HOW GLENNON LOST HER MIND
September 6, 2022
Glennon Doyle:
Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. And today, we have just the three of us and I am so happy about that. I love our guests so much. And I also miss just this time with the two of you.
Abby Wambach:
Same.
Amanda Doyle:
Just the three of us.
Glennon Doyle:
Three of us.
Abby Wambach:
We can make it if we try, just the three of us.
Glennon Doyle:
So far, so good. Today, well, it’s sort of the three of us, but it’s four of us because today I am inviting Weird Glennon to speak on the pod. You know there is this version of me that is a little woo. And I invited this weird self to the episode about my recovery and my relapse for my eating disorder. So there is three of us here today. And the three of us are me, Glennon.
Abby Wambach:
Me, Abby.
Glennon Doyle:
And Sister Amanda. But there’s also four of us because I just want to be clear that today I am inviting my weird self to the pod, Weird, Glennon.
Amanda Doyle:
I was not aware that Weird Glennon had not been on all of the pods.
Glennon Doyle:
No.
Abby Wambach:
I also wasn’t.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s not. I come and I bring my most sane, organized self, most logical self to this podcast, honestly.
Abby Wambach:
Well, then where does Weird Glennon go?
Glennon Doyle:
Well, she’s lonely and sad. And she doesn’t get to speak as much. And I we’re joking around, but not really because actually I have noticed that that that is something that as much as I absolutely love doing this podcast, it’s one of my favorite creative things I’ve ever done. I do miss my weird self because I feel like that self comes out more in my writing: the untamed unbridled, crazy, weird, a little bit insane self that comes out.
Glennon Doyle:
And when people are dancing wild, or in poetry, or just the feelings inside of you that explode and you can’t really put into words until you really try, and the fire comes out of you. Today, I am going to get a little weird. Okay. And I’ll tell you why, because I’ve been wanting to discuss this topic with you all for a while, which I don’t even know what to name this topic. Okay. So that’s great.
Glennon Doyle:
I think what it is: a self discovery that I think maybe the whole rest of the world had already discovered.
Abby Wambach:
About you?
Glennon Doyle:
About themselves.
Abby Wambach:
Oh.
Glennon Doyle:
But it’s something that I discovered about myself about six months ago that I think has saved my sanity more than anything else I’ve ever tried, including talk therapy, including all of it. It’s all important, but this is one thing that shifted my ability to stay grounded and find a little bit of peace. And I thought that maybe now would be a great time to talk about it just because I have been hearing from so many friends and so many pod squaders about how this is a really fucking tough time for everybody. And with all that-
Amanda Doyle:
Why?
Glennon Doyle:
… Why?
Abby Wambach:
What could you ever mean?
Glennon Doyle:
Why? Well, the continued horrific state of the world and our country. And I think the lack of feeling safe anywhere, I really think that’s hitting people. And there have been so many people throughout the course of history who have not been or felt safe.
Glennon Doyle:
And now that lack of safety is expanding to all kinds of other people who have historically had more privilege. And we’re just at a time where everyone feels terrified, rightfully so, and unsafe. And so I thought that’s a bit of a mental health rock bottom. And so I’m going to take the pod squad back to a recent mental health rock bottom that I had. And maybe it can be of service.
Abby Wambach:
I can’t wait.
Glennon Doyle:
When the whole world gets anxious, it’s my time to shine. I live here, y’all. Okay.
Abby Wambach:
Welcome, Glennon says.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. So as the pod squad knows, and if you don’t know, go back and listen to episode 70 and 71. I recently shared that after almost 20 years of basic food sobriety, meaning I wasn’t binging and purging anymore, I had a relapse, a bulimia relapse. And so I talked about that then and got a little weird. And so I want to tell you a little bit more in detail of how I began to unspiral from that time, which is that during COVID, we’re still freaking in during COVID.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. We’re not in lockdown anymore, but yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
But in the heat of it, I started noticing there was a lot going on. I mean, Untamed had gone crazy, felt like expectations of me were just through the roof, and Chase was leaving for college. And the COVID of it all, and those are all reasons, but I’ve never really needed a reason to spiral into disordered thinking, but I did. I started to notice weirder than usual thinking, meaning that almost like obsessive thinking about food and body stuff.
Glennon Doyle:
And so it feels to me when that happens, there’s two voices in my head, or maybe they’re both the same voice, but they’re saying opposite things. The one voice I wake up in the morning and it’s just exploding in my brain, and it’s like, “What did you eat last night? How do you feel? How is your stomach? What can you eat today? Based on what you eat yesterday, how do your…” All these ridiculous questions. And then there’s another voice that’s like, “What the hell is wrong with you? Why are you still thinking this way? This is a total waste of energy of brain space. All of it. Shut up, stop being such a loser.”
