ON OUR BEST BEHAVIOR
A groundbreaking exploration of the Seven Deadly Sins—ancient ideas of morality that still control and distort women’s lives today—revealing how trust in our natural instincts can return us to a more balanced, peaceful, and spiritually complete way to live.
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I host a weekly podcast with luminaries, spiritual elders, and wise thinkers, who provide context and insight on who we are, why we do what we do, and how we can move forward in this complex time.
Episodes
“Now the tragedy, in one sense is a tragedy, that often people only become open when they've suffered horribly when that is both the tragedy of trauma, but also the promise. It's one thing to be trauma informed. It's another thing to inform our experience of trauma with some kind of courage and some kind of hopefulness for profound change. That's what's got to happen. If that can happen, then maybe out of all this contentiousness that is present in our 21st century United States, maybe something really good can happen, but we've got to pay attention, we've got to act on it, and take responsibility.”
“I realized I think there's a few things that are in our heads that are so deep in the culture. One of them is the idea that being overweight is a sin. It goes right back to if you look at Pope Gregory I in the 6th century when he first formulates the seven deadly sins, gluttony is there, it's always depicted with some fat person who looks monstrous, overeating. And how do we think about sin? If being overweight is a sin, we think sin requires punishment before you get to redemption. The only forms of weight loss that we admire are where you suffer horribly, right? You think about “The Biggest Loser,” that horrid, disgusting game show. If you go through agony, if you starve yourself, if you do extreme forms of exercise that devastate your body, then we'll go, he suffered. We forgive you. Well done. We'll let you be thin now, right?”
“When we can pause for a moment and rifle through all that noise to figure out what the root of the fear is, then we can be with it in a meaningful way, rather than just let it run our lives. And a little bit of fear of death and a little bit of death anxiety is totally normal, for all of us. I mean, it's that thing inside that tells you not to keep walking when you get to the edge of a cliff, and even to like drink water, you know, hydrate, stay alive. It's in us. It's in our DNA. It's rooted in there. And so the goal is never to get over it entirely, but rather to learn from it, to be with it, to not let it run our lives, but rather to let it fuel our lives.”
“But one thing the whole “Karen” thing did, which I think was very good, was that it pointed out the existence of spaces Ostensibly open to everyone, but not, and then patrolled often by white women saying you don't belong here. And she got a name, and people with that name wince and rightfully so, but without that wince-worthy kind of situation, I don't think large numbers of Americans would realize that there really is a sort of silent apartheid in our public spaces.”
“What is that instinct that might be asking me to do something really unadvisable or radical or leap outside the bounds of my own life? And that's the space by which I think we move forward in life. And that's the space in which I think we move forward honestly on the page and in writing. And I tell people, you know, what is it that you want to explore in your writing? Like the page is this beautiful opportunity to start taking some big risks, whether it's persona poetry, where you're literally writing in a different voice, or you're naming something that cannot be held in any other space available to you, or you're testing out just an idea that you're not ready to say out loud. The page is this really beautiful field that gives us a lot of courage to then apply that, I think, to our actual lives.”
“You want to find yourself? Give. We're not hungry for what we're not getting. We're hungry for what we're not giving. And then at the same time, you watch this old pattern of guarding what you have and of watching your mother take the leftovers and your mother taking leftover food and taking the piece of cake that broke in half while it was being served and taking the lesser car and taking whatever time is left for her to get her needs met. And so, you know, all truth is a paradox. And that's really what I believe is that I really, really give, but because I'm healing the codependence, I'm healing the self doubt, I'm giving from a place that is abundant because I live in gratitude. I notice how much I have been poured into, crazy love from a number of different directions. And I give that away. I don't give from my place of deprivation.”
“From my perspective, one of the reasons we tell stories is it helps give us a sense of who we are, we use stories to affirm our identity. And that's part of the reason why we don't actually like to call them stories, because if we call them stories, and we begin to see that the self is actually rooted in construction, made up interpreted reality, it can be very threatening to us and to our sense of who would I be without this story. And so that's one of the things that I really love about this is you can begin to see that my sense of self has to change, if I'm willing to look at my stories, what is going to happen is my sense of who I am is going to change.”
“I think historically we have always seen that intergenerational partnership is the way that movements grow and expand and the way people feel resilient about what they're trying to accomplish. The first defeat as a young person, when you feel your morals are on the line, your sense of justice is on the line, that is such a devastating blow and you really need people who've been doing this work for a long time to say, yeah, you're right. That's how that feels. It sucks. It hurts so bad. And this is how, when it happened to me, I got up again and I kept fighting. There is no future for progress without that kind of perspective. You need the fiery engagement of young people and you need the sense of history and the sense of perspective that older people can provide.”
“Part of middle life is that hopefully there's a little bit of wisdom there. And I think that is part of what we gain as we go through this journey of life is that there is wisdom that's accrued, which allows us to exist a little bit more in the complexity and nuance of things. I believe so much of this work is that we have to hold grace and compassion. And we also have to hold ownership and accountability and responsibility. And I feel that way, right? It's like, okay, if there's something that happened in our childhood or something happened in our teenage years, something that happened in our twenties, right? It's hard to process those things really early on. And especially when we're younger and really immature, because the lens is so narrow. I think as we grow and hopefully as we get wiser, that the lens opens.”
“In writing my book, I wanted to bring it back to the self because being online allows us to have this inappropriate level of audacity. And I think audacity is a very beautiful thing, but it gets so inappropriate online where you can go into Elise's messages and say, “by the way, I saw you liked this, you should be liking this, prove yourself to me”-- when the same person is probably not even able to have a conversation with their own partner in their home, but they can go online and demand people to say certain things, but in your home, are you that courageous to have a difficult conversation? Are you that courageous to have that same level of audacity in your day to day life. And I just worry that we're performing this very shadowy version of ourselves, especially online, without making any kind of effort in our everyday life to cultivate a strong sense of self, where you're able to handle conflict, where you're able to express disappointment to someone face to face and have a dialogue.