September 24, 2025 • 42 mins
What happens when a bestselling writer and a former corporate executive dive deep into life’s second half?
In this powerful conversation, Anne Lamott and Neal Allen share raw, funny, and moving stories about midlife transformation, spiritual awakening, recovery, and how to finally silence that relentless inner critic. From faith and writing to intimacy, aging, and finding purpose, their wisdom will leave you inspired — and maybe even rethinking your own path.
👉 Don’t miss this chance to hear life-changing insights from two voices who know the journey inside out. Watch now and discover how midlife can become your most powerful chapter yet.
Timestamps:
00:00 From Corporate Life to Spiritual Coaching
06:08 Annie’s Christian Spirituality
08:19 Annie’s Childhood, Religion & Humor
12:46 Embracing Christianity in a Ghetto Church
14:40 Annie’s Left-Wing Christianity Views
17:23 Anne’s Washington Post Columns on Aging
21:04 Imposter Syndrome & Life After 50
24:50 The Value of Intimacy & Deeper Connection
28:51 Taming the Inner Critic Workshop
33:46 Wisdom Bumper Stickers
Learn more about MEA at https://www.meawisdom.com/
#AnneLamott #NealAllen #MidlifeChrysalis #SpiritualGrowth #LifeAfter50 #InnerCritic #WritingCommunity #RecoveryJourney #ChristianSpirituality #PersonalTransformation #MindfulnessPractice #AgingWisdom #SpiritualCoaching #SelfAwarenessJourney #FaithAndHealing
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
What I loved writing about how amazing it is to be older.
I know I didn't expect to be 18.I was really drinking and using
a lot and I was reckless. And then I didn't expect to be
21 and then I became 50 and I was so young, you know.
But So what I write a lot about is how much drops away that you
(00:20):
think is who you are and that who you try to be and who you
try to burnish. Because everybody loves that you
have this certain personality oryou have the these gifts or you
have these accomplishments. And you start to learn as you
get older. That is the least important
stuff about who you are and. Welcome to the Midlife Chrysalis
(00:40):
Podcast with Chip Conley, where we explore how midlife isn't a
crisis, but a chrysalis, a time of profound transformation that
can lead to the most meaningful chapter of your life.
Well, welcome to the midlife chrysalis.
And this is our first episode inwhich we have a couple, two
(01:01):
people being interviewed at the same time.
And this is a really interestingstory because the two of them
met in their early 60s. Annie, I always like to call it
say Annie Lennox, but it's AnnieLamott.
Annie Lennox is from the Eurythmics.
Annie Lamott and Neil Smith, they're both writers, actually.
(01:21):
I don't know if Neil's a Christian based upon what he
said today. He's definitely spiritual and
he's a spiritual teacher, spiritual coach, and he helps
people. What I loved about this episode
is the weaving of their stories.It's almost as if they'd met 30
years ago. It might not have worked, but
somehow in their 60s, it did. I hope you enjoy the episode.
(01:45):
Well, Neil, you're a refugee from the corporate world, so I
want to understand, did you havea midlife chrysalis?
We, we call it the, the, insteadof a midlife crisis, this sort
of transformative era in the middle of your life that led you
to ultimately becoming a writer and a spiritual coach.
(02:07):
What what, what led you to to flee corporate America?
So I'd always been a writer. So my first career was in
journalism and I was a reporter and even entering into my
corporate career I was a reporter also, I mean a, a
writer also. I entered through the soft side
of PR and corporate communications.
I ended up in the hard side of product development and IT and
(02:32):
things. But I always looked at myself
that my default expertise was writing.
What happened though about my corporate career was I was in my
early to mid 50s and I accidentally stumbled into
spiritual work. I'd been a atheistic hardcore
(02:53):
rationalist all my life and had no interest in spiritual matters
and got tugged into it, much to my surprise.
And as that absorbed me, there seemed to be a fairly natural, a
(03:14):
bumpy but natural transition outof the work I had been doing
into new forms of work. The, the, the, the odd thing
about most spiritual paths, 1 odd thing is that they're very
good at defining the work that needs to be done in order to
(03:35):
free yourself. And they're very poor at telling
you what you do next. And so it's because all of life
is, to a certain extent, trial and error.
Being in my late 50s, really scratching my head about meaning
and purpose and all of those things and not having a clear
(03:56):
path where to go. I kind of drifted out of my
corporate life. I, I tend to think that I wasn't
as good at it anymore. Also, I think that I, I simply,
my, as my interest in other things increased, there was a
deficiency in my interest in, inmy corporate work.
And I, I, I don't think I was very good at it at the end.
(04:19):
And I left completely. And then I, I just stumbled and
kept trying to figure out what to do next.
And I got a, I tried executive coaching and, but the executive
coaching ended up turning into spiritual coaching over time.
And that seemed to happen kind of naturally.
(04:39):
I, it turned out I was less interested in momentary crises
people had and more interested in the long game.
And so executive coaching is really, you know, quick therapy
work. And that just wasn't interesting
to me. I got interested in death and
volunteered for a number of years in Hospice and just
(05:00):
watched and sat with people as avolunteer as they died.
And all of that added up into a kind of, oh, I can use my skill
set, which is writing. And this can be the subject
matter now. So I've always thought of myself
as a writer and Annie and I talkabout this.
(05:23):
The sentence is what's important.
The, the subject matter is quitesecondary to me.
And so I've always written, but I, I wrote about subjects that
were handed to me. I was like, you know, a hack
writer for hire. And I love doing that.
It's it's exactly the same thingto me whether it's my subject or
somebody else's subject, becausemy interest is the sentence and
(05:46):
the. It's a it's a craft.
Yeah, Yeah, it's a groove. I mean, it's just this groove
that I know that I'm comfortablein, that I love doing, that
presents me with innumerable interesting puzzles that I can
solve. And so I kind of carried that
particular form of puzzle makingthrough journalism, corporate
(06:07):
work, which was often writing and then or I could turn it into
writing in some way. And then my spiritual life that
that showed up in the fit in my 50s.
The the oddest thing happened when I woke up one day around
2013 or 14 and realized that everything that I spent my time
(06:29):
with writing Hospice work, coaching people spiritually was
what other people would call serving people right service.
And I have never been a person of service.
I wasn't then, I am not now. It's it's odd that people call
this service. I'm just doing the next thing
(06:51):
that seems my role right now. I have no sense of purpose in
it. I have no sense that I'm serving
humanity in any way. As a volunteer in Hospice, I was
like most Hospice workers or thevolunteers or paid workers,
you'd pay for it to do it, to bearound dying people.
It's just a selfish thing. It's a fantastically interesting
(07:15):
way to spend time, spend a day is is hanging around with the
dying people and and I've never felt that I owed the world any
particular sort of behavior or work.
But but all of my work now is called is within that service
category. It's just odd.
(07:37):
Richard Rohr is one of our faculty members, although he is
no he's retired now from MEA andhis book Falling Upward, The
spirituality for the second-halfof life.
Did that have any influence on you at all or Neil?
I don't read a lot of Well, that's not quite true, do.
You read Annie's books. Let's let let's I want to
(07:59):
understand. I read all of Annie's books.
OK, there you go. Now you got extra point.
You, you, you checked the box there.
So Annie, how, how is your spirituality your your Sunday
school teacher? You're, you've written quite a
bit about both religion and spirituality.
And how does how does your spirituality weave in Weave with
(08:20):
meals? Doesn't in, in any obvious ways,
like I said, I'm really seriously a Christian, a left
wing Christian. And that's my, my guy is Jesus
and I'm very, very attentive to him and to what I believe he
would have me do. And just sort of endless talks
(08:42):
and prayer and appreciation. And Neil's a lot more ecumenical
and I, and really ecumenical. And you can ask Neil about any
wisdom school at all and he can tell you a great deal about its
origins and its main scripture and what it teaches.
And, and I'm not like that at all, but we both have a huge
(09:07):
life in nature, a daily and hugelife in nature.
And that's A and Neil comes to my church sometimes and he
really loves it, but it's just not his path.
He was an atheist Sunday school teacher for years.
