Tending to the Soul (with Elizabeth Oldfield)

0:03Don't hold anything too tightly. Just wish for it, want it, let it come from the intention of real truth for you and then let it go. For me, our soul is like it's unbound. It's limitless. But we will use words to limit ourselves. When people stop believing that somebody's got your back or Superman's coming, we turn to ourselves. And that's where you become empowered. Courageous participation attracts positive things. I'm Gwyneth Paltrow, and this is the Goop Podcast, where we bring together visionaries, scientists, healers, artists, and seekers. I'm so grateful that I get to interview these extraordinary thought leaders and share their wisdom with you.

0:51And I love listening to the conversations that are led by my co-host and dear friend, Cleo Wade. Cleo is a beautiful poet and author. I deeply admire her and the way she keeps her heart open to the world. Together, we believe that engaging in open-minded, honest, and sometimes difficult conversations has the power to change our lives. All right, over to Cleo. I'm very excited for today's episode with Elizabeth Oldfield. Elizabeth is the author of a book called Fully Alive, Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times. In it, Elizabeth reframes the concept of the seven deadly sins as a way to explore human nature, connection, and spiritual growth.

1:36After I saw the book in my friend Casper's newsletter and read it, I knew immediately that I had to talk to Elizabeth on our pod. Today we talked about her journey to religion, how she found her faith as a teen, and then why she left it behind years later. We talked about what her relationship with Christianity looks like today and how her faith has shifted over time. Whether you're religiously inclined or not, I think Fully Alive is an incredible meditation on freeing ourselves from the ideas that keep us from finding meaning in our lives. I love chatting with Elizabeth about her framework for distraction, gluttony, addiction, and sexuality.

2:16And I especially loved when she used the phrase growing up our souls. I often think that we mistake our souls as a fully developed thing that we're just trying to find within us rather than seeing it as something that is changing and evolving with us. I can't wait for you to hear all of this from Elizabeth herself. So let's dive right into today's conversation.

2:40So I want to get into this book because your new book, Fully Alive, we jokingly called it the rebrand of sin. And more than that, it's a real reframing of the way sin can propel us towards something, as you would say, better or into our kind of higher nature. So I'd love to talk about your story of your relationship to Christianity, the claiming, the reclaiming, the letting go, and how it kind of landed you into the work you're doing. Thank you. Of course, yes. Similarly, I find the people that I find are most able to listen to about these big questions of faith and spirituality and metaphysics are the people who've wrestled, right?

3:25The people who've struggled and suffered, who know that none of this stuff actually is simple. And I also find one of the reasons I have ended up being a sort of bridge person, a translator between tribes, someone who's trying to kind of break out some of the treasures of my tradition for those outside it, is that I have been outside it and in and out and in and out. But I was raised not especially Christian. I would say it was really in the background. The UK in the 80s had this strange kind of cultural Christianity, default Anglicanism in the air, but it wasn't present in my house. My parents didn't talk about God.

4:03They weren't kind of actively practicing in any way. And then I was taken by a friend of mine at school to her church youth group because she had a crush on a boy and he was a very glamorous American boy because in the 80s in the UK, all Americans were glamorous, you'll be glad to hear. And he was called Chris and she wanted to show me her crush. So I ended up in this church youth group and have been a massive nerd. And so I had all these questions, you know, where did the universe come from? What about other religions? What about suffering? And it actually wasn't that the youth leaders were particularly good at engaging with my intellectual questions.

4:36They were a bit like, oh, my goodness, who have we got on our hands here? But they really took me seriously. And they were lovely and warm and cool and interesting. so when they said do you want to come to this big Christian youth festival I was like sure and again the boys and the skate park and the freedom which was what most of the week was about but towards the end I had this moment that I have never really been able to shake off that I think of as the sort of hinge of my life where I stood in this big I mean sort of bonkers charismatic Pentecostal type worship meeting, kind of revival tent thing.

5:16People are speaking in tongues, they're falling over. I had not experienced any of this. I was from a very kind of buttoned up British small village in Jane Austen country. But I prayed for probably the first time in my life when I was about 15, God, if you're there, would you show me? And so my entry into faith was through this very powerful ecstatic experience because I felt myself to be answered and was very transcendent and mystical. And, you know, all of this language doesn't really get close to these things. It's interesting just how, especially when you're a teen, but actually in all phases of life, whether it's because you've moved, you've divorced, you're going through transition.

