Super Soul Special: Timothy Shriver: Fully Alive, Discovering What Matters Most

0:00Hey, it's Paige from Giggly Squad, and I want to let you know that if you want the newest and hottest beauty products, you have to go to Sephora. I'm obsessed with the One Size Liquid Blotting Paper Spray. It's the first of its kind blotting spray that mattifies for up to eight hours. It's unreal. There's also the Summer Friday Shade Drops SPF 50, which basically lives in my bag at this point. Oh, and the Kayali Eden Plush Pear smells so good. It's sweet, warm, and addictive. like people literally stop me and ask what perfume I'm wearing, which you know I love. So if you want the makeup, skincare, hair, and fragrance products everyone's about to be obsessed with, shop only at Sephora.

0:38Host unforgettable backyard barbecues with savings from Whole Foods Market. Get the good times going with made-in-house chicken or pork sausages and ready-to-cook kebabs for hassle-free flavor. Grab tasty flatbreads and their new balsamic chicken salad in the prepared foods department. Keep things fresh with organic red cherries, strawberries, and peaches at their peak. And stock up on bug sprays and sun care must-haves. Make your summer sizzle at Whole Foods Market.

1:09I'm Oprah Winfrey. Welcome to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast. I believe that one of the most valuable gifts you can give yourself is time. Taking time to be more fully present. Your journey to become more inspired and connected to the deeper world around us starts right now. Timothy is the third of Eunice Kennedy and Sergeant Shriver's five children. His older sister Maria has been a close friend of mine for over 30 years now. Growing up in the Kennedy family, his uncles were President Kennedy, Senators Bobby and Ted Kennedy. Tim felt the pressure to achieve. Yet, of all of his mother's famous siblings, Tim believes his Aunt Rosemary was perhaps the most extraordinary.

1:59Born with an intellectual disability, Tim says Rosemary's presence in the family changed everything. In 1968, Eunice launched the first-ever Special Olympics at Chicago's Soldier Field. Tim watched his mother change how society views intellectual disabilities. while leading the Special Olympics with grace and grit. In 1996, Tim carried on her legacy and became president. Tim's mission is to bring service, empathy, and tenderness to individuals with disabilities around the world. In his recent memoir, Tim writes, We need to embrace our weaknesses, live without judgment, and redefine what it means to win in order to feel fully alive.

2:48So tell me how you came to, obviously, I've known your family for years. Maria and I became friends when we were both young reporters in Baltimore. I've been to events at your home. I adored your parents. Thank you. And, you know, know a little bit about this big life that you've lived. How is it that you come to write something as really profound as discovering what really matters, being fully alive? Well, I think in some ways, you know, I was programmed to search. I didn't choose it. It chose me. You know, from the time I can remember, I was always wondering. And I think now more recently, as I lived more and more in the world of people with enormous vulnerabilities, I kept thinking to myself, these people understand something about life, about authenticity, about vulnerability that I keep trying to share with the world because it's making such a difference to me, and I never can find the words.

3:49And so the book just took me over. I had to write it. I had to try to capture this unconditional love, openness, trust that came to me from these folks who had such unlikely stories of brilliance and wisdom. Brene Brown was really one of the first teachers on Super Soul Sunday to talk about vulnerability, and she wrote a book called Daring Greatly. Yes. I want to know what specifically the Special Olympics athletes have taught you personally about the value of vulnerability. I think for me, it's all about leaving it all on the court. I mean, the athletes taught me, you know, the fun that comes from not being inhibited.

4:33You know, but most people, you know, think fun and soul are two different things. The soul unleashed. Fun is really living directly from your soul. From your soul. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Going into that space of freedom and going, wow. So they taught me that. They taught me humility and simplicity. They taught me trust. I mean, you know, trusting the world with your dreams is scary for most of us. But these athletes taught me, even if you get disappointed, even if the world doesn't come through for you, do it again. And one of the things that you really, that gave me an aha, that you were saying, there's a little bit of Special Olympics in all of us.

