5 Ways to Be More Present: Indigenous Wisdom from Kaitlin Curtice

March 9, 2023

Glennon Doyle:

Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. Today is, as our friend Allison says, a real TR, which means a real treat. Her mom used to say, “This is a real TR,” which was supposed to be short for treat, but actually it’s longer than treat. It’s a little confusing. Anyway, today we have a real TR, our dear friend, Kaitlin Curtice. Kaitlin Curtice is an award-winning author, poet, storyteller, and public speaker. As an enrolled citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, Kaitlin writes on the intersections of spirituality and identity.

Glennon Doyle:

She is a wise and vital voice on decolonizing our bodies, faith and families, and the freedom and peace of embodiment, finding wholeness in ourselves, our story, and our lineage. Her new book, Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day, examines the journey of resisting the status quo by caring for ourselves, one another, and Mother Earth and is beautiful and is available now. Welcome, Kaitlin.

Kaitlin Curtice:

Thank you. I’m so happy to be here with you.

Glennon Doyle:

We are delighted.

Amanda Doyle:

I learned so much from your story about assimilation as a violence that disconnects us from ourselves and that compels us to erase who we are. And then the process of deconstruction that you walk us through, that seems to me to be the digging through the rubble to unearth and remember who we are. You offer so many concrete tools because all of that seemed so aspirational and wonderful, but it’s really hard to find an inroad there. If the whole world is a relentless effort to separate us from our humanity, then it’s almost like our whole life needs to be a relentless fight for the wholeness.

Glennon Doyle:

Yes, yes.

Amanda Doyle:

Can we start at the very beginning? Before we need to remember, before we got dismembered, can you talk to us about your life before you were nine?

Kaitlin Curtice:

Yeah, and yes to what you were just saying. It’s so hard and I just want us to learn to be human together. That’s what I want more than anything, and that really involves every aspect of who we are. When I was young, I learned how to balance a checkbook, but I never learned how to listen to my own body. I never learned how to engage with Mother Earth. Those are the things we learn. We come to a certain age and we’re told, “Okay, here’s how to be an adult. Here’s how to enter the capitalist system that we have set up here for you to be successful.”

Kaitlin Curtice:

And right at that moment, that is a disembodiment because we’re taught to enter into that harshness of the world and lose the softness of who we are, even as kids. I was a sensitive little kid. I was the baby of my family. My sister’s nine years older than me and my brother’s seven years older than me. My family moved a lot. My father worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, so he was an Indigenous police officer. I was born in Oklahoma and we moved back and forth from Oklahoma to New Mexico multiple times. And then we ended up in Missouri, in this very small conservative town in Missouri.

Kaitlin Curtice:

It was really interesting, but my childhood was marked by poverty. We lived in trailer parks. We lived in a lot of different places that were difficult. We ate commodity foods as an Indigenous family. We had all of those markers of poverty. My siblings and I would make news shows and we’d make up commercials and we loved music. Our whole family loved music. We loved movies. We loved art. It’s always a mix. It’s always a mix of these things that you remember. When I was young, I also just remember, I love to reenact the scene from Beauty and the Beast, the Disney cartoon, where she’s out in a field like blowing the dandelions into the air.

Kaitlin Curtice:

I would just go into my backyard singing the same song over and over, waiting for the wind to take the seeds off the dandelion, which it didn’t, so then you spend two minutes blowing it out, getting lightheaded, but I just kept singing. It was my life. Having this interaction with magic and nature, and then it just begins to get away from you or trauma enters. And then for me, I realized that television, these characters on these movies and TV shows that I loved were my safe space I think growing up. I coped with them. I spent my time with them. I did my homework alongside them every day after school.

Kaitlin Curtice:

These characters in my favorite movies and shows became the safe place for me. That was up until eight. We had lived in Missouri for a few years. My parents got divorced when I was nine.

Glennon Doyle:

And then what happened?

Kaitlin Curtice:

My parents divorced. My dad is Potawatomi, so my Potawatomi heritage is from that side of my family. It was abrupt. He just said, “I have to leave,” and he left. My brother and I were at home and he told us. It’s like those out of body things. When you’re a kid, you don’t quite understand, you don’t quite grasp it, but I still have the memory of it.

Glennon Doyle:

Kaitlin, you just said out of body, and you said a minute ago that trauma separates us from our bodies. And that is what happens. It feels out of body because when trauma enters, we exit our bodies. And that’s disembodiment.

Kaitlin Curtice:

It’s so interesting because I remember as a kid when that particular trauma happened, what I wanted more than anything was to feel close to God, to feel close to myself, to feel close to my family, like some sort of safety to hold me. I remember just sitting in my room praying like, “God, I need a physical touch right now. Is there a way you can just become real arms for a second and give me a hug? I’d freely appreciate it.” I had those moments. It’s so interesting now trying to practice embodiment, recognizing how my body all these years has given me signals. Our body’s give us signals. They’re always saying something, and we don’t learn how to listen to that.

