New Year, Same You: Good News About Bad January Branding
January 4, 2022
Glennon Doyle:
Welcome to the first, We Can Do Hard Things of 2022.
Abby Wambach:
Whoa.
Glennon Doyle:
Whoa, that’s weird, right?
Abby Wambach:
2022, what’s up?
Amanda Doyle:
That just explains the difference in our personality. I’m like, “What, 2022?” My sister’s like, “Whoa, 2022.” And Abby’s like, “Hot damn 2022.”
Abby Wambach:
Let’s go.
Amanda Doyle:
I’m confused. Sister’s sad, Abby’s excited.
Abby Wambach:
Of course.
Amanda Doyle:
Which means that it might be a new year, but we are the same us’s, okay?
Glennon Doyle:
Let me tell you where we are right now. Abby and I are in our office slash recording room slash living room slash Chase’s bedroom, when he is home from college. He is home now for his break. So what we do on podcast day is we just come in here and we step around all of his piles of clothes and books, and we fold up the hide a bed couch to set up.
Glennon Doyle:
So we’re in here now, this is my favorite room of the house. We have these glass doors, so we can see out onto the street of our little LA beach town. And so as we record, we can see little families lugging their kids in gear to the beach, pretending to have a good time. And occasionally we can see a badass woman in a wetsuit carrying a surfboard, which always makes me so happy. But not today because it’s raining outside today. Which is an anomaly in LA and it’s my favorite. Because when I wake up and hear rain, it feels like the universe has handed me a get out of jail free card. Because in LA it’s always freaking sunny, which is wonderful, I guess, but it’s also annoying because when you think about it, the sun is really bossy. Do you know what I mean? It’s like-
Amanda Doyle:
It’s an indictment. If you’re not out here enjoying the sun, look, you are wasting your life. Not taking it in.
Abby Wambach:
I mean talking about a pretty bossy human being, you just don’t like being bossed, do you?
Glennon Doyle:
No, I don’t. I don’t like being boss, especially by the sun, which just sits there in the sky. Just shaming me for living my home body, home-sexual life. That’s how I identify is a home-sexual. I love my house, I would marry my home if I were not already married. It’s the only identity I’ve ever had that has stayed constant.
Abby Wambach:
You can’t even figure out all right, alright.
Glennon Doyle:
I don’t know if I’m a homosexual, I just identify as queer, but I do know that I’m a home-sexual. So it’s just when the sun doesn’t come out and the rain comes, it’s just an invitation to just stay snuggly and cozy.
Glennon Doyle:
So it’s a rainy snuggly day and Abby and I are on the couch, sister’s in her son’s bedroom. That’s where she records. And in here there’s a little fire on and our lazy dogs are on the floor and we’re talking to you. So, so far, 2022 is pretty good stuff. It works for me so far.
Amanda Doyle:
Give it a minute.
Glennon Doyle:
“But give it a minute,” she says. So the one thing that doesn’t work for me that I want to start off with is this January can drive me a bit bat shit, okay. And it’s because, I’ve been thinking a lot about this and it’s because of the way that January is branded, okay. It is as if January has this PR agency that all sat around a table and decided that the way that we will brand January is to capitalize on how much people hate themselves, right? By creating this tagline of new year, new me.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s actually new year, new you.
Glennon Doyle:
New year, new you. New year, new you. Okay so two reasons why this is stupid. New year, new you is stupid. Number one, it does suggest that all of us hate who we are. And are just waiting for the right month to come. So we can completely change our horrible, stupid-ass, hateful self.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s so true, it’s so insulting. It’s so good it goes like, “New year, new wife, New year, new husband.” As if you’d take the first chance you got to throw them to the curb.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly. New year, new self, new year, new you. You suck, in other words. So number one, it suggests we hate who we are, but number two, it’s it goes against the way life is and the way people are. This is not how life works, new year, new me. This is not it. So what is fundamentally true about people that I have observed in my own life and with other people, is that on our core, at our deepest truest self, we are unchanging forever. We are always the same self. I have just recently accepted this. I am not never, no days in the future am I going to wake up and suddenly be an adult. I just had this idea that there was myself, but at one point out there I was going to wake up and I was going to be this future self that I had dreamed up that had more things figured out, that was everything’s been a dress rehearsal, but at one point it’s going to start.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah. It’s like a page loading, loading, loading and then it gets stuck at 99% and will never fully load. That’s how I feel about life. Loading, loading, aah.