5:17There's a little bit of that, gee, I have my weaknesses, I have my vulnerabilities. But every one of us wants to be able to cross the finish line of whatever hurdle we're going through in our own lives with that same kind of joy to be, same kind of, you know, love of what you're doing, that same kind of being in the moment. Yeah. Yeah. I think to be open about the things inside of you that hurt, that cause you pain that you're ashamed of, the corrosive effect of holding in your pain, of trying to hide it, I think is the worst suffering you can have. And you write so beautifully about that. Thank you.

5:57About your Aunt Rosemary, for whom the whole family held this shame. Tim's Aunt Rosemary was the third of Joseph and Rose Kennedy's nine children. After older brothers Joe and Jack, Rosemary was born with intellectual disabilities, which the Kennedys kept a secret from the world for most of her lifetime. Rosemary's disability was not obvious to strangers. As a teenager, she attended dances and concerts, but by her early 20s, the family says she had become irritable and difficult to control. Without telling his wife or children, Joseph Kennedy scheduled a lobotomy for his oldest daughter. The lobotomy had devastating consequences, leaving Rosemary unable to care for herself.

6:48The family moved Rosemary to a Catholic institution in Wisconsin, where she lived until she died in 2005 at the age of 86. Do you remember how you first came to hear about her? You know, Rosemary was in our house by the time I was a child. You know, she would come regularly to visit. I can remember thinking to myself, she comes here unlike everybody else. Everybody else, we sort of have to prove ourselves. You know, everybody else was a senator or a TV star or a CEO or a Nobel Prize winner. Because to say the least, you grew up in a competitive family. Very competitive and, you know, earning all the time your stripes and trying harder and, you know, with a lot of humor.

7:31Yes. And a lot of joy and a lot of tenderness, but still tough. Yeah. And then here's Rosemary. And she walked in the house and she didn't have to do anything. Everybody loved her. And you didn't have to do anything for her. And she'd sit with you and talk to you, play games, swim, walk. No urns. So she didn't have to do anything. I love that. She didn't have to do anything to prove that she mattered. That's it. Or that she was worthy. And that's, to the extent any one of us learns that, I think you have the, we have the key, the first steps in feeling fully alive and feeling really that our souls are free.

8:09I love what you say, because this feels in many ways like a love letter to your Aunt Rosemary. Would you say that? It's a love letter to her. It's a thank you letter to her. It's a, you know, you're still with us letter to her. And I love when you say she's a woman who never gave a speech, wrote a book, or held a job. And for a Kennedy, that's a pretty big deal. Yeah. Yeah. I think she taught her brothers and sisters this enormously powerful lesson, which is that, you know, there's some things you can earn in life, and then there's some things that are just given to you. And I think her mother and father told their brothers and sisters, take care of Rosemary, include Rosemary.

8:53And when they did that, through that long growing up period that they had Rosemary with them, they, I think, discovered that, you know, when you get asked to give yourself to someone else, you get something wonderful in return. Was there a shame at first about her? I think her family struggled to figure out how does this child fit in. We want our daughter to matter just like the other children, but the world doesn't necessarily understand or treat or accept her. So, you know, you have these equal powers of shame and love. In the end, I think the love wins, but not before a lot of pain comes along.

9:29I like when you wrote that the shame and vulnerability of intellectual disability was our family secret that even those of us within the family barely understood. Why do you say you barely understood it? Well, because I think in some ways we thought of intellectual disability as a cause. and it was only when, at least for me, I spent more time in silence and reflecting that I started to see intellectual disability as a part of who we were, as shame as a part of who we were, as vulnerability. I mean, we spend a lot of time as a family. Most of us in all of our families spend a lot of time proving that we're not vulnerable.

10:10We think that if we're not vulnerable, we'll be more valuable. I came to understand that in our family it was this vulnerability that Rosemary invited us into that was a whole source of value that I really had never really fully internalized to be open to be vulnerable. No, you know, only when after reading this book, Fully Alive, did I come to really understand how everything has its own divine reasoning always. Always. And that in your family, this family of politicians and stars and competition constantly, that Rosemary, you call her, was the most radical, literally the most radical member of the family, and that she was there as an offering.

