratic, like Stoic kind of Greek conception?

• 1:25:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:13André Duqum?

  Yes.

• 1:25:14Speaker 00

  And most creative people that I know experience it that way. Regardless of having grown up in whatever empirical culture they grew up in, most people, when you talk to them about where they got their inspiration, it came to them. Like, they will use the language, it came to me. Like, then it came to me. Suddenly I had this idea, it came to me. Like, even people talking about mathematical formulas and, and scientific ideas are like, it came, you know, it came to me. You might know the story about how Henry Ford figured out, and he was totally right, that there's this liminal space between sleeping and waking when you're very, very, very open.

• 1:25:53Speaker 00

  And, and I find when I'm working on a book, I write very early in the mornings and I will wake up and the second I'm like in that kind of gray veiled space between sleep and awakening, the solution is instantly in my mind for the narrative problem from the day before. To the point that I will keep a notebook next to my bed, because I'll just hear the words, I'll hear the, I'm like, oh, there it is, there it is, there it is, you know? And like, I'll write it down and then go back to sleep. And, and forget, and wake up and be like, ah, somebody gave me this, you know, in the middle of the night. And, and Henry Ford used to try to game that by, he would go to sleep with like, he would

• 1:26:36Speaker 00

  take these little mini naps with like ball bearings in his hands, and there would be metal trays underneath him. So he would sit up straight and just like go into kind of a meditative state. And then when he dropped the ball bearings, they would make a noise that would wake him up just enough that he'd be in the liminal space that he could catch an idea. So he was trancing himself in order to try to, to, to catch these ideas. So, yeah, I literally feel like ideas and inspiration are spirit. They are external spirit that's looking for a human collaborator. And there's all kinds of evidence, and I've had it in my life, and every creative person I know has had it in their life, where like, an idea hits two people at the same time who don't even know each other. And like, there's all sorts of magical ways that that gets evidenced.

• 1:27:20Speaker 00

  But I remember being on NPR when Big Magic came out and the very nice NPR reporter was kind of trying to save me from myself.

• 1:27:29Speaker 00

  And was saying like, you talk about magic, I know you don't mean magic. I know you mean that it feels like magic. I'm like, bitch, I literally mean magic. Yeah. Like, no, like, like, thank you for trying to not make me look stupid on NPR, but like, I'm talking about magic. Like, I'm talking about magic, which I believe in. And I hundred percent believe that it is like coming to me from an external source, yes.

• 1:27:55Speaker 00

  And a lot of people that I know who are creative experience it that way.

• 1:27:57André Duqum?

  Hmm. Yeah, likewise. What, um, because you also shared how they like, ideas will find the swiftest conduit to earth. What happens when you ignore an idea that comes to you? What does that do to a person? What happens to the idea?

• 1:28:14Speaker 00

  I want to be careful, because I don't want to like fill anybody with dread, you know? Or with a feeling that like, oh, I lost mine.

• 1:28:22André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:22Speaker 00

  You know? I have a friend who says, I used to think that life was a train, that I got on the wrong one. You know, I used to think I got on the wrong one, or I got in the wrong seat on the wrong train, and that other trains were passing me by and I was supposed to be on those trains. And I, and she said, I used to just feel my whole life was just a missed, missed train transfers. And, and she's like, I don't feel that way anymore. I don't think you can get on the wrong train. And, um, excuse me, I know that like Ram Dass said that. He's like, you can't, you can't do this wrong. Like, you can't miss your life. There's no such thing.

• 1:29:04Speaker 00

  You didn't make a mistake big enough that you missed your life. You, you marry the wrong person, then you get to go on that train. Like, you get to go on marry the wrong person train and have that adventure. And that adventure is going to bring you to something that you could only get by getting on the marry the wrong person train. Like, favorite person that you love dies, you, you get to go on that train ride. And that's going to bring you to your destiny. Like, every single decision you make is going to bring you to your destiny. You can't miss it. You can't miss your destiny. Don't worry about it. Like, take a left, your destiny is there. Take a right, your destiny is there. Create, your destiny is there. Don't create, your destiny is there.

• 1:29:45Speaker 00

  So I don't want to like, fill anybody with this sense that there was this moment that you had this opportunity for this, this great idea and you missed it, and so you are now terminally fucked.

• 1:29:57Speaker 00

  Like, that is not what I believe. First of all, I think there's more. You know, I don't think the universe is like scant on ideas, you know? Or like, or opportunities, or notions or inspiration. I think there's plenty. I think there's plenty. And I think there's still more in you if you want. And again, you don't have to. You can just hang out. And then you can have hangout destiny. And that's also fine. Like, I really am at a place where I genuinely believing that you can't do this wrong.

• 1:30:30Speaker 00

  But the idea will go find someone else.

• 1:30:33Speaker 00

  Like, a hundred percent will. And, and like, you will wake up someday and open the New York Times and somebody wrote your book. Like, I've had that happen to me. Everybody I know has had that happen to them at some level. So, and that's okay, there's another one.

• 1:30:44André Duqum?

  Right.

• 1:30:45Speaker 00

  And then they get to have that journey. You know, good for them.

• 1:30:49André Duqum?

  But there's something, when you do, you know, catch the butterfly, so to speak, or you, this, this lightning bolt of inspiration happens where, when you do follow it and pull on that thread, you surely learn a lot about yourself in that process, if that is so the train that you hop on, right?

• 1:31:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:31:06André Duqum?

  That's, that's for you.

• 1:31:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:31:07André Duqum?