Abby Wambach:
So you have one voice that’s criticizing you and then another voice that’s fighting the criticisms that you’re holding of yourself?
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
No.
Glennon Doyle:
Shaming me.
Amanda Doyle:
You have two voices criticizing you.
Glennon Doyle:
Right.
Abby Wambach:
They’re two? Okay.
Amanda Doyle:
One voice is criticizing you in one way. And the other voice is criticizing you for criticizing you. So that sounds awesome.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. Fun times.
Glennon Doyle:
One’s crazy, and the other ones shaming my crazy.
Amanda Doyle:
You’re crazy for being crazy? Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
You’re crazy for being crazy. Right. I was in a battle every minute of every day during that time to decide which one to listen to. I felt like I was in the middle of a battle to figure out which one was me, which one I should follow, which one was sane and which one was insane. During that time, you made me go away for a couple days just to try to get a grip. And-
Abby Wambach:
Well, I didn’t make you.
Glennon Doyle:
… Well, no, I mean, you suggested heavily.
Abby Wambach:
I was like, “Let’s go on a trip.”
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. It was an invitation.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. And so we went to this place and I went into a bookstore and I picked up this book called The Untethered Soul. And I have read this book before, maybe two or three times before. And there are just times where a message can hit you exactly the time that you need it, exactly the moment where you can understand it in a way that you couldn’t understand it before, or it didn’t take hold.
Glennon Doyle:
And the message of this book just took hold for the first time. Which I realized, and we’ll talk through how, throughout this unfolding of the book. But I realized that I was always trying to decide which voice in my head to trust, that I’ve always thought of my sane self and my insane self. And my sane self was trying to keep my insane self in check in my head.
Glennon Doyle:
I had this ridiculous, nonsensical, traumatized, conditioned, patriarched voice. And then I had my untamed voice. And they were at battle and I had to decide. But what I realized through reading this book and it took this true mental rock bottom to grasp the message that was, I don’t have a crazy voice that I have to ignore and a sane voice that I have to listen to in my head. All the voices in my head are crazy.
Glennon Doyle:
And I have to listen to none of them. And we’ll unpack that. And it might not be true for you. I’m not saying it’s true for every pod squatter. I’m all I’m saying is my experience that I know that this is true for me. That it was no longer I’m going to be in this battle all day and decide which side I’m on in my head.
Glennon Doyle:
I am retreating from battle. This place in my head is not me. I’m living in the wrong place. I’m trusting my thoughts to define me, to keep me safe, to make any sense of this world and of my life. But actually that’s not where the sense comes. Right? That’s not where the piece comes. I have to drop lower.
Abby Wambach:
Well, and I just want to say before we move on-
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Let’s hear your reactions to that so far.
Abby Wambach:
… Yeah. Two things. One: we are not doctors, or experts, or people who pretend to know anything about anything.
Amanda Doyle:
I pretend to know a lot about things. Just so…
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
Just to clarify.
Glennon Doyle:
Sister does. You and I don’t know shit. Sister knows a lot.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. Sister knows a lot. But I just want to say that this is Glennon’s experience, and we’re talking about Glennon’s experience. And we hope that people can relate in some ways; it may not work for you, but I’m sure it’s working for somebody in your life. I’m sure this is going to be true for somebody in your life in some way, shape, or form.
Glennon Doyle:
And I’m just saying I’ve always been a good example of the extreme, and then people can find themselves somewhere along the spectrum. But what I do think is that I’m talking about disordered thinking, and I think everybody’s thinking is disordered in terms of order being making sense.
Amanda Doyle:
Right, because you said you have a taming conditioned voice, and an untamed voice, and you’re trying to figure out which one is you, but that’s not what I heard in what you were saying. I heard that you have-
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, what would you say?
Amanda Doyle:
… this voice that is this conditioned, trying to show you how you’re missing the mark of what the condition world tells you to be. And another voice that is berating you for your need to meet the standards of your conditioning. Neither of those are untamed. You’re either acquiescing to the standard that’s been given or you’re being berated for trying to acquiesce. Both of those are equally shaming of you.
Glennon Doyle:
I start reading this book and it’s talking about the important, beginning of it, is that it asks you to consider the place from which you’ve been living your whole life, which is in your mind. I would like to have a conversation between the three of us of what it’s like to live in your mind?
Glennon Doyle:
Because to me, what Michael Singer and The Untethered Soul, and everybody talks about this. Right? This is just the one way he presented in that moment spoke to me. But people have been talking about this for millennia. Right? But this idea that you have this voice in your head, or it could feel like a million voices to you or whatever. But you have this voice in your head that you think is you, and that voice spends all day trying to make you bat shit crazy.
