“I’ve kind of been a student of self-acceptance my whole life because I’ve had to be.”
Author Elizabeth Gilbert (“Eat, Pray, Love” and “Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear”) was one of the speakers at the Self-Acceptance Summit produced by Sounds True.
Host Tami Simon: Let’s start right with self-acceptance as a topic that you care about – why is this an important topic to you personally
Elizabeth Gilbert: Well, I mean I’ve kind of been a student of it my whole life because I’ve had to be, because its absence – it’s moments of absence – in my life have brought me the darkest pain I’ve ever been in.
And the only way out of that pain of the absence of self-acceptance was to claw, study, fight, beg and inch my way toward it.
And it’s been what I’ve been up to for a long time, and it’s something that I still have to work on.
And there are times where I lose it. I’d have to find my way back to it again and again and again – which of course always means finding your way back to your heart – it’s the only place you’re ever gonna find it.
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Hear the full length interview and many others in Sounds True program:
Self-Acceptance Summit recordings
Article with more details, quotes, videos: The Self-Acceptance Summit
Related articles:
Elizabeth Gilbert on fear and courage and being creative.
Self Esteem and Self Confidence and Creative People
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Transcript
Tami Simon: Welcome everyone to the self-acceptance summit. This is our very first session and it’s my great joy to be able to launch this entire series with a special interview on self-acceptance with Elizabeth Gilbert.
My name’s Tami Simon, and I’ll be your host for this session and for our entire series. and now I’m so pleased to launch the self-acceptance summit with this special conversation, with the best selling author of “Eat, Pray, Love” and “Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear.”
Someone who is a friend to Sounds True. I’m so grateful for your willingness here to take flight with me, Liz Gilbert. Welcome Liz.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Hi, Tammy. Thank you for having me on. I’ve missed you.
Tami Simon: Well, let’s start right with self acceptance as a topic that you care about. Why is this an important topic to you personally?
Elizabeth Gilbert: Well, I mean, I’ve kind of been a student of it my whole life, because I’ve had to be, because its absence, its moments of absence in my life have brought me the darkest pain I’ve ever been.
And the only way out of that pain of the absence of self acceptance was to claw study, fight, beg an inch my way toward it.
And it’s been what I’ve been up to for, for a long time. And it’s something that I still have to work on. And there are days and times where I lose it, and I have to find my way back to it again and again and again, which, of course, is always finding your way back to your heart.
It’s the, it’s the only place you’re ever gonna find it. I keep looking for another way. uh, but so far I haven’t found one.
So, so I’ve been forced to be a student of self acceptance. Uh, life has forced to be a student of self acceptance. The alternative has just been dreadful.
Tami Simon: Now it’s interesting that you say that you still have challenges with it because I think one of the, let’s call it a misconception that people have is that people who seem so bold and like such a truth teller,
– I mean, you didn’t write a book called small magic, you wrote a book called Big Magic –
that they’re over it, that you you’ve you’ve graduated from being a student, if you will. Sure. But it sounds like that’s not really true.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Not until you’re dead, you know? Um, are you still here then? You’re still a student and you’re still a student of your, of your own life.
And, you know, life will, you know, the bell it’s like the school be will ring when it rings and the school will be in session and life will continue to throw things at you, but the take you down, you know, um, I don’t, I don’t care how long you’ve been doing this. I mean, you’ve, you’ve talked to all the great spiritual leaders.
Maybe you’ve met people who are actually fully ascended, and no longer have any disturbance in the force, um, around their lives whatsoever, but I haven’t spent a lot of time with those people and I certainly haven’t become one of those people.
You know, one of the, one of my favorite things that my friend Rob Bell always says is when, you know, one of the beginning things I do when I’m like at the pit of shame is I will actually write on my hand, the word student.
It’s something that my friend Rob taught me just to remind you’re still a student. You’re not a master of anything yet.
And, and obviously right now, you’re not, because right now you’re in a heap and, and you feel like a total failure and a total disappointment to yourself and to others. And so now it’s time to become that student again, who seeks her way out of this hole any way she can.