  And I find the topic of multiple discoveries incredibly fascinating, how that really happens. I know Michael Jackson was like interviewed saying, I stay up late into the hours, because if I don't catch this idea, then Prince will get it, you know?

• 1:31:20Speaker 00

  I hundred percent love that. I hundred percent love that.

• 1:31:26André Duqum?

  And I think so many of us do feel, I, I love the, I love the reminder you gave, and a lot of us feel.

• 1:31:31Speaker 00

  But time out, look how Michael Jackson and Prince both died, right? So that urgency might also not be great.

• 1:31:40André Duqum?

  Totally.

• 1:31:41Speaker 00

  Just saying.

• 1:31:41André Duqum?

  No, one hundred percent.

• 1:31:44Speaker 00

  You know?

• 1:31:44André Duqum?

  Yeah, I think we can, we can elaborate. The highlight reel of someone's success without the real suffering they endured and ended their life with.

• 1:31:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:31:52André Duqum?

  Totally.

• 1:31:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. Sorry, I interrupted you, but I just had to say, like, maybe we don't want to go that hard.

• 1:32:00André Duqum?

  But I think on most people's conception of like what a life well-lived is, is both self-realization and self-actualization, like, living your life in expression to what you most value and the ideas that are correlated with that. And you give this distinction around genius, which I think is fitting here, because, not to say that we all want to become a genius, but we all would like to discover what is our genius or the genius that will have us.

• 1:32:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:36André Duqum?

  So what do you think is what happens after a life of following these ideas and letting them take you, so to speak? What can come up?

• 1:32:42Speaker 00

  Well, I'll give you an example. Like, a lot of times, what I see, because I do a lot of events and people have questions, and there are certain questions that come up again and again, and that's how I know that it's in the collective zeitgeist, it's our shared anxiety, like, and one of the questions that people have is, like, I have this idea, and there's almost like a energy cost benefit analysis that they're doing on it, which is like, I want to write, I'll just use book, because that's what people come to me a lot with. I want to write a book, but it's going to take a huge amount of energy, and it may end up being nothing. Like, how, why? How and why should I do that?

• 1:33:26Speaker 00

  Going back to the thing we shared at the beginning of this conversation of God saying to me, will you come with me even if I make no assurances? Every one of my books has also said that, in a way, like, will you come with me even if I make no assurances? And, and it's very hard to answer that question in some sort of promising way, because I don't want to ever promise anybody that they're going to have any success, because that's so impossible to promise. And I know we all want to think we can manifest everything, but I'm not, I'm not sure that we can control outcome. And so what I will say is, I can't promise you that you're a good writer. I have no idea. Like, you don't know.

• 1:34:11Speaker 00

  I don't know. Who knows? I've also seen books written, I'm thinking of two particularly in my mind, that people that I know have written books that I thought were freaking great, that never got published. And so I can't even promise you that if your book is great, that it will, and like, I threw all my weight behind trying to get those books published and could not, could not make it happen. And like, it's bewildering to me. I'm like, these, both of these books are so much better than 90% of the books that are out there. So you might be a good writer, and you might write something that's better than 90% of the things out there, and it still might not be published. It might be published and it might not sell. It might be published and it might get terrible reviews. It might be published and you might get canceled.

• 1:34:54Speaker 00

  It might get, be published and your family may never invite you to Thanksgiving dinner again because of the things you revealed in that book. You might get sued. Like, I don't know. Any version of a lot of those things have happened to me, you know, and like, have happened to a lot of people that I know. So I can't promise you anything, except for, I can absolutely promise you that if you sit down and tell that story that is within you, by the end of that, you will be a different person than you were at the beginning of that experience. It, a hundred percent, you will be altered by it. And don't you want to kind of know who you become? Like, can that be enough of a reason to do something?

• 1:35:36Speaker 00

  Like, don't you kind of want to know who you'll be if you actually do that thing? And if the answer to that is yes, then that, that has to be enough. That has to be enough, because nothing else is assured.

• 1:35:47Speaker 02

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com, not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 1:36:18André Duqum?

  Most people astonished with your work have no idea to the degree, and neither do I, of, of the dedication and devotion and commitment that was required to do the work. As Picasso's quoted, you know, inspiration exists, but it must find you working. Right? So talk to me about the, the effort that's required to arrive at a place of those effortless, magical moments of insight.

• 1:36:40Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, you got to prepare the field for the seed, you know? Like, oh, it's funny, there's something in me that's resisting talking about this, because I'm, I'm coming out of sabbatical and my whole body just went like, I don't want to talk about discipline, but I'll talk about discipline. For me, what it looks like, for me, what it looks like is, like, I become a marine. I become a marine. Like, I am, like, it's the only way I know how to do it. And it doesn't mean that's the only way it needs to be done, but this is the only way that I've known how to do it.

• 1:37:22Speaker 00

  It has to be, for me, all right, we're gonna get up at before dawn, we have to get up before everybody else. Like, for me, I, I want to be up before the world starts annoying me and knocking on my door and demanding my attention. So that's early. And most of my books are really heavily researched, whether they're fiction or nonfiction. And so there's usually two to three years of research before I even begin. Big Magic wasn't like that, because I had been living researching it for so long that when I finally decided to sit down and write it, I just, I'd actually collected all of

• 1:38:05Speaker 00

  these books about the history of creativity, had like a whole wall of books about like creativity and creative process and the associations of creativity and depression and schizophrenia and like the neuroscience of creativity. And one morning I looked at that and I was like, I will jump off a roof if I have to read any of these books. I know what I want to say about creativity, and I'm just going to sit down and say it. And that became Big Magic. But most of my books are very, very heavily researched and through this intricate note-card system that I have involving like index cards and shoeboxes and files. It's very autistic and very like train-schedule-y, like, it's very nuanced. And then, and then when I actually sit down to begin writing the book, I clear my life away.

