You can also find this episode on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Today it’s just me, sharing a few revelations I’ve had this summer around: The set ages we seemingly get stuck at. Emotions I’m connecting to for the first time in my life (and how certain codes of anger have helped me). How busyness impacts our physical patterns and the way we hold our bodies, or clench our weight. And practicing rejection and building our capacity to hear no, while simultaneously building our capacity to say no. (In this month’s solo episode, I also get into some life-altering experiences I’ve had with different healers, and the new list I compiled of my favorite healers.)

On Our Best Behavior

Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness: A Process for Reclaiming Your Full Self

ELISE:

Okay, before we dive in, I just wanted to remind you all that Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness: A Process for Reclaiming Your Full Self, is on sale tomorrow. This is a workbook companion to On Our Best Behavior. Though you don't need to have read On Our Best Behavior to work this process and use these tools, it works in any space of your life.

Although the paperback of On Our Best Behavior is out tomorrow too, for all you paperback lovers, I love a paperback personally rejoice. I hope that this means that the book will find its way into many more hands. So those events are happening tomorrow on Thursday. I'm with Courtney Smith, who's my co-author on Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness: A Process for Reclaiming Your Full Self, and we are going to go through the core process and teach you some tools. So don't miss that episode coming on Thursday. And we're also doing a smattering of events in various cities. We're doing some workshops as well and I'll be adding to that.

I added a new page of healers and resources. So there you can find many people I've interviewed on the show or written about in Substack, but I've collated them all and put them there. So that's a new resource for you. And also on my Substack, you can find all the podcast episode show notes and transcripts, et cetera. It is all there. And if there are other resources that you would like to see, let me know.

Alright, housekeeping aside, let's dig in. So this isn't necessarily a new revelation, but something I've been thinking about a lot and recent events have made me realize how much I've grown up in the last few years. It's interesting, a few of my trusted friends have reflected this back to me too, that really in the last five years I've changed and they can hear it in the timber of my voice and also in my content.

It's funny, I'm sure many of you can relate to this. I think there's this set age I think that we all have, and I think for some people it's exemplified by Arrested Development. I don't know what determines this age. Actually, it's an interesting question and I'd be curious for all of your thoughts, but I realize in the last few years that my set age is precocious teen and that I go into situations in my life and I have as sort of this precocious teenager, this younger sister, this elevated child really. And I hadn't really put my arms around that or realized that or gotten the definition or separation from that to realize that that's what I was doing, but that's how I've been living my life. And I don't know, maybe it's looking in the mirror and recognizing my hard won wrinkles, but I have been coming around to the realization that I am a middle aged woman, 45 years old and I'm an adult.

But I think I needed some more life to really grow me up to where I could feel like I could fully embody that. And I'm sure that people listening, some of you are like, yeah, I still feel like I'm 30 or I still feel like I'm 60 even though I'm 90 or whatever it is. I think we all get sort of stuck at these developmental levels. And that was mine. And I'm going to explain the unlocks that have come from recognizing that I'm a grown adult, as silly as that sounds because obviously I'm one of those little big kids that not kind of app parentified child, but I've been responsible and grown up for my whole life. I had a wonderful childhood, but I've never been a little kid. I still struggle to play, but I have gone into a lot of situations up until recently, really as my friend, I'm agreed, go listen to her podcast if you haven't.

It's called Aspire. But Emma, she talks about this as the employee mentality, which is this tendency that we have to look for anyone to be our boss even when you work for yourself, but looking to delegate authority to other people rather than assuming it yourself. And she had her own epiphany when this was mentioned to her many, many, many years ago. Whereas for me, it's been new where I'm like, oh my God, that is what I do. Are you my mommy? Are you my mommy? Are you my boss? Are you my boss? Are you going to tell me what to do or how to feel about this any given situation? And so I've been really grappling with that. And I think it's part of one of the reasons that I've come to realize, no, I'm not a teenager. I am the adult in the room and I am the adult for myself too.

And I'd say the emotional part of this has been coming to face and embrace some of the unsavory and unsettling emotions that I have been disconnected to potentially for my whole life. And I think that they are emotions that have been really scary to me because they feel destabilizing. And those emotions are anger and grief and I write about them and on our best behavior, obviously. And we all know about the caricatures of angry women, but for me it hasn't been so much fear out of being labeled a castigated or a shrew or a hysterical bitch That hasn't been, I think what's been keeping me from my anger, what keeps me from my anger accessing it is really not understanding or clearly being able to define my own boundaries and betraying myself continually in service to making other people feel comfortable and empowered rather than standing up for myself and saying, actually no, this doesn't work for me.