Glennon Doyle:
Singer calls it the inner roommate. Eckhart told the story I think in, A New Earth, about how he was walking on the street and he saw this woman who we would’ve all considered mentally ill. And she was talking to herself out loud, having conversations with people who weren’t there. And people were avoiding her on the street and all the things. And then he realized he was looking into the mirror later that day and he was having this back and forth in his head about something or other, some made up scenario.
Glennon Doyle:
And he realized, “Oh my God, all she’s doing is vocalizing what all of us do in our brain all day.” We are all having those crazy conversations with people who aren’t there. We’re talking about things from the past that don’t make sense. We’re bringing up trauma. We’re arguing with ourselves all day. She’s just doing it out loud. And when someone does it out loud, we call it crazy. But isn’t that what we’re all doing?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. I mean, I don’t do it nearly as much as you. I want to get down to really what it is. Give us an example, maybe.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. Well, what Singer says in the book is to do a daily experiment. So just actually do a thing where you personify the inner roommate of your mind. Pretend that person was beside you all day.
Abby Wambach:
Okay.
Glennon Doyle:
What would happen if that inner roommate became personified and followed you around all day? It would be like, “Do we like that girl? We don’t like that girl. Oh my God. Do you remember when your mom said that shit to you when you were 10? Wait, wait, wait, let me have this fake argument I’m going to have. Wait, wait. I don’t want to go to that thing. I don’t want to go to that thing. I hate my lips. Don’t trust them. Don’t trust them.”
Glennon Doyle:
Do you not have an inner narrator that constantly just tries to describe the world outside of you and constantly is deciding who’s good and who’s bad, and what’s right and what’s wrong all day long?
Abby Wambach:
No.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh my God.
Amanda Doyle:
I know. This is why she’s happy. I understand what you’re saying. I think that mine is often about myself. I get that. But I think I relate it to Singer’s work more from the perspective of constantly being bothered about other people or other things happening around. That’s what struck it with me with that when he said the moment in front of you is not bothering you, you are bothering yourself about the moment in front of you.
Abby Wambach:
Oh yeah. That’s good.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s not personal. You’re making it personal. How every single thing that was happening, my neighbor acting a certain way.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Your husband is making dinner too slow, or somebody’s making a noise next to you, or you’re constantly saying that’s so annoying. You’re judging, judging, judging, judging everything. Whether it’s yourself or somebody else, or a scenario. Singer says, “You are locked in there with a maniac.”
Glennon Doyle:
If that person that was talking to you all day was your friend, you would not listen to them. You would think that they were not a trustworthy person. He says, “You will never be free of problems until you are free of the part of you that has so many problems. Has your mind ever not had a problem? As soon as the one is solved, isn’t there another?” Do you relate to that?
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
The idea that it’s not like your mind is protecting you from problems. It’s like you’re wandering mind, that’s its job.
Abby Wambach:
Is to find a problem.
Glennon Doyle:
Is to find a problem.
Abby Wambach:
I get annoyed with things, but I don’t turn them into problems. It feels like what is the root when things upset you, is it a control thing? Is it just like upsetting?
Glennon Doyle:
My experience is that most people have an inner dialogue in their mind and the pod squad will have to tell us. I believe that most people, that this is what most spiritual traditions are based upon. That we have a place called the Monkey Mind. It was called a bunch of different things, but it is our constant hamster wheel of thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking. And what it does is it narrates the world outside of us. It tells us, “She’s coming. I’m walking down the street. That’s a tree, that’s a dog.” It’s controlling things. It’s saying, “That’s bad. That’s good. That’s bad. That’s good. That’s right. That’s wrong,” to keep itself safe.
Amanda Doyle:
And just to make it practical, someone is playing music, that is just a thing that’s happening, someone is playing music. But if your mind is interpreting it in the terms of making it personal, “That person is disrespecting me. That person is disturbing my family. That person is whatever,” you’re giving it a meaning to you that is different than the actual thing is that that person is playing music. It’s whatever the meaning that you assign to things that you are making them mean things that could be true or could be not true. But that is your thinking mind that is doing that.
Abby Wambach:
Interesting.
Glennon Doyle:
And I think we trust our minds because we are in a culture that tells us power is in our brain, and everything’s valued there. For me it’s about where I am identifying who I am. That story that I have in Untamed about the touch tree. We were watching a survivor show or something, some show where-
Abby Wambach:
Survivor Man.
Glennon Doyle:
… they were lost in the woods. And-
Abby Wambach:
I love those shows so much.
