Chapter 1: What is sacred rage and how is it a form of love?
Yes. Hello, hello.
Hello, hello, hello.
Well, PodSquad, we have back the Megan Watterson, who I just emailed last week on a particularly... Actually, they've all been particularly infuriating days, so who knows which one it was, and said, please, God, just come onto the pod and Sit with us. I think I asked you to go feral with us because you had used that word.
I was telling Abby that all I know to do right now and what I want to do is just gather the people that I have long trusted who feel like they've been preparing us for a long time for a moment like this. And just sit with them unprepared and unguarded and just ask them, how are you? How are you doing? What are you doing? What are you thinking about? How are you getting through?
And you're the first person that I knew we had to talk to. And before we get started, I do want to say that we were privately listening to the soundcheck you just did and pod squad, I need you to know this. So our incredible producers, Alison and Marissa and Jen, they get on with the guest and they say, okay, tell us what you had for breakfast.
And the point is just to listen to the noise that comes out of their mouth. And most people just say bacon, one, two, three, four. So Five minutes ago, Marissa said, so Megan, just tell us what you had for breakfast. And she said, well, I was making my son an egg.
Scrambled eggs.
Scrambled eggs. And I kept thinking of eggs and Mary Magdalene and how she pointed to an egg. And I think what she meant by that pointing was that it is all within us. And that is what I think is important is that it is all within us. That was Megan's sound check.
Okay.
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Chapter 2: Why is trusting our inner knowing more important than ever?
It was my body telling me exactly how much work we have to do, but also in particular, You know, that had to do with Deepak Chopra and the fact that he's in the Epstein files. And, you know, for those who have read a lot of the files, as a survivor, I felt like I had to read some of them for the sake of the survivors. And when I read the ones that Deepak wrote,
There was this validation for my anger, for the rage that I had, I've long since had for him, for the hubris of thinking that he needed to teach us about the divine feminine. That alone, you know, I was already in fuego a long time ago.
But then to read his comments to Epstein and my voice is shaking now because I'm trying to get to the email and I'm not going to repeat exactly what the email was, but it was about the littlest one, you know, Epstein's littlest one. And... You know, I can't comprehend how the world hasn't ended for everyone. I don't understand that. My world has ended.
And after I read that email, I described it, you know, my day was like, I was a very tiny, unproductive hurricane. I was channeling the rage, the creative energy, right? This is the rage that love inspires, right? I was channeling enough rage to literally reconfigure the world. But I also couldn't make my bed. It was that kind of situation.
And I just felt like my entire nervous system couldn't handle the idea of not doing anything. This idea of moving on from the person who is named more than Christ is named in the New Testament, right? Telling us to just move on. My nervous system was only calmed by making a list.
So what I did that day is I started making a list because, you know, you have long since told us what breaks our heart are who we serve. And I went into seminary because of trafficked girls. You know, that population, pregnant teens, is why I went back and and sort of went into the whole question as to where did women's voices go within Christianity. I went back to seminary for pregnant teens.
They were referred to as prostitutes at that time, 14-year-olds, right?
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Chapter 3: How do women respond when systems of protection fail?
There's no such thing as a 14-year-old prostitute.
Same as the girls in the Epstein files. The actual prosecutors prosecuted them. this as that they were prostitutes, their children.
And that was, you know, I am prostrate, like I am on my knees in gratitude for Amanda, to going into the files and really helping compile, because I couldn't go near them after reading that one email about the littlest one. I couldn't go near them again.
And then Amanda went into it and her conversation with Brad Edwards then, the attorney, when he brought up that word prostitute, it's just everything lit up for me. Again, back to Mary Magdalene, because this is what the church called her, right? a prostitute, then somehow devalued her.
And the only thing that made my nervous system okay that day was beginning this list that I titled, How Women Pray When the World is on Fire. And I started researching what have women done throughout history in peaceful protest to when the people in power are saying, you do not have power and we are going to take your rights, what have women done?
So that was the only thing that started calming my nervous system. And I found some really amazing, amazing moments in history. First of all, there was this woman, Abby, it may have been a reincarnation of yours or a previous incarnation of yours. Well, because your middle name's Mary, which I love. And I only- Well, my first name is Mary. Your first- My middle name- Is Abby? Okay. All right.
So I'm Mary Abigail. Okay. So this was definitely you. Listen, see if it sounds familiar. In 1908- there was a woman named Mary Maloney. And when Churchill dared to disparage women who were fighting for the right to vote, right? He disparaged the suffrage movement. Mary Maloney grabbed a bell and she followed Churchill wherever he went.