I don't like this. It doesn't feel good. And I've talked about this before, but a couple years ago now, I had this experience at a Carissa retreat with this healer named Uta Opitz who's on my healer page in Substack. And I went to this Carissa retreat and I just was feeling enraged. And it was such a wild experience for me because it had no target. It was not directed at anyone or anything. There were the daily disturbances happening, like traffic and whatever, but it wasn't about anything. And of course as the retreat evolved over the course of several days, it turns out that the whole thing was about conflict, which is hilarious. And Carissa ended up giving us these codes of anger, which I'll give to you, but I was already deep in my own anger process before any of this happened. In fact, I was so, I felt so mad that I thought I was going to vomit.

I had to lie down until these waves of nausea passed. And on day, maybe two went back to my hotel, I was up almost all night just feeling furious. And again, no content, no story, no one to blame, nothing was happening except a visceral physical feeling of my own anger, which had been long suppressed and denied, and I hadn't been in a rush to get rid of it. I will also say that I just knew I needed to be present with it and that I was having some sort of physical energetic experience that was very important to me and that I couldn't actually get rid of it and I needed to live with it. And then it got to the point where I was like, okay, I'm ready to move this. And Uta, who I'd never worked with before, I'd met her at Journeys. She lives in Germany and this very sweet angelic being who I've really come to love dearly Krisa was like, UTA, can you help Elise?

And she took me into the woods and put a blanket down, and then I had the most intense energy healing experience I've ever had. I could feel her. I could feel chakra portals opening and the anger energy exiting into the earth. I could physically feel it was like going to a sump pump. I don't know if any of you guys have ever driven around in an rv, but when my dad and I did these endurance horseback rides and I was a kid, we had this camper and we would go and camp with all the other horses and riders and then you'd do these 50 mile long marathon horseback rides. It's very fun, very specific culture. But yeah, you'd have to go and hook up the sump pump and that's what it was like. It was just tunneling out of me. And then it was gone and I felt clear, but I also felt, oh, I understand what this energy is and I understand that I need to stay connected to this and that I need to be in touch with this because just in light of the fact that I felt like I was going to puke when I was so discomforted on that first day, I was like, oh, this is going to make me ill if I don't learn how to channel and funnel this appropriately.

And again, that anger doesn't have a target necessarily. Often we look for a target. There's got to be someone to blame and castigate and there's someone who needs to make our discomfort go away and fix what's been broken. But I think most of the rage and the anger that we feel doesn't have a specific target or if it had a specific target, it might be structures and systems rather than people. I always go back to that John Powell quote about how in our culture we need to be hard on systems and structures and soft on people and that we practice the reverse, which is to be really hard on people and soft on systems and structures. So anyway, of course Carissa goes on to talk about anger and conflict and essentially was like instead of rushing to resolve conflict, we need to learn how to experience it. And these are the list of disturbances. I'm going to read them to you because I think some of these are big, a lot of them are very big for me. Disturbance of flow. This is what inspires anger, disturbance of space, disturbance of connection, disturbance of needs and boundaries, disturbance of integrity, disturbance of expression, disturbance of evolution, disturbance of beliefs, disturbance of moment and presence, disturbance of trust, disturbance of ego, disturbance of faith, disturbance of security, disturbance of safety and disturbance of fear slash control.

And then this was very cool. She took us through what she called the seven rays of conflict resolution. I'm going to share these with you too because she aligned the threat with the chakra and what needs to happen because I think anger is a bucket. What's the right response and the right circumstance and it's triggered by various things. So how do you channel it effectively and appropriately and what is your anchor actually trying to communicate to you? All right, so let's start at the bottom. Code red, which is the root chakra utilized when safety is threatened, address conflict directly firmly from a grounded stance with as few words as possible. No, stop code orange, which is a sacral chakra. Use this when you're dealing with someone with an exploding ego, ego who is having a temper tantrum, including a child, deflect and distract by disrupting the disturbance through reorienting the conversation.

