Internal & External Coherence with Lisa Fitzhugh

A powerful conversation with facilitator Lisa Fitzhugh about the coherence between our internal and external worlds. Sometimes we focus so much on cultivating our external persona that we are blind to how such striving affects our private, inner world.

What does it take to look honestly at both, and to see their coherence?

Lisa works with top business and political leaders to build teams that thrive. She also founded one of the most nationally recognized and respected youth arts organizations in Seattle.

Watch Lisa’s TedX talk below.

Read Manger Magazine's recent article about Lisa and another company she co-founded, Creative Ground.

Lisa was listed as one of Redbook's Mothers and Shakers.

Seattle Women wrote a piece on her called Art Becomes Her.

Watch the full ArtsCorps Tribute to Lisa that we speak about here.

Connect with Lisa on LinkedIn or through her website.

More here about her work around the idea of Coherence.

Find Lisa's latest inner examination and reckoning here: The Unmaking of Heresy.

"Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant." (Martin Heidegger)

Transcript:

Internal & External Coherence with Lisa Fitzhugh

[00:00:00]

Andrea: There are people in the world who change things for the better behind the scenes. People who open doors and see truths and stretch possibilities for many of the people they encounter and move the world forward by giving other people a place to shine. And as long as I've known, today's guest, Lisa Fitzhugh, I've seen her do this quietly confidently. Mostly out of the limelight. Uh, whether it's working. With the government or with corporate executives or in the nonprofit sector, she's always focused on finding ways to illuminate what [00:01:00] others need to thrive. I met her in the early two thousands when I lived in Seattle. And it was around that time that she'd also had battle breast cancer. She had just gotten over that one challenge, which we'll talk about a bit. Here in our interviews, when she, uh, built Seattle's largest nonprofit arts, uh, education organizations called Arts Corps. It was something completely new at the time. Connecting. Uh, teaching artists to young people in extraordinary ways. And many of those teaching artists became just guiding stars to generations of young people and opened them up to a whole new level of potentials and possible journeys in life. And Arts Corps became a national model and a lot of people around the country and probably around the world were inspired by it. But another thing about Lisa is that she really strives to be better and she doesn't pretend she's made all the right moves. She looks at her mistakes. She's always trying to be real with you, with herself, with the [00:02:00] world. I honestly can't remember a time. I've seen her do something just to fit in or to try to be some person that everyone expects her to be. She really lets you see the reality and she's not embarrassed to open to all realms and philosophies and ways of life. Which is why it's a good fit for her to be on Beyond Dichotomies, because she's really explored a lot of science, but also spirituality self-actualization politics, all these things, which we might feel are dissonant, Lisa has been open to all of them. And her journey really bridges them. Uh, through this idea of coherence, which we do talk about a lot here in this conversation. Especially when it comes to our internal world and the external world. And how to overcome the seeming distinction between internal and external. And how that actually gets us into a state of flow or coherence. This experience that we've all had in different ways at times. Lisa really looks at her own life [00:03:00] and her intentions, her actions. Her thoughts. To understand what the philosophy is that's guiding her where it came from how it could be improved.

She thinks very seriously about these things. So yes. Be aware. This is a bit of an intense conversation. W e just kind of let it go where it wants to go. And it's a personal exploration this episode. So I'm so glad you're here And I'm so glad to introduce you to Lisa. If you don't know her already. All right let's go

hey Lisa. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on the show.

Lisa: I'm so happy to be here.

Andrea: So this podcast is about love and philosophy and as you know, philosophy means love of knowledge. So, to start, I wanna ask you about those two words. W hen you think about the beginnings of your journey, what comes to mind when you think of love or an early experience of love?

Lisa: So I think one of the things I'm working with that's really interesting to me, my learning [00:04:00] edge at 55, which is how old I am on this day that we find each other, is that for most of the time, ever since I can remember, I feel like I was captivated by what was outside of me and the, fabulous multiplicity of things in the outside world.

 I loved learning about becoming connected to the outer world and in many ways I got lost. Exploring and falling in love with what's outside of me that's kind of what we do as humans. Mm-hmm.

Andrea: Do you remember that from an early age already sort of thinking of a difference between the inner you and the, the out outside world in a way?

' cause a lot of kids are just immersed in it,

Lisa: I was outside and also I was, mm, yoked to it because because of the relationship with my mother who [00:05:00] was, trying her best to keep things afloat for us as a single mom and a single kid, and her demands and needs were primary and I became the masculine pole. In that dynamic, it required me to be very outwardly focused on her. And I was aware at a young age that it, that my survival depended on being focused on what was outside of me.

Andrea: So it was just you and your mom. You were in Baltimore then, is that right? Yeah.

Lisa: Yeah. I grew up in Baltimore in then, and you know, I was born in 1967, in the middle of it.

Um, my father was a reporter for the Washington Star and was involved in some of the riots that were going on at the time. He was almost killed by a sniper. He was trying to investigate it. It was a pretty tumultuous moment in our history, US history and , all around the world.

1969. He was out trying to interview people about what was going on King had been [00:06:00] shot, um, the war in Vietnam, things were just exploding.

I think it was right after, Robert Kennedy was shot that, anyway, he was out and about and going to interview somebody and he was pulled in into a house because somebody said, you gotta get in here. And he was in a primarily black neighborhood and pointed upwards and there was a sniper up on the top.

Andrea: Yeah. That also contributes to being aware of the

Lisa: outside. Exactly. It was dangerous. So, then my mom, my dad left when I was two. And, we were in survival mode for many, many years at that point. So outside focus. , predominated,

Andrea: did you know you were in survival mode?

Did your mom tell you, I mean, of course she probably felt it, but was Oh yeah.

Lisa: Yeah. Oh, I felt it. She had a lot of anxiety and , it was pretty threadbare, financially and I, knew 'cause , utilities might get cut off or things like that. I was working when [00:07:00] I was pretty young, starting when I was about, I think I might've been like 12.

I was working in a restaurant making food. Um, extra cash.

Andrea: So you already felt like you had to take control of certain external things?

Lisa: Definitely. It was clear that I was , a required partner , in the whole equation with her. And I don't remember feeling, feeling much that I had the space or the liberty to, to be truly in my childhood.

 That that was just a privilege or a luxury in a way. Not to say I didn't have fun and I wasn't a kid and ran wild at certain times, and, have great memories of all that, but I can feel that I was mostly focused on my sense of my responsibility to her, to our survival, to my own, maybe getting out of there alive in a way.

Andrea: Just to think about knowledge a little bit, did you feel like you needed to learn something or you needed to use your skills? [00:08:00] Or how did you see this way of getting control or getting some power?

Lisa: So when you're focused on survival, then you're thinking about being resourceful and you're watching the outside world understand and pick up all the cues.

And I could see that if I were able to, if I was able to get a, you know, do well in school and secure access to a secure job of some kind, and if I could be within a, a structure that I could climb, an institution I could climb , that would be a pathway to security. And um, so I got pretty focused on that.

And, you know, anything you focus on, you, you do learn to love in a way. So, so I I did fall in love with the quest for outer stability and outer significance. . I definitely fell in love with that as I think most of us [00:09:00] do. I feel like that's part of the developmental process, although for me, I really did lose touch with an innate curiosity about an internal landscape that ultimately I didn't feel like I had the luxury to mess around in and cultivate

Andrea: Did you think that was a waste of time or something ?

Or was it more Yeah. You were afraid to go there? Was your mom more in that space or

Lisa: what was your No, my mom was, even, my mom even found that space, um, threatening because it reminded her too much of the uh, you know, all that was going on the sixties with the, , inner development and the New Age movement and what she might describe as naval gazing, um, that I think I had an instinct for, but that I very quickly learned was stigmatized , in my family.

Andrea: Do you remember when you [00:10:00] learned that, like an

Lisa: example of it? Um, I think I was picking it up in the ether pretty fast.

Andrea: Mm-hmm. That was the time of when everyone was experimenting or, expanding consciousness and so

Lisa: on. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, anything that smelled of that reminded her of my father.

I see. And what happened to him and how he got lost in it. How he got lost in that sort of, , ethereal place experimenting with drugs and Okay.

Andrea: So that had to do with why your dad left or what happened with that? Just dissolution of

Lisa: that relationship very much. Yeah. He had, he was experimenting with L S D or, and the early stuff was really strong.