• 1:38:50Speaker 00

  Like, I let everybody know you're not going to see me for at least three months. And it's kind of like I'm a monk, kind of like I'm a marine. I cancel everything in advance. I like lay the groundwork and, and I begin. And it's a little bit like swimming the English Channel in one breath for me. Like, I, I just sit down and I'm like, we're going to do this until it's done, and nothing else matters. And nothing else does matter for me when I'm in that state. It costs me a lot physically, and it costs me a lot of like life that I'm not experiencing because I'm shutting out life. A lot of invitations that I have to say no to, a lot of fun things that other people

• 1:39:30Speaker 00

  are doing, a lot of connection, but it's the most fun once it starts. Like, and, and I'm always like, why am I doing this? Why am I doing this to myself? But once it starts, it's, when I'm in the vibe of that, there's no, it's, I feel more like myself than any other time, except probably when I'm in prayer. And I think, actually, for me, writing was the first experience that I had of feeling like an intelligence beyond. Something is guiding it, something is moving it. My rule when I first begin is, because it's so hard to get into it, is I write by the clock, not by the word.

• 1:40:12Speaker 00

  So I'll just say, you've got, you have to sit at this chair for one hour, and you're not allowed to stand up, and you're not allowed to look at the internet, and you just have to be present to this project for one hour. And at the end of the hour, when the timer goes off, you're allowed to get up and leave, and that's considered a good hour of work, regardless of what was created. But then, once I get going in the zone, it's magic. Like, magic starts happening. Time drops away, three hours have passed and it feels like two minutes. All the stuff that they promised meditation would do, like, starts to happen, like, real, and like, I write better than I can, you know? Like, at the beginning, it's definitely me writing, but then things happen where I'm like, that's much better writing than I, than I can do. Something else is doing this now. Something else is moving this, this whole thing.

• 1:40:57Speaker 00

  And that's extremely thrilling and very energetically tiring, but wonderful. It's the best. But I don't want to do it for a long time now, because I'm enjoying not being at that level, of vibrating at that level.

• 1:41:12André Duqum?

  Yeah, I think Thelonious Monk said the genius is the one most like himself. And you said you feel like the most like yourself when you're in that pocket.

• 1:41:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:41:23André Duqum?

  To your own Monk version.

• 1:41:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. Both versions of Monk.

• 1:41:27André Duqum?

  Yeah, Lizzie Monk. And I'm curious, what do you think about the?

• 1:41:36André Duqum?

  What it reveals about what we actually really loved and were naturally drawn to repeatedly as a child, and how that's an indicator potentially of what will make us most come alive as an adult.

• 1:41:47Speaker 00

  Well, children intuitively do all this stuff. You know, like, they dance, they sing, they make up stories, they do theater, they draw. They do all that stuff. They just do it. Like, they know to do it, they know that it's theirs, they know they're allowed to do it. Most of us can point to an exact moment in childhood where that lack of self-consciousness was taken away. And that's what Brene Brown calls art scars. And everybody has them. Where somebody told you, the teacher said, like, "You're not a good singer, so you stand in the back and just move your mouth during this point." And like, for some people, that was the last time they ever sang, you know?

• 1:42:32Speaker 00

  Like, up until then, they didn't know that you had to be a good singer to sing. They just sing, you know? And then it's like, "Oh, now I don't sing." "You're not a good dancer, you're not a good drawer." Here's this person in the class is the one who's the good artist. And that's when the sorting hat starts, you know, where it's like, "This person is talented, you're not. This person is a good dancer, you're not. This person is a good singer, you're not. This one is the writer, you're not." And creativity is taken from you. And for some people, that's the end of the story, you know? And we live in a culture that separates people out that way, where it's like, "These people are creative, and these people are producers and consumers."

• 1:43:11Speaker 00

  And if you're not, if you don't get to be in the creative class, then you're just stuck producer and consumer. But like, I've lived in, like, I've traveled and lived in cultures where that is not the way, where there's no such thing as somebody who doesn't dance. Like, when the community gets together, everybody dances. When the community gets together, everybody sings. Like, I used to live in Bali next to a, like, one of the community buildings where people would come and like, have these huge, you know, orchestras and singing and drums and chimes and everything. And like, no one's like, "Oh, Danny doesn't..."

• 1:43:49Speaker 00

  "Oh, Karen doesn't do that, because she doesn't have good pitch." It's like, no, everybody does that. And there's something that's been determined that collectively happens when people sing together. Their hearts co-regulate, their breathing co-regulates. Like, it's good for you. Like, all of this stuff is really good for you, and it's fun, and it's meant to be fun. So to cast yourself out of that because somebody in fourth grade made a disparaging comment about your version of that is really, is a tragedy. But you can reclaim it at any time, I believe.

• 1:44:25André Duqum?

  What's the single most useful thing you could, someone could do, in your experience, to reclaim it?

