Sonya Renee Taylor: What If You Loved Your Body?
January 12, 2023
Glennon Doyle:
Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.
Amanda Doyle:
I feel so honored to be sharing this space with you. I am so thrilled that we get to hear from you and share you with our community. It’s just an honor. You’re just a genius. And this is a joy. I’ve been very nervous all morning. I’m very nervous.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, we are. We’re going to start and then, okay. Welcome.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
You all are so cute. Everybody take a deep breath. Yes, everybody just take a deep breath.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. Hi, everybody. Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.
Abby Wambach:
Can I interrupt you?
Glennon Doyle:
Well, go right ahead.
Abby Wambach:
I just need the people to understand that we’ve done hundreds of these episodes. And Sonya, I can’t tell you how excited/nervous the three of us are, and it’s just been kind of a shit show for the last 10 minutes with these two.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
What’s the nervousness?
Abby Wambach:
It’s utter respect.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s respect.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s like you’re about to have lunch with Julia Child and she’s like, “What can I make you?” And you’re like, “Well, sky’s the fooking limit.” The possibilities are endless of what we could do in the next hour, and it’s just amazing. That’s how it feels.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
Okay.
Glennon Doyle:
So Sonya, I’ve never sent surreptitious love letters to a guest in preparation. Thank you for writing me back. I thought maybe you wouldn’t show up after that, but thank you. So pod squad, months ago when I was preparing for so long to talk to you about what was going on in my life, my health life, my mental health life, the diagnosis of anorexia nervosa, all of that, I knew I was going to tell you all in January. And then I felt like it was a very, very important decision about who would come talk to us next and especially about bodies and freedom and self-love.
Glennon Doyle:
So in my religious tradition, we always were told stories of prophets, that there would be everybody in the town and they would be doing all the things and screwing around and selling each other things and living their lives. And then there would be these prophets and they were living usually out in the wilderness, farther away from the town-
Amanda Doyle:
In New Zealand-
Sonya Renee Taylor:
I’m like this relates so far. I’m tracking.
Glennon Doyle:
Right? And I don’t know if it was because they just couldn’t stand the scurrying of the damn town, of the hustle. So they left or they had to be far out so they could see, so they had some perspective on the whole game. But anyway, these prophets lived out in the wilderness and they would just yell back every once in a while, like, “No, no, no. You’re missing it all.”
Sonya Renee Taylor:
From a bathtub.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. And so there are these people, and for this podcast, I feel like they’re like tent poles of what we do. I think of these people as a Alok about gender or Ocean Vuong about masculinity and femininity or Yaba about race or Cole Arthur Riley about faith or Tricia Hersey about rest. They’re just these prophets who are like, I’m actually not doing your game, but if you want me to let you know what I’m doing over here, you might sense some more freedom. So in choosing who would be talking to us about bodies, I just listened to so many voices and I’m so sensitive to this stuff right now that it always just feels a little bit out of tune, just a little bit out of tune. And when I listened to Sonya Renee Taylor talk about body freedom and radical self-love, it just feels like perfect pitch.
Glennon Doyle:
So somebody not from town, but this prophetic voice that is calling us out of town. And not just out of body shame culture or out of just past all of it, past body positivity culture towards what she calls radical self-love. So Sonya Renee Taylor is a world-renowned activist, award-winning artist, transformational thought leader, author of six books, including The New York Times bestselling The Body Is Not An Apology, just go get it now. And founder of the International Movement and Digital Media, an education company of the same name whose work has reached millions of people by exploring the intersections of identity, healing, and social justice using a radical self-love framework. Sonya continues to speak, teach, write, create, and transform lives globally from out of town. Sonya, thank you.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
Wow. I’m kind of like what am I supposed to do now?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, you can do anything. You’ve done enough.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
Well, I just want to say first and foremost, that it is a tremendous honor to be in this conversation with you. I never take it for granted. One, I never had any idea who’s actually listening to anything I say. And as far as I know, I’m just talking in the wind from my bathtub. It doesn’t necessarily land on me. I assume it’s impacting because I assume I wouldn’t be told to say it if it was not. But once it’s out of my face, it’s not my business anymore. And so it’s always just such a beautiful, beautiful reflection to have folks be like, “No, it’s landing and it’s helping.” And so, thank you for inviting me and thank you for including me in the names of all of those people who I love and whose work I follow. And yeah, I’m really grateful to be here.