Mm-hmm. I'm pretty sure it kind of cracked him Yeah. And led some sort of instability and some, um, borderline schizophrenia. Mm-hmm. But made it made perfect sense that there was this perfect storm of subtle and not so subtle cues surrounding me all the time, [00:11:00] which is, you know, find stability and stay far away , from the inner landscape that probably yields nothing and in fact could be dangerous.

That's pretty

Andrea: powerful that that your father or that this relationship between your mom and dad sort of was centered around this inner exploration having gone in a bad way, in a sense.

Lisa: Yeah. And I, I remember, many years later, even, you know, we were, I was in my thirties and I brought up something related to astrology with my mother and I thought she was gonna, lose it.

She, we were driving and she actually, as we were driving, was so angered by my mention of something that related to something she deemed as threatening. Mm-hmm. She opened up the door and got out of the car in traffic. Oh, wow. Get outta the car. So that signaled to me a, a earlier [00:12:00] memory of how threatening it was to her.

And so in my childhood, I'm sure I was doing a lot to dampen and my curiosity about the metaphysical and anything that couldn't be measured.

Andrea: And how did that manifest? You were already working and things like this, but it was also a matter of getting good grades or what you ended up studying, or what did that trajectory look like as that

Lisa: unfolded?

It's an interesting trajectory actually, because I, my mom, because she was. Really needing our lives were not stable and needed to find somewhere where I could go that would be more stable. Ended up, um, uh, doing the work to get me to, to get into private school. And I got a scholarship that paid for it the whole way through.

So I, it was a gift. Baltimore, at the time, the schools were pretty in disarray. A lot of teacher strikes. So I ended up in this place that was stable, amazing teachers at an all girls [00:13:00] school. Um, became family became anchoring. I, succeeded in that. I did quite well academically and I ended up getting into a really good college.

I went to Duke and thought I was gonna go pre-med and I could feel my instinct of wanting to help there. , wanting to have stability and structure in my life and be that masculine pole for my mom and there was also this kind of caretaking feminine in me, and I felt it as an urge to serve and medicine.

 I was good in math and science. I thought medicine could be the way. So I get to Duke, I go in, as pre-med. I sign up for all those ridiculous weeder classes. And then my very first semester, I end up working my tail off in a chemistry class and end up failing, getting an F and I thought to myself, wow, this is, not the way to [00:14:00] go. , I'll do something else. And, three or four months later, the university sends me a note saying, we got my grades switched and I'd gotten a B instead of an F. , but I'd already switched political science. It was like the university and sent me off another trajectory.

And political science became what I became really interested in it. And it turns out I was also really good at it. So I was interested in how, , governments function and how politics operates within an environment.

It's the place where we're trying to exert control over chaos and how, and what we look to in society to solve a lot of our problems in this more, what I just call authoritarian way. It's how government operates. It's about controlling, it's about putting the, the side rails on what otherwise , could be a bumpy, chaotic place in our worlds.

So I gravitated to that, no doubt. Influenced by. [00:15:00] What I had been trying to do all my life, which was govern. My chaotic environment.

Andrea: That is an intersection of these worlds in a way that, um, wouldn't, for example, freak out your mother or like look new agey or spiritual.

But of course, in politics there's this idealistic streak too with this wanting to, you know, find a better world. And a lot of the things that people are trying to find when they do something, like explore their consciousness in the kind of ways that would've scared your mom but you still found this way to touch them, didn't you? I guess by

Lisa: studying that very much. And, uh, and I, I also recognize now that I felt a lot of powerlessness as a child. And by going into politics I was already aware of how quickly you could feel your own power, but it's not power, personal power, of course, it's more power by rank, power by position.

And I looked out at that [00:16:00] landscape and started to be successful in it and could see. Wow, this would be satisfying. This would be a way, this is a proxy for the power that I wasn't feeling , in my personal world, in my insides. 'cause I was, again, I was still missing the relationship with an inner reality.

It just hadn't been cultivated. I would call it a kind of neglect in a way, you know?

Andrea: It was probably there, but you just hadn't turned your attention to it, or you hadn't taken time to actually look at it?

Lisa: I hadn't taken time to really pay attention to it.

And so and so in my dreams, in fact, you know, for years and years and years, I dreamt the same dream over and over again. I'm rushing to catch a plane or a train or a boat to get somewhere, usually home. And home could, was a variety of cities that I felt in alignment with and I was always missing it, or late forgetting my bags so I could never get home.

Oh. [00:17:00] Feels emotional. And it kind of haunted me. Yeah. It was a haunting dream and I would wake up and I just can't tell you how many times I had it over years and years and years until, and I haven't been having it, lately, um, at all. So that parallels, I think, to me it's a signal of that I was. Home really does represent some place inside me that is, known, explored, familiar. And there was something where I was focused too much on, and exclusively with where I was going in the outside world.

Andrea: When you're talking, I'm thinking about a young woman who's sort of controlling things, taking care, but also knows that her mom has certain parameters that she doesn't want crossed in terms of emotions and looking inside.

But also, your dad also had left you and that must have been something you also couldn't really look at and deal with in that kind of a context or, or I don't [00:18:00] know. I mean, that also seems to be something hard about exploring that

Lisa: landscape completely.

Well that one was about, I I understood. Only later, 'cause I didn't rem have memory, he left when i was two. Mm-hmm. But I guess, , he was the apple of my eye. I, I hear from my mother. Mm-hmm. And I think I was in love with my father. I mean, in a way that probably all little girls

Andrea: are. Yeah. It's the first love, usually it's the first love matter.

Yeah.

Lisa: And he, when he left and literally disappeared and became emotionally unavailable to me, it was my first broken heart. And , that one was , I'm sure at the time, was excruciating. I felt into that one through other heartbreaks in my life. I've returned to it. But it's, also shaped a kind of a walling off or a redirect of my energy because the heart had felt so raw.

Mm-hmm. And moving forward, what [00:19:00] else would you do except, um, sort of wall it off to, to protect yourself?

Andrea: You probably had to. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting to think about this. This is the beginning of your knowledge of love or your also love of knowledge, right? It's, it's going both ways, but, so from your father, you have probably this immersive feeling of love that you don't access through reason.

And then with your mom, it's almost the opposite. the way you're showing your love is through reason or that's what you kind of had to learn. I, I don't know.

I wonder what your mom would think about that though. How do you think she felt she showed her love for you?

Was it through worrying about you or through making sure you didn't go off this cliff that she saw your father go off of?

Lisa: I think my mom, saw her expression of love for me as modeling her own, decision and determination to make it on her own as an artist in the seventies and eighties. I think she knew [00:20:00] on some level that her choice to not get remarried and to pursue a career as a photographer in a sector where there were no female photographers really except for Mary Ellen Mark was one of the early, mavericks in that world, and she, made a choice to not move back to New Orleans where she was from after my dad left because she didn't want me to grow up as a debutante woman. So she was making choices, I think, very specifically to not have me become a sort of an objectified, consort.

She really wanted me to experience something else. And so that was one way she expressed her love. And for that, I'm actually very grateful. I think she also didn't get in my business at all when it came to my my schoolwork or my ambition, she left it completely alone. She had no comment.

And all it was is that wow, great, fabulous. Go and do [00:21:00] as long as it was in this realm that she understood and she could see that , was within the framework of conventional moneymaking. you framed

Andrea: it as a kind of a ladder. Like you were already seeing things as levels or something climbing.

Lisa: Yeah. Levels. Levels of achievement, levels of, um, access, power, and stability. And when I look back on that, I am really glad that I had that experience. And my son will even say to me now when I'm worried about his focus or fixation on his own ambition, he'll say regularly, mom, you were exactly this way. And I say, yeah, you're right. You're absolutely right.

Andrea: cause when you were his age, he's what? 21 now and 21? Yeah. When you were his age, where were you exactly? Were you climbing? Yeah, I

Lisa: I was graduated from college, I had, I'd won this big award in, for this paper in international [00:22:00] law that I'd written about the

um, EU and the, uh, , the taxes that they applied, commonly, especially on luxury goods. And I did this deep economic analysis of this, which is, I look back on now, I'm like, wow. Why? That's interesting. So I was interested in that. We were hosting forums with, with EU parliamentarians at the time, at college.

