hello and welcome to wise i'm rosie acosta wise stands for women inspiring success and empowerment this is a 10-part podcast series featuring interviews with successful inspirational women in business art entertainment and more at some point in our lives we all learn to believe certain things about the world and our place in it promises about what we're capable of how we're supposed to act what we're supposed to think they're repeated to us frequently that we manifest them into our reality whether it's truth or not eventually we start repeating these mantras to ourselves but what if they're
not true what does it take to unlearn something that you've believed about yourself for as long as you can remember i discussed that topic today with elizabeth gilbert best-selling author of e-pray love city of girls and big magic on her journeys professionally personally and spiritually elizabeth has had to learn and unlearn many facts about herself sometimes more than once as you might expect with such an accomplished author liz certainly has a way with words and so instead of editing our conversation down we've decided to release it in two parts please enjoy part one of wise's
conversation with elizabeth gilbert [Music] to me wisdom is is something that is um it's something i don't even know that it's inside of us i think it's something that exists within the fabric of everything it's like infiltrated in our being and i don't think it matters how old you are or how much experience or not experience you have i think experience absolutely does help to garner wisdom but i feel like for so many of us we're in this world of instant gratification everything needs to happen instantly we are constantly searching for validation and approval and
i feel like wisdom is one of these things that happens when we live through experiences and we learn from them and we can then experience our lives through them i guess i'm curious for you like what your definition of wisdom is and and with regard to just being able to look at women in specific specifically women um what that role has played in your life i mean i know that this is a very broad and i'm very like ambitious of me to try and get you wait wait a softball to start right i know but
i just feel like because you you are this for me and one of the reasons why i want not one i mean there's millions of reasons why i wanted to have you on the show and just to have a conversation with you but i feel like for me you are such a incredibly uh grounded and embodiment of what wisdom is just in your whole life your whole experience everything you talk about everything you've been through your uh your wins your losses everything in your life you're so transparent about talking about all of the lessons and
i think it's so inspirational for somebody like me which obviously you know my background like it's it's so inspiring and obviously like i i want to hear about what role that plays in your life and the women in your life and how they have helped shine a light in in your own process of acquiring that wisdom okay let's play [Laughter] let's go with a couple strands of thought are coming to me um the first thing is i'm realizing that i've never been asked for a simple definition of what wisdom is and so as you were
talking i was like how would i say that in one sentence and i think that for me and this is just from my own lived visceral experience wisdom is the gentlest path through life on life's terms the wisest calmest people that i know are the ones who live their lives in the least amount of resistance to the will of life itself and every time that i have tried to insert my will my ego my um my instant gratification unfettered desires my anger my resentment any time that i i've imposed myself on that my dear friend
life has corrected me my dear friend life has corrected me sometimes instantly sometimes almost instantly and that correction has been painful and and deep a deep cut and from it more wisdom has been learned um i had a friend who used to say that there are three kinds of people in the world there are people who will never ever learn wisdom they will never learn wisdom no matter what happens to them no matter how many consequences they endure no matter how much pain they have to be in no matter how many you know exploding instances
of their life that they have to do just they just won't can't um that's one category and and it's an argument there's an argument to be made that it's most people and then the second category of people are people who become wise over time because they learn from their own mistakes and so their own mistakes act as teachers for them and they learn from that that's the category that i'm in um and then the third category are people who are really brilliant the absolute geniuses there's just a small number of these and that's people who
learn from other people's mistakes [Laughter] so you just watch someone else do it and you're like yeah there's got to be an easier way to do it than that and and that's that is a particular kind of genius but i'm the sort of person who needs i'm such a i'm such an empiricist i i i'm such an experiential person and um and i've always been somebody who's had to go roll around in the actual world in order to learn anything to learn it in my own skin i have to learn it i won't don't trust
your teaching i'll try it on i'll try it out but i won't just trust it because somebody said so um so i've been knocked around a bit by my experience of not being able to learn boundaries until i've crossed them at 100 miles an hour you know been like oh i guess that was the value back there ten miles ago okay now i get it um you know and and i think that there's something there's a certain degree of magic that's involved with wisdom and in the word magic i'm gonna quote my beloved friend to