Amanda Doyle:
One of the things that I think is such a promise and a hope of your message is that in a world where everyone’s trying to figure out what self-care is and how do I stop being so terribly uncomfortable in my body and my life, there’s plenty of people selling us a lot of things and five steps and what we can do. But what’s so beautiful about yours is that there is no acquisition of skills and steps. It’s more like an excavation back to our original intelligence and possibility that just got really paved over. So I wonder if you could tell us your re-imagining of the oak tree from Marianne Williamson’s quote about how that pertains to us and the way we came into the world, the acorn.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
Yeah, the acorn. It doesn’t have to be told to become an oak tree. It doesn’t have to do anything to become an oak tree. It simply needs to exist as itself inside of the conditions that are fertile for oak trees. And I think part of what humanity or societies have done is we are all these acorns with all of the wiring and encoding necessary to become oak trees. And we’ve created a world that is incompatible with our ability to grow into what we authentically and inherently are. And so part of what I’m always one asking us to do is first realize that it’s already in you. That just that acorn, we do not have to figure out how to radically love ourselves. We have to figure out what conditions have paved over the fertile ground that allows that thing that is naturally in us to sprout, to grow, to continue to grow.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
Because it’s not even that we were an acorn and then we fell on some concrete and now we’re never going to grow. It’s not even that. It’s like we were already a growing budding plant and then somebody was like, you’d be better as a parking lot in a Target. And at some point enough people said, you’ll be better as a parking lot in a target. And we were like, you know what? Maybe they’re right. Maybe whatever it was that I thought I was, maybe that’s a lie, maybe that’s not true at all. Maybe what’s true is what I keep hearing.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
And even if I haven’t raised that to consciousness, I think about it in the relationship of my blackness. And I think about, it doesn’t matter if anybody ever came up to me, although people have and said, Sonya, your blackness is wrong. They would just have to keep showing me again and again and again by either not showing me at all, by making me invisible in the external world or by offering me skin lightning cream or by making jokes about dark skin people or by creating entire media landscapes there in which I am absent.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
All of those things together are the message. You should be a parking lot and a Target. You should be a parking lot and a Target. And so then one day I’m like, oh, obviously maybe I’m the one who’s tripping. I should be a parking lot and a Target. And then we begin to move our lives that way. And so the work that I am proposing is, what if we just remember that the other message is a lie. That’s it. It’s just like, what if we remember that there is no beautiful vibrant verdant place in the world that if we sat down and thought about it, we would decide should be a parking lot and a Target. Nobody’s like, you know what? The Niagara Falls should be a parking lot and a target, nobody right?
Glennon Doyle:
Except for target.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
Except for the person who benefits and profits off of it becoming a parking lot in a Target. That’d be the only person who would say it. And so the only person who would say that you are somehow deficient and not enough and need to change and are not good enough, inherently valuable enough in the beingness that you are today, is someone who profits from you not believing that, someone who profits from your failure to see your own magnificence.
Amanda Doyle:
And so we are suffering when we fail to see our own magnificence because some part of us know because we are hearing the messages we feel, I mean anyone who’s listening to this, if you don’t feel this way, don’t call us because I believe everyone feels this way.
Abby Wambach:
We don’t understand you.
Amanda Doyle:
There’s another podcast for that. The burden, the shame, the constant apologies that we are issuing for our life and our existence are when we are denying our magnificence. And when we are reclaiming our magnificence, that’s deeply uncomfortable too. So talk to us about choosing the right kind of hard in this situation and how we can taste it and smell it and know it’s the right kind of hard.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
I always talk about this Fannie Lou Hamer quote as the way that I orient around the right kind of hard, which is she says, “If I’m going to fall, I’m going to fall five feet three inches toward my freedom.” That’s how I know it’s the right kind of hard. It doesn’t mean my knees ain’t scraped up, it doesn’t mean I didn’t lose some skin. I might be bleeding, I might have broke something. Am I closer toward my own revelation of my divinity than I was before I started? If so, then I’m doing the right kind of hard. I’m doing the hard and service of the reclamation of my liberation. A lot of people don’t do this work because they’re like it’s so hard. Of course it’s hard. It’s hard to dig up the asphalt and mow down a building. We built structures, literal structures on top of our sense of inherent worthiness. And so it is laborious, it’s tiring, sometimes it’s expensive. It’s all of those things.
Abby Wambach:
Lonely.
Glennon Doyle:
Audacious.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
Lonely. It can be frightening. It’s all of those things. But what I’m proposing is it’s that anyway. You are lonely and frightened and fearful and exhausted right now believing you’re not enough.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes, I am.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
Yep. So if you’re going to be it anyway, if you going to do that anyway, fall five feet whatever inches, six feet whatever inches. Fall towards your liberation.
Glennon Doyle:
What is radical self love? I’ll tell you there’s a lot of townspeople just selling and shit and-
Sonya Renee Taylor:
Selling a lot of shit.
Glennon Doyle:
My 16 year old came home and told me she wrote this thing about this in her school newspaper. She told me that when she was 13, she didn’t even know that she was supposed to not love her cellulite until she saw a big thing that on Instagram that said, love your cellulite ladies, love your cellulite. And she was like, I don’t know I wasn’t supposed to love my cellulite.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
It never occurred to me not to.
Glennon Doyle:
Right, Exactly. What’s the difference between the body positive and radical self-love?
Sonya Renee Taylor:
Radical self- love to me, I always describe as it’s your inherent sense of enoughness. It is your inherent sense of divinity. It can’t be externally gained. It can’t be externally magnified. I say the same thing that decided that there should be daisies and butterflies and the river Nile and sunrises also decided that there should be a Sonya and that’s divine. And if we can connect to that, if I can connect to the sense that the most stunning sunset I ever saw is made of the same material reality as my own beingness, how is that not miraculous? How is that not phenomenal?
Sonya Renee Taylor:
How does that not, if we really let it in, move us to awe and wonder and make me never trip about what anybody else has said. I’m a sunset in these streets. Why would I be tripping with you about being a Target, right? I’m going to just keep going back to that because I love that as this material structure that we give a lot of money to go do things and buy things and do things.