So I was seeing myself as kind of heading off and, hungry for experience, hungry for the world, hungry for that adventure and I think I was feeling that desire to go out and see what I was made of in the world coming out of college. I could remember feeling like, let's just see what happens now without all these protective handrails that college really was. You're still in the theoretical. I wanna go out and I wanna apply it. I wanna see how all this stuff plays out in the real

Andrea: world.

Did you feel like you were pushing a little bit too at the edges? Like you wanted to see what was there that you couldn't already sense?

Lisa: I think I wanted to see what I [00:23:00] could master.

Andrea: you were still externally focused.

Lisa: Definitely. What can I push up against? How can I know myself? Thinking of it now, it's the way that I knew to know myself is to be in relation with the outer world. So again, picking up on that theme of where of love.

The love I had was the love of exploration and learning, but the learning was fixated on, primarily on who am I in relation to my outside world.

Andrea: You were getting a lot of, external, input. People were saying, wow, you're doing amazing things.

So was that part of it too, that you wanted more of that?

Lisa: Yeah, I thought, if I can do this, what else am I capable of? I remember I worked for a summer for a congressman in college on Capitol Hill, and I was a legislative intern and I focused, I supported the legislative correspondence.

I wrote letters to [00:24:00] constituents. And it was during the time when Oliver North was being questioned by Congress about his involvement with, Nicaragua and the, all of that kind of messiness with during the Reagan administration. And we were getting a lot of letters about it. And it was right, it was right in the middle of that.

And they asked. So I started writing constituent letters in response to this situation. And I remember a senior guy who worked for the congressman at the time, this guy Ben Cardin, who's now a senator for Maryland, in the US Senate. The AA, they called him, its Chief of Staff, said that I was writing some of the best letters he'd ever read. And I was 20 and how did I know what to say about a complex ethical political situation on the world stage? How did I know, what was I tuned into? I was tuned into the outer world [00:25:00] really intensely.

I'm reading people, I'm reading context. I'm reading whatever I can absorb that is describing that reality, whether it's, you know, the, the work I was doing in school or just reading the voraciously, the Economist and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Just, I was reading all that and then I was watching people intently and deeply studying human nature again outside of me.

Andrea: Fascinating because I mean, we'll get to it, but now there's a lot of inner observation, but this outer observation was sort of the way that you develop those skills in a sense, it sounds like.

Yeah.

Lisa: And they're, and those skills are, I'm so glad I have those skills. They serve me so well. They serve me so well, and they serve all of us well. I mean, it's a fantastic dive and a kind level of mastery to be that attuned through all your senses to this outer reality.

And you can navigate masterfully in the [00:26:00] outer reality until you can't, in until it's not enough.

Andrea: We're gonna get to that. But first just power of observation. How much of it was something you nurtured and how much of it was how to survive like that you learned how to observing was your power or how to be

Lisa: powerful?

Well, I mean, there is a lot of data that says that people who grow up in really traumatized, traumatizing situations or children of alcoholics often are some of the most masterful politicians, people who do read the tea leaves because their attunement to what the outside world seems to need is so precise and so subtle.

Picking up on signaling that other people are missing because you have to.

Andrea: Sometimes had these moments where you could be a child in play, but in general you were on guard.

Lisa: Guard on guard. Like sentry level on [00:27:00] guard. Like a little bit like my German Shepherd.

 With the ears that point up , and are always pointed up. 'cause they're always listening. They're never closed off to the world. They're always listening for any sign of a change that might signal danger.

Andrea: And when you bring that into the gathering of knowledge, you start to realize that's kind of how you get up that ladder.

Right. It's how you get the knowledge that puts you a step ahead.

Lisa: Yeah. Because it's not just the knowledge, it's not just what you know, it's what you can, um, project about what, you know, how you can find trends, elicit trends from all that information.

Andrea: Mm-hmm. I was gonna ask you about patterns. Had you started to notice certain patterns because to write these briefs you kind of would've had to, I guess.

Lisa: I think that's, that pattern making skill is ultimately what sets it apart. 'cause anyone can [00:28:00] download knowledge, and obviously, and then there's a whole level of interpretation, but the pattern making, the pattern seeking, there's a kind of an oracle quality to it. You're, you're, you're looking and you're trying to see where all of those things lead to ultimately.

And then, make some decisions or some choices within that range of possibilities based on, tendencies. Probabilities. All of which are usually more intuitive. What you might call, data slicing, you know, where you're just looking at a whole bunch of data, but ultimately just finding a thread based on your own intuition.

Andrea: It's almost like predictive processing. Where has the trajectory been? And therefore where is it gonna go? It's almost statistical, huh.

But you said something about downloading knowledge. So it makes me think that you think of knowledge as this kind of substance or external thing, not necessarily the power of observation itself. So do you [00:29:00] distinguish these things between the sensory observation and pattern recognition and knowledge?

I mean, do you think knowledge is something kinda in this external world, or how do you see that? I.

Lisa: I think you make a good point in that there, there is that, differentiation. I would say that I wasn't very, conscious that I was downloading or receiving sensory input that was equally, on the same equivalent level in terms of my assessment of its value as everything I was reading, listening to digesting from a a, the sort of the world of, of written knowledge or history or, and that my own senses that the data I'm getting from my senses, my felt experience was equally was, was participating with this as a partner, but I don't think I had the awareness [00:30:00] that how powerful those two were working in tandem at the time. Because again, I was separated from my understanding of how all that sensory data comes in and becomes interpreted in a way of navigating the world. What you, are so, are looking into mm-hmm. And how it pairs. So it, and it's such an embedded, it's so completely mixed with this other piece. And I just simply wasn't aware of it. I couldn't have articulated it that way. But now that I look back on it, it's clear to me that that's what was actually enhancing all this other kind of knowledge that I was taking in through my my cognitive function.

Andrea: Yeah, it makes sense because you weren't looking at that inner landscape as you said, you were al you [00:31:00] were fo focused outward, so you weren't looking at your own patterns, but in a way you, so you were noticing these patterns in the things that you read, the things that you saw, the things you observed. But in a way those couldn't be disconnected from your own patterns. It's just that you hadn't, you hadn't actually turned that on yourself yet. Right, right. So you graduate from Duke Political Science and you start exploring,

Lisa: So I leave school and, the first job I get is in Washington, DC with an economic consulting firm. And, my college sweetheart and I move into an apartment in Arlington. And, I work for these, PhD economists who are called in as expert witnesses to the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission.

And, um, mostly to support, mergers and acquisitions, making companies bigger. We were supporting the robber barons, basically. But in two years time, I learned [00:32:00] so much again about, this kind of deeper level of, uh, worlds, the systems of economics and politics and how they play together. And I became the research coordinator. Which was a coveted job. I got to manage people. I made a lot more money. It was a kind of equivalent of a lot of people go out of school and they go and work for these, financial consulting firms. And it was similar in that way. They work you really hard, you work long hours. So I got savvy on software that was just coming out, so savvy on computers that were just becoming available.

So interesting to think about it, this era. And then I left that job and my college sweetheart and I decided to, move to Seattle. He had a job offer. We had come out Seattle was beautiful. I kept thinking, oh my God, why hadn't I seen the West coast? It was just gorgeous and fell in love with nature's [00:33:00] beauty and fell in love with my college sweetheart, who I subsequently married too young.

 It was early spring. The sky was that oyster pink light. Everything was green. It's kind of like how it is right now. So I said, yeah, let's do it, but this feels really good. And I needed some, time and space away from my, hometown. And my mom wanted to get outta Dodge. So that summer after our jobs wrapped up, we drove across the

Andrea: country. And you were in your twenties?

Yeah, mid twenties or something by then. Maybe 24 or 25. Yeah. Yeah. And so what was this love like? Was it also externally

Lisa: focused? Yeah, it was, I should have realized it was dangerous. As soon as my mom said, oh gosh, he just re so reminds me of your father when he was young. He was wonderful and smart and [00:34:00] kind and deeply confused, we were also, he was also disconnected from his inner, you know, self.

And so got out to Seattle. We both got jobs. I got a job working for, an environmental consulting firm. He, he did too. So we landed on our feet. But within a couple years, he was drinking a lot and, I was getting increasingly freaked out by that. And, so he was in his demons and then I fell into mine.

I ended up having an affair with an older man. It was a mess, it was one of those messes, and it was the first time I realized, oh, I'm a mess. I'm not this, I have my, you know, shit together. And I've, I've done all this succeeded and I can master my universe. I realized that [00:35:00] my emotional landscape was messy and untended and pained and inflamed, and it mm-hmm.