Do not put yourself in the direct burst of current. Kind of fascinating, right? This is how you deal with a certain type of person or a certain type of situation. It doesn't work to go into direct combative conflict code yellow, which is the solar plexus chakra. This is about asserting healthy power and healthy control. Turn down fear switches and turn up healthy control switches. Counter the current of conflict instead of being struck, recognize that conflict is present and be assertive to the person coming at you with a clear and firm that's not raised. Repeat the same thing over and over and over again. Use the same script. Please don't speak to me in that way. At first they will be confused, then angry, then they won't want to deal with you anymore. Code green heart chakra. This is when your heart is right in the middle of the conflict because someone is having an experience. This is where you listen and let them get some of it out before you speak. You aren't to swallow it, but you are to hear and to bring light to common ground.

Okay, code blue throat chakra. This is where I get stuck, okay? This is typically where I have never been able to, I haven't been able to get past code blue. That was what I realized when I did that session with UTA. Code blue throat chakra. Code blue is passive non-resistance and being unattached to the current of conflict. This isn't about avoiding or running away, but about picking your battles and discerning that. Being the counter polarity is not always right for you. You don't need to be in everything with everyone. When you are not welcomed or invited into a town or village, when you are being hated or persecuted, shake dust off your feet before you leave that place. There are two emanations of code blue, passive non-resistance. The other is to use a Socratic method. Ask questions and keep asking questions. Find an unbiased source in your life who can reorient your perceptions.

It's powerful code Indigo third eye chakra. This is the seat of sensory perception. When you can close down your focus on the current of conflict and open your sensory perception, everything can calm down. What am I seeing and hearing in this moment allows you to sense and see the revelation code, violet, crown chakra. Often your in theory self, you call this the acquired personality too, has certain expectations about what an experience should be. Ask, am I feeling conflicted because this experience is disturbing my in reality self. The in theory self has ideas about how everyone should behave, use code violet when you need to manage expectations including your own. And then she called out what she called the code spectrum. This occurs when there is a massive disturbance of the peace. Ocean currents become a riptide. If you fight the current, you'll drown swim sideways.

I love that because I think so many of us think you respond with the same force at whatever is coming towards you, that that's what's required. And instead it's this. No, you need to use your anger skillfully. I think the anger for all those reasons, all those disturbances I mentioned is justified, but then the response needs to be modulated to what's present. And I think since going to that journey, having that experience, feeling my anger really viscerally that I have had much more clear guidance from it as a system in terms of how I need to respond and and whether I need to respond at all. And if I'm being as big hearted as possible, why is this happening and what can I learn from it? And what is this showing me about what I need? And there aren't that many people in our culture who are really skilled at anger.

Most of us repress and suppress it. It's too scary and destabilizing to our identity, particularly if our identity revolves around being a calm, placid, trustworthy person who's very stable. And I know that a lot of us try to maintain that vision for ourselves. And so anything that disrupts it is too threatening really to often look at. But I do think as we grow up our culture, we all need to become much more skillful with anger rather than letting it trigger us into automatic response. The other emotion that I mentioned is grief. And I've written about this a fair amount. And man, if you missed it on Thursday, I had Francis Weller on the podcast, and he is just an incredible modern prophet and really poet. His ability to speak experience is so profound, and his books are so beautiful. His new book is called In The Absence of The Ordinary.

And I had read his new book the week before the floods in Texas, and I know that many of us were deeply affected by that event, but I just felt unmoored. It just touched some grief. My inability to properly access my tears has been dissolving with every year that passed, they're harder and harder to reach. And that in part because I was willing to stay with it and be present with it, and to recognize that underneath that grief was so much more grief. And really just fear. Fear of loss of the people we love and just recognizing that we can't engineer certainty or control and these terrible things just happen and we know this. And yet I think we try and keep it away from our conscious awareness and tell ourselves that we can do whatever we need to do to keep everyone we love safe.

It's just not enough. And that's a very hard reality. And so I really needed, again, help time to sit with that emotion and reconnect to it and let it come up, and then hopefully maintain a slightly less deep reservoir of grief by attending to it more intimately with every day. I think we all need it. And Francis teaches people how to conduct these grief circles, which are somewhat structured in the way that he described them as almost an initiatory right around the hero's journey, where when terrible things happen to people, repair is only possible communally. And people have to come back into community and share what's happened to them, and they have to in their own way, bring the antidote back, bring the medicine back from what they've learned. Anyway, please go listen to that episode. It was, I think, I mean I feel this a lot, but one of my most favorite episodes, sos.

