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The Fluidity of Desire with Esther Perel Oct 03, 2015

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A native of Belgian, fluent in nine languages, and a penetrating observer of the social and cultural patterns shaping our relationships, Esther is a practicing psychotherapist and organizational consultant to Fortune 500 companies. Her 2013 TED talk, “The Secret to Desire in a Long-Term Relationship,” attracted more than a million views in the first month after its release. Her second TED Talk, “Rethinking Infidelity: A talk for Anyone Who Has Ever Loved”, was equally well-received. Combined, her TED talks have received approx. 10 million views. In today’s episode, Esther and I spoke about: — Her definition of desire; the importance of owning desire and how to connect to our own desires— Women are socialized for connection and the associated vulnerability of the inability to connect to self— Experiencing freedom from perfection without the guilt— Imagination complementing reality in relationships— What women can hold onto for stability in the ever increasingly gender-fluid era. Here is my ‘juicy’ conversation The Fluidity of Desire with the insightful and practical: Esther Perel. Subscribe to the Emerging Women podcast on iTunes. Transcript Welcome, Esther! I’m so excited to have you here on the show! Esther Perel: Thank you! It’s a pleasure for me to be with you as well. CP: And every time you speak, I feel like a tender heart, because my mother, who has passed away, had a much thicker French accent than you have, and I’ve been listening to your audio book, Mating in Captivity, so I feel like you’ve been with me on my walks in the morning and listening to your content. It’s kind of taking me back a bit. EP: You know, we share, in utero, it’s probably the first sense that we develop. So we are starting out with a very intimate connection. And if you want, I can even make my French accent a little stronger, so that I can channel your mother. CP: [Laughs] She spoke like zis. EP: Oh, wow. CP: Oh, no, it was very thick. But I think that when you have an accent like that, and you’re talking about sensuality and sex and desire—I don’t know what your experience has been, but it seems like you might have carte blanche to say just about anything, right? EP: Well, you know, the French accent works in both directions, especially in the United States. Sometimes it comes with a kind of bias that says, “Oh, you must know something, the je ne sais quoi that French people have in the realm of the erotics.” But then, on the other side, the opposite way is to start with kind of a warning sentence that says, “No, no, I’m not French, I’m not morally depraved, it’s not like anything goes.” I think there’s an enormous amount of projections in this domain onto the French—onto the Latin people in general, it seems, certainly onto the French—some of which is going to be accurate and some of which is the fantasy of the person who expresses it, or the person that is being designated. CP: Of course. Well, I think we’re probably going to get into that a lot more [and] in a lot more depth, instead of just talking about the French accent in terms of projections, as we get into your content. So the first thing that I would love to lead with is, you speak a lot about desire. And it seems to me that—especially since our audience is primarily women, we address women, the modern woman, who’s moving it and shaking it in so many different ways—what I’m finding a lot is that women in relationships—and I don’t want to make a generalization with statistics and all that, but anecdotally, I find often women are in relationships where they’ve either lost the desire or the desire has shifted, or they don’t even have juice for desire after working a full day. I’m curious to see—this is such a cornerstone to relationships, and I would love to hear your take on, first of all, what do you mean by desire? And how is that such a foundation for healthy relationships? EP: So I really like the fact that you start by asking me to define the term that you want, so that really know what we are talking about. Now, we could pick a scientific definition for “desire,” we could pick a behavioral, a hormonal—they’re both ways to enter. I tend to think more of it being an existential term, if you want, and I tend to think about the nature of desire because it is probably one of the most important elements of modern life. Meaning, desire is to own the wanting. Desire is the expression of the sovereign self. Desire points to free will. You can force people to do, you can never force them to desire. It is the ultimate expression of our free identity, if you want. And in the realm of intimate relationships, sexual desire has become central. Because this is the first time in the history of humankind that we are meant to remain sexually connected to ourselves and our partner. Not because we want multiple children and we’re having sex for procreation, nor, at least in the West, some of us privileged women know that sexuality is just a marital duty for women. So it is all about, “Do I want it? Do I feel like it? Do I want this to be part of my experience?” And we know that part of the real challenges for women in relationships in general is this dialectic of, “How do I connect to you without losing me? And how do I stay connected with me without losing you?” Hence the notion of staying attached to one’s own wanting, to one’s own preferences, desires, is challenging for a woman in relationships throughout. CP: I love what you’re saying. You own the wanting. Because it’s one thing to recognize it, “Oh, I want this,” but there’s something really proactive in the owning [of] it. EP: Yes, because it points to agency. What I’m saying that’s very typical for woman is that if the other person wants, she often knows what she wants because the other person has said, “Oh, I wanted to go to this place,” and then she says, “No, I don’t really want [to go to] this place.” Now she has a better sense of what she wants because she’s positioning it in the reaction, in response, in contrast to what the other person wants. It’s like she [can’t] elicit it on her own. And then, once she already knows what she wants, the second challenge is to actually drive it, to stay connected to it, to not lose it in the transaction with another person. This is true for sexual desire, this is true for one’s overall sense of self, of, “How do I take care of others, be it in my job, be it in my family, my family of origin or my current family, or in my relationships? And how do I not lose touch with my own?” It is a real challenge, and I would say this, as women in business, as women in professional life, as women in other realms of familial obligation, it’s just essential to the challenge of [a woman knowing her] identity. How does she navigate self and other? How does she know what she wants when she sees the wanting of others, the wanting of her friends, of her mother, of her children, of her boss, of her colleagues? CP: God, this is so deep, I feel it in my own life, too. Do men just have a healthier relationship with desire because it’s more connected to them and not reliant on the other? What do you see as a trend there? EP: Great question, great question. Let me put it to you in a different language. Traditionally, we would see that women are socialized for connection and men are socialized for autonomy. If women are socialized for connection, then their greatest resource is in their ability to connect to others, but they’re greater vulnerability is about staying connected to themselves. If men are socialized for autonomy, then their resource is their ability to hold on to themselves. They know what they want, they can go and get it. But their vulnerability is in the fear that they would lose their autonomy if they create intimacy. So these are dialectics. We all struggle with the same two things: we all need connection and separateness. We all need security and freedom. But I would say that, if you look at general socialization, you will find that the vulnerability for men is not how to deal with their autonomy, but how to deal with the fear of the loss of autonomy in the realm of the relationships. For women, the difficulty is not how to connect but how to stay connected with themselves. CP: Yes. I’m curious to know, once we’ve identified desire and we own it and we have some practices—I know you have an online workshop and an online course that you’re doing around desire that will have more practices in it, so I’m excited to hear more about that. But once we have practices in our lives that are staying connected to desire, how do we—is it possible to rekindle desire? First of all, is it possible for desire to die? And then, can it be rekindled? Because that’s another thing that I’m seeing, that once that goes, it’s like, “Well, you can never get it back.” It’s like a slippery fish, sometimes, this desire. EP: Right. I would describe it differently. Yes, desire dies. But I wouldn’t say “dies.” Sometimes it dies. Generally, I would say desire is more like the moon. It goes through intermittent [phases]. Desire ebbs and flows. Many of us lose connections, to ourselves, to our sense of excitement, to our arousal, to our playfulness, to our aliveness, to our brightness. We all lose it. The difference is that some of us know what to do to resuscitate it. The ebb and flow is not that—we don’t disconnect from ourselves, but that we know how to reconnect. A way of asking the question that I find very, very powerful, that I borrow from the work of Gina Ogden, a colleague of mine—who has written wonderful stuff, by the way, on women and sexuality and female desire. She asks the question like this: “I’ve turned myself off by” or “I shut down when.” Broadly, it’s not just sexually. It’s not the same question as, “You turn me off when” and “What turns me off is.” They basically talk about, “When I stop thinking about myself, when I don’t take care of myself, when I don’t go in nature, when I don’t see my friends, when I stop singing and playing the music I love, when I am disconnected from my partner, when I’m disconnected from my body, when I don’t like my body, when I’m loathing it.” It’s really about [a woman’s] relationship with herself, fundamentally around two areas: the area of self-worth and the area of donation-giving for pleasure. And when you ask the question in reverse: “I turn myself on when,” “I unleash my desires when,” “I awaken myself how, by,” rather than, “You turn me on when,” or “What turns me on is. They will tell you the same thing in reverse. “I awaken my desire when I think of myself, when I take care of myself, when I pamper myself, when I give myself time to go and do the things that I enjoy, that make me feel alive, that make me feel worthy, that make me feel good.” From that place of aliveness, of [connecting] with the erotic self, flows the desire. CP: And what about in relationship? Now you have two people. It’s one thing to stay connected to your own desire and to realize the ebbs and flows—which I love, by the way, because it just gives us permission to be human, and to have that ebb and flow is a wonderful analogy. But what about in relationship? You’ve got two people, two desires, right? EP: Yes, yes, yes. The first thing that jumps to me—I haven’t even let you finish the question, so maybe I should actually listen to you. CP: No! Jump in! It’s a conversation, let me hear it! Cut me off, I love it. EP: What jumps out immediately, of course, is that in relationships, one of the things that [you will] notice with women, in line with what I described before, is that she knows more of what she wants when it’s in a position of what the other person wants. Because when she wants what the other one wants, she often wonders, “Is this really what I want? Or am I just trying to please the other?” She doesn’t know how to know what she wants when the other one wants the same and still feel like it’s hers. So as a result, she is often much more vocal about what she doesn’t like. With desire, you can’t desire not something. You always desire something. You cannot form your desire as a negation. “I desire not to feel something,” no. “I desire to feel that other thing.” And that is where it really is a challenge in life. So often, with a partner, she finds herself articulating her dislikes, her criticisms, the shortcomings, rather than what she would like instead. Now, any criticism is a wish in disguise. But it is also much [harder] to actually articulate our wish or our desire than to articulate our frustrations about the lack thereof. And yet, we women, in that sense, we are masters. So that’s one of the things that she needs to learn if she wants to stay connected to the other person. Why? Because if she just becomes critical and negative, the other person stops listening to her wish and only [makes] a defensive stance toward her criticism and her frustration. So that’s when you get a classic disconnect. The second thing is that sometimes she needs to learn to create boundaries, to give herself that time, to give herself the things that are just privacy with herself, if you want, or what I like to call “intimacy with herself,” so that she can also have an intimacy with the partner. And then the next thing is that sometimes she need to challenge what I think is one of the great problems of modern intimacy, which is that she often turns to one person to give her everything. That in itself becomes a source of frustration. So it’s not that she can’t express her desires, it’s that she comes with all her desires to one person, and basically would like this one man or woman to satisfy what normally an entire community needs to be built for. So what I often find myself doing is asking her, “Who else is in your world? Who populates your inner world? Who do you reach out to? Who do you communicate [with] about what? And can we dismantle this big, romantic ideal that there will be one person who will basically become an extension of you?” Because when that happens, that in itself becomes the death of the erotic in the most unanticipated way. A lot of it is about integrating rather than fragmenting, but at the same time, not integrating to a point of it being so intimate that she has not sense of boundaries. Now, a basic example, a typical, daily example, is, at what point did she stop cleaning, organizing, fixing, doing, being instrumental, and just say, “I’m sitting down now and just doing nothing, or reading, or listening to music,” whatever, just enjoying. At what point did she say, “Enough work, now me,” rather than, “I have to be perfect. Once I have been perfect, then I have earned my desire. Now I’m allowed to want, because I’ve done everything that other people expect.” Many women in this age of perfection have to really learn to just say, “It’s enough for today. And now me,” rather than, “Wait!” She’s exasperated or frustrated or something beyond, and then she doesn’t know how to experience desire because then she experiences deserving. Now she’s in the realm of resentment and now she doesn’t just say “I want,” she says, “I deserve,” right? “Deserving” is wanting for [a] prize. It’s the people who don’t really feel that they are allowed to want so they have to be [at the end] to finally say, “Now me!” But then they say it with such violence and with such an aggression that they can shake up the whole house. That’s what happens to her many times in relationships. She doesn’t say it earlier when it’s just, “Hey, I feel like it, I want to,” she screams it, “I deserve! I’ve had it, I’ve had enough!” And then she blames him or her or whoever else is around her for not being allowed to say this sooner. No, no. She just doesn’t feel like she can because she first needs to be perfect, have it all done, and then she feels that desire is a reward rather than desire is basically part of her human right. CP: Oh my God, does this sound familiar! I mean, I feel this way too, that perfection. I ne…