10:59Her soul was an offering for the rest of the family. If I were saying the hand of God was there, I think she saved us all to find ourselves conquered by love. I mean, this is a beautiful expression of St. Teresa, which I love. In silence, we are conquered by love. In vulnerability, we are conquered by love. I think Rosemary was the person who invited us all to not just be conquered by power and influence and money and fame. Often called American royalty, the Kennedy family is one of the most influential in U.S. history. Born into a prestigious legacy that includes an American president, senators, war heroes and public servants, Tim Shriver says that along with wealth and power also came enormous expectations.

11:49Tim says his family shared a restlessness to achieve, compete and win in all areas of life. But from an early age, Tim says he felt a yearning for something more, a longing to find his place among the great Kennedy names, and a hunger to discover what really matters most. How big was that pressure in your family? I think my parents held ambition in good tension with love, but there was a lot of ambition and there was a lot of demands, And we thought if we did things that were big, we'd be more valuable. I can tell you, I remember being at the breakfast table at your house. I had to be like in my early 20s.

12:31And I remember like all the cereals lined up on the table and sitting there. And your father asking everybody, what have they done? What have they accomplished? And I was like, oh, my God. The question gets around to me. What am I going to say? Yeah, yeah. What am I going to say? And I felt that from one day. Yeah. being in the house. Was that always? Always. Like beginning in the morning, you write that beginning with... It's a race. A race to who could get to the breakfast table on time. Who can do the best, who can get the best grades, who can get on the best team, who can win the biggest trophy, who can get to sleep and get the most rest.

13:09There was a scoreboard in that house, which was, you know, I mean, I don't want to make it sound too horrible because, as I say, there was a lot of love in our family and my parents were enormously generous and open-hearted people. But when you grow up with a scoreboard, do you always feel like you're having to measure up to keep the score? I think you miss out on one big thing, which is that you're already valuable. I think you can get, like religion does this to people too. You start to think, well, God is the person whose love I need to earn. Yeah. When God is just already there. God is already there.

13:42Waiting on you. I mean, that didn't, you know, it's so obvious, I suppose. But God is already there. You've already got it, you know. You don't have to earn God's love. That's the starting point, not the ending point. And I missed that. I missed that lesson until a couple of people just kept bringing me up short and inviting me into a deeper soul sense. You know, I thought it was interesting that you wrote in Fully Alive, Discovering What Matters Most, about the unspoken rule you learned as a child when it came to grief and loss. how did that shape really what you believe? First of all, tell me what the unspoken rule was.

14:25So the unspoken rule was we don't talk about that. Move on. Move on.

14:34And I think every child grows up, not just my family, there's a lot of loss around. You can't miss it. I mean, we think we hide it from our children, but the children see it. Yeah. And if you don't have any tools to channel it, I mean, I think if you get grief wrong, you get a lot of things wrong in life. Ooh, that's a tweetable moment. If you get grief wrong, you get a lot of things wrong. You hide from a lot of pain. You hide from a lot of frustration. You hide, hide, hide. And in my family, of all the gifts we had, that wasn't one of them. We didn't really know how. I didn't feel like I learned how to face grief and transform it.

15:14Yeah. So a lot of it just kept getting bottled up. You know what's really stunning to me? Maria and I were having an overnight girls talk. Slumber party. Slumber party one time. And it was around November 22nd, something. I was saying, gee, this must be a really hard time for you. It must be a hard time for your family. And she said, and this maybe was, wait, seven, eight, nine years ago. She said, we never talk about that. We never talked about that. We never. We never. Which is so shocking because I still remember the day President Kennedy was shot in Miss Stag's class, school being let out, walking home in the rain by myself, that whole sense of thing.

15:53And every November, you know, around that date, I would think about it, talk about it, talk about it to other people. So it was shocking to me that it was, I was like, well. My mom just said, we want to move the celebration of Jack's life to his birthday in May. And that was it. No talking about it. No talking, but on the other hand, And, you know, our house had hundreds of pictures, and most of the pictures were of people who weren't there. And, you know, there were pictures of her parents and her brothers, her sisters. So there was this, in a way, attempt to keep everybody alive, you know. Yes, but what you write about in the book is that it wasn't just, you know, don't grieve about it.

