← 10% Happier with Dan Harris
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- [00:01]
Dan Harris
Wondery subscribers can listen to 10% Happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. It's the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody. How we doing? Some men, myself included, don't like to talk about this, but it is incredibly common for many of us humans, whatever our gender, to be at war with our bodies. We're trying to live up to the people we see in the movies, on social media, or even the versions of ourselves in old pictures. This never enoughness, this insufficiency, can lead to an ambient level of self loathing that can be incredibly destructive, never mind what it can do to your relationship to food, which can be downright dangerous. Body image issues and eating disorders are frequently discussed among women, less so among men. We tend to hide our dysfunction behind life hacky tactics such as performatively restrictive diets, absurdly hard workouts, etc. To be clear, in case I've created the wrong impression here, this is not an episode aimed solely at men. It's for everyone. That said, my guest today says straight white men are usually the most resistant to to the antidote that she proposes to body and food related dysfunction. And I will be honest, she occasionally uses the type of language that the old and more judgmental version of myself might have dismissed out of hand. But if you have those skeptical tendencies, do me a solid, curb them for a minute and hear this person out. She has both wisdom and science on her side. Her name is Sonya Renee Taylor. She's the author of three books including the Body Is not an Apology, the Power of Radical Self Love. She's the founder and radical Executive officer of the Body Is not an Apology and she has come to this work as a result of her own personal pain as a black woman inhabiting a body that she says does not conform to societal norms. In this conversation we talk about the definition of radical self love and why she believes it's actually our natural state. We talk about tools for cultivating radical self love and the connection between being okay with yourself and the larger society. Or in her words, how we're messing up each other's lives lives because of our sense of not enoughness. Just to say, we first aired this conversation back in 2021 and we're bringing it back while our team takes a little time off over the holidays. This is a great time to engage with all of these ideas again, both during the holidays and as we move into the new year and get swept up in the whole new year new you thing. So we will get started with Sonya Renee Taylor right after this. But first, before we get started, I want to let you know about what we're planning for the first few weeks of 2025. We've got a big series called Do Life Better. It kicks off in January to get your year off to the best start possible. On New Year's Day we have a very special episode with the Dharma teacher Vinnie Ferraro. The last episode we did with him, which was actually the first time he was ever on this show, I got more comments for that episode than anything I've ever done on the show. So we thought bringing it back for.
- [03:26]
Sonya Renee Taylor
The first day of the year would be a good move.
- [03:29]
Dan Harris
And then we're gonna follow up with a huge month long pod series where we combine world class scientists with Dharma teachers to help you actually do your resolutions. Meanwhile, over on DanHarris.com, we're offering a ton of resources and support including a free seven day New Year's Challenge. I will do live check ins where you can ask me anything. We also have subscriber chats about the most common resolutions like diet, fitness and personal finance, dry January, stress reduction and breaking up with your phone. Plus exclusive access to transcripts of our podcast and much more. To join, all you have to do is subscribe@danharris.com, just go to danharris.com, type in your email, click Subscribed and then I'll take care of everything else. Hey prime members, have you heard you can listen to your favorite podcasts ad free Good news. With Amazon Music you can have access to the largest catalog of ad free top podcasts included with your prime membership. We are regular consumers around my house of Amazon Music.
- [04:32]
Sonya Renee Taylor
Often we're listening through our Alexa. My son has a very intimate relationship with his Alexa who he talks to all the time. He learns about amazing new music through Alexa and then shares it with his parents. To start listening to either music or.
- [04:48]
Dan Harris
Podcasts, download the Amazon Music app for free or go to Amazon.com ad free podcasts. That's Amazon.com/ad free podcasts to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads. There are people making the same amount of money as you to the dollar who are not stressed about money. You probably see them all the time talking about their latest vacation or hosting parties in their freshly renovated homes. It makes you wonder how do they do it? Where does all of my money go? With Ynab? It goes wherever you tell it to go. Ynab spelled Y N A B is a life changing app that helps you do what you want with the money you have. With Ynab, you'll create a flexible plan for your money through the simple practice of giving every dollar a job, keeping you focused on the life you want, cover your mortgage and fund your 401k without sacrificing dinners with friends or that long awaited trip to Greece. With ynab, you'll stop wondering where your money goes and start deciding where it will take you. The average ynab user saves $600 in their first two months and $6,000 in their first year. 92% of users report feeling less money stress. Since using Ynab, life is short. Spend it well with YNAB. Listeners of 10% Happier can claim an exclusive three month free trial with no credit card required at ynab.com happier. That's www.ynab.com happier and again, YNAB is spelled Y N A B. Sonia Renee.
- [06:26]
Sonya Renee Taylor
Taylor, welcome to the show.
- [06:27]
Thanks for having me, Dan.
- [06:29]
I'm really looking forward to this. Let me start with some definitions. What is radical self love? What is that?
- [06:38]
Radical self love is our inherent sense of worthiness, enoughness, divinity. It is the source state in which we arrive. I like to think of it as like the human operating system before anybody starts tinkering with it. Like we came installed with radical self love. We already were fully connected to our own divinity, fully connected to the divinity of others. Like we thought all humans were amazing. We thought the fact that we had feet were amazing. I say all the time, like you've never seen a self loathing toddler. You know, there's no toddler who's like, I just can't stand these thighs. Like this is not a thing, right? Toddlers are in love with themselves. They think they're amazing. They think you're fascinating. And that's our original state, that relationship of actual joy and celebration inside of our beings and the beings of others. That's what I see radical self love as.