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A Technology of Aliveness with Guru Jagat Sep 24, 2015

Show notes

Deemed the modern face of Kundalini Yoga, Guru Jagat brings a fresh perspective to this ancient practice. She is the founder of RA MA Institute for Applied Yogic Science and Technology, a premier yoga school with locations in Venice CA, Boulder CO, and La Jolla CA offering classes, workshops and group cleanses. She launched RA MA TV, a new virtual media platform that makes Kundalini Yoga and yogic lifestyle accessible to people all over the world, as well as the indie yoga music label RA MA Records with a mission to trailblaze a new genre of music for mass consumption-in and out of the yoga space, on the dance floor, radio and beyond. Guru Jagat was a featured presenter at the 2015 Emerging Women Live. In today’s episode, Guru Jagat and I spoke about: The story behind her name and what exactly she means by Kundalini Why her spiritual technology is so great for women and why Kundalini is Why she has brought business into Kundalini Practice How women are hardwired to make a difference in the world Waking up every day with a conscious decision of how you are going to live that day Here is my conversation “The Technology of Aliveness” with the powerful and energetic: Guru Jagat. Subscribe to the Emerging Women podcast on iTunes. Transcript: OK, hello, and welcome, Guru Jagat! How are you? Guru Jagat: Doing really well, thank you for having me on the show today. CP: I’m so excited to do a deep dive into the mysteries and the practicalities of Kundalini yoga with you, and your whole spiritual—I guess when I say “dharma,” that’s probably the wrong lineage, right? GJ: No, dharma’s not specific to lineage. CP: Right? The Buddhists don’t own dharma, right? GJ: They don’t, they don’t. I use that word all the time. It means what you came here for and what you’re uncovering that you came here for. CP: So I know that you have been on tour quite a bit, and you’re expanding centers and you’re traveling with your work. You were just in Europe? Am I right? GJ: Yes, we were just touring Europe with RA MA TV and with some other Kundalini yoga—there’s a big Kundalini yoga festival that happens in France. We also took a huge group of people to all the mystical sites in a southern cave, which was a very powerful experience, like, life-changing. CP: Wow. That sounds great. Kundalini yoga and the south of France—that’s something I would definitely sign up for. GJ: Yes, not bad! CP: Not bad, right? Why don’t we start with—because some people are listening and they’re like, “What is Kundalini yoga?” And I even want to go back a little bit—and maybe you can figure out the right way to talk about this, but your name is Guru Jagat. That is your name. And I would love to hear the story around that, and I think when we first talked, when I met you, you had such a strong energy. You definitely feel like you carry the weight of that name, to me, just meeting you. I didn’t know what to expect. But maybe you can talk a little bit about the background and how you came to be doing what you’re doing, and where your name comes from. And we can start there. GJ: Sure. Kundalini yoga, at its essence, is a technology of sound. And I believe that we’re really at the very surface, scratching the surface, of what sound in this age of technology is going to open up for us—this age of space travel and the whole universe and our whole daily perspective, and also world perspective, expanding so rapidly. So Kundalini yoga at its basis has this sound technology, which you could call “mantra,” but really it’s just these codes, these sound codes. So Yogi Bhajan gave names that were destiny sound codes, we’ll call it. So when he gave me my name, I was really young, and everybody else was getting—it was one of those moments where everybody else was getting Tej and Jot and Prem, these sweet, simple names, and then it came to me and it was like, [deep voice] “Guru Jagat.” [Laughs] CP: Right? [Laughs] It’s like, you’ve got to fill those shoes with a name like that, right? GJ: [Laughs] You do! He wrote me a letter and I closed it and put it back in the envelope. I was like, “Hmm, I don’t know about all this.” So basically, in its essence, it’s a reminder, it’s a code that can be activated, of destiny. I think sometimes people get confused, because we just come from an age of people seeking gurus to take away their karma or to save them from themselves, and we know that didn’t necessarily work. So we’re in a new age, and in this age, the sound guru, when you make it, when it crosses your own neurology, your lips, it actually activates that heightened consciousness in you. That’s the code of that sound current, so it means nothing around the kind of guru trips that we’ve seen in the spiritual world and the kind that we’ve come from. It’s really more about a self-initiation. CP: Right. Got it. And I so appreciate that. I do feel that our conscious as human beings, just physically we evolve, our consciousness is evolving, and that the old standards of how we approach spirituality are evolving. I think there was a time and a place where the guru did take karmas. Not to get too esoteric, but I think they really did serve a purpose. Not that they don’t serve a purpose anymore, but I just wonder, doing some kind of Kundalini practice and dharma practice and meditation, if we’re actually creating a new system out there for spiritual unfoldment. GJ: I feel that that’s definitely part of what’s happening on the planet. Don’t get me wrong, I believe strongly in having a human teacher, a guide you can show you through some of the realms of your own subconscious and places of blindness. I believe strongly in that, personally, and I have one and I also have a lineage. I feel that’s different than putting—people tried to pay Yogi Bhajan millions of dollars to initiate them in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, before he died. He was in Hollywood, so he had many stories of celebrities and rich people trying to pay him a bunch of money to “initiate” them, and he would just say over and over again, “We are now in a time of self-initiation.” So it’s not to not have a lineage or to not have a teacher or even a guru, but that this is a time of self-intiation. You have to activate the practice and the revelation in ourselves through our practices, through our daily choices, to be more conscious, compassionate human beings. And I think that’s the difference, at least to me. CP: Yes. I mean, here you are in LA, and I think it was last month, after we first met, [I] found this article on the “hot, cool, Kundalini yoga teacher taking LA by storm!” And there just seems to be so much energy and interest and excitement around this new form of yoga. And I think there’s a lot of mystery in it. I’ve done some classes, and I know I feel good, and I know that there’s some practices, but could you help us understand exactly what you mean by “Kundalini yoga”? GJ: Sure, yes. I think when we get that word, “Kundalini,” it does create this kind of esoterism that is not necessarily necessary to participate in the practice. Now, the thing that’s beautiful about Kundalini yoga and Yogi Bhajan, the way that we delivered this great canon of teaching over 40 years, is that there are many different ways to participate in the technology. Just like I have an iPhone, I’m using it in a certain way, it does different things for my daily life, it makes my daily life easier in certain ways. Now, my mom just got her first iPhone, and she is participating in using it in a whole different way, but it’s the same technology. That, to me, is a very similar thing to the way that Kundalini yoga—why it’s so practical and the mass appeal is growing by leaps and bounds. It’s in fact the biggest growing yogic movement, and I would like to say, consciousness on the planet, especially after traveling around all summer. Just seeing what’s happening and how people [are] touched, I’m feeling it more than I ever have. We’re at a tipping point, and there’s a great revolution