Kaitlin Curtice:

My parents divorced. My dad moved to Oklahoma. We did visitations with him, but it was hard. It was hard for me as a kid. I didn’t feel connected anywhere, really. It really was just this continual severing, and then severing and grasping at the same time. You’re losing things. You’re losing yourself. You’re losing pieces of safety, and then you’re just grasping at the same time for anything. A few years after that, my mom got remarried to my stepdad, and he was, at the time, a Baptist pastor at this little church in our town. I grew up in the church. We grew up going to Baptist churches. Both of my grandmas on each side were Southern Baptist secretaries.

Kaitlin Curtice:

It was a part of our life, but becoming a pastor’s kid is a whole nother level. It is what it is. I was already well into the people pleasing stage of my existence. I was ready. I was ready to be the best kid

Glennon Doyle:

You were grasping. You were grasping, right?

Kaitlin Curtice:

Yeah. The best little worship leader, the best specials music singer. I was ready. I was doing it all. The church did become my safe space, but also my space of assimilation and pain and severing the ties to understanding what it means to be Potawatomi in a family that doesn’t know how to talk about it. Colonization has taken those healthy conversations from us. It’s taken that presence away of figuring out who we are as Indigenous people. A lot of us have to find our way back again as adults. That happens a lot.

Amanda Doyle:

It’s so fascinating that the medicine becomes the disease. If you are disconnected, you’ve lost the connection to your dad, you’ve lost the connection to your native culture, and you’re yearning for that. You need it. You’re reaching out, and here comes the evangelical church that’s like, “We’ll give you every connection you want,” but then it’s further disconnecting you, in many ways, eclipsing all of those parts of your identity.

Kaitlin Curtice:

Yeah, that’s the painful part of specifically that church culture is that I was safe. I was loved by the people in my church. I would never say I wasn’t. But in that process, it was still colonization. It was still assimilation. It was still trauma, and it left me with all the residual trauma and disembodiment that I now have to heal and work to heal. And that’s the story of so many of us who have been through this in various degrees and trying to find our way home.

Glennon Doyle:

How did specifically purity culture… Because when we talk about disembodiment and then we talk about evangelical way of life, purity culture seems to be a factor.

Abby Wambach:

What is purity culture?

Amanda Doyle:

Everyone reign blessings upon yourself if you don’t know what purity culture is.

Kaitlin Curtice:

Yes, yes. Memorial Hall in our town was the big-ish building where our true love waits, rallies were held, and it was always like the event, but the purity movement as I experienced it was this… Well, it’s connected also to the whole abstinence until marriage. Even in my public school, we learned very Christian things like, and your bodies will change multiple times throughout your life, and these are things that could help you process that. There’s so many resources we could have had that we just didn’t get.

Kaitlin Curtice:

The purity movement, there was a popular book called I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Josh Harris. I remember laying in my living and reading this book and saying to myself, “I will not kiss anyone until I am ready to marry them. My first kiss will be on the altar at my marriage, and I will not have sex.” All of the things. You stay pure, right? You stay pure. If you’re a girl, that means you dress appropriately and you don’t show your shoulders, because it’s always on you if anyone lusts after you. Ironically, my name means pure. Kaitlin means pure.

Glennon Doyle:

Oh god, Kaitlin.

Amanda Doyle:

You were screwed from the start. 

Kaitlin Curtice:

I was like, yes, I am pure.

Glennon Doyle:

Purity culture reminds me of the credit card machines. You know how you look at the card and it’s like, do not remove, do not remove, do not remove. You’re watching it and you’re like, I shouldn’t remove, and then remove now, remove now, remove now. Purity culture is like don’t have sex, don’t have sex, don’t have sex. And then the minute you get married, have sex, have sex, have sex. But you’re still traumatized from trying not to have sex because you thought it was so bad.

Kaitlin Curtice:

It’s horrible. It’s a horrible thing, and your body is bad. Your body parts, you don’t know how they work. It is so traumatizing, not just for women either, for young boys, what they’re taught about their bodies, it’s so insidious. But add on top of that being an Indigenous young woman, but I wasn’t connecting any of that until adulthood. Now, connecting that Indigenous women’s bodies, how they have been treated by America, by the government, the things that our bodies have been through. To put that layer of colonization on top of it and woven throughout is just such a… I don’t know. It just amplifies the grief and the violence. I still have my ring.

Glennon Doyle:

You still have your ring?

Kaitlin Curtice:

I just can’t get rid of it.

Glennon Doyle:

Tell everybody what the ring is. Tell everyone what the ring is.

Kaitlin Curtice:

The purity ring, you would buy it at a conference, or in some cases, a father would give it to the daughter as a…

Glennon Doyle:

It’s not creepy at all.

Kaitlin Curtice:

It’s not. No, no, it’s normal. 

Abby Wambach:

And you’d wear it?

Kaitlin Curtice:

In front of the church even sometimes. Yes, you’d wear it on your wedding finger. Mine said, “I am my beloved’s. My beloved is mine.” That ring, I loved it so much. I still have it. There are times where I’m like burning it would be fun, but I also just think I need to keep it for a little bit. I just need to remember, there’s a lot about our child selves that we blame.