And whenever he tried to say something, Mary started ringing her bell and drowned out everything he was gonna say. Yes. It's so creative and it's so powerful. And what ended up happening is that she annoyed the hell out of everyone. And he, of course, was only speaking to other men and people in positions of power. And so they were like, who is this Mary? What is like, what is she about?
And so it ended up really raising awareness about the fight for women's right to vote. Then there was the Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina, 1977, when they're You know, young adult children were being disappeared in the middle of the night by the reign of terror.
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Chapter 4: What historical acts of resistance inspire women today?
of Liberia, Mass Action for Peace, they joined together, Christian and Muslim women, and they protest wearing all white in front of the presidential palace to end the Liberian Civil War. They just refused... You know, like Thekla at the beginning of the Acts of Paul and Thekla, they refuse to go on with life as is. And that's absolutely where I am.
Like my nervous system can't, I can't not be utterly changed by this. My world has ended. And for me, I am actively changing. creating the circumstances for the new world to come about. I have to only focus on that. And I don't know what my action is yet. You know, I love that Florence Welch right now has everybody scream tour because I feel like screaming is a form of prayer right now.
And Abby, I just want to say as a survivor, it does something to my nervous system. You know, for you to have... stood up and left the Wasserman agency. It's like at the beginning of the Gospel of Mary, there's this beautiful passage that for me is an articulation of love. It's every nature, every modeled form, every creature exists in and with each other. That to me is, that's love.
And when you stood up and you refused to be a part of that agency as a direct example action that love was inspiring you to do. I'm connected to you. You're connected to me. You are demonstrating that fact that we exist in and with each other. And it calmed my nervous system. It changed me, you leading in that way. And that's on my list, how women pray when the world is, you're on my list.
That's really sweet. And, you know, I actually, I've thought a lot about this because I've been, we've actually traveled the world since this all happened. And there are people all over the world that recognize me and are saying, they're not saying like, congratulations on soccer. They're like, what you did really was so important. And thank you so much.
And it's just like, we do have more agency than we think. We just do. And even if it is in a smaller way, maybe you're not a public person, but we all can do something in order to not keep living in the same fucking world that we live in. And this is what you're saying. It's so beautiful.
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Chapter 5: How does the story of Mary Magdalene relate to women's worth?
We can not do something before we do something. What I loved about your... statement when you left Wasserman, when you said, I don't know what my next steps are. I just know where I can't be. And I felt like that was so important. It was vulnerable, but it also was about accountability for other people.
Because what people tend to decide is, well, I guess I'll do something when I have everything figured out, when I know my next steps, when I know where I'm going. And I don't know that this is a time for that. This is a time What Megan, you're saying is, no, no, no, I'm going to stop my world whether or not I know where I'm stepping next.
I am detaching myself at least from this monstrous nightmare that I have always known was present. And Megan, that's why- I feel so deeply connected to you is because as a person who has, and I'm not going to say a lot of this, right?
Cause it's still spinning, but who has sat in therapy for 40 years where people, and there's so much I love about therapy, but where basically the message was like, everything's okay. And you're just going to have to understand that everything's okay somehow. And here are your strategies. I have always been like, okay, I guess I have to pretend to believe you.
But I have always known that everything was not okay. I have always known that was horseshit. I have always known that just maybe because I'm particularly safe in my home with my – does not mean – That anyone else is safe just because I could protect my peace doesn't mean that that's the definition of what peace is for me.
That peace is about continuing to make yourself vulnerable until more people have peace. That I knew peace. that these motherfuckers were doing this shit in every locker room, in every meeting, in every back end, that I knew that they were profiting off of women and then turning around and raping them behind their backs, that they were laughing in locker rooms.
that they were using the feminist movement to make money and find a place. And then the second they're in private, they are laughing at us. The indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter. We all knew this in our bones. And so now is the great un-gaslighting of women. Now is the time where before maybe we were saying, oh God, can we trust ourselves? What is this rage? Maybe more meditation.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. Maybe more retreats. Maybe more like no more retreating. As my sister says, the rage now is out. It's outrage. It no longer stays inside of us and eats us alive. We unleash it like dragons. And so when you're talking about the women, you know, what about the troubles in Ireland?