Glennon Doyle:
And be better, make our house better, make our face better.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
Make your house better, to make your face better, to make your look better at the job. All of these things. And no one’s ever been like, I would exchange this phenomenal sunrise for a Target. No right? And so radical self love is our sense of our inherent divinity that enoughness, it cannot be exchanged for some capitalist made external reality, and body positivity to me, which is it, it’s one of those things where I’m just like, oh, capitalism’s so great at being like, oh idea, let’s sell it. But for me it’s always anything that doesn’t acknowledge the existing power structures, that doesn’t acknowledge that there are people and bodies in the world that we’ve decided we do not feel positively about and we have no intentions on changing that, then we’re not talking about the same thing. A body positivity that doesn’t have a politic, that doesn’t say I demand that marginalized bodies be treated positively.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
That I demand that disabled bodies be treated positively and black and queer bodies and trans bodies be treated positively. If there is not a place of advocacy and effort toward creating a world where all bodies are not only treated positively, but for me, treated reverently, treated like we treat the most gorgeous sunrise, like we treat the most precious butterfly. We’re not creating that world then what’s body positivity for? And the other piece that feels important to me is, I’m never just talking about the corporal body. I’m never just talking about our physical beings, which are important in so much as we need them to traverse this planet. But we are also spiritual and emotional etheric beings. We also have those bodies as well. And if we are in a world that doesn’t value the completeness of our entire beings, then again what are we saying we’re positive about?
Abby Wambach:
Something that just occurred to me, Sonya, is I was a professional athlete. I have spent my whole life thinking about my physical body. And something that was just completely life changing for me is this idea of where this little seed, we can call it the acorn comes from. Let’s say I actually start using this idea of radical self-love and live with that rather than all the ways that I myself have been training my body, working my body, thinking about my body. That’s actually self-hate because all I’m doing is looking at something to change rather than breathing into it with a sort of positive perspective. I’ve never one time in my life thought of that.
Glennon Doyle:
Control is the opposite of love. We only control what we don’t trust. And Sonya’s saying we can trust. What would that look like?
Abby Wambach:
Oh my God, I’ve never trusted myself. This is really-
Sonya Renee Taylor:
And that is the piece of this work that is the spiritual work, that is the healing work. Do I trust this vessel that has brought me here? Can I trust it? And when I’m in a relationship of trust, what do we do? How do we move then? But we can’t even get there until we actually get to a place of saying, I talk about in the book. One of the tools that I give is, my body’s not my enemy. And it’s like, what does it mean to decide that my body and I are on the same team? It’s not a thing I control, it’s not a thing that has to do my bidding.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
And anytime we find ourselves in a way of thinking relationally about our bodies that gets reflected in the ways in which marginalization and inequity are set up in the external world is a great clue that we’re outside of radical self love. When I treat my body a thing that has to do my bidding, where else do we see that? Where else does that dynamic play out? Oh okay, in all manner of inequity and injustice. And so the question is, am I in a just relationship with my body? If I’m saying I want to practice justice, am I in a just relationship with my being right now today? Are the dynamics of dominance, control, coercion, force, are all of those the way in which I’m in relationship with my body?
Amanda Doyle:
So because everything you say is macro, everything is micro. It’s true all the way through. So is the first level of force coercion control the injustice we impose upon ourselves? Is that through the thoughts? If we are an asphalt ground that is trying to remember its magnificence, do we start that work by raising to consciousness and deconstructing the thoughts that are the way that we are controlling ourselves, which is incidentally the way the world is controlling us too. But can you talk about that? When I have the, oh God, the love handles in the jeans that I do an injury upon myself. How do I raise that up and think about it so I can remember?
Sonya Renee Taylor:
So part of it is this kind of conversation. It’s like, oh, what’s the dialogue that I am currently having with my beingness, with my body, with my identity? What’s the current dialogue and choosing to get into conversation about that? What are the messages that I believe that I hear, that I say, how do I talk to myself every day and then, once that’s raised to consciousness, and that’s a practice. Most of these things run default. They’re going in the background. I call them the outside voice that we believe is the inside voice. We’ve been listening to it for such a long time you just think it’s ours. This conversation, oh my hand, my left hand is you think that’s your thought, but it’s not your thought. It’s you now being a puppet for a larger external profiteering system who’s like, oh yes, please think our thoughts in your mind because that works for us.
Amanda Doyle:
We were born into a total immersion program and then we start speaking the language and we’re like, this is my native tongue. No it’s not.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
No, absolutely. And that’s really the question is like, can you retrieve your native tongue? And you can by starting to question the language you’re currently speaking. And so that’s the first step to raising it to consciousness is, can I ask myself questions about the things I believe today? And this is oftentimes where people sort of hit their first major hurdle is then I have to acknowledge that I have bought the lie. And if I bought the lie, then I have a whole story about what it means for me to have bought the lie. And I call this meta shame in the book. Now I have shame for having shame. Now I’m ashamed because I bought the lie and that keeps me from actually tackling the other shame that is the manifestation of the lie I bought. And then we’re in a loop.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
Whereas if we come to it from curiosity and compassion, of course I bought the lie. Everybody sold it to me. An entire world from the time I emerged from whatever womb I emerged from was like, here is the lie we expect for you to believe. Of course I bought it, of course. And as an act of defiance and liberation, I do not have to keep listening to it. I don’t have to. That’s the freedom. There’s no shame in having gotten what everybody else got. But the freedom is recognizing that you don’t have to keep it, that it’s not yours and you don’t have to keep it.
Glennon Doyle:
Because there’s a moment I think where you figure out not only have I bought the lie, I’m having this moment. Not only have I bought the lie and lived with the lie, I was a victim of this and then I was complicit with this and now I am teaching this. Now I am modeling or continuing the-
Amanda Doyle:
I’m a disciple of this.