Kaitlin Curtice:

There’s a lot in them, we blame them for these things that they went through. I don’t know, there’s just a softness I want to hold for her because she didn’t know. She didn’t know a lot. She didn’t know that she had grief and trauma. She didn’t know how to communicate the things she needed. Sometimes I just want those reminders to be softer toward her and toward myself.

Amanda Doyle:

Kaitlin, to me, the perversion, no pun intended, in the purity conversation, but the perversion of such a beautiful connection with God, with spirit. So many of us can relate to the fact of being taught to be ashamed of our bodies, be ashamed of what our bodies want. We’ll, of course, inevitably distance ourselves from our bodies. We have to. If we think our bodies and our desires are evil, we have to distance ourselves from ourselves. And then that becomes disembodiment. But for you as a Native woman, the whole additional giant layer of God being used as a basis for the theft of your ancestors’ land and bodies, and that is actually God’s will.

Glennon Doyle:

Talk to us about the Doctrine of Discovery.

Kaitlin Curtice:

Yeah, it’s so painful. I always point to Sarah Augustine and Mark Charles have both written on this extensively. Sarah Augustine, her book is called The Land Is Not Empty, and she writes specifically about this through a Christian lens as well. Men are given in the name of God the command to enter any lands that are deemed un-Christian, are deemed not worthy of God, and they can take what they want. It came from it’s called a papal bull. It was a document given by kings and queens or by royalty to allow these men, these conquerors to come and take the land. To have that as a basis of we will literally remove these bodies from this land.

Kaitlin Curtice:

If you already have a basis of not honoring land as a being, we don’t honor Earth as Mother Earth as a being. Sekmekwé is what we call her in Potawatomi. Having a relationship with her, which I think is so much of the collective trauma we carry in our bodies today, all of us, is that we don’t have a reciprocal relationship of care with the land anywhere. Anywhere we step, anywhere we exist, a relationship with the Earth. That Doctrine of Discovery gave permission in the name of God to do this, to cut up the land, to separate the people from the land. It just has continued, an ongoing colonization to this day.

Kaitlin Curtice:

We know that. Whether we recognize it or not, we do carry it in our bodies. All of us. We all do. Naming that is really important.

Glennon Doyle:

It shows us the connection between colonization and disembodiment. Because even when you hear that language, the way you’re using it, Kaitlin, it sounds like sexual assault to me. It sounds like you, powerful men, have the right to enter and conquer any unholy, that is so directly connected to purity culture in American, in Christian, in patriarchy. What is an unholy body, an impure body, is a woman’s body. It’s so directly related to why women need to be disembodied. Because in a world like ours, our bodies are not safe to live in because they can be taken over at any point without justice.

Kaitlin Curtice:

We have things like missing and murdered Indigenous women and relatives. We have our relatives that go missing all the time, and it’s not going to make the news, and lot of times those cases are not going to be solved. It’s so painful to constantly be reminded of our invisibility, but also the ways we’re sexualized in society as well. When I lead workshops, sometimes I have people write letters to Mother Earth and I tell them it’s a define the relationship letter. It makes people so uncomfortable because, well, one, it can bring up our childhood trauma. It really can. But also, what is it like to actually acknowledge this as a relationship?

Kaitlin Curtice:

What if you filled up a whole journal of letters to Mother Earth and you said, “I don’t know where things went wrong. I don’t know what happened, but I miss you, or I never knew you. Who are you?” How would that change even our climate conversations if we acknowledge this as a caring, reciprocal, beautiful relationship, a kinship? It would change a lot. I think it would change a lot if we were able to reframe that. But America and the Christianity that many of us have grown up with was one of dominion and assault and violence. There’s so much to undo. I don’t know, somehow I chose to be part of that. So here we are.

Glennon Doyle:

It’s a tiny job you got. It’s a tiny job, Kaitlin.

Amanda Doyle:

I agree completely with just the massive paradigm shift that creates when you even say Mother Earth, when you even say her, because it reminds me of the podcast we did with Jen Hatmaker when she was talking about how she learned from Hillary McBride to instead of say it about her body, she started referring to her body as she. And just that shift, she talks about how the empathy and the gentleness that she thought about her body with even just personalizing as she as opposed to it, and the way that you talk about the Earth and personify her, that gentleness and empathy is there.

Amanda Doyle:

It’s not a commodity. It is living and it’s wild that it’s a leap to think of the Earth as a living, breathing thing when it literally is. But that’s beside the point. Another part of your work, when you talk about the Earth in terms of the climate emergency you say, you think of the Earth as a mother screaming that she’s done. We are telling her again and again that she is beautiful and resilient, while we pillage and take from her, while we push her back down and tell her to keep getting up. It reminds me so much of how mothers across this nation and the world are overwhelmed and overburdened and overtaxed.

Amanda Doyle:

As a culture, we give them this kind of empty praise, “You’re a superhero. Here’s your greeting card. You’re not even a human,” instead of doing the thing that will actually reduce their overwhelm and reduce their burden by treating them better. We just call them a hero. It just makes me think of that connection between the Earth and mothers. What is the lesson that we need to learn about kinship with mothers and with Mother Earth to start to have that respect to treat them better?