Glennon Doyle:
… The Survivor Man was telling us, the watchers, that when you find yourself lost in the woods, that the number one thing you have to concern yourself with is getting found. Okay. But you also have to survive. The number one thing you can do to make sure that you get found is to stay in the same place, in exact same place, but you can’t do that if you also have to survive because you have to find food and water.
Glennon Doyle:
Survivor Man said the best strategy to get found but still survive is to find a touch tree, which is the most big, glorious, recognizable tree in the forest. And you stay at that tree each day. But then you go out from that place and come back to that place, go out a bit and come back to that place. You venture enough to find your food, but not too far that you get lost so you come back to the touch tree.
Glennon Doyle:
To me, that’s living well, is figuring out who am I? What is my touch tree that I keep coming back to over and over and over again so I don’t get too far gone? Because we get lost when we make our touch tree a goal outside of ourselves, or a relationship, or an institution, or even ambition, or whatever it is we get lost.
Glennon Doyle:
If our touch tree that we don’t keep coming back to is in ourselves, the question becomes which self? Because the beauty for me is I have suffered with all different kinds of mental illnesses throughout my life. So I know inherently that my mind is not the safest place to come back to, that it’s not the self-iest self of me.
Glennon Doyle:
That it’s an excellent tool. And Singer describes this really well in his book. For me, a good example is it’s like a GPS. If I get into a car, I can tell the GPS where I want it to go and it will take me there. But if I get into the car and just let the GPS take me wherever the hell it wants to, I’m not going to end up anywhere intentional. And that’s like my brain. My brain is amazing.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
I write books with my brain. I do all the things. I’m not saying I don’t trust my brain. But what I’m saying is I don’t trust my brain to lead me intentionally. I trust myself to lead my brain intentionally. If I sit down and say, “Here’s what we’re doing, we’re going to figure out what next to do about reproductive justice. We’re going to figure out what we need next for our daughter. We’re going to write a thing.” My brain can do that.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
But if I leave my wandering brain to lead me, I am fucked. There’s no order there. The way I describe it is what I have discovered… Now this is going to get Weird Glennon. But there’s no God there, meaning, there’s no trust-able, intentional order or structure. It’s just random chaos. It’s like going on the internet.
Glennon Doyle:
The internet is the world’s mind. When you start scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, looking for some order, looking to make sense of things, good freaking luck. That’s not what the internet is for. It’s just a bunch of people yelling voices. And the only people that are giving any order to it are algorithms meant to control you, which is what happens in our brain with our conditioning.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Going into my brain to look for making sense of things like knowing what to do, knowing what, is the same as scrolling through Instagram, trying to find order.
Abby Wambach:
I see. So what-
Glennon Doyle:
Intentional mind, yes. Wandering mind, no.
Abby Wambach:
… Giving your mind a job, giving your brain a job, something to do is good because we have to do that. I’ve got to get my chores done. You’ve got to write things, and we’ve got to do things. That’s good. Then where are you? Where do you live in your body? Where’s the “you” of the you?
Glennon Doyle:
Here’s the cool stuff. But let’s talk about this for a second. So who are we? Who am I? This is where we get to where you two, where I drive you bat shit crazy. Because have I for 10 years been, who am I? I am what? I have never been able to put. That’s why I ended Untamed with the, “I am,” and then all the words and the, “I am. I am, I am, I am,” because my challenge has always been, “I don’t understand what I’m supposed to put after that ‘I am’ that is true enough.”
Glennon Doyle:
Because I am a woman. I literally don’t know what gender is. I don’t feel solid in that definition. I’m 45. Okay. Wait, actually, what am I? 46?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. Whatever. But my point being that it keeps changing. I can’t be that. I can’t be anything that’s not true all the way through.
Abby Wambach:
Interesting. Age is a weird thing, because it’s always changing.
Glennon Doyle:
It doesn’t define you in any way. Here’s what freaks-
Abby Wambach:
Because aren’t you, you the “you” when you are born?
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Abby Wambach:
At the same “you” you are now, 46 years later, isn’t it the same you?
Glennon Doyle:
Here’s a freaky thing. Think about this: so think about you when you were seven or seven years old. Okay. You’re seven years old. Don’t you think of yourself as a different being, but actually the “you” that is you inside you right now, you pod squader, what you’re looking out into the world right now. That’s the same you-
Abby Wambach:
It’s the same.
Glennon Doyle:
… that was looking out into the world through your little eyeballs from inside of your consciousness when you were seven. And that same you inside of you looking out through your eyeballs right now, experiencing the world is going to be the same you on your death bed. You have always been in there peeking out.