Glennon Doyle:
I’m a disciple and I’m making disciples.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
But we all are. But I think that’s the thing is again, it’s like, oh I’m in this exceptional space where I’ve done something extra bad. No, you are still doing the same thing everyone has done, whether your discipleship is three million listeners or the four people that live in your house. The expectation of the system of body shame and body terrorism is that you pass it on. That’s the expectation. If you didn’t pass it on, then how would we build more Targets and more parking lots? Again, there’s no failure that we’ve been indoctrinated into this system.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
It is by design. What’s the gift of this moment right now is that we have been born into a time unlike any other time before where we have the tools and mechanisms to at a massive scale dispel the lie. That’s the gift. There is no other point in history where a black queer woman and all y’all wonderful white folks will be on a Zoom, get ready to talk to however many millions of people listen to your podcast to interrupt this story that has gone on for centuries. We are in a moment of gift that hasn’t existed before. So actually I’m like, yes, of course we all got it and something in the ether said this is the perfect time for us to all get off that train.
Glennon Doyle:
That feels good.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
It feels good to me.
Amanda Doyle:
It feels so good. Okay, so what is the deep fear that is for someone saying if I listen to that, if I acknowledge that’s a lie, not only am I ashamed because I’ve been duped, but what happens to me? What is the fear that will become of us if we step outside of the bounds that we have been so careful to try to stay inside of for so long?
Glennon Doyle:
If we stop hating ourselves? If we stop controlling ourselves, what are we so afraid will happen? Yeah,
Sonya Renee Taylor:
We’ll lose the perks. We’ll lose the perks that we got. Right? Because here’s what’s happening is we’re holding two things at the same time. Like you said, Glennon, we’re holding both a victimization by this system and we’re also holding a complicity and a proselytizing of the system at the exact same time. And so what that means, when I talk about it in terms of a ladder of bodily hierarchy is, we are neither at the top of the ladder nor are we at the bottom. And the entire goal of the system is to figure out how to ascend as high as possible while recognizing that most of us live in bodies that will never exist at the top.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
But as long as there are people below us, then we know we’re better than something even if that’s not conscious, at least I’m not down there inside of this experience of comparison that we live in. And so the fear is whatever I got at rung eight, I’m going to drop to rung three. If I denounce the ways in which white supremacist delusion has indoctrinated me, then I’m going to lose the perks that whiteness gives me. And I don’t want to acknowledge all the perks that whiteness gives me because then that makes me a bad person. So it’s a really beautiful-
Glennon Doyle:
So just go hold on for deal life at ring eight.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
I’m going to cross my eyes and hold on and pray nobody shakes me off, right? But what I think I’m always offering or certainly what I believe for myself is the ladder is only real because we keep trying to ascend it. The latter is as real as our investment in it is. And you’ll absolutely lose something, right? You’ll lose a Target. You’ll absolutely lose a Target. And maybe there were some nice candles and throw rugs and pillows in there, maybe there was a great face cream that you really loved.
Amanda Doyle:
There really were.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
And those things will be gone from that particular place. But what you get in exchange, what you get in exchange is in some ways is beyond anything you can imagine because you can think about really gorgeous, stunning sunsets you’ve seen, but you really can’t know it until you’re in it. The wonder in awe of it isn’t fully present until you’re standing there watching that giant orb of flame and fire and heat and gas descend over horizon and you’re like, and then expand across an entire skyline and you’re like, oh my God, this is so much greater than anything I could have ever imagined.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
So the challenge is that we are offering inside of radical self-love a thing that sometimes people are like, I can’t even imagine it so why would I go there? But what I’m proposing is where you are is unsustainable. It’s not going to last anyway. So you could be thrown off the ladder or you could go on ahead and climb off yourself. Either way it goes. I think we’re looking around every single day and seeing that we are inside of an untenable system, a system that cannot sustain itself at all and only can sustain itself by swallowing more of us. And so if I can practice, and this is why radical self-love I think is such a beautiful space of practice. What is the unknown but probable beauty that I can live into every single day in a small way that expands my capacity to hold the unknown probable magnificence of a collective future?
Sonya Renee Taylor:
How do I practice liberation inside of myself in such a way that when we arrive at that collective sunrise we could have never imagined, we are not even thinking about a Target?
Abby Wambach:
Yes. It’s like what you’re saying. It’s like there’s an illusion of safety that we’ve been sold our whole lives and they’re like by this, look this way. And then if you do it, then you are going to be safe here in this body as a person.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s this shitty consolation prize. We are so desperately clinging to a shitty consolation prize because we do not believe we are either worthy or will ever stand a chance of getting the main event. So it is the shitty store bought steak that the cheetah is afraid to let go of even though they’re going to be running around on the open savanna.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, exactly.
Amanda Doyle:
And so that’s why this place of imagining is so perfect. I don’t think that it is a coincidence that the most revolutionary people that we have heard from on this podcast, like Glennon was saying, the Tricia Hersheys, the Ocean Vuong’s, Alok. You are poets at the heart of you. It’s like Shelly said, where the poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, because it’s this idea that this imaginative practice is so inextricably linked to activism that you have to activate that imagination. That is the thing you’re inviting us to do.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
We are already imagining, we are living inside of imagination right now. It just happens that we’re living inside of the imagination of white, cis, heterosexual, powerful white supremacist delusional patriarchy. We have been inside of that imagination for a really long time. And so the invitation is, what would it look like to live inside of some other imaginations? What would it look like to decide, oh that, we’ve tried that imagination. Dap it up and what else is out there? What else is possible?