This is a poem. Alright, I first read this poem in The Broken Mirror by James Hollis. It's by Maxine kumin. And she writes, gassing the woodchucks didn't turn out right. The knockout bomb from the feed and grain exchange was featured as merciful quick at the bone. And the case we had against them was airtight. Both exit shoehorn shut with putting stone, but they had a sub sub subbasement out of range. Next morning they turned up again, no worse for the cyanide than we for our cigarettes and state store scotch, all of us up to scratch. They brought down the marigolds as a matter of course, and then took over the vegetable patch, nipping the broccoli shoots, beheading the carrots, the food from our mouths. I said, righteously thrilling to the feel of the 22, the bullets neat noses. I elapsed, pacifist, fallen from grace, puffed with Darwinian pieties for killing.

Now drew a bead on the little wood check's face. He died down in the everbearing roses. 10 minutes later I dropped the mother. She flip flopped in the air and fell her needle teeth still hooked in a leaf of early Swiss charred, another baby. Next 1, 2, 3. The murderer inside me rose up hard. The Hawkeye killer came on stage forthwith. There's one check left old wildly fellow. He keeps me cocked and ready day after day after day, all night, I hunt his humped up form. I dream, I cite along the barrel in my sleep if only they'd all consented to die, unseen, gassed, underground, the quiet Nazi way.

So as mentioned, this is in a James Hollis book, and he interprets this poem as I do as well as an inquiry into what lies in our psychic basements. And I've been thinking about this a lot because of obviously what's happening on the world stage and just the endless justification on all sides. I will say that we find for propagating harm and hate on each other while not recognizing what we're up to. And I think that that poem with all of its justification and righteousness, it's just such a beautiful expression of the way that I think we become unrecognizable even to ourselves. And when we go into conflicts charged again full of our own righteousness and any threat to our perception of reality, only girds our chest even more. And I think we should all tape that poem to our bedside table and meditate on it daily.

Where am I betraying myself and my own values? This gets into spiral dynamics, which was the subject of a solo episode a couple of months ago. But where am I betraying my own values and pursuit of the values I profess to want to see? And what is disturbing my own piece in such a way that I am perpetuating violence? There's just ample evidence for this everywhere. We are all participating in it. Me too, me too. I see it in my Instagram DMs all day, the way that people feel like they can talk to other people and oh, we're just so much better than this. If we can become conscious to our own psychic basements, really this is the subject of my next book. So it's really heavy on my mind and my heart.

Long exhale. Okay, the next revelation moving into easier territory. In some ways it's around the idea of busyness, which is one of my favorite things. And I wrote about this inner structural Hellerwork guy I go to here in LA, Dan Bienenfeld, who's amazing. He does Hellerwork and rolfing, but it's his own blend and it's all about uncovering the physical patterns in the body, some of which we get through just the way that we're structured or the sports that we've played or how we sit or slump at our desks and so on and so forth. Some of them are habitual routinized patterns and some of them are attached to other stories. I have a lot of these. It was hard to be tall, it was hard to be well endowed. I just learned how to carry myself in a way to deemphasize my height and roll my shoulders forward, et cetera.

Some of them are emotional where I have a fear of being stabbed in the back, the hypervigilance around my upper middle back. And we all have these stories. It's really interesting work, and Dan is incredible at finding the story. And one of the things in my work with Dan, and I've noticed this all the time, I really struggle to release my weight, to let go. Even now I'm sitting in my chair and yes, my weight is on my desk chair, and yet I can still steal myself, clenched held, trying to almost suspend myself above the seat. And Dan is always like, give me your weight. I need you to release into my hand. And I don't know if it's about feeling like I'm so heavy, I'm going to break. You can't handle my weight. But even just imagining whose lap could you relax on, who could you sit on?