Glennon Doyle:
What is the “you” that is peeking out, taking in all the world, noticing all of these thoughts, having all of these emotions, experiencing the world? The “you” in there. I think that’s what Singer calls it. The “you” in there, who is that? Because it’s not a body. This is why in scripture it’s like the “you” in there, the soul, the spirit, whatever people are talking about when they’re talking about consciousness, is beyond race, beyond gender, beyond age, beyond class because it’s just a consciousness.
Abby Wambach:
When I think about the “you” in here, I think that it is confused my ideas of gender, because-
Glennon Doyle:
Because it doesn’t live there.
Abby Wambach:
… there isn’t that form there. I bring the things that I was taught and conditioned to believe to the thing that I even see in the mirror. I don’t know. This is weird and awesome.
Glennon Doyle:
The spirit soul is not touched by any of that. I don’t know how to describe this any other way. I mean, this is just, what? The Atman. Right? The Buddhist self: the heaven, the soul, the spirit. This is what everybody’s talking about in every spiritual tradition. That there is a self that is self-ier than the brain.
Glennon Doyle:
There is a true self that is unpolluted where there is a God there, where there is a knowing and a divinity and a piece and an order. The blessing of struggling with mental illness is you’re forced to find that a little bit more.
Abby Wambach:
Oh.
Glennon Doyle:
Because this is so clearly not safe. But what I’m saying is I don’t think it’s super safe for anybody. Even if you’re disordered thinking is less disordered than mine, if you don’t have obsessive or compulsive thoughts, your mind is still disordered just by definition of that word. There’s no order there.
Abby Wambach:
It’s more obvious for somebody in your perspective because you work on it.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly. That’s why I feel like we should learn from people at the extremes more, really, instead of dismissing people who struggle with mental health; really learning for everybody from what their brains are doing.
Amanda Doyle:
I think that there’s a lot of people that are miserable and it’s because they live and reside in their brains, which are making them miserable. And it’s when you think about it, it’s so simple, I loved what he said when he said we are trying to fix what’s out there instead of making it pleasant in here.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s almost like we are working so hard on overdrive with our brains to try to figure out how can we apply what we know from our brains to make it better out there. When if we just reoriented our efforts to make it pleasant in here, what happens out there wouldn’t affect what happens in here.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
And that sounds very dangerous, frankly, from an activism perspective and from a change-making perspective, because the last thing we need is everyone who feels it’s pleasant in here and doesn’t need to fix what’s out there. But the way that he talks about it with it is not to accept what’s happening out there without acting, but it’s acting from a place of peace.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly.
Amanda Doyle:
If it is pleasant in here, we are actually able to have a sense of peace to make more fruitful our actions that we have on the world. In essence, not making things so your mind can be at peace, but to be coming from a place of peace so that you can make things right.
Abby Wambach:
Damn.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right. You think about a room full of people, of activists, where there’s a huge problem, like a life, a world threatening problem that this group of people are in charge of fixing. And there’s a week to figure it out. And there’s a bunch of people at that table and most of them are freaking out and are angry and are yelling and are panicking.
Glennon Doyle:
And there’s one there who is solid, who is centered, who is going to be the one that everybody is like, “That one. Let’s follow that one.” It is not so you don’t affect change. It’s so you become effective in change.
Glennon Doyle:
And the reason why it’s important to do this episode right now is because people’s minds are freaking out because it’s makes sense. And so it’s more important than ever for people to retreat, sink down, get lower, find this other place so that they can come to the problems of the world with power and peace instead of panic. I think it’s dangerous to be like, “I get what you’re saying completely,” and to not, “Oh yeah. We all just stay on our yoga mats.” And that’s not what I’m saying at all.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes, of course.
Glennon Doyle:
I’m saying things are wild and hard, and so it’s more important than ever that we find a place of peace and power.
Abby Wambach:
How do you do that, though?
Glennon Doyle:
I don’t know. All I can tell you is when my mind starts up and starts telling me all of the unhelpful things, the funny thing is we think our mind is reminding us of stuff. Right? Like, “Oh my God, I’m going to forget that.” But if your mind’s telling it to you, you already know it. That helps me a lot. It’s like, “Oh no, I can recall this. I know this thing. Nobody else told it to me except for my own brain.” So got it, good. Right?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
But also when that starts, there’s this thing that happens where I get lost in it for a little while and I forget, and I am the thoughts again. So you know how when you’re reading a book and you’re trying to concentrate and you’re like, and then you realize, “Wait, I’ve been turning pages for five pages. I don’t have a freaking clue what just happened”?
Glennon Doyle:
That’s what happens in life. You’re in it. You’re with your people. Imagine your life is the book. Your lover, your dog, your problem, your challenge, your work for the day, that’s your book. And then you get lost in your brain for a while and you miss the whole thing. Of course, I can only compare it to reading, but that’s how I know I’m lost. I’m gone in my brain. I’ve missed the last five pages of my life.