That was all the women, the mothers saying enough death, enough death and Protestants and Catholics coming together and saying that's enough, we're marching. And also let's tell people just in case they don't know what you're talking about with this Deepak Chopra piece of shit.
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Chapter 6: What does it mean to pray when the world is on fire?
It's so funny when I'm talking about these guys now, I'm using was all the time. Like they're gone.
But that's our power.
Deepak Chopra is some kind of like fraudulent wellness, self-appointed guru that claimed to talk about the divine feminine, I guess. I don't know. I've never met him, seen him, been in a room with him. I've always felt utterly repulsed by him. But- You knew.
Again, it's that validation.
Yeah.
Yes, yes. He's found all over the Epstein files. One of the most interesting things that he said directly to Epstein was, God is a construct. Little girls are real. So that's who Deepak Chopra was.
And what's so fascinating for me is that the majority of his followers are women. And that's really, really important for us to look at, you know, and to sort of understand then, okay, how did this happen? How did he become a spokesperson for the divine feminine? Right? For me... it really is important for us to understand that if we claim our worth, we will know our power.
And the men have positioned themselves as gatekeepers to the divine via the patriarchy. That's right. What teachers like Mary Magdalene and Thecla, whose scriptures, of course, were removed by the empire when Christianity became patriarchal, what they revealed to us is that there are no gatekeepers.
So if the divine is directly accessed from within us, when I use the word power, what I'm really meaning is love. Right. The ultimate source of power is the love that we can source inside of us. No one can keep it from us. It is unconditional. And we are told the absolute opposite, that it comes from outside of us. We have to prove that we're worthy of it. And the church positioned itself.
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Chapter 7: How can women reclaim their power in today's society?
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I recently was interviewed by Diane Sawyer about the gospel of Mary for a documentary. And she asked me this unbelievable question that was so good. I kind of left my body. So I have no idea how I answered it like for the documentary, but I have super low bar for myself in situations like that.
It's pretty much just don't pass out, you know, cause it's like, it's so unnatural being in a, you know, a studio and, It's just so intense for me. And I know what that costs me, you know, to try to do something like that. So I was just like mercy for myself. Just try not to slowly slip out of the chair and pass out on the floor during the interview.
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Chapter 8: What is the significance of believing women and ourselves?
They must believe us. Because I think what has to happen first is I must believe me. We must believe us. It is like we learned young. There's like strings that are connected between our inner selves and our outer selves.
And we became so scared of our inner selves who were raging and questioning and feeling and railing against all of it that we cut the strings and we handed them to somebody else outside of ourselves. And we said, you move my face. You move my, you feel for me. You tell me what you, and then we became fucking puppets.
It disembodied puppets because we disconnected ourselves from our inner selves and we gave the strings away. And now we are going to have to rest those strings back from outside of ourselves and reconnect it to our inner selves and start believing the questions and the feelings and what happened to us and the stories and stay connected and keep believing.
I think that there's gonna be a lot of folks who are listening to this that haven't connected all of this to rage yet. Because a lot of us might be feeling a little bit lost in that there may have been, I won't say easier acceptance to what was like the way of the world, the world order of for me growing up in sport, right? Like I just knew women's sports was not as popular as men's sports.
So I was just like, all right, I'm just gonna run uphill. I'm gonna just, this is what I'm gonna do for my life. But there was some kind of internal acceptance to feeling inferior to men. And it wasn't until I was 36 years old standing on a stage when the rage finally came.
And it was when I was at the ESPYs and I was getting the same ICON ESPY award from ESPN, the ESPY nationally televised award show for sports. I was getting the same award as Kobe and Peyton. It wasn't until I walked off that stage knowing that the three of us were walking into three very different retirements that I actually let myself feel rage.
I think that so many of us don't want to express or even feel rage. because it feels counterintuitive in some ways to love. And so I just want to acknowledge anyone out there who might be seeing all that's going on in the world with the Epstein files and our government and all of it and feeling so confused and kind of muddled up and bottled up, it is okay that you haven't found the rage yet.
but I want to invite you because it's a vulnerability. It is. Letting yourself admit to yourself that this is something you've been carrying kind of silently. I mean, this is going to make me cry a little, but like the locker room, the laughter is, You know, like I think of myself as somebody who can just like brush it off. And I think we've been doing it for so long.
And I keep giving men the benefit of the doubt, especially male athletes, the benefit of the doubt. Well, they just don't know. And this is just what their locker rooms are like. And there's just something about the most recent men's hockey locker room incident where they were laughing.
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