Glennon Doyle:
Loading forever. There is no future version of myself. This is it. And I don’t mean our identities stay the same all right? That shit changes constantly. I used to be straight now I’m gay, I’m married, divorce, single, non-mother, mother, woman. Those are just costumes those are just roles. I’m talking about at our soul level. I’m talking about at our consciousness level, what is actually you, what is actually me, what I really am. The me that is in here looking out at the world.
Glennon Doyle:
This weirds me out. I actually just thought of this a few weeks ago. That the me that is in here looking out at the world was the same me that was in here looking out at the world when I was 10 years old, in the back seat of my van, looking out at the backs of my parents’ heads. Same me inside, that was looking out at the world, right.
Glennon Doyle:
Same me, that’s been in here looking out that was watching doctors deliver Chase, same me inside that was watching Abby say her vows. It will be the same me that is on my deathbed. Hopefully, if that’s the way I go looking around at people who love me. Same, same inner self. And this is bad news for January branding. Because the truth is forever new year, same ass me. But I think it’s good news because actually makes me feel safe. I’m going to be okay forever because I’m never going to leave me. This self looking out from inside at everything is going to be the same self. It’s like I also just began to understand yesterday that if I’m never switched into this different grown up adult future version of myself, that means that nothing ever is going to be able to separate me from myself till the day that I die. Which is very comforting and also scary as shit. I am stuck with this self forever.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah good news, bad news. Good news, bad news people.
Glennon Doyle:
Good news, bad news. So-
Amanda Doyle:
But it’s beautiful.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s kind of right? It’s weird. I don’t know if I’m explaining it right. But it is weird to me that this inner self that’s looking out at the world was the same when I was 5, 12, 25, 40, 60, the same consciousness.
Abby Wambach:
But is it weird because I think in your brain, you’re making it weird. The consciousness self is like, “This is what I’ve been trying to teach you all along.”
Glennon Doyle:
That it’s just the now. It’s just the now.
Abby Wambach:
It’s just who I have always, always been.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s exactly like the sun being out all the time and making you feel you should be doing something. We are here to say, “It is January, the sun is shining, everyone is new year, new youing all over you.” And you get to say, “I am not going to accept that shame and expectation that I should be out running around in the sun. I’m not going to accept the job you’ve given me, which is to apparently, throw my old self to the curb and start fresh and new.” That it’s always just the next right thing, one thing at a time and there’s no radical promise of transformation, but there’s also no radical assignment. Just keep doing the next thing.
Glennon Doyle:
There’s no premise you have to accept that who you were wasn’t good enough in the first place.
Abby Wambach:
It’s a very insulting campaign now that you think about it.
Glennon Doyle:
Screw you January PR people, screw you.
Abby Wambach:
It’s a great way to run an economy.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, exactly.
Abby Wambach:
It’s a great way.
Glennon Doyle:
Because what it’s really about, the PR for January is really just everybody on earth who’s trying to sell you this shit that will certainly make you a new year, new you.
Amanda Doyle:
So it’s new rule. New year, screw you.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. Screw you January. Is my January vibe. But what I will tell you is I do not think that you need to be better. I think you are perfect right now, but there is a cool thing. When I think about this, me self, this soul level self inside of me, that’s been with me for forever and will be with me forever more. That one thing that has saved me at every point of my life, no matter what identities are changing or relationships are changing is returning to that self, over and over and over again, like a touch tree. A thing that I’m coming back to.
Glennon Doyle:
And when I think, what the hell is that, that I’m talking about, that self, what I would describe it as is this churning stillness inside of me. That’s the best I can describe it right now. That it is a stillness, but it is a moving stillness inside of me that if I return to, it saves me.
Glennon Doyle:
And so what I would say is “Let’s have an episode today that’s about not being better, but being still, and how can we use stillness to save us?”
Glennon Doyle:
I was thinking in prep for this little conversation with y’all about how I’ve kind of experienced life thus far to be three different parts. Well, from when I got sober. Because I don’t know what the hell was before that. That was just a-
Amanda Doyle:
It was a prologue, very dicey prologue.
Glennon Doyle:
It was a very dicey prologue is what it was yeah. Bit of a tornado. But it feels as an adult, there’s this level one where you’re just becoming whoever the world told you who to be. You’re just like, you look at the world and say, “What is makes for a successful person.” And then you just gather up those things as the best you can, right. Try to become a good whatever. Whatever your culture has decided, a good mother, a good wife, a good partner, a good worker, a good community, whatever, you build that way.