the teacher martha beck who says that her definition of magic is um magic is nothing more than knowing and understanding the thing that wants to happen next and then aligning yourself with the thing that wants to happen next and becoming a channel through which the thing that wants to happen next can happen so you and i were speaking a little bit before the podcast and you were talking about your book and you were talking about going out into this not even postcoded middle like right a couple weeks ago you know we're in april now or
may now but a couple weeks ago you were out there in the middle of the greatest pandemic the world has seen in a century trying to sell a book that that you were writing and you said i had to do it um friends were advising me against it they were saying this is a really bad time to be going out in the publishing world but you were like i had to do it um and and i was like it's because the book wanted you to i don't remember you know if you remember me saying that
but i really believe i had to do it because you were acting in alignment with the thing that wanted to happen next and the thing that wanted to happen next was that rosie's book was finally published and you were just an asian letting that occur that so wisdom and the magic to be in alignment with the thing that wants to happen next and the extraordinary magic the incredible all-transforming maturing power of being able to step away from something that doesn't want to happen next rather than bashing yourself with trying to make it occur that is
also wisdom and there is not a lot of that wisdom in this culture because we live in a very immature and kind of entitled culture where people believe and it's kind of a tenet of our culture that you can have anything you want if you like fight hard enough work hard enough struggle hard enough we're all adults here so i'm just gonna let you know that a really important strand of wisdom is recognizing that that is in fact not true and all of our lives show lots of evidence as to how that is not true
um if we're true that i could have everything that i wanted there i won't even get into it but the fact is that i can't um and and when i fight that and resist that i suffer and other people suffer and so i think that one of the most important pieces of wisdom that i've gained that differentiates me now at 50 from who i was at 25 was it's really so much simpler for me now to go oh yeah there's nothing that's going to work here i'm going to excuse myself from this situation i'm gonna
excuse myself from this relationship this is already too hard this isn't the easy way this isn't the gentle way this isn't the thing that wants to happen next apparently and and i'm not gonna suffer and struggle to try to make something happen that the universe doesn't want to have happen and i'm okay with that um so that was my attempt to answer your question no that's really no i love and i love what you said because that's actually what spawned this whole podcast you know the whole idea was that we are in a current state
socially culturally where we want things to happen quickly i mean i was i was running and i was i wasn't see that's the thing it's another thing like this pod the whole idea of this podcast and how it's all just come together i was just it came in and i was like you know what why is it that we feel just in our society that things happen quickly you know what what happened to the art of patience i mean you say that to me two months ago when i was like how long is this going
to take to finish this book how long you know it's like i i quit at least five times in the last five years you know but it was in those moments where i recognized okay patience is the number one lesson that i learned during this whole process and i think just to your point that feeling of allowing whatever is happening uh evolve without the force of my will and just accepting things as they are is just if anything it just is more comfortable to go through as opposed to just being in this forcing state where
a lot of people want to uh grow their instagram quickly or they want instant uh 10 times your growth in one week lose 10 pounds in five double your money without having to leave your home yeah you know all these things and that's where this whole idea of what is happening to our ability to just wait and and be patient i mean and i've read all of your books one of which is right here um but this whole idea of being patient with the experience of experience like if you're you're planting a seed and seeing
the flower grow it doesn't you know what i was thinking about do you remember chia pets do i of course i remember do you remember how like oh they you just water them and they grow in five whatever it was like i'm sure it was like a gmo seed that just grew really quickly but i i feel like we're really losing touch with the idea of experience and having to actually go through stuff in order to acquire that discernment that you're talking about so eloquently um i was remembering that uh the guru in india who
i went to study with when i was there at the ashram used to say um instantaneous bliss dissolves instantaneously [Laughter] um and it's very very true um this idea of an overnight transformation overnight transcendence because people would come there and they would have these experiences of instantaneous bliss they would drop into some heightened meditative state and all of a sudden they would be like well my whole life is going to be bliss from now on and it's like well what you've seen what you've been given it doesn't mean that that experience was meaningless the way