6:02We have such a true loving desperation for belonging. Yes. And I put loving in front of desperation for a reason because I don't want it to seem negative, that thing, but it is this really overwhelming, powerful desire to say I belong. And it's powerful how that can be found in religion. And, you know, Katswar and I on this pod in general, we talk all the time, which is obviously his thesis, is the decline of kind of religious organizing spaces and the rise of non-religious ones, but all on the sake of finding belonging. I think my kind of deep thesis about what human beings are is relational, right?

6:43Made for a relationship, seeking that. You said that loving desperation, just seeking to see and be seen. You know, Ada Limon talks about not just being a witness, but witnessed. Seen up close in our lives, in all of our tenderness and complexity and fragility. and you know for better or worse the major place people have found that down the centuries is in these ecstatic religious experiences right and I had one and it was undeniable and it changed me at a very deep cellular level and yet in lots of ways didn't make any sense intellectually and you know as anyone listening will know if they've not been living under a rock the institutions of religion can be everything from sort of comically disappointing to actively traumatizing.

7:37And so can Christians, including me, right? So I then had this major, people use the language of deconstruction now, and it wasn't really called that when I went through it because I'm old, but it used to be called the, you know, Christ of faith, dark night of the soul. But I liked that language of deconstruction because it did feel like my house was falling down around me and the foundations on which I'd built my whole sense of self just gave way and it was horrible. I think about this all the time in my relationships that I think the hardest thing to move from, because I don't know that there's a lot of things we actually get over, is disappointment.

8:13In disappointment is probably where I think for me personally, judgment lives. It's really firmly cemented in the foundation of the space and the judgment is so harsh and I'm so married to it and intertwined that for me, whenever I'm having any type of relational fracture, I can almost always put disappointment at the center of it. I think that that's what happens with religion where you're just kind of like, I see the hope. And then you see the thing that the church does to some people and the ways in which it subjugates and, and, and, and oppresses and, and, and, and depresses and does, you know, you, you see this harm and you see the ways in which it becomes entangled and you know in white supremacy or in you know all these different kinds of ways in which people don't get to belong on her and that disappointment I find is kind of really that thing that makes it really easy to kind of stick your foot in the mud and turn away from the institutions of religion but as I say if you're ever turning your back on an institution it's usually you know it what an institution is always a collection of people.

9:19So there's always like the micro place that we have to ask ourselves about those things too, which is why I say, you know, when I have the hot, my highest judgments of religious institutions, they're usually reflective of my highest judgments I have interpersonally. I had a conversation with a guy called Kurt Thompson, who is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, writes a lot about spirituality, mental health, neurobiology. And we were talking about this, this this wider sense that a lot of people are feeling very disappointed by religion and by the structures of the church and this deconstruction moment and i asked whether that was showing up in his practice and things were going on and he said this thing and he said if you go digging uh with people who are in that moment and they are able to be emotionally honest enough to get there very often it's not with the institutions of the church it is with a person it is with a parent or a pastor or a leader who turned out to be corrupt and they had trusted right and that it's a that that's very raw and interpersonally difficult because that's real right it's up close in our life there might actually be some relational work we could also do even if it's we're not able to reconcile or maybe we shouldn't but we could maybe work on our side of what's gone on or how we respond to the moment and he's like and it's easier and he understands why i understand why because i did it it's easier to generalize right it's easier to go it's all the institutions it's the whole church and so i feel like both of you having said something similar to me within two weeks means that there's some something kind of a word in season that i really need to hear that everything comes down to relationship right comes down to relationship with our own soul with other people and with the earth and i believe with divine love and putting those things at the heart, realizing that these fractures and these withdrawing into ourselves are what are keeping us from fullness of life and that we can move towards them is the thread I've been trying to pull on.

11:22Yeah. Where are you in your faith and religion today in comparison with the 15-year-old who was confronted with it in a kind of beautiful way? So there's a philosopher called Paul Ricoeur, and he talks about having a second naivete with a lot of these deep things. And I think that best describes it. You know, I really tried, I really tried hard to shake it off. I worked very hard at being an atheist after it all fell apart. And for me, it was mainly about the Bible. The Bible just suddenly ceased to make any sense. And it was dark and spiky and scary. And I'd never been taught to read it. And I was working on this BBC television program.