Who could you release your weight on? And I am finding that I am struggling to even give my weight to a bed or a chair or an object. That's something I'm working with. Just can I relax? Can I release? Can I sit more deeply into this seat of my car? Lauren Roxburgh is another amazing and a conspire with Dan's. When I first met her 10 or 15 years ago and she was helping me after I had Max, she was like, every time you pull up to a stop sign, I want you to consciously release your pelvic floor. Which was so wild because I realized and not alone that so many of us walk with our pelvic floors in a perpetual clench. It's just interesting to think about that in the context of how you meet the world. And again, this goes to the beginning of this conversation of feeling like I've really grown myself up and that part of that is taking responsibility for these emotions and my use of these emotions, and also taking responsibility for showing up as a full adult, a 45-year-old adult. I'm not a slouchy teen, although still look like it. And I also wanted to offer, oh, this is from In the Absence of The Ordinary, which is Francis Weller's new book.

He's talking about a speak that he listened to or a talk from a brother David, I want to say his last name is Alten. At one point, and this is me quoting at one point in his talk, he shared that the Chinese spell the word busy with two ideograms that mean heart and killing. We all gasped as he shared this idea. We pride ourselves on how busy we are as if to suggest worth and value are attained by our exhaustion, and yet our obsession with speed increases daily. I was thinking about that busy and heart and killing and oh, it's really powerful. I think just to sit with that for a minute, and it relates to me to this idea of releasing weight or letting things go because it's part of my perpetual clutching and clenching, right? It is just heads down busyness in order to avoid the existential anxiety of life right now.

And it's the domain in which I can control. And yet I'm going to offer that when you keep everything clenched, your muscles actually weirdly atrophy your ability to deal and contend with life, whether it's these emotions or the events, because a muscle that's stuck in a clench is not strong. It needs that expansion and retraction and it needs the corollary on the other side to strengthen as well, for any muscle to really build. And so you're only in some ways as formidable as the rest that you allow yourself to take and the release that you allow yourself to take, which is another big reframe for me of shifting out of this idea, this story that I have. And Courtney and I talk about this a bit in the context of the workbook, but I have this story. It's a big part of how I have structured my identity that I'm the only one who can do things, so I should do it all. And I've set up my life to confirm that that story be true. And I'm, I'm actively working in this growing up process on a different story, which is I'm much more powerful when I accept support. And that goes with this idea of learning how to release and let other people hold me and let my chair hold me too.

So funny. I have friends who do solo episodes and they sort of write them and then they speak them. And I just wing this and I'm always like, how am I going to fill the time? And then suddenly I'm like, God, I'm, here's the final thing I want to leave you with because this is something that I think we can all practice all the time, which is again, two sides of one coin is practicing rejection and building our capacity to hear no while simultaneously building our capacity to say no. And this is an underdeveloped muscle for so many of us. Fear of disappointing other people, wanting to keep up other people happy at our own expense, trading ourselves off betraying ourselves in service to someone else's agenda. And I think part of the reason that many of us are afraid to say no is because we're terrified to hear no.

And so look for opportunities to practice rejection. Harriet Lerner writes about this in one of her books, and it was with someone who had recently gotten divorced and he was just so terrified of dating. He just couldn't imagine. I think he had married his high school or college sweetheart, and he was so scared to put himself out there because he had no practice or that's what she realized. What she eventually backed it up to is, oh, he's never been rejected. He's so fragile around this because he has never been rejected. And this is an old book, so it would be weird to do this in today's times, but she instructed him to go to the mall and stand at the base of an escalator and just ask a hundred women out. And invariably, I think a couple people said Yes, but we got 97 rejections and he just needed to build that muscle so that he realized that he would survive on the other side of it, and that he started to actually almost look forward to the rejection.

He felt his aliveness come back online in a really powerful way. And I love that story because kind of funny and weird, but also it's just so many of us, I think spend our days practicing not being rejected, that we get even more petrified and paralyzed around the idea of someone saying, no, but we need to build our tolerance. This is part of foundry setting, which is something that I really struggle with and the source of so much of my own resentment and frustration is this self betrayal around saying yes to things that are a physical no for me, we offer some tools for this, quite a number of tools for this and choosing wholeness over goodness. But that would be what I would leave you with is how can you practice rejection? How can you practice hearing no and building your temerity for that? And then conversely, how can you practice saying no? All right, friends, this was a fun ride. I will be back next time, back on Thursday talking about the workbook and as always, thanks for hanging. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend or share it on social. You all know what to do. That's how people discover the show and trying to become a better promoter of my work, which if you've read On Our Best Behavior, is part of the sin of pride. Guys. Alright, I'll speak to you soon.

If you got something out of today's episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That's how we grow this thing. It's so helpful. Thank you.