Stewarding My Soul: A Conversation with Elizabeth Gilbert, Part II
On not abandoning ourselves, the job of staying well, healthy sponsorship, and the miracle of Pepita!
Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.
As promised, here’s Part Two of my conversation with Liz Gilbert. It picks up exactly where we left off, so if you need a review of Part One or haven’t yet read it, you can check it out here.
Next week I’ll be sharing Craft Advice from Liz. It’s pretty spectacular!
I loved this talk with Liz. Let me know what you think in the comments!
xJane
I love when someone in the rooms says to you, “Are you still waiting for someone to change so you can be okay?” And later, you write, “I have finally learned I cannot be abandoned by anybody, I can only abandon myself.” I feel like that’s the key to health. When I woke up to the truth of that, I was in part terrified. It felt like a lot of weight to carry. But in part, I was so liberated, I was so excited, I felt so much lighter. I don't normally put myself into these interviews, but I saw myself in this book so much.
Well, you also have a deep personal connection to this story!
What are your experiences of that sort of awakening?
I saw my favorite teacher, Byron Katie, working with a woman in her fifties whose husband had left her for somebody else, and she was in a deep fugue state of betrayal and victimization and innocence. And a feeling of having been abandoned.
Katie, who doesn't fuck around, said, “Adults cannot be abandoned. Only children can be abandoned. Adults can only abandon themselves.”
I watched as she kept working with this woman, and this woman was gradually waking up to, “Oh my god, I betrayed me. This guy's been cheating on me for seven years and I've been doing his laundry. I've betrayed me by thinking that I'm powerless and can't take care of myself, and buying that story as a truth, and staying in a relationship where I wasn't being treated well because somebody else was paying the bills.”
I love that concept. Any time that I feel that somebody has abandoned me, it is 100% certain that I have abandoned me. And it is 100% certain that there's somebody inside of me, the original wounded child who was oftentimes abandoned and betrayed and neglected as a kid, who needs me to pick her up and say, “I have got you and I have an amends to make to you. I'm sorry I once again put you in somebody else’s hands, setting us up to experience this abandonment wound again.”
When I first came into the rooms of recovery, and I heard people talking about how, especially with love addiction and codependency, the solution is that you have to take complete responsibility for yourself, I was furious. I felt like having a tantrum. I was like, “I've been taking care of everybody, somebody take care of me.”
But the reality is that it's not anybody else's job to steward my soul through its journey in life. I was bequeathed this soul. I matched my body to this spirit. And I like to think that it was because something in the universe believed that I could accept that stewardship. Once I stopped having a tantrum and stopped going into fits of resentment about all the people who were supposed to take care of me who didn't, because every single person I have ever been with who I thought was going to take care of me, I ended up taking care of 100% of the time—the thing that is so distorted is I'm on record as being somebody who's very good at taking care of a human being, why do I refuse to take care of myself?—once I picked up that responsibility and made it my own, depression went away, and anxiety went away, and shame went away, and terror went away, and I can sleep through the night now, and I'm not on any medications. It's like, “Oh, all I had to do was take responsibility for myself, and all of this stuff would drop away and I would be alright. I thought I had to find somebody who was going do that for me.”
Standing up to your bully, which in that moment manifested as Rayya, and the profound realization that you are responsible for yourself feel part of the same piece. Does that feel true to you?
Yes. The great cosmic relationship with Rayya was that she, more than anyone, constantly said to me, “I will not rest until I see you standing on your own two feet in every circumstance of your life.” What I find so remarkable about the emotional state that I'm in now, and my relationship with her now, is that I can't really feel her anymore as being present. She was so vividly present after she died. She died, but she didn't leave. She was really there, and I was really leaning on her, the same way that I always did. As I've gotten healthier and healthier and learned how to stand on my own two feet, I can't access that anymore. And I realized, “Oh, she literally said ‘I won't rest until I see you standing on your own two feet.’” I'm standing on my own two feet, she must finally be able to rest.
Oh, that's beautiful!
And now I want her to rest.
Rayya was a gifted musician with a glorious voice. In the weeks before she died, in a vision she experienced herself as music. And once she dies, you want her to become music. Do you feel her as music now. Is that rest for Rayya?
I went to a medium after she died, and through the medium, Rayya said, “I have become music.” Music was what she loved the most, and music was also what she abandoned the most whenever she looked for other things in the world to satisfy her. It’s like music was given to her as medicine, but she often didn't take that medicine. She went looking for other kinds of medicine instead, and they never did what music did for her. I think maybe she didn't quite have the security to believe that the music was enough to carry her through this journey, so she wanted more of other things. Maybe that's projecting. I was about to ask her, but I can't feel her, so I don't know. I’ve got to work this one out myself.
I did an ayahuasca journey after she died, where I saw her as music. I was struggling with something, and I kept asking for her advice, “tell me how to deal with this person.” I felt her come to me, and she said, “I could tell you what to do, or can I just show you what I am now?” And I was like, “Well, I kind of want you to tell me what to do. But I also kind of want to see what you are.” In the journey space, I said, “Yes, go ahead.” Then she arrived as this dancing teal-blue line of light that was rhythmic and moving, and that I understood to be the visualization of music, and that's what she had become.
I don't think I was bothering her at the time, but now I do feel that I might be. And I have been given guidance from my higher power to leave her alone and let her be music. It's the most healing thing in the universe that her soul could be. And I’ve got my own work to do.
I love that. You’re a sex and love addict and have done a lot of healing work around this. You have daily check-ins with you sponsor and attend regular meetings. Plus, all your at-home grounding and healing protocols. With my health challenges, much of my day is likewise devoted to healing. Is this ever exhausting for you? Does it verge on becoming another addiction?
It's not the worst thing to be addicted to. I've heard other people say that. An addiction is something that consumes your entire life and all your resources and makes you sick and cuts you off from the source of life itself. An addiction is a spiritual illness. I think it’s good to keep that definition in mind.
That’s helpful.