But yeah, I was raised by atheists.
And so I was really given free reign to come up with on my own
(09:28):
path. Talk a little bit about that,
Annie, because I know your father was a writer and, and you
grew up in in San Francisco or in or in Marin in.
Marin, Yeah, in Marin. So where did your where did your
curiosity around religion come from, and where did your sense
of humor come from? I think my sense of humor
developed because I, I was really badly bullied as a young
girl because I had this crazy hair and I looked, I was very
(09:52):
different looking and boys just set on me as a way of kind of
self soothing themselves and having some sense of self
esteem. It was just devastating, as you
can imagine. And I discovered pretty early
on, by first grade, I was understood to be the class
clown. And I had discovered that if I
could think of something as a retort to whatever they were
(10:12):
shouting at me as they went by on their bicycles that I won
and, or that I even the playing field.
So I got funny early on and withspirituality, I, even though
both of my parents were atheists, I, I was raised in by
two best friends who who had religious parents.
(10:33):
One was a woman I still walk with, you know, 66 years later
in Shelley and her mother was Christian Science.
And I, I just grew up at that house because our house was
pretty unhappy. And I grew up with Missus Eddie.
You know who ends up being the founder of New All New Thought,
right? Yeah.
And Mary Baker, Eddie and and just this in the Bible.
(10:56):
And she would just read to her three kids and me every morning.
And I had this secret belief that in the late at night in the
dark, when I was afraid and sad,that if I said hello or are you
there, that something heard me and drew closer.
And so I spent most of my teens trying not to have anything to
do with Jesus because my made myparents so nervous because they
(11:20):
just thought Christians were crazier than you had to be.
And my father had been raised bymissionaries in Japan and so he
had a complete aversion to it. And you know, to the he was
raised Presbyterian, which they call God's frozen chosen.
And I ended up being a Presbyterian aunt drunk.
What happened were somewhat during my 20s, I was drinking
(11:41):
and taking a lot of drugs and I was really studying a lot of
Eastern philosophy. And Ramdas was a really huge
part of my coming to believe that you could use the word God
and that you could devote your life to union and to reunion and
to restoration with who you really were and with, with a
(12:02):
sense of wholeness and, and awakened consciousness.
And that it wasn't just hippie BS.
But I kept trying to not be a Christian.
And I always loved Jesus and I always really loved Mary, but in
a kind of friend, you know, theywere kind of a friend, friend,
friends or something. And then at when I was 31, I was
living on a houseboat. That was a 10 by 10 and very,
(12:25):
very broke. I had four books out, three
books out. And I would go over to this flea
market and I'd hear this, the music that my parents had raised
me on, which was the music of the civil rights movement, which
was Joan Baez and Pete Seeger and the Weaver singing the great
old gospels of the Deep South. We shall overcome and, and our,
you know, swing low, sweet chariot and we shall not be
(12:47):
moved. And it resonated for me because
I'd grown up on these spirituals.
And, and so I came in and I sat down and for about a year, six
months, I left before the, the Jesus part, the sermons, I just
wanted the love company and the healing breath of people who
(13:09):
loved one another and loved God.And we're trying to be people of
goodness in the world. And and then at some point I
just got tired of trying to escape from the Jesus part.
And I just said one day sort of bitterly on the dock, walking
back to my house, cut hold, I said to God, Oh, I felt him.
I've written a lot about this, but I felt Jesus sort of like a
(13:29):
stray cat. And I'd felt him kind of running
around near my feet for a while.And you don't feed a stray cat,
right? Because all of a sudden it's not
a stray cat. All of a sudden it's your cat.
So I'm not stupid. So I put it off as long as I
could. And then one day I just said, oh
fine. Would you like some milk, Jesus?
(13:50):
But I had a radical black preacher who was very into the,
the movement of, you know, the Berrigan brothers and.
And not Cecil, was it? Are you talking about Cecil
Williams? No.
No, it was a tiny, tiny, tiny failing church.
His name was James Noel and he looked, he looked like Marvin
(14:10):
Gaye, which didn't hurt. But he also had given me like
the new seeds of contemplation and all of Thomas Merton.
And there's a lot of emphasis on, on, on consciousness and,
and awakening and just being people of, of love and accepting
that we were loved as is, which had not crossed my mind unless I
(14:32):
was on the exact right combination of drugs and
alcohol. And it seemed to be the message
that we were here because we were beloved and we were here to
be the beloved. We were here to offer bread for
the journey to people who were not doing very well.
It had been a sanctuary church during Vietnam.
It was a church that was mentoring.
(14:52):
It was in a ghetto. And it was, you know, there are
40 people there on a big day. And but I love the music and
they didn't hassle me or try to get me to figure things out or
to join Bible study. They just could see that I was
extremely lonely and hurting. I didn't have a scent.
I was bulimic, I was anorexic. I was hungover.
(15:15):
I was and I had three books out and I've lived in Marin my whole
life. So I was loved out of all sense
of proportion. But they could see that on the
inside I was just Swiss cheese. And they got me water and little
by little I started to fill backup.
And then about a year later, I got sober.
I know I have friends of mine, like people like Deborah Amador
(15:35):
Delarosa, who are friends of yours through the program.
And I hope I I hope Deborah doesn't mind me mentioning her
name here. And your journey to being in
recovery is phenomenal as as still a relatively young mother
with Sam, your son. And what's it like being a
(15:59):
humanist Christian in this age we're living in right now?
Well, you know, of course in on one level just mortifying
because all the people that are public Christians are also, I
would say racist and anti everything that I love about
life. I identify as a feminist.
I certainly identify as somebodywho loves, cherishes and
(16:22):
involves myself in the LGBTQ community.
I'm pro women's rights. I'm and so, you know, they don't
sell my books at Christian bookstores.
I think for good reason. They're probably distressing,
but because I think God loves everybody and I don't think
there's a hell. So that's like not good
Christian doctrine. If you're a conservative, you
(16:43):
know, there's you would be surprised by how many of us
there are, by how many people ran screaming for the for their
from their cute little lies drumfundamentalist or very
conservative Catholic or Christian families, but found
their way very much to Richard Rohr and ROM Dos and these
people that could be so gentle and dear and also funny, just so
(17:06):
tender hearted people without like an axe to grind or a a
position. So I let people know I'm a Jesus
person in case they want to talkabout it.
And then I mostly don't try to proselytize or or get people to
to come back. You know, I just say, well, this
is what it, you know, in the recovery, we talked about it.
(17:29):
We share our. Attraction, not promotion, Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, Attraction, not promotion.
And so I just try to be a personwho was saved and and filled and
guided one day at a time. 30-40 years later.
I converted 40 years ago, I got sober 35.
So I just try to be the word, you know, the and the word is
(17:52):
love. And so I just try to be that.
And people are curious. What's it like being a left wing
Christian writing for the Washington Post these days?
I love your column. I the the Post was smart enough
to bring you on board and especially the topic, which is
usually topics that are orientedtoward a reader who is in their
(18:17):
60s, seventies or beyond a both.What's it like working for the
Post these days or actually being a writer for the Post?
And, and more importantly, you know, what do you, what do both
of you believe has gotten betterwith age in your life?
I wrote 12 pieces on age for thepost, and then I've written a
(18:40):
few since then on the resistancefrom the point of view of being
an older person with sore feet. But so I loved writing those
pieces. People that are most of my
friends are very, very progressive and most of them
think that the Christianity is just kind of like, it kept me
alive. You know, I'm alive because I
(19:01):
had this boundless little churchand and most of the people that
are I identify as being very staunchly Christian are not
anywhere near as left wing as I am.
And so, you know, it's always been the same that you kind of
in recovery. We should also say take what you
like and leave the rest. But with writing these pieces
about being older, anytime I mention God, even an acronym
(19:24):
like goodness or the gift of desperation, which is what got
most of us sober who have gottensober, people will complain in
the letters and I cannot stay away from the letters.
I mean, at the ripe old age of you would think that we can go
not to read some letters, but I what I loved writing about was
(19:45):
the how amazing it is to be older.
I never I didn't expect to be 18.