Glennon Doyle:
And then you burn out from that and you wake up and you realize, you look at your life and your like, “This is not my beautiful life.” You’re like, “What the hell?” I did all the things they told me and either I crashed and burned or I just feel meh about all of it. So then you level up to this level two.
Abby Wambach:
I love level upping.
Glennon Doyle:
Level up, which is this time where you actually figure out who you are and what you desire and what your true feelings are and your true ambition and your true intuition and imagination. You create a self separate from what the world told you. I feel like that’s what a lot of untamed is about. Creating this self, who am I? What are my feelings? What do I want? What are my boundaries? What are my values?
Glennon Doyle:
And then you kind of figure out who you are. And then, and you know that there’s this part we’re trying enter into now, which is this other level. Which happens when you figure out you have created such a self that you cannot stand your damn self. You’ve created so many boundaries that you can’t stand anybody. Your values are so strong that you are kind of not able to see other, you just you’ve self yourself out. And then I feel there’s this third level, which is transcending the self. We watch that Ram Dass especially recently, that was like, “You spend your whole life becoming somebody but the actual goal is to become nobody.”
Abby Wambach:
If feel so counterproductive. You spend the whole first part of your life being somebody that you’re not, then you spend the next part of your life trying to find the person and that somebody that you are, and then you spend the rest of your life trying to become nobody, exactly. To lose thyself, that which you just found.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, to become as wise as you were, when you were born. And I don’t think you really get from level one to level two level three and that it’s this permanent thing. I just feel I’m always dipping in between all of it. Every single day, I’m finding myself, becoming who the world wants me to be and then finding my fire and being all and then transcending, it’s all every single day.
Amanda Doyle:
Studies of happiness and age find that people are least happy and least satisfied with their lives in their twenties, thirties and early forties. There is the worst satisfaction of life in midlife. And then you gain an appreciation for life as you age. It’s crazy because not withstanding ageism and sexism and this kind of archetype in the media of this miserable old woman, it’s actually, women are increasingly happy after age 55. So they’re just have better wellbeing and lower levels of anxiety and stress. And actually women are consistently rank higher than men in life satisfaction as they grow older. The happiest people period are women age 65 to 79. So even if none of this rings true, I think there is kind of a low grade process happening in us where either it’s, we’ve learned from our life or we’re learning because we’re getting closer to death about what’s important.
Glennon Doyle:
God, that’s so hopeful to me. It’s counter-cultural, because the culture promises us that we are done as women after what, now it’s probably 18. I don’t know the ages where they tell us were worthless. And what I see in my life is what you’re saying. That I want to look at most 20 year olds, 30 year olds and say, “Honey, hold on it gets better.”
Glennon Doyle:
You stop when you finally figure out that, oh, I can’t please everyone. It’s the phenomenon of people saying, “I’ve run out of fucks to give.” That is a joke, but it’s not. It’s this very deep letting go of, oh, I see the game here and I’m not going to play anymore and I’m just going to please myself. The very thing that the world tells us we should fear, which is that the world will stop looking at you like an object, is probably what is freeing. When the world stops praying on you, in a million different ways, not just for prey, I’m not just talking about sexually and physically although that is real, but for everything. The world just looks at women as objects to serve, to fix, to… So when you start to disappear, in terms of the culture, that might be the first time you actually can exist inside your own skin.
Abby Wambach:
Oh that feels so exciting.
Glennon Doyle:
I know.
Amanda Doyle:
It is. It’s the great giving up. That’s what the, I’ve run out of fucks, is basically when you can still strive to meet any kind of standard, is keeping you miserable. When you’re out of the game and I’m not saying, I’m saying from a cultural perspective, you’re in pursuit of something else at that point. And I think that actually dovetails really well with you wanting to talk about stillness today, because stillness is a lot of a great giving up it’s you know-
Glennon Doyle:
When I think about those levels that I was just talking about, which I think sometimes correlate with age often, twenties and early thirties are this striving to be what the world tells us to be. And then we kind of find our own backbone and hard and soul in our mid thirties and then we try that for a while and then often people, like you’re saying around their fifties, let go of that identity too.
Glennon Doyle:
And when I think about what is the, for me, what is the magic trick of the leveling up? What is the teacher, that has always been there to push me up a level it’s always stillness. In a million different, well, actually just a few ways, getting still has been the greatest teacher of my life. Just forcing myself, so, I wanted to talk today about, well, I want to tell a story of about stillness and how I first discovered its power. And I’m excited to talk about it because I haven’t talked about it in so long and I don’t know how it’s going to feel now. I used to think it was so smart and now I’m, it was such-
Abby Wambach:
Revolutionary.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, oh my God.