- [07:36]
When you say divinity, what do you mean? I, I, I ask that because I'm what I call a respectful agnostic. But I think some percentage of the people in the meditation world come to it because they either don't have any feel any connection to traditional religion or they had a bad experience there. So when you say divinity, what do you mean? Is that a specific religion you have in mind?
- [07:56]
It is not a specific religion that I have in mind. The way that I connect to my own sense of divinity. One Is that idea of source. Right? Like, regardless of whatever your theological or cosmological belief is, there was a starting point, There was a thing in which other things come forth, whatever that is, whether that was the big bang. But there is a process through which life gets created. To me, that experience is divine. And so whatever it is, that source that. That created flowers, that created the ocean, whatever it was that made that, that same source energy, also created a Sonja, which I think is pretty cool. And for me, that speaks to my idea of what is divine. Divine is whatever it is that creates this ecosystem of life, whatever things go into that, such that life keeps wanting to manifest itself both through me and through the things around me. That's the experience of divinity that I'm talking about. And there are ways certainly that that correlates with religious philosophies, but I think it also correlates with things that are not religious at all.
- [09:07]
So it could be just nature as opposed to sort of a creator God of some sort.
- [09:12]
Absolutely, yeah. Whatever works for you. I'm not in, you know, I'm not here to tell people, like, this is what this means. I'm much more interested in can we drop into the experience of a thing less about, like, what the labels are that we've attached to it? What is the felt experience of that which is magnificent in the world, that which you find, you know, unfathomable in its beauty in the world? Can we feel that in ourselves? Can I sense my connection to that? That, to me, is divinity?
- [09:45]
Well, let's talk about how one does that, because I think a lot of people listening to this would say, oh, radical self love sounds pretty good. I'll have what she's having, et cetera, et cetera. But how does one, you know, even begin to feel this?
- [09:57]
So I think that feeling it is a process of actually recognizing what we feel instead. Because if radical self love is our inherent state. Right. I use the word radical literally, pulling from the dictionary definitions of radical, inherent, foundational, thoroughgoing, and extreme, proposing drastic political and economic change. These are the framework by which I talk about radical self love. And so in order to understand that, if it is inherent and I'm not feeling it, then the question is, what is in between me and that which is inherent in me? What am I feeling instead? What's the story that's living on top of it? And how do I begin to disengage that story? That is, for me, the way back to radical self love? It's kind of like an onion. If radical self Love is in the center. There's a whole lot of layers that we've put on top that we actually have to start peeling away so that we can get back to that core bulb where new things grow.
- [10:54]
From playing with the onion metaphor here, there may be some crying as you go through the layers.
- [11:00]
There's a lot of crying. I think it's really important for people to realize, I never propose that this is an easy journey. I think we should be leery and skeptical of anyone who proposes radical self love as this light, fluffy, airy fairy. Just go to the day spa and take more naps with cucumbers on your eyes, and you'll be at radical self love if that's what they're proposing. We are talking about a drastically different thing than what I'm talking about, because in order to get to that inherent space, becoming aware of where you have been, becoming aware of the thoughts that have been governing your life, becoming aware of the thoughts that have been governing your relationships with other people, and the ways in which those are fear and shame and trauma based and oppression based, and having to confront that is deeply uncomfortable. However, one of the things that I propose is that it's already uncomfortable. Living in fear and shame and disconnection from yourself and disconnection from everybody else is already uncomfortable. So if you're gonna be uncomfortable, be uncomfortable in service of your own liberation. Be uncomfortable in service of your own growth. You know, and I think sometimes we settle for the discomfort that we're the most familiar with, rather than the one that gets us closer to what we most desire to be and manifest in the world.
- [12:34]
So in that spirit, can you say more about how we start peeling back the layers of the onion? How we do? I mean, is this a. The job of therapy? What are the modalities you recommend in this process?
- [12:45]
I'm a person who believes in a deep tool belt. I do everything, I've done a little bit of everything, and I add all of those things. But I think if you want to break it down to its sort of simplest forms, the way that I talk about it in the book is it's a thinking, doing, being, process. The first step is that you actually have to become conscious of your thoughts. You have to become conscious of the ways in which you are moving through the world. So the things that usually operate on autopilot. Right. I'm gonna use a simple example, and I think it's really important. Sometimes I will use the example of weight because it's an easy one for people to understand. But I am in no way making radical self love or the work that I do about just weight. The work that I do is about all the ways that we show up in our bodies and in our beings and all the ways that we are conditioned to believe that somehow that's not enough. So I just felt like that's important to say so. But in this example, let's say it's weight. I go to the store, I try on some jeans, they don't fit. The immediate default response for me is that there's something wrong with my body. That's the immediate default response for most people. Socialized female in the world. Something's wrong with my body. It's me. Oh, my gosh, I can't believe I've gained weight. What's wrong with me? Whatever that story is, and that happens so quickly that you never challenge it. You never say, hmm, where does that thought come from? What is that about? Why is it wrong for me and not actually the, you know, the gene makers only make genes cut this particular way that doesn't, you know, match my body. Why am I the first line of assault? And so once I raise that to consciousness. Oh, when something doesn't feel right about my body, the first place that I blame is my body. If something doesn't feel right in the world, the first place that I assign blame is myself. What would it look like if I stopped doing that now? Here enters therapy, enters 12 step program, enters a smorgasbord of things, Right? Like, I think there are all kinds of things you can do. There's also just you being in practice with yourself because this actually is just an activity of regular and consistent practice. I notice the thought, I interrupt it. Oh, I'm doing that thing where I always think that somehow it's me that's wrong, it's my body that's wrong. All right, what's a new story? I can tell myself what is a new option. And that's the doing piece. So we've gone from the thinking. I've interrogated my thinking, I've raised it to consciousness. And now that leaves me at choice, I can either keep going down that traditional pathway of self blame, or I can say, what are the other options here? Okay, let me pick a different option. And it'll feel uncomfortable. It'll feel like, I don't believe that yet. It'll feel like this voice that tells me the opposite is really, really loud. All of those things will be true. But what's actually happening on a scientific level, on a neurological level, is that you're creating new neural pathways by the repetition of new behavior in the face of old thoughts. You create new neural pathways that then make it much easier to go to the new thought as default rather than the old one. And the repetition of that over time creates what I like to think of as a new way of being. That's the beingness that is when people are like, oh, my gosh, you just really own yourself in a space that didn't just show up one day. That's the practice of raising my thoughts to consciousness, interrupting them, choosing new action over and over and over again so that I actually believe it now it is who I understand myself to be.