And that happens still, like that happens this week, you know, like it’s not a rare occurrence. I mean, that happens again and again and again.
Tami Simon: And just to respond to your comment [about me], that in your role at Sounds True, you’ve interviewed all of these great luminaries and you’ve met people who don’t have such challenges.
And I will say I, uh, don’t trust people who aren’t on some kind of journey, something in me goes, well, I don’t know something fishy. So there you go. Just from this side over here.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Oh good. That’s pretty sure . I thought you were gonna say yes. I know 11 of them. No, fully ascended masters. Um, no, I think as long as you’re still here, you’re still a student.
{Note – transcript below has not been fully edited.]
And I remember asking my friend Martha Beck, um, who’s a person who I often reached to for teachings and who I know struggles with this stuff too personally. I said, why is it that you don’t get to just stay there? Right. You get this, you get this moment of clarity and we’ve all had this in our lives where you, you feel like, oh, we’ve got it.
I see. I see. I see. And now I feel that I’m at peace. I’m, I’m at ease and I’m relaxed in myself and cool. Now I can just coast, you know? Um, and then it it’s like the back of your head falls off and all those teachings fall away and you know, the next Wednesday you you’ve lost all of it. And I said, why, why is it that you, you don’t get to just stay there?
And she had this great metaphor. She said, if aliens came to earth and saw people at a gym working. And they saw you lifting up a weight again and again and again, and they’ve watched it for a while and they puzzled and they finally figured out, oh, clearly this person wants the weight to be up high and they would come with a solution and their solution would be, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna build you a little shelf.
And what you can do is just put the weight on that shelf at the level that you seem to keep wanting it. And then you don’t have to keep lifting it up every, every 30 seconds. Like we can solve this for you, so you don’t have to keep doing. , they would be missing the point and the point of the exercises that you are strengthening.
Right. And, and if you put the weight on the shelf and just leave it, leave it there, then you would lose all your strength. Right. So that was her explanation for why we emotionally collapse. And then we have to do that work again and lift it up again. Is that in each process, every time you lift yourself out of the hole and back up into the heart, you’re strengthening, you’re actually making, you’re actually building something.
Um, and other. It would just go to, to entropy mm-hmm mm-hmm now Liz recently in your life, you made a big move and it’s, you know, been quite. Public that you left your second marriage in order to enter a relationship with your best friend Raya Elias mm-hmm . And this is a move in your life, uh, for which you’ve been, uh, praised and criticized and probably everything else in between.
And what I’d love to know is. Inner process as it relates to going against social norms, if you will. And the self-acceptance for you that was required in making such a life change and doing it in such a public way. Yeah. Well, I’m gonna be super careful answering this because this is a story that I’m still living.
Um, and, and there’s so many delicate things around the story. I mean, I haven’t been secretive about the fact. That Ray and my partner has a terminal cancer illness. Um, that was a large part of, of my decision to go and be with her. Um, you know, we’re so deeply in these, at the, at this very moment, um, that in many ways I feel like it’s too soon to talk about it publicly.
As I said, when I made my notes about it, this is a story that I’m living, not a story that I’m telling, but, but what I can say is.
secrets make you sick. We all know this, you know, um, this is the, the general rule of addiction and recovery that anything that you’re secretive about is going to cause you pain in your life. And so the decision for me to leave my marriage and, and go and be with Reya is, is one that I don’t feel like talking about publicly yet, because it’s so intimate and so private, but I can say the reason.
That I went public with it pretty much instantaneously was because I just don’t have the stamina or the stomach anymore to live my life in secrets. Um, and for better or for worse, I am a bit of a public figure. So I’m sometimes out there in the world. And the last thing I wanted was to be walking around the world, not being able to hold hands with my love, not being able to kiss her in public, especially at this moment in her life.
And my. Um, or acting as though this is something that I should be ashamed of when it isn’t. And so I figured the easiest way to take care of that is to just stay ahead of it. Um, and, and just tell people, this is what’s going on and recognize that everybody gets to have their own feelings about that.