• 1:44:32Speaker 00

  A group, I think. You know, we have this version of the artist as like, the great man living in the Garrett apartment in Paris. And I kind of do that, play that role when I, when I write, to a certain extent. But I had a long time in my twenties where, after college, I decided not to go to graduate school. I don't have a graduate degree or an MFA in anything. I knew it would cost me too much. I didn't have the money, and I didn't want to go into debt. And somehow, I had some intuition that I'd be better off not in a room with a bunch of other people trying to find their voice. But I created a group. And for reasons that are lost to history, we called ourselves The Fat Kids. I cannot remember why. And there were six of us.

• 1:45:17Speaker 00

  And it was some people I went to college with and some people that I worked with and knew from my bartending and waitressing who wanted to write. And we met twice a month for like, four or five years. And we brought what we were working on, you know, whatever we wanted to write. And everybody, we took turns where it was some, one person's week, and they would bring something that they were working on. And my first book was pretty much written that way, because there wasn't a lot of other motive to do it. Nobody was knocking on my door and saying, "We hear, we heard there's a good unpublished writer living here."

• 1:45:54Speaker 00

  So I had to create like, a reason to do something. And so the reason to do something were these deadlines that we had in the group. And, yeah, my first novel, too, was like, largely written with the help of The Fat Kids. It's like, in the acknowledgements of my first novel, it's like, "Thanks to The Fat Kids."

• 1:46:14André Duqum?

  Out of context.

• 1:46:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, out of context, just no explanation of what that means. So even the most private art forms, I mean, I think of writing as maybe the most private.

• 1:46:28Speaker 00

  You can still get help from other people. You're not supposed to do this by yourself. So if there isn't a group, make one. Like, invite people. I've been doing this thing at my house, and I share this idea with anybody who wants to do it.

• 1:46:44Speaker 00

  I have these days called Quiet Art Days. And I, I live in an old church, so it's a very inspirational space, anyway. But I invite like, five or six women over. And we, the rule is this. We, we do this 30-minute breath meditation, and then we do 30 minutes of listening to this recording of sound bowls. So like, an hour of breath meditation and sound bowls. And then, the next two hours, nobody's allowed to speak. And you can go take a place anywhere in the house, bring anything that you're working on. The only rules are no speaking and nothing electronic. So no laptops, no phones. And I lay out all sorts of art supplies, and you can just play with the art supplies. You can take a nap, you can go for a walk,

• 1:47:27Speaker 00

  you can draw, you can paint, but you can't talk, and you can't be on the internet.

• 1:47:34André Duqum?

  Wow.

• 1:47:34Speaker 00

  And, and so we spend essentially three hours in silence, one hour of the singing bowls, and then two hours of the creativity. And then we break, then I like, do a gong, and then we eat dinner together and talk. And, or you can leave. If you're just in the vibe and you don't want to break it with speech, you can just go.

• 1:47:53André Duqum?

  I want to come.

• 1:47:54Speaker 00

  It's really good. So you can, you don't have to wait for somebody to make things like that. Like, you can invite people into creative spaces with you, and it's less lonely and less scary.

• 1:48:07André Duqum?

  I think we're seeing this return to the imperfection of the human creative pursuit in music and art and everything as AI is continuing to grow. What do you think is the danger of letting AI take over your creative expression?

• 1:48:22Speaker 00

  It's so tempting, right? Because it's like, it's gonna get, like, somebody said, "It's gonna be like, a year, in a year or two, like, AI is gonna be able to write a novel that's good." You know? And I'm like, "I bet it'll be sooner than that." And, and somebody asked me like, "How do you feel about the fact that AI could write a better novel than you someday?" And I'm like, "There's already people who can write better novels than me." Like, that's been, that's been my reality my entire life. Like, every single creative thing that I do, there are people who do it better, you know? So, who I think do it better. So that can't be a reason to not create, is that there's some intelligence that can do it better. That already is the case, right? So I'm not gonna compete with AI if I don't compete with Aunt Paget.

• 1:49:09Speaker 00

  Like, I can be friendly with AI the same way I'm friendly with Aunt Paget. So I'm sure it's tempting. But I think you'll miss the fun, right? I think it's sort of, the question is like, "What are you doing this for? Are you doing this to be the best at it? Or are you doing this to have the experience of it?" And so, yeah, AI could do it for you, but then you don't get to go on the ride. You just get to operate the robot.

• 1:49:40Speaker 00

  That doesn't seem as much fun for me.

• 1:49:45André Duqum?

  No, and yeah, as they're getting more and more capable, there is something particular with AI music that I noticed, this like, that just the perfection of the voices that it generates is like, immediately, I can tell it's AI, that feels devoid of, we want to be moved by stories that are authentic, right? And so if it's like, a machine generating a thing that sounds great, which some of them sound really cool, and just like, books, I'm sure that'll write were really beautiful. I don't know, I suppose there's, do you feel like what makes it magical is that it came from somebody who was in a process of discovery, and it was authentic in that? Or do you, do you not make it so precious?

• 1:50:27Speaker 00

  I think that is precious.

• 1:50:28André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:29Speaker 00

  You know, and I think that is magical. And, you know, I think AI will get so good that it'll make music that doesn't sound like AI.

• 1:50:38André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:39Speaker 00

  You know, it's only a matter of time, you know? And it will write, I mean, already some, I can't remember who, some poet did an experiment where they said, "Write a poem like me." And then they wrote a poem, and they put it on the internet and said, "Which one do you think I wrote?" And most people chose the AI one. And it was, he was like, "It's better than mine." You know, like, and you were fooled. Like, "You thought I wrote this."