Glennon Doyle:
First of all, one of the things people talk about the most in terms of mindfulness, this is called mindfulness. I hate that word so much. I’m actually trying to be mindless.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. It’s confusing.
Glennon Doyle:
I’m trying to lose my mind. I understand what it means. It means be mindful of your environment and not your thoughts, but your thoughts are in your mind. So I find it very confusing. I would prefer to call it soulfulness, how to live from a different experience.
Glennon Doyle:
The idea is if you even notice your thoughts, if you even say, “Oh, thinking, there I go again, thinking.”
Abby Wambach:
And there are words to it?
Glennon Doyle:
That, that is your soul, is your spirit because you cannot notice a thing that you are. If you’re watching a movie screen, you are not the movie screen. If you are noticing the thought, then you, by definition are not the thought, you are the noticer of the thought. Okay, you can’t be the subject and the object at the same time.
Abby Wambach:
Okay. Got it.
Amanda Doyle:
If you’re able to say, “Oh, look, a thought passing,” that helps your system to know, by definition, “That thought is not me. I am the one who is noticing the thought.”
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly. Then what is that “I”? If you are not your mind, because you can’t be if you say, “I’m thinking. I’m thinking.” Who is “I”?
Abby Wambach:
Where does that thing live?
Glennon Doyle:
Who is the I? That’s your consciousness. Singer has a new book out and he calls this The Three Ring Circus. Our challenge in life is that we are trying to figure out this three ring circus that the three rings are the world, everything that’s happening on the outside, our emotions, and our thoughts.
Glennon Doyle:
And we are watching all of those three things, but we are not those three things. What we are is the spirit that witnesses all of that.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
I think of it as being in a seat, which is interesting because some people call it the seat of the soul. When I hear the thinking, when I say, “Oh, I’m thinking again. That’s thoughts, that’s thoughts, that’s thoughts.” And I haven’t told my brain to do that. So my brain’s just doing its job. It’s just churning, churning, churning. It can’t be trusted. It’s not bad.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s just not good. It’s not making any sense. It’s lower than the mind. I know it’s lower. I know it’s further back. I know that the second I drop from it, there is a peace that is not the same kind of peace as telling myself a bunch of happy mantras. Here comes weird me again.
Glennon Doyle:
But what I seriously believe is that this is what the Bible’s getting at. The Kingdom of God is not out there. It’s not out there. We are all talking about heaven and hell, that it’s an afterlife, that it’s an after world. I think that living in the mind is hell.
Glennon Doyle:
And what the mind does is it constantly decides, it tries to protect you by judging and controlling everything. What it’s doing is constantly trying to defy the experiences, people, yourself into good and bad, good and bad, good and bad, good and bad, good and bad, so that you can make yourself safe or not.
Glennon Doyle:
You think about the first, the opening of the Bible. There was Eden. This is a poem about the human experience in Genesis. What nobody talks about is that the snake comes, talks to Eve. There’s this tree that God says, “Don’t eat from that tree.” That tree is the knowledge of good and bad. And God says, “Don’t worry about that one. You’re a human being. Don’t worry about that one. Don’t worry about deciding what’s good and bad. Just live your happy life.”
Glennon Doyle:
They decide. I mean, you can see it any way you want on this pod. As for me in my pod, we believe that Eve was framed, but regardless, they eat from the tree of good and bad and they are cast out of Eden. And I feel like judgment going into your brain and constantly deciding what’s good and bad and trying to separate right, wrong, good and bad. Judge, judge, judge, judge, judge is the fall.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s like being cast from the spirit, the heavenly place that knows all is well, that can just accept an act and not be afraid is the Eden. That’s the touch tree. That’s the spirit. And when we go into our judging minds, that’s the fall over and over again. For me, it’s constantly getting to that place-
Abby Wambach:
Getting back to Eden or heaven.
Glennon Doyle:
… Yeah. I think that’s what people mean when they say, “It is well in my soul,” or, “Even so, it is well,” or, “Everything is wrong and everything’s all right.” I remember calling Lizzy the very beginning of working to get the separated families back and just being in this hellacious place of all the things we were learning and listening to me over and over again, nothing is okay. And there is a place where everything is okay. And it wasn’t that that made me less of an activist, or it made me less effective. It’s what allowed me to continue without losing my Goddamn mind. Losing my mind is how I did not lose my mind.