16:39It's like because there are other people who are suffering. Yeah, get over it. Get over it. And, you know, everybody's in heaven and the children who are starving to death are much worse off than you. And get on to yourself. Move on. Hurry up. Get going now. Yeah. Get back in the game. You know, get back in the game. This is the way we did it. There's some strength in that. I don't want to completely say that there's no value in that. But I think we have to be honest. And good religion, good spirituality is honest about pain. But I am telling you what you just said, you know, the tweetable moment.

17:07If you don't deal with the grief, it comes out in every other area. If you don't transform it, you will transmit it. Yeah. And I think learning how to express grief, to move through it, to internalize both the pain and the healing, make it a real process of growth and change, I think if you don't get that right, you don't get the big question in life right, which is why am I here and what's going to happen? That's right. That's right. So I know you've been a seeker. I didn't think of you as a seeker, but you've been a seeker for quite some time. Right. What did you think of me? I don't know what I thought of you.

17:44Maria's little brother. Maria's little brother. He's doing something, you know. Oh, it's so cute. Right. No, no, I think of you as a grown-up who's running Special Olympics. Yeah, yeah, no, I know. Well, the thing is, when you think of something like Special Olympics, people tend to think of it as that's sweet, you know, that's nice. Oh, isn't that good? That's so good. And there's little kids having a nice time, and everybody smiles and pinch their cheeks and take their pictures. But it's not. It's a revolutionary movement. It's a movement of the spirit that is kind of an unbridled challenge to the world.

18:15You know, if you look at a child who's 12 years old with Down syndrome and believe, really believe in your heart that that child is as beautiful as any human being on Earth, you've got to change everything. Yeah. So now you are running Special Olympics. You are it. I'm being run by it. It's a great, huge, wonderful global movement being run by the most caring, compassionate, loving human beings on the planet. Millions of them all over the world. And tell me this. You know, I talk a lot about honoring your calling. When did you know that this is what you were called to do and not just something your mother would want you to do?

18:51Yeah. Well, I think when I, probably when I was 16 years old, I ran a Special Olympics event in high school, which I did because my mother told me I should. Yeah. And I didn't want to do this. You know, I felt like I'd lose myself if I was in a family business. And to some extent, you know, that was a risk. But I came back to Special Olympics when I was a little older, a little stronger, a little more centered, a little more present to who I was. And knew what you wanted. And I knew what I wanted. And I wanted to make Special Olympics into a school of the heart. And I wanted to share that story because I felt like it had given that to me.

19:28It had given me back my heart. What is it about Special Olympians? Why is it that going into that space where some people makes them so uncomfortable? Well, I think we're all afraid. Think of who these people are. You know, they're not smart by traditional definitions. They're not rich by traditional definitions. They're not pretty by traditional definitions. They're not successful. They sometimes look sick by traditional definitions. They're all the things we don't want, we're afraid of. That we fear. We fear. Nobody wakes up in the morning saying I wish that for anybody. So a lot of people go, well, I'm sorry that happened to you.

20:09You know, one mother told me she had three sons. One works, two work at big investment banks, and the other has a severe intellectual disability. And she says every time people ask me about my sons, I tell them about my oldest who's in New York. I tell them about the second one who's in Chicago. And then I tell them about Kristoff, who's at home, who I have to get out of bed every morning. And they always say to me, I'm sorry. And she said to me, Tim, your life's work is to tell them to stop saying that about my son. She said, that boy is the light of my life. And everyone thinks that I should be afraid, that I should be sorry that I have this boy.

20:47And he is magic. So we're afraid of all that. You know, we don't know what to say. If you have a baby, you know, what's the first question you ask a doctor? Is the baby okay? Is the baby okay? Sometimes the doctor says, no, the baby's not okay. And your world goes crashing in, you know, like, what is this child? This child is not healthy. This child is not going to be what everybody thinks he should be. Normal. Normal. Normal. The tyranny of that word, you know, it's just like it's a cancer in the culture. Yeah. Yeah. Normal. Are you normal? Are you fitting in? Are you like everyone else? My God.