I was really drinking and using a lot and I was reckless and
then I didn't expect to be 21. And as we were saying when we
were coming up like somebody whois 50.
It was like, you know, Jessica Tandy and Hume Krennan, and then
(20:05):
I became 50 and I was so young, you know.
But So what I write a lot about is how much drops away that you
think is who you are and that who you try to be and who you
try to burnish. Because everybody loves that you
have this certain personality oryou have these gifts or you have
these accomplishment. And you start to learn as you
(20:27):
get older. That is the least important
stuff about who you are. And that there's, there's
somebody way down there who is the same as they were when they
were four and probably will be if they live to be 80.
And that is the sense of spirit and, and awareness.
And you know, we both of you know, and I love that definition
(20:50):
of Ramdas's that, that we are loving awareness and that well,
because in older age, so much drops off that has to do with
these created personas and theseperceptions of the world of how
well we're doing. You just get more and more and
more to coming back to that. I'm loving awareness.
(21:10):
You know, I'm just, I'm watchingyou get older and you start
becoming a lot more watchful, a lot less opinionated, a lot
quieter. And yet I'm extremely
opinionated. And a million people might read
what I wrote in the Washington Post.
About half of them are going to complain.
It just goes with the territory.I love one of your quotes and
(21:33):
and I used it in one of my booksonce and I'm Here to Be Me,
which is taking a great deal longer than I had hoped.
How about you? How about you meal?
When in my corporate career, I noticed something that actually
I kind of watched over the course of my coaching practice
and it holds up, which is imposter syndrome tends to build
(21:58):
through the 20s, 30s, well into the 40s and then tends to
decline. And by the end of the 50s, it
tends not to be there. It people have almost always
shed it. And I think what they, what
happens between the 20s and the and 60, let's say, is that it
(22:21):
gradually dawns on you that everybody's faking it.
Everybody in the next decision they make are depending on
patterns and, and memorized patterns and a little bit of
information and essentially guessing.
Once you know that you're guessing and that you have blind
(22:42):
spots and that everybody else isguessing and they have blind
spots. And I've survived Despite that.
I think it, I think life just gets easier after 60, after the
mid 50s, most people I know, obviously for some people it
gets harder and more rigid. And there's a, there's no locked
(23:06):
in template for this. But most people I know realize
that oh, the point of life is tosuffer and adapt.
Not because at adaptations your superpower it is, not because
suffering is a good thing, but because later in life it just
feels so good to take things more lightly.
(23:29):
Let me piggyback on to that to say also one of the great
blessings, and I wrote a couple of columns about this is that
when you're younger, like even in your 50s, you, you compare
your, your insights to other people's outsides and you see
people that look right or they have a lot of money.
They seem to have it together. They would what seems from the
outside to be a beautiful marriage.
(23:50):
And you know by the end of your 50s that people just have a lot
of struggles and problems and stuff is coming up with their
heartbroken that that's the central part of the human
experience is heartbroken and this existential loneliness.
And it doesn't matter if you're happily married, doesn't matter
if you had kids or didn't have kids or have grandchildren or
(24:12):
didn't. It's just part of the human
condition. And so God, you go a lot easier
on people because you start to realize that and you have so
much more in common than what you thought you had when you
were younger because they had this or they were good at this
or you were this. They would never have what you
or this or that. And you all of a sudden you're
just kind of in diff. You have different biographies
(24:34):
and you you have different, you know, again, you have different
coverings, but that you give up a lot of that sense of how
different we all are. And you just you feel a lot more
tenderly towards people. You know, before I had a a
brilliant gimlet eye to what waswrong with people, you know, And
now I just think, boy, God, that's a heart.
(24:56):
Like I can even look at Trump and I can think that is a
heartbroken man. That is a man who has never been
loved. That is him, except by his
daughter, and that was it. Some, you know, some people luck
out and as they age, they start to notice that they're judgement
of people and things gets in theway of things, right?
(25:19):
You can't have judgement and intimacy at the same time.
And for me, and I think a lot ofother people, well, I just kind
of crave intimacy now, right? And intimacy is who I was when I
was 3, right? I wasn't judge mental.
I didn't have regrets. I didn't predict the future.
I just was where I was intimate with the world.
(25:41):
And that age becomes a return torock solid intimacy on good days
where I, you know, I became a gardener.
That's that's not an accident that I became a gardener as I
was older. It isn't an accident that older
people start to garden. It's an intimacy with the world,
a really close intimacy that lacks judgement.
(26:03):
Those flowers and bushes and fruit trees and redwoods in in
our yard, they decide what they're going to do today.
I don't decide for them. I can't be judgmental of them.
I just have to tend them a little bit and mainly just watch
them and be with them. Well, people become like that
too. I, it doesn't help for me.
(26:25):
Yes, of course I vote, and I have to have a political opinion
of Trump. But Trump, like most CE OS, is
living living a completely unlovable, unloved, miserable
life. But also the, I think that's a
really good point about being older is that the, the value of
intimacy become when you're younger, you're striving, you
(26:49):
know, you're on, you're in the rat exercise wheel and it's Lily
Tomlin. Tomlin famously said the one
problem with being on their rat the rat exercise wheels.
You're still a rat you know. And at some point as you get
older Holder the value turns away from that endlessly trying
to stay one step ahead and and to achieve and what not and into
(27:09):
intimacy. The miracle that you have three
incredible friends to whom you can say anything with whom you
have ridden the the Rapids with whom you have gone through death
and complete catastrophic loss and and experience resurrection
at the same time. But so in recovery, we talked
about intimacy as being into me.I see.
(27:32):
And part of the blessings of being old age in older age is
that you do see how screwed up you are, how screwed up we are,
how flawed we all are, how wounded, how neurotic, how
petty, how narcissistic. There's so many things about
Trump or anyone you want to nameI can identify with.
I'm that way. But so that has to do that.
(27:52):
That gives us the opportunity, as we see into ourselves to to
let people off the hook a littlebit more and a little bit more
and a little bit more because wehave it.
It's like, Oh yeah, I got that too.
Yeah. You know I was always told and
we all were told that meaning and productivity were connected
and to have meaning I had to be productive in some way.
Well as I get older I look at meaning and productivity as the
(28:18):
distraction and simple fascination might be the
purpose. It's like the the two origin
stories in the Bible which and Hinduism has the same 2 origin
stories. Essentially, first origin story
is US without judgment and it's all good, right?
(28:38):
It's just fascination with what is.
And the second origin story, judgment comes in the knowledge
of good and evil and everything gets screwed up because of that.
What can I return to my 3 year old self who's now buttressed
with a huge amount of practical knowledge and and maturity and
(28:58):
adulthood and I can be as intimate with the world on some
days as I was when I was 3. I just have two last questions.
What I hear is something that feels like a bridge to the
workshop you're leading in November, which is how to tame
the inner critic. And I know, Neil, you've written
(29:20):
quite a bit about the inner critic from what I've seen.
And, and Annie, you're inner critic.
Sometimes you, you laugh about your, you have, you have a sense
of some. There's a beautiful Richard Ward
quote, which is a humiliation a day, hopefully mild.
So that to have a sense of humorabout you're, you're just that
critic. And talk a little bit about what
(29:43):
the workshop will be like in terms of how does someone coming
to this workshop who has a really strong inner critic,
learn how to to have a sense of humor about that critic.
OK, I'll go because Neil's too close to it.
So I started hearing the word inner critic on our, I think our
second date, Neil said. Maybe our first date, Neil,
(30:07):
we're having coffee because I can't eat with people.
And Neil said, I asked what kindof work he did.
He said, well, have you ever heard a voice inside you that
keeps you small or afraid or desperate to appear to be doing
better than you are? I said, have I ever like, I
heard it this morning. I'm hearing it right now, you
know, and and he started talkingabout this work.
(30:28):
Now Freud calls it the Super egoand and I've been writing about
it for years without having thatterm for it because I mean, I
talk talk a lot in bird by Bird,my writing book about it that
there's this voice. It says, Oh boy, don't, don't
write that. Talk about beating a dead horse
or New York writer, New York editors or book reviewers,
(30:50):
They're going to hit, you know, and that that voice that you
need to learn to tame. Now, Neil wrote a whole book on
it called Better Days, and it was about accepting it and
learning to identify it as something that kept us alive as
young children. It kept us safe.
