Loving Your Body Changes Your Life with Sonya Renee Taylor

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Hello, Dear Pod Squad.

Before I first shared my anorexia diagnosis at the beginning of 2023, I was preparing for so long to talk to you about what was going on in my life, my health.

my mental health, everything.

And I knew it was a really important decision about who would come talk to us next after those episodes aired about bodies and freedom and self-love.

I felt like that was more important to me, getting that right than even the way I told my own personal story.

Just who is going to reframe,

launch us into the conversation we actually need to be having about bodies and love and equality and freedom.

And of course,

that person

is Sonia Renee Taylor.

She was the one person I knew I could trust to talk to us about body freedom and radical self-love.

In this episode, which exceeded all of my hopes, Sonia examines the way we talk to our bodies and helps us change negative self-dialogue and shift from a relationship with our body based on dominance and control and shame to a relationship based on trust and love and freedom and peace.

She opens our minds to the full life that is possible if we just stop believing that our body is our enemy and start seeing our body as us, as our teammate.

If you missed this episode the first time, you might have missed your revolution.

So please listen or listen again and stick around through the end.

You'll want to make sure to do that.

Every minute of this conversation helped me, and I hope it'll help you too.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

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

a joy.

I've been very nervous all morning.

I'm very nervous.

Yeah, we are.

We're going to start and then, okay.

Welcome.

So cute.

Everybody take a deep breath.

Yes.

I was going to say.

I'm going to stop doing over here.

Yes, everybody's just taking a deep breath.

Okay.

Hi, everybody.

Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.

Can I interrupt you?

Well, go right ahead.

I just need the people to understand that we've done hundreds of these episodes.

And Sonia, I can't tell you how excited/slash nervous the three of us are.

And it's just been kind of a shit show for the last 10 minutes with these two.

What's the nervousness?

Just respect.

You know what it's like?

It's respect.

It's respect.

It's respect.

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 fucking limit.

The possibilities are endless of what we could do in the next hour.

And it's just amazing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's how it feels.

Yeah.

That's how it feels.

Okay.

So, Sonia, 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.

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 like scurrying 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, like in New Zealand.

They're like, this really so far tracking.

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 kind of yell back every once in a while, like, no, no, no, you're missing it all.

From a bathtub.

Yes.

And so there are these people.

And for this podcast, I feel like they're kind of like tent poles of what we do.

I think of these people as like 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 listen 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, like just a little bit out of tune.

And when I listen to Sonia Renee Taylor talk about body freedom and radical self-love, it just feels like perfect pitch.

So somebody not from town,

but this kind of prophetic voice that is calling us out of town and not just out of body shame culture or out of just like past all of it, past body positivity culture

towards what she calls radical self-love.

So Sonia Renee Taylor is a world-renowned activist, award-winning artist, transformational thought leader, author of six books, including the New York Times best-selling, The Body is Not an Apology.

Just go get it now.

And founder of the International Movement and Digital Media and 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.

Sonia continues to speak, teach, write, create, and transform lives globally from out of town.

sonia thank you i'm like what am i supposed to do now you can do anything you've said enough well i just want to say first and foremost like that it is a tremendous honor to be in this conversation um with you i never take it for granted

like one i have no i never have 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 you know like it really doesn't 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

um but like once it's out of my face it's not my business anymore and so um 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 um for inviting me uh and thank you for including me in the names of all of those people who i love and whose work i follow and um yeah i'm really grateful to be here

one of the things that i think is such a promise and a hope of your message is that in a world of 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 reimagining of the oak tree from Marianne Williamson's quote about like how that pertains to us and the way we came into the world.

The acorn.

Yeah.

Yeah, the acorn.

It doesn't have to be told to become an oak tree.

It doesn't have to do anything to become 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, our 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, right?

Like that just like 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.

Because it's not even that like

we were an acorn and then we like fell on some concrete and, and you know now we're never gonna 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 and a target

and

and

at some point

enough people said you will 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, right?