- [16:36]
Training the mind is a concept that does land well for me and I think will land well for this audience, because that's what we talk about on every single episode.
- [16:45]
Absolutely. My work centers on the body. And the reason my work centers on the body is one, because we all got one. I was like, what's the most unifying thing we can talk about as humans that we think is not unifying at all that we think we have nothing in common with other people about. So much of the oppression and equity and injustice we experience in the world is based on our relationships with bodies, our own bodies and other people's bodies. And so training the mind to think differently about bodies, about my own body, about what are the immediate judgments that come up in my body? What are the immediate judgments that come up in other people's bodies and that about other people's bodies? And how do I slow that process and then retrain my mind to think something different and also to notice all the places where input is happening that would have me deviate from the path of radical self love. Where are all the messages? Where are all the external feeders that want to sort of keep me in that repetition of the. Of my default thoughts?
- [17:53]
If I work on RSL radical self love for myself and we scale that up enough, would it go beyond fatphobia to racism? Everything, sexism, all the isms.
- [18:07]
All the isms, all the obious. Because at the end of the day, they're about our bodies. Right. Racism is about whose bodies, phenotypically, do we assign greater value to have we decided, are more human than other bodies? Right. Homophobia is about how bodies desire in which ways we experience desire in our body that we find acceptable or we find unacceptable. Sexism is about our assessment about gender identity and bodies and whose bodies are value. All of it lives inside of what I call the ladder of bodily hierarchy that we have said there are some bodies that are greater than other bodies. And that all of our assignment, our social assignment, is to figure out where we live on that ladder and to keep trying to ascend it in one way or another. And that that ladder is what keeps oppression in place. Because I will always have to have someone below me if I am to be understood as valuable in the world. In the current social construct that we live in, the work of radical self love is to say the latter is an illusion. The latter is actually not real, other than it is real because we keep trying to climb it. And if I stopped trying to climb that ladder, then what would happen? I'd be left with my inherent state, which cannot exist in comparison because it is already enough, it is already worthy, it is already divine unto itself.
- [19:40]
What do you mean by the title of your book, the Body's not an Apology?
- [19:44]
That there are a multitude of ways in which we constantly are apologizing for the way we exist in the body. The origin of it came from a conversation with a friend who had a disability and who was afraid that she might have an unintended pregnancy. And, you know, I say probably everywhere I go these days that I'm the nosy friend. I will get in your business from a deep place of love. And so in the spirit of that, I asked my friend about why she was having unprotected sex with this casual partner that she wasn't all that into. And my friend really answered me in this deeply vulnerable, deeply honest response. And she said, my disability makes it really difficult for me to be sexual already with, like, positioning and stuff. And so I just didn't feel entitled to ask this person to use a condom, too. And my response, without thinking, without it, wasn't a conscious response. It was a something from someplace else response was, your body is not an apology. It's not something you offer to someone to say sorry for my disability. And when I said that, something just resonated, rang in me so true about. I was like, oh, this is not for her. I'm the nosy friend. But I'm in my own business right now because this was clearly a message for me and a message for the way in which I, too, have moved through the world, deciding that my, you know, big, dark, bald, neurodivergent body was wrong. And so here's the way I'm apologizing. I'm apologizing for my alopecia with these wigs I wear every day. I'm apologizing for my size with this girdle I put on every day I'm apologizing for my blackness with this tone, this respectability tone, and this sort of mimicking of white speech so that I'm seen as more acceptable in those spaces. There are all kinds of ways in which I'm constantly apologizing for, for myself apologizing for this body and the way it shows up in the world. And if we got that there was nothing to apologize for, if we got at a cellular level that this body is not an apology, how would it transform the way I move through the world? How would it have transformed the way my friend showed up for her own safety and well being in that sexual situation? You know, and so once I said it, I was like, mm, that's a thing. I don't know what it is yet. And I was a poet, you know, at the time, I was making my living as a full time performance poet. And I was like, oh, I guess it's a poem. I'm gonna write this poem. And so I wrote this poem and it just kept making things. Every time I said it, it made something new till eventually it made an entire company and a movement and a series of books and all kinds of stuff.
- [22:36]
Yeah, I'm curious about you because you taught, you share, you know, shared a little bit of your story there. Having felt like you needed to, either consciously or subconsciously, you felt like you needed to apologize for all these physical attributes or psychological attributes, how well could you practice what you preach with radical self love?