Amanda Doyle:
There’s an centuries old tradition of this in America. I mean enslaved people, that was the whole basis of their spirituals: “I will not be moved.” It’s the whole idea of active enslavement and torture for generations. And just like a tree that’s planted by the water, “I shall not be moved.” It’s the layer below the layer of experience. I mean, it’s why that spiritual was used in the anti nuclear movement and the peace movement.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s that in order to be effective, in order to survive, in order to fight for something different, you have to go below the experience that you are being subjected to, to get to the place where you know that you are a tree planted by the water; that there is dignity and that you deserve more, and that you’re unmoving in that space. Because if you just react to the world according to the way the world is reacting to you, you will just be in spin cycle forever.
Glennon Doyle:
And getting back to that tree thing. It’s the difference between thinking you’re the branches and being broken and being moved by every wind and being rained on. And then to realize like, “Oh no, I’m in the roots.”
Abby Wambach:
I actually just have a practical question, because I think that we’ve got some practical pod squaders.
Glennon Doyle:
God bless them.
Abby Wambach:
How?
Amanda Doyle:
I have an example of how.
Abby Wambach:
How do you do this?
Amanda Doyle:
And it’s very, very, not fancy. But as you were talking, I was thinking about, do you remember the week of your wedding? And I flew down there and it was, y’all had a place to get married and some outfits, and not much else. And I was just like, “Oh my, okay. We don’t have place cards. We don’t know who’s talking. And where’s the schedule? Oh my God.”
Amanda Doyle:
And you said something, Glennon, that I have never forgotten. You said, “This is where we’re coming from. It’s not everything is going to be perfect so we will be happy. It’s we will be happy, so everything will be perfect.
Amanda Doyle:
And it’s not this idea of being happy makes it perfect. It’s that your focus was on the happy. And when you were happy and receiving your experience from that perspective, you would experience everything as perfect. Instead of waiting and holding your breath to see if everything in your wedding turned out to be perfect so that you could be happy.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right. Yeah. That’s good. And I think there’s a touch of that, that we need people to bring ferociously and relentlessly into their lives right now.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Which especially, not except for, especially people who want to be effective for the long term in making change in our country, in our world, especially those people. And I don’t think for us right now, I think we’re going to be happy, so everything’s perfect, might be a stretch at this moment. That was our wedding week. But there is a insistence that I have to our pod squaders and each other that now is the time that we double down on finding our roots, that we double down on getting to this part of ourselves where even though nothing is okay, we are okay.
Amanda Doyle:
Like Monica Ray Simpson says, “What we are fighting for is liberation. And we’re not asking for anything anymore because it is already ours, inherently, as human beings.” So when we come to this, for example, reproductive justice fight, we’re not asking for a Goddamn thing. There’s a lot that’s going to be on our list of demands as we fight forward. But we already have the dignity. We already have the essence of what we need. So we need to act as if it is ours now. Because that is the place you’re coming from.
Amanda Doyle:
That is the tree planted by the water. Y’all are having a fit over here and talking nonsense on the court and talking nonsense in your little committees that you’ve set up in your little Congress. But we shall not be moved. We know who we are. We know what we came into the world with. And we are acting from the place of that dignity moving forward.
Amanda Doyle:
And so we’re not waiting to see if we’re okay from y’all. You’ll hear from us with our demands. But we’re not asking if we’re free in this world. We are acting as if it is so. And you will see if your authority is derived from a free people as you try to control them. If you don’t come from that place and you are looking to the folks to tell you whether you’re free.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
Can we have it? Can we have peace? Can you decide?
Abby Wambach:
Give us peace.
Glennon Doyle:
Let’s wait ’till the next election. Let’s give some more. We will do all that shit. But let’s vote. Let’s do all that. Let’s see if we can have peace. Let’s see if we can have our bodies. Let’s see. No, there’s a way of each day. And I think that’s what it is, is each day finding that liberation and peace for which we also fight.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s creating the truest most beautiful thing now in your life, and how, people do it all different ways. Some people meditate and that is a way… There’s no Nirvana there as far as I can find it. But that’s just a way of noticing your thoughts. So you don’t try not to think. You just practice-
Abby Wambach:
Noticing.
Glennon Doyle:
… noticing your thinking so then you can do it more later during the day.
Abby Wambach:
That’s good.
Glennon Doyle:
So you don’t get as lost because you’ve practiced for that 15 minutes being like, “There’s my thought, there’s my thought. There’s my thought.” And the one who says, “There’s my thought,” that’s who you actually are. It’s a practice of returning to that touch tree so that you can do it further down during the day. Yoga for me is a Goddamn life saver. I don’t know. It’s the only place that I feel truly safe, and loved, and all of the things. It takes me right back to that soul spirit place.
Abby Wambach:
That’s sweet you’re doing it on your own.
Glennon Doyle:
I know.