Blew up and our relationship blew up. And, we got divorced and it was a lot of heartache in all of it, a lot of collateral damage. So

Andrea: you'd climb this ladder and a lot of people would look at you at that age, you have this incredible job.

You've just moved to, you probably didn't know it at the time, but the kind of the city that was about to explode in very positive ways in everything that you were interested in and doing. You're in love. You're kinda at the top by these external standards that you'd been so focused on. But then at the same time, you were you'd unmoored yourself. I mean, you'd taken yourself out of the external landscape that had become familiar or maybe comfortable and safe. So what cracked you open? Was it that you'd gotten to a place where you felt like you'd arrived and so you had to look elsewhere?

[00:36:00] Was it that you'd gotten to a new place physically? Like how do you see all that?

Lisa: I think when it all blew up, I was 26 or 27. So that's a time where a lot of people run into, a particular phase towards entering into some sort of new level of maturity. And I felt like it was a wound that was coming to the surface from my earliest childhood and what set it off was his instability, and my own heartache that needed to be seen finally and dealt with on some level. It's interesting because. That timeframe within four years time, I got out of that relationship.

'cause we'd gotten married quite early, and then gotten outta that relationship, gotten a new job, worked for a city council member. I mean, all the ways I was kind of on the outside, keeping my world together, making it look like I had it together. Um, [00:37:00] got another job working for the mayor at the time, but inside, underneath it was a hurricane inside me.

There was nothing stable. It was like inside, there was a storm going on and it was throwing stuff up against the wall. And I was really uncomfortable, but I was keeping it together. And I kept on this trajectory of, I'm gonna stay in jobs, I'm gonna keep on the ladder.

And then when I was 31, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, so that one finally got my attention. And, um, and I was 31 and it was an aggressive tumor. Hmm. They were, uh, concerned, they being the medical community surrounding me in that moment and, warned me [00:38:00] that, you know, this was dangerous.

So I accepted what they threw at me, which was all the various medicinals, the, I call it the, poison and burn the, it's the medieval torture chamber that is chemo and radiation. 'cause it really felt like that. Went through all that and, it changed everything. , it broke me open in a way that nothing else, it stopped me and stopped this outer focus, this quest for outer conquest, quest for outer knowing, quest for outer loving.

And, and again, nothing else could get my attention, I guess, except for my own, um, mortality. I didn't take the opportunity to look inside, truly really asking myself, how did I get here [00:39:00] until this diagnosis? And it says a lot to me about my own story. Some call it victimology. I dunno if I like that word, that my own narrative that had things happening to me all the time.

Andrea: Mm-hmm.

Well that makes sense if you saw yourself as an agent in an external world rather than an kind of this inner being.

Lisa: Yeah. And so I didn't. On the one hand I saw it was through my own motivation and quest and capacities that I was making things happen in the outside world. But then, then the flip side of that is, is that the outside world was happening.

Yeah. to me.. It was, and I had no real, uh, control over it. You know, my father had left my mother was this, my world was that I needed to control that to maintain, my stability. So yeah, I do think that it, the turning [00:40:00] point meeting one's mortality, I was that far gone in a way. And I remember the moment, I, I have very distinct memories it was a Christmas by then, I was actually with another partner.

So the mess I'm talking about was me being in multiple relationships and mashed up together. I was in this desperate attempt to find an outer balm to the pain I was feeling. So then the relationship I was in then was that person who came in to hold me at that time, who ended up being the father of my son. It was around Christmas time and, we were having a bunch of people over and I did not wanna go downstairs. I had just found out. I knew that the only way I could be in that group setting that would be palatable to those people coming was to put on the face and the smile and the [00:41:00] ease and the hostess and the welcome.

But to be lost in my own pain and suffering and to project that to the group would've wouldn't have worked. It wouldn't have worked with my partner at the time. It would've worked for anybody who was coming. It would've, my perception was it wouldn't have worked at all for any, so I had to put everything I was feeling to go inside.

And what I felt going inside was the grim reaper. this figure. Carrying a sickle walking towards me saying, I'd like to have a conversation with you. And I said, I don't have time for that. And I went downstairs. So even then, I was still refusing the call to come in and dialogue with an inner being who was terrified of dying at 31.

Yeah. So when I think back then I go, [00:42:00] wow. I was so convicted that if I didn't show up for the outer world, that I loved so much, that I felt a contractual obligation to be present to all the time. This outer reality, this love of the outside and what it gave me. If I didn't do that, then I, I would risk everything.

And that was 50, 25 years ago now, and I would say the next 25 years of my life, interestingly, 25 years, yeah. Um, we're all about finding my way back to a relationship with the internal. And it took that long for me to get to know the inside of me because I had neglected it for so long. I was reluctant. It was scary. My heart had broken. I'd walled off the heart. It was this inner chamber that I [00:43:00] just didn't get any oxygen. And so I, it's one of the reasons why, I mean, I, I love Andrea. I've always loved talking with you so much is that you embody, for me, I experience someone who's been able to and had an innate inclination. To hold both more seamlessly the outer world relationship, but also that inner world relationship you held in a way that was really, I could palpable. And I felt that you knew something about it that I didn't know. And interestingly, there's a many more people in my life that are younger than me, especially young women, younger women who seem to know more about it than I know.

And it gives me great hope and humility. And makes me think that, ah, perhaps in this next [00:44:00] generation, the outer quest can calm down a little bit, might be less of a, an addiction and the inner is calling. And that more of us will, and I, I don't mean to get off on this Phil, philosophical track, but it does feel like the love of some inner, knowing is, is innate in younger generations potentially.

I mean it is, and yet there's a lot of things still pulling us out. Yeah,

Andrea: yeah. There's quite a few things that come up there. Let's, let me try to explore. The first thing I was thinking about was vulnerability and that you hadn't really had a chance to be vulnerable and that this. Was part of why, or this was sort of your role in a way, like excel hold things together.

Control. So you'd never really had this space where someone said, okay, just be vulnerable. Um, at least it doesn't sound like it. Yeah. And then I was thinking of [00:45:00] this sickness forced you to be vulnerable. , like as you were saying, that's really like the last way that you were gonna have to confront the fact that you're vulnerable is that your actual biological life was

was threatened. And I, I know what you mean about us seeing different things in each other, but also in you.

By the time we met, there was such a deep strength, um, and I think it probably had always been there and it had to have been connected to this way that you'd manifested yourself externally. So for me it becomes very interesting of how these 25 years might've been about being able to have a space where you can be vulnerable and somehow that also already being the strength that you had that you didn't know. Does any of that make any sense?

Lisa: For sure. I know that people's perception of me, I remember my cousin saying to me just a couple years ago [00:46:00] that she always perceived me as this impenetrable force growing up as a child. And when I would admit to being vulnerable with her or that I was scared of something, it didn't, it didn't compute it almost as if the world, the, my outer reality wouldn't really allow me, didn't want me to be vulnerable. A lot of people came to depend on me as invulnerable.

Impenetrable.

Andrea: Yeah. Exactly. That's what I was thinking when you were saying about going downstairs, that all those people were looking at you as a invulnerable strong person in this very, in this way. That I don't know. I mean, I'm trying to get a grasp on of how that must have felt to be seen that way by everyone to have learned, to be seen that way by everyone.

Lisa: And it was a cage. Yeah, of course. Um, and I'd made it, I take full responsibility. I'd made it, and it's how I came to know myself. And it's how I came to [00:47:00] be in relation with the outside world is to be that. And it didn't give me very much freedom to be a whole person. Because as I crashed and burned and fell apart in various phase times in my life, which I did, you know, numerous times after that, you know, starting with the breast cancer was a, was the beginning of the crack.

. Of, oh, she's human, she's mortal, she's, you know, her, she bleeds. Mm-hmm. That trajectory was, difficult because it, the, um, projection was so strong. Even to this day, I can feel, no matter what I've gone through, there's a kind of, uh, expectation that, I would be inviable in a way to things that come at me.

And so when I do things that appear to be, uh, not having it together or reveal a kind of, that, a neediness, [00:48:00] essential quality of need in my humanity, um, I experienced the world being sort of appalled and impatient.

Andrea: Do you think there's some way in which, because this was from almost the beginning of your life, that you were in this role that you, before you really had memory, you know, two years old or.