- [22:58]
That's a great uncomfortable question, Dan. Thanks. I, you know, I'm really grateful that these tools came through me, you know, and the book is a set of tools. So the first edition of the book was a set of tools. The Last chapter was 10 tools, things you can actually put into practice to help, you know, strengthen the core muscle of your own radical self love work. And then that moved in the second edition to a separate workbook. I pulled out all of those tools. They're in a separate workbook. And now in the second edition of the book, it is. How does radical self love in these tools apply to the isms and obious? How do we use it to dismantle inequality in the world? What I'm very clear about is that this offering came through me. But y'all. And when I say y'all, I just mean the collective y'all humans. Whoever buys this book, whatever y'all, are the refrigerator. And radical self love is the refrigerator magnet that sits on my refrigerator so that I remembered to look at it. It is so out in the world that it calls me back to it. And I think I came to this earlier this year where I was like, oh, this is, for me, part of my own radical self love practice is that I have to put a thing out in the world that I then become responsible to doing. And that responsibility is what reaffirms my ability to live into it. And so I was like, oh, all of this I made for the world is not actually for y'all at all. It's actually for me. It's for my own practice. And so I've gotten pretty good at it. I mean, there are certainly places, and I think it's so important that we all remember this is not a. It's not a destination. It's not like I have arrived at radical self love. And never again is there a thought of loathing or, you know, discontentment with my own being or any repugnant thoughts about other people's bodies. That is not how this works specifically. It doesn't work that way because that's not the world we live in. We are still contending with the world that constantly tells us that we should see ourselves as deficient and see others as deficient. And so we're always gonna be contending with that outside voice inside of us. For me, what I have been able to manage to do in this work is I have some tools now so that I know how to turn down the volume on that outside voice. It's not as loud in my head. It doesn't speak to me as consistently. I don't understand it as my voice, which is, I think, one of the first places that we struggle with when we take up this journey is we hear that voice and we think it's us talking to us. And it's not us talking to us. It's the system talking to us. It's been talking to us since we came out of the womb. And now it just sounds really familiar. But it's not us. And so I can make that distinction very easily. And then when those thoughts do come up, I begin to engage in enacting those tools that I know will realign me with my radical self love.
- [25:56]
You're reminding me of a quote that I first heard from a friend of mine, meditation teacher, who comes on the show named 7A Selassie. The quote is something to the effect of, you think you're thinking your thoughts, but you're actually thinking the culture's thoughts.
- [26:09]
Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. Exactly. I mean, and I think that's one of the Things that is really disconcerting for us in the beginning of this journey is we have to get in touch with how out of control we have been in our own lives, how we think we are controlling things. We think that these thoughts are our own thoughts. And I find it powerfully liberating when I realized that this wasn't actually me. One of the things that I think gets us really stuck, particularly around issues of racism, white supremacist delusion, those sorts of things. And white supremacist delusion is the language that I always use when I talk about what other people call white supremacy, because I think it's important to name that it's not real. So I think that's why I use that language. But one of the things that when I'm talking to white folks who are interested in disengaging from that narrative, one of the places where they get stuck is I can't acknowledge it. Because if I acknowledge it, then I'm a bad person. And I don't want to be a bad person, because bad people lose loved ones, they lose jobs, they get disconnected from life, all of these things. And so I can't look at this part of myself. And if we just got clear that those ideas weren't ours to begin with. We didn't create them. They were given to us. And of course, they swarm and swim in our heads because that's the world that we were birthed into. It becomes so much easier to go on ahead and let it in. What is that thought someone else gave me? Oh, I don't want that thought. Well, let me begin the process of returning that thing I did not want. But we can't ever return the thing we didn't want if we can't acknowledge that we have it in the first place. I think if we could put some space between, you didn't create it in you, but you are responsible for the fact that you've been carrying it around uninterrogated. That's your responsibility. And you can interrupt that part. I think that makes the journey so much easier.
- [28:18]
I have found that to be powerful, too. Very powerful. Because I've had the same resistance to looking at my own isms and obias because it's embarrassing or because it maybe confirms some suspicions I had about being horrible or whatever. But to know that I didn't create them, I didn't inject them into my mind, they were injected by the culture. It makes it much more tractable. Workable, yes. Along those lines, it's interesting to me that you have said that the population, from your perspective, that struggles the most with radical self love would be straight white males. You're. You're talking to one now. Why do you think people like me struggle with this concept of radical self love?
- [29:05]
I think that the culture, society has told straight white men, here is how you are valuable. And they have told that message of externalized validation throughout time immemorial. That you are valuable by what you can conquer, that you are valuable by how much wealth you can amass. You are valuable by how strong you can become, how much you can dominate. That is the story of straight white male masculinity. It's also the story of most masculinity, unfortunately, in our societies, certainly in Western society. And so it is really difficult to trade that in for this unknown thing, for this thing that you don't have any relationship with, right, that you're not connected to. You're like, so wait a minute. I'm supposed to give up all the things that I've been told, make me a man, make me valuable in the world, make me necessary and essential in the world for some language that we've inherently feminized. So let's be clear for an idea love that we have absolutely feminized. There's an essay in a book that I just contributed in, edited by Brene Brown and Tarana Burke, called you'd Are youe Best Thing. And it's a compilation of stories of shame and vulnerability and resilience from black writers. And there's a piece in it by Mark Lamont Hill that I really appreciated. And in it he talks about the only way that he understood to process any emotional output of any sort was sex or aggression. And that those were the two places where feelings got to live. I feel good. Sex, I don't feel good. Some form of aggression or domination. And I'm like, with such a limited access to one's own true self, there's nothing but havoc that can be wreaked from that. Like, it's just not. That's just not enough tools to do real life. And yet that's what we've been asking men, and very specifically straight, white, cisgendered men. That's what we've been asking them to use to navigate life. And so I think there has to be a deep sort of re emergence of what is possible inside of masculinity for men to really begin to move into their own radical self. Love journeys. I'm seeing it, I'm seeing it pop up, but it's definitely a Place where there's a lot of resistance and challenge.
