There's Wisdom All Around Us—You Just Have to Look for It

We are at a moment in time where we desperately need to accelerate wisdom: We must comb thru near and distant history for insight and information, and share what we’ve learned and know widely and collectively. In this era of rugged individualism, we have forgotten that we are all connected: This shows up from the micro to the macro. In our bodies, we’re beginning to understand that we can no longer treat organ by organ, but must assess the entire system—and that the system of our body extends beyond our skin: To our relationships, and our wider environment.

I’m fortunate that I’ve been able to spend the better part of my career interviewing people and distilling their life experience and knowledge into parsable wisdom that people can then apply to their lives. What I’ve heard back from people over the years is that change-inducing resonance comes from a sentence, or a single idea that suddenly unlocks a new way of seeing a relationship, or one’s relationship to the wider world.

We are being called to bring our relationships—to ourselves, each other, and the environment—into balance. We are being tasked to make our society whole again by re-integrating all its parts, many of which we’ve excommunicated or decided are not valuable. And one of those groups of people who we’ve widely dismissed and made invisible are older women, who are one of the primary focuses of my new podcast, called Pulling the Thread. I may be a little overly obsessed with Barbara Walker’s book, The Crone, but my primary hope for all of us is that we learn to re-instate older women as our cultural initiators. We are at a moment in time where we desperately need their wisdom from lived experience—their erasure from society, which can be traced back to the advent of the patriarchy and the death of the goddess, does us no favors.

With every interview, I feel the aperture of my life shifting and widening, nuggets of wisdom that gave me an expanded view and more hope. Conversation can create a different kind of resonance in this overly visual time: You can feel the energy of people’s words and whether they’re true for you, or not. Audio also allows people to project and stretch their own imaginations, to travel into a different space and time.  

1. Our collective story web falls apart if we do not honor all its parts.

“We walk in and out of history all of the time… And sometimes being in a place, that history needs healing, it needs rest. Just like some memories are so full they need to rest. They need to be acknowledged. And then they need a place to lay down and rest for a while so they can get up again and be useful.” —JOY HARJO, POET LAUREATE

Harjo was my first guest on the podcast, and we had a wide-ranging conversation about the importance of metaphor (largely disappearing in our text and symbol-based style of communication) and how we cannot, in her words, “throw out everything that is not glorifying a certain color track of history.” We need those building materials, she told me, to build a comprehensive story web, one in which every person’s story matters and has its place. Her best advice: Give painful stories time as sometimes they are too tender to be put to use right away.

2. It’s through the crucible of struggle that we really find out who we are.

“I asked people a very pointed question: Do you want to continue to live out the patterns of your childhood or do you want to make different choices? Are you programmed? Or are you self-determining? And let's look at what that looks like. I think that people aren't taught how to be accepting of their own mistakes and self-forgive. And then, because they can't do that, they can't forgive others for what they perceive are other peoples’ mistakes, and they think that they should be harshly criticized, punished, those kinds of things.” —LORETTA ROSS, ACTIVIST

Loretta Ross, Professor at Smith College in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender, a founder of reproductive justice theory, and an expert on feminism, racism, and human rights spent decades helping people leave hate movements. She’s also created a recent movement to push people to call others in, rather than calling people out. She is not a fan of cancel culture simply because she doesn’t believe that it works—and that when we shame others for not being politically perfect, we lose an opportunity to come together over shared values and beliefs. In her vast experience working with people that most of us would shun—incarcerated rapists, members of the KKK—she maintains that we all have more in common than not.  

3. We are wired for partnership, not domination.

“I suddenly woke up one day and realized that in all my years of so-called higher education in what I had been taught as important knowledge and truth, there had been hardly anything by, about, or for people like me: women. And that was like, Whoa. And we all need to wake up to that. You know, if you look at modern Western science, as the historian of science, David Noble writes in a wonderful book that I cite called A World Without Women. Western science came six, 700 years ago, came out of an all-male, celibate, really a world without women. And I would add a world without children. And this has shaped it, and it has shaped what we're taught. And so this is such an exciting time when so many people are waking up from this domination trance.” —RIANE EISLER, HISTORIAN

Eisler’s bestselling classic, The Chalice & the Blade, came out almost 30 years ago, but it’s as revelatory today as it was then: She puts together a theory about who we are that rings so much truer than what we’ve been sold as our inevitable destiny, which is an oppression-based patriarchy, men on top of women, with many other layers of marginalization. She argues that for most of our history, we lived in affiliative bands without an artificial hierarchy: In short, we did life together. The patriarchy is a system we’ve learned, but we can evolve past it.  

4. Anger often belies its real root—but it still signifies a boundary has been crossed, a need gone unmet.

“Anger helps us to define the self. It helps us to define who we are, to say, and to know, you know, this is who I am. This is what I think. This is what I feel. These are the things that I will and will not do. So, in the same way that physical pain tells us to take our hand off the hot stove, the pain of our anger preserves the very dignity and integrity of the self. And another reason that anger is so important is anger is a powerful vehicle for change. As witnessed by, you know, our many decades of feminism. And people may not ‘those angry women,’ but it's those angry women who have changed and challenged the lives of all of us.” — HARRIET LERNER, PhD, THERAPIST & AUTHOR

It took Harriet Lerner five years to publish her revelatory book, The Dance of Anger, which went on to sell north of 3 million copies. Nobody wanted to touch a book about women and anger, in part because women are taught to exchange their rage for guilt. In our conversation, Lerner explained to me that it’s primarily fear of relationship loss that keeps us bound and holding our tongues: It’s fear that when we allow ourselves to change, those we love won’t change alongside us. And so we typically desert our own needs, choosing safety instead. The trick, of course, is to dig in the garden of anger to understand what it is so desperately trying to communicate.  