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, it doesn't matter if anybody ever came up to me, although people have, and said, Sonia, 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-skinned people, or by creating entire media landscapes in which I am absent.

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, right?

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, right?

It's like, what if we remember that, like, 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 in a Target.

Nobody's like, you know what the Niagara Falls should be?

A parking lot in a Target.

That's right.

Nobody.

Except for Target.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Except for the person who benefits and profits

off of it becoming a parking lot in a Target.

That's right.

I'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.

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.

We don't know.

There's another podcast for you.

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.

I always talk about this Fannie Lou Hamer quote as the way that I 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.

Right.

That's how I know it's the right kind of heart.

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 heart.

I'm doing the heart in service of the reclamation of my liberation.

A lot of people don't do this work because they're like, it's so hard, right?

Of course it's hard.

It's hard to dig up the asphalt and mow down a building, right?

Like, we built structures, literal structures, on top of our sense of inherent worthiness, and so it is laborious, it's tiring, it's sometimes expensive, it's all of those things.

Lonely can be audacious, it's lonely, it can be frightening, it's all of those things.

But what I'm proposing is, is that anyway?

Yes,

you are lonely, and frightened, and fearful and exhausted right now believing you're not enough yes i am

yep so so if you're gonna be it anyway if you won't do that

fall five feet whatever inches six feet whatever inches fall towards your liberation

yeah

what is radical self-love i'll tell you there's a lot of of townspeople just selling shit and selling selling a a lot of shit

my 16 year old came home and told me she wrote this thing about this in the news 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's on instagram that said love your cellulite ladies Love your cellulite.

And she was like, I didn't know I wasn't supposed to love my cellulite.

It never occurred to me not to.

Right, exactly.

What's the difference between the body positive and radical self-love?

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 sonia.

And that's divine, right?

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?

How does that not,

if we really let it in, move us to awe and wonder, right and make me never trip about what anybody else was saying like

i'm a sunset in these streets why would i be tripping with you about

about being a target right yes i'm gonna just keep going back to that because i love that is this like material structure that we give a lot of money to to go do things and buy things and be things and be better make our house better make our face better make your house better to make your face better to make your you 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 that cannot be exchanged for some capitalist-made

external reality.

And, you know, body positivity to me, which is,

I don't know, you know, it happens.

You know, it's one of those things where I'm just like, oh 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 have no intentions on changing that then we're not talking about the same thing like a body positivity that doesn't have a politic, that doesn't say, I demand that marginalized bodies be treated positively, 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.

If we're not creating that world, then we're, then what's body positivity for?

You know?

Yes.

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?

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Something that just occurred to me, Sonia, is, you know, I was a professional athlete.

I've 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.

Control is the opposite of love.

We only control what we don't trust.

And Sonia's saying we can trust, what would that look like?

Oh my God, I've never trusted myself.

This is really and that, 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?

Right.

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 like, you know, my body's not my enemy.

Right.

And it's like, what does it mean to decide that my body and I are on the same team?

Right.

It's not a thing I control.

It's not a thing that has to do my bidding.

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 like a thing that has to do my bidding, where else do we see that?

Where else does that dynamic play out?

Oh, okay, right.

And all manner of inequity and injustice.

And so the question is: am I in a just relationship with my body?

Right?

If I'm saying I want to practice justice,

am I in a just relationship with my being right now today?

Or Are the dynamics of dominance, control, coercion, force?

Are all of those the way in which I'm in relationship with my body?

So is the, 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 like, yes, can you talk about that?

Like, 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?

So part of it is this kind of conversation, right?

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

From once that's like raised to consciousness, and that's a practice, like most of these things run default.

They're 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.

We just think it's ours.

This conversation, oh, my hands, my love handles.

You think like that's your thought, but it's not your thought.

It's you now being a puppet for a larger external, you know, profiteering system.

Yes.

Who's like, oh, yes, please think our thoughts.

in your mind because that works for us.

Right.

We were born into a total immersion program.

Yes.

And then we started speaking the language, and we're like, huh, this is my native tongue.

No, it's not.

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.

