I'm Oprah Winfrey.
Welcome to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast.
I believe that one of the most valuable gifts you can give yourself is time, taking time to be more fully present.
Your journey to become more inspired and connected to the deeper world around us starts now, right now.
Elizabeth Lesser has been on the cutting edge of the personal growth movement for more than three decades.
She was born in 1952 in New York City.
She was the second oldest of four daughters.
Her family wasn't particularly religious, but as a child, Elizabeth found herself drawn to spiritual life.
She would pray in secret and tag along with her Catholic neighbors to church.
That hunger for a spiritual path reawakened while Elizabeth was a student at Barnard College.
A free spirit, she began visiting churches, exploring Eastern traditions like Zen Buddhism, firmly establishing her lifelong vocation as a seeker.
Her search for something more eventually led her to upstate New York, where she helped form a spiritual commune.
She married young and had two boys.
In 1977, she co-founded the Omega Institute, set in the hills of the Hudson Valley.
It's become one of the leading education centers on spirituality, creativity and social change in America.
Elizabeth is the best-selling author of two of my favorite books The Seeker's Guide, Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure, and Broken Open How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow.
We had you on The Oprah Show several times for one of my favorite books called Broken Open.
And you know what I was trying to deliver or offer to the Oprah show audience at the time was this idea that you convey in the book so well that oftentimes things happen in our lives.
When challenging things happen in our lives,
Those things have the opportunity to crack us wide open.
And, uh, So we've had wonderful conversations about that.
But one of the reasons why I wanted you here, to invite you under my oaks, is because I think you probably because of what you've been through personally in the past year are more cracked open and could do.
I don't know, an epilogue to that book now, right?
Could you not?
Yes, I could.
You wrote it, and now you have lived it in a way.
Can you share with the Supersolars what you've been through?
Well, I wrote it because I had lived it.
You know, like you think, I'm going to learn from this difficult experience.
My first big one was divorce.
And then you think, Good, tidied up, done that, learned that.
But that's not the way life is.
You're always given these opportunities to either break open into the mystery or to shut down.
So about seven years ago my younger sister Maggie, was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma that's very hard to treat.
And she was treated with chemotherapy and seven years later it came back.
The news of the recurrence was particularly difficult because there was only one option for treatment a high risk bone marrow transplant.
The lengthy and painful procedure would involve harvesting stem cells from a matching donor and transferring them to Maggie's body.
It was a last resort but offered Maggie her only hope.
The critical next step, finding a donor.
And so we all got tested and I tested the match.
My other sisters did not.
And so we have been on this journey, my sister and I, where I had my bone marrow stem cells harvested and frozen.
And then she had intensive chemotherapy and later radiation and more chemotherapy getting her to a place where she had none of her own stem cells left, all killed off by chemotherapy and radiation, so she could receive my new ones.
And now she's in the long journey of having my stem cells engraft into her and become her.
Interesting.
And heroic on both of your parts.
So I remember you sent me an email, which I have here.
It was quite something to see my blood leaving my body, entering a machine and being spun and then coming back into my body over and over for five hours.
At first I was nervous and also the poking around in the veins been painful, but once i calmed down it was really quite miraculous.
Maggie came to visit.
Midway into the procedure she got to kiss the bag of stem cells that was collecting and hanging above me.
Having her there made it all seem very real and very meaningful and, dare i say, holy.
What a day.
What a day.
What a day.
So what was going through you emotionally, spiritually at the time?
Well, I love science, so I had educated myself about the process.
And I felt, first of all, What an honor.
What a privilege to be able to actually save someone's life.
And I took it really seriously.
And I know for myself, I know how, when I'm stressed, when I'm upset, when I'm angry, I know it affects my own body.
I know my state of mind affects my own cells.
And science is researching this now, the mind-body connection.
And so I thought, those are going to be my cells in her body.
I want to purify my cells of any bad intention toward her.
And I want her to totally accept me.
And we're sisters.
We're loving sisters, but we have a long history of competition, of not being in good places together, all through childhood, all through adulthood.
So I asked her, and she's not this type of person.
I've always been the weird spiritual kind of person and she's much more of a.
She's a nurse and a scientist.
And I said would you do a session with me, a spiritual therapeutic session, where we come into a field of love and acceptance together?