i interpreted it is that you were given a taste of of what serenity and peace and bliss could feel like now do the work um you know now do the work of sitting in meditation every day for months and years on end now now be patient um and and i think the reason that we go to sit at the feet of the great masters is that they don't give me this analogy the great tiger hunters because they have been devoted themselves to the the gifts of what can come slowly um the long-earned results of long
practice and long devotion and deep faith um they you come to them and you're like i want to see a tiger i want to see a tiger and then in this case the tiger's wisdom or the tiger's piece where the tiger is um whatever the tiger is i want to see a tiger i see a tiger and they will say to you i can't in a way they say i can't make you be able to see the tiger but i can tell you where tigers are often found you know um so if you go sit
by that water hole for months and you're very quiet and you're very still a tiger might walk by it you know you might get to see a tiger but you're going to have to be really quiet and you're going to have to be really still and all of this especially this aspect of being able to feel in your intuition what is the thing that really wants to happen next um not the thing that i want to have happen next but the thing that wants to happen next and what is my role in nourishing that as
a gardener as a steward as a caretaker of my own spirit how can i be in alignment with that it takes a lot of stillness and stillness is just something that you know a lot most of us just didn't grow up ever even hearing of um so you know for you to be able to feel like no this is the time to to go out and look for the book not because you're gonna get the baseball bat and smash the world open and demand you know but just because you are like i think the book
wants this now that's that's you just being working in conjunction with this thing that's working through you and with you yeah and you know just to add to that it was also and i you know i want people that are either watching this or listening to this to to know that there were those moments where i needed to just pause and and not do anything with it in just a period of months on end where i was like you know i'm just gonna shelve it for a bit it just doesn't feel i didn't feel aligned
with what what i was trying to do it felt very forced and it felt very influenced by what people think and should or all this needs to be this way or oh your yoga teacher now it has to be about yoga and i'm like yeah but my parents were immigrants like i want to talk about growing up in the environment that i grew up in and why this is important to me and why this matters i think that that's the point you know and getting advice like i don't know people are not people want you
to tell them what to do and i'm like no they don't and i love big magic you talk about that you're like please don't don't please don't tell please don't give me advice like please don't tell me please don't write a book to try to help people right and i try to help me yeah tell me your story and then i'll figure it out well and that was part of that really struck me i mean that really struck me in a deep way and i feel like that just that statement really helped me allow the
the idea to just evolve on its own it's like oh okay i see now i don't need to try to make anything happen it just is gonna be [Laughter] yeah 100 on that whether it's whether it's gonna be good or not we don't know this episode is brought to you by bio optimizers what is the number one mineral to fight stress and fatigue magnesium but not just any magnesium the one i recommend is magnesium breakthrough because it combines all seven essential forms of magnesium into one convenient supplement most magnesium supplements fail because they are synthetic
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the wise podcast 10 off of your first month if you visit betterhelp.com forward slash wise that's better help help dot com forward slash wise w-i-s-e to get 10 off of your first month and now back to our show i've always wanted to i've always wanted to ask you this i mean i hear interviews that you do all the time and i'm just like how come nobody's asking her this so i'm i'm oh cool i'm excited what's going to be well i it has to do with um your own ability to you know learn from other
people's wisdom you know i want to take uh i want to ask you the question regarding your mother and wisdom that she gave you that you were easy to take and other wisdom that she may have shared that it took you a long time to realize if there was two people i thought the second part of your question was going to be wisdom that she may have shared that it's taken me a long time to unlearn absolutely and it's you know we as children we see our parents as gods and and it takes a lot
and i really respected and admired my mother so i took in a lot of stuff that she believed as simply gospel um tried to fit my life to it and then it didn't fit my life um so there was there's been a lot with my mom and it's a no it's i say this with all love to her it's just i was given a different spirit um than her spirit and so there are things that she has taught me that i'm incredibly grateful for for most of which is a sense of um self-accountability and um