Or whatever, that it became how you learned language and how you learned poise and how you learned expression. Because I think it's actually, even the way you communicate with the world is tied up in that pattern of strength and confidence, which, like you were saying, that's a huge power. It's how you've gotten to places people don't get to in a way.

But of course also it's um, very hard to break through that, you know?

Lisa: Yeah. You know, I feel it now these days in how much, how I hold my body.

You said poise. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think I've always held my body with a kind of rigidity, with the kind of [00:49:00] firmness, because I hold that clarity and firmness the masculine pole. I know, I decide. Mm-hmm. I take action.

And it's great. It helps in a lot of ways. And I, and, I remember, you know, I was thinking about this just last night. I was thinking back to a, a conversation that I had. I was working fast forward. I'm working for a consulting firm, my own that I started and very quickly, the local government and heads of government were calling me in to resolve really difficult, intractable conflicts within their agencies.

And I remember being called in to present a report to the head of the transit agency in this region. It was reported, we had written talking about what a mess their engineering department was and the things they needed to do to make it better. And there were seven of us around the table and he was sitting at the head of the table and he was, um, looking at his phone as we were launching into the presentation.

And [00:50:00] I could see everyone accepting that. And I found it really difficult to concentrate. And I thought, what a waste of time this is. So I stopped. I said, can we pause for a second? I just wanna ask, is this what you regularly do during presentations? And if so, I'm finding it hard for me to stay present.

 Because without you being present, I can't be present and I'm not sure what the value is in our presentation and. When I think back on that, and I've done, that's an example of things I've done multiple times in my career where I just decide to say something that in the moment might feel really hard to a person in high power. But what was true for me was, is that I couldn't be present. I was finding it intolerable because I couldn't be present in the meeting. So is it, what is that? Well, it's a sense of conviction [00:51:00] about, what needs to happen in a given moment.

But I thought back on, what it took for me in my body to hold the conviction that my need was valid in the midst of, that was a rigidity in my body that I didn't know how to do other, any other way, but to simply get really convicted about clarity and then suddenly I'm like a frozen statue almost.

It would've been really cool if I could have done it in a loose, sort of adaptive way. Hmm. But transit's like a military organization. And I just adapted the military stance of conviction. It's what I'm dealing with now in my body is that I'm unwinding from that level of rigidity day, you know, on a regular basis.

And the, I hear from my rofer and the person I do cranial sacral work with that. In fact, most of the senior level executives she works with [00:52:00] are so tightly wound, are so rigid in their bodies. She can feel how much pain it is that they're carrying because they don't know how else to be in these senior level positions that have that much responsibility.

There's a kind of rigidity there.

Andrea: Yeah. That speaks to what we were talking about, the difference that's not really a difference between this way external knowledge and the senses and the observation. Because you notice how there's not a separation between the way you've learned to be a body because you aren't in your body actually, you are your body, in the world.

But we learned to think of it as inside and outside in a way. But, so first as a child, you would've had this bodily reaction to your situations that was already your cognitive self. So it's not like there was an inner you and an outer you, there was you. [00:53:00] Learning how to be that way. So it's in your body and it's in your actions.

And only through kind of turning the observation on that body do you start to change it a little bit. But I'm so glad you told that story because I've seen you do that before. Those situations where you say what, you just say it if something's uncomfortable.

And usually it's not just you that it's making uncomfortable. So it's a bit of a gift that you're giving to the space, but it is a, a strong physical bodily, um, way of doing it.

Lisa: Yeah. The, one of the things that though, one of the liabilities associated with that is, is that, Then it also draws a lot of projection and it's drawn projection in my life all over the place.

So people who, for whatever, feel that that's an intimidating, someone in their exterior is showing that much kind of conviction about [00:54:00] something or being able to, um, speak with such clarity about something. There's so many other ways to be in the world, and I do think that for, for people who aren't really settled in themselves, can find that as, um, a threat basically to, because it,

there's a way in which people experience that kind of clarity as a kind of violence. Hmm.

Andrea: Well, I guess it's a violence of their expectations. And I think this goes to this, you brought up this male female energy thing, you know, even starting when you were a child. And of course we're now trying to learn how that too is always in all of us.

But I think there's those characterizations, right, and expectations of how a person is supposed to behave and a certain, kind of way that things are supposed to come out from a certain kind of situation in person. And some of it is just that when those expectations or those [00:55:00] predictions don't play out the way they usually play out, then people get uncomfortable.

Lisa: Oh, yeah. It's a great lesson in expectations. I feel like that's one of the things I'm regularly encouraging people, my clients, anyone I've been working with is, is that how difficult it can become, the more expectations we carry around about anything,

it's a limitation. And it also tends to create just misinterpretation on a regular basis as opposed to an open filter that allows for what's happening to be what's happening. Mm-hmm. Um, so

Andrea: We need to come back to this moment, this very important moment going downstairs.

So you went downstairs and you just, you you played the role? Or, or what did you do?

Lisa: Suited up. Mm-hmm. I suited up, as they say, to put on a good face and let people know that, you know, everything was okay that I wasn't. And

Andrea: when was the first [00:56:00] moment you were able or not able, when was the first moment that cracked?

 Do you remember a moment where you were, where that didn't happen? Yeah. Uh,

Lisa: yeah, it was finally, um, you know, so I ended up a year later getting pregnant, having a son over many people's, um, speculation that I would be infertile after the chemotherapy. And I was not infertile. I, I prove again, it was like, I'm gonna prove them wrong.

Mm-hmm. I can have a child. And, um, so had this beautiful little boy and, uh, that started to crack me open. 'cause of course, having a child usually does. And I started to get in touch with a vulnerability in myself as a mother, loving something, someone that much recognizing that that heartbreak would come when they [00:57:00] left, or any number of things.

It just, you, you, you know, heartbreak is coming whenever you have a child. Mm. And so it started to awaken, awaken me that possibility of that vulnerability in my heart. Um, uh, but then couple years later, I was pregnant again and with a second child and and I really didn't want it.

And I ended up having a miscarriage at about four to five months. So it was a little bit dangerous and , but that was the beginning of that next level of vulnerability. And what it did was, is it actually cracked. Finally, the veneer of what I was pretending that I, of, of my strength. And I knew that I was going into something dark, the cave, the place, finally going [00:58:00] to a place that would really be not in the sun, but in the underworld, so to speak.

 Because at that point, truly everything fell apart and it pulled me in. I lost my, my second marriage, um, left the organization I started and loved. Um, and I returned to the wound of my father. This was all happening. We lost my beloved dog. It all happened in a year's period of time. The breakup with my son's father was excruciating and, um, violating.

And, in the end, I recognized that what felt like a betrayal of the outside world to me was ultimately the betrayal of myself to myself. That, that grim reaper that just wanted to have a conversation when I was 31. [00:59:00] Finally I was having a conversation with, and grim reaper, I say that word.

It's just like life in another form. Um, got my attention at 42, 10 years later and took me fully into his, her grasp embrace, and said, we're gonna be partners for a while. We're gonna go down and this time we're gonna go way under and it's gonna be painful, but you've left it for so long. I tried to get your attention

I had no other choice. It just took me we went way, way down under the waves for a while. That was 15 years ago. And I feel like in some ways I'm only just coming up for air. ' cause one could say that I got out, came up for air from a lot of that emotional pain and I ended up making another firm.

And I went into this consulting [01:00:00] business and went back into government and did quite well and grew it and brought on partners and was making a lot of money. But I was clawing my way in the dark there for a long time and I was in a really dark, hard place. Everything was hard about that work. It wasn't easeful, it wasn't joyful and creative the way that I had found a way to be in the previous years.

And so, was it penance? I don't know. I was learning a lot. I learned a lot in these last 15 years of being under the waves, being in a darker, more tumultuous place.

Andrea: Yeah. I wanna think about this time 'cause you started something called Arts Corps. Yeah. Was that before you got sick or was that, um, it was around the same time or around,

Lisa: around right around the same time I got sick.

I was still working for the mayor. I worked through all my cancer treatments while I was working for the mayor. Once again, like I would leave my [01:01:00] office and go up and get radiated, at my lunch break. Oh my, until finally I decided I can't do this anymore. Seattle, uh, went through the whole WTO drama in it was back in 2000.