Abby Wambach:
10 years ago.
Glennon Doyle:
It was epiphany to me. So a long, long time ago, after I found out about the infidelity in my first marriage, we’ve gotten to this place now with our family, that all is well, but that was horrifying, terrifying time for me.
Glennon Doyle:
I really, for those of you who haven’t been with us since the early days I was married for a decade and my then husband told me that he had been unfaithful to me pretty much our whole marriage. And I was deeply shaken and so afraid because I had no idea what to do. I had very little kids and I could not see a solution. I could not see staying with this person and living with that kind of pain and dishonesty and betrayal in my own home. And I could not see leaving because breaking up my family at that point felt like an impossibility to me. And so I was just in a slice of how-
Abby Wambach:
That was your experience because there’s a lot of people out there that must leave.
Glennon Doyle:
Or must stay.
Abby Wambach:
Or must stay.
Glennon Doyle:
Clearly, I mean, I did both. I get, I understand completely. But at that moment I had no, those moments where you just feel frozen because this way is impossible and that way is impossible.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
I just couldn’t I spent all day just trying to make something make sense in my brain and I in my heart and nothing, there was nothing and I was so furious. And then when you’re a young person, you have children, you can’t even deal with your own stuff because your kids are constantly there and you’re trying to help them through. Anyway, I was in a rough place. I was going to therapy and explaining a lot of my rage and pain. And my therapist recommended that I go to yoga. And I was like, “No, that’s not going to happen.” I did not have a lot of woo-woo, back then.
Amanda Doyle:
I know, I can’t believe there’s ever a time where you didn’t have woo-woo, it’s so wild to think about it.
Glennon Doyle:
I mean, now I’m just woo-wooed out.
Abby Wambach:
Five incense burnings a day. Candles lit, we are a fire hazard literally.
Glennon Doyle:
I know, it’s just, this smells are so, well, we always talk about that, but it makes me feel there’s more magic when the incense is going. Anyway-
Abby Wambach:
Whatever floats your boat sweetheart.
Glennon Doyle:
Thank you love. So I said, “No,” but then there’s this one morning where I’ll never forget it. The kids were at the kitchen table. I was at the counter in the kitchen and my ex-husband walked over to me and tried to put his hand on my arm and yanked my arm away just like really, really hard. And I looked over and the kids were watching the whole thing. And I remember one of them going, “Mommy, what’s wrong?” And I was just like, “Nothing. Everything’s fine, everything’s fine. Fine, fine, fine, fine.” And I sat and grabbed them and, I just thought, oh, this is we’re all lying to each other, I’m telling them it’s fine. They know something’s wrong. I’m teaching them not to trust their own instincts. All of it was just so I drove to drop them off at school and then I drove straight to this freaking yoga studio that I’d driven by a million times.
Glennon Doyle:
And I walk into the studio and there’s all the freaking incense. I have no, Matt. I don’t know what’s happening. Just where do I go? Okay. So the nice lady sent me into this room. I sit down in this room and you all know this story. I, it was 490 degrees in that-
Abby Wambach:
So it was a hot yoga class that you didn’t.
Glennon Doyle:
Well, I didn’t know that. I just thought that the air conditioning was broken. I just sat there and thought, why does my life suck so much? All of this is happening to me. And then now I go to the one yoga studio that the air conditioning’s broken. But all these other women are sitting there in the heat. So I’m like, “Forget it, I’m leaving.” I pick up my little rented mat and start to walk out. And then this yoga teacher walks in. So then I just sit right back down.
Amanda Doyle:
Because we are nothing, if not pleasing of authority figures. Yes. Okay. I was just repositioning. Thank you so much.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly. I was like, “Fuck this, I’m out of here. Oh, hi, just had to pee. I’ll be right back. I’m looking to get an A plus in whatever class this is. Thank you.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh my gosh. Isn’t that so true?
Glennon Doyle:
So I sit down, the woman says, “Welcome to hot yoga.” And I’m just like, “Oh, what kind of, what slice of fresh hell have I stepped into?” She sits down on her mat. So I sit down on my mat, everyone else is sitting on mat. And then she says, “Let’s all set our intentions for the day.” Now how normal does this sound? Now we always set. We set intentions, we do all of these things, right, babe.
Abby Wambach:
But the first time, the first go around with somebody setting intentions is like, what the hell are you talking about?