Kaitlin Curtice:

Well, the line that you quoted from my new book, this is my problem with the term resilience, is that resilience should be us choosing our resilience, not an oppressor saying you’re resilient and then shoving you back down. And then you get up and they say, “Look, you’re resilient,” and then they do it again, over and over again. I share about that through also this lens of how we treat the Earth. Look how resilient you are. You’ve lasted all these years as we continue to take from you, as we continue to hurt you, as we continue to harm ourselves and harm you, but look how strong you are. You just keep taking it and you keep getting back up again.

Kaitlin Curtice:

You must be resilient because we say you are. At a conference a few years ago, I was on Pueblo Land in New Mexico, and I was the only Indigenous person at this entire conference. I took some time outside and the land just called to me. Now, I had grown up in New Mexico, and so the place is really special to me for many reasons. But it was this moment where Mother Earth was like, “I need you to feel something. I need you to stop for a second.” I sat on the ground and I put my hand on the ground. I just started weeping and I couldn’t control it.

Kaitlin Curtice:

It was as if for just a second, she was like, “This is how much it hurts. Feel it for a second because that’s all you can handle as a human. Feel this pain for a minute and then go on and do what you need to do.” But if we stopped to actually feel that, to feel the pain that mothers feel, to feel some of the things that they have been put through, if we stop to acknowledge the relationship between our bodies and government and land and colonization, there’s so much there. There’s so much there to unpack. I don’t fully know always how to change it, this whole conversation between the micro and the macro.

Kaitlin Curtice:

In social work, you study macro, which is the big systems, and the micro, which is the one-on-one or the everyday. What I learn about humans is that we need both. We need the small moments to change the way we think and the way we process our world, and then we need the macro. We need change on a larger level. But both of them have to happen. I think about that a lot with the way that women are treated and the way that the Earth is treated. There has to be the micro changes, the relationship change, and then we have to move to the systems and how they affect the Earth and affect women all over the world. They are connected. Even if we don’t realize it, they are connected.

Abby Wambach:

I’m actually struck in this moment right now at the connection, because I’m sitting here thinking, why are we so flippantly horrific to Mother Earth? And even us women, maybe we are just trying to get some sort of power anywhere we can. How we can reunite and connect again with Mother Earth, what are ways that we can actually reconnect?

Kaitlin Curtice:

Yeah, I love that you brought that up because throughout history, you see people or persons with power show the people below them they have power, and then those groups fight with each other to gain scraps of power. That is what humans have done throughout history is to survive. We fight with each other to try to gain any ounce of power to be close to the people at the top because we would like to survive. And in doing so, we brutalize each other. We hurt each other for centuries and centuries. That is such a painful reality of the human experience. But you’re right, and that we’re also doing that to the Earth because we can.

Kaitlin Curtice:

If we grew up in my Southern Baptist tradition, the language is always dominion, dominate, dominion. That was the language. I never heard the term kinship growing up or reciprocity or Mother Earth, any of it. I see specifically within different faith traditions some of that changing, and I see part of decolonization as some of that work of having those really hard conversations. I spoke at a women’s conference recently, and I gave them five ways to connect with the Earth. One was researching the history of colonization because we have done these things to the land, to a being, to who she is, and that has affected our bodies, that has affected society.

Kaitlin Curtice:

Researching colonization, researching things like the Doctrine of Discovery. One of the other things I said to go on walks or to look out a window or to bird watch. Any way of connection is connection, and it is a point of healing. My family, we’re a family of rock climbers, so we climb in a gym and outside. It has been one of the most healing things I’ve ever experienced is to be by rocks and to be on land that we acknowledge and we ask permission. We spend time in these places and we’re honoring the rock beings. We’re honoring these beings. When you go to a river and you recognize that water in that river has seen more life than any of us can even imagine, it has carried history on its skin.

Kaitlin Curtice:

It has carried us. These trees that we’re staring at literally helps us breathe, but also they have carried stories. They’ve sheltered all these people. Isn’t that so beautiful? We are terrified as humans of a lot of things. I think we’re really scared of our humility. I think we’re scared of that. The power and the ego, that doesn’t allow us to sit under a tree and say, “You’re really old and really wise. I bet you could teach me a few things.” That scares a lot of people to imagine doing that because what would it start to pull on? What would start to unravel? I told these women at this conference to talk to their houseplants and they all giggled.

Kaitlin Curtice:

You need to talk to your houseplants because these are beings that take care of us every day. They’re sitting in our homes. They’re bringing us joy. They’re cleaning our air. What if we thanked them and watered them and said, “Oh, you’re beautiful. Thank you.” It’s so funny and silly, but it would change something in us if we actively began to shift the way we think and examine our relationship to other beings. It really would.

Amanda Doyle:

That small thing that you’re talking about is monumental of just seeing your plants, seeing the earth, seeing the water, seeing the trees as a she or a them. Just that simple shift in your brain changes the way you experience everything. I would love to talk to you about when you’re talking about this connection to the land, opening up connections in yourself, you have this revelation while you are walking in a hike with your family and your one and a half year old son in Georgia. Can you please tell us that story?