of evolution happening on the planet. I’m very inspired right now. In terms of Kundalini [and] how wonderfully practical it is, you can literally do—and this is kind of the book that I’m writing for Harper Collins, the essence of it. There are huge amounts of people on this planet who don’t want to wear spandex, who can’t touch their toes, who don’t want to do yoga, and I understand. I was one of those people. I resisted yoga for so long because the culture around it—and this was 20 years ago—was so irritating to me, and everybody was like, “Yes, I was just in India, and, like, you know.” It felt like a lot of white privilege. CP: Yuck. GJ: And a lot of snobbery and pretentiousness around it. And I was like, “I don’t want to do what these people are doing, if this is what yoga is.” Because I didn’t know what yoga was. I was like, “I don’t want to do it.” So one of things in one of my huge messages around Kundalini is, it’s so mass-appeal because somebody can just be sitting in a hospital bed, and can’t move any of their limbs or their body, [and] they can do a pranayama that’s going to give them energy to heal, energy to face whatever their having to face. That’s going to be something practical for them. [Also,] I work with professional athletes. I was just in the studio in Boulder, and all the athletes there—it can be participated in by very athletic bodies who want athletic performance or want greater mind focus, or by business people. There’s a plethora of things you can engage in in the technology. I think that’s one of the great mass-appeal parts of it, and why it is taking the planet by storm. One of the reasons. And then, if you’re an esoteric like myself—I love the esoteric, it’s my favorite—if you are that way and your mind works that way, you can get all esoteric on it, but you don’t have to. And that’s what I love about it. The essence of how I describe it is, the technology, it’s just like the iPhone. I think about what the iPhone or what these smartphones have done for us in terms of the evolution of how we move through the world and how connected we are, and can be used in so many different ways. It’s very similar to that. So in terms of what we’re used to with yoga, like Downward Facing Dog and Chaturanga, the things that we encounter in a gym or just a regular, standard Westernized yoga class, that is kind of a far cry from what the actual essence of yoga is in all lineages. We do physical practice so we can have enough energy to command our mind so that our mind works for us and we’re not a slave to it. That’s kind of the basis. CP: So the way I think of Kundalini is—we’ve got the real physical yoga, and I kind of put the energy body in the physical, in between consciousness and the physical body. It’s kind of an in-between position. But Kundalini seems to work with consciousness, the energy of our human existence, as well as the body. Is it more energetic or working with energy and meridians and things like that? Or is there another way to approach that energy component of it? GJ: It definitely—I don’t think it should be more energetic than other yogas. I just think the Westernization and the dilution of what the yogic teachings are have become that. But I don’t think it’s about—I actually was an Ashtangi and I had lots of experience in different lineages, and I think the pure essence of yogic practice, on whatever level, whether you’re doing a pranayama or you’re doing something super physical or you’re doing a meditation, the essence of it is all the same. Now, Yogi Bhajan said—and this is also why I think the Kundalini practice is so modern—is that hatha or hatha lineages of yoga take about 22 years to master. And we’re in the nature of changing so rapidly that I got my phone stolen while I was in Europe, and when I got back—it was a new phone, mind you—to America, when it replaced, it had a whole new operating system. Literally everything was new, and that’s within a month. So that’s how quickly everything is changing. I think we’re so used to it, all the updates. We’re just going so fast, we don’t even realize that. But the reason that Kundalini’s so modern is, within 30 seconds, within a minute, within three minutes, and then, if you want to get crazy, 11 minutes or something longer, you can make a dramatic shift in how you feel, your endocrine system secretions, your hormonal balance, your organs. You don’t need 22 years to master the system, and even though there’s something beautiful and classic about that, who has the time? CP: Right. Oh my God. GJ: I don’t. CP: Plus the hour and a half Ashtanga classes. I mean, I remember those days. GJ: I know. [Laughs] CP: You know, 5:30 in the morning. Oh yes. GJ: Exactly. CP: OK, so I think we get an understanding. I’d love to see how this applies more as we get into the content and the applicability of it. You do a lot of work in application of these technologies, and not exclusively—I know that it’s not exclusive—but you have a lot for women. Can you talk a little bit about how and why this, as you say, spiritual technology is really right for women and really right for women at this time? GJ: Yes. The men used to complain a lot back when Yogi Bhajan was teaching in the early days, because he would take the women for eight weeks every year to train them, to take them away from their mother duties, from their professional duties, and he would do this thing called “ladies’ camp.” It was basically a training ground for new type of woman on the planet. I now know more than every why he did that, and why he put so much, really, the big thrust of his effort and teaching, toward the women. Because him, the Dalai Lama, many other teachers have said it in different ways, but the change in consciousness on this planet is rooted in the change of consciousness in the Western woman. Not even in women, but the Western woman. So I feel like, a lot of times, things like that end up getting fed into this subconscious man-hating stuff. I talk about this a lot because of whatever unprocessed stuff we have about our fathers or whatever as women. And so it’s really part of my gift with my own connection to these women’s teachings, to use them as a way to lift up all of humanity. And because women do hold certain keys of auric, energetic responsibility around their families and around their workplaces and around their relationships, if we upgrade, if we step up, if we stop being competitive, if we start to love ourselves, if we create security in women’s systems—I said this to a group of people in Montreal a couple months ago, and I said, “What would happen if every woman on this planet felt good about herself?” And someone went, “Armageddon!” [Laughs] CP: [Laughs] GJ: Which just tickled me, because think about that. To create secure women who are not playing into a huge amount of hypnotic programming that comes from the media and comes from our programming and conditioning as children and the whole educational system—to create a group of women who have that kind of security and kindness and compassion and true sisterhood, it’s a revolution. So that’s one of the reasons why I’m so committed. And also, these teachings give you a choice. They give you a choice, as a woman, to not buy the aging anxiety, Botox train of numbing yourself out so you can look a certain way and forgetting who you really are and your true power, the whole thing. It gives you some choices so you can—if you do choose that, which is fine, I’m all about whatever choice is an educated choice and comes from an [educated] space, then you can choose it in that space of integrity rather than feeling like it’s our last choice to keep our husbands and try to scurry toward the finish line in some way. It’s desperate and it’s sad. CP: Yes. Well, it’s reactionary, it’s not sourced from an original place from within us. Yes, I see that a lot. So what are you seeing as women come to you for your teachings? And I know you have a big following in LA and you’re op…

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The Upside of Stress with Kelly McGonigal Aug 31, 2015