Glennon Doyle:
I was like, “What?” She might just come in with a witch hat and a cauldron. I was like, “What is this sorcery that’s happening here?” So the freaking lady next to me says, I swear to you, I swear to both of you on this worst day of my life, this lady goes, “My intention is to radiate, loving kindness to all sentient…” Is that how you say the sentient? Isn’t it sentient? I think it’s sentient.
Abby Wambach:
Oh God.
Glennon Doyle:
I don’t know.
Abby Wambach:
I just have only heard you say sentient beings.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s how it’s spelled. And I usually say things how they’re spelled, because I only read.
Abby Wambach:
How do you spell it?
Glennon Doyle:
S-E-N-T-I-E-N-T.
Abby Wambach:
But sentient.
Glennon Doyle:
I wanted to stab this peaceful lady. I just felt my intention is to make it through this class without slapping everyone.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. She was out-staging everybody with her freaking intention here.
Glennon Doyle:
I mean, are you serious? We’re just trying to get through the day. I give an intention. I say, “My intention is just to make it through whatever’s about to happen here over this next hour, without picking up my mat and running out the door.”
Amanda Doyle:
Very good intention.
Glennon Doyle:
And well, actually it was, I think it was a good intention because the yoga instructor looked at me like I had some said something very revolutionary.
Amanda Doyle:
Like you were sentient, whatever it is being.
Glennon Doyle:
I was one of those beings they were talking about. So she looks at me and she says, “Okay, you just sit there and stay on your mat.” And I was like, “Okay, I can probably do that.” Okay so here’s what happens, the woman starts the class. She’s telling everyone to do all of these various choreographed situations. The other people know how to do the choreographed situations. I sit there on my mat for 50 minutes in the hundred and 50 degrees. Well, everyone else does their stretches. And what happened to me was my first experience of deep, deep stillness okay. Because what I figured out is I was running so fast from what had just happened to me in my life. I had been running I think since I actually first got sober.
Glennon Doyle:
I think this was my first deep sobriety experience in that class. Because, when I got sober 10 years before, I immediately was like, I was pregnant. I got married when I was sober for four minutes. I was like trying so desperately to become, I was the level one. I was trying so desperately to become everything though… I was trying to be a good girl. I had been a bad girl my whole life. I was trying to be a good girl.
Abby Wambach:
I mean no, but-
Glennon Doyle:
And that’s what I had. And I just decided I’m just going to push under the rug. I’m going to push it under the bed. All of my addiction, all of my pain, I’m just going to push it under there. I’m going to become this upstanding citizen. And then this thing happened in my marriage and I was so terrified of the future. And I was so ashamed that this was my life and I was avoiding all of it.
Glennon Doyle:
And then while I was sitting there for that 50 minutes, I just let it all come up. It was every single fear, every single bit of shame, all my anger, all my memories, they just started all popping up one at a time, like a twisted game of Whac-A-Mole where all the moles are your worst, the things you think will kill you, if you feel them. And I had no mallet and I was just crying and just, it all came up. And then at the end of the class, there’s this thing that they do in yoga called Shavasana. Anyway, it’s a nap. It’s a little nap.
Abby Wambach:
It’s the best part.
Amanda Doyle:
If they just did that the whole time everyone would do yoga.
Abby Wambach:
So your teacher just told you just to lay there the whole time.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, she was amazing. And then she, no, I didn’t lay there. I was sitting.
Abby Wambach:
Oh, I see you just sat there. Just sit there the whole time and you just didn’t move.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly.
Amanda Doyle:
She exercised her intention. She stayed true.
Glennon Doyle:
I stayed on my mat and didn’t run out and I’m telling you, this yoga instructor knew something big was happening. She was looking at me with her encouraging face. Her encouraging face was like, “You’re doing a good job.” I mean, I was bawling. Clearly she knew something was happening. Then at the end of yoga, I was in the nap laying down, just rung out with sweat and tears and all of the things. And that was the first experience I had with the power of doing nothing. The power of not running, the power of staying on your mat of not picking up your mat and running out of the room, which is what I was symbolically doing with every feeling that I had, because I felt if I let the memories come up, if I let the pain arise, if I let it all be and looked at it, I would die.
Glennon Doyle:
And I think that was my real first understanding of what sobriety is, which is just a, not running because I had really kind of replaced the running with booze to the running of achievement and of identity building. And so that’s when I stopped being afraid of my feelings. I was, it was like that deep stillness of refusing to run from emotion. It didn’t free me from pain. I feel pain all the time, but it freed me from being terrified of pain. I don’t have to be afraid of pain anymore. I can allow it all to come up.