Sonya Renee Taylor:
So if we start, because a lot of people are like, I can’t imagine it. I’m like, you can. You’re living in an imagination right now. So what would it look like to reclaim that power, to raise it to consciousness and to then be like, all right, well I’m inside of an imagination? Let’s start moving things out. This is why games like The Sims or whatever, they’re fun. It’s like, oh no, different couch. What would happen if you take that couch and put a different couch in? Just to start playing with that idea, I think is a place to expand that muscle of imagination in each of us.
Glennon Doyle:
Because the white male cis imagination also said, okay, this is how we imagine white women will work on this rung. This is where they go and this is the bidding they’ll do for us. My therapist was talking to me about that Fiji study where there was no TVs on the island and then they brought TVs to the island and after three months, 50% of the girls had eating diet disorders. And what’s fascinating to me about that study is when they started asking the girls, why are you dieting? Why are you purging? It wasn’t about beauty per se. They said, because it looks like all of the women who are thinner or smaller are in more powerful positions on the TV.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s all about status and power. So when I’m thinking about recovering, I’m thinking about recovering in like Sonya’s imagination. And what that would require me to do is step off the ladder completely. And what that makes me do is look at what benefits I’m getting from controlling myself, from staying thin. It’s not beauty anymore. I’m married to Abby, she doesn’t give a fuck. Sex is great. All of these things, it’s not that. So then I have to look at what perks am I getting from not having any wrinkles in my forehead, from him not having any gray roots, from wearing this certain thing and it’s power.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
There you go.
Glennon Doyle:
So stepping off. It’s like white feminism is the latter. It’s white feminism body positivity. It’s a little taste of the real thing with no necessary destruction of the thing.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
Yes. And it’s an imaginary power again. It’s a power inside of a fixed imagination. And if we’ve decided that because… It’s so funny, I hope you don’t mind if I mention this really quickly in the letter that you wrote me, Glennon, where you were like, and by the way, totes just has botox.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, I was like I’m ready. Soon as this shit wears off, I’m ready.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
It seems like I look like I’m not asking a question now. I thought to myself, literally the question you just posed was the question that came up to me is like, what does that give you that you believe you need that you don’t already have? But what’s interesting is that your answer is a lie right? It gives me power except you already have power. So then the question becomes, power where and for what, right? Every question has another question that it wants to ask because the truth of the matter is, you have a massive platform, you have huge reach, you have a beautiful family, you have people who love you, so you have power. So the question is what kind of power and for what? And then we get to the parts we don’t want to tell ourselves, power to keep ascending in a system that I know is murderous and brutal.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
And that harms the people that I say I love. And what does it mean for me to have to contend with that? And again, can I contend with that not from a place of blame or shame, but of course this is just the deeper layer. This is that subterranean floor that they laid before they laid the foundation for the pavement and the Target. The fact that you’re there means you are starting to get really, really close to dismantling it when you’re ready to tell yourself that truth. I have power. So this is a different kind of power and it’s a power inside of this system and do I really want to keep that, right? That’s where we get to start grappling.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s it.
Amanda Doyle:
And I also do not think that it is a coincidence at all that you started as a sexual health educator. I truly believe that that is one of the reasons why you in this moment are the person we need to be talking to. Can you talk to us about that story of where that started?
Amanda Doyle:
To me it was so poignant that it came to you in poetry and then it came to you in a very specific conversation with a woman about what she believed she had a right to and what she believed she did not have a right to when it came to a sexual exchange. And to me, it feels like if the body is not an apology as the Target, there’s this bullseye that is there about the way we perform, not having needs. The way we perform, even pretending that our needs are met, the way we perform our desire and sexuality and the freedom and the fear of that freedom. It’s all in there. So for the three people who don’t know that story, can you…
Glennon Doyle:
I could hear it a thousand more times.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
So the inception of this idea of the body is not an apology came from a conversation with a friend who was sharing with me that she was afraid she might have an unintended pregnancy. And I’m a nosy friend, I’m just nosy. And I also had some background in sexuality health. I used to be a teen pregnancy prevention educator as a teenager and worked around HIV and Aids and sex worker rights and all kinds of things. So I had a lot of experience in that realm, which also made me ask more pointed questions than perhaps most people might. And I asked this person, I asked my friend why she wasn’t using condoms with this casual partner. And she shared in such an incredibly vulnerable way, just told the truth. She has cerebral palsy. And she was like, my disability already makes it really difficult and stuff.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
And I didn’t even feel entitled to just add another layer of things to the conversation. And my response, which I’m very clear at this point in my life, was through me not of me. I was just given a thing to say. And the thing was, your body is not an apology. It’s not a thing you offer to someone to say sorry for my disability. And what struck me in that moment was that this thing that came through me was also very clearly for me and I was instantly just dropped into the millions of ways I had given my body away as apology. And I think that sexuality is one of those places where we can see if we really just sit and look, we’re like, oh yeah, I had definitely screwed you on some apology stuff. I get a list of things that I’ve done with my body that were like, am I good enough now?
Sonya Renee Taylor:
Am I worthy now? Am I enough now? And this moment where she shared this, there was the intersection of that bartering that we do around sexuality and desirability to obtain our worthiness and it’s intersection with disability and it’s intersection with this interracial conversation where I had. And I was just like, oh, there’s a whole matrix of things operating that lead us to this position of apology around our beingness.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
And for some people it’ll be easy for them to see it in their relationship with food. For some people it’ll be easy to see it in their relationship at work, for some people it’ll be easy to see it in their relationships around sex and desire. And so the question is, where does life want to direct me first that’s the most visible place where I can see apology happening? And then, as I begin to dissect and inquire and get introspective around that area, then you’re like, oh, it’s a whole web. This isn’t just a one thing. It’s a way of being that I’ve been indoctrinated into the world to be. But yeah, I think sexuality is one of those places where that’s really reflective for us, can be if we want to look at it.