Kaitlin Curtice:

Yeah. We were out on a hike on Muskogee and Cherokee land. You know how sometimes the sacred or God or Sekmekwé, Mother Earth, or your ancestors just stop you in your tracks. They’re like, hey, let’s notice something about your life on a grander scale than what you’ve been noticing. I’d already been asking some questions. I’d already been deconstructing some things and leaning deeper into aspects of my identity that I couldn’t even fully name, but again, grasping for embodiment, trying to understand. I will also say, a part of my own trauma and journey was in being disconnected from the land and finding safety and things like television characters and some of these things.

Kaitlin Curtice:

I didn’t do a lot outside. I would’ve rather watched a movie. A lot of people picture Indigenous people and they’re like, “Oh, you love to camp, and you love tepees, and you wear fringe, and you burn sage by your tepees.” Let’s not make assumptions. Some Indigenous people don’t like to camp. There was a lot that I had not experienced. My partner, Travis, has always been someone who has loved being outside. He’s always been adventurous in that way, and it taught me a lot in coming home to myself. I did it alongside him. We went to this spot that he had found to go hiking. My youngest, I was still breastfeeding.

Kaitlin Curtice:

There was this moment where I had to stop and feed him. There’s nowhere to sit down. I turn him sideways and I’m just still walking and I just feed him while we’re walking. In that moment, the lens of my life sort of zoomed out. You just zoomed out to see the whole thing. In our tribe, in the Potawatomi tribe, we had a group of people in Indiana who had a forced removal. I’m sure many people listening have heard of the Trail of Tears. We had something called the Trail of Death. It was in 1838 and it was a forced removal at gunpoint of a group of Potawatomi people who were forced to walk from Indiana to Kansas.

Kaitlin Curtice:

So walking to Kansas, to a land they had never been to or known anything about it. It was just in that moment that I could feel the mothers and the women and the grandmas who were walking with their babies, I could feel them in my own feet. I could feel their steps in mine and the trauma and the beauty and the glory of it, and the pain just completely just fell onto me. It was also this moment of asking, who are you and what are you going to do about it? It was like this flip just switched on for me.

Kaitlin Curtice:

And after that, it was a series of months of painful, exhausting realizations of coming to terms with my identity of all of who I am, of coming to terms with all aspects of what I was processing and who I am as a mother. If I don’t know what it means to be Potawatomi, then how are my kids going to know? I don’t want them to go through that like I did. I want to continue to break through the trauma and the colonization that has been put on us, and I want them to know more than I knew. It just flipped a switch that day. I got into our car and I just started journaling and writing, just trying to remember and hold onto that moment. It was really pivotal for me.

Glennon Doyle:

We’re all deconstructing. Every single person who has made it even close to this far on this podcast is deconstructing something, was taught a way of life that at some point for you, Kaitlin, it was in college where you think you took a literature class and was like, wait a minute. I mean, deconstruction comes fast for evangelicals. People are like, wait, there’s dinosaurs? It’s something that’s like very literal, right?

Amanda Doyle:

It either comes fast or not at all.

Glennon Doyle:

Or not at all because you protect your Jenga tower, right? You don’t let one block come out because you don’t want the whole thing to…

Kaitlin Curtice:

Yes, it’s true.

Glennon Doyle:

But what is so fascinating to me, Kaitlin, and something I go through over and over again is that with deconstruction of anything, whether it’s a family code or religion or whiteness or patriarch, it starts to deconstruct and then we want to replace it with something else. For you, you lost your connection to the Indigenous community. Evangelicalism, it’s like replace it with something else.

Glennon Doyle:

What I’m finding over and over again from a million different wise women and for myself is that the only thing that can replace a structure of thinking that’s off is not another one, but it’s embodiment. It’s embodiment. In your work, you offer us real things that we can do when you said that the way you pray, listen to this, you said that sometimes the first thing you say when you pray is, “God, how are you doing with all of this?”

Abby Wambach:

Wow.

Glennon Doyle:

“How does it feel to have to be aware of so many things?” I mean, Kaitlin, in the whole book, I sensed my whiteness as much as I did when you said that. I was like, I haven’t fucking checked in with God ever.

Amanda Doyle:

The only time I check in is you must be real busy because I haven’t gotten all the things asked for.

Glennon Doyle:

Circling back, circling back, God.

Amanda Doyle:

Did you receive my email? Just checking.

Glennon Doyle:

It’s so beautiful. Talk to us about embodiment and maybe can you start with how you talk about checking in with your little girl self?

Kaitlin Curtice:

I will say that a few years ago, right after I had first started therapy… It’s so funny, even in therapy I’m like, “My parents divorced when I was nine and my dad left, but it’s okay. I’ve forgiven him. I love him. I’m good.” My therapist was like, “That’s trauma.” I was like, “No, it’s fine. It’s just a thing. It happened. It was hard, but it’s okay.” Minimizing our trauma means we’re minimizing the strength of our inner children as well. We’re minimizing what they were. We’re not trusting that they did the best they could to take care of us in those times. Little Kaitlin held me as best she could.

