elizabeth lesser
intro’d to Elizabeth via her tedwomen oct 2016 talk
love that they transcript
Every newborn was as singular as a snowflake, a matchless mash-up of biology and ancestry and mystery. And then that baby grows up, and in order to fit into the family, to conform to the culture, to the community, to the gender, that little one begins to cover its soul, layer by layer.
as adults, we spend so much of our time uncomfortable in our own skin,like we have ADD: authenticity deficit disorder. But not those babies — not yet. Their message to me was: uncover your soul and look for that soul-spark in everyone else. It’s still there.
I remember what I learned from the mothers: stay open. Stay curious. Ask the pain what it’s come to deliver. Something new wants to be born.
cure ios city.. as cure
At the end of his life, Albert Einstein concluded that our normal, hamster-wheel experience of life is an illusion. We run round and round, faster and faster, trying to get somewhere. And all the while, underneath surface time is this whole other dimension where the past and the present and the future merge and become deep time.
And there’s nowhere to get to.
Albert Einstein called this state, this dimension,
“only being.“
And he said when he experienced it, he knew sacred awe.
carting around made-up stories in our heads that kept us separate.
i know you ness.. danger of a single story
What felt brave to me was .. getting emotionally naked with another human being, putting aside pride and defensiveness, lifting the layers and sharing with each other our vulnerable souls.
attachment.. being known by someone.. soulmate ness
naked streets ness
we began to spend more and more time together. It was as if we were little girls again. The past and the present merged.
We entered deep time.
*Our fast-paced society does not support or even value this kind of work. We see it as a disruption of real life and important work. …
was paid in the kind of currency our culture seems to have forgotten all about. I was paid in love. I was paid in soul. I was paid in my sister.
she became more unapologetically herself with everyone. She said things she’d always needed to say. She did things she always wanted to do. The same happened for me.I became braver about being authentic with the people in my life. I said my truths, but more important than that, I sought the truth of others.
regrets..
I tried to make sense of it all, how becoming one with each other had made us more ourselves, our soul selves, and how by facing and opening to the pain of our past, we’d finally been delivered to each other,and how by stepping out of time, we would now be connected forever.
2 needs..
You don’t have to wait for a life-or-death situation to clean up the relationships that matter to you, to offer the marrow of your soul and to seek it in another. We can all do this. We can be like a new kind of first responder, like the one to take the first courageous step toward the other, and to do something or try to do something other than rejection or attack. We can do this with our siblings and our mates and our friends and our colleagues. We can do this with the disconnection and the discord all around us. We can do this for the soul of the world.
we can’t not..
_______
find/follow Elizabeth:
Author of The Seeker’s Guide & Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow, Co-founder of
@Omega_Institute
her site:
http://www.elizabethlesser.org/
Prior to her work at Omega, she was a midwife and birth educator. She has been active in local environmental issues for many years in New York’s Hudson Valley, where she lives with her husband. She is the mother of three sons.
be you. 