Amanda Doyle:
And doesn’t it reflect also in the promise, the shitty consolation of that sexual exchange versus the promise of if we can actually get to the place where, that is part of our magnificence, our birthright to have desire as a way of accessing the world goes out in centric circles of our right to enjoy food and look at our bodies and say, that is beautiful and wonderful and also is deeply connected to this political system where we are so apologetic about our own desire that we acquiesce to a political system that punishes our desire by divesting us of our autonomy over our own bodies.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
Exactly. I mean all of it is, again, what I’ve heard what you said Amanda was like desire is one of the accesses of actual power of real power. The actual power of the choice to create or not to create. The choice to harness so much energy and to have that explode in orgasm. What is the big bang, if not like the cosmos having an orgasm? How incredibly powerful is that? And so that’s of course if we understood that level of power, then we would understand why there are so many systems that would desire us to squelch that. That would be like, actually no, you don’t get to be in charge of your body at all. Here are all the ways your body is wrong, here’s all the ways in which you’re failing and we really need you to believe that because if you stopped believing that you might be another big bang. And then our elusory power is immediately disintegrated.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Is that what the acorn says when it starts growing when it’s not paint over?
Sonya Renee Taylor:
Oh yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
I want, I need, I prefer, I feel. Is that the growing of the acorn?
Sonya Renee Taylor:
I don’t think it says anything though. It just is. And from that is-ness comes action. It doesn’t have to think I want water, it’s just like my entity pulls water towards me because water is what is compatible with my growth. And I think that’s part of the challenge which I think about inside of this idea of what we want and our thinking about it is we have to acknowledge our thinking is so conditioned. I’ll give you a really funny example. So I’ve been traveling the planet since April. I’ve been on some wild pilgrimage sojourn thing that I’m still trying to understand. And at one point I was in Greece, I was supposed to be in Greece for 10 days. I was in Greece for 34 days at some stranger’s house who thought I was going to be there for three days. Just wild, wild wildness.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
And I’m finally leaving and in my mind I was like, oh yeah, I’m going to Kenya and then I’m going to go to Thailand and Vietnam and Bali, then I’m going back to New Zealand. That’s my plan. And I was doing this meditation for shadow work or something like that. And in the meditation, like go visit my little Sonya. And I don’t say anything to her, I just observe where she is and what’s happening and it takes me back to this really root memory. And then once I observe and I spend some time in it, I go up to her and I ask her what she wants. And little Sonya said, I want to go home.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
And I was like, oh, I’ll be your home. We are our own home. It was really sweet and tender and beautiful and I practiced it a lot. And little Sonya was like, no chick. I want a plane trip to Pittsburgh and I want hoagie. Thanks for all your fluffy duffy therapized meaning, and it was this phenomenal moment of awareness where I was like. Sonya, the adult who been indoctrinated into so many things including all of this wonder. But the core of me that didn’t need to think or do anything was like, no, that need didn’t come from my head, that need came from my soul, from my center, from the smallest parts of my truth. And so sometimes the work is to not be in our head at all. You don’t have no answers there. The answer is in the center of you. It’s in your gut, it’s inside the deepest, quietest, usually most disavowed parts of ourselves. And that part isn’t thinking.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s not thinking.
Abby Wambach:
I love what you just said too about this idea of just letting what is good come to you like that acorn rather than, I mean, I’m a recovering addict and that behavior is me reaching out and trying to grab something. So this idea of getting courageous enough to not just want but let what your intuition and what your deep soul needs come to you rather than going and grabbing it.
Amanda Doyle:
But that’s trust too. I trust it’s going to come.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
I trust this is going to come and of course, inside of a construction of capital scarcity and lack, we have all reason not to think it’s going to come because as long as we’re in that imagination, we’re right. As long as you are inside of the imagination of scarcity and individualism and power over and lack and competition and comparison, if that’s where you live, you’re going to get exactly what that has to offer. And that’s why I’m like the divestment is a practice.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
Oh I see. I’m living in scarcity right now. What would it mean in this moment to just practice something different? And it’s going to be scary and yes, you might lose what that imagination would offer you, but never without gain over here, never without it. I want to share another little example, this funny thing. So I was doing my finances a couple of weeks ago looking at my sort of year end and all this stuff. And black women, historically it’s have a five, it was like $500 net worth or something like that. Something abysmal and horrible. And I was looking at this network graph and my budgeting software and it’s like flat line, flat line, flat line for years.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
And then it spiked a little bit in 2019 and it spiked a little bit more in 2020. And then it had this really drastic drop at the beginning of 2021 back down to where I was. And then it quadrupled. And I was like, bro, what happened? Something wild has changed. And I was like, oh, in 2021 I paid my taxes. Now this seems ridiculous in the sense that, I mean I have opinions about the tax system, but this isn’t about the tax system. This is about, there was something I owed regardless of how I agree with it or whatever else. There was something I owed and I paid it and the paying of it in that moment looked like I’d lost most of everything. But my obedience to the possibility of my integrity, I pay what I owe. I trust that the release of this will net something greater than its loss in a year and a half quadrupled anything I’d ever had.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
That’s the practice of trust that no, I might not see it in that moment, but it always comes back because I decided I was living in a different imagination and an imagination where the US government can’t take all my money and I just stay broke forever. I don’t believe in that imagination. I live in the imagination where I have more than enough resource to take care of that which it is that I owe and to still live in overflow. And just cause it don’t look like it at that moment doesn’t mean it’s not true. Just hold on. Hold on, the return is coming.