It kept us from running out intothe street.
But at 71, I have really excellent Traffic Safety
(31:12):
understanding and I don't. Every cell phone, I step out
into the street and Neil has these long arms and he pulls me
back to the curb. But I'm mostly pretty good about
it. And so it just freed me because
he had these techniques which hecan share over the course of the
workshops on on saying to the inner critic, oh, it's you.
(31:33):
This isn't truth. This isn't the reality of who I
am. This is something I internalize
as a very young child because myparents drum beat the the drum
beat was the inner critic and myteachers and my culture and I
want to be free. I want to be wild again.
I want to make a lot more messesthan I was ever allowed to make
(31:54):
in the interests of creativity and wholeness and restoration.
So that's the sort of work that he does with people and it it
just blows people's minds to identify and visualize their own
inner critic and to be able to to work with it.
It's very, it's kind of mechanical work, oddly
mechanical, very repetitive work.
(32:16):
They're just sort of simple techniques.
The problem is that the inner critics got, you know, decades
advantage over me. And so to wear it down to get it
to like move to the side takes lots and lots of repetition.
So what my work is, is to introduce some simple techniques
that work for me and have workedfor other people.
(32:39):
That's all I know. I don't know they'll work for
you, but I know that they've worked for other people.
That over time releases you to the freedom of choice and your
own choices and A and a wider view of the world.
I actually do tend to believe that 9095% of the path to
(33:01):
freedom of a sense of ease in life is getting that voice to
move to the side. Wow.
I'm I'm excited. I have spent my life taming that
inner critic and I've gotten better at it with time because
of a sense of humor. I mean, that really has what
been to be able to laugh at myself, which is something I
(33:23):
just couldn't do when I was growing up.
I you know, I grew up with a Marine captain father and I was
doing my best not to show the world that I was gay.
And so the idea of having a sense of humor about, you know,
the things that were my shadow side was something I look back
and I just say like, wow, I wishI could have told that little
(33:44):
kid or that teenager, you know what, you're you're so lovable,
Chip. But we're going to be together
in November. My last question is this.
Let's say that someone 20-30 years younger than you comes to
you and says, hey, I want to have some coffee with you.
No, no, no meal with you, Annie,we're going to have, I'm going
to have coffee or tea with you and with you also kneel
(34:06):
separately. And they said, give me a wisdom
bumper sticker, not something literally, but like a figurative
bumper sticker that you've learned along the way that has
sort of in many ways defined whoyou are today or how you live
your life today. And is there an origin story
behind that? I wrote a novel 35 years ago or
(34:28):
something like that, about a young girl, Rosie.
I wrote a trilogy. But in the novel where she's a
very, very serious tennis player, there's a man, a kind of
dark, shadowy man who may be scary to the to the girls where
I knew I was a tennis player in tiny white tennis clothes.
And but he's like, he's like a shadow following her.
(34:49):
And finally he's alone with her.But it's kind of a weirdly safe
situation. And he says to her, this
troubled kid whose father's diedand everything, who's
struggling, who's so miserable if she's only ranked seven,
which I could get ranked seven in California and just be
miserable. And he's he looks at her and he
says, you are pre approved. And so with all of my stuff, you
(35:13):
know, this side of the grape, a very important Dioshan priest
whose past said to said to me years ago, we don't get over
here much. And I'm going to have a lot of
the same foibles and obsessions and fixations this side that,
you know, my whole life here, I just am.
I'm going to worry about my thighs.
I just AM. And I'm 90% better, right?
(35:34):
That's a wonderful gift of beingolder.
But we don't get over here much.But I over and over and over
seeing Annie you pre approved. What?
About you. Neil Yeah, You know, the the the
probably most famous 20th century Hindu master was Ramana
(35:54):
Maharshi. And I got interested at some
point during my spiritual adventure in Ramana Maharshi.
It was a natural place to go. And I went to his ashram and
India and Tiruvannamalai and spent some little bit of time
there, 11 days, and kind of paidattention and paid attention to
(36:20):
the surroundings and read the little bit that he wrote and
other people wrote his, wrote down quotations of his.
And while he was alive and everything about him comes back
to simply asking the question, who am I?
What happens when you ask that question is if you're like most
(36:42):
people, you answer roles. I'm a father, I'm a, I'm a
writer, I'm a coach, I'm a this,I'm a that.
I'm a baseball fan. I'm a nice person, I'm a mean
person. I'm a, you know, a son.
I'm these things. And then eventually you start to
think of those. Those are my surface.
Who am I underneath? And I think it's much more
(37:04):
interesting than anybody thinks when they start to explore who
are they biologically and soulfully without all beyond all
of the role. And it's hard work.
It's hard to see that stuff because nobody, nobody's ever
(37:26):
encouraged you. And everybody's said things like
it's ineffable or oh, that's a soul.
You can't define soul. No, you can define who you are.
And that doesn't take anything away from it.
It isn't like a role, it's a it's usually an abstract noun of
value, like I am strength or I am wisdom or I am love, for I am
(37:50):
truth or I am indeterminate. All right, you know, I am those
things and in those things I'm exactly the same as everybody
else. So empathy comes from, derives
from figuring out who I until I know who I am under all the
roles, I'm I'm separated from everybody.
(38:14):
But when I learn who I am under the rolls, I am with everybody.
Cardiff. Yeah, we have gotten it
backwards. We say we have a body or we are
a body and we have a soul that Iactually think we are a soul and
we have a body. And so it's a beautiful way to
end. Thank you.
I'm thrilled that we're going tobe in Santa Fe together and that
(38:36):
you love Santa Fe and we'll see you this fall.
And yeah, just thanks for the beautiful work that you do and
for giving some hope to those who are single in their 60s or
beyond and to realize like, oh, wow, this could happen.
I got married three days after Igot my first Social Security
(38:57):
check. Thank you, love you.
See November. Well, I hope you enjoyed that as
much as I did. I, I would say my 3 takeaways
from this one is number 1 is do not count love out.
Do not believe that if you've hit a certain age, you cannot
find a new soulmate in your life.
(39:21):
And you know, Annie and, and Neil, they can finish each
other's sentences. It is very clear.
They also are very different. He has sort of a masculine
energy. She has a more of a feminine
energy and between the two of them, it's very clear that they
want to spend the rest of their lives together.
And that didn't, you know, happen on their doorstep until
their early 60s. So number one is do not count
(39:43):
love out and #2 is do not count spirituality and religion out.
You know, Annie grew up in a in an atheist family.
Neil was a devout athlete atheist in his adulthood.
He was he was very a brainy verymuch in his head.
(40:04):
He was. They both studied philosophy in
college. But Annie was sort of in the
party circuit and the enjoying the good life of actually,
frankly dealing with her addiction to alcohol.
And so the idea that Christianity was going to come
along and tap on our door was a surprise.
(40:27):
And it was that combination of the Christianity and then
leading to stopping drinking 3738 years ago.
That's it was that 1-2 combination.
And in the case of Neil, it wasn't until his late 50s when
he was getting out of the corporate world and, and really
(40:47):
sort of exploring spirituality in, in a, in a a new way that
surprised him. So, you know, I, I'm a big fan,
as I mentioned, Richard Rohr's book Falling Upward, the
spirituality for the two halves of life.
For those of you who are curious, spiritually curious in
at age 50 and beyond, highly recommend it.
(41:09):
And then I think the third thingI would just say is that both of
them, you know, with their finalanswers, he said, who am I?
And she said pre approved. There's an element of age being
something that allows you to tame your critic, allows you to
get to a place where you have a sense of humor.
(41:32):
You see yourself as not trying to be perfect.
You realize, as, as Neil said, everybody else is just faking it
as well. And the imposter syndrome
somehow actually slides away. So I, So what?
I, what I get, I, you know, I mentioned Annie's quote.
(41:53):
I'm here to be me, which is taking a great deal longer than
I had hoped, but what I see is 2people now in their early 70s
who are solidly themselves who they are in this life.