Mm-hmm. And I realized it was enough of working 80 hour weeks and going through cancer treatments. So I left and I started dreaming and I dreamt about finding, making something beautiful again. And I wanted to do something with kids in art and I don't know why I wanted to do something with kids in art.

Mm-hmm. I know now it has to do with reclaiming a part of my own childhood and reclaiming relationship with my mother as an artist. Like somewhere in there. Yeah. It's

Andrea: all those same themes in a way, to go even deeper . And also to work with children who are so raw and sensory and emotional and,

Lisa: and real and mm-hmm. And [01:02:00] vulnerable and, uh, not yet, shaped so much by all this molding of the world. And, um, going back to this theme of love, I mean, now that you've started us there and we're still there in a sense, like my, that journey into politics in my twenties was fueled by love.

And when I returned, when I left politics and pursued Arts Corps as a dream, it was love magnified. It was love again. But coming from a new part of me, a new part of me that wanted to live in a different way,

Andrea: before we began, I asked you to send me like some quotes of, things that came to mind just around this idea of love.

And one of the quotes is by Heidegger and it's actually, um, longing is the agony of the nearness. Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant That's what it is. Yeah. So you just brought us back [01:03:00] to love, but there's something with this longing now that comes into my mind too. It Also when you were talking about the, the grim aspects of it, there's something of longing in there too,

Lisa: that's what makes love so bittersweet.

That's I'm coming to feel love and longing as being very close cousins,

because if love is what I feel in my body when the corners of my eyes start to well up with a little bit of tears like I'm feeling right now. Mm-hmm. It's, there's longing for something I can't quite touch, but I know exists that I know

is something where someplace we inhabit some possibility. Hmm. Yeah.

Andrea: It's like, you wanna merge with this? Or sometimes I think of love when I love someone so much that you, it's such a. It is a longing because you can't do anything about it. You just have to sit with it. And [01:04:00] that is a feeling of longing in a way because you wanna take care of them or express it or hold onto it.

, there's a million things you wanna do when you feel that, but you can't, you just have to sit there with it. And longing is kind of the way into that feeling. Maybe more than that. I don't know what it is, but I I'm trying to get at what I think you're also talking about.

Lisa: Yeah. I mean, I have, when I think about what I was loving at the, when I left the mayor's office, I had a love for, I felt a love for a childhood that I never had. Mm-hmm. Um, and a love for a memory of being with my cousins, making plays improvisationally, a love for, um, my mother's own creative endeavors that I watched Blossom when I was a childhood as an amazing photographer.

Like, [01:05:00] I loved that part of my life, no matter how chaotic it was. Um, and I had a deep longing to return to, to touch it again, to feel it again. Mm-hmm. Know it in my life again somehow. And to prioritize it. Prioritize it. To prioritize it. The irony , is that I created this organization and surrounded myself with creative people.

And we did beautiful, beautiful things and made beautiful invitations for young people all over Seattle. But I ended up playing the role again as that masculine poll. I ran the organization, I did the fundraising, I wrote the grants, I managed the details.

Andrea: You even created spaces that were vulnerable and open and joyful and creative. You created them for other people, and at the same time, you were the responsible one holding up those spaces rather than [01:06:00] necessarily being in them.

There's a bit of a difference.

Lisa: There's a big difference because to be in them means that I would've had known how to receive.

Andrea: Yeah. I think that's what I was thinking of earlier. I wanted to say, Lisa, did you talk to anyone? Did you express any of this? Like did you, did you enter that space of letting go, being held, letting someone else hold the space is the best way I can

Lisa: think of it.

When I left Arts Corps, they gave me a party. I just read all the notes actually, that people had written. Um,

and they made it about me, which I didn't really want, but they invited all the teaching artists and students and parents and donors and people made music and offered me and invited me up. One of the [01:07:00] teaching artists had me come up on stage and present me with a drum and have me play it with him. He is a professional cellist, and, um, I was terrified, but I was, they were sort of forcing me to receive and I felt very held then, um, by what was going on around me and very seen and held.

It's a bit excruciating and I think back on it now. It's, it was really, really powerful and powerful because the very few times like that, that I've allowed or, or put myself in a situation to feel that . To be. Mm-hmm. And, uh, I think that's why love if longing. There's this, it's like I had this longing for that, and that world [01:08:00] received me in that way, but I'm pretty clear now that the fullest kind of love is happening now for me because I'm receiving myself for the first time. I had to have all these experiences of giving and giving and giving and doing, and being clear and firm, but I mean, and it's, there's still not a lot of clarity here for me because it's so new Yeah. To receive myself. Yeah. Ultimately. Yeah.

Andrea: That, that's really powerful because especially thinking about this way, that you're really changing what you think of as internal and external space so that at the same time that you're letting someone else hold the space, which sounds like the hardest thing for you to do to, to be held, to let someone hold the space and, and trust it and fall into it.

But at the same time, you seem to [01:09:00] be realizing that that's trusting yourself in a way too or something.

Yeah. Uh, yeah. I have to say, I was around during Arts Corps and , you changed so many people's lives. I know you don't wanna hear all this, but other people should hear it. You really created an a community and you gave a lot of people a way to express what they wanted to express, and you affirmed that creativity and art was essential and important and powerful and worthy of attention.

And you made teaching artists, people could take themselves seriously as people creating these spaces. But at the same time, I have seen Yeah, you, you never really quite can sit with that space that you created and let people be grateful to you in a way.

There's something very vulnerable about that. I don't know how, what do you think it is? Like what is that, that doesn't even almost make sense. Like, why should it be so hard? To let someone else hold [01:10:00] you, hold the space that you're in. Be, be, it's a gift to them in a way.

But there's something about then you have to, well then I have to, is it an admittance that you need them or

Lisa: it's an admittance of how much my heart heartaches to know that much love. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it is, uh, admitting that how broken my heart

Andrea: is. Yeah. That makes sense.

'cause if you feel how much, if you feel it fully, then you have to also feel how much you haven't felt it and have wanted it longed for it to go back to that

Lisa: word. Right. And then if I reveal, if it's reveal how much I've longed for it, will that be seen as a liability? Will that, will that, I feel like that's the tricky, that's the great, uh, challenge I [01:11:00] think for all of us in opening our hearts is if we are real, how much reveal to others, how deeply we long mm-hmm.

For connection and love and, and this place of being held. Mm-hmm. Will, we've all experienced that feeling as if it was taken advantage of. Feeling as if that was a liability, feeling it as if it cost us something, and that if they see how much you long for it, that they would hurt you. You know? Hmm. And that I, I see us all kind of in a similar place in the sense that heartache is con is running a lot of the show these days.

Um, and yet there's something powerful about being able to walk around with a [01:12:00] broken heart and it be normal.

Andrea: And being able to sit with your heart open is, I mean, broken is how it opens. That's where the light gets in as the, as the quote goes right through the cracks. So, I mean, I hear you saying what you're trying to do is expand your notion of self a bit so that it's not, uh, what we were talking about at the beginning.

So strict, you know, this strict inside outside control, not control this, this binary, dichotomous male female energy. You know, we've been going back and forth between a lot of those and this, what you're trying to describe for me, echoes how hard it is to live in. This paradox where strength is vulnerability and love is longing and male is female, and female is male.

And it can become so hard to uh, we always feel like we need to be one or the other, I [01:13:00] guess. And so I think in those moments where if you let yourself be held, if you let someone else hold the space, if you still think of it in binaries, then it's like, okay, then, but then that means I can't hold the space.

 It doesn't mean that, but if you're thinking in those binaries, it does and that's how it will affect your life.

Lisa: Yep. And then you get stuck in the polarity. Yeah.

Andrea: Then you need to prove yourself again, and then you're just back and forth again. Rather than like, how do we realize that those spaces are not opposites, they're part of the same space and it has something to do with a different notion of what a self is and what internal and external is and all of this.

I'm not, I think in a lot of your work you explore that. Yeah,

Lisa: definitely. Yeah. With other people,

Andrea: you help other

Lisa: people explore that. Well, and I do it myself too, and I long for integration. I long for being merging with my own longing. Mm-hmm. To really understand it as some sort of [01:14:00] deeply embedded process.

Mm-hmm. That. Isn't outside or inside, it's just how the energy is moving through the

Andrea: space. Yeah. To dance in this way, dance with that. And it's it, as you said, that also means realizing you're worthy of being loved even if you aren't in control, even if you are in control, even if you're being held or holding, you know?