Glennon Doyle:
When you talk about radical self-love, you’re listening to little Sonya who just want really, she seriously just wants a hokey and for you to go home and stop being so educated about all this travel and shit. I’m hearing you talk about living in our imagination and our body and not living in our mind and I’m thinking about at my religious tradition I was raised in, there was such an emphasis for us to not believe that our bodies were us. It was everything was, oh no, no, no. You are not your body. Your body is just a vessel. You can’t trust your body, your body has evil tendencies. Just a concerted effort to separate us from our body.
Glennon Doyle:
They would say, you are a soul, you have a body. And I’m trying to understand the damage that does not just because we don’t trust our own bodies, but then it is so easy for us to hurt other bodies, to dismiss other bodies. If the body is not who we are, if the body is not holy, then well actually the same forces who taught us that are killing are crusading or whatever, actually, oh shit, it was all-
Sonya Renee Taylor:
It’s a great message. It’s a great message if you desire to control a large number of bodies is to tell the people in them, don’t be that body. What an amazing thing to be able to tell enslaved Africans, your body doesn’t matter. You’ll get your reward in heaven. Great, it’s a wonderful way for me to continue to utilize your body for my prophet and not have you be embodied enough to decide in a collective mass scale to uprise. The intention of that message is disconnection.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
The intention of that message is disconnection. Often thinking about the sort of connections between various religious doctrines and this idea of radical self-love. But here’s the thing that immediately just came to me was inside of the Christian tradition. If the body didn’t matter, Jesus would’ve never had to die on the cross. If the body didn’t matter, then he’d be like, hey, all y’all sin forgive because I said so.
Glennon Doyle:
Take care of it in the next life.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
Right, we’ll take care of it in the next life. His body was his representation of love. I love you so much that this thing that is so precious that we all know is so precious that it matters that I’m choosing to give it up. It wouldn’t matter that I was choosing to give it up if the body doesn’t matter, if it’s not an essential part of our understanding of our value and magnificence in the world. Otherwise, the sacrifice of Christ means nothing in the physical form. We know that’s not true. We just let people tell us a different story and that story makes us pliable, it makes us manipulable, it makes us wonderful consumers and robots in service of these systems of oppression and injustice.
Glennon Doyle:
And so the healing of that, the opposite of that is loving. And when we love ourselves, I’ve read 70 million times the part in your book where you talk about don’t just get rid of this body shame because it’s hurting you, get rid of it because it’s hurting everybody. It’s hurting everybody. So how Sonya is the return or uncovering of radical self love? How is my liberation from this shit I’m in right now anorexia, which has got to be the fucking opposite of every single thing that you talk about. How is my liberation tied to your liberation and how is the disability activist tied to your liberation a, how is all of our liberation tied to each others?
Sonya Renee Taylor:
So there’s the meta version of that, which is that we are not separate, that I am you. That’s the high spiritual level that everybody’s like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s nice. But it’s really not a lie. It’s really the truth is that we are actually one giant organism. And we know we’re one giant organism because right now we’re one giant organism fucking up the planet. As an entire being, we are creating harm collectively in the realm in which we are existing that sustains our life. So there’s that level of it. But the more sort of intricate nuanced level of it is, every way in which you believe the system reinforces it. And the system that tells Glennon your power lies in how you can control your body and make it do what it is that you say. And that is how you ascend and achieve greater power in this ladder.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
I am on that ladder too because we’re all on that ladder. And as long as you are cashing in on your piece of power, you are mandating that I remain below you because in that ladder my body is less than your body. My fat black queer body is never going to be as valuable on that ladder as a thin white cis woman’s body. And so if you’re like, nope, I’m going to ascend another ladder, then you are ensuring that it’s almost impossible for me to actually ever catch you, which means to decide that inequity is the order of the world and will remain in place.
Abby Wambach:
Oh fuck. That’s so good.
Glennon Doyle:
I was worried that was the answer Sonya. I was really worried.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
You’re here. I will press you down and what I want people to get is, no matter where you are on the ladder someone is below you. There is someone in this world that has a body that is deemed less valuable than yours. And every time you are like, I’m going to take another step, you are ensuring that they stay low too. That they stay lower than you. They have to. And so until you get off that ladder, we will continue have a world of inequity where your body is valued more than my body. So if we say we’re about justice, if we say we’re about equality, if we say we want marginalization done away with, then we have got to do away with marginalization inside of ourselves. We have to get off the ladder. We can’t say I really want a world where all bodies are valued equally, but I got to figure out how to make my body better because those don’t go together. That’s a contradiction.
Amanda Doyle:
And if that all sounds like too theoretical to folks, you don’t actually think someone’s on a ladder, how do you think we end up in a world where the schools, your kids go to have all the books and after school activities they need and the kids in Flint, Michigan had poison water for four years and have the highest levels of lead now that they’ve had since 2016 or if a black baby boy is born today, one in four of them will end up in prison. That is because we have desensitized so much to the divinity of bodies that we in our heads are not up in arms about that. We know that one in four boys are going to end up in jail, we know the folks in Flint don’t have water and we just carry on with life because we’re on that ladder.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
Because we’re on the ladder. There was a period of time four or five years ago where we literally had hundreds, thousands of babies sleeping in cages under tinfoil. There were babies washing up dead ashore because their families were trying to flee and we closed our borders. Somebody’s body is more valuable and it clearly wasn’t that one. We know that the power systems are committed to remaining entrenched regardless of whoever’s body might be on the line.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
I was never more clear that the United States was committed to power over regardless of anything when they kill all them babies in Sandy Hook, little white children. And they were like, love and prayers, love and light. And we don’t plan to change one thing that would give us less power over the collective. Those bodies were less valuable. That’s the hierarchy that we’re all participating in as long as we are even on an individual level trying to figure out how to ascend inside of that imagination.