Yeah.

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.

Yes.

Right.

And if I bought the lie, then I have a whole story about what it means for me to have bought the lie, right?

And I call this like meta-shame in the book.

Now I have shame for having shame.

Yeah.

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, right?

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.

It's not, 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.

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 that, like, I'm a disciple of this.

I'm a disciple and I'm making disciples.

Yeah.

But we all are.

But I think there's, 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 3 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.

It is by design.

What's the gift of this moment right now is that we have

been born 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 would 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,

right?

That hasn't existed before.

So it's actually, you know, I'm like, yes, of course we all got it.

And something,

something in the ether said, this is the perfect time for us to all get off that train.

That feels good.

It feels good to me.

It feels so good.

Okay, so what is the fear, the deep fear

that is for someone

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?

If we stop hating ourselves, if we stop controlling ourselves, what are we so afraid will happen?

Yeah, we'll lose the perks, right?

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, right?

And so what that means when I talk about it in terms of like 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.

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, right?

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.

That's right.

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 thing.

So just going to hold on for deal life at ring eight.

I'm going to close my eyes and hold on and pray nobody shakes me off, right?

Yeah.

Whereas, but what I'm.

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 ladder is as real as our investment in it is.

And you will absolutely lose something, right?

Like, 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 love.

There really

is totes, toasts.

And you will indeed, 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, right?

But you really can't know it until you're in it.

Like the wonder and 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 a horizon in your life 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.

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 intenable system, a system that cannot sustain itself at all and only can sustain itself by swallowing more of us.

Yeah.

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?

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're not even thinking about a target news.

Yes.

It's like what you're saying.

It's like there's like an illusion of safety that we've been sold our whole lives.

And they're like, buy this, look this way.

And then if you do it, then you are going to be safe here in this body as a person.

Yes.

It's power.

It's the 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 shape.

Yes, exactly.

And so that's why this place of imagining is so perfect.

Like, I don't think that it is a coincidence that the most revolutionary people that we've heard from on this podcast, like Glennon was saying, the Tricia Hershey's, the Ocean Vongs, the Lokes, 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.

We are already imagining, right?

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?

Right.

What would it look like to decide, oh, that imagine, we've tried that imagination.

Cool, you know, dap it up.

And what else is out there?

What else is possible, right?

So if we start, because a lot of people are like, I can't imagine it.

I'm like, you can.

You are 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.

You know, let's, 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.

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

right yeah 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.

Oh my God.

It's all about status and power.

So when I'm thinking about recovering, I'm thinking about recovering in like Sonia's imagination, right?

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.

Like 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 not having any gray roots, from wearing this certain thing.

And it's power.

It's a

so stepping off.

It's like white feminism is the ladder.

It's white feminism is body positivity.

It's a little taste of the real thing with no no

necessary destruction of the thing.

Yes.

And it's an imaginary power.

Again, right?

It's a power inside of a fixed imagination.

Yes.

Right.

And if we've decided that that, because it's so funny.

I hope you don't mind if I mention this really quickly in the letter that you wrote to me, Glenn, where you were like, and by the way, Toach just had Bill Tops, right?

I was like, I'm ready.

I'm ready.

As soon as this shit wears off, I'm ready.

As soon as I can look like I'm not asking a question, I got a question.

I thought to myself,

literally, the question you just posed was the question that came up to me.

It's 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 lot, 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 an amassive 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?

Right.

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 and it 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, right?

It's like, oh, I mean,

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.

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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?

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 is 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?

I could hear it.

I could hear it a thousand more times.

Yeah.

So, you know, the inception of this idea of the body is not an apology came from a conversation with a friend.

um 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 a lot of experience in that realm, which also made me ask more sort of 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, you know, like just told the truth.

She had cerebral palsy and she was like, my disability already makes it really difficult and stuff.

And I just didn't, you know, like, I just didn't even feel like 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 that 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, like if we really just sit and look, we're like, oh yeah, I definitely,

you know, I 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?

Am I worthy now?

Am I enough now?

Right.