Kaitlin Curtice:

Even though in young adulthood I was so disembodied, I was so lacking in how to communicate well and how to love others and myself, there are so many walls. But when I had just started therapy, I started noticing the pain that my body would tell me about like, oh man, my lower stomach really hurts. I just went to the most like, oh my God, this is bad, or I have abdominal pain. Oh, this is probably cancer. I went to the worst extreme. My lower back is hurting. I get these headaches. I just was noticing my body was telling me things, and I went to the worst extremes looking everything up.

Kaitlin Curtice:

And then I had to stop and realize, maybe my body’s just saying like, “Oh, this thing is really painful and you’ve been thinking about it a lot.” This is a trauma response. This is a stress response. It took me so long to realize that the trauma I’ve carried in my body since I was little still manifests in my adult body, and my adult body is still trying to tell me things just like my child body was trying to tell me things. Stopping and recognizing that what if I went slower and what if I stopped and learned to breathe and learned to listen to what they were telling me.

Kaitlin Curtice:

That’s really actually very helpful. I’ve gone through cycles of this. I’m still going through cycles of this. I’m still not very good at embodiment in the way that I think I should be good at it, which tells me a lot in what I just said. There’s that.

Glennon Doyle:

Get at it.

Kaitlin Curtice:

I didn’t know this was going to be therapy.

Glennon Doyle:

It always is, Kaitlin.

Amanda Doyle:

I’ve never really understood what embodiment is. But when you say embodiment is regaining what was lost so we can learn to be present again, I can understand that.

Glennon Doyle:

What does that mean to you, sissy?

Amanda Doyle:

The way it feels to me is we are not present now because, like Kaitlin just said, the trauma of growing up, we had to take care of ourselves. It was not how small the trauma was. It was how big we were in showing up to take care of ourselves, and we had to lose some of ourselves to survive in families, in institutions, in societies lying to us about our power and our history. You’re losing and losing and losing that part of yourself. Of course, you are not able to ever be present in an authentic whole way because it’s the very path that you’ve taken to survive that leaves you here fractured.

Amanda Doyle:

It seems to me that embodiment is going back and remembering. I think why Indigenous culture as you describe it, Kaitlin, is so powerful because it’s all about remembering. Nothing is just this point in time. Nothing is a point on a timeline. It’s this cyclical time. When you are healing now, you’re healing seven generations past. When you are healing now, you’re healing seven generations forward.

Glennon Doyle:

Do you keep a picture of yourself when you’re a little close, right?

Kaitlin Curtice:

Yeah, I have it on my laptop.

Glennon Doyle:

I do that too. Why do you do that?

Kaitlin Curtice:

I actually learned this from my friend Ruthie Lindsey. She’s just a beautiful author and speaker, and she has so much love for her child self. She writes about it in her book about this journey of learning to love her child self and keeping pictures. She has framed photos of her child self around her home. I don’t know what happens when you just stare at that picture you’re seeing? We lived it, but we may not remember where or how that picture was taken. I actually just yesterday on Instagram shared a photo of myself when I was seven or eight and just thinking about what she wanted and the angst that she carried in her little body and all the joy and all of the things.

Kaitlin Curtice:

It’s so full and it’s so deep. I will say about embodiment and our child selves, I’ve always been someone who lives in my head. The danger with any information we get that has to do with embodiment or health or care or self-love, I love to read about these things, and then I love keeping it in my head. It never goes below here, not even my heart. It just doesn’t even enter. But my head feels so good. Yeah, it’s so great. I have all this information. I love it and I categorize it and I could write about it, but to actually let it seep into my body is so hard. It’s so uncomfortable. It’s so painful for me even now, maybe especially now, because I know what I’m doing and it’s so much harder.

Kaitlin Curtice:

Dealing with anxiety, struggling with that, struggling with all of these things, loving my child self, those realities have to seep into our body and not just live in our heads. If you are someone like that, read all the books, but you have to let it also seep into your body, which can be really scary, because sometimes embodiment feels like a giant void, because it’s painful. Sometimes it is painful, but it is bringing us back home to ourselves. It is bringing us back home to God and to the sacred and all of these things, even in the painful parts of it.

Glennon Doyle:

I’m in this embodiment journey because of my therapy, and I just was talking to Liz about my 20 books about embodiment. She was like, “That should do it, G. Just go ahead and just keep reading about embodiment.” You can read 20 books about embodiment. But when you look at a picture of your little self, you realize that you are nothing but a nesting doll of every age that you have ever been inside your body. Our daughter just had her 17th birthday yesterday, and she had an existential crisis. That’s what she does. That’s who she is. She’s my kid. She said, “I cannot believe I’m never going to be 16 again.”

Glennon Doyle:

I said, “Honey, you’re going to be 16 for the rest of your life. You don’t just become 17 and let go of all the others. Now you get to be 17 and 16 and 15 and 14 and 13 because trust me…” Kaitlin, don’t you ever think about when people are in dementia and they go back to their childhood selves and that’s what they remember, it makes me think that that is who we are. We are at our core self. We are our child self.

