Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. Before we dive in today, pod squad, we want to send you off into this holiday season with so much love. Our hope for you is peaceful, cozy, slow days with your people, full of warmth, gentleness, and rest. This, however, will be our last episode of the year.
We're taking two weeks off and then we will return on the first Tuesday of the new year, January 6th. Today, we're sending you into the season with something special. a conversation I had recently at the Kripalu Center in Massachusetts, hosted by the brilliant, warm, and deeply wise Iset Rose.
She is an artist, a healer, a thought leader, and truly one of the most grounding presences I've sat with. We got to the heart of so many themes we've been circling lately on this pod in a room full of beautiful, beautiful people,
We talked about how to not abandon our own agency, how to stay with ourselves in the hard moments, how to let the old scripts burn so something new and truer can grow, how to reimagine our relationships in ways that deepen connection, how menopause and midlife are horrific and also somehow quite spiritually important, and how enoughness can feel like death when we've been raised inside of capitalism.
And we talked about the work we will need to do, the grieving work, the healing work, the work of changing the metrics of our lives so we can live inside what is real and right now and stop arranging our existence around the next thing. As we wind down 2025, it was a doozy, wasn't it, pod squad? And once again, we made it through together. We love you. We're grateful for you.
We look forward to meeting you again on the other side of this holiday season. We'll see you in 2026. Let's jump right in to this conversation with a set.
So you've spoken recently about fury and joy dancing together. When fury shows up, not as something to push down, but as something to pay attention to, what helps you channel it into truth and creativity or boundaries instead of letting it consume you?
Well, I think it's good that we're starting with an easy one. Thanks, love. Just get right on in there. I mean, first of all, I just want to say I feel really grateful and amazed that we're all here right now. It just feels like... I mean, I'm grateful and amazed when I leave my house at all, but this... I just feel like I've been feeling so... confused and...
stuck and lost and I just feel like this is a really big gift for me to just see all your faces and be here in the same place and so I'm really grateful that you did whatever you have to do to make this happen because I know it isn't easy. It's really moving to me. I've been doing whatever it is I do for 20 years. I'm not sure what it is that brings us all here. I think that besides
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Chapter 2: What themes are explored in the conversation about self-identity?
Patterns, old patterns and old stuff. And this thing happens to me when I'm almost 50, but when I get back around my family of origin, I'm seven. Right. So I think what happened is that there was a moment at the table where a pattern rose up that made me upset and uncomfortable and angry. And the problem was that I was seven again.
So when you're seven or you're 10, you don't have any agency to deal with what is happening. You can't say your thing. You can't get up and leave. You are stuck in the dynamic. And so my way of dealing with that was to dissociate. So dissociation is how you leave so you can stay. And we all do it in different ways. Mine was always related to food. I just will eat and eat until I'm just gone.
I'm gone. You have to leave so you can stay when you're a kid. So the thing that I had to remember... was in those moments that I'm not a kid anymore. So the thing that I have as an adult that I didn't have as a kid is agency. It doesn't feel like a lot of agency, even when you're 50 and you're with your family of origin. It still feels scary. But
The difference, I think, is that when I am feeling that I'm in a system, a group, a country that feels to me very much like a dysfunctional family, almost parallel to a lot of the dysfunction in our own families. Some of us had fathers who didn't know how to regulate, fathers who were authoritarianism, fathers who were angry, and then
mothers who are afraid and complicit it feels very much like the micro of our family is being reenacted in the country a lot and that is hard for all of us and that's why it doesn't just feel like it's happening out there it feels like it's happening in our bodies because we're like seven again and feel like we don't have agency and all of this is just happening to us and so the way that I know how to try now is to use some agency
whether it's with my family of origin or whether it's with my American family, it's to refuse to dissociate.
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Chapter 3: How can we reclaim agency in our lives?
I think that what we can do is decide what power or control we do have. Like what is a thing that we can say? What is a thing that we can make? What is a table that we can leave? What is a table that we can create with different rules? So I think for me, whether it's in eating disorder language or in community language or political language, I'm just trying to refuse to abandon my agency.
And I'm trying to stay with all of it. I don't want to abandon myself anymore. I don't want to leave. Okay, that's not true. I want to leave a lot of places. But I guess what I'm saying is if I'm leaving, I want to take myself with me. I want to leave in alignment and in integrity.
And I don't want to leave in a way that's going to hurt me and leave myself sitting there where one day I come to my senses. I want to stay in my senses, I guess. Okay, that's that about that one.
Well done.
Did it like literally any of that make sense? It did.
Okay.
Okay. And I love where you landed with agency as not self-abandoning and loving yourself enough to stay with yourself and trusting yourself to know that you can meet the moment. You got it. That was a good answer.
Thank you. Thank you.