Show notes

Today my guest is Dr. Kelly McGonigal. Kelly is a health psychologist and award-winning lecturer at Stanford University. A leading expert on the mind-body relationship, her work integrates the latest findings of psychology, neuroscience and medicine with contemplative practices of mindfulness and compassion from the traditions of Buddhism and yoga. She is the author of The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good For You, And How To Get Good At It, where she highlights new research indicating that stress can, in fact, make us stronger, smarter, and happier—if we learn how to embrace it. In today’s episode, Kelly and I spoke about: Her definition of stress and how it can actually be a benefit The research surrounding stress and the idea of transforming stress instead of reducing it Examples of how to transform the way we think about stress Embracing the ‘Flow State’ How our culture of fear of discomfort holds us back. Here is my conversation “The Upside of Stress” with the intelligent and revolutionary: Kelly McGonigal. Subscribe to the Emerging Women podcast on iTunes. Transcript Well, hello and welcome, Kelly McGonigal! How are you? Kelly McGonigal: I’m doing great! Thanks for having me back. CP: Great. It’s always so fabulous to talk to you and to connect with you. I’m super excited to get into this new material. One of the things I thought we would just launch in with was, the last time we talked, you had launched the book The Willpower Instinct, and you were working on the psychology and the science behind internal change. And I’m curious to see, just in your own life, how this work on stress has evolved from your first book and what your journey has been. KM: Yes. So when I think about how all of the work that I’ve been doing—the willpower work, the stress work, and my work at the Stanford Center for Compassion, trying to help people cultivate greater compassion—I realize that everything I’ve been doing for the last 15 years or so has been about trying to help people accept inner experiences or life circumstances that they can’t really control. Whether that’s dealing with cravings in terms of addiction, difficult emotions like anxiety and anger or grief, or even how I got started, which was working with people with chronic pain, and finding a way to accept pain that you can’t fix or change or control. And the funny thing is that, because of my training in psychology and medicine, I’ve kept one thing outside of that circle of acceptance, and that was stress. Somehow stress remains that inner experience, that enemy, that really was toxic, that we really did need to reduce or avoid or manage. And it took me until, really, just a couple of years ago to realize that everything that I’ve been saying about the best way to deal with and transform other difficult inner experiences—like pain and anxiety and grief—the same applied to stress. It’s a big mistake to spend your energy trying to suppress or trying to avoid, just because you find that experience distressing. The same principles that I recommend for these other difficult inner experiences, of accepting and then transforming them, of using them as a catalyst for meaning or for connection with others, that same principle [applies] to stress. And it really took some of the science that was coming out in the last five years or so about stress mindsets to really confront me and realize that I had somehow created this enemy out of stress that was not serving people. We’re all stressed, and I think the idea that we could ever avoid it is probably fundamentally flawed. CP: What is stress? I mean, you reference difficult emotions, and then there’s the whole physiology behind it. I’m curious to see what you’re calling “stress.” Is it a physiology thing? Or is it— KM: Yes, it’s a tough question, because we use the word “stress” to basically describe everything we don’t want to experience. We will use the word “stress” to describe a delay in traffic that irritates us. We’ll use the word “stress” to describe the pressures of parenting or work. We’ll use the word “stress” to describe our racing heart or our own anger and anxiety. And we even use the word “stress” as a synonym for “trauma.” That makes stress very interesting, because fundamentally, it seems to describe the relationship that we have toward things that we’re experiencing, a relationship where we’re basically saying, “This is unwanted. I reject this.” And then we use the label “stress” to basically tag the things in our life that we don’t want. And I actually think that that’s what makes stress so rich for reinterpretation. So the definition that I use for “stress” is much narrower, because I think that the way that we use the word actually isn’t helpful. We’re tagging basically everything in our lives as fundamentally toxic or unworkable. So instead, I like a much simpler definition of “stress” that puts the focus more on our reaction and our resources. And I talk about stress as being what arises when something we care about is at stake. It’s what arises in you. It includes your thoughts, it includes your emotions, it includes the body’s response to stress, the stress hormones it releases to try to help you do something about the fact that someone you care about is at stake. And it’s basically the way that we choose to respond to those challenges, which are those circumstances. When we use that definition of stress, as what arises—our thoughts, our emotions, our desires, our motivation, and our body’s response to stress—it actually becomes much more clear that stress is quite helpful, that it really is a resource. And when we stop talking about stress as something that we’re being victimized by, and sort of reclaim stress as an instinct and a capacity for dealing with challenges in our lives—that’s what I’m encouraging people to embrace. That’s the upside of stress: putting our attention on our own resources and the fact that human beings have a natural capacity to respond to challenges and to transform difficulties into growth, learning, meaning, and even connection with others. CP: Tell us about the research around this. I’m curious to see if that awareness, or what you call embracing the stress and really facing it head-on, not ignoring it, not pushing it away. So if I open my arms to stress, is there research that shows me that I actually am reducing my stress? What are the results? KM: So language is key. Not “reducing” stress, but “transforming” stress. And there actually is a growing body of research—actually, I think that language really matters. It’s one of the reasons that I wrote this book. Because if we talk about reducing stress rather than embracing it and transforming it, we end up doing things that are actually quite destructive, like deciding we need to get drink because we can’t deal with our feelings. Or deciding that we need to take a less stressful job because we can’t cope with the pressures that we face. So rather than talking about “reducing,” I really like to talk about “transforming.” And the research is growing that how you think about stress and your relationship to stress can really determine the effects that stress has on your health and your well-being. Some of the core, foundational research came out of Yale, where researchers asked people how they thought about stress: “Do you view it as fundamentally negative and something to be avoided? Or do you view it as something that is fundamentally positive and should be utilized and embraced?” And those researchers found that you can predict the effect of stress on people’s lives by the attitude they hold, that people who view stress as positive are less likely to become depressed during periods of high stress, they’re in better physical health, they’re more productive at work. And research beyond that laboratory shows that they’re better able to find meaning in their stress, they have better relationships with others. And what really caught my eye was the research showing that how you think about stress [can] even impact something like cardiovascular disease and how long you live. People who really hold that negative view of stress are more like to experience the toxic effects of stress we expect, whereas people who do not hold that harmful view of stress [almost] seem to be protected by the presence of stress in their lives. The one site I mentioned in my TED talk, [which] sort of kick-started this book, found that people who have very stressful lives but don’t view stress as harmful are the most likely to be alive at the end of this eight-year study that they looked at. Whereas people who have very stressful lives and viewed it as very harmful to their health were the most likely to die. And the presence of stress was not the determinate in that. It was really the mindset. So there’s all this research that’s suggesting how you think about stress matters. And what’s most exciting to me is a lot of studies coming out showing, “OK, how the heck do you change your mind about stress? Because we’ve all been told that stress is toxic and we should be reducing it.” And there are a lot of really small mindset shifts we can make in our daily lives that actually transform how we experience stress. CP: Can you give us some examples of those? God, I’m taking notes here, this is handy. KM: Sure. Well, one of my favorites, as somebody who experiences anxiety—we all have different flavors of stress that are most familiar. Some people tend to get angry when they’re under stress. Some people get paralyzed. Some people get anxious. I get anxious. And research coming originally out of Harvard—the lead researcher is Jeremy Jamieson, he’s now at the University of Rochester. He came up with this mindset intervention of taking people who deal with anxiety—whether it’s just students who are facing a difficult exam all the way to people with diagnosed anxiety disorders—and he told them that anxiety is basically energy. When your heart is pounding, when you’re breathing faster, when you’re sweating, they’re all signs that your body is trying to give you energy. And research shows that energy, that arousal that you’re feeling of anxiety, can actually help you. It can help you do better. It can help you rise to the challenge. Which is, by the way, completely true, despite the fact that most people think you need to be calm in order to do your best. The biological research suggests that that’s not true, that adrenaline pretty much always enhances performance, even if you feel it as anxiety. So he told people that, and said, “So, when you feel anxious, try to remember that. Try to remember it’s energy. It can actually help you.” And he’s shown that that helps people perform better under pressure, whether it’s students who are taking a difficult exam, whether it’s women who are facing stereotype threats and violence, whether it’s people with social anxiety disorder having to give a public speech and receive critical feedback about how they present themselves—which, of course, is their worst nightmare. In all of these different scenarios, people who embrace their anxiety and view it as energy, in the moment that they are feeling the anxiety, they do better and their physical stress response changes. They don’t become less stressed—they actually all have higher levels of adrenaline than people who are trying to suppress their anxiety. CP: Oh, interesting. KM: But they also have lower levels of inflammation, which is one type of stress response, usually the more harmful or toxic side of the stress response. So even as their being fully energized by stress, they’re not experiencing the inflammation, they’re not experiencing the blood vessel constriction that often goes along with an unhealthy stress response. And that’s what I mean by transforming stress. If you focus all your energy trying to calm down, you actually lose the benefits of stress. And that’s just one example, one flavor of stress. In the book, I talk about looking at all the ways that we experience stress. Sometimes it’s anger, sometimes it’s despair, sometimes it’s wanting to give up. And each one of those responses to stress can be transformed by changing the way that you think about stress in that moment. CP: When I hear you say “thinking about stress”—first of all, I think this is fabulous. Such a turnaround from pushing stress away, and I want to get into that a little bit more. But there’s something that, in me, when I think, just thinking, because I’m so future-oriented, and I, like you, have more [of] the anxiety side of the stress, that I find the thinking—God, if I think too much, it just keeps going, it’s a spiral. So are there any tips on that? Or perhaps maybe a more bodily approach as an alternative to us overthinkers? Is it really just staying in that thinking zone and re-creating imagery? KM: Well, it’s both. As you know, I’m a mindfulness researcher and mindfulness teacher, which is not inconsistent with the idea of embracing stress. We all know that “mindfulness” is not a synonym for “calming down,” despite the way the media talks about it. But I think one of the core lessons of mindfulness is, we’re always trying to cultivate the ability to choose the focus of our attention. And when something is really capturing your attention, it’s often because it matters. So if you’re worrying about the future, it’s because something you care about matters. And I think it’s a mistake to try to push it out of your mind through distractions that have nothing to do with what you care about and have nothing to do with meaning. And one of the mindset interventions that I really like is, in those moments when you’re worrying about something, to recognized, “OK, worrying is a sign that I care about something. It’s a sign of meaning.” And by the way, research shows that people who worry more also have more meaning in their lives, that they tend to go together. People with less meaningful lives worry less. So it can be helpful to remember that, that there’s a strong relationship between meaning and worrying. People who have more in their lives that they care about are going to inevitably worry more. That seems to be true. So in that moment when the worrying is happening, rather than letting your attention go to worst case scenarios, or the things that you can’t control, some researchers have asked people to think about why they care in that moment. What is meaningful to you about this? What value is connected to this? Family, wanting to make a difference, wanting to grow, wanting to do well—whatever the core value is, put your attention on that, why it’s meaningful and why it matters, even for a brief moment. And that’s been shown to make it more likely that your worrying will be transformed into something productive rather than something that makes you feel stuck or that is a drain on your energy. So you’re worrying, and you think, “Well, the reason I care about this is because this role is really meaningful to me. Or this relationship is really meaningful to me.” People are then more likely to be able to see what the choice is in that moment, that it’s consistent with the meaning or with the value. “Because this relationship matters to me, I’m going to make the phone call now instead of just ruminating over it and worrying about it and thinking about what I said yesterday or thinking about how they’re going to respond.” Or I’ll take an action to get started on a project rather than just worry about whether or not I’ll be able to do it or do it well. That’s, again, a mindset shift that basically transforms the function of worrying without having to suppress it or get rid of it. CP: You know what I love about that? You do have a chapter in the book where you say, “Connect: How Caring Creates Resilience.” And that just—what you said about values, in the moment when you return to your values, you feel more love and compassion. It’s sort of tying into you former work—or, whatever, it’s no…