Yeah. This longing and like this opening to the longing is also opening to like your own belief that you're worthy of, of also being held, which means being longed for and loved by the world

Lisa: around you. Yeah. Yeah. And I, and that's a hard one too, right? With, because when you're longed for by the world, then what will the, will the world want too much of me?

Yeah. I know My mother was longing for a relationship with me and it felt like she was trying to [01:15:00] consume me. Mm-hmm.

Andrea: I think that's a good point to bring that up, because there, it's not that you just dissolve your boundaries , and give everything, some of it is protection, right.

If you're creating such spaces and giving so much, you need that poise that we talked about earlier of the masculine or whatever, the control, the, the, that's also protective of not losing your energy, your capacity. Right.

Lisa: Right. Having some definition, having some clarity about what's okay to what is in alignment with your system in any given moment.

How does your system want to thrive? In what conditions and what relationships is it thriving the most? Can it be nourished the most? This is a big dance right now. I think for me, in how uh, how I make choices. Is it nourishing to me? Is it not nourishing to me? And it gets back to am I nourishing myself at the right levels?

Is a way [01:16:00] of seeing myself as worthy of love, finally, because I care about the fact that I'm making choices about my own nourishment. And I mean that metaphorically versus being sort of indifferent to that and having a real discernment about that on, about everything coming in or out, meaning what I'm being in relationship with is, is my way finally of noticing that I'm loving myself enough to be discerning.

Mm-hmm. And to, disappoint others and to, um, prioritize self nourishment

Andrea: fundamentally. I'm so glad you said that word disappoint, because I think that's the hard thing. Maybe speaking from my own experience or something that it's, what's hard about taking these steps, which, which you, you take a lot of, of being raw and who you really are is that people might not, [01:17:00] people might see it the wrong, might misinterpret it or, or think that it's weakness when it's not.

And I think it can be hard to to let that space be and, and know that it's strength, even if others are gonna be disappointed or characterize it as weakness in the short term. Does that re, does that make any sense to you of this being able to be misperceived or being able to be seen as ways that, you're not, and not try to fight against it?

Definitely. Yeah. I think it's hard.

Lisa: I think it's really hard. I mean, here's example of the, on the fractal level of the smallest to the largest. So the smallest is n not using emojis anymore in my texts because it's too time-consuming and I'm, I'm realizing I'm doing it because I wanna make sure everybody knows that I'm nice.

And part of me is like, why do I have to prove that I'm nice? I'm a good person. Like just, I'm just sending a text. Yeah.

Andrea: Yeah. On the largest level, on

Lisa: the [01:18:00] highest level is, um, the last three years because I made a choice because of my own physical. Knowing my deep bodily, knowing everything I'd gone through, that I didn't wanna take the vaccine when it came out. And I was trying really hard to explain it to people in a way that they could understand that it was coming, it was coming from a deep place in me that mm-hmm. I just knew. Mm-hmm. It was probably not gonna go well.

Andrea: Mm-hmm. Because your body's been through a lot of things that a lot people said you should do that you knew you shouldn't and you did it anyway.

Exactly. And I

Lisa: overrode my body time and time again and I didn't wanna do it this time, but ma'am, that was a tough one for people to not be

Andrea: disappointed by. I think that's a great example too, because people then assume that you're taking a stance that no one should have a vaccine, which was not at all what you were doing.

It was a personal decision based on your own trajectory that no one else could [01:19:00] understand. Right. And it wasn't some, you know, you weren't saying vaccines are bad, but that's exactly what I mean, where it just gets misin. You have to, to stay in that space means that you, there's, it's inevitable. People are gonna think that and you have to know it and you can't fight.

Tell them every single person that and fight it and so on. So it becomes this very long game kind of thing of.

Lisa: Exactly. It really built that in me of like, it's okay. You're gonna disappoint. We're we're gonna disappoint people.

And, um, and I was as gracious as I could be in the face of that disappointment. I saw it time and time again, and and yet I kept choosing to express love and inclusion back to them about them and their choices. Yeah. To say, we can do this, folks, we can be, you know. Mm-hmm.

Um, at what seems like [01:20:00] polar opposites without turning, making it that somebody has is, is actually antagonistic to an entire worldview. Yeah. Uh, I, I wonder and I hope if that what I just did over the last three years isn't helping me to step into whatever might need to happen next . In my own world, which is a greater and greater comfort with, um, disappointing not meeting expectation.

Um, you

Andrea: know, yeah, I think it goes what you were saying about clarity of looking, now that you've turned these observational skills that we talked about at the beginning, that you, that you use to excel and you've built many, um, communities and you've gotten awards and you've been praised for this , in the external world, we didn't even talk about creative ground, uh, yet that another organization that you created that's also helping people, [01:21:00] um, yeah.

But turning this on yourself is a different sort of thing. And to get clarity about that, as you were saying, and to know, okay, I know why I am doing this. I've thought through it. It's the best thing I can think of at this moment. Doesn't mean I won't change my mind later, but in this moment, this is where I am.

I'm just gonna be here. There's a kind of clarity that then you can handle other people, misperceiving being disappointed and so on. But you can't, if you're only in the external focused, you have to really turn that observation on yourself and be okay. Know that you're doing it with the right intention.

Right. If you're gonna be at peace.

Lisa: Exactly. And that sort of leads to where I've ended up. In terms of work, and again, what am I doing? How is all this interplay with the relationship between inner and myself, and the outer world coming into mm-hmm. what's the dance now? [01:22:00] So just what you said I about this idea of having conviction for yourself regardless of what the outer world might perceive.

 So in this moment, I know why I've sort of been on this trajectory, um, with such an intentionality to really, well, what am, what am I clear about in myself? What is home for me? What does that inner reality look like? What's my, where are my anchoring, principles around the environment that I love and I care for?

And I tend, and that it's most important to me in me, um, is the project that I'm involved in, or the projects that I'm involved in now are, is related to working with teams and team leaders inside of institutions to figure out how they're going to be within a collapsing structure, institutional structures, in such a way that it might create some beacon of stability in and [01:23:00] amidst

the collapsing and the chaos of within these structures. And I love this quest because it reminds me a lot of what is happening, what we know about. And I know this is a metaphor that's used often and probably overused, but I am experiencing going back into institutions again. I've been in and out. I've been, I've gone into them and I've come out, I've gone into them.

Come on. , whenever I come out, I get a break. I rest, I rethink things. And now I'm going back in. And within there I can see that there is a level of chaos happening because deep hierarchies are so ill-equipped to solve and resolve the problems of our time. They don't enable the kind of collective intelligence, empowered collective intelligence we need to access to really be making interconnected solutions in every sector.

[01:24:00] So if institutions are collapsing in this way, there are teams of people. Who try to come together in every institution, there's teams, team at all levels who are trying to come together and be cohesive trying to around the work that is theirs to do within that organization. But most of the time those teams are not cohesive.

They're struggling with power dynamics. They're not sharing information, transparency, they don't trust each other, and they're getting pressure above to act in, in certain ways. And they're getting pressure from below. And everyone's in a sort of pain and disorder in a way. I'm seeing this in nonprofit and private and government sectors, but my curiosity, my longing in this moment is the knowing, feeling the distance of the possibility of a small group of people, finding coherence with each other, finding a kind of trust and seamless [01:25:00] connection where they really start listening in new ways and sharing information in new ways and building their shared purpose, simplifying it in certain ways and designing their ecology, their ecology as a team in a new way.

I felt what that feels like. It's amazing. Mm-hmm. And I love and long for the experience of more of that with other teams and because I can sense that. When that starts to happen, it's a new template of stability within the muck, within the collapsing goo of back to the metaphor of a caterpillar dying goo, institutional goo before it becomes something new, before it can be aligned with other imaginal cells and create the next, the butterfly.

 But I know just coming back finally full circle, I couldn't have done this unless [01:26:00] I had discovered my own coherence, which has to do with the integration of my longing myself, my inner, and my outer, all of those pieces. If I wanna help a group, a team, a group of seven people find coherence with each other, Hmm.

I better have coherence inside me as much as I possibly can in order to do that. Otherwise, I will just attract more incoherence.

Andrea: I love this word, coherence. This dance, this walking the edge of the razor blade. This, not one, not two, not inside, not outside. Dance. That is not one person in a team. It's many people. It's dynamic. It's not that one person's gonna be the same always in that constellation for the coherence to hold. Exactly. Yeah. It's a different way of thinking about self that speaks to this way.