Live to be good. We're going to move into some relationship, family kind of questions. You, Abby, and Amanda often model how family can be chosen and recreated. What feels most alive to you right now about reimagining family and partnership in ways that make space for truth and love?
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of menopause and midlife in personal growth?
And I said to her, we need to negotiate this. I need you to, Jesus. I said, I need you to tell me which noises on this list are most important to you. And it seemed completely logical to me. It seemed like this is what a wise, loving partner would do, yes, is negotiate the noises. And then the next morning, I woke up. I mean, right now, I'm thinking of Abby's face when I was doing this.
And it was heartbreaking. Okay, because it wasn't the first moment like this. We'd had many moments that led up to the list moment. Okay. And she was like, where has my wife gone? And so the next morning, I made an emergency appointment with my doctor and said, I'm not waiting for your freaking hormone tests. I need something, do something. Do something that will make my family not leave me.
Okay? And then, you guys, I got home, and I couldn't find Abby anywhere. This is my favorite thing. I texted her. I said, where are you? What's going on? She had also made an emergency appointment with our doctor, went in right after me to tell him he had to help her find a way to make less body noises. So it was like a medical gift of the magi. Okay? each going, help us, we can't help ourselves.
So, that, and then we left, that's dramatic language, we didn't leave our daughter. Our daughter went to college, and I don't know how to do this. I feel like I can be pretty logical about changes. Like I've had a lot of changes in my life. So I understand in my head that things are supposed to change.
And that best case scenario is that your children go off on their own and wings and all that shit. Give them wings. And that makes sense to me in my brain. But my body cannot handle it. I don't understand. I think that I became sober by becoming a mom. Just was like, I guess I'll be a mom now. And I just created just an entire identity around mom.
And then I don't have any groups that I ever feel belonging in. I always feel like I don't belong in this group. Like my friends who feel belonging all the time, I just don't even understand what they're talking about. Like I just... always feel like I'm encroaching or uncomfortable or like looking in from the outside.
But this little crew of these three kids and Abby is like the first little community that I've ever felt belonging in. Like I've ever felt like I could be my full self, that they love me for exactly who I am. I mean, honestly, they're contractually obligated to stay with me. They need money. Well, actually, maybe that's it. Like they need me, right? They can't leave. They are so poor.
So this idea of them going off and becoming their own thing, I just don't understand how to be. I don't understand what I'm supposed to, like, make my decisions around or, like, scaffold plans around. I feel like when Tish was walking away into her dorm, I just kept hearing that Stevie, the landslide song. Like the landslide, that's how it feels.
It feels like a landslide and those lines about I'm afraid of changing because I've built my life around you. Can I handle the seasons of my life? Just absolutely not. Absolutely not.
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Chapter 5: How do we redefine relationships in a capitalist society?
I think that it's another thing that I'm going to have to figure out. Sometimes it's something that is very beautiful and good. It can get in the way. That's another reordering that I have to figure out. Like I don't want my 50s. I'm almost 50 and I really don't want my 50s to be based on any sort of like arranging people I love to make
work things or to, so I don't know what I'm going to do about that. But what I'm saying is it's like landslide in a lot of areas and maybe it's beautiful in a way of like, you know how they have those controlled fires of places because sometimes things have to be on fire for like absolute newness to come. I'm hopeful that that's what this is. And I feel like maybe menopause is
spiritually important because I am unable to tolerate stuff that I was able to tolerate before. And so now I think the problem isn't that I can't tolerate this now. The problem is that I tolerated this shit for so long. And so it's like the body's way of saying, all right, we're not even going to give you whatever chemicals you need to tolerate it anymore, I guess.
So I haven't gotten to the point where I can see the beauty that's coming from it, but I can feel in my bones that it's spiritually important and probably for my best next life. I just don't know what the next life is.
Thank you. Real. We go on and on about perimenopause. Thank you. Are you?
Is it? Yes. It's like every morning I'm like, is this flash of rage inside me from the fallen estrogen, the fallen democracy, the fall? I don't know.
I appreciate in the last question, you just speaking about, cause I asked like, how are you re-imagining and just speaking to this, the truth of like, actually right now I'm just in the landslide. I'm in the, it's coming undone. I'm in, I'm bumping up against the like, oh, I don't know if this is working right now.
And just the truth of like, you know, in this moment where I think we all want so badly, like something else, we don't know necessarily what that is.
We're just in not this. Right. My friend Liz calls it not this stage. Like, I don't know what the next is. I just know not this, which is a really important stage.
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Chapter 6: What role does grief play in our healing process?
That is the slide. That is the slow deadening thing we feel in all our bones right now where the rage that we had, which was proof of life, is now settling in and we don't even feel that rage proof of life anymore. We just feel this lead settling into our blood that feels like a chill and is like scary as shit, we have to get the fire back.