12:04turning it into a drama and suddenly I was like well I only know the nice bits and it turns out there's not it's not all nice bits there's a complex book right and it fell apart and I I really worked hard to reject it I decided I would be an atheist but I'm just crap at it Cleo I don't have the temperamental ability to be an atheist I could not shake God off god would not leave me alone and so it took a long time to rebuild trust in god i still still feel like i'm i don't am i rebuilding trust in the church i think i'm just in a sort of p i'm in a more peaceful place that's it well that it is a human institution and deeply flawed and not a place to put your faith although that doesn't mean it can't be a place to belong but for a while it was very austere cautious faith this sense of like i tried to be an atheist and i failed i guess i'm a christian then but very reluctant about it in recent years it's felt that experiential embodied emotional intuitive practice you know hands in the air i i do ecstatic dancing at church i lie on the floor i have a cry almost every time i pray and it partly feels like it's what my body needs and it's what my soul needs but it also part of me part of it feels political honestly it feels like there's this guy called jules evans who's a philosopher and he wrote a book on ecstasy and he talks about how down the centuries mainly male mainly white elites both in the church and outside the church look down on these kind of ecstatic expressions right it's not reasonable it's not rational you should be contained either in a sort of atheist way or in a sort of constrained religion way and it is women and people of color and the poor who dance and wave their praise flags right yeah through suffering and through struggle and who are not scared of the emotional aspect of their faith and and so I'm back being really quite a weirdo like I was when I was 15 and and less ashamed I'm unashamed of it well and when When you think about, you know, there's so much conversation around how, you know, mostly straight men who go to sporting events do it.

14:22And it's probably their relationship to the ecstatic, to ecstasy. And we're always saying like, do they need to do that to have emotions? And I've kind of always been of the mindset that they actually need, you know, and I love the way that you write about, you know, orienting towards freedom in your book and really the kind of focus on becoming and being more free and, and, and how you especially try to move towards there for your children. And to me, I think that, you know, even though these, these, these groups, whether it's the kind of white male, wealthy straight, you know, the, the people who kind of face the least of kind of structural society, societal oppression, no there that doesn't mean that you have you you're spiritually free and emotionally free and or you know as Brené Brown would say is that you know they're they get to kind of like ride on the white horse but then they have to have to die on that white horse too and because they can't say I need help when I'm on it you know and I think that when they're at these games and they're just I just went to a Yankee game I go to a Yankee game they've been in every summer by one of my favorite things to do.

15:32And I was there and you're just people are, they, even if they know their team is going to lose the whole time, they're screaming and their hands are up and they get to yell and they get to look at a stranger and they get to say, Oh my God, because guess what? The stranger is a witness. They're not judging. They're not wanting, they're not anything. They're actually in witness and also in the energy as well. And I always say that I love to start the summer with a baseball game because I love to be the witness of that really, really kind of high key, ecstatic energy. Collective ritual. The Durkheim calls them collective effervescence.

16:10And we need it, right? We're not designed to be on our own. I don't know that many people feel loads of joy watching Netflix on their own. Like a really, really great show that is a genius might get you there occasionally. But we are... But most people also, they understand the context of the show. they watch by getting on Twitter to be in community about the thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's always stretching outward beyond us. We are made for each other. We are made by each other. And so many things that I think are harming us are when we try and deny that. We try and deny that we want to be together.

16:44We want to be seen. We want to be known. We want to be making meaning together, sort of turning our attention in the same direction together, solving problems together. and the trouble is human beings are really hard work and annoying and we are out of the habit of it right so disappointing and all of the structures that used to hold us together all the institutional frames right the unions and the congregations and the workplaces and the social clubs we've stopped showing up for them and stop providing services that actually help people So usually at your community center, there was beyond the hobby that is also helpful.

17:27There was probably also the same place where you get soups and this or that, or, you know, kind of things that would help you make ends meet in your life, in my way. And you knew your neighbors, right? I feel this strong sense of we try and keep ourselves safe with prosperity when our safety is in each other. Yeah. But if we don't know each other, we can't keep each other safe. And now so much public space has been privatized. And I think that there was a moment in the pandemic, and it happens in disasters, where you suddenly realize that these disembodied digital lives we live are very fragile.