And so I hope you enjoyed it. Look forward to seeing you next
week. Thank you.
Thanks. For listening to the Midlife
Chrysalis, this show is producedby Midlife Media.
(42:15):
If you enjoyed this episode, help us spread the word by
subscribing and leaving a reviewon your favorite platform.
What I loved writing about how amazing it is to be older.
I know I didn't expect to be 18.I was really drinking and using
a lot and I was reckless. And then I didn't expect to be
21 and then I became 50 and I was so young, you know.
But So what I write a lot about is how much drops away that you
(00:20):
think is who you are and that who you try to be and who you
try to burnish. Because everybody loves that you
have this certain personality oryou have the these gifts or you
have these accomplishments. And you start to learn as you
get older. That is the least important
stuff about who you are and. Welcome to the Midlife Chrysalis
(00:40):
Podcast with Chip Conley, where we explore how midlife isn't a
crisis, but a chrysalis, a time of profound transformation that
can lead to the most meaningful chapter of your life.
Well, welcome to the midlife chrysalis.
And this is our first episode inwhich we have a couple, two
(01:01):
people being interviewed at the same time.
And this is a really interestingstory because the two of them
met in their early 60s. Annie, I always like to call it
say Annie Lennox, but it's AnnieLamott.
Annie Lennox is from the Eurythmics.
Annie Lamott and Neil Smith, they're both writers, actually.
(01:21):
I don't know if Neil's a Christian based upon what he
said today. He's definitely spiritual and
he's a spiritual teacher, spiritual coach, and he helps
people. What I loved about this episode
is the weaving of their stories.It's almost as if they'd met 30
years ago. It might not have worked, but
somehow in their 60s, it did. I hope you enjoy the episode.
(01:45):
Well, Neil, you're a refugee from the corporate world, so I
want to understand, did you havea midlife chrysalis?
We, we call it the, the, insteadof a midlife crisis, this sort
of transformative era in the middle of your life that led you
to ultimately becoming a writer and a spiritual coach.
(02:07):
What what, what led you to to flee corporate America?
So I'd always been a writer. So my first career was in
journalism and I was a reporter and even entering into my
corporate career I was a reporter also, I mean a, a
writer also. I entered through the soft side
of PR and corporate communications.
I ended up in the hard side of product development and IT and
(02:32):
things. But I always looked at myself
that my default expertise was writing.
What happened though about my corporate career was I was in my
early to mid 50s and I accidentally stumbled into
spiritual work. I'd been a atheistic hardcore
(02:53):
rationalist all my life and had no interest in spiritual matters
and got tugged into it, much to my surprise.
And as that absorbed me, there seemed to be a fairly natural, a
(03:14):
bumpy but natural transition outof the work I had been doing
into new forms of work. The, the, the, the odd thing
about most spiritual paths, 1 odd thing is that they're very
good at defining the work that needs to be done in order to
(03:35):
free yourself. And they're very poor at telling
you what you do next. And so it's because all of life
is, to a certain extent, trial and error.
Being in my late 50s, really scratching my head about meaning
and purpose and all of those things and not having a clear
(03:56):
path where to go. I kind of drifted out of my
corporate life. I, I tend to think that I wasn't
as good at it anymore. Also, I think that I, I simply,
my, as my interest in other things increased, there was a
deficiency in my interest in, inmy corporate work.
And I, I, I don't think I was very good at it at the end.
(04:19):
And I left completely. And then I, I just stumbled and
kept trying to figure out what to do next.
And I got a, I tried executive coaching and, but the executive
coaching ended up turning into spiritual coaching over time.
And that seemed to happen kind of naturally.
(04:39):
I, it turned out I was less interested in momentary crises
people had and more interested in the long game.
And so executive coaching is really, you know, quick therapy
work. And that just wasn't interesting
to me. I got interested in death and
volunteered for a number of years in Hospice and just
(05:00):
watched and sat with people as avolunteer as they died.
And all of that added up into a kind of, oh, I can use my skill
set, which is writing. And this can be the subject
matter now. So I've always thought of myself
as a writer and Annie and I talkabout this.
(05:23):
The sentence is what's important.
The, the subject matter is quitesecondary to me.
And so I've always written, but I, I wrote about subjects that
were handed to me. I was like, you know, a hack
writer for hire. And I love doing that.
It's it's exactly the same thingto me whether it's my subject or
somebody else's subject, becausemy interest is the sentence and
(05:46):
the. It's a it's a craft.
Yeah, Yeah, it's a groove. I mean, it's just this groove
that I know that I'm comfortablein, that I love doing, that
presents me with innumerable interesting puzzles that I can
solve. And so I kind of carried that
particular form of puzzle makingthrough journalism, corporate
(06:07):
work, which was often writing and then or I could turn it into
writing in some way. And then my spiritual life that
that showed up in the fit in my 50s.
The the oddest thing happened when I woke up one day around
2013 or 14 and realized that everything that I spent my time
(06:29):
with writing Hospice work, coaching people spiritually was
what other people would call serving people right service.
And I have never been a person of service.
I wasn't then, I am not now. It's it's odd that people call
this service. I'm just doing the next thing
(06:51):
that seems my role right now. I have no sense of purpose in
it. I have no sense that I'm serving
humanity in any way. As a volunteer in Hospice, I was
like most Hospice workers or thevolunteers or paid workers,
you'd pay for it to do it, to bearound dying people.
It's just a selfish thing. It's a fantastically interesting
(07:15):
way to spend time, spend a day is is hanging around with the
dying people and and I've never felt that I owed the world any
particular sort of behavior or work.
But but all of my work now is called is within that service
category. It's just odd.
(07:37):
Richard Rohr is one of our faculty members, although he is
no he's retired now from MEA andhis book Falling Upward, The
spirituality for the second-halfof life.
Did that have any influence on you at all or Neil?
I don't read a lot of Well, that's not quite true, do.
You read Annie's books. Let's let let's I want to
(07:59):
understand. I read all of Annie's books.
OK, there you go. Now you got extra point.
You, you, you checked the box there.
So Annie, how, how is your spirituality your your Sunday
school teacher? You're, you've written quite a
bit about both religion and spirituality.
And how does how does your spirituality weave in Weave with
(08:20):
meals? Doesn't in, in any obvious ways,
like I said, I'm really seriously a Christian, a left
wing Christian. And that's my, my guy is Jesus
and I'm very, very attentive to him and to what I believe he
would have me do. And just sort of endless talks
(08:42):
and prayer and appreciation. And Neil's a lot more ecumenical
and I, and really ecumenical. And you can ask Neil about any
wisdom school at all and he can tell you a great deal about its
origins and its main scripture and what it teaches.
And, and I'm not like that at all, but we both have a huge
(09:07):
life in nature, a daily and hugelife in nature.
And that's A and Neil comes to my church sometimes and he
really loves it, but it's just not his path.
He was an atheist Sunday school teacher for years.
But yeah, I was raised by atheists.
And so I was really given free reign to come up with on my own
(09:28):
path. Talk a little bit about that,
Annie, because I know your father was a writer and, and you
grew up in in San Francisco or in or in Marin in.
Marin, Yeah, in Marin. So where did your where did your
curiosity around religion come from, and where did your sense
of humor come from? I think my sense of humor
developed because I, I was really badly bullied as a young
girl because I had this crazy hair and I looked, I was very
(09:52):
different looking and boys just set on me as a way of kind of
self soothing themselves and having some sense of self
esteem. It was just devastating, as you
can imagine. And I discovered pretty early
on, by first grade, I was understood to be the class
clown. And I had discovered that if I
could think of something as a retort to whatever they were
(10:12):
shouting at me as they went by on their bicycles that I won
and, or that I even the playing field.
So I got funny early on and withspirituality, I, even though
both of my parents were atheists, I, I was raised in by
two best friends who who had religious parents.
(10:33):
One was a woman I still walk with, you know, 66 years later
in Shelley and her mother was Christian Science.
And I, I just grew up at that house because our house was
pretty unhappy. And I grew up with Missus Eddie.