Full show notes at the publisher

Talk Rx: A Prescription for Connection, Health & Happiness, Part 2 with Dr. Neha Sangwan Aug 26, 2015

Show notes

Welcome to Part 2 of our podcast with Dr. Neha Sangwan. Dr. Neha Sangwan, CEO and founder of Intuitive Intelligence, is an internal medicine physician, international speaker and corporate communication expert. In her new book, TalkRx, Dr. Neha Sangwan reveals practical yet profound communication tools that will strengthen your relationships, reduce your stress, improve your health, and save you time! Dr. Neha Sangwan was a featured presenter at the 2015 Emerging Women Live Conference. In today’s episode, Neha and I speak about: Desire: being able to articulate and get to the core of what we desire The importance of clarity and the positive expression of what we want How to change conversations with people who are not clear with their desires and the skills to do it Vocalizing what we value and acting in alignment with these values Neha’s 2-Step Decision Making Tool Rewriting History, the importance of being vulnerable and how “Truth is Always the Answer” Here is Part 2 of my conversation “Talk Rx: A Prescription for Connection, Health and Happiness” with the honest and wonderful: Dr. Neha Sangwan. Subscribe to the Emerging Women podcast on iTunes. Transcript: Chantal Pierrat: OK, welcome back, Neha! Neha Sangwan: Oh, it’s so good to be here again. CP: Now, you are visiting your parents right now. What state are you in? NS: New York. CP: You’re in New York, OK. Are you on Long Island? NS: Oh no, I’m in Buffalo. I live right outside New York in Williamsburg, but my parents live in Buffalo. So the whole family’s out. CP: So this is a perfect opportunity to practice a little TalkRx. NS: [Laughs] Family is always the perfect opportunity to practice communication skills. CP: And you have—you said it’s your parents’ wedding anniversary? NS: Yes, their 50th. CP: OK, all right. Now’s the time. [Laughs] NS: That is so true. CP: Well, in our first part 1, we talked about your five-step process, which I think you call the i-Five? NS: Yes, the i-Five conversation. CP: The i-Five conversation. Maybe we should just quickly summarize the five parts, just for the listeners that might be coming in for the first time, even on part 2. And then we can dig into the part 2 of our podcast. NS: Sure. The whole premise of the i-Five is that it’s five steps to having not just conversations, but honest conversations. And I think that’s where people get a little stuck. So I’ve broken it down into five parts, and the first part is your body. Basically, how our senses help us pick up information from the external world while we are simultaneously getting information from our internal world, like our heart racing, [our] stomach turning, all of that stuff that also is giving us information. And sometimes those two things are not in sync, right? So I’m saying “yes” but my stomach’s dropping. So that’s the body section, which is, how do you take in data from the outside world and inside world and have it sync up, and when it doesn’t, what do you do? That data takes us to the second part of the i-Five conversation, which is your thoughts. So if I am in room and I’m talking to you, and my eyes tell me that you just get up and leave in the middle of a conversation, that’s data that I would pick up. I’ll make up a thought about it. I’ll decide that it means you’re not feeling well. I’ll decide that it means you don’t like me. I’ll decide all sorts of things. So the second step is around the thoughts we make up once we’ve observed the data from our body. And then, depending on which thought I believe—if I think that you’re not feeling well, it leads me to step three, which is an emotion. So if I think you’re not feeling well, I might feel an emotion of concern or worry for you, for your health, how you’re feeling. Now, if the thought I made up was that I don’t think you like me or thought that our conversation was very interesting, then the emotion that might come next is disappointment, sadness, feeling upset. So you start by picking up data in your body, second is you create thoughts around what it means. The third step is, depending on which thought you commit to or believe, you have an emotion. And the fourth step then leads you to have a desire, a want. I might want to get up and leave the room and see how you’re doing. I might want to run out of the house and say, “Oh, I don’t want to have this conversation anymore.” I might get curious, I might want to get curious, like, “Hey, what happened?” So it leads to step four, which is desires. And then step five is, when you’ve integrated body, thoughts, emotions, and desires, you take some sort of action. And so that’s the fifth step. So is that clear? CP: Yes. I think it’s great to just summarize that. What we want to talk about is the last two of those, because I think especially with women, it’s so hard, when we get to that desire. What do we actually want? We can spend a lot of time in the awareness zone about our bodies and our thoughts and our feelings, and then when we get to what we want—and I don’t know if this is just millenniums of not being able to articulate what we want or not having the freedom to do so, or that we’re just naturally just so geared and wired toward the other that that is just a hard thing for us to nail down. So I would love to start there, and hear what you think and what kind of actions we can take in practices to get to the root of that desire, and really, fully articulate what it is that we want. What are the outcomes? NS: Yes, I mean, I think it’s really, really important, because if people don’t know what they want—I mean, there are a lot of people who spend time really upset that someone else hasn’t given them what they wanted, even though they never told them what that was. I’ve definitely been guilty of dating someone and wishing that they would do something or show up in a certain way on Valentine’s Day, or whatever it is, but, by the way, I never articulated that that was something that was important to me. So I think it’s not only knowing what you want, but it’s also having the confidence to say it out loud and really be willing to express it and get clear within ourselves as well as with each other. So, yes, let’s definitely start there. The premise around desire is really—they’re based on what we value. That’s a great place to start. A really simple way that I do this is have you bring to mind somebody that you really admire. Because people will say, “I don’t know, ‘value’ is such a big thing. I don’t know what I value, I value a lot of things.” Well, you may value lots and lots of things, but it’s important to come up with your top five, your top 10, so that there’s a way you can at least guide your decisions, whether you know it or not. So I would have you just bring to mind someone you really, really admire. And you don’t have to tell me who it is. Can you bring someone to mind? CP: Yes. NS: OK, great. So just tell me three qualities about that person that you really admire. CP: They’re super creative. They’re modern, at the cutting edge. My person is Martha Graham, [she] is one of my idols. And she’s uncompromising but graceful at the same time. NS: Wow. So what’s incredible about that is she’s this vision in the world, for you, of someone you admire and value. But what you’ve just done as well is, really quickly and easily, pinpointed some of your highest values. So these are probably principles that you are the most proud of yourself when you show up as super creative, as uncompromising but graceful. The words that you use to describe someone else—you might as well use that for women, right? We’re so other-focused, let’s use that and help us get clear about what we value most. CP: Yes. Love it. NS: So I just think of that as a really simple exercise that people can begin getting clear about what they want. Another one is: women, I think, are very clear about what they don’t want. The brain is hardwired to avoid pain and seek pleasure, so we’re really clear about the times when we felt burned or we felt rejected or we felt like we didn’t get what we wanted. Those are blazed in our memory. Or we got feedback that didn’t resonant—not that it didn’t resonate, but it felt like it was more critical. So people will say things like, “I don’t want to lose my cool.” Well, when I ask them what they want, they say, “Oh, I don’t want to get sick.” “I don’t want to go to another wedding alone.” “I don’t want to end up in my career and not have made a difference.” Do you see what I mean? I’ll ask them what they want, and they will list all the things that they desperately do not want. CP: OK, yes. Guilty of that myself. NS: [Laughs] So I think the next step would be, once people getting really clear about what they value, then it will help lead them to what they want, and as they begin to craft what they want, start thinking through: are you clear about what you don’t want or what you do want? So let’s take a couple of those examples, and let’s just turn them around. So if I say, “I don’t want to lose my cool,” well, what I might really be saying is, “When I’m disappointed, I’d like to be able to express myself clearly.” Because you can’t really stop yourself from getting upset, but you certainly would hope that if you are disappointed, you could articulate that clearly. Or, “I don’t want to get sick.” So if we flip that around, it would be, “I want to be healthy.” CP: Now, tell me, what is your view on switching that around? Is the value in the absolute clarity, or is the value in leaning more towards a positive articulation of the value? Do you know what I’m saying? Or is it both? NS: It’s really both. It’s both, because when you can envision something, and you can envision it clearly, you will move in that direction. And in the craziest way—I find, and this is my own belief system—I just find that the universe comes together to support me in that. So the clearer I get, the more miraculous my world becomes, as soon as I set my intention on something. So yes, I think it’s a little bit of both. I think it’s important to—when I say, “I don’t want to get sick,” all I’m really focused on is “sick.” “I don’t want to get sick, I don’t want to get sick.” When I say, “I would like to feel strong in my body, I would love to be able to run five miles three times a week, I would like to win a race,” whatever it is, there’s a bit of guided imagery, imagery that really helps align your entire physiology and your beliefs in that direction. It’s used in the Olympics a lot, with how divers basically have a perfect 10 dive. Well, they don’t do it by hoping everybody else is messing up or worried that they themselves are going to mess up. What they do is they keep envisioning, over and over again, what a perfect dive, what little splash in the water, feels like, looks like, would be like, until their body creates it. So I think it’s a bit of imagery. I think it’s a bit of getting really clear on the vision. Because I can say, “I don’t want to get sick,” and even if I have low energy and I’m kind of functioning, I’m not really sick, but I’m not this picture of health either. So the better I can articulate and describe it specifically, the clearer it will take me to my goal. CP: Right. Now, in terms of creating with another in a courageous conversation, how would having more of the positive articulation of your desire be more effective in making things smoother and more harmonious? NS: Yes, so this is really important. So getting clear about what you want is in a few different categories. The first is, if you and I are having a conversation—and let’s say you’re my sister, and when you and I come together, I tend to get defensive, because at the beginning of the show we were talking about family. So the first level of want is how I would like to show up in this conversation. Let’s say every time we talk about where the family is going to vacation or whatever it is, you and I tend to disagree. So I come in, I’m closed, I’m defensive, and I’m guarded. My first level of want in a conversation with somebody else is, how do I want to show up in this conversation myself? So this time, I’m hoping for a new outcome, so I will show up as open, curious, and honest. So I want to be honest, compassionate, open, and curious. So that’s the beginning of how you set the stage, which is taking accountability for yourself. Now, the second piece is, when I know what I want—let’s say that I highly value warm-weather vacations, because one of my highest values is play, competition, and athletics. And so when the family is together, I feel really connected to everybody when we get to golf, when we get to walk on the beach, and we get to play tennis. Now, if I understand what I value, and what I want, which is a warm-weather vacation because it allows me to feel really connected to the family and stay engaged rather than go in my hotel room and work—which is my default that happens when I don’t feel as connected and engaged—then when I’m negotiating with you, or having a conversation with you, it’s really important that when I say, “Hey, can we go south for our vacation rather than going skiing or something else?” If I’m asking for whatever it is, I have the room to negotiate, because I’m very clear about what is underlying it that’s important to me. So if you suggest something else, I can find a middle bridge of creativity and expansiveness where you and I can meet if I know that what I really want is connectedness on this trip, when I know I want some way that we can play together. I may have ideas of it being on a sports field, some sort of sporting event. I would say, “The most important thing to me is we get to play, that it’s like a game, that we all feel connected. Can you help me think of others ways that that could be possible in the scenario that you’re suggesting?” CP: Exactly. Now, here’s my question: so here we are, doing our work, and we’re getting clear on our desires and we’re getting super specific and positive and we’re articulating. But we may not be speaking with somebody who’s going through the same program. How do we find out what they’re desire [is] and if they’re not clear. Because I find myself often in that situation, where we’re talking with somebody who doesn’t have the communication background—or who hasn’t read your book cover to cover—and is not putting these practices in place, and their desires are murky as well. Is there a way to bring that out, or are there clues and signs to get to a knowing at that level? NS: Yes. So I say several times in the book that it only takes one person to change the outcome of a conversation, and that person is you. And the reason is, curiosity is going to help the other person get clear, like me saying, “I’d love to have a beach vacation or do something here with the family,” and somebody else is really, really committed to doing something else, if I can notice that I’m reacting in my body, that I have these thoughts that, “She’s just doing this to make me mad,” whatever it is, but if I’m really aware of what’s happening for me, what I do is, I shift into curiosity, and I say something to you like, “What’s important?” Instead of me saying, “No way, this is what I want to do,” and digging in, what I do is I get really aware of myself and then I say, “Wow, it sounds like you’d like to do this,” whatever it is that they just said, “help me understand what’s important about that to you? What is it that would make this a really meaningful experience for you?” And as soon as I’m aware of myself and I shift into curiosity, I can actually ask the questions like, “What do you value about that? What did you really enjoy about the last time we did X, Y, and Z?” So there’s a way that I can show up [with] curiosity in order to help this other person figure out what’s happening, or in a conversation with somebody else if I realize that I heard what they observed and what they thought and how they’re feeling, but they haven’t told me what…

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Sleep Your Way to the Top (and Other Myths About Business Success) with Jane Miller Aug 18, 2015

Show notes

Today my guest is Jane Miller, CEO and founder of JaneKnows, a career advice website, has spent three decades in the corporate world. For the past 20 years, she’s become the highest ranking woman in every company she’s worked in including Pepsi Co, Heinz and others. Now, she’s written a how-to for millennials wanting to make it to the top – Sleep Your Way to the Top (and Other Myths About Business Success). Her new book is the go-to guide for grads, pre-grads and new execs, showing where it’s easy to get tripped up, who might trick us and how to make it past the pitfalls on our way to the corner office.

In today’s episode, Jane and I speak about:

Women in the corporate arena and what challenges they face
Myths about business success, having confidence, and knowing what fills your cup
How to deal with difficult people in the business world
Jane’s Business Dark Night of the Soul and how she got through it
The one thing women can do to increase personal power and influence in the world

We hope you enjoy “Sleep Your Way to the Top (and Other Myths About Business Success)” with the accomplished and inspirational: Jane Miller.

Subscribe to the Emerging Women podcast on iTunes.