And I think we do that through our little candlelight personal vigils each day.
As you're speaking, it's really reminding me of ancestral ways. I've done a lot of study with ancestral indigenous communities and they speak of these very things and these practices of, you know, grieving and wailing and then going out and doing whatever the work is and the job is for the community and everyone has their job.
And one elder was telling me like, if it was his job to go chop the wood and we need that wood to make the fire for dinner, he doesn't do it. We don't eat. And like, we all sit with that, you know? So doing that work and then celebration and the dancing and how the dancing and the singing is also what moves the grief and allows us to meet the challenges of the moment.
So much to me at this moment is about returning to these ways that are just like so simple when there's so much madness and noise trying to pull us from what matters. And I love when you spoke of folks who are meeting their grief and their pain head on and feeling the feelings as being more trustable.
As someone who grew up in a family of denial, my own self-trust was eroded because I couldn't feel my feelings. And then all the masks and all the things to perform and be good and be loved. And yeah, it's not trustable. The real stuff is getting in there and going towards that painful stuff that maybe some call your shadow or your darkness or whatever, but there's nutrients there.
Back to Ancestral Way, it's like it all happens in the dark. you know, it all, all life starts in that place and we've got to go down and grow down to grow up and out.
Yeah. And the shadow stuff, like I feel right now that the sadness that people feel or the anger or the confusion right now, I feel like brokenheartedness is a badge of honor. I don't feel to me like my sadness or my anger or my
bafflement at what is going on is a shadow I feel like it's proof of the beauty inside me because it's like if there's something happening in the outer world and you're rejecting that that is because you have an inner vision of something truer and more beautiful if you're not rejecting that that's because that's that's okay with you that's the vision so for me that this is why sometimes artists have such a
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Chapter 7: What does it mean to have hard conversations?
So he came home and I was like, sunshine. I was sunshine each day. I was music on. I was, yeah, doing the whole thing. And two-thirds of the way through the week, he just walked up and was just, like, despondent. And I was like, what's going on? And basically, he was like, I can't be in this place. Like, what is going on? Do you people not know what's happening in the world?
And I was like, god damn it! Because then I couldn't be like, oh, actually, I'm just lying. I'm just... I've been acting for four days, and I'm actually really... The good news is I'm so sad and miserable. I just had to, like... I mean, Abby and I just looked at each other across the room like, you've got to be kidding me. I let him feel so alone.
Because he needed to see his brokenheartedness reflected in his family, and I gaslit him while trying to be a good mom. Right, so I think that it's okay, we're not making this up. Like all this is happening and we're feeling it in our bodies and it's okay and might even be our work to let other people see it so they can find their people and not feel so crazy and alone on the earth.
Right? Yeah, I mean, I was sharing with you. I have this thing on my hand that I'm wearing and rocking with because right now my big spiritual teaching has just been, you know, it's time to be able to show up with a broken heart. And there's no sense that it's like that's coming to an end anytime soon. And so hearing you say like, yeah, that, and, and that's what's needed now.
But then it's like, but how to be vertical, how to be vertical, how to be vertical and serve stretchers to show up with each other on. Yeah. I mean, I do have friends who are able to pull it together in a way that like they're peaceful and logical and you know, many of them and they go out in the world and with a different demeanor and I love them and follow them and, But that's not my jam.
So the three kids, I have the three children.
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Chapter 8: How do we navigate the complexities of community and belonging?
And I have the oldest, and then the middle, and the youngest one. And the two older ones were always able to like, so I would say, you guys, we're going to leave in 15 minutes. Be in the foyer in 15 minutes. And 15 minutes later, the three would show up and the two were ready and they had clothes on.
And then the third was just, God, just like a pizza box on her head and like two different shoes and like a mustache painted on her thing and no pants and just, you know, the whole thing. But it would be too late. So I would always just say, look at them, be like, okay, you two are good. And you just, you're going to, honey, you're just going to have to go like that. Okay.
And I just feel like God is like that with me. Like God looks at my friends and he's like, okay, you're good. You're good. And then looks at me and he's like, honey, you're just going to have to go like that. Right? And that's okay. Like if we just wait till we're different to show up, I've been waiting to be different since I was five. Like, I don't think it's going to happen next Tuesday.
I think this is just, there's many of us who are supposed to show up without tidiness and a bunch of different answers. And I feel like maybe it's even more important in this moment because If the only people who are showing up are the people who have their shit together and who are not deeply affected, that's dangerous. Think about that. That's really dangerous.
If you're not brokenhearted and you're not messy right now, I'm not sure that's the voice. We need people who are brokenhearted out front. And now it's time to thank the companies who allow you to listen to We Can Do Hard Things for free.
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