You know who ends up being the founder of New All New Thought,
right? Yeah.
And Mary Baker, Eddie and and just this in the Bible.
(10:56):
And she would just read to her three kids and me every morning.
And I had this secret belief that in the late at night in the
dark, when I was afraid and sad,that if I said hello or are you
there, that something heard me and drew closer.
And so I spent most of my teens trying not to have anything to
do with Jesus because my made myparents so nervous because they
(11:20):
just thought Christians were crazier than you had to be.
And my father had been raised bymissionaries in Japan and so he
had a complete aversion to it. And you know, to the he was
raised Presbyterian, which they call God's frozen chosen.
And I ended up being a Presbyterian aunt drunk.
What happened were somewhat during my 20s, I was drinking
(11:41):
and taking a lot of drugs and I was really studying a lot of
Eastern philosophy. And Ramdas was a really huge
part of my coming to believe that you could use the word God
and that you could devote your life to union and to reunion and
to restoration with who you really were and with, with a
(12:02):
sense of wholeness and, and awakened consciousness.
And that it wasn't just hippie BS.
But I kept trying to not be a Christian.
And I always loved Jesus and I always really loved Mary, but in
a kind of friend, you know, theywere kind of a friend, friend,
friends or something. And then at when I was 31, I was
living on a houseboat. That was a 10 by 10 and very,
(12:25):
very broke. I had four books out, three
books out. And I would go over to this flea
market and I'd hear this, the music that my parents had raised
me on, which was the music of the civil rights movement, which
was Joan Baez and Pete Seeger and the Weaver singing the great
old gospels of the Deep South. We shall overcome and, and our,
you know, swing low, sweet chariot and we shall not be
(12:47):
moved. And it resonated for me because
I'd grown up on these spirituals.
And, and so I came in and I sat down and for about a year, six
months, I left before the, the Jesus part, the sermons, I just
wanted the love company and the healing breath of people who
(13:09):
loved one another and loved God.And we're trying to be people of
goodness in the world. And and then at some point I
just got tired of trying to escape from the Jesus part.
And I just said one day sort of bitterly on the dock, walking
back to my house, cut hold, I said to God, Oh, I felt him.
I've written a lot about this, but I felt Jesus sort of like a
(13:29):
stray cat. And I'd felt him kind of running
around near my feet for a while.And you don't feed a stray cat,
right? Because all of a sudden it's not
a stray cat. All of a sudden it's your cat.
So I'm not stupid. So I put it off as long as I
could. And then one day I just said, oh
fine. Would you like some milk, Jesus?
(13:50):
But I had a radical black preacher who was very into the,
the movement of, you know, the Berrigan brothers and.
And not Cecil, was it? Are you talking about Cecil
Williams? No.
No, it was a tiny, tiny, tiny failing church.
His name was James Noel and he looked, he looked like Marvin
(14:10):
Gaye, which didn't hurt. But he also had given me like
the new seeds of contemplation and all of Thomas Merton.
And there's a lot of emphasis on, on, on consciousness and,
and awakening and just being people of, of love and accepting
that we were loved as is, which had not crossed my mind unless I
(14:32):
was on the exact right combination of drugs and
alcohol. And it seemed to be the message
that we were here because we were beloved and we were here to
be the beloved. We were here to offer bread for
the journey to people who were not doing very well.
It had been a sanctuary church during Vietnam.
It was a church that was mentoring.
(14:52):
It was in a ghetto. And it was, you know, there are
40 people there on a big day. And but I love the music and
they didn't hassle me or try to get me to figure things out or
to join Bible study. They just could see that I was
extremely lonely and hurting. I didn't have a scent.
I was bulimic, I was anorexic. I was hungover.
(15:15):
I was and I had three books out and I've lived in Marin my whole
life. So I was loved out of all sense
of proportion. But they could see that on the
inside I was just Swiss cheese. And they got me water and little
by little I started to fill backup.
And then about a year later, I got sober.
I know I have friends of mine, like people like Deborah Amador
(15:35):
Delarosa, who are friends of yours through the program.
And I hope I I hope Deborah doesn't mind me mentioning her
name here. And your journey to being in
recovery is phenomenal as as still a relatively young mother
with Sam, your son. And what's it like being a
(15:59):
humanist Christian in this age we're living in right now?
Well, you know, of course in on one level just mortifying
because all the people that are public Christians are also, I
would say racist and anti everything that I love about
life. I identify as a feminist.
I certainly identify as somebodywho loves, cherishes and
(16:22):
involves myself in the LGBTQ community.
I'm pro women's rights. I'm and so, you know, they don't
sell my books at Christian bookstores.
I think for good reason. They're probably distressing,
but because I think God loves everybody and I don't think
there's a hell. So that's like not good
Christian doctrine. If you're a conservative, you
(16:43):
know, there's you would be surprised by how many of us
there are, by how many people ran screaming for the for their
from their cute little lies drumfundamentalist or very
conservative Catholic or Christian families, but found
their way very much to Richard Rohr and ROM Dos and these
people that could be so gentle and dear and also funny, just so
(17:06):
tender hearted people without like an axe to grind or a a
position. So I let people know I'm a Jesus
person in case they want to talkabout it.
And then I mostly don't try to proselytize or or get people to
to come back. You know, I just say, well, this
is what it, you know, in the recovery, we talked about it.
(17:29):
We share our. Attraction, not promotion, Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, Attraction, not promotion.
And so I just try to be a personwho was saved and and filled and
guided one day at a time. 30-40 years later.
I converted 40 years ago, I got sober 35.
So I just try to be the word, you know, the and the word is
(17:52):
love. And so I just try to be that.
And people are curious. What's it like being a left wing
Christian writing for the Washington Post these days?
I love your column. I the the Post was smart enough
to bring you on board and especially the topic, which is
usually topics that are orientedtoward a reader who is in their
(18:17):
60s, seventies or beyond a both.What's it like working for the
Post these days or actually being a writer for the Post?
And, and more importantly, you know, what do you, what do both
of you believe has gotten betterwith age in your life?
I wrote 12 pieces on age for thepost, and then I've written a
(18:40):
few since then on the resistancefrom the point of view of being
an older person with sore feet. But so I loved writing those
pieces. People that are most of my
friends are very, very progressive and most of them
think that the Christianity is just kind of like, it kept me
alive. You know, I'm alive because I
(19:01):
had this boundless little churchand and most of the people that
are I identify as being very staunchly Christian are not
anywhere near as left wing as I am.
And so, you know, it's always been the same that you kind of
in recovery. We should also say take what you
like and leave the rest. But with writing these pieces
about being older, anytime I mention God, even an acronym
(19:24):
like goodness or the gift of desperation, which is what got
most of us sober who have gottensober, people will complain in
the letters and I cannot stay away from the letters.
I mean, at the ripe old age of you would think that we can go
not to read some letters, but I what I loved writing about was
(19:45):
the how amazing it is to be older.
I never I didn't expect to be 18.
I was really drinking and using a lot and I was reckless and
then I didn't expect to be 21. And as we were saying when we
were coming up like somebody whois 50.
It was like, you know, Jessica Tandy and Hume Krennan, and then
(20:05):
I became 50 and I was so young, you know.
But So what I write a lot about is how much drops away that you
think is who you are and that who you try to be and who you
try to burnish. Because everybody loves that you
have this certain personality oryou have these gifts or you have
these accomplishment. And you start to learn as you
(20:27):
get older. That is the least important
stuff about who you are. And that there's, there's
somebody way down there who is the same as they were when they
were four and probably will be if they live to be 80.
And that is the sense of spirit and, and awareness.
And you know, we both of you know, and I love that definition
(20:50):
of Ramdas's that, that we are loving awareness and that well,
because in older age, so much drops off that has to do with
these created personas and theseperceptions of the world of how
well we're doing. You just get more and more and
more to coming back to that. I'm loving awareness.
(21:10):
You know, I'm just, I'm watchingyou get older and you start
becoming a lot more watchful, a lot less opinionated, a lot
quieter. And yet I'm extremely
opinionated. And a million people might read
what I wrote in the Washington Post.