This is the thing about your life, whether. in the public eye or not. And I think all of us always feel like we’re in the public eye, cuz we feel like we’re being scrutinized by our, our friends and our families and our communities and our culture and our history. And you know, um, there’s kind of really no such thing as a private life in, in the human life.
You know, you just have to, at some point say, this is, you know, this is who I am and, and you all get to have every feeling about it that you need to have. Um, and nonetheless. here I am. This is what we’re doing in the context of self acceptance. This idea of being able to say this is who I am and how important that is.
And I’m imagining somebody who’s in a marriage and. Actually knows they need to leave, but isn’t leaving or isn’t a job that they know they need to leave, but isn’t leaving or a book that somebody knows they need to write and they’re not writing it. And how. Your inner move and really the moves you’ve made in your life could be potentially a source of instruction.
Cause I really think in many ways you are a, a living permission slip, if you will. I try to be yeah. For others. I mean, I think I, I see you as that, uh, someone who’s following your. And even, even in the face of, uh, people having all kinds of feelings about, about you doing that. And so I’m wondering if you can talk to that person who is in one of those situations I, I mentioned and is not making the move that they know they need to make.
Well, here is the most loving and self accepting way that you could possibly interpret that I would say to you person who. it says I’m in a marriage that I know I need to leave, but I’m not leaving. I’m in a job that I know I need to leave and I’m not leaving. I’m in a situation. I know I need to leave and I’m not leaving.
What’s the matter with me. I would say, clearly you do not yet know. Um, you don’t know, and you can’t know until, you know, you cannot know until, you know, and you will know when, you know, because then you’ll leave or you’ll. But as long as you’re staying in situations, because you don’t know yet, you don’t, and I’ve, I’ve had people say to me, I mean, I think there’s a shame spiral that happens around that, where people say, I could just like, I wanna beat myself up.
I stayed so much too long in X, Y, Z situation. And I knew, I knew seven years ago that marriage was over. I knew five, five months ago. That this job move was a wrong move for me. I knew 20 years ago, I didn’t wanna live in this town. And I always say to them, no, you didn’t no, you didn’t. You think you did now, because now you have this extraordinary clarity of being in this moment, looking back with all the information that you’ve gathered over the last 20 years, seven years, five months, whatever it was, you have this incredibly privileged position in your life right now at this moment where you do know.
And so it’s incredibly easy to go back and abuse your. by saying, I should have known, I did know you didn’t, you didn’t know until the moment that you did. Um, and when that moment came, you took the action and it was not too late. It was at exactly the right time and the most loving thing that you can do.
If you’re beating yourself up about stuff you should have done and didn’t do at the right moment is to really pause and take a look back at her or him, that person who you were seven years ago at that moment that you’re beating yourself up for. Take a look back and really go truth, searching and look in that person’s face and say, could she have done anything different at that moment, knowing what she knew at that moment and remembering that all she had was the information she had at that moment.
She didn’t have the benefit of the entire history of the world that you now have. She only had who she was, then what her history was, then what culture was telling her, then what she was trying to be. Then that’s all she had to work. And weighing all of that out. She was doing the best she could with what she knew, and she didn’t know anything other than to stay.
And until that changes, that’s how it is. And you have to, I mean, that’s the basis of forgiveness for the past, which for me is always the big, the, the most painful thing that I struggle with in my life is, is learning how to forgive myself for the past and, and constantly having to remind myself, going back and looking at her face in my.
when you were 34 Liz, remember who you were when you were 34, could you have done anything differently than what you did at that moment? And the answer is always no, and you can, should have as much as you want, but it’s so cruel. It’s such a cruel thing to do to somebody who frankly, didn’t have the wisdom you have now, who is younger than you are now.
And, and didn’t have the benefit of all the years of experience that you’ve got. Now you have to let her off the. and your best was good enough, by the way. I know this is a radical concept for many of us who are raised in a shame based culture , which is most of us. Um, but actually your best is, is really good enough.
And if that’s what all of us are doing all the time.
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Douglas Eby (M.A./Psychology) is author of the The Creative Mind series of sites which provide “Information and inspiration to help creative people thrive.”
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