Amanda Doyle:
I’ve heard you tell that story so many times. And it’s the first time that I have thought of the fact of stillness, that perfect storm happening, because it was the first time that you didn’t have motion in your decisions too. When you got pregnant with Chase, okay, I’m getting married, I’m having a family, I’m doing the thing. You get the house, you have the kids, you get the family together, or you’re going, going, going, going. I’m just thinking for the first time is part of that ability to have that stillness set in was precisely because there was no forward motion in your ability to make the decision. Because if you had been like, “I’m staying, no matter what,” then you would’ve been like, “Insert couples therapy insert everything we need.” You would’ve project managed that. Or if you were leaving, you would’ve been project managing that. But the fact you were in this intractable middle space where you couldn’t make a decision made you have to.
Glennon Doyle:
Wow, that is so interesting because first of all, I’ve never thought about that before, but it also is how I tend to fix problems is rush into something else. And that is what makes me feel progress is happening, that is a bit of a numbing too. It’s like sometimes is our stuckness. It’s almost a claustrophobic feeling of, oh my God, there has to be, it’s a suffocating, there has to be a decision that will relieve this pain. And when there is no decision that will relieve the pain, is that perhaps an invitation to stillness, there’s still more, that needs to be healed or faced and your life won’t allow you movement until you faced that which stillness will bring up.
Amanda Doyle:
I think maybe that we will avoid stillness at every possible cost. And so, because we will only succumb to stillness when we absolutely have to, maybe it’s those play of stuckness where we kind of get that gift, because if we can move left or move right. Versus staying still, we absolutely will. So it’s those moments that you have that are horrible. I wouldn’t wish them on anyone, but they are unique in that you’re so desperate for any kind of shift and there is no external shift you can make. So it has to be an internal shift.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. I mean, I couldn’t agree more. It feels like all of us, I mean, I can just remember the times in my twenties, I’ve had friends who were trying to get me into meditation, do more yoga and I’m just like, “Oh yeah.” But deep down, I knew that that was the thing that was helping me the most. I knew deep down that sitting quietly for 10, 15, 20 minutes a day is going to be a thing that can help, but why wouldn’t I do it?
Glennon Doyle:
I know, because it’s the hardest thing. And so that’s an interesting point because I’m thinking, when I think about the moments of stillness that have changed my life, they always are right after a massive rock bottom. So a massive rock bottom and then there after that is the big stillness that has shifted something for me. So is it the fact that stillness is the gift of rock bottom or is stillness always there? We just only will go there when we have completely run out of any other option?
Abby Wambach:
Any other option?
Amanda Doyle:
I think that’s exactly when it is. I mean, I think it’s the latter because of course it’s available to all of us. We just only take it when it’s the only thing available to us. I mean, it’s available all the time to all of us, but we will only take it when it’s the only thing available to us.
Abby Wambach:
It’s like praying. It’s like praying to God for me, it’s like praying to God at the end.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah. You’re like, “I’m literally out of every other option.”
Abby Wambach:
I will do anything. I promise I’ll go to church on Sundays from now on I’ll believe in you from now on. And then there’s meditation after that.
Glennon Doyle:
After that. That’s right. It’s because it’s very hard. It’s the simplest hardest thing. The truth is in the stillness and who the hell wants that?
Abby Wambach:
I think it’s fear for me.
Glennon Doyle:
Of what’s going to come up.
Abby Wambach:
I feel I’ve been afraid of my internal world self, of finding out who I am. I’m a fraud, I’m an imposter. Any second now people are going to catch me for not being real and true.
Glennon Doyle:
Totally. I always feel that way.
Abby Wambach:
What the fuck is that about?
Amanda Doyle:
Well, let’s talk about that because Glen, you said that’s the first time that you were still with your feelings, that you weren’t afraid of them. What does it mean about us? That we’re afraid of our feelings? What does it we are afraid of? What is the thing that keeps us in motion?
Glennon Doyle:
Well, I have a couple thoughts in this moment. One is, as we talk about a lot, we are not taught how to experience uncomfortable emotions. We think that the pain of uncomfortable emotions ends in death. We do not understand that we can feel rage and anger and sadness and heartbreak and that it will go through us and pass. Because I think we just live in a culture that is so obsessed with happiness.
Abby Wambach:
Sadness is not marketable. It’s just not. It’s not, sad Christmas, sad holidays. It’s happy everything. Everything is fucking happy. Happy Christmas, happy holidays, happy new year. We should change it. Medium New year.