21:29It's terrifying. And yet we all feel that. So we come to these games expecting to be sad. We come to them expecting to feel pity. We say things like, there but for the grace of God go I. People say that well intentioned to me all the time. Yep, yep, yep. Hold on a second. Tim's making me cry. Go ahead. What was I saying? So people come and they say, there but for the grace of God go I. And I always want to say to them, you know, that pity, that fear, that that embodies that I'm healthy and they're not. I think there's a strength in vulnerability that only vulnerability knows. You know, I think in some ways the whole Special Olympics gamble is, is there a power in vulnerability and trust?

22:18And I think the answer of our athletes is there is only power in vulnerability and trust. The other power is superficial. It locks people up. It puts people behind bars, social, cultural, political, interpersonal. There is only power. You know, I grew up, everybody's in a spotlight. That's where we all wanted to get to. You know, that's where you'd be successful. And what I saw was sometimes, you know, when the lights are the brightest, people feel the most invisible. I think sometimes where you think you want to go is not the place where you will find your most heartfelt, most meaningful, most purposeful life.

23:03I think sometimes it's in the places you think. I mean, I looked around thinking I wanted to be like all those people in lights, and I found myself happiest in places nobody wanted to be. Okay. You know, one of the most amazing stories that you tell in the book, and it speaks to the heart of what it means to be a Special Olympian and what we can all learn, is that game in 1968. Can you describe that? Can you talk about that? So down on the field in 1968, at the first ever Special Olympics, when people with intellectual disabilities are still living in institutions in huge numbers. In fact, the institutions are still growing in 1968.

23:42Can we just have a shout out to Ms. Eunice Shriver at this moment? Yes. Because in that moment, in that moment, when institutions are growing, when the federal government, state governments, local governments are doing nothing, when parents are struggling with the most impressive kind of shame, the shame you cannot reveal, she says, let's create an event and call it Olympic. So you have the most forgotten, the most humble, the most stigmatized people on the planet. And she says, let's put it in soldier feel. And so in that moment, she, together with these incredible volunteers, and we walk on that field, and they say, let's run our races.

24:23And one of the races, which to this day, no one knows quite who ran it. It's one time around the track, six athletes, and starting gun goes, and the volunteers are on the sidelines cheering. And the athlete, they come around the back stretch, and the athlete that's leading the race stumbles and falls. and tumbles to the ground. And the athlete who's in second proceeds a pace or two and then stops. And the other four athletes continue to the finish line, but the athlete who stops and turns around in the middle of his moment says instead, my fallen friend is the priority right now, is what matters most.

25:03And they get up and they cross the finish line together. He goes back and picks up his fallen friend and together they walk in as the last. And everybody's cheering and they come in last. And they come in last. And they come in last or do they come in first? Yeah, I like when you say, who really won that race? Yeah, who won that race? Who won that race that day? That's, I mean, I think that's a lesson for all of us. We sit at our home and we wonder, what do I do to come in first? And I think this athlete told us. I love what your mom wrote just before she was going to that game. Let me win. This is, it became the oath for the Special Olympics.

25:37Let me win, but if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt. How have those words actually become a guiding force in your own life? So if you just, if you closed your eyes, which I could do, and say, just the second half, let me be brave. What do I need to trust the world? I think bravery is like it's the source, it's the presence within you of a strength you don't know you have. Let me be brave. I feel like somehow my mother knew that the secret of living fully alive, the secret of the soul, was to try to win. But more importantly, to be brave. And you also write that equally as important as bravery or courage is this quality of grit.

26:30Yes. This quality of having grit. We want to teach grit to children. We want to have grit ourselves. One of the things we've learned, I mean the scholars teach us, is that grit comes from being undeterred. People with grit just focus. You know, they know where they want to go and they stay at it. Yeah. But everybody fails. Yes. Right? We all fail. And then the question is... Why don't they teach us that in school? Everybody just teaches... We need the lessons of the heart, right? We need to tell children that this is an important part of life. We need to remind children that when you lose, you have a chance to win the next time.