- [31:44]
Yeah, I mean, I can't speak for my whole cohort.
- [31:47]
Go on ahead. They asked me to do it all the time. Do it, Dan. All right, fine.
- [31:57]
I'm going to speak for all the straight white men. That all sounds really true to me. I don't have any. I'm just basing this on my own lived experience. I don't have any data to back it up, but what you just described feels like it rhymes with what I've lived for nearly 50 years. For sure.
- [32:15]
I don't have no daddy either. I'm not a scientist. I'm a radical self love evangelist. But what I know to be true is I know the world that I live in and I know the outcomes and impacts of the choices and decisions that have been made that govern my life. And unfortunately, most of those are governed by straight white men. The societies I live in, the choices and legislation and laws that get passed, all of those created by straight white men. And they tell me all that I need to know about the level of disconnection between radical self love and the choices that get made in those spaces. And so that's how I know, because I actually have to live with the results of it. We actually all do.
- [32:59]
So this gets back to the societal aspect of your work, which is, as I understand it, you spoke about this a little bit earlier, but I think it's worth winging back to it that if you can get everybody interested in radical self love, including powerful straight white men who have been running big chunks of the planet for big chunks of human history, well, then people who love themselves tend not to be too aggressive and judgmental and hateful toward others.
- [33:28]
They seem to not kill people as much. They seem to not pillage and rape as much. They seem to not hoard and manipulate as much. Somehow things get really, really better when we're connected to our own self love. And I say that in this sort of flippant way, but what I really, really am getting at is that we have built a world on domination and aggression. We have built a world on greed and resource hoarding. We know what that world looks like. We are living in the ruins of it, or certainly what I experience as the real time crumbling of all of those particular structures. I'm curious what it would look like if we decided to build the world on love. I'm curious what it would look like if we decided that love was the central place from which we made decisions on a collective and on an individual basis. I'M willing to bet what little bit I have that we would have a really drastically different planet. And even if I'm wrong, nothing beats a failure but a try. And so I would like to see us effort in that direction and see what comes of it.
- [34:42]
Dan Harris
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- [36:14]
Unknown
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- [36:45]
Dan Harris
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- [37:12]
Sonya Renee Taylor
Let's go back to the tools here, because there's a lot of things that you recommend. So let me just pick one of your ideas or practical recommendations. This is about body, judgment and shame specifically. And you have these three key tenets that you call the three pieces.
- [37:31]
Yeah.
- [37:31]
P, E, A, C, E, S. Yeah.
- [37:35]
So there are three things, I think, that you have to sort of, again, raise to consciousness and begin to contend with in order to even begin to make some traction in this area. Making peace with not understanding, then making peace with difference, and then making peace with your own body. Making peace with not understanding gives us the spaciousness to contend with difference. Part of the narrative that we all receive is that we're supposed to know things. And that when we don't know things, it's one of those places where we personalize that not knowing as some individual failing. And what that does is it forces us to make up stories that aren't true just for the sake of saying we know things. And whether or not that story is. You're wrong in the case of homosexuality. Right. The issue is I don't understand how you desire in a way that is different than how I desire. And so the story that I create to make peace with not understanding in that sense is that you're wrong, is that you're an anomaly, an aberrant anomaly in the world and consequently should be judged and somehow are a threat to me. And that's how I understand this. As opposed to saying I don't understand that particular way of desire. It's not real for me. It's not true for me. And I don't have to understand it. There's no need for me to understand it. It's not mine. Okay, so if I don't understand it and I don't need to understand it, then I can just allow it to be an expression of human variance. I can allow it to be an expression of the multitude of ways in which we are all different. We exist in a society that says sameness is better. Even the idea of assimilation is the idea that your difference needs to leave and your sameness needs to. Needs to stay. And there's a part of that that is evolutionary. There's a part of that that comes from the fact that we needed to recognize in groups and out groups, and which tribe was ours and which wasn't. And whether or not that would mean less resource for us or a warring faction, we would have to deal with all of those things are real historically, and they're not evolutionarily needed in the same way that they were when we were hunter gatherers living in caves. And so what does it look like to intentionally evolve from a thinking that doesn't serve us in the same way? And so when we make peace with not understanding, it creates the space to make peace with difference, to not see difference as threat, to not see difference as avenue for scarcity, and instead to see difference as part of the natural kaleidoscope of our ecosystem, the natural variations of the world that we have. And we are down for that in the natural world. And then somehow when it comes to humans, we're like, nope, those things have to go. And so I think there's an opportunity for us to disengage that thinking, to interrogate that thinking and shift that. Because once we do that, then we have the ability to be at peace with our own difference. And that difference is our bodies. Because so much of our shame and judgment about our bodies is, my body is different than what the world says is normal. Right? My body is different than what society says is a good body is a body higher up on that ladder of bodily hierarchy. If we can go on ahead and accept difference, then we can recognize and accept and embrace the difference that lives inside of us.
- [41:15]
I want people to read the book. So I don't want to have you give away all the tools, but can you just pick out a few that you think are particularly resonant that might be helpful for listeners?
- [41:27]
Absolutely. So tool number three is reframe your framework. And I think this is such an important tool because part of what happens when we are in this radical self love journey, or at least before we begin it, is that we're in this story of how our body is the enemy. Our body is messing up. And there are small ways in which we do that, and then there are large ways in which we do that. And so what happens when we stop seeing our body as the enemy and start seeing our body as operating in solidarity with us? How does it shift the way that we move and relate to our bodies? I find that this tool is really helpful in conversations about gender identity and for trans folks as well who experience body dysmorphia and body dysphoria. And again, it's not so much like this is what it is, but instead is what happens when I try on a new thought process. It's not about whether or not I believe it. It's not about whether or not it's true. It's does my perspective change or shift when I try on a new thought process? And if the new thought process is my body is not my enemy, my body is working in solidarity with me, then what decisions do me and my body make together in service of our most authentic existence, in service of our highest good?