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Talk Rx: A Prescription for Connection, Health & Happiness, Part 1 with Dr. Neha Sangwan Aug 10, 2015

Show notes

Today my guest is Dr. Neha Sangwan, CEO and founder of Intuitive Intelligence, internal medicine physician and corporate communication expert. She has written the new book TalkRx: Five Steps to Honest Conversations That Create Connection, Health, and Happiness, in which she reveals practical yet profound communication tools that will strengthen your relationships, reduce your stress, improve your health, and save you time!

In today’s episode, Neha and I speak about:

What she means by interpreting your body and then interpreting your thoughts
The importance of Self-Awareness and how our thoughts teach us more about ourselves than anything else
The 5 components of communication
Anger as a limiting factor in difficult conversations and how to overcome it
Slowing down to speed up: using awareness and understanding to resolve problems in communication quickly

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Creating Big Magic, Part 2 with Elizabeth Gilbert Jul 08, 2015

Show notes

This is part 2 of the conversation with Liz on Creating Big Magic.

Liz is the author of 2006’s runaway bestseller Eat, Pray, Love, which has sold more than ten million copies worldwide, as well as her most recent novel, The Signature of All Things. Her forthcoming book, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear will hit bookstands in September 2015. In Big Magic Liz asks the reader to embrace curiosity and let go of needless suffering. She shows how to tackle what we most love, and how to face down what we most fear. She discusses the attitudes, approaches, and habits we need in order to live our most creative lives.

Topics in this Episode:

Originality vs. Authenticity – how we should stop striving to be original and embrace authenticity
Complaining, and Gratitude as an antidote
Giving yourself permission to be creative
How Liz stays in touch with the divine

Looking for Part 1? Listen here.

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Creating Big Magic, Part 1 with Elizabeth Gilbert Jun 24, 2015

Show notes

Today my guest is Elizabeth Gilbert.

This is part 1 (of 2) of my conversation with Elizabeth. Liz is the author of 2006’s runaway bestseller Eat, Pray, Love, which has sold more than ten million copies worldwide. Her forthcoming book, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear will hit bookstands in September 2015. In Big Magic, Liz asks the reader to embrace curiosity and let go of needless suffering. She shows how to tackle what we most love, and how to face down what we most fear. She discusses the attitudes, approaches and habits we need in order to live our most creative lives.

In today’s episode, Liz and I spoke about:

How Fear can block creativity
The Fear we ‘need’ and the Fear we don’t
Being open to the “Yes,” but finding wisdom in the “No”
How inspiration promises us nothing
Hard Labor vs Fairy Dust and the balance that she seeks in her life

I hope you enjoy part 1 of my conversation “Creating Big Magic” with the trailblazer of personal voice and creativity: Elizabeth Gilbert.

Subscribe to the Emerging Women podcast on iTunes.

And please be sure to rate Grace & Fire while you’re there!

Becoming a Warrior Goddess with HeatherAsh Amara Apr 30, 2015

Show notes

Today my guest is HeatherAsh Amara. HeatherAsh Amara is the founder of Toci — the Toltec Center of Creative Intent, which fosters local and global community that supports authenticity, awareness, and awakening.

She is dedicated to inspiring depth, creativity, and joy by sharing the most potent tools from a variety of world traditions. She brings an openhearted, inclusive worldview to her writings and teachings, which are a rich blend of Toltec wisdom, European shamanism, Buddhism, and Native American ceremony.

She is the author of Warrior Goddess Training, The Toltec Path of Transformation and co-author of No Mistakes: How You Can Change Adversity into Abundance. HeatherAsh Amara lives in Austin, Texas and travels extensively around the world, speaking and teaching workshops.

In today’s episode, HeatherAsh and I spoke about:

Her background and how she was attracted to Earth-based spirituality and her concept of the Warrior Goddess
The Toltec Tradition and the 4 Agreements:
- Be Impeccable with your Word
- Don’t Take Anything Personally
- Don’t Make Assumptions
- Always Do Your Best
Dealing with the Inner Critic
Using the agreements to enrich creative and sexual energy
The difference between Intuition and the Mental Habits of the Mind

Here is my conversation “Becoming a Warrior Goddess” with the Warrior Goddess herself: HeatherAsh Amara.

As her gift to you, download two free chapters of the Warrior Goddess Training book. And when you buy her book, you’ll receive HeatherAsh’s 11-day online Warrior Goddess bootcamp for free.

Subscribe to the Emerging Women podcast on iTunes.

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The Art (and Power) of Asking with Amanda Palmer Apr 09, 2015