We were trying to talk about holding the space paradox, [01:27:00] longing in love where, you're clear about who you are in that moment and you're also okay if in the next moment it's gonna change, but there's a coherence. There's a continuity. Mm-hmm. Uh, and it is this awareness and clarity really is what it is.

This observation, sensory dance, as part of something larger and not a static part of that, a part that's exchanging itself with that.

Lisa: Exactly. In the same way that we might do if we were out on a, ship in the middle of the ocean, looking up at this changing set of stars and constellation around us, where are we going?

And finding our way in that with each other on this small island of floating material amidst this larger constellation of forces. How can we find coherence in all of that? There's the tension of doing it [01:28:00] in your small ice, you know, unit. Mm-hmm. That's floating on the ocean.

The team that's in the midst of this larger contextual reality. And then everything that's around you, but something is guiding you and you can tap into that as a team collectively, and be aware of it and sometimes lose sight of it. But ultimately the work is kind of staying in connection to it and, and being open to the fact that it is changing.

That, that you're, where you're going will change, you're in dynamic conditions,

Andrea: you know? Mm-hmm. It's, it's a movement that you're participating in and co-creating. Yeah. It's a

Lisa: movement and it's very counter-cultural at this moment. People want plans, objectives, decks, PowerPoint decks.

Andrea: Yeah.

Yeah. Bullet points. Bullet points, rules. Yeah. This really brings us back to the beginning, I think, because it really shows [01:29:00] how your own journey in this way that we've described is actually the knowledge that you now have to bring into this environment where we need a different way of understanding what coherence is not as something static and, binary, but something alive and , co-created and dynamic and about longing and love in the way that you express. Can you see your own evolution since the beginning? And how that now is inextricable from this work that you're doing?

Lisa: Yeah. I realize there's no, there was no other way to get here than the way I took.

There were other ways,

But this one, this path. I look back and I go, wow. So I'm so glad I made all those detours. I took those other really dangerous side paths that led off that cliff over there. I climbed, backed up. I [01:30:00] found that other way.

Here I am in with a kind of wholeness I never thought I would've found, sort of always imagined. Maybe that's one of my longings that I would live with the missing pieces

Andrea: inside me. And now you feel like you can be on this moving landscape and know that it's not about arriving or, but it's about.

Lisa: What is it about? Like, well, it's certainly not about controlling. Okay. I know that much. No, I definitely, um, resolved my fixation for the most part, with control, not in the sense of our immediate things and, you know, making sure that I can find some warm socks when I need them. But you know, more just about,

um, I have relinquished this idea that I can control my [01:31:00] relationships. And I thought I could, I think for a long time

Andrea: how do you see your poise now? How do you see your body and the poise and what's changed or what do you wanna feel from that embodied place now?

Lisa: I really hope to experience more, agility and fluidity in my physical body.

 On a day-to-day basis that would be, A beautiful unfolding from where I've been. It's been a lot of years holding that rigidity. And so I'm dancing spontaneously and moving spontaneously and being in water whenever I can and trying do that. I was thinking of flow, flow, but it also has to do with how I hold conviction.

So if I wanna be convicted and clear and, and solid within what I know, how can I do that physically in a different way and [01:32:00] still feel moored to my own place of being. And I don't know yet, that's the great, that's the next level of learning for me is how to be with this physicality, this material that isn't as immovable as the energetic or the intellectual, the cognitive, all these other things that can float and move more dynamically, but the physical is more rigid.

And yet there what if, what do we have to learn about how the physical even becomes more, agile over time.

Andrea: And how does spatiality, this coherence is related to that. You know that when you're changing your own poise, you're of course changing the parameters of the coherence of yourself with the world.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah. , and finding more coherence inside of me because , if I find a new [01:33:00] poise that is more in alignment with the true dynamic energy that's always in there moving and surrendering, and that's actually happening inside of us, inside of our bodies. So much of what happens inside of us is unconscious, actually. We don't have control. Yeah. Most of it. Most of it, I mean, all of it, like this little bit is we're conscious of, so what would it look like to really reflect that level of humility of what is moving dynamically and self-organizing self-organizing intelligence.

It's already there.

Andrea: To actually be present to it, but not need to control it.

Lisa: That's, ah, and how can that, if we're doing that inside of ourselves, then what does it look like when we're doing that? I mean, doing that within our own bodies. Then what does it look like when we're doing that in relation to other

Andrea: bodies or maybe doing that in relation to other bodies becomes.

Doing it within yourself. Maybe those boundaries are the thing that are not so real in that [01:34:00] situation of, of dynas.

Lisa: Yeah. You make a really good point. And if, if there's one thing I'm really gonna take away from this, 'cause you've emphasized it several different times, is the interplay between the two.

And there essential tensions going back and forth in a way that they, they're abstractions, but they are pointing to something around what's out there that you're learning from and how does that, how do you integrate it? And what's happening inside you is applying outside. And if those things start become less, more indistinguishable,

Andrea: that's a flow.

That's this liquid dy dynamic state that you described. That's the flow.

Lisa: Yeah. And I truly hadn't been able to put words on flow that way. Um, 'cause it, it was more, I was just going with my intuitive feel of it until just now as you, as you kind of emphasize that

Andrea: point. So your description of coherence, when you look at it in that way [01:35:00] becomes very powerful.

I think when you think of it as a coherent, continuous movement. That we make into these binaries of inner and outer so as to learn how to observe them in the way that you've said you needed to in your life. But then there must be another place from which you can view those as coherent. Right. Yeah. So I think to end it, I just wonder if you look out at the landscape, the inner and the external, like just what's your sensory feeling, as you kind of go into this day and this, the rest of this year and this place that you're in with work, with self, with relationships, what's your vision?

Lisa: I look out, it's almost, here's in my experience, I'm, I've, I've crawled out onto this little hill look and I was sort of down in a valley for a long time, you know, traveling along and I didn't have much of a view [01:36:00] and I'm just cresting and I'm looking up over this lip of land and I realize as I cross over that lip of land and I look out, then I'm in a completely different geome and it's hard to take in.

Right now, I can't really tell you what I'm seeing. I just know that it's unfamiliar. Um, is it

Andrea: bright or is it colorful, or is

Lisa: it definitely bright and colorful? It's sort of magnificent. It's, it's slightly daunting. There's big craggy mountains, there's rushing rivers. There's. There's intensity, there's, it's dynamic.

It's probably more dynamic than where I've been in this valley for the last several years. And yet I, God, I wanna go. I'm not sure where I want to go first, but I have, but I know I'm ready to go out in it [01:37:00] again. And I'm excited. I'm a little nervous. I'm very nervous, to be honest.

I don't know what it implies about how it's gonna change my life. I've been here before. And I recognize when I've been here before, everything changes certain things. Certain relationships stay the same. Very few I hold onto very, you know, the, the through line. You and I are

Andrea: one of those. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Um,

Lisa: but almost everything else changes. And this has happened so many times. And so I'm at that point of feelings, a little grief for what's what might fall away. Yeah. Excitement. 'cause that valley is gonna fall, a bunch of what was in that valley is gonna fall away. But some excitement was for what's coming and some slight trepidation that my 55 year old body is not what it was.

but I'm getting stronger. And so I'm, I'm prepared. And recognizing that maybe. What this asks of me this time is a [01:38:00] different level of being and an offering that has more to do with wisdom and not so much with fixing

Andrea: yeah, well that, that love and knowledge just persists and it's all tied up with all those endeavors .

Lisa: So love keeps, love keeps coming, gluing

Andrea: us back together. You can't get away from it. Nope. Yeah. Well, Lisa, I just wanna thank you for all the paths you've opened for other people and for me

 I just wanna send you some gratitude.

Lisa: Well, I wanna send you huge gratitude because I can with you in your presence, I can feel our shared kindness, the kind of kindness that, is the through line in relationships

Andrea: always.

Yeah. It's love. It's love, it's

Lisa: love.

Andrea: And I could talk to you forever, but I think this has been powerful, so I think we should, yeah.

Lisa: I agree. Yeah.

Andrea: Be let the silence come and think about it a little and [01:39:00] yeah.

All right.

All right. I love all Oh, hi. Hey, this. Glad to see you. That's a nice goodbye. Okay. All right. I'll talk. Be well. Bye.