- [43:00]
That's very interesting and worth dwelling on for a second. You know, when I hear you talk about that, it reminds me of. I don't know if you've heard of this person, but there's a person who's had a huge impact on me. Her name is Evelyn Tripoli, and she's one of the progenitors of something called intuitive eating.
- [43:17]
Yes.
- [43:17]
And so she came on the show and then I, for the last couple of years worked with her personally. And I was one of these, you know, typical guys who was kind of like a biohacker and counting your macros and whatever, counting calories and all that other whatever, working out a lot and maybe playing with crazy things you cut out of your diet and all that. But it took me talking to her until I realized that that was a pretty hostile attitude. I'm not saying you shouldn't take care of your body. I think you should. But when I talked to her, I realized that there's a lot of aggression that was self directed there. And I hear a lot of overlap. And when you're talking about kind of, this is the, one of the ultimate cliches here, but like listening to your body, especially for Evelyn, she'll talk a lot about listening to your body. Are you hungry or are you full?
- [44:06]
Right.
- [44:06]
And that's a pretty, to use your word, radical way to orient toward when you're going to eat.
- [44:12]
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [44:14]
So anyway, I throw that out there to see if that lands for you.
- [44:17]
So I mean, I do know Evelyn and am familiar with Evelyn's work. And you know, radical self love aligns so much with things like intuitive eating, with things like health at every size. And you know, I'm really, I feel really grateful that the eating disorder community is one of the communities that early on latched onto this work and saw it as like, oh, this applies to what we do. And because again, part of those dynamics in those situations are I'm at war with my body, I must control my body. Right. My body is a thing for me to manipulate, to strategize against, to figure out how to fix as opposed to, I'm in relationship with my body. And we want our well being. We're on the same team. We both wanna stay here as long as possible and as much wellness as possible. How do we create that together? And again, that's just such a different paradigm than the world that treats the body as this, you know, this machine that we are basically man the controls of and beat around and, you know, get to do our bidding. And I think that it's just a really harsh, just like you said, an aggressive way to be with oneself and it creates an experience of consistent disharmony. We are always fighting our bodies and I don't wanna fight every day I'm tired. I want sweetness, I want tenderness, I want some love. And how can I be the purveyor of that inside of myself again? How do I create in me that which I'd like to see externally? I create that by starting with the relationship that I have the closest to me, which is my body.
- [46:05]
Dan Harris
Much more of my conversation with Sonya Renee Taylor right after this.
- [46:17]
Unknown
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- [47:04]
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- [47:38]
Sonya Renee Taylor
I interrupted you earlier. You were going to move on to another of the ten pillars.
- [47:43]
I'm going to give you two more tools.
- [47:44]
Please.
- [47:45]
Two more tools. And they're the two most important tools. I tell people all the time you could do everything I said. If you don't do these two things, you're going to struggle in your radical self love journey. Tool number nine is be in community. My work dances between the world of personal development, which I find to be a world that misses the opportunity to shift and change the external world. It's like, hey, fix yourself and then forget about all the other things that happen out in the world. And the social justice world. It's like, fix all the problems in the world, but forget that you are part of the world. And they got there because of the ways in which you move and think and behave in the world. My work is about how do we bridge those things, which means that we have to do away with individualism, with the notion that individualism is a valuable way of being. I disagree. Interdependence is a valuable and sustainable way of being. And the truth is interdependence is the only way of being. And individualism is the illusion we've been selling each other because it's a great external way to validate ourselves. But it isn't true. The truth is there is nothing that you actually have that did not require other humans help to get there. That's just true. And so being in community is how we make this work sustainable. You can do all the things all day long and you are still up against an entire societal, cultural, political and economic machine that has a deep investment in all of those areas. And you continuing to exist inside of the paradigm of not enoughness. It really is a very lucrative place for you to exist inside of these systems. The idea that you can do this all alone is just silly. It's just not possible. And you'll find yourself back in the same loops again and again. But inside community, not only do we have reinforcement for the shifts that we're making and the changes that we're making, but we also then have the people power to express those shifts and changes on the structural and systemic level. It's necessary. In the book I talk about it as the. I use the example of the epidemiological triad, which made me really excited. I was like, look at me using science. The epidemiological triad talks about the ways in which pathogens pass in the world. And they require a host, they require the pathogen, and they require a mode of transmission media. And how we engage is the mode of transmission. We are the hosts and the pathogen is shame is disconnection is the belief in our not enoughness. You only have to break one of those things in order to stop that pathogen from spreading. If we stop being the host, which means if we stop containing it in isolation, if we stop saying that it's just me and I'm going to work and fix this all by myself, which actually just makes You a seal tight container for the pathogen to continue to grow and spread that is actually keeping it intact. But like most diseases, like most diseases, when you expose it for any prolonged period of time, it dies. And so there's a way in which when we expose our own journey of radical self love in community, we begin to interrupt the contagious nature of body shame, and we start spreading the contagious nature of radical self love. Because all of it's contagious. We're always spreading something. The question is, what do we want to spread? And in community, we can be spreading something different.
- [51:46]
Third, third tool that you were gonna recommend to us before I let you return to your day in New Zealand, because I know it's just beginning.