27:04You find a different part of yourself. Yeah. But we need to know that for ourselves. I mean, I see our culture in particular is so driven to win, win, win, win, win, so that when you don't win or when you are third place, when you do fail, when you do fall down, people feel a sense of despair about it and feel like they can't go on or feel like that, that in some way defines their value. Defines them. And then you become not just embarrassed about what you didn't do, but ashamed of who you are. But a lot of us wake up in the morning thinking, I'm not really doing what I want to do with my life.

27:42and I'm not really who I want to be, and there's something more to life than what I'm getting. And the truth is, if you're not doing what you want to do or being who you want to be, then you're not fully alive. You're not fully alive. In what way did writing this book, Fully Alive, Discovering What Matters, feel like a spiritual journey for you? To try to put words on what is wordless is hard, but it's a good exercise, it's a good attempt, because it forces you to try, it forced me. I kept diving into the journey, and I kept finding stories in my own memory, in my own soul. I remembered the story of Loretta Claiborne telling me, you know, you don't have to be intimidated.

28:19Oh, tell us that story. So I'm racing around the office and the governor is going to come into my office. We were working hard to prepare for big games in New Haven. 6 ,000 people were coming and the governor was going to come inspect everything. And I was tense and tight and screaming and barking and clean this up and move this around. And Loretta Claiborne, a person with an intellectual challenge, child of the housing projects. And she's just sitting there helping out in the mailroom and she watches me go by and she says, you know, Tim, the governor puts his pants on in the morning the same as you.

28:50And my first reaction was, you know, I know that. And then I just had that one gift of a pause and I thought to myself, you know, she's trying to remind me that we're all in this together. You know, just relax. You know, when I read that, I found that so striking because, my goodness, governors, you're raised in houses with presidents and senators. Yeah, but we were intimidated by all that. We wanted to be like, we wanted to impress, I wanted to impress him. She was saying, don't worry about it. Don't worry about that. Yeah, relax. Because he's coming to our world. This is, you know, she had the audacity to say, you know, you need to come to my world.

29:27And I'm thinking to myself, no, Loretta, we're trying to tell these people that we can get into their world, you know, that we belong in their world. And she's like, no, no, no, we're not. their world is all messed up. Their world's about competition and greed and avarice, and they're all unsettled and stressed out. They should come to our world. Everybody counts. Everybody belongs. I think she's, you know, she's a genius of the soul. Yeah. What is the key to being fully alive? You talk a lot about our weaknesses and our pain. I think it's, I mean, the practice of fully alive is silence and service, I think.

30:04The key, I think, is recognizing that you are more beautiful than you dare imagine, and that you have to be afraid of nothing in sharing yourself with the world. I think so much of our lives are centered in places where we don't feel fully alive because we're afraid. I think to be unafraid of the judgment of others is the greatest freedom you can have. And I think all great innovators, all great souls are people who are not afraid. They found, if you will, God's strength. They found trust and they became unafraid. I feel like I went into this experience thinking I would help the world, found myself quite insignificant, something of a failure and struggling to figure out where I mattered.

30:56You wanted to do what made you feel alive. Fully alive, yeah. Fully alive. And I couldn't have articulated it, but intuitively I followed it, which is dangerous. You know, I can't say that's an easy recommendation to make, just follow your gut, although it's a good one. But sometimes your gut gets you, you know, it's hard. You know, you lose your job, you lose your income, you lose, you know, it can be difficult. But, you know, if you don't follow your heart, it's always going to take you to the right place eventually. Your gut's guiding you to God. It is, it is. Tweetable moment. But God's guiding you to God.

31:26Did I say that? Oh, she said that. See? It's tweet competition. It's tweet competition. How many does she have? I'm not complaining. Can't help it. I admit it anyway. Your gut's always leading you to God. Yes, it's true. Let's talk about your personal soul practice. What is it? You know, I try to meditate at least once a day. I am a practicing Catholic. I go to Mass every day that I can because for me, the sacramental presence, the idea of God within me, is like something I just need to practice over and over again. But God and I... Can never get enough of it. I can't get enough of it. I just love it.