uh resourcefulness um the the wisdom of knowing that it's not the responsibility of the world to take care of you it's your responsibility to take care of you um she taught that to do a fault i might say you know i always say my mother's number one parenting statement was you're on your own you know and i might have been a little young to be like i'm seven how am i on my own she really really my mom was on room for a lot of her life and she really wanted to raise daughters who could
take care of themselves and a lot of what she taught us was how to do it ourselves you know she's going to show it to you once and then she expects the next time you can do it yourself um i protested a lot against that as a kid because i wanted to be coddled but she wasn't having it and so um part of my nature the nature the part of my nature that maybe in a different household would in a coddling household might have just been allowed to remain stunted um i was really forced and
pushed to be really self-sufficient earlier than i was comfortable with um and i'm really grateful for that as painful as it was at the time because i really did go out in the world and forge my own life which is something that my mom had wanted for me from a very early age she always said i don't all i want is for you to create your own life um you know that's it then there were also messages that she taught that i that i imbibed almost like as if drinking them from the ground water they
were like principles that were really sacred to her um and for most among those was that there is nothing more honorable that a woman can be a wife and mother and i'm laughing at it now because it's hilarious just for me right that just doesn't oh that just does not work and i i mean i can say that because i've tested it i'm really good at like i said about going out and being empirical and trying things um i really did try to fit into that um because i really did believe it because i was
raised in a household where it was very deeply believed it was an article of faith it didn't it felt like wearing marriage to me felt like wearing a hair shirt you know it felt like it was so incredibly uncomfortable for me and then the thought of having children to me honestly truly and honestly felt like a death sentence um and i understand that this is not how many women feel i understand because it was always very surprising to me like women who talked about having feeling their biological clock or their breast aching when they would
see a baby and they would want or smelling its head and wanting it or picking out baby clothes before they had children i had exactly the opposite response which was um on the day that i have a child my life will be over so thankfully i didn't go ahead with it because that's somebody who you don't want as your mom like you don't want that i feel like i mother the world in other ways but like how sucky would it be to be to be the kid who even subconsciously knew that your mother felt her
life ended when you arrived right like so thankfully i didn't do that to any soul or spirit but i had a lot of guilt and shame around it because i felt as though i had disappointed some really important cosmic um the most important fundamental cosmic truth which was really the foundational basis of my mom's entire theology of the world um so i want to just say there were lessons that i received there were lessons that i took in the lessons that shaped my life and there were things that i had to say i respect entirely
that this is your religion um but this doesn't work for the spirit that i was given to steward through this life so i think that the process of wisdom is also a process of selectively curating and unlearning and not throwing away the entire person and every single thing that they've had to offer but having the maturity to pick through it you know i almost feel like at one point psychically it's like i i kind of imagined my mom dumping out her purse on the table and me dumping out mine and and then just going okay
this is mine and this is yours and this is mine and this is ours but no these this these keys are definitely not mine this comb is yours this you know this lipstick is mine and just dividing it up in order to differentiate yourself between you and the sometimes very powerful and always very influential whether it's positive or negative people who raised you yeah oh i love that i love that so much and it totally resonates with me on so many levels especially the whole idea of being a mother i i've been on a fertility
journey for the last couple of years and it's been one of these things right again trying to force the issue right it's like no it i'm i'm this age i need to be a mom like check it off the list and then i started to think why is this really do i really want this like is this i really want to be a parent and where does that come from or and then i had to go on this whole you know inquisition about why what is the reason behind it why do i feel so desperate
for it is it because i can't have it well there's other things i can't have and am i torturing my soul just as bad because i can't do something and you know a lot of it it comes from being raised in a hispanic household you know i'm you know in my mid 30s i should have had 10 kids by now you know like this whole thing where i feel the pressures of not only just who i am as as a a woman but who i am in the place of my family and where i need
to be and it just almost added to that you know when you feel fine and somebody asks you are you okay like do you know what i mean like are you okay and it's like [Laughter] so i find it fascinating that we we can be completely uh you know taken over these ideals that people think we should be or what we actually believe and how often do we actually take stock on our own and ask ourselves the questions that really matter for ourselves you know to really sit and ask ourselves those questions is this something