Abby Wambach:
That’s a you, solo thing.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Abby Wambach:
That’s really sweet.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. I don’t know. That’s the thing. I don’t know what it is for everybody. That’s everybody’s job.
Abby Wambach:
Being physical is how I get into where I can learn how to get free from the Monkey Mind.
Glennon Doyle:
So it’s different for everybody. What-
Abby Wambach:
What about you, Sissy?
Amanda Doyle:
And I think the thing that I’m working on with this is this idea that whatever’s happening is going to be happening whether I’m tortured about it or not. And again, to say that the allowing it to torture me actually just depletes my resources in my effort to make things not terrible.
Amanda Doyle:
But this idea that responding to all the moments in front of you bothering you, is exactly like accepting assignments, nonstop from the world and strangers-
Abby Wambach:
Forever.
Amanda Doyle:
… all day, every day for the rest of your life.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Amanda Doyle:
And the place that I would like to get to is not accepting those assignments, but deciding what my own agenda will be instead of constantly being in reaction of like, “Oh gosh, that person did this. What does that mean for me? And how do I fix it?”
Amanda Doyle:
The idea of when a problem is disturbing, you not asking what should I do about it? But asking what part of me is being disturbed by it? Because then it’s a little bit more self revelatory. It’s a little bit more, “Oh, that music is being played loud by my neighbors.” Not, “What do I do about it? Do I run over there? Goddam it. I’m going to talk to John about it for an hour and a half because I’m so pissed.”
Amanda Doyle:
Not, what do I do about it, but what part of me is getting disturbed by this? Is it just the idea that someone would be doing something that may affect me? Is it just the-
Glennon Doyle:
My scared, controlling self. Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
… my scared, controlling itself. It’s more interesting, and it’s deciding which assignments you will take instead of just taking on the agenda of the entire world and you never know what’s going to be thrown at you.
Glennon Doyle:
And then you get right sized, which is what we call it in recovery, which is your only real project is yourself.
Abby Wambach:
Exactly.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s literally the only… This whole world, your only project you can ever work on is yourself. And this is why Singer points out that that’s the difference between a worldly person and a spiritual person. We think of worldly as money and power and whatever, and spiritual is deep. But actually, when the problem arises on the outside, the worldly person thinks this is something out in the world I need to change. And the spiritual person thinks this is something in myself that’s being bothered by this. This comes back to so much of control and love, and what we always talk about on the pod.
Amanda Doyle:
And I think another way that this is liberating and freeing is that it takes a lot off your to-do list. When you recognize that that’s the way you work, the way thoughts and brains work, it relieves you. Or I should say me, because this is where I come from, but it relieves me of the need to punish people for being who they are.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
And it also relieves me of the need, to bring it full circle to your two voices, of punishing myself for being who I am.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
When that can just be what it is, and you don’t need to make it different, you just need to observe it and decide what assignments you’ll take, it takes a hell of a lot off your to-do list. And it relieves you of the need to punish yourself for being exactly who you are and thinking what you think.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. If I could make it real in the world, this is what it would be for me. I remember walking into a room with the kids a little while back and they were all fighting, all of them. And I, for a second, was like, “Okay, here we go. I got to figure this out. I got to go in and I got to figure out who was right and do the whole thing.”
Glennon Doyle:
I noticed that they hadn’t seen me yet, so I just backed out of the room. I just backed the hell out of that room, walked away, went to my room, got a book. Knock yourself out, knock yourselves out. And that’s the way I feel about my brain. I get there, and then I’m like, “Oh,” and then I just back out.
Abby Wambach:
Lean back. Lean back.
Glennon Doyle:
This is not my business. Nobody’s making sense here. These people weren’t raised right. Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
Amen.
Glennon Doyle:
These people were not raised right.
Amanda Doyle:
Excusing yourself from the need to raise yourself because you weren’t raised right, y’all.
Glennon Doyle:
No. Pod squaders, we weren’t raised right, and that’s why the voices in our head cannot be trusted. And so your next right thing is to lean back. If you do find any of these slices of peace, can you tell us just how, seriously, just if this made any sense to you, God bless you.
Amanda Doyle:
And if this didn’t make any sense to you, congrat-fucking-lations. All right?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, exactly.
Amanda Doyle:
We don’t want to hear from you.
Glennon Doyle:
We don’t.
Amanda Doyle:
You don’t need to call in and brag and be like, “I don’t know what you meant.”
Glennon Doyle:
Nobody wants to hear from you, Linda and Abby, with your quiet brains. The rest of you, if you find any of this spirit moments, this soulful moments, let us know because we want more. We love you so much. Thanks for hanging with us. See you next time.
Amanda Doyle:
Bye Glennon’s weird self.