32:09I'm like one of the kids in a candy shop at church. I mean, I know it's weird. I know I sound like a goofball, but I love it. What's your definition of God? My definition of God expanded when I saw into the eyes of another person's soul and felt like I was in the presence of God. Where I wasn't on my knees, when I wasn't saying prayers, when I was looking at another person, all of a sudden I'm like, oh my goodness, I'm looking at God. This is like I'm in the presence of the master, the creator, the energy of the universe. Where do you feel most at home or at peace? I have a little chapel in my house, which is gorgeous.

32:54You built a chapel? Well, I didn't build it. I just took a room and turned it into a chapel. Yeah. So it's like your prayer room. Yeah. Oh, no, it's a chapel. It's got an altar in it. Oh, it's a chapel. Statues and kneelers and all kinds of crazy things. Candles. Yeah, no, I have a chapel. You have a chapel in your house? I have a chapel. Yeah. It's fabulous. I recommend it. That's great. Yeah. I think people's homes need to be places of prayer. I mean, you know, to be in prayer is to be open to the world for me. So what's the lesson that's taken you the longest to learn?

33:31I think it's the same lesson that I matter regardless of what I do. Regardless of how many tweetable moments you got on the show? No matter how many tweetable moments. If this show is a bomb, if you walk off the set and go over there and go, wow, that was a loser, and call Marie and say, I like him, but the show sucked. But you know it didn't. Yeah, no, but I'm okay. I mean, that's a hard lesson for me to learn. I still want to be good on the show. I still want to be good in life. I still want to write a book that people like. You know, I still want to be liked. That's hard for me to trust that I don't have to do that.

34:03So why do you think we're all here? What do you think the reason for this human experience? I think we were here, we're put here to learn to love unconditionally Additionally, every fiber and sinew in our bodies and in the universe. I think we're here for the glory of the idea that we are united. You know, I think we think we're all divided. Like, I think, you know, like you sit here thinking you're not the same as me. Yeah. And I think I'm not the same as you. Like, we're separate. Yeah. And it's a lie. It's a lie. We're not separate. And as soon as we get close to that, as soon as we trust that, Whew.

34:43That's why we're here. That's why we're here. So what do you think happens when we die, then? I think we rise up into this gigantic, glorious sense of life where we can see clearly. I think eternal life is as obvious and present to me as these trees. I have no doubt that my mother and father are right around here, and all my friends and cousins and children who I've put into the ground, and I think they're all right here just bursting with the life energy. And I think they're inviting me to say, relax. All will be well. All is well. That all will be well. Thank you, Timothy Shriver. Thank you, Oprah.

35:33Thank you. Perfect. Perfect. Best I can do. That's really good. Thanks. Hey, you did your best. I did my best. I did my best. That was good. I'm Oprah Winfrey, and you've been listening to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast. You can follow Super Soul on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. If you haven't yet, go to Apple Podcasts and subscribe, rate, and review this podcast. Join me next week for another Super Soul Conversation. Thank you for listening.

36:08Hey, it's Paige from Giggly Squad, and I want to let you know that if you want the newest and hottest beauty products, you have to go to Sephora. I'm obsessed with the One Size Liquid Blotting Paper Spray. It's the first of its kind blotting spray that mattifies for up to eight hours. It's unreal. There's also the Summer Friday Shade Drops SPF 50, which basically lives in my bag at this point. Oh, and the Kayali Eden Plush Pear smells so good. It's sweet, warm, and addictive. like people literally stop me and ask what perfume I'm wearing, which you know I love. So if you want the makeup, skincare, hair, and fragrance products everyone's about to be obsessed with, shop only at Sephora.

36:47You've got social dialed in. Search is doing its thing. So why do your marketing results look the same as six months ago? That's because you're fishing in the same pond as everyone else. Podcast listeners are a different audience entirely, more engaged, harder to reach through traditional channels, and ready to act when someone they trust makes a recommendation. We're Acast, and we put them right in front of you. Browse thousands of the world's leading podcasts, book host reads or run your own ads, and track every conversion in real time. Same skills you already have, brand new results. Acast.

37:23Acast.com slash advertise.