• 1:51:04Speaker 00

  So this is gonna really put our feet to the fire as to why we create, you know? Like, I have a friend whose kid is in music school at NYU right now, and he's like, "The only ones who are gonna be left doing it are the people who just love doing it." Because all the other reasons are gonna fall away. You're not gonna be, who knows? You're not gonna be able to make a living from it anymore. Or, "The robots will do it better." Or, like, whatever. There'll be all kinds of, all of those external sources going back to our original conversation about seeking the external. Like, all of those external forces might just go away.

• 1:51:46Speaker 00

  And then who's gonna be left making something with their hands? Somebody who wants to make something with their hands. And what's gonna be the reason to bother doing it? The same reason our ancestors did it, because it's pleasing.

• 1:52:01Speaker 00

  You know, it's pleasing. I get most of the art that's ever been made in the entire world was not generated. Nobody made any money from it. Like, you made it because it was pleasing. It was beautiful to make. My grandparents were Dust Farm Depression era Swedish Lutheran dairy farmers, like the least woo-woo fanciful people in the entire world. And both of my grandparents made beautiful art. Everyone did. They didn't have mass media. So what do you do on those long, cold nights? Like, when all the chores are done, you make something with your hands. And my grandmother made these quilts that are like works of

• 1:52:40Speaker 00

  art. Her ancestors have them framed on their walls. And my grandfather did woodworking that was more beautiful than it needed to be for a guy who had no sentimentality. You know, like, why did he bother to make something more beautiful than it needed to be? Because it was pleasing to him. And I think in the end, that's what it's gonna come down to.

• 1:53:08Speaker 02

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 1:53:39André Duqum?

  Yeah, no, I couldn't, I couldn't agree more. I think we're already seeing it be highlighted across the board. And I'm curious, just to kind of wrap a bow and kind of full, come full circle within this conversation. You started sharing more about your two-way prayer and that practice that you have. Are you doing that every morning still? How long does that take, usually?

• 1:54:06Speaker 00

  Half an hour, 45 minutes.

• 1:54:07André Duqum?

  And if somebody wanted to do it tomorrow morning, what would they do?

• 1:54:11Speaker 00

  Oh, well, if you can get on Substack and go to, I have a Substack called Letters From Love, and there's instructions there on how to do it. And there's a community, going back to the idea of we can do this in community, there's a community of people doing it. And you already told me you were gonna do it.

• 1:54:28André Duqum?

  Stellar.

• 1:54:29Speaker 00

  But I can, but I can say, you know, I can say where this came to me. I now have found out that it's called two-way prayer. I didn't know that it was called something when I started doing it 20 years ago. It came to me in my time of the lowest depression I've ever been in my life, after the end of my first marriage, when I had no tools, I had no spirituality. I was just out there roughing it, you know? And one night, one sleepless night, a voice that I now would call God came to me and said, just get out of bed and get a notebook and write yourself everything you've always wanted to hear somebody

• 1:55:09Speaker 00

  say to you. Because I was so lonely and I was so heartbroken. And, and I did it. And that voice, and I, you know, you know what you've always wanted to hear somebody say to you. Write that down, like, to yourself. And so for me, it'll be different, maybe for other people, but mine was, I'm not going anywhere. Like, dear Lizzie, I'm here with you. I am not going anywhere. I am not leaving. I'm here. And you don't have to do anything to earn that. And you don't have to, you can't lose it. You can't earn it. You can't earn this love and you can't lose this love. This is your inheritance. And you've always

• 1:55:54Speaker 00

  had it. And I was with you at the moment of your birth. I'll be with you at the moment of your death. Everyone can come and go. Everybody else can leave. I'm with you. I've got you. And you don't have to impress me. And you don't have to get better, because I was in a real depression at that point. Like, you don't have to get well. You can be this fucked up forever. You can be this low. You can be this depressed. You can be this ashamed. You cannot improve. And I will, I will love you entirely. We can live in a box under a bridge, yelling at people when they walk by, I love you. Like, I love being

• 1:56:33Speaker 00

  with you in there. Like, you are my love. And that will not alter. And if you need to stay up all night tonight, because you can't sleep, I will sit with you and I'll just repeat this. And that's where it came to me. That's where I started doing the practice. And then I found out that there's this thing called two-way prayer, which is that. You know, one-way prayer is like beseeching God. Two-way prayer is listening. It's like, I'm gonna ask you a question, you give me the answer, and I write the answer down. So you can do that. You can just, you can just write your name. It actually really helps. I've learned if you use a nickname, an affectionate nickname, it softens your heart toward yourself.

• 1:57:14Speaker 00

  So, God calls me Honeyhead and Love and Little One and Lizzie. Like, these are all softening nicknames. So you can use a softening nickname, and then you just write what you wish somebody would tell you. You just write what you need to hear. Or you listen to see if you can hear what love would want you to know. And that's available to everybody. And I was telling you before we started the interview that one of the things I find most amazing now on that Substack, because there's 200,000 people there now doing this, is that when people share their letters, there are some people on there who have never had any experiences of being loved. Like, people who grew up in such extreme abuse, such extreme neglect,

• 1:57:57Speaker 00

  and they have access to this voice. So you don't, you didn't have to have someone model for you what it looks like to love at this level, to experience love at this level. And that's really good news, because a lot of us never got that. So you can have it anyway. And I think that's the really magical thing to know.

• 1:58:19André Duqum?

  So beautifully said. Could we try a little exercise? Maybe, like, this is a two-way prayer in and of itself. Maybe I'll ask a question and you can channel the G O D.