- [51:53]
It is the final tool, the most important tool. You could do everything. If you don't do this, you're gonna struggle in your radical self love journey is tool number 10. Give yourself some grace. The truth of the matter is, this is not an easy journey. This is not easy work. This is difficult work. It's confronting work. It's uncomfortable work. And you will absolutely find yourself back in your old loops, in your old stories. One of the things that I think because we are so indoctrinated again inside of this idea of getting it right, is that when we find ourselves back in our old loops, then we're like, see, I failed, right? And then we have what one of my workshop participants called Metashame. Now I have shame for having shame, right? That's exhausting. That's a lot of shame. It's a truducken of shame. And I think what we can offer ourselves is the grace of imperfection on the journey. You know, I tell people all the time I run an entire organization. I've written three books, all related to only about focused my whole life on radical self love. And there are days when I do not feel like I like myself, when I don't like this body, when I'm over it. And my work on those days is to love the Sonya that doesn't feel like she loves her body until she loves her body again. I love you, Sonya. Who feels not enough. I love you, Sonya. Who feels like you're failing. I love you, Sonya. You can't fit into this shirt you used to be able to fit into I love you. And the more that I practice loving that Sonya, that imperfect on her journey Sonya, the more capacity I have to return to that space of love. I invite that for all of us on this journey. It's the only thing that makes it sustainable.
- [53:49]
Let me go back into sort of my role, unasked for, of spokesman for all straight white males. But so I can hear two skeptical arguments emerging from my straight white male reptile brain. One is, and I'll let you attack either or both. One is, oh, this whole I love you fill in the blank thing is forced, overly earnest, too treacly. I don't want to do it. The other is, if I feel like I'm enough, if I love myself, if I get over my insufficiency, I will be utterly ineffective and I won't be ambitious.
- [54:27]
Yes, exactly. I know both of those. I'm quite familiar with. The first thing that we have to do is just acknowledge where there's resistance and get curious about the resistance. Because the first scenario is just resistance. It's saccharine. It's too sweet. I don't want to. I don't want to love myself. What does that even sound like? Right? Like if you let yourself just sit with the reflection of I want to love myself. Let yourself be with that. Right. Cause I think if we sit with that long enough, we start to be like, oh, there's something underneath that. There's a fear underneath it. There's a fear that I'm gonna lose something. There's a fear that, again, that the external things that I have gained by not being in that relationship will be lost. Right. I'm gonna lose something. And let yourself be with that. Right. Like. Cause the truth of the matter is, and this is again, one of the uncomfortable realities of radical self love is you will lose something in a world that has rewarded you for being disconnected from yourself, disconnected from others, and plugged into dominance and aggression as the way in which to assign your own value. Divesting from that will cost you. And I am never going to pretend like it will not. It absolutely will cost you. And it's the reason why people cling to it. And what I want to invite in that space is choosing you. That's what I really want to invite, is what would it look like to choose me? Because some of us have only ever had that option. And I think that's an important thing to remember is there's only so much cashing in on what the system says is appropriate or validatable that I can use. It expires at my fatness. It expires at my blackness. It expires at my woman. There are things that are immutable about me that the system will never, ever say is the top rung. And so I have had to Figure out either to live in self loathing about those things or to recognize the system as a liar. That is stealing something from me, that is stealing my wholeness, my connection to other humans and my connection to myself. And I invite people, particularly the folks who are at the top of that rung, the people who get rewarded the most for being the most disconnected from this, to take back your humanity. Because that's actually the thing that the latter ask you to exchange. Can you be less fully human with yourself and with others in exchange for all of these external prizes? And I believe that if we really let ourselves into ourselves, we want our humanity back. I can see it, I see it every single day. That there are ways in which we all want the fullness of our humanity back. And I believe the radical self love offers us that. That's question number one. Question number two. If the only thing that is making you ambitious is the idea that you are not enough, if what you have attained requires you to be less fully connected to yourself, I would offer that it's on its way to crumbling anyway. It is not sustainable. It is not sustainable because they are not asking you to pull from, from an inexhaustible resource. They are asking you to pull from an exhaustible resource that has limited amounts of energy, time and actual physical existence. And so if your ambition is only driven by an engine that is soon to burn out, it's gonna burn out anyway. Love. I assure you that radical self love makes you alive. It makes you alive to your purpose. It makes you alive to the things that bring you joy and excitement and enthusiasm. I am more ambitious than I've ever been in my entire life. And it's because I wake up and I talk about what I love. It's because I wake up and I'm clear that I am in alignment with what it is that I was put on this earth to do. There is no greater engine than that. I assure you. You will be more ambitious than you ever knew you were. With radical self love as the motor rather than all of these external trinkets that the world is going to offer you and don't believe me, try it and then let me know how it turns out.
- [59:02]
Speaking as somebody who's tried it to a, you know, limited but non trivial extent, on the first question of, you know, is it, you know, it can feel forced or overly earnest. I mean, I guess for me the two things that have helped get over that. One is seeing that there's sexism in the resistance and that that sexism isn't My fault. Just part of the conditioning and the other is, yes, it is forced. But what would an alien think if an alien landed on this planet and went to a gym? Why are people systematically picking up and lifting and putting down heavy things or running in place for 45 minutes? It's force. That's force, too. And so that's what we're trying to reprogram, our inner dialogue. Yeah, it's going to take some work. It's going to take some exercise. That's what this is.
- [59:54]
Exactly. Exactly. That's why I say you don't have to believe it, you just have to practice it. And the repetition of practicing makes it possible. It's the being part. All you have to do is think and do again and again and again. And eventually that which you thought wasn't becomes.
- [60:11]
Sonja, can you just tell everybody the names of your books and where you are on the Internet and where we can learn more about you generally?