5. Racism costs white people, too.

“The stat that just blew my mind was from this big survey data called the ANES, is this not that important, but in 1956, and 1960, two-thirds of white Americans believed that government ought to guarantee a job to anyone who wanted one, who couldn't find one in the private and guarantee a minimum level of income, that no one should fall below. I mean, that's like wild in today's politics, right? Those are like radical socialist ideas. You have a job guarantee and an income guarantee, nearly 70% of white folks. And, and between 1960 and 1964 support among white people fell in half for that, those two ideas. And so I looked at that and I was like, you don't, you don't have that. Like, it was the next time that this every four-year survey was fielded. So you don't have that kind of a dramatic decline without something exogenous happening. It's something happening in the world that shifted people's public opinion.

And I thought about, okay, so what happened between 1960 and 1964? We had the March on Washington in 1963, which was for jobs and freedom, and which included a job guarantee and a national living wage as part of demands, like the very small number of demands that the Black activists mostly were bringing to the Mall. And then 1963 was the year that President Kennedy went on this media blitz around civil rights, sort of bringing into American’s homes, this idea that the party of the New Deal was going to also be the party of civil rights. And then of course, we know that his success or Lyndon Johnson would become after signing the civil rights and voting rights acts and sort of, you know, being the civil rights president, he would become the last Democrat running for president to win the majority of the white vote.” — HEATHER MCGHEE, AUTHOR

In her stunning book, The Sum of Us, Heather McGhee explores the way zero-sum thinking, or what she calls “drained pool” politics is terrible for all of us. She tells the story of how public pools were drained and covered over, simply because white people would rather lose the privilege than see public services desegregated. The impact for all of us is colossal, impacting all Americans across class lines and decimating the Middle Class. Her book—and our conversation—is full of heavy shots and eye opening revelations that very much explain this moment in time.  

6. Your vibration must be higher than what you create otherwise you cannot manage it.

“Consciousness can only be found within the present. So when we're focused on progress and out here and progression, and doing all of these things, and building all of these things, and creating all of these things and doing, doing, doing, we may create progress in the world, but we're not actually evolving on the inside, that co-creative evolution of the Divine is such an empowering concept, that I never would have thought of before Yeshua presented it. That we are actually helping to evolve the Divine. What we bring into the world is what we bring into consciousness and into the Divine. And that carries a certain responsibility and integrity. That's sometimes gets lost.” —CARISSA SCHUMACHER, FORENSIC MEDIUM & YESHUA CHANNEL

Carissa Schumacher is one of the most incredible forensic mediums I’ve ever met—and in my time at goop, I’ve met…a lot! Most remarkably, as of October 2019, she is also a channel for Yeshua, otherwise known as Jesus. I am not religious—though I would call myself spiritual—so I recognize tha the concept might be triggering to some folks, but I’ve found the transmissions she’s brought through from him to be life-altering. They published a book called, The Freedom Transmissions, this past November, which I highly recommend. Carissa came on the podcast to talk about some of our favorite transmission moments, including the fact that Carissa/Yeshua told me that if I didn’t make space in my life, they would make space for me!  

7. When we let go, we gain clarity about what actually matters.

“I don't want anyone to think that you have to have cataclysm befall you, in order to get through to these kinds of points that we're talking about today. But for me it was…I did need it. I didn't need a big old, I call it the cosmic-spanking. I did need something to come along and to smack me really hard and make it clear that I wasn't so in charge, though….It was actually, no, it was more of a refinement: Look where you do have control, look where you do have a say, and get really granular. And it was also a process of, as a spoiled kid, of course, I thought there were things I wanted, to the point where I want I'm so bad, I thought I needed them.”—B.J. Miller, M.D.

When B.J. Miller was an undergrad at Princeton, he climbed an electrified train car and ended up as a triple-amputee and long-term patient. Understanding the healthcare system from the inside out inspired him to go to medical school—and it also put him into a deep and reflective dance with mortality, fear, and what it means to lean into life. He has become a cultural sherpa, showing us all what this looks like, particularly at a time when we have a cultural numbness to death in the abstract— and concrete fear sparks when death becomes personal. We forget, B.J. says, that suffering and dying are fundamental and intrinsic parts of life. When we allow ourselves to acknowledge the many small deaths that occur throughout our lives—whether it be the death of a relationship, of a career, or of a way of life - we can use these moments to practice losing and letting go, gaining clarity around what truly matters in the process. The goal, B.J. tells us, is not to be unafraid of the end, but rather to cultivate a love of life so big, that it encompasses death as well.

8. Depression manifests very differently from men.

"How much have you heard in the culture that we need to turn girls into women, right? Because girls naturally turn into women, but don’t boys naturally turn into men? I guess not. I guess you have to do this surgery on them to get them, to let go of their dependencies and feelings and mothers and boyish ways and be initiated into the stoicism of manhood. Boys left alone will become men. Just like girls left alone will become women. The question is what kind of man is this boy going to become? And that’s where we all come in.” —TERRY REAL, THERAPIST 

Marriage therapist Terry Real got his start working exclusively with men, and in the process, he identified a new model for male depression: In his experience, it’s typically trauma, wrapped in an addictive defense and covert depression. To heal, the addictive defense must be removed so the depression can become overt. And men need to support, as in some ways, they are victimized by the patriarchy as well, particularly in the way it conditions them to “behave like men.” Wounded boys become wounding men; when we look around, we see this impact on society.