Kaitlin Curtice:

Yup. Yeah, I think that’s why some personality tests and I even think the Enneagram, it’s asking you to examine your child trauma or your shadow, the things that happen in childhood. Even at the height of I want to live this very evangelical Christian life, even at the height of that when I was in my teens, I’m still me. At the core of who I am, I was a teenager who wanted to love people and the world better. I wanted to do kind things. That was still at the core of who I was then. Who I am now, it’s still there, but it got muddied and I was told who I was supposed to be instead of trusting who I am.

Kaitlin Curtice:

We still are those things even as adults. To have care for who we were, it’s still painful and we still make mistakes and there’s still so much grief. But to know inside at the core, at the root, we’re still who we’ve always been. Coming home to ourselves, that phrase that a lot of writers have written about, that just resonates so much with me, that coming home, because if we can’t be safe with ourselves, then what? Then what? It makes the world a much scarier place if we can’t at least love ourselves well.

Glennon Doyle:

If you want to know what embodiment is, you ask yourself, what does 10 year old Kaitlin need? Because 10 year old Kaitlin is not going to say that she needs a new business strategy. 10 year old Kaitlin is going to say, “I need rest. I need to walk outside. I need fresh air. I need to scream.” Talk to us about screaming.

Kaitlin Curtice:

Okay, this is funny because I’m not very good at screaming. It kind of scares me, but there are times when I know I need it, so sometimes I do. What I have found is that when I am rock climbing, I have permission to be loud. When I’m climbing on this wall, because rock climbing even in a gym, outside, rock climbing brings out the most raw. You’re on the wall thinking you’re probably going to die, even though you’re not because you’re attached to ropes. But your instincts kick in of like, I will survive this, but what it does for me is it drops me into my body. I actually have to shut my mind off completely if I want to climb well.

Kaitlin Curtice:

It’s so fascinating for me as someone who does struggle with anxiety, as someone who overthinks everything, climbing has helped me so much. Being able to yell on the wall and get those things out of my body has been so healing for me. On stressful days, my body craves getting it out. It’s like there’s just energy ping ponging around inside of me, mostly all in my head again. This is not very much room for a whole lot to ping pong around, and so then this area is just like, what is happening, and then I need to get it out or it’s bad.

Kaitlin Curtice:

That’s what it has done for me. Being on the wall or playing piano or writing, there are different things that get the energy out and get me out of my head. I would like to learn to scream better one day. But for now, I’m loud at our climbing gym.

Abby Wambach:

I have a question. I think that for a lot of our listeners, I am more embodied. I do physical things that purposefully turn off my brain. That is what I am geared towards. How do you become embodied? Let’s just hypothetically say, you two are people who live in your mind.

Glennon Doyle:

Hypothetically, Kaitlin.

Abby Wambach:

Because that was a safety mechanism you both used because you felt like the outer world wasn’t safe. This was the place that you could stay safe. What do you have to change about your mindset or maybe the world to feel safe enough to get embodied?

Kaitlin Curtice:

That’s a great question. Well, one thing I noticed about myself that was painful to realize but helped me was that I realized a few years ago, I was telling myself that I am safest in my own head because it’s mine and I know what’s going on. And coming to the realization that actually even though I love my mind and my thoughts, it probably isn’t the safest place for me to be.

Amanda Doyle:

Danger. Fire. Danger.

Kaitlin Curtice:

Yeah, because it’s healthy. It’ll land us in the hospital because we are so stressed and we are so scared. We are living these realities that aren’t healing us because we’re not dropping in. I think for me to recognize actually this is not the safest place, my safe places are being with people who love me and see me, and my safe places are doing the things in my body that will get out some of this stress and the grief and the anxiety, whatever it is. I have a Peloton, and I write about it in the book.

Glennon Doyle:

Yes, you do.

Kaitlin Curtice:

I do. I have a Peloton.

Glennon Doyle:

10 minutes though, right?

Kaitlin Curtice:

It helps me a lot. Robin, who’s one of the women that I Peloton with, Robin was saying recently that she was journaling about, when do I feel most myself, where do I feel that? I was thinking about that. What clothes do we wear to feel most ourselves? What are we doing? Who are we with? What are those things that actually drop us into our body? I know I can think of those places now. I know the places that are not. Ironically, there are places that used to be safe for me that are not any more, churches.

Kaitlin Curtice:

There are places that used to be my safe place no longer are. Coming to terms with the honesty of that, that maybe this area is not our safe place, but there is safety in recognizing that and then leaning into the places that get us out. Does that make sense?

Glennon Doyle:

Yes. Yes.

Amanda Doyle:

One of the practical tools that I pulled from your work was, again, this idea of being in the present and recognizing living things because they remind us that we are living things. In a world that wants us to be machines, it is easy to think of ourselves as machines. But when you talk about your begonias, it made me cry because you were talking about the tenderness that you give them water and then you say, “Oh, you were so thirsty.” And then you watch them soak it up, and then you say, “I wonder if we let others know when we need a drink or a break from the heat.”

Amanda Doyle:

When we get closer to the water, we drink it up within seconds, begging for more, while nearby someone says, “Oh, love, you are so thirsty. I wonder if we even know we’re thirsty.” We don’t even know we’re thirsty because we think we’re machines, but we are so thirsty.