Amanda Doyle:
Mediocre have a mediocre New year.
Abby Wambach:
Mediocre day.
Glennon Doyle:
Well happyish. I’ve always liked happyish. Happyish ever after. And then maybe there’s something that our feelings will make us do. There are conversations that I need to have that when I feel my anger kind of remind me that I have to have that conversation. Or resentments, where I feel like, “Oh, that’s right, you still are in that friendship that is not good for you.” In the stillness, your feelings kind of guide you toward hard decisions.
Abby Wambach:
They guide you towards truth.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. And those truthy things are decisive hard thing that are disturbing to your life.
Glennon Doyle:
I also wanted to talk about this second version of stillness because I would say the first version for me is a stillness with feelings. It’s a stillness that allows emotions to exist and live and be acknowledged and be released in one way or another.
Abby Wambach:
To feel the energy of motion inside you.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. It’s like what, emotion. Right energy and emotion. It’s energy and motion so it can’t be completely stagnated we can’t ignore it has to be released in one way or another. I mean, that’s what we teach our kids. It’s okay to feel this thing. How do you feel? There’s a lot of adults that get to the point that they don’t know how to feel their feelings and how to sit with it. And so that was a big epiphany for me. But there was this second experience that I had with stillness that taught me something completely different.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. So this was a teacher where a time when stillness was a teacher, again for me, it taught me something completely different. So sometime later when I was still in this shit storm of what am I going to do? We’d already been through, this is my first marriage, we’d already been through tons and tons of therapy. I could not find peace to save my life. I could not find peace about going, I could not find peace about staying. I did not know what I wanted to do, I did not know what I wanted to do. I would go back and forth every single day, argue with myself, argue with myself one night I find myself sitting on the bed, just shoveling Ben & Jerry’s into my mouth and Googling, what do I do if my husband is a cheater, but also a really good dad, enter.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. So I was Googling my one wild precious life. I was asking a bunch of bots and trolls if they knew what I should do with my life.
Abby Wambach:
Bots and trolls.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. And I mean, I had, that was looking at that question in the Google search bar was a wake up call to me. It was oh my God, when did you start trusting literally everyone else on earth, more than yourself. And up to that moment, you guys, I have been calling friends, asking them what I should do. What would they do. Reading every single article that anyone has ever written about infidelity and broken up families and yada, yada, yada, I had taken freaking buzz freed quizzes. You know, those quizzes that 16 year olds make in their parents’ basement.
Glennon Doyle:
I was getting advice from those.
Abby Wambach:
I like those Buzz. I’m like, “Who am I, who am I going to be?
Glennon Doyle:
I will always take all the quizzes.
Abby Wambach:
I love them.
Glennon Doyle:
But I realized looking at that, the computer that night, I have one life and I am never going to live my one life if I don’t figure out what I want to do. If I don’t keep desperately searching outside of myself for somebody to tell me what to do, if I don’t quit living my life by inquiry and consensus and permission. So that is the kind of moment that rock bottom, that kind of advice, rock bottom, I guess. Lack of self trust, rock bottom, desperate, searching for approval, rock bottom is when I committed myself to stillness again, it’s when I decided that’s when I started to sit in my closet for seven minutes at a time to try to, I just kept feeling everyday I’m waking up and asking the world what I should do.
Glennon Doyle:
If you want to do that, it’s easy to do because the exterior voices in our lives are so freaking loud. Here’s your next audio book, here’s your next TV show, here’s your next expert, here’s your next, minister, teacher, whatever. There’s all these voices on the outside of ourselves that it drowns out this kind of knowing that we all have inside of ourselves. And that was a weird return to stillness. It was just this desperation for some kind of wisdom.
Abby Wambach:
So you were going in the closet for seven minutes and doing a kind of meditation. How did you learn about this meditation? Or were you just sitting there quietly, because I kind of think that’s my favorite definition of meditation, sit quietly.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, I didn’t have any special technique or anything back then, I just was committed to quiet. Stillness had already taught me something and I kind of instinctively knew that that was the place to return to when I was lost. And instinctively knew that there was something to be found there that I would never find in all of my desperate searching outside of it. So that time is when I found this inner, it’s not a voice, it’s just what I call the knowing. It’s intuition, it’s spirit, it’s whatever, you call it gut Abby. It’s this inner guide that always knows what I need to do next. It never tells me the five year plan, but it always guides me towards the next right thing. And then when you commit to the next right thing, it gives you the next thing. And then it becomes a yellow brick road. Where can find your entire way home, just one thing at a time. So do you experience that knowing or that intuition, how do you experience the knowing and is it, do you find it stillness?
