Andrea Gibson

speaker

930 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard 3 Mar

Andrea Gibson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

We Can Do Hard Things · The Bravest Conversation We’ve Had: Andrea Gibson (Best Of) · 26 Jan 2025 podcast

And also, you know, I wrote this thing, I wrote this thing on our wall downstairs that said, no regrets. Like if I have a short time to live, I'm not about to spend that time dying. I'm going to spend it living.

It used to mean something very different to me. It used to mean just going out and doing everything and seeing everyone and having every conversation. But for me, it means opening my heart to gratitude, opening my heart to love and mostly being present. Like for right now, you know, I'm sitting here, nothing in my body feels bad. Like if somebody told me I had cancer, I'd say, no, no way.

Nothing in my body feels bad. And so that is life like that right now in this little second, this is my entire lifespan in this moment. And I can fill it with worry thoughts. I can fill it with just stories about what's unfair. I refuse to do that to my life.

I refuse to spend the end of my life, no matter how much time it is, whether it's two months or it's 20 years, I refuse to spend it not loving my life. And that doesn't mean not feeling. My therapist taught me years ago that You can't shut yourself off to grief without also shutting yourself off to joy. You have to think of it like a kink in the hose. You stop the flow of sadness.

You stop the flow of happiness at the same time. So I'm crying about twice an hour and then I'm bursting into laughter. So it's feeling it all to be open to this moment and to the aliveness of this moment.

I try to think about God, but that never works.

I try to think about God. I try to sit down and write about God, and it just never happens. I used to think God or the divine or source or whatever you want to call it, the consciousness within us all. I don't even have a name, but I guess I use God easily these days. which I, which I didn't before, but is the most vital thing in my life.

And when I was having the experience right after I got diagnosed, I had thought what the biggest things were, were, you know, human love and, and all of, all of that human connection. And that's enormous and that's part of it, but it is the most important thing. thing in my life. It is the most eternal.

It is also the relationship in my life that makes me show up to the people in my life in a way that I respect. And I wasn't having that consistently before this experience. And so that's why initially I couldn't say this is just a disease. It was also medicine. And I'm trying to think if there are any words, but Whenever I tried to think about it, it almost, it escaped, it runs away.

It runs away in my thoughts. But it's an experience, a sensory experience and an emotional experience of being absolutely loved and feeling that I am immensely and completely loved every moment of my life and always have been. And everyone I have ever encountered has been too.

And I think that was the thing that was so healing because when you have trauma in your history, what it does is it, it sort of undoes your sense of being unconditionally loved and When this came in, this knowing, all of a sudden I knew that I was unconditionally loved and it almost felt like it just washed through me and started immediately healing all these wounds.

And then in that sense of feeling just unconditionally loved, it was so easy to unconditionally love everyone I was around.

Yeah. Yeah, he's rad. So they have changed so much over the years. You know, even when I was really angry and angry at the church and coming out. And I wrote about it once. I said I had to kill my own God to fall in love for the first time. That's what it felt like. I'm like, I'm going to kill my God so I can love this woman. And so I sort of I didn't identify as a Christian person.

And for a long time through, as I was a young activist, I had Jesus as a role model, as a revolutionary. And I was writing poems about Jesus being a revolutionary. But now when all of this happened, every time I would go to some Buddhist text or watch something online about consciousness, it was so consistently people were, the Buddhist folks were leading me back to Jesus. And

And talking so much about how the teachings are very, very similar and how the teachings of Christ have been misinterpreted. And to sort of, in many ways, undo our own sense of the God within us all. And now, yeah, I love Jesus. I get my mag. Meg, who is like not really a Jesus-y person, has I have to listen to stuff all night right now to sleep.

And so she's like, I hear we were listening to Jesus all last night.

I've been doing it for about 17 years now where I couldn't sleep without some sort of sound happening. And it actually started during the time in my life when I had just gotten Lyme disease and I was terrified and, and really, really sick. And I had nights that I was worried I wouldn't live through the night.

And so I started at that time and I have ever since just like sort of some soft television sound happening. And now it's just, you know, videos of people talking about near death experiences or the life of Buddha or all of it. Yeah.

I do know that line. I'm trying to think if I remember it, but no, I don't believe in good and bad people. The definition for myself for a long time is, Are you trying? Are you trying to be kind? Are you trying to be generous? Are you trying to make the world more beautiful? Are you trying to care for yourself and those around you?

And I say trying because I have experiences of times in my life where I tried to be kind and I couldn't be. Like I couldn't get there, whether it was I mean, when I was sick with Lyme disease and I had was so sick and all these bugs in my brain, like my my anger response was so quick. And I also have people in my life who have particular mental illnesses where they try to not be snappy and they.

Showing 801–820 of 930 · page 41 of 47