So I think this is so important that psychologically emotionally, spiritually not just physically am I going to give you my cells, but psychologically emotionally, spiritually.
I want to be clear.
I want everything between us to be clear, so that my cells will be clear and you will be in the clearest space in which to accept my offerings.
And if you have any feelings of rejection toward me as a person, which we all do as humans and especially as siblings a lot of baggage of childhood jealousies and unspoken.
How did you know to do that?
I know that... we all go around carrying these stories in our heads about each other.
Most of the stuff we think about each other, we've made up.
They're stories.
And even though we're both loving and good and smart people, we had really never cleared a lot of stuff.
And I thought, wow, isn't this amazing?
It takes someone almost dying for me to come into a whole and beautiful and cleaned and loving relationship.
But if ever there was a time to do it, now's the time to do it.
First of all, how did it change your relationship with your sister?
How did it?
Totally.
Totally.
And just thinking about it, it just makes me cry.
It fills you up.
It fills me up because we had the help of a wonderful therapist who really brought us through the stages of our life, from childhood all the way up, where we kind of cleared each year and um, the misconceptions each of us had about the other petty things like i didn't like that we had to share our birthday party and you made mom do that, things like that.
It was like really no, that's not every step of the way to more serious things.
We All that happened was I didn't mean that.
I love you.
I love you.
All I want to say is I love you.
And it changed everything between us because I know now that she loves me.
And she knows I love her.
And we kind of knew that, but we didn't really know it.
Like, I know it.
What do I know for sure?
I know my sister loves me, and I know she knows I love her.
So I was able to give her my cells.
I was able to give them in love and release them into a field of love.
And love heals.
And I felt that's the best I can do.
And now I give it up to the universe.
Would you say this experience has transformed you as it is also transforming Maggie?
Yes.
Yeah, it has.
All holy and difficult, arduous experiences there to transform us.
Yes, if we so choose, break us open, to break us open.
And I felt it gave me a lot of courage to come more fully into my own skin because what I went through with Maggie in Cleaning up our relationship and getting rid of the stories
I felt this sense of like, I want to do this in my life as much as I can with everyone.
I don't want to live in the storyline anymore, because my relationship with everyone else isn't as life and death.
Yes.
But it's important who we are with each other, what we say, how we show up at work.
People sometimes think, I want to do important work in the world.
When I'm done being an insurance person in this office, I want to go out to Africa and save people's lives.
And I think, and I say, especially now, don't wait.
There are relationships waiting to be healed in the person in the cubicle right next to you.
In your own backyard.
In your own backyard, in your place of work.
There are conversations you haven't had, stories that need to be unraveled.
And if we all do that in our backyard, in our office, in our families, have the difficult conversations.
Miracles happen.
So what has this process taught you?
It's taught me that I am enough, just who I am.
Just showing up for my sister, who I am, is enough.
And it really brought me deeply into that that teaching that my soul is enough, not what I do, not who I am.
When I showed up there with my sister, she didn't care my credentials or where I'd been or who I know or what book I was writing.
She wanted me.
And that was very hard for me to really wrap my heart around.
You mean I'm enough for you?
You really want me?
And I think we all struggle with that.
Like we think we have to be somebody, do something, say something, when really our souls, Our golden radiant core, is enough.
That's what people want.
They don't want you to impress them with your wisdom, and they don't even want you to do anything for them.
Just come be with me and be your true self.
Be your genuine self.
We want each other.
I want you.
I just want the real deep you.
Maybe it's because we're sisters in our 60s.
As you know, as we're taping this, it's on the eve of my 60th birthday.
And as we were walking down to the Oaks I was saying to you it's the birthday that I've actually thought the most about.
It's the one I've taken the most seriously.
And at one point, I was planning a birthday party.
And I was doing this because I recognized that the reason why I was having this big birthday party is because someone had asked me months ago what are you going to do for your birthday?
And I think I just blurted out, oh, I'm going to have the biggest birthday bash ever.
Now, instead of just saying, I really don't know.
I hadn't thought about it.
I felt it. that everybody else is thinking about it, so I should do something.
So I started this idea of this party and recognized that a big party with over 400 people was the last experience on earth I really wanted to have.
I mean, if I were leaving the earth tomorrow, that would be at the bottom of the list of things I would want to do.