About half of them are going to complain.
It just goes with the territory.I love one of your quotes and
(21:33):
and I used it in one of my booksonce and I'm Here to Be Me,
which is taking a great deal longer than I had hoped.
How about you? How about you meal?
When in my corporate career, I noticed something that actually
I kind of watched over the course of my coaching practice
and it holds up, which is imposter syndrome tends to build
(21:58):
through the 20s, 30s, well into the 40s and then tends to
decline. And by the end of the 50s, it
tends not to be there. It people have almost always
shed it. And I think what they, what
happens between the 20s and the and 60, let's say, is that it
(22:21):
gradually dawns on you that everybody's faking it.
Everybody in the next decision they make are depending on
patterns and, and memorized patterns and a little bit of
information and essentially guessing.
Once you know that you're guessing and that you have blind
(22:42):
spots and that everybody else isguessing and they have blind
spots. And I've survived Despite that.
I think it, I think life just gets easier after 60, after the
mid 50s, most people I know, obviously for some people it
gets harder and more rigid. And there's a, there's no locked
(23:06):
in template for this. But most people I know realize
that oh, the point of life is tosuffer and adapt.
Not because at adaptations your superpower it is, not because
suffering is a good thing, but because later in life it just
feels so good to take things more lightly.
(23:29):
Let me piggyback on to that to say also one of the great
blessings, and I wrote a couple of columns about this is that
when you're younger, like even in your 50s, you, you compare
your, your insights to other people's outsides and you see
people that look right or they have a lot of money.
They seem to have it together. They would what seems from the
outside to be a beautiful marriage.
(23:50):
And you know by the end of your 50s that people just have a lot
of struggles and problems and stuff is coming up with their
heartbroken that that's the central part of the human
experience is heartbroken and this existential loneliness.
And it doesn't matter if you're happily married, doesn't matter
if you had kids or didn't have kids or have grandchildren or
(24:12):
didn't. It's just part of the human
condition. And so God, you go a lot easier
on people because you start to realize that and you have so
much more in common than what you thought you had when you
were younger because they had this or they were good at this
or you were this. They would never have what you
or this or that. And you all of a sudden you're
just kind of in diff. You have different biographies
(24:34):
and you you have different, you know, again, you have different
coverings, but that you give up a lot of that sense of how
different we all are. And you just you feel a lot more
tenderly towards people. You know, before I had a a
brilliant gimlet eye to what waswrong with people, you know, And
now I just think, boy, God, that's a heart.
(24:56):
Like I can even look at Trump and I can think that is a
heartbroken man. That is a man who has never been
loved. That is him, except by his
daughter, and that was it. Some, you know, some people luck
out and as they age, they start to notice that they're judgement
of people and things gets in theway of things, right?
(25:19):
You can't have judgement and intimacy at the same time.
And for me, and I think a lot ofother people, well, I just kind
of crave intimacy now, right? And intimacy is who I was when I
was 3, right? I wasn't judge mental.
I didn't have regrets. I didn't predict the future.
I just was where I was intimate with the world.
(25:41):
And that age becomes a return torock solid intimacy on good days
where I, you know, I became a gardener.
That's that's not an accident that I became a gardener as I
was older. It isn't an accident that older
people start to garden. It's an intimacy with the world,
a really close intimacy that lacks judgement.
(26:03):
Those flowers and bushes and fruit trees and redwoods in in
our yard, they decide what they're going to do today.
I don't decide for them. I can't be judgmental of them.
I just have to tend them a little bit and mainly just watch
them and be with them. Well, people become like that
too. I, it doesn't help for me.
(26:25):
Yes, of course I vote, and I have to have a political opinion
of Trump. But Trump, like most CE OS, is
living living a completely unlovable, unloved, miserable
life. But also the, I think that's a
really good point about being older is that the, the value of
intimacy become when you're younger, you're striving, you
(26:49):
know, you're on, you're in the rat exercise wheel and it's Lily
Tomlin. Tomlin famously said the one
problem with being on their rat the rat exercise wheels.
You're still a rat you know. And at some point as you get
older Holder the value turns away from that endlessly trying
to stay one step ahead and and to achieve and what not and into
(27:09):
intimacy. The miracle that you have three
incredible friends to whom you can say anything with whom you
have ridden the the Rapids with whom you have gone through death
and complete catastrophic loss and and experience resurrection
at the same time. But so in recovery, we talked
about intimacy as being into me.I see.
(27:32):
And part of the blessings of being old age in older age is
that you do see how screwed up you are, how screwed up we are,
how flawed we all are, how wounded, how neurotic, how
petty, how narcissistic. There's so many things about
Trump or anyone you want to nameI can identify with.
I'm that way. But so that has to do that.
(27:52):
That gives us the opportunity, as we see into ourselves to to
let people off the hook a littlebit more and a little bit more
and a little bit more because wehave it.
It's like, Oh yeah, I got that too.
Yeah. You know I was always told and
we all were told that meaning and productivity were connected
and to have meaning I had to be productive in some way.
Well as I get older I look at meaning and productivity as the
(28:18):
distraction and simple fascination might be the
purpose. It's like the the two origin
stories in the Bible which and Hinduism has the same 2 origin
stories. Essentially, first origin story
is US without judgment and it's all good, right?
(28:38):
It's just fascination with what is.
And the second origin story, judgment comes in the knowledge
of good and evil and everything gets screwed up because of that.
What can I return to my 3 year old self who's now buttressed
with a huge amount of practical knowledge and and maturity and
(28:58):
adulthood and I can be as intimate with the world on some
days as I was when I was 3. I just have two last questions.
What I hear is something that feels like a bridge to the
workshop you're leading in November, which is how to tame
the inner critic. And I know, Neil, you've written
(29:20):
quite a bit about the inner critic from what I've seen.
And, and Annie, you're inner critic.
Sometimes you, you laugh about your, you have, you have a sense
of some. There's a beautiful Richard Ward
quote, which is a humiliation a day, hopefully mild.
So that to have a sense of humorabout you're, you're just that
critic. And talk a little bit about what
(29:43):
the workshop will be like in terms of how does someone coming
to this workshop who has a really strong inner critic,
learn how to to have a sense of humor about that critic.
OK, I'll go because Neil's too close to it.
So I started hearing the word inner critic on our, I think our
second date, Neil said. Maybe our first date, Neil,
(30:07):
we're having coffee because I can't eat with people.
And Neil said, I asked what kindof work he did.
He said, well, have you ever heard a voice inside you that
keeps you small or afraid or desperate to appear to be doing
better than you are? I said, have I ever like, I
heard it this morning. I'm hearing it right now, you
know, and and he started talkingabout this work.
(30:28):
Now Freud calls it the Super egoand and I've been writing about
it for years without having thatterm for it because I mean, I
talk talk a lot in bird by Bird,my writing book about it that
there's this voice. It says, Oh boy, don't, don't
write that. Talk about beating a dead horse
or New York writer, New York editors or book reviewers,
(30:50):
They're going to hit, you know, and that that voice that you
need to learn to tame. Now, Neil wrote a whole book on
it called Better Days, and it was about accepting it and
learning to identify it as something that kept us alive as
young children. It kept us safe.
It kept us from running out intothe street.
But at 71, I have really excellent Traffic Safety
(31:12):
understanding and I don't. Every cell phone, I step out
into the street and Neil has these long arms and he pulls me
back to the curb. But I'm mostly pretty good about
it. And so it just freed me because
he had these techniques which hecan share over the course of the
workshops on on saying to the inner critic, oh, it's you.
(31:33):
This isn't truth. This isn't the reality of who I
am. This is something I internalize
as a very young child because myparents drum beat the the drum
beat was the inner critic and myteachers and my culture and I
want to be free. I want to be wild again.
I want to make a lot more messesthan I was ever allowed to make
(31:54):
in the interests of creativity and wholeness and restoration.
So that's the sort of work that he does with people and it it
just blows people's minds to identify and visualize their own
inner critic and to be able to to work with it.
It's very, it's kind of mechanical work, oddly
mechanical, very repetitive work.
(32:16):
They're just sort of simple techniques.