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 its intersection with disability and its 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

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 would 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 like 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.

Yeah.

And doesn't it reflect also in the promise like the shitty consolation of that sexual exchange versus the promise of like if we can actually

get to the place where we are

that is part of our magnificence like our birthright to have desire as a way of accessing the world goes out in concentric circles of our right to enjoy food and look at our bodies and say, that is beautiful and wonderful.

And also it's 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.

Exactly.

I mean, all of it is again, like, but I heard what you said, Amanda, was like

desire is one of the accesses of actual power, of real power, right?

Like the actual power of

the choice to create or not to create,

right?

The choice to

harness so much energy and to have that explode an orgasm.

You know, what is the big bang if not like the cosmos having an orgasm?

Damn.

How incredibly powerful is that, right?

Yes.

And so that's, of course, if we saw, 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.

Woof.

And then our illusory power is immediately disintegrated.

Yeah.

Is that what the acorn says when it starts growing?

When it's not paint over?

I want, I need, I prefer, I feel like, is that the growing of the acorn?

I don't think it says anything though.

It just is.

Is.

And from that isness 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, you know, inside of this idea of like 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 at some stranger's house who thought I was going to be there for three days.

Like just wild, wild, wildness.

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.

And then I'm going back to New Zealand.

That's my plan.

And I was doing this meditation, a meditation for shadow work or something like that.

And in the meditation, like I visit, go visit my little Sonia.

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, you know, once I observe and I spend some time in it, I go up to her and I ask her what she wants.

And little Sonia said, I want to go home.

And I was like, oh, I'll be your home.

You know, we are our own home.

It was really sweet and tender and beautiful.

And I practiced it a lot.

And

Little Sonia was like, no, chick, I want a plane trip to Pittsburgh and I want a hoagie.

Like,

thanks for all your fluffy, duffy parapies meetings.

Oh, my God.

I mean, I want to go.

Go home.

Take my ass home.

Take my ass home.

I'm 75.

I'm seven.

And it was this phenomenal moment of awareness where I was like, right,

there is Sonia's, Sonia, the adult who has been indoctrinated into so many things, including like how fabulous all of this wonderlust and how much greater insight I'm going to have traveling around the world.

And that's what I'm supposed to do.

Yes.

But the seed of the core of me, 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's right.

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 won't have no answers there.

I mean, we've tried them.

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.

It's not thinking.

I love it.

It's not thinking.

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, I'm a recovering addict, and I, that behavior is me reaching out and trying to grab something.

Yeah.

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.

But that's trust too.

I trust it's going to come.

Jesus.

I trust it's going to come.

And of course, inside of a construction of, you know, capitalist 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.

Yeah.

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.

Yes.

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.

It's going to be terrifying.

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.

Yes.

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, you know, Black women, historically, it's like have a five, you know, it was like $500.

net worth or something like that, like something abysmal and horrible, right?

And

I was looking at this network graph and my budgeting software and it's like flatline, flatline, flatline for years.

And then it spiked a little bit in like 2019 and spiked a little bit more in 2020.

And then it had a really drastic drop at the beginning of 2021, like 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, like, you know, like, 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.

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, in an imagination where the U.S.

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 because it don't look like it at that moment

doesn't mean it's not true.

It's good.

Just hold on.

Hold on.

The return is coming.

When you talk about

radical self-love, you're listening to little Sonia who just want really, she seriously just wants a hoagie 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

in my religious tradition I was, 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.

They would say, you are a soul.

You have a body.

And I'm trying to

understand the damage that 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, our crusading, our whatever.

Like, actually, it's all shit.

It was all it's a great message, right?

It's a great message if you desire to control a large number of bodies is to tell the people in them, don't that body, you know, like, 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 profit and not have you be embodied enough to decide in a collective mass scale to uprise.

Yeah.

Right.

Like the intention of that message is disconnection.

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, you know, here's the thing that immediately just came to me: inside of the Christian tradition, if the body didn't matter, Jesus would have never had to die on the cross.

Oh, yes.