Glennon Doyle:
And so if we are not seeing the holiness and the preciousness of our own bodies, it is harder for us to see it in others and we continue to allow this to happen.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
Right, or we can say we see it another. I mean people are all the time like, oh no, I see everyone’s value, absolutely. But then we don’t practice it in ourselves, which is to say, yeah, I said it, but do I really believe it? Do I believe it at the level of practice? And if I believe it for everybody else, this is what I say all the time. So many times people, activists are like, we want to get everybody free, we want to get everybody free. And I’m like, if we all got free and you got left behind, we didn’t it all get free.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
So if everybody lives in a world where their bodies are valued as magnificent and divine and you are still the one person who’s like, nope, I only when I cash in this way or that way or the other way, then we didn’t actually get there. But as I say it I was like, that’s an ethos that is outside of the construction of individualism.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
That is an ethos that demands that I believe that our liberation is bound up together as Watson said. And so even to not believe that again, no, but it doesn’t matter if I don’t make it is another way to be like, oh, that’s how I still bought into the old imagination.
Amanda Doyle:
Because the real truth is that you don’t need to love that person just because they’re divine. You don’t need to want them off the ladder just because you don’t want your foot on their head. You need to love that person because you know that your actual liberation, your freedom is inextricably linked with theirs because-
Sonya Renee Taylor:
They’re inextricably linked.
Amanda Doyle:
And you can’t see more obvious than the last decade of our politics to know that any time you pull on a thread, everybody’s raveling.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
The whole is about to unravel. I think this is one of those places in politics where we were really? When we were like, y’all are still voting for Trump? Why ladies?
Amanda Doyle:
White women.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
Great. Thank you for being aligned with our agenda because our agenda is actually to force you to birth more children so that white people don’t lose their majority of population. So regardless of what you want, you have now been inscribed in our particular political army whether you mean to or not. That’s what happens when you stay connected to that imagination is it’s coming for you next, it’s always coming for you next because it’s only power is in domination. It’s only power is in controlling everything. And so if you think you’re not going to end up under the control of it, you are lying to yourself.
Glennon Doyle:
And those white women voters think that their whiteness is going to protect them and it’s never been. Sandy Hook proved that wasn’t the case.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
Right. I was like, white will not protect you because at the end of the day, whiteness is still just a tool for domination. The only reason whiteness came into existence was because there needed to be a narrative that made sense for why this group of people could dominate, steal, oppress and hold in bondage another group of people. Well then we got to figure out what’s different. All right, well what’s different? Skin. Cool. Well then one of these skins has got to be better than the other skin.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
And that’s literally the creation of whiteness as a category came as a justification for enslavement. But its purpose wasn’t like, oh, whiteness is so great, its purpose was power and control. And if somebody wants power and control, they will use any narrative to get it. And so whatever identity you hold, if there is a person above you on the ladder who is invested in power and control, they will use any aspect of your identity to reinscribe the ladder.
Amanda Doyle:
And it’s always sold as inherent. It was sold as an inherent superiority. But that was the concocted plan. And to go back to the only thing that’s inherent is the thing you come into the world with, is the acorn. That is the only thing that’s inherent. Everything else is made up.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s why it’s the only thing we can trust. So we have kept Sonya Renee Taylor two extra minutes and that is unacceptable.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
I’m having a joyful time.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. I need to just end by thanking you deeply because you are so special and the energy that you have given to us in the last hour is such a freaking gift, not just to us, but to the millions of who are going to be listening. And I cannot think of a better way for so many people to start this year than spending this hour with you. I have goosebumps feet to head because I just think that is the best thing that we could give people the beginning of this year is this conversation and you for an hour. And so now I just want you to get back in the bathtub and refill.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
Well, it’s really been a deep joy and I just thank you all for, like I said, wanting to have this conversation, for letting me ideate with you. And I want to say to you, Glennon, that I struggle with addiction as well for many, many years. And I know how hard it is to let go, to be like, oh, I could release that and there is something else that will come that is far greater. And I just want to tell you that I promise there is, I just want to tell you that if… I know there is. I know, I know, I know that there is some… You wouldn’t be called to do what it is that you were doing in the world. You all wouldn’t have been called to have the reach and expanse that you have if it wasn’t because there is something so incredibly powerful, so big banged in what the world has for you when you let go of that last piece of power inside of an old imagination.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. I’m just going to think about your tax return for the next, I am. That’s my…
Sonya Renee Taylor:
It’s doing this but it’s getting ready to go here.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s like a shot, it’s like a slingshot.
Glennon Doyle:
I would like to not just thank Sonya, but thank God for Sonya. Thank you for whoever is sending her these messages and the rest of you pod squad. I’ve never said this before, but you are welcome. I’m not even thanking you pod squad, today I’m just saying you are welcome for that. And we’ll see you next time on We Can Do Hard Things. We Can Do Hard Things is produced in partnership with Cadence13 studios. Be sure to rate, review and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts. Especially be sure to rate and review the podcast if you really liked it. If you didn’t, don’t worry about it. It’s fine.