- [60:19]
Absolutely. So the books are the Body Is not an Apology, the Power of Radical Self Love, and you'd Body Is not an Apology Workbook. Both of those are available any place books are sold. I also have a children's book called the Celebrate youe Body and Its Changes, the Ultimate Guide to Puberty for Girls. And that's also available any place books are sold. And you can catch my newest essay out in the anthology, you Are your Best Thing. So that's places all the book things right now, and that's actually not true. And there's the International Handbook of Fat Studies, which is an academic handbook co edited by myself and Kat Paze. And that's also available any place books are sold. You can find me on the Internet@instagram.com I am Sonya Renee Taylor. I post things there, but I no longer do engagement on Instagram. So you can have a sort of, you know, it's like my Pinterest. I treat Instagram like Pinterest. But if you want to be in dialogue with me and community with me, I invite you to come over to my Patreon Community. It's also Sonya Renee Taylor. I post videos, I do a series called what's Up Y'all? Where I'm just musing about the reflections that I experiences that I see in the world about inequity and justice, how we move forward with this radical self love journey of ours. And I communicate and talk back and all that good stuff. So that's Sonya Renee Taylor at Patreon. And then you can learn more about my work@sonyarenetaylor.com you can learn more about the Body is not an apology and the work that we've been doing for a decade now@thebodyisnotanapology.com all the things.
- [61:59]
Great. That was a succinct listing of all the things. Did I miss anything?
- [62:04]
No, I don't think so. Thank you so much. I feel like you were very thorough and you gave me just enough skepticisms to contend with, so. To do some resistance training. So, yeah, no, thank you so much. It's interesting. I feel like you are on your journey and I'm curious and would continue to be curious about sort of where are the things that come up as you continue to move further along? Because again, I always. I just want to acknowledge that the people highest up on the rung, there's a lot to shift. It can feel like you're falling from a very high height. And so I applaud the folks who are the most comfortable in their position still choosing to take this journey because at the end of the day, there's still something in them that is like, this can't be it. And I'm glad that you're on that journey.
- [62:56]
I have not experienced it as a falling, though.
- [62:58]
That's wonderful and important to note because I think that what keeps people from doing it is that they're afraid that it will be the experience of falling. But if what you're experiencing is. No, I just have a deeper, richer connection to myself. My life actually is joyful and easy. Those are the stories we actually need to hear. That, like, I divested from some of these things and it's actually turned out great is the story that needs to be out in the world. I think it's the thing that invites more people to take the journey.
- [63:27]
I just, you know, I feel like not kicking my own butt as much has made my. That makes my inner life better. And as a consequence of that, I'm nicer to the people around me. And as those relationships improve, my inner life gets even better. And then I'm even nicer to the people around me. And so I just experienced it as that. I'm not really thinking about it in terms of the larger social structures, but that's where I wonder whether maybe I'm doing it wrong.
- [63:53]
Well, that's the invitation is to now begin to think about that. Okay, so I feel gentler and kinder to myself, which makes me gentler and kinder to others. Now how can I begin to pull in these social structures? How can I begin to situate myself inside of these systems and see how would I move differently in those cases. What are the things that I can challenge here? Those are the places. Cause you're right, if it feels too nice and fluffy, you probably haven't challenged a system yet. So I invite you to go out and challenge some systems and see what resistance comes up, but also see what opens up. Because there's always a give and a take. Like I said, there will be something that's uncomfortable, but there will also be something that's really beautiful that comes. And I think getting into that field, playing in that arena is powerful because actually the things that most need to move, it's your body and the bodies like yours that are going to be the most effective in the long term in getting them moved.
- [64:55]
Yeah. And to be clear, you know, we do a lot of stuff on the show and also behind the scenes at my company around the larger social stuff. And we've done a lot of work on the show around sexism and racism, body image. And yes, that is deeply uncomfortable. But to me, I experience it as it would be way more uncomfortable if I didn't have the self acceptance, self compassion, self love aspect in it, where I can see that my. The ugliest aspects of my own mind aren't my fault. Perhaps they're my responsibility, but they're not my fault.
- [65:34]
Exactly.
- [65:34]
So it just lowers the shame quotient. So again, I don't experience any of this. Even though I am looking at it from a systems level to the best of my ability, I still don't experience it as a loss or a threat. It's scary and it's challenging in some ways, but I still don't feel like I'm losing something as a consequence.
- [65:53]
That's perfect then. To me, that speaks to the difference between what the illusion is for the people who haven't taken the journey and the reality once you're in it. And so that's what we need to keep hearing, is that actually when you, when you do this, it's all a net gain. It's all a net gain.
- [66:08]
It's an absolute pleasure to talk to you. I think what you're doing is fantastic and thank you for coming on.
- [66:13]
Thanks, Dan. I appreciate you having me.
- [66:20]
Dan Harris
Thanks again to Sonya Renee Taylor. Don't forget to check out her website, sonyarenetaylor.com and as she mentioned, she's still on Patreon and she recently started a podcast called Mundane Miracles, which you can find anywhere that you listen to podcasts. One last thing to say before I go I just want to thank everybody who works so hard to make this show a reality. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan and Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer, DJ Cashmere is our executive producer, and Nick Thorburn of the band island wrote our theme. If you like 10 happier, and I.
- [67:07]
Sonya Renee Taylor
Hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining.
- [67:11]
Dan Harris
Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music.
- [67:17]
Sonya Renee Taylor
Before you go, tell us about yourself.
- [67:19]
Dan Harris
By filling out a short survey@wondery.com survey.
- [67:25]
Lindsey Graham
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- [68:19]
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Sonya Renee Taylor
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