that i really want why do i want it and who am i without this thing who who will i be without it and then when i was able to answer those questions i was like oh i'm okay well i want to be a parent and maybe it doesn't look like how it looks for everybody else like maybe it just is going to look different and there's no time stamp on it i don't have to do it now i can wait five years i can wait 10 years i can wait it it's it's i've got a
little hint for you if you want to really build relaxation into it yeah you can wait for the next lifetime you know like this is how i remember just really letting myself off the hook from it where i was like well i don't have to do this every lifetime right you know like i have just thought like i i had this thought like maybe i've just been having kids like millennia after millennia after century after century you know incarnation after incarnation and maybe i'm gonna take one of these incarnations off you know like and have
and just take i'm just take it off i'm just gonna take this one off and i'm gonna do some really fun stuff and letting other people raise the kids for a while that's fun and and that just lifted it like it just it just lifted it where it's like yeah maybe i'll come back to this next time maybe not let's take this let's try this what's it like to be this person you know um and and take this let's take this incarnation for a ride in a different way yeah um so if that resonates with
you you're free thank you it absolutely does so i want to ask just another question with regard to being on this why is a sage journey that you're on oh why sage i'm curious about i'm curious about um the women that have inspired you and what inspiration actually means what is your definition of inspiration and who are who have been the women in your life that have um cultivated that that have planted those seeds of uh growth within you so inspiration i think i i think i'll go with the standard definition i think it means
to breathe into someone um you know so so to expire is to die um with the last breath right um and to inspire us to inhale so so there's a level of like trans transmission you know a transmission where you breathe in from somebody what they have already gotten for you um when i think about the women in particular who have inspired me um i've got a sort of eclectic list but it's it tends to be women who have well of course women who have chosen an unconventional path an unconventional path through life um so
going back to and sometimes there were women who just breezed in for a very quick time into my life put some inspiration breath into me of an idea that was radically new to me and then breezed right out and one of them that i'm going to think of just returning to this idea of children when i was 30 and struggling with this idea of whether or not i should have children i did a photo shoot for gq magazine where i used to be a writer and mary ellen mark who was one of the greatest female
documentary photographers of the last century incredible incredible photographer whose work i'd always admired so much and she was so cool she was like by the time i met her i mean she might have god it's killing me to think this but she this is 25 years ago she might have been like how old i am now maybe a little older like 50s 60s she had this like face and being that i would associate with kind of new mexico hippie rangy she had long gray braids like willie nelson but a woman and she wore all this
like silver jewelry and her face was really lined from being outdoors and she just she had such a cool her own iconic classic style she kind of looked like patty smith and she was photographing me for this article and we were talking at that point i was asking everyone i met you know like every woman i met what are you doing about kids how do you feel about kids do you regret having kids do you never get that i was trying to find the answer and everyone and i'll never forget it we had this i
feel like she came into my life for just this one thing she had her face behind her camera she's doing her work and she's this incredibly successful artist who's made this huge life for herself she's got seven studio assistants she's won how many pulitzers i mean she's just so bullying herself and she's behind the camera she's taking pictures of me and then i said mary ellen did you ever have kids and she just you know it's usually a question that launches this long like monologues from women whether the answer is yes or no and she
just goes like this she moves her face through the camera she goes never had him never missed him and then went back to work and that was her entire statement and i was like wow that can exist like it can just be like a four word answer with no ambivalence and like no and that was it you know and i still get like a tingling on my scalp which is always the feeling i have when i'm in the presence of great truth where i'm like well thank you for that mary ellen you know so there's
one person who i would say was like people can come in they can breathe inspiration in one second they can leave and your whole life can be changed you know um and then there are people like my personal the teacher who's changed my life more than anyone else in the world byron katie um who has a series of practice of um spiritual teachings not even spiritual teaching it's sort of philosophical and meditative teaching that's called the work that's a beautiful system of patient inquiry where you sit with your most troubling beliefs and you ask of