18:06And actually proximity in emergencies is what you need. You need someone who can actually come and bring your shopping. Or when you are injured, can take you to hospital. There's a lot of evidence. I do some affiliation and mediation and conflict resolution. There's a lot of evidence that if you have reasonably high trust in a local community, then post disaster recovery can be quite fast and actually leave you in a better place than before, because the power of working together to fix problems and to face things empowers us and makes us feel more human and is strangely joyful. if you don't have high trust in a community you get none of that post-traumatic growth on my like do me a days on my like hard-headed pragmatist days i'm like the the thing we can do for the future of this planet and the future of society is go around and knock on our neighbor's door and open offer them a piece of cake or whatever it is because then when the shit hits the fan we have better civic infrastructure than we would have had otherwise yeah but it requires you to be the earnest awkward one and sometimes you get rejected and disappointed

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20:23I want to talk about Fully Alive because I want to, you talk about this in the book and I didn't even know the origin of the seven deadly sins, kind of the monks. And so I want to talk about why you wanted to write this book, especially now that I know you're kind of like, you know, the Bible traumatized you. I love the question you have, you know, how can I move from sloth to attention in order to make the most of my short life and stop getting distracted by trivialities? Like I, even the word sloth, I just, I don't know. I like died laughing. I don't know. So talk to me about getting into this.

21:03And then I want to kind of pull apart a couple of the sins with you. Thank you. So when I found my way back into faith, I had this real sense of, oh gosh, there's a lot of treasure in here. And I'd been just part of one little narrow bit, but I just started discovering the mystics. I started discovering the contemplative practice, you know, the Pentecostal. I was like that, that there is my, my experience of my faith, despite the public branding and despite all the things that we know about is an extraordinarily rich source of wisdom and humane, psychologically astute practices. Religions just sort of know how humans work, right?

21:44What motivate us, how we structure our attention, how we actually change and all and and the sense that actually there's some love at the center of all this that i get to be i get to walk in relationship with and i worked at the bbc and then i ran a think tank and i got more and more frustrated about this gap between my lived experience of the thing and the public narratives around it and so i knew it was something that i wanted to go can i just tell a slightly different story can i tell a slightly better story can i complexify this story and also frankly take some of it back from the largely American edges of the thing that feel to me so deeply unrepresentative of the Jesus that I see in the gospels.

22:23So I knew I wanted to translate some of it. I knew I wanted to write about attention. I knew I wanted to write about the Christian sexual ethic. I wanted to write about ecstasy. And I have this amazing agent who was working with me on it, even though she's doggedly non-religious. And she was like, I was like, you know, I'm really impressed with her courage of trying to sell a mainstream book about faith because there aren't really many that cross outside, right? That are of any use or interest to people who would not already call themselves religious or might have some very good reasons, frankly, to be hostile, suspicious.

22:51But I couldn't work out how to structure it. And I sat down and kind of laid out the themes and was like, this is why is this sounding familiar? Why is this sounding familiar? These seven things. And I realized that I was basically circling around the seven deadly sins and had been very influenced by this guy called Francis Spufford, who's an amazing, amazing New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling novelist, teaches creative writing at one of the big creative writing courses in the UK called Francis Spufford. And his definition of sin, what's your swearing policy on this podcast? Oh, swear away.

23:23Great, great. It's one big cultural difference. British people are much swearer than Americans, I have realized. But Francis Buffett's definition of sin is the human propensity to fuck things up. And that sense of there is something that is stopping us living up to our values and our aspirations. And we can have these lovely principles, but I don't know about anyone else. I find it quite difficult to be honest and brave and loving and free and to pay attention to the right things. And to not be full of hate and rage and greed and all these things. So the deeper I got into the tradition, the more I realized that I really did want to write about sin.

24:02I really wanted to reclaim it as a psychologically astute concept that's about relationship and fracture, not legal or economic punishment and reward structures, which is one completely valid way of reading my tradition. But I read it as this is about relationship. It's about we are designed for relationship and we resist that. And we resist that in all these ways. And it turns out the desert monks understood human nature about as well as we do. Right. And that there was treasure in here. It surprised me. I did not go into this thinking the seven deadly sins would be such a rich framework for self-reflection, but they really are.

24:39I was just talking about this last night at dinner. I was saying that, you know, if the thing I'm really trying to let go of is the ways in which I've decided that I am someone who deserves constant interruption. because in this addiction to holding onto something that will disrupt me no matter what, there's something where there's a choice I have made along the way that whether it's some type of new kind of worship at the altar of productivity rather than even efficiency, by the way, and not really wanting to dismantle efficiency and saying productivity is obviously just our kind of the ways in which late stage capitalism has kind of hijacked us all.