Amanda Doyle:
Well, intuition, first of all, everyone experiences it. It’s not just, if you believe in the woo-woo. I mean, it’s a real thing. Intuition is the ability to know something without analytical reasoning. It bridges the gap between conscious and non conscious parts of our mind. So whether you believe in the woo-woo knowing or not, it is a thing that’s happening. The science shows that intuition operates through the entire right side of the brain and through our gut, that’s why it’s called gut instinct. So the enteric nervous system is located in your gastrointestinal tract and it’s full of neurons that convey information just like the brain does. So you are having, whether you acknowledge it or not, your body is sending signals through your gut and through the right side of your brain. So I just feel whether you believe in it or not, it’s there. But I think I really resonated with what you said before about kind of coming from the most desperate moments where we literally have nothing else that we can turn to, or some of the best practice zones for that.
Amanda Doyle:
And I think it is for me when things were miserable enough that I was desperate enough to try to figure out whether there was any kind of something better, a better idea or a better way to feel that happened right after my divorce. And I think that that wrecked me so much in my view of how the world worked, that I wasn’t willing to rely on how the world was working anymore. And that how it kind of in that darkness, I started looking for any kind of light for anything that made me feel alive. I didn’t know what I wanted, or I didn’t know what a plan would be. I didn’t even know how to trust what I wanted because of what I’d just been through.
Amanda Doyle:
Ashley Ford’s new book, Somebody’s Daughter, which is so amazing. In her book she has this incredible story of this moment in her life and she says, “Inside of myself, I let go. For half a minute I was flying, for half a minute I knew I had it in me to tell the truth and be loved anyway.” And for me that’s what inner knowing feels like. What joy and freedom and anything that makes me feel alive. It just always shows up just about for a half a minute. It’s never sustained, and it’s not a static place of arrival. It’s sadly and tragically. It’s just for kind of half a minute of believing and half a minute of seeing another way for yourself.
Amanda Doyle:
And at that time in my life, I was so desperate for anything that made me feel a little more alive, that I just started to take a chance that I could go towards that and eventually feel more alive. That to me is how we know that something is for us, how we know that something is of our knowing and our choosing is that we can practice learning what our intuition is by running toward anything that feels a half a minute of being alive. And I think anything that feels like freedom to you is what you can trust.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s good.
Glennon Doyle:
I just have one question for you about that. The 30 seconds of freedom, when you experience that feeling, and then everything goes back to shit normal mundane life.
Amanda Doyle:
Always, always inevitably.
Glennon Doyle:
Right, exactly. So are you able to tap because the feeling isn’t enough, right? Are you able to tap back into the feeling, remember the feeling and make decisions in your mundane life based on what that flash of freedom taught you?
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think in a day in a month in a year that is in that claustrophobic intractable middle place, you were just talking about for those two times where you couldn’t go left or right and the internet wasn’t even telling you what to do. There’s nothing that I think, those 30 seconds at a time that are these kind of raindrops in a desert. It’s not going to fill you up, it’s not going to take your thirst away, but it’s enough to remind you that water exists. It’s enough to show you it isn’t always going to be exactly like this and there is a better place for you, but it’s not here and it’s not right now. So you have to rush toward whatever looks and feels like that freedom. Because that’s going to take you closer to the place that is not right now.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. That’s good. All right y’all for the next joint thing today, I think we just find a minute of stillness.
Amanda Doyle:
One minute? I mean, if you feel-
Glennon Doyle:
Can we do a minute?
Abby Wambach:
If you’re feeling kind of hardcore, get to two.
Glennon Doyle:
No, we’re not going to do two. We can do hard things we can’t do impossible things. One minute of stillness pod squad and see what comes up. We love you.
Glennon Doyle:
Next episode I’m going to talk about some new stillness that is kind of rocking my world these days.
Amanda Doyle:
Ooh, can’t wait.
Glennon Doyle:
Things get hard this week, don’t forget. What are we not going to forget love bug.
Amanda Doyle:
We are not going to forget that we can do hard things.
Glennon Doyle:
Hard things. See you soon.
Amanda Doyle:
Bye.
Glennon Doyle:
I give you Tish Melton and Brandi Carlile.
Glennon Doyle:
We can do hard things is produced in partnership with Cadence13 studios. Be sure to rate, review and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts. Especially be sure to rate and review the podcast if you really liked it. If you didn’t, don’t worry about it. It’s fine.