• 1:58:29Speaker 00

  How about you ask, and you channel G O D?

• 1:58:32André Duqum?

  Okay.

• 1:58:33Speaker 00

  Because it'll be my answer, and I'd rather hear yours.

• 1:58:36André Duqum?

  Yeah, but I want to hear yours.

• 1:58:39Speaker 00

  Okay, how about you ask a question, and we sit for a minute, and then see what we heard?

• 1:58:43André Duqum?

  Okay, great.

• 1:58:53André Duqum?

  What comes to mind is a soul that's about to incarnate into earth school. What are the instructions?

• 1:59:00Speaker 00

  Oh, gosh.

• 1:59:04Speaker 00

  It just, what'd you hear?

• 1:59:08André Duqum?

  You already got, you hear something?

• 1:59:10Speaker 00

  I got mine.

• 1:59:11André Duqum?

  Okay, well, let her read.

• 1:59:13Speaker 00

  But why don't you ask yours? And maybe keep it specific. What are your instructions? Ask it, like, you came here and incarnated to earth school. What are your instructions?

• 1:59:23André Duqum?

  Do you want to say yours, and then I'll, do you want me to think on it first?

• 1:59:27Speaker 00

  I think you should, before I say mine, you should think.

• 1:59:30André Duqum?

  Already knows your.

• 1:59:30Speaker 00

  We're not, anyway.

• 1:59:31André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:33Speaker 00

  What are my instructions? I incarnated here.

• 1:59:48André Duqum?

  Yeah, mine, I feel like I got mine.

• 1:59:50Speaker 00

  Mine is stay close. Stay close to me. Stay close to this voice.

• 1:59:57André Duqum?

  Mine was love everyone.

• 1:59:59Speaker 00

  Same, same.

• 2:00:01André Duqum?

  Same, same. Same, same. Stay close, love everyone.

• 2:00:04Speaker 00

  Do you know what? You might be an extrovert, and I might be an introvert. Because I've also heard that, like, if you're, even though I present very extroverted, and my answers are always about in here, and yours was out here. So even if you're like a quiet and private person, your, your love might be this. And that's a sort of extroverted version of that, love everybody. And mine is stay close. It's here.

• 2:00:38André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah, no, it also feels like that's a bit more intimate. Yours is almost an instruction for you in relation to God. Mine is almost my relationship to the external in a sense. So, basically what you just said.

• 2:00:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. But the right answer. And not hard to find, right?

• 2:00:54André Duqum?

  Yeah. I was, I was thinking it was gonna take, it would be a longer spiel.

• 2:00:59Speaker 00

  I'm telling you, this is the thing. This is the thing. God's like, I'm not a mystery.

• 2:01:06Speaker 00

  I'm here. Like, what do you want to know?

• 2:01:09André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:10Speaker 00

  You know? And if your intentions are pure, and you really want to know, the answer will be there.

• 2:01:19André Duqum?

  Yeah, I say it so often, that like, when you get quiet, what needs to be heard grows loud. And it seems like this practice of yours has been getting to that space of quiet, and seeing what wants to be heard. And I could only imagine what would happen

• 2:01:37André Duqum?

  Like a civilizational level, if everyone had that as a practice.

• 2:01:41Speaker 00

  I know, right?

• 2:01:42André Duqum?

  And had that connection and stayed close to that. Because we feel so alone, like the loneliness epidemic is so real. And when you build that relationship with something that isn't impermanent, you know, it feels like you always have something to be with to lean on.

• 2:02:01Speaker 00

  I think that there have probably been cultures where everybody was that connected, where that was prioritized, you know? Maybe I'm glamorizing cultures I don't know anything about, but I feel like I feel like that had to have been the case, especially for cultures that lasted a really, really long time, you know? Like, I've been spending a lot of time in Connecticut where I grew up, and I never thought I would go back there because I was like, I gotta get out of here. But I have found I've come back 50 years later, no, 40 years later. And been spending a lot of time in the Connecticut woods and getting very curious about who was here, you know?

• 2:02:42Speaker 00

  Because there were people there when my ancestors came from England to New England. And those people are mostly not there anymore. And it's just very moving to find out that there were people in those woods for 12,000 years. Not like 12,000 years ago, but for 12,000 uninterrupted years.

• 2:03:06Speaker 00

  And the fact that they managed that land and themselves well enough that that was preserved and taken care of so beautifully makes me think that they had to have been in some deeper communication than we are.

• 2:03:19André Duqum?

  Oh, for sure. I mean, anyone who's gone camping for a couple of days, let alone 12,000 years, generationally, like, what does that do? What does that open?

• 2:03:29Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 2:03:32Speaker 00

  So, yes, I think, I think it's, but we are still human and we do have, we are divine as well. And we're distracted and we're afraid. And it's a scary moment.

• 2:03:50Speaker 00

  And we're divine. And the answers are not far away.

• 2:03:55Speaker 00

  I went to do this five-day darkness meditation retreat last year.

• 2:03:59André Duqum?

  Oh, me too.

• 2:04:00Speaker 00

  Did you?

• 2:04:00André Duqum?

  I did, yeah, I did like.

• 2:04:01Speaker 00

  In Oregon?

• 2:04:02André Duqum?

  Two years ago, yeah, in Oregon, Skycap.

• 2:04:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:04:04André Duqum?

  Oh, nice.

• 2:04:07André Duqum?

  Love that for us.

• 2:04:07Speaker 00

  Okay, so you know, so you know.