25:19But efficiency, this idea that my life is efficient, that I'm able to do things well and in a way in which I can live in whatever I want to be abundant to be abundant. Because to me, when I think of efficiency, I think of it as a means to making time for things that I enjoy. And so when I'm trying to think about how do I do something, it's not about like, oh, I just want to do it really quickly and have these results so I can deny. I think about efficiency because I like to be efficient in order to be wherever I'd like to be. And so I was saying that I was like, I'm really trying to let go of this so that I can be present and actually in order to be, you know, available to receive whatever gifts are in the moment and give those gifts as well.

26:08But also just for the sake of being efficient so that I can actually have more power in my own life to have the time to do the things I want to do, which I think is like the big myth of the phone, right? Because it's like, you can send an email and you can do all this and you can do all these things so fast. But then we all still know that we need to like kind of sit down and bring attention and awareness to something if we want to do it well. It's that one important email, you're not going to write it in your car on your phone or do the thing you're going to be, you're going to say, I've got to sit down and write this letter in a way.

26:36And so I'd love to talk about the kind of go into the sloth attention space with you. Yeah, it feels absolutely endemic, doesn't it? We talk about the attention economy and in my head it's now the acediac economy because the word that the desert monks use is acedia and it doesn't quite translate into sloth because we think of sloth as laziness, right? Just like lying around. Acedia is more spiritual apathy, busy work, distracting ourselves from the really important things with nonsense, you know, listlessness, ennui, it's all in there. But for me, it's just the bit of me that doesn't pay attention to the things that I, in theory, want to define my life.

27:21You know, I want relationships to be at the heart of my life. I want, and it's, you know, right from my tradition, someone asked Jesus, what is life all about? And he says, love God and love people. That's the whole law. Your horizontal and vertical relationships are the defining fact of your life. And that is what I've signed up to. Right. And yet I can be with my kids and think I'll just double check the weather. Oh, there's my eBay alert and what's going on on Instagram. And I'm not looking in them. I am not looking in the face. Right. And the same with my husband, with my housemates, you know, we live in this small intentional community deliberately to try and kind of form my attention the way that I want it to go.

28:05And yet still these devices are sucking me into a world which I have not consented to be part of and forming me in ways that I am not choosing to go. And so I came to see how much religious practices, rituals, postures are a way that we can push back against that. That actually, you know, Rowan Williams says this, thing that we know we know that religions will give us an ethical framework and they might give us some existential comfort but what we forget is that their core genius is they help us structure our time and when we can structure our time we structure our attention and when we structure our attention we take control of who we are becoming and this this theme of becoming is central to my life it's all through the book the the sort of religious term that gets used is formation.

28:57It's just, who are you becoming? And my phone is forming me and I want it to form me less. And so these liturgies of celebration, Thanksgiving, confession, prayer, meditation, generosity, these rituals that we find, and crucially they're collective, which I think really helps us. These collective rituals that we find in religious traditions are linked to distraction because they're a medicine for it. And I didn't honestly have been a Christian on and off for 20 years and I hadn't really worked that out. And now that I have, when I feel fractured and scattered, I'm like, put your phone down and go to the chapel at the bottom of our garden in our little commune or, you know, read a sacred text with attention or do a meditation practice because these are things I want to be changing me, informing me rather than the noise and the hustle of the digital world, which I seem to spend half my life semi-living in.

30:03Obviously, there's been so much conversation around this way of kind of getting off of our devices or raising kids that don't get smart devices until they're much older than they have been in the current generation that's grown up with having a phone and social media their entire lives. so many people kind of do say this thing of you know we're all following this one doctor is telling all the kids to get off their phones and we're not giving our phones these kids phones until after they're out of high school or something something something and I was like and I remember saying to my partner I was like it's interesting because a lot of people that I witness as chronically online are the parents saying that they should yeah not going to give their kids this and as we know and to quote James Baldwin you know children never listen to their elders, but they never fail to imitate them.

30:48And I remember watching it. God, I, there is no way I can tell my four and a half year old and my almost three year old that they should not do something I am doing all the time, you know, and they should not have something attached to them that I am so attached to. Yeah. It just, it wouldn't matter, you know, I, cause I know that we are our values. And I know that our values come from what we value. And so if I value this thing so much that it must be in my hands, 90 % of my waking hours, this is a core value in my home. And therefore everything that comes with it is a value of, and it is what I think I deserve.