Show notes

Today my guest is Amanda Palmer. Amanda Palmer is a rock star, former street performer, and a crowdfunding pioneer, who knows all about asking. Performing as a living statue in a wedding dress, she wordlessly asked thousands of passersby for their dollars. After creating the world’s most successful music Kickstarter campaign for her album with the Grand Theft Orchestra, she has written a book titled: The Art of Asking: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help. In her new memoir she tells the story of an artist struggling with the new rules of exchange in the twenty-first century and inspires readers to rethink their own ideas about asking, giving, art and love. There are so many cool things about this woman – not least of which is her post-modern retro punk cabaret band called the Dresden Dolls. She is also married to Neil Gaiman, my favorite comic book illustrator and writer of all things. But perhaps what I love the most about Amanda Palmer is the fact that her nickname is Amanda Fucking Palmer – somehow it just feels right! In today’s episode, Amanda and I spoke about: The Art of Asking and how she learned this art A constant theme in her life: balancing vulnerability with control Dealing with the fear of rejection – and how to ask anyway Relationship based communication and the need to still ask for help The Art of Receiving as an integral part of the ask Here is my conversation “The Art (and Power) of Asking” with the wildly inspirational: Amanda Fucking Palmer. Subscribe to the Emerging Women podcast on iTunes. Transcript Hi, welcome Amanda. How are you? Amanda Palmer: I’m wonderful, how are you? CP: I’m a little bit outside myself, because I feel like I’ve been stalking you a little bit. [Laughs] AP: [Laughs] CP: So I’m so excited. For the listeners who are tuning in here, this is my first time really talking to Amanda. I think we spoke for a half a minute prior to this, and I’ve been “reading” your book—I’m saying that in quotes here because I love to listen to books on audio— AP: Oh, great! CP: Yes, and I want to say that I’m promoting the audio version of The Art of Asking, because there’s so much in there that’s not in the book. I feel like I’ve really gotten to know you through it, and your voice. So I feel an intimacy. AP: Yes, it’s really nice, as a musician, to put out an audio book, because that’s my medium. That’s what I’m used to, and it’s really nice to add the music and the songs to weave within the story. They really belong there. CP: I love that you sang your intro. It was fabulous. AP: [Laughs] CP: [Laughs] It was so great! AP: Thank you. I’m glad you like it. CP: I just thought it was so unique, and you—just by way of full disclosure, I’m just going to get this out here now so we can get the stalking vibration out. I am also a huge fan—when I was in college, it was Love and Rockets and The Sandman. I mean, that was my deal. So [I’m a] huge fan of your husband, Neil Gaiman, and his work. And when I saw you coming forward on the fabulous TED talk, and I realized who you were, I was like, “Oh my God.” Can you be in love with a couple? AP: Totally! If your polyamorous. CP: Right? So I was in love with Neil, and now I’m in love with you, and the two of you together just makes so much groovy sense, it’s off the charts. I feel especially honored today. AP: Thank you. It makes me really happy when people love Neil’s work, because I love him. And the really lucky thing was I wasn’t a Neil Gaiman fan, and I think that might have been a deal breaker. So I got to fall in love with the weird guy, not The Sandman author. [Laughs] I had to catch up. CP: Right. Oh, great. What I thought we would start with today is maybe a little background on how you came into this work. I know a lot of this stems from your experience as a traveling musician and a performing artist, but the work I’m referring to is this art of asking, and how that emerged inside of you and what the journey was and where it [plays] out in different parts of your life. AP: Oh my—that’s like an hour-long [story]! CP: You’re going to talk and I’m going to interrupt! That’s usually how these podcasts go. [Laughs] AP: Well, the first thing it makes me think of is the fundamental training I got, without totally realizing it as it was happening, when I was a street performer. And I grew up in kind of a basic, suburban situation. Not a lot of artists around me. But [I was] very, very into music and theater and record collecting and everything I could get my hands on. Politically liberal, but a somewhat conservative family in that there was one path: you went to college and went to a liberal arts college. That’s what all my older brothers and sisters did, and that’s what you did in my family. I kind of went kicking and screaming because I just had no desire to go to college, but I went. And I didn’t have the best of times. I suffered through it. But as soon as I got out the other side and was finally free to make my own decisions in life, I went straight to the street and became a street performer. And no one guided me. I didn’t have a street performer mentor. I didn’t even really know any street performers. I just saw people doing it and thought, “Who’s going to stop me from doing that if I get up and do it?” So from the time I graduated college, I made money in a ton of strange ways. My primary income for four or five years was in Harvard Square as a living statue standing on a box. I talk about that in my TED talk and I talk about that at length in the book. I definitely started out with a particular bent, but standing on a box and standing still until strangers give you money and then having a moment of connection with them year after year after year really did pound in the philosophy that I kind of tentatively started with to begin with, which is the idea that human beings, if given the opportunity, are fundamentally generous, do want to connect with each other, do like helping artists. It’s maybe naïve, but definitely an optimistic outlook. If I wanted to be an artist, I would find the people who wanted to help because I knew they existed. And that’s the attitude that I brought to music when I started a band, which was my real passion, because I was a songwriter and I knew I wanted to fundamentally follow that path. And I sort of just took my street performing attitude into rock ‘n’ roll. It didn’t feel strange to me and didn’t seem odd to constantly invite my fans on the stage and ask them for help and constantly connect with everybody, answer every fan letter, stand in the midst of my fans and not separate myself. As I traveled through the world more and more, I realized the way the Dresden Dolls—which was my band—I want to say it was unique, but it wasn’t even unique. It was just a different lineage. Even though we were working in the world of rock ‘n’ roll, we were sort of like a folk band with rock music. We were about the community and we were about staying with our fans and we were about trying to help everybody. And we had a lot more in common with the folk scene and the punk scene than we did with the rock scene and the rock circuit that we were mostly touring on. CP: And so, just to clarify, [when you were] the human statue, you were a mime bride, which I think is lovely. Is that correct, you were dressed in a bride’s outfit? AP: Yes, I was all white, covered in a giant white gown with white gloves and a black wig. Unless I was at a crazy festival where I just couldn’t keep up with the demand, I handed out daisies. I handed out white daisies. A work shift was just as long as the flowers lasted, then I was done. CP: There’s something—and this, I know, plays out also when you’re playing music, but there’s something about that that’s both intimate and isolating, and I’m wondering if you could express that a little bit. You’re frozen—and you say this in your book—where it’s almost like protection, or you can retreat, even though you’re out there in the middle of Harvard Square, and you’re totally exposed, and sometimes it’s raining, and sometimes people are not so nice. But at the same time, you refer to it as almost a protection, that you can hide behind your stillness. And I thought that was so interesting and I’d love to hear more about what that’s like for you. AP: You know what’s fascinating about that is that there’s such a parallel between what you just said, that aspect of being a living statue, and what it’s like to be on stage singing these really vulnerable songs and pouring your heart out and bearing yourself. But simultaneously, you’re kind of in control. You’re the one in the spotlight, you’re the one behind the piano, you’re the one deciding how far you want to push things and how much you want to reveal yourself and how much you want to pull back. Which you decide moment to moment, depending on the venue and the audience and how much you are able to give in that moment, how much you trust that particular audience. It’s almost the same thing. And [it’s] one of the things—just one of the themes of my life that I’ve been so fascinated by, because it shows up everywhere: in my marriage, in my job history, on stage. It’s a real tightrope between control and total vulnerability, and balancing between these two extremes all the time. I mean, look who I picked for a husband. [Laughs] I picked the gigantic guy with huge fame and busyness and stuff, but who was also really vulnerable. Neil is a perfect example of the extremes in himself, and that’s part of why we really recognized each other. And in all of the jobs I’ve done—you know, I was a dominatrix, for Christ’s sake. That’s a job—and I actually just finished reading a fantastic book by Melissa Febos, who details her four years of working in a dungeon in New York City, and it’s the same thing. There’s this façade of ultimate control, but also you’re the employee, you’re the one getting paid. There is this kind of crazy dance between who actually is in power here. And I felt that as a statue, and I felt it as a stripper, and I felt it as a dominatrix, and I still feel it on stage. I feel it with my husband. It’s that amazing yin/yang of dancing between control and no control. CP: In that art of asking, is there a certain ratio of control to vulnerability that actually yields better results? Not that one is always asking with a specific result in mind, but sometimes—and I think you’re a master of this, you ask in ways when you don’t even verbally ask for things. We’re going to get to that. But what is it, if you ask with more vulnerability you’ll get what you want? Or is it if you have more control over the messaging when you ask? What is that inner play between control and vulnerability in the art of asking? AP: The crazy thing about that is that it’s so specific to the situation. And people who are good at asking know that wherever you are, in whatever position or situation, you’re standing and facing somebody else, whether you are the asker or the askee, part of being good at asking is knowing that the ecosystem of the balance of power is different in every moment, with every situation. There are moments when being vulnerable just approaches the idiotic and the masochistic, and then there’s moments when showing your vulnerability actually pulls you up to a place of real empowerment. Because there are times where being truly vulnerable—not just faking it and not just saying the words and not just offering up the token because you think you’re going to get what you want. Those moments, and knowing how to shift those gears—that is just the work of life, and that is the work of every single human being I know who’s decided to be in relationship with other people, which is, uh, everybody. [Laughs] One of the things that I found so lovely about this book is when it came down to it, I realized that the stuff that I was talking about was so fundamental to everybody I knew in a relationship: when do you face your pride, swallow your pride, and just ask for what you need? And what’s getting in the way if you find yourself unable to do that? And, on the flip side, what’s too much to ask for? When do you turn into that needy asshole instead of someone who is really stepping up to the plate and making yourself vulnerable and asking for something reasonable? And we all torture ourselves with these questions all day. Am I asking for too much from my husband? Am I taking too much? Am I being too selfish? Am I being too greedy? All those things. CP: Well, how do you know? AP: Oh my—search me! [Laughs] I don’t know! I think if I knew, I’d explode in a beam of light and never be seen again. [Laughs] I don’t think you know. I think it’s like the meaning of life, you search for it, but you know you’re never going to find it. CP: I wonder though, after reading your book, I feel like the default is to ask and then deal with the repercussions after, rather than not ask. AP: Yes, I think that’s a pretty safe default, when in doubt. If you’re in actual, serious doubt, then chances are, for the vast majority of people I know, yes, the default should be, “You’re probably afraid, and if you’re really on the fence, eat it and ask.” Because that’s usually the correct door. But, again, that really depends. In certain situations—I face this with younger musicians all the time, who see the flip side of that, because they sometimes ask before they’re ready. They ask before they have enough to give. They ask before they’re ready to do the work. They ask the universe to pay for their tour bus, but they don’t have a fan base yet. And it’s in cases like that where I’m like, “Eh, you know, you’re not ready yet.” You can’t ask before you have an audience. You can’t go out on a first date with someone and be like, “So, do you want to have kids? Do you want to get married?” That’s actually not the best bet. It’s context. CP: How do you deal with rejection? AP: Badly, usually. [Laughs] CP: [Laughs] Thank you! AP: You’re welcome! Oh man, it’s definitely gotten easier, and I don’t just say that to be corny. I’ve dealt with my fair share of it in the industry, within the music business, and certainly Internet lives and personally. I’ve been rejected as a person with ideas, as a woman who won’t cop to the beauty standard, as a million things. And one of the things I’ve found about life is that if you trudge on, it just gets easier. It gets easier to be rejected because you just stop taking it so personally. Neil said something funny, didn’t he, once, when he was talking about reading reviews of his first book, or his first big book, when he put American Gods out. And the reviews started to come in, especially the user reviews, the customer reviews on Amazon. And they were either really glowing or really, really shitty. He was just stacking up all these one-star and five-star reviews, and there was nothing in the middle. Which feels very much like my life. My life seems to be a sea of one-star and five-star reviews. And he said he got to a certain point where he stopped reading any of the reviews and just started counting them. And he figured if he was getting a lot reviews, whether they were one-star reviews or five-star reviews, the book was probably doing well. And that’s a great metaphor for dealing with rejection and criticism, especially when you start realizing that life isn’t personal, and that most people who are out there aggressively rejecting me are dealing with their own fears and their own issues. It all starts to feel a lot easier. Especially when you’ve built up your own community of smart and interesting people who actually do understand me and know where I’m coming from and are happy to have a dialog about ideas instead of an outright rejection of who I am. There’s plenty enough to feed me while all that noise goes on in the background, and it gets a lot easier to ignore. CP: Let’s talk more about that. That is also another theme throughout the book, and just the way you m…

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