Glennon Doyle:

Yesterday we were at dinner at our table and two of the teenagers at our table were talking about how they actually have to set alarms every hour to wake themselves up all night to keep studying. Because they have so much work, they sleep for 15 minutes, wake themselves up. We are doing this to them, and it’s not a mistake. We’re training them to be good machines in a capitalist culture, right? That’s why this work is everything. It’s about coming home, what you’re saying, Kaitlin. It’s about adamantly, relentlessly remembering and holding onto being human.

Kaitlin Curtice:

If we pass anything down to the next generation… What’s so hard though, it’s like Tricia Hersey’s new book of The Nap Ministry, Rest is Resistance. I bought that book for every woman in my family, because we have all become the cogs in the machine. That is the scary question is if the systems are like this and we have been taught to be like this and the systems probably aren’t changing anytime soon, then how are we supposed to resist that status quo? How do we do that? What I have come to is that we keep having conversations with our kids and we keep giving them tools they need. We let them have the day off when they need it, and we tell them that it’s going to be okay.

Kaitlin Curtice:

I was so much the people pleasing and wanting to just make sure everything stayed okay everywhere, at school with my teachers, at home, at church, everywhere. I wanted to just keep things very smooth no matter what my inner world was. It’s not fair for our kids to have to carry that, and it wasn’t fair that we had to carry that. None of it is. Trying to remind ourselves of that or finding these subversive ways to rest and to care for ourselves and each other, it’s not easy and it can be exhausting, but we can’t give up on these conversations.

Amanda Doyle:

I have to ask one more question, and it is about the ancestral realm. When you talk about trauma and coming home to ourselves and wholeness, it strikes me that a lot in white culture, we have this individualist myth really of, okay, this is what’s wrong in my life, and it is because of the generations before me. And there is some truth in that. But you see memes going around that are like, I’m going to hand my parents the therapist bill with a note that says, “You broke it, you buy it.”

Amanda Doyle:

This idea, it’s kind of like a funny thing we’re doing. You have such a different view of that that I think is so powerful. You say that to practice decolonization, we name the ways in which our ancestors did what they could but didn’t do enough, in the ways that they still had so much to accomplish, but didn’t have the space or resources or time to do it all, and the way that they rely on us to change the things they couldn’t or didn’t change.

Abby Wambach:

Wow.

Amanda Doyle:

This view is so beautiful because it’s not you failed to do it so I have to, it’s you did what you could and it is the honor to take where you left off and build. And in doing that, I’m healing you and I’m healing my kids. I really want that to settle into my body as a way of being on this honored path of these generations that are doing the best they can. Can you say more about that?

Kaitlin Curtice:

Yeah. I love the idea of liminal space. I use that word a lot, liminal, liminality, liminal space, the gray areas, the spaces in between, which is often the nuanced spaces, the spaces we don’t want to talk about because we’d rather be on one extreme or the other.

Amanda Doyle:

Can’t put it on a meme, Kaitlin. Can’t put liminal spaces on a meme.

Kaitlin Curtice:

No, that would just confuse everyone, wouldn’t it? I think of my life, this living space I live in, that I exist in, between those who came before and those who will come after, we exist in that. We can’t escape it. It’s who we are. And not in just a linear way, but these cycles, the cycles of who our ancestors were, the cycle of our life now, the cycle of seven generations after us who will exist and who will have to reckon with what we’ve done and left undone. That whole idea. You’re right, it is a very this individualistic way of understanding things that we’re not like, “My ancestors were awful. They did some awful things, but that’s not my problem.”

Kaitlin Curtice:

When instead, if we could actually say, “I want to be a part of the healing. I want to be a part of healing whoever my ancestors were,” and we don’t always know that, and that’s okay. You don’t have to know who your ancestors were and what happened. I want us to hold the vision of that. Whoever our ancestors were, whatever they did or didn’t do, we don’t know the ones that come after us, we don’t know what they’re going to look like or who they’re going to be in this world or what the state of the world will be, but there’s healing. Our healing is directly connected to those who came before and those who will come after.

Kaitlin Curtice:

If we can experience it that way, doesn’t it feel so much fuller? I don’t know. It doesn’t make it feel like it’s all on me, but that I get to be a part of this fluid moving space of resistance. Because the other problem that I often find with especially white people who want to fix things, like they want to fix it, they want to put the bandaid on and call it good or read the book or do the thing is that I keep reminding people, this is lifelong work. You’re not going to be healed in a week. You’re not going to be anti-racist in a week. You’re not going to learn all of Indigenous history in the next two years.

Kaitlin Curtice:

You need to keep reading and then keep reading more. Keep doing the things, because the best thing we can give the generations after us is that we understood that it doesn’t end with us, that we keep passing on that healing, and that we pass on the healing to people who came before us in a way we don’t understand it. Again, drop into your body and let it just be the truth and live into it and don’t sink on it too hard or you’ll just burn out and explode.

Glennon Doyle:

You can only know it in your body. Kaitlin Curtice, y’all, just go get Native, go get Living Resistance, follow Kaitlin on Instagram and begin the rewiring. We adore you. Thank you for this time, Kaitlin. Pod squad, catch you next time.

Glennon Doyle:

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