We begin to think like that at 60.
Is that what happens?
I think so.
Because I was like, that isn't what I want to do.
What do I want to do?
I really just want to be whatever.
I'll have a cup of tea, a cup of chai, a cup of, I'll be with Stedman.
I'll be with the dogs.
I'll call over a few friends.
But 450?
Nah.
That's going to give me great anxiety.
I will have to tell you, that's one of the most liberating things I've done.
Well, I think it's appropriate, for at least the way I've been feeling in turning 60 is I'm feeling both more simple and more grand.
But the grand is a soulful grandeur, which is ever more myself, but also nobody.
I'm both more who I am, and I don't really feel like anyone.
I just feel part of everything.
Wow.
That's really wonderful.
That's really wonderful.
If 60 means anything, it really really means being able to sit within the seat of your soul, inside yourself, and say what do I really want?
That's right.
When you think back to your younger self.
We were walking down here talking about gee.
Both of us are 60.
You're 61.
I'm 60.
Did you imagine that 61 would be like this, that you would feel this great, that you would look this great?
No.
No, I imagined 60.
60 is the first age that feels kind of like old.
You know, when I turned 50, it didn't feel that way.
At all.
But I feel, I definitely feel the gravitas of age.
You know, I feel like maybe I do know something.
Yeah.
And, but as I said, I also feel free more free yeah it doesn't even that is what i wish for myself i wish for the freedom of you know other people's expectations and other people's anything but also i would agree i feel that it is significant and worthy of sitting with it and acknowledging it and being with it and knowing.
And when people say, do your grandchildren call you grandma?
As if that would make me feel old.
I'm like, well, what else are they going to call me?
And do you tell people you're 60?
And do you feel like an elder?
And I want to get comfortable with, yeah, I'm an elder.
I'm an elder.
And I feel more and more like my role is to be there for people coming up.
Yeah, I do too.
I've had such a great life.
Who can you lift up?
But also this is what I also refuse to allow to happen to me, because I know it will in the media is for people to put you in a box as to what that is supposed to look like.
I think it's really important for you, for me, for anybody who's turning 40 50 60 70 75, Jane Fonda 80, Gloria Steinem is to define that in your own terms and to make it your own.
Because because we that is what women have fought for.
Absolutely.
That is what women have fought for is for you to have the right to make it whatever you want it to be.
Yes.
And the easiest way to do that is just check in every day.
Who am I?
What do I feel?
And to do it.
Yeah.
So your ability to introduce other people through omega, through your own learnings, has that been one of the reasons why your own spiritual growth has been so profound?
Do you think yeah, you know when you uh, they say, you learn the most when you teach.
Yeah, yeah and um.
They also say uh, you teach what you need to learn.
Yeah, absolutely.
I feel that for myself.
And also, one of the things I've... Teaching, it keeps me in the vein of it.
It keeps me constant with it.
It keeps reminding me.
It keeps me...
And looking for language to wrap around concepts that really are not describable.
You know, what is the soul and God and cosmos.
Our brains are poor, divining. of the grandeur of what's really happening.
So to search for words that are plain and fun and easy to use.
That makes it easier for me to practice.
And that's why I'm blessed that I've had the chance.
You're the one who introduced me to Hazrat Inayat Khan, who was one of the leaders of the Sufi movement.
I would say if there's a religion that I would... It's not even a religion, though, is it?
Well, it's a branch of Islam, but it's really gone way beyond that.
It's a way of life more than a religion.
You sent me an email recently by Hazrat in Yad Khan about how the soul is covered by a thousand veils.
So Elizabeth and I have these conversations where she'll send me a passage or read a book or a poem or a piece of thing and say, What do you think of this?
And I had to read that thing over four or five times out loud, translating it to myself, trying to get my brain to comprehend.
But what do you think that means, the soul is covered by a thousand veils?
I think it means Everything you need to know is in that line.
Everything you need to know is in the line, your soul is covered by a thousand veils.
What it means to me is that you have a soul first of all, and that soul is like the music, God's music, your song, your song, to sing here on this plane.
That is your soul.
It's precious.
It's yours.
It's unique.
But you come here to Earth, and then you're raised by parents.
None of our parents are perfect.
You're kind of maybe a loud and lively kid.
They think you should be quiet and genteel, especially if you're a girl.