• 2:04:11Speaker 00

  Well, maybe you've had a different experience, but what I, what I found out was there's, you can take everything else away and that voice of love is still there.

• 2:04:19André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:20Speaker 00

  It's the only thing left. And that was such good news. I was like, oh, this is great news. Everything else can go and this is still here.

• 2:04:32André Duqum?

  What drew you into that? Because I feel like that, it takes a special kind of person to want to go into the void.

• 2:04:37Speaker 00

  I know. My friend Margaret was like, you're such an idiot. She's like, give me a couple thousand dollars. I'll lock you in a closet in the house and give you food.

• 2:04:47Speaker 00

  Like, you're such a sucker. Why are you doing this?

• 2:04:49André Duqum?

  It's more complex than that, Mark.

• 2:04:50Speaker 00

  I'm like, there's more to it than there is. And I love them at Skycap, like, they really do take care of you in a way. You know, it's a, I had a friend who did it and talked about doing it, and it was a full-body yes. Like, there's things, there's things in my life that I hear about and I instantly know, like, oh, that's one of the things I came to earth to do. And she said that she had done it. And I was like, oh, that's one of the things I came to earth to do. I'd like, right, I forgot that that was on my list. Okay, that you're supposed to do that, you know? It was just a full, automatic, absolute yes.

• 2:05:22Speaker 00

  And yeah, did you enjoy it? Enjoy is not really the right word.

• 2:05:26André Duqum?

  Enjoy is a weird word.

• 2:05:26Speaker 00

  Are you glad you did it?

• 2:05:28André Duqum?

  For sure. I was just intrigued, you know? I know a lot of people go in there trying to like, seek a certain answer maybe, or I don't know what, but I was just like, I want to see what happens to just, when your sensory world is pulled out from underneath you and then it's just you and your consciousness floating in the void, what happens? And what happens to your sense of time and space? And I, it was powerful in a different way than like a meditation or a Vipassana retreat, it has been for me, for sure. But I'm super glad I did it. And it was very, it was like, it was similarly like one of those things where it was kind of like, I want to, I want to see what's there. I want to peek around the corner and see what that.

• 2:06:13André Duqum?

  And I think it has deepened my relationship to the unknown, the void, being uncertain, and stillness in general. Yeah. What were you doing in there? Did you journal at all?

• 2:06:27Speaker 00

  Oh, I didn't bring anything in. I knew if I had access to writing, then that's such a security blanket for me. And I can always find God on the page in two-way prayers. So I was like, but what if you didn't have that? Like, what if you didn't have a notebook? What if you didn't have a pen? What if you didn't have light? What if you didn't have, could you still find it?

• 2:06:49Speaker 00

  And so, yes.

• 2:06:52André Duqum?

  The answer is yes.

• 2:06:53Speaker 00

  Well, it found me.

• 2:06:54André Duqum?

  Yes.

• 2:06:55Speaker 00

  It found me. Actually, what happened is, a lot of things happened, but what happened that was interesting is I thought I was going to be really good at it. Because I was like, I meditate a lot. I like myself. I don't have any enemies in my mind anymore, I don't think. I love being alone. I'm not afraid of the dark. I'm not claustrophobic. This is gonna be great. And I was like, let's go. Like, shut the door, let's go. And the minute they shut the door, I freaking freaked out so hard. Like, I did not, like, I went mental. I was like, wow! Like, I did not, like, I was just like, wow, okay. Like, my body went crazy, my mind went crazy. I panicked. Like, I think I had a full panic attack.

• 2:07:37André Duqum?

  Wow.

• 2:07:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was like, whoa, I did not see that coming. And then I heard, I'll just say, God's voice say, let the wild horses run. So just don't fight this, like, just let this run out. Like, let your brain run out, let your body shake, like, whatever has to happen. So it was just like, thought, thought, thought, thought, thought, thought, thought, thought, thought. You know, like, just this completely disordered mind and this completely disordered body. And then one of the thoughts I had was, what if God isn't real? And what if this thing that I speak to every day that brings me such peace and calm and directs my life is just a figment of my imagination and does not exist, never did? There's nothing but void. There's never been anything here. We are alone in the universe. And I had like, the biggest existential fear.

• 2:08:19Speaker 00

  I was like, you know, like, just like, I'm not gonna be, you know, like, ah! You know, and then God said, that's the one thought I'm not gonna let you entertain while you're in here. You can go in, you can go anywhere you want while you're here, but not that. Because first of all, it isn't true. And you're gonna scare yourself to death with that. And it's not true, I'm right here. So, and secondly, you're not gonna do well in here without a God for five days. And you're not gonna do well out there without a God. So, that's it. That's a non-starter for a conversation. And I was just like, oh, thank God. And then that's when it began. And I was like, okay, you're here.

• 2:09:05Speaker 00

  And you're always here, so we're good.

• 2:09:08Speaker 00

  And I guess that's what my soul came here to learn. So you couldn't be alone if you tried.

• 2:09:16Speaker 00

  Go in the deepest, darkest hole.

• 2:09:20André Duqum?

  You're not alone.

• 2:09:20Speaker 00

  You're not alone.

• 2:09:21André Duqum?

  In the complete void, even.

• 2:09:23Speaker 00

  There is no void.

• 2:09:27André Duqum?

  I'd be remiss if I didn't ask, what do you think it means to know thyself?