If the body didn't matter, then he'd be like, all right,

all y'all sins are forgiven because I said so.

Take care of it in the next life.

Yeah.

Right.

We'll take care of it in the next life.

The body, 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 couldn'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.

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, Sonia, 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 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?

And how is all of our liberation tied to each other's?

Right.

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.

Like 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, right?

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, right?

But the more sort of intricate nuanced level of it is

you, 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.

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.

Oh, fuck, that's so good.

Well, I was worried that was the answer, Sonia.

I was really worried.

Your foot's on my neck.

You're here.

You're here.

Like,

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 that's right there is someone in this world that that has a a body that is deemed less valuable than yours

and every time you are like i'm gonna 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.

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.

Yes.

Those don't go together.

That's a contradiction.

And if that all sounds like too theoretical to folks, like 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.

Because we're on the ladder.

Right?

There was a period of time four or five years ago where we literally had hundreds, thousands of children, 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.

We know that the power systems are committed to remaining entrenched regardless of whoever's body might be on the line.

I was never more clear that the United States was committed to power over regardless of anything when

they killed all them babies in Sandy Hook, little white children, and they were like,

I'm loving prayers, loving light, and we don't plan to change one thing that would give us less power over the collective.

That's right.

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.

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.

Right.

Or we can say we see it in others.

I mean, people are all the time like, oh, no, I see everyone's values.

Absolutely.

But then we 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?

Do I believe it?

And if I believe it for everybody else, this is what I say all the time, right?

Like so many times, people are activists are like, you know, we all want to get, 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 all get free.

Right.

That's right.

So if everybody lives in a world where their value, their bodies are valued as magnificent and divine, and you are still the one person who's like, nope, I only when I, you know, cash in in this way or that way or the other way, then we didn't actually get there.

Right.

But that's an ethos, as I say it, I was like, that's an ethos that is outside of the construction of individualism.

Yes.

Yes.

That is an ethos that demands that I believe that our liberation is bound up together as Mila Watson says, right?

And so even to not believe that, again, like, nope, it doesn't matter if I don't make it is another way to be like, oh, that's how I've still bought into the old imagination.

Right.

Because that is 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.

Like, you need to love that person because you

that your actual liberation, your freedom is inextricably linked with theirs.

It's inextricably linked.

And you can't seem more obvious than the last decade of our politics to know that anytime you pull on a thread, every whole body's wrapped.

Yes.

I think this is one of those places like in politics where we were like, Really?

You know, when we were like, y'all are still voting for Trump?

Fine ladies?

White women.

White women.

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.

That's right.

Whether you mean to or not.

That's what happens when you stay connected to that imagination: 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 and those white women voters think that their whiteness is going to protect them and it's never been

it hasn't actually sandy hook proved that wasn't the case right i was like whiteness will not protect you because at the end of the day whiteness is is still just a tool for domination that's right right like 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.

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 re-inscribe the ladder.

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 in the world.

The academic inherently.

Everything else is made up.

Yes.

That's why it's the only thing we can trust.

So we have kept Sonia Renee Taylor two extra minutes, and that is unacceptable.

So

I'm having a joyful time.

Okay.

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 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.

Like 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.

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, you know, 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, right?

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 I know there is.

I know, I know, I know that there is something.

You wouldn't be called to do what it is that you are 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 bang in what the world has for you when you let go of that last piece of power inside of an old imagination.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm just going to think about your tax return for the next just

doing this.

That's doing this, but it's getting ready to go here off the screen.

It's like it's doing a shot.

It is.

You know?

I would like to not just thank Sonia, but thank God for Sonia.

Yeah.

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 will see you next time when we can do hardware.

Amazing.

If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us if you'd be willing to take 30 seconds to do these three things.

First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things?

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To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and then just tap the plus sign in the upper right-hand corner or click on follow.

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We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle in partnership with Odyssey.

Our executive producer is Jenna Wise-Berman, and the show is produced by Lauren Lograsso, Allison Schott, Dina Kleiner, and Bill Schultz.