Yes.
Don't be powerful.
Don't be big.
Look who she thinks she is.
Or maybe you're a shy person.
Maybe you're a recluse.
Maybe your goal in life is to be your soul song is to be a monk, but you're always being pushed excel.
See your sister be like her.
The sister who's loud is told to be quiet.
The sister who's quiet is told to be loud.
Veil veil, veil.
You go to school.
Another veil you get wounded.
You're a man who's told not to have emotions.
Veil by.
By the time you're an adult, Your song, that beautiful soul song, is covered, covered.
So spiritual work, spiritual practice isn't about getting anything.
It's about uncovering.
That's why spiritual work...
It goes back to Dorothy, Glinda the Good Witch.
You already had it.
You already had it.
And really, that's what the journey's all about, isn't it?
That's what it's about.
It's about uncovering and peeling back the veils.
And there's so many wonderful ways to peel back the veils.
That's why I think things like psychotherapy or coaching, like what Brene Brown does, that's holy work.
That's veil peeling.
Yes.
And so is getting healthy.
You know, some of the worst veils we suffer under are unhealthy bodies.
So healing work is veiled.
It's a literal shield.
It's a literal shield.
Yes.
So spiritual work is taking care of your body.
It's taking care of your psyche.
It's doing meditation to quiet all of those stories we're telling ourself.
And however that meditation takes form for you.
I think you know one of the wonderful things we've been able to do on the web with Deepak is the 21 day meditations.
That's not for everybody.
You know, I meditate daily, regularly.
But i also have many different forms of meditation, sometimes just walking in silence and just sitting and being, or for many people it's with a piece of music that lifts you up, that's dancing, it's going to church.
You know, prayer.
Prayer is a tremendous veil, You know, because you pray to God, remove the veils.
That is my prayer to God every day.
Remove the veil so I might see what is really happening here and not be intoxicated by my stories and my fears.
Do you find that the spiritual path gets easier?
Yes.
The longer you're on it, does it get easier?
Absolutely.
Let's say it's, you know, they call it spiritual practice.
Yes.
Because it's like basketball practice or scales.
You practice not to become a great scale player or drill doer, you practice to become an artist.
And spiritual practice actually works meditation prayer, whatever you do, practicing gratitude.
I would say i've said this many times.
I cannot say it enough because if you didn't hear it the first time and also maybe you didn't try it, but gratitude is the single best way I have ever discovered of changing your personal vibration.
You can instantly do it with gratitude.
I love this Latin term, amor fati, love of fate.
Instead of bemoaning your fate, And sometimes our fates are terrible.
But we love our fate, amor fati.
It's a way of being grateful.
I'm going to love what happened to me because I trust that it's here to remove a veil.
I'm going to search for what's happening to me in this time so I can take away yet another misconception.
And what is your own personal spiritual practice?
Ye who's run Omega, the institute for it all.
Ye, oh, yes.
I would have to say love.
Is your spiritual practice?
When all else fails, love.
Love of my fate, love of the other.
You know there's such a knee-jerk reaction to other people.
You're different from me, you're not of my tribe, you're not who i want you to be at this moment.
Judgment, fear.
I find the.
The thing that busts through otherizing is love, and not saccharine love yeah but um, that sense of heartfulness, opening my heart, softening my heart to the world, as you were just saying that.
I was just thinking about, as a friend, how you've shown your love to me.
Do you even know?
No, it's gonna make me cry.
Okay hello, don't cry.
Um, you know the when i was starting up this network And there were a lot of people who were saying a lot of discouraging things and mean and unkind things.
I really didn't even read them all.
But I happened to open a paper one day and the line was, Oprah not quite standing on her own.
And for some reason that struck me so deeply, because I was like gee, that's all I've ever done is stand on my own.
And so I didn't read anything else uh, but certainly i was aware that there was lots of stuff, and then i thought well, this is a great lesson.
For the thing that i say i want to most learn is not having not worrying about what other people think, and being focused on you.
Know what is the next right move in the next right move with my team?
But your love came to me through such encouraging words.
Just every now and then you would just send me an email, or you would see something on this show, or you would send me a passage or a piece of poetry that you'd read and share with me.
And I cannot tell you how that lifted me.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Really.
Thank you for telling me that.
And that's what love is.