• 2:09:37Speaker 00

  Oh, what comes to mind? Two things. One is serenity. I think that people who know themselves and have accepted themselves and have no notes, you know? Like, no notes. I just love you. I've got you. I'm with you. There's a serenity that is maybe the side effect of knowing myself. The reward, if I want to put it in those terms, and I'm not sure I do.

• 2:10:11Speaker 00

  The impact. But for me, what it means personally?

• 2:10:18Speaker 00

  So I'm metapausal, which means my sleep has been weird. I mean, that doesn't mean that for everybody, but for me, it means that my sleep has been weird. And so like three nights, I had these nights where I just, it's like, we're not sleeping. It's like, it's like it's a talent I used to have. I'm like, I thought I used to know how to do this. Like you just lay down and you shut your eyes and you go to sleep. And it's like, no, not anymore. Like, this is interesting. And, and there are times when I get frustrated with that. And then I get fearful with that. I'm like, tomorrow's gonna suck if we don't sleep. So just like three nights ago, I was having a not sleeping night. And I was doing all the things I know to do that help, and none of them were helping.

• 2:11:00Speaker 00

  And I guess I got a bath and I ate a banana, you know, and I, and I chanted and I like, you know, sprayed some lavender in my face. I don't know. And my body's just like, bitch, we're not sleeping. And, and I had this anger at myself, this like little wave of anger at myself. Like, you should, you should sleep. And then the next thought I had was, I just put my hand on my heart and I said, I will never turn my back on you. I will never turn my back on you. I've done, I've done it in the past and I won't do it again. For me, that's what it means, know thyself, is like, I will never throw you away. I will never abandon you.

• 2:11:44Speaker 00

  I will never turn my back on you. And it's just a commitment that I have to myself. So if this is gonna be a sleepless night, then we're in it together, you know? So we're gonna get up and read, and that's okay. And if tomorrow's a hard day, then I'll love you then too. And, and that's something that I did come to earth school to learn. Because I was not pre-programmed to intuitively have a sense of affection toward myself. I was pre-programmed to have a tremendous sense of shame, to feel like I could never be good enough, could never get it right, could never earn enough, could never have enough

• 2:12:23Speaker 00

  love, could never, like, just constant self-improvement project that never ends. And so to have come now at the age of 57 to a place where I'm like, little sister, I'm never gonna throw you away. I'm never gonna turn my back on you. And this is just fine. Like, if this is what we do, if this is just what it is, then, then this is great. And I'm happy to be here with you. And that has taken a long time to get to, 57 years and who knows how many lifetimes. But just for today, we're good here. And that's all there is.

• 2:13:03André Duqum?

  You've really become your own best friend.

• 2:13:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. My own secure attachment. For somebody who has a very severe attachment disorder, I have my own secure attachment.

• 2:13:15André Duqum?

  No small feet.

• 2:13:15Speaker 00

  No small feet. If I can do it. If I can have a secure attachment to me, anybody can do that. I know that to be true, because I have a very severe attachment disorder. So if I, if I can have just a day where I'm okay in my own company, that's amazing. And that's available to anybody.

• 2:13:43André Duqum?

  Liz, I'm so honored you're gracing us with your presence after a good period of just...

• 2:13:48Speaker 00

  Hanging out?

• 2:13:48André Duqum?

  Hanging out. I, yeah, it's, it's such a great joy to be able to do this show. And then you get exposed to so many people's work. And then your job is to dive into their story and their genius and all the things. And then you get to meet them and feel like you get a new, new friend at the end of it. And, um, yeah, I, throughout this whole conversation, I've felt your commitment to your own authenticity and like saying what is true, what feels true, and not what's just performance, but like what is actual presence in this moment. And so, thank you for being here.

• 2:14:25Speaker 00

  Oh, my God, it's a joy.

• 2:14:27André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:28Speaker 00

  Thank you for what you do and for who you give the mic to and, um, and for being so curious and for being so lovely.

• 2:14:36André Duqum?

  Oh, thank you. Appreciate you.

• 2:14:38Speaker 00

  I appreciate you too.

• 2:14:39André Duqum?

  Well, uh, congrats on almost, it's almost a year exactly of All the Way to the River, which is now available on paperback. Do a little promo.

• 2:14:48Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 2:14:49André Duqum?

  Yeah, of course. And that's it. Do you have any other last words?

• 2:14:53Speaker 00

  No, I think we did it. We covered everything.

• 2:14:55André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you for easing me back into this and making it easy. Thanks to you guys too for everything you do.

• 2:15:04André Duqum?

  You're welcome back anytime, whenever you want. And for everybody that's listened to this episode of the Know Thyself Podcast, let us know how this episode was uniquely impactful. If you did that two-way prayer with us, what came through to you? I'm curious to see what came up.

• 2:15:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, me too.

• 2:15:20André Duqum?

  Write in the comments. Hey, everyone. In case you didn't know, we have an online community. It's amazing. It's called the Know Thyself Collective, and there are three main things on the inside. First, each month, I host a two-hour live call with a featured guest. Think of it like this podcast, except you're in the room with us. We go deeper, we take live questions, and when you join, you get the full archive of every past call. It's basically like a second podcast. Second, you get a full companion guide for every podcast episode of this show with key takeaways, transcripts, journal prompts, and more. Third, but not least, we host community calls every two weeks to meet each other and put all of this into practice together.

• 2:16:03André Duqum?

  It's 29 a month, and if money is ever the reason you can't join, just email us and we'll take care of you. If you feel called to practice this stuff alongside people asking the same questions, go to knowthyselfcollective.com or use the link in description. I hope to see you there.