The problem is that the inner critics got, you know, decades
advantage over me. And so to wear it down to get it
to like move to the side takes lots and lots of repetition.
So what my work is, is to introduce some simple techniques
that work for me and have workedfor other people.
(32:39):
That's all I know. I don't know they'll work for
you, but I know that they've worked for other people.
That over time releases you to the freedom of choice and your
own choices and A and a wider view of the world.
I actually do tend to believe that 9095% of the path to
(33:01):
freedom of a sense of ease in life is getting that voice to
move to the side. Wow.
I'm I'm excited. I have spent my life taming that
inner critic and I've gotten better at it with time because
of a sense of humor. I mean, that really has what
been to be able to laugh at myself, which is something I
(33:23):
just couldn't do when I was growing up.
I you know, I grew up with a Marine captain father and I was
doing my best not to show the world that I was gay.
And so the idea of having a sense of humor about, you know,
the things that were my shadow side was something I look back
and I just say like, wow, I wishI could have told that little
(33:44):
kid or that teenager, you know what, you're you're so lovable,
Chip. But we're going to be together
in November. My last question is this.
Let's say that someone 20-30 years younger than you comes to
you and says, hey, I want to have some coffee with you.
No, no, no meal with you, Annie,we're going to have, I'm going
to have coffee or tea with you and with you also kneel
(34:06):
separately. And they said, give me a wisdom
bumper sticker, not something literally, but like a figurative
bumper sticker that you've learned along the way that has
sort of in many ways defined whoyou are today or how you live
your life today. And is there an origin story
behind that? I wrote a novel 35 years ago or
(34:28):
something like that, about a young girl, Rosie.
I wrote a trilogy. But in the novel where she's a
very, very serious tennis player, there's a man, a kind of
dark, shadowy man who may be scary to the to the girls where
I knew I was a tennis player in tiny white tennis clothes.
And but he's like, he's like a shadow following her.
(34:49):
And finally he's alone with her.But it's kind of a weirdly safe
situation. And he says to her, this
troubled kid whose father's diedand everything, who's
struggling, who's so miserable if she's only ranked seven,
which I could get ranked seven in California and just be
miserable. And he's he looks at her and he
says, you are pre approved. And so with all of my stuff, you
(35:13):
know, this side of the grape, a very important Dioshan priest
whose past said to said to me years ago, we don't get over
here much. And I'm going to have a lot of
the same foibles and obsessions and fixations this side that,
you know, my whole life here, I just am.
I'm going to worry about my thighs.
I just AM. And I'm 90% better, right?
(35:34):
That's a wonderful gift of beingolder.
But we don't get over here much.But I over and over and over
seeing Annie you pre approved. What?
About you. Neil Yeah, You know, the the the
probably most famous 20th century Hindu master was Ramana
(35:54):
Maharshi. And I got interested at some
point during my spiritual adventure in Ramana Maharshi.
It was a natural place to go. And I went to his ashram and
India and Tiruvannamalai and spent some little bit of time
there, 11 days, and kind of paidattention and paid attention to
(36:20):
the surroundings and read the little bit that he wrote and
other people wrote his, wrote down quotations of his.
And while he was alive and everything about him comes back
to simply asking the question, who am I?
What happens when you ask that question is if you're like most
(36:42):
people, you answer roles. I'm a father, I'm a, I'm a
writer, I'm a coach, I'm a this,I'm a that.
I'm a baseball fan. I'm a nice person, I'm a mean
person. I'm a, you know, a son.
I'm these things. And then eventually you start to
think of those. Those are my surface.
Who am I underneath? And I think it's much more
(37:04):
interesting than anybody thinks when they start to explore who
are they biologically and soulfully without all beyond all
of the role. And it's hard work.
It's hard to see that stuff because nobody, nobody's ever
(37:26):
encouraged you. And everybody's said things like
it's ineffable or oh, that's a soul.
You can't define soul. No, you can define who you are.
And that doesn't take anything away from it.
It isn't like a role, it's a it's usually an abstract noun of
value, like I am strength or I am wisdom or I am love, for I am
(37:50):
truth or I am indeterminate. All right, you know, I am those
things and in those things I'm exactly the same as everybody
else. So empathy comes from, derives
from figuring out who I until I know who I am under all the
roles, I'm I'm separated from everybody.
(38:14):
But when I learn who I am under the rolls, I am with everybody.
Cardiff. Yeah, we have gotten it
backwards. We say we have a body or we are
a body and we have a soul that Iactually think we are a soul and
we have a body. And so it's a beautiful way to
end. Thank you.
I'm thrilled that we're going tobe in Santa Fe together and that
(38:36):
you love Santa Fe and we'll see you this fall.
And yeah, just thanks for the beautiful work that you do and
for giving some hope to those who are single in their 60s or
beyond and to realize like, oh, wow, this could happen.
I got married three days after Igot my first Social Security
(38:57):
check. Thank you, love you.
See November. Well, I hope you enjoyed that as
much as I did. I, I would say my 3 takeaways
from this one is number 1 is do not count love out.
Do not believe that if you've hit a certain age, you cannot
find a new soulmate in your life.
(39:21):
And you know, Annie and, and Neil, they can finish each
other's sentences. It is very clear.
They also are very different. He has sort of a masculine
energy. She has a more of a feminine
energy and between the two of them, it's very clear that they
want to spend the rest of their lives together.
And that didn't, you know, happen on their doorstep until
their early 60s. So number one is do not count
(39:43):
love out and #2 is do not count spirituality and religion out.
You know, Annie grew up in a in an atheist family.
Neil was a devout athlete atheist in his adulthood.
He was he was very a brainy verymuch in his head.
(40:04):
He was. They both studied philosophy in
college. But Annie was sort of in the
party circuit and the enjoying the good life of actually,
frankly dealing with her addiction to alcohol.
And so the idea that Christianity was going to come
along and tap on our door was a surprise.
(40:27):
And it was that combination of the Christianity and then
leading to stopping drinking 3738 years ago.
That's it was that 1-2 combination.
And in the case of Neil, it wasn't until his late 50s when
he was getting out of the corporate world and, and really
(40:47):
sort of exploring spirituality in, in a, in a a new way that
surprised him. So, you know, I, I'm a big fan,
as I mentioned, Richard Rohr's book Falling Upward, the
spirituality for the two halves of life.
For those of you who are curious, spiritually curious in
at age 50 and beyond, highly recommend it.
(41:09):
And then I think the third thingI would just say is that both of
them, you know, with their finalanswers, he said, who am I?
And she said pre approved. There's an element of age being
something that allows you to tame your critic, allows you to
get to a place where you have a sense of humor.
(41:32):
You see yourself as not trying to be perfect.
You realize, as, as Neil said, everybody else is just faking it
as well. And the imposter syndrome
somehow actually slides away. So I, So what?
I, what I get, I, you know, I mentioned Annie's quote.
(41:53):
I'm here to be me, which is taking a great deal longer than
I had hoped, but what I see is 2people now in their early 70s
who are solidly themselves who they are in this life.
And so I hope you enjoyed it. Look forward to seeing you next
week. Thank you.
Thanks. For listening to the Midlife
Chrysalis, this show is producedby Midlife Media.
(42:15):
If you enjoyed this episode, help us spread the word by
subscribing and leaving a reviewon your favorite platform.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Cardiac Cowboys
The heart was always off-limits to surgeons. Cutting into it spelled instant death for the patient. That is, until a ragtag group of doctors scattered across the Midwest and Texas decided to throw out the rule book. Working in makeshift laboratories and home garages, using medical devices made from scavenged machine parts and beer tubes, these men and women invented the field of open heart surgery. Odds are, someone you know is alive because of them. So why has history left them behind? Presented by Chris Pine, CARDIAC COWBOYS tells the gripping true story behind the birth of heart surgery, and the young, Greatest Generation doctors who made it happen. For years, they competed and feuded, racing to be the first, the best, and the most prolific. Some appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, operated on kings and advised presidents. Others ended up disgraced, penniless, and convicted of felonies. Together, they ignited a revolution in medicine, and changed the world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.