your most stressful and troubling beliefs these four questions is it true can i absolutely know that it's true how do i react when i believe that it's true and who would i be without that belief um i have definitely in the last five years really sat at her feet as a student at the feet of the master i've taken her 10-day class food work i've um you know i listened to everything that she produces in the world and she has transformed the molecular structure of my brain um and then my guru who i studied with
in india um guru maharaja um incredible classic indian um shavik teacher um who really taught more through just she was one of those people who you sit in her presence and then you're changed just by being in her presence there's so many ways to be impacted um and then martha beck who's one of my who's become one of my best friends and who has a radical just such a radical way of seeing the world when i first had a conversation with her and i got like tuned into her mind and how it works i remember
coming away from that and thinking i used to think i was playing the game of life pretty well but martha took the ball and left the arena she doesn't even play it anymore like she doesn't even engage with it on cultures terms anymore she's like excused herself from the game as it is played in this culture and she's doing her own thing 10 miles away from the stadium you know and i was like i want to be like that i don't want to play the game of life by this culture's terms anymore i want to
i want to walk away from it completely and do something that's totally of my own and so she makes me feel really liberated and makes me feel like all things are possible as long as you follow your intuition but only always and um and that intuition is eavesdropping on the cosmic mind and there is only one navigational system that is indisputably yours and that is your own intuition and um so that has become like she's become a guide post for me and then like a million i also have a friend who's a nun in philadelphia
who runs an incredible um nonprofit called um project home that works with the homeless in philadelphia and she's filled me with inspiration because she also somebody who has followed her own path that does exactly what she wants it just happens that what she wants is to live in a single room occupancy hotel with a bunch of homeless guys and give her entire life to taking care of them because she loves them and she's filled with joy and service so there's all these levels um and then there's all the female authors that i admire like the
list is is extremely long but i think it's way too much pressure i would never put so much pressure on my mom to say that it was her responsibility to raise me all of these women have raised me and they continue to raise me even me postmenopausal 50 year old i still look for the women who are going to raise me and i'm going to continue to look for that my whole life yeah oh talking about i'm i miss hugs i miss hugging people i don't know why that just made me feel like oh all
those women they sound amazing i'm like i just want to be in a circle of uh just wise women i mean in fact this is the other inspiration that came when i thought about this podcast was my my grandmother used to host these weekly prayer circles for all the little you know like hispanic abuelitas and and grandmother's mothers on our block that you know were had sons in jails or they were in gangs and and so she would host these weekly prayer vigils they were little you know prayer circles and they would all gather at
our you know in our little apartment and she would make hot chocolate and there would be and and everybody would just do these prayer circles but really what it would be is it was a support group they would just all talk to each other and i was little and i mean between the ages of like five and seven this would happen every week and so i'd sit at their feet and listen to them and i would hear and i would cry when they would cry you know i was just so i wanted to i wanted
to just help you know any way that i could and and to me just to be able to experience the wisdom or the support that they gave each other was absolutely it really helped shape who i was and how i treated other women you know i never grew up with having that competitive edge with women you know that thing i just always have been obsessed with women i just always have i just love all women i i think every woman is beautiful and and wise and loving and and i know that you know everybody has
flaws nobody's perfect but where else everybody is right exactly you know and i think that that's that's one of the things as you're speaking right now to all of the these incredible women that inspire you i'm like that it's just taking me to that space of being able to sit at the feet of women that are living their path they're living their their truth their their life their passion their dharma their calling and i think there's nothing more inspiring than a woman who can just stand in her own power and be completely unapologetic yeah for
sure yeah for sure wow liz gilbert thank you so much for an incredible conversation everyone join us next week for part two this concludes next week the series is done season one if you haven't subscribed yet please subscribe to wherever you get your podcast remember to leave us a review and let us know what you thought perhaps even what you'd like to see for season two this podcast was produced by me rosie acosta and aviv rubenstein you can find aviv on instagram at rambocalrission thank you again so much and we will see you next week
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