That's what love is.
And that's what will save the world, okay?
That's all we have to do.
It's not that hard.
It's like... An encouraging word.
An encouraging word.
You see, you asked me what is my practice.
Now, certainly for years, my practice really was meditation and prayer and physical healing.
And psychotherapy.
I'm not poo-pooing that.
But my practice now is love.
And how can you put that into being?
Yeah.
And it's not phony.
It's like I wouldn't have sent you encouraging words if I thought you were doing the wrong thing.
That wouldn't have been a good friend.
But I look for ways, and everyone can do this, and many people do it.
Look for a way to lift someone up.
And if that's all you do, that's enough.
Okay.
You were saying earlier how hard it is to say what the soul is.
Do you have words?
Well, I also found myself saying earlier that the soul is like a silent music inside.
Quiet, beautiful song that you were given to sing here on earth.
That universe god, wants you to sing your song and that's the soul, the song.
Spirituality versus religion how do you define it?
You wrote a whole book about it.
You're the one.
You're the reason we asked this question, Because in The Seeker's Guide there is spirituality and then religion.
What's the difference?
Well, okay, I'll start with spirituality.
Spirituality is this kind of fearless seeking nature.
Like it's the part of us that says, whoa, what made a tree?
Who am I?
Where did I come from?
What made something out of nothing?
Where do I go when I die?
How do I live?
How am I supposed to live?
That's spirituality, the seeking life. truth.
It takes fearlessness to seek after truth.
Sometimes we'd rather just live, go through the paces.
So that's spirituality.
Religion are our attempts to answer the questions.
And some of those answers are great and beautiful.
And some of them are just dogma and rules that get us into trouble.
My rules are better than your rules, and then we fight about them.
Right.
So spirituality are the questions, and religion are attempts to answer them.
What is the lesson that took you the longest to learn?
I'm still learning it.
Love. acceptance, not judging.
Do you see a purpose in suffering?
What's the purpose of suffering?
I think we create suffering, but once we've created it, it's to help us learn.
Can we learn as much from joy as we can?
Yes, we can.
Yes, we can learn as much from joy.
Spirituality is not about suffering.
You know, sometimes people are so serious.
Oh, I'm such a serious seeker.
But joy is a great teacher as well.
All right.
How do you stay awake?
How do I stay awake?
I stay awake by paying attention to the amazing feedback loop that's always there.
There's an amazing system in the world, it's called karma, but it's happening at every moment.
Who you are, what you just did, what you said.
Its reactions are happening all around us to other people.
Stay aware of your effect on other people, of your effect on the earth.
Don't be afraid to admit mistakes.
And that's how I stay awake.
I stay aware of my effect in the world.
What do you think happens when we die?
I was thinking about what happens when we die.
I think about it all the time.
But I was thinking about it when I was about to get on the plane to come here.
And I was noticing how, whenever I'm about to go somewhere, I'm always resisting it.
Why am I leaving home?
I like it here.
Like, I don't want to go there.
Believe me, I feel that.
And even if things aren't good at home, there's always this resistance to change.
And then you get on the airplane or the train or whatever, and you're like, what was I afraid of?
This is an adventure.
And I think that's what will happen when we die.
It will be we resist, we're afraid, what's coming, and then it will turn into an adventure.
And such a surprise.
And a surprise.
That's what I think.
You know, it's what Whitman says in Leaves of Grass.
That's right.
It's going to be such a surprise.
Death is not what we think it is, is what he says.
What do you know for sure?
I know for sure that when in doubt about what to do, and we often are, be loving.
Don't be phony about it.
But love, it's the great answer to everything.
Look for ways that you can offer it.
That's what I think.
Yeah, look for ways that you can be it.
To be it.
Be love.
Be love.
That's what I know for sure, that that is a good game plan.
Love that.
Thank you.
That was great.
That was great.
Hey there podcast listeners.
I have exciting news.
We're launching a brand new podcast in addition to Super Soul Conversations.
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Listen as Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake, Ellen DeGeneres, Shaquille O'Neal, Reba McEntire, Dwayne Johnson, and Jane Fonda, just to name a few, share what they've learned about life, I believe that there's something to be learned from every experience and everyone can use their life as a class.
Oprah's Masterclass podcast will be available July 19th on Apple Podcasts.
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