IN CONVERSATION WITH ELIZABETH LESSER

On a winter morning in January, I spoke with Elizabeth Lesser about her new book, Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are the Storytellers, The Human Story Changes. Elizabeth is the author of several bestselling books, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow and Marrow: Love, Loss & What Matters Most. She is the cofounder of Omega Institute, recognized internationally for its workshops and conferences in wellness, spirituality, creativity, and social change. She has given two popular TED talks, and is one of Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul 100, a collection of a hundred leaders who are using their voices and talent to elevate humanity.

The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity and brevity.

Sylwia: Elizabeth, where did the inspiration to write Cassandra Speaks come from and why was it important to you to write a book like this?

Elizabeth: Well, in some ways the inspiration can be traced all the way back to when I was a little girl. I grew up in a family of primarily women: me, my three sisters, my mother, my grandmother, my great aunt and one man in the family, my father. My father was typical of his generation - his voice was the only one that mattered and we all had to do whatever he said. Everyone went along with it, except for me. I don’t know why. I was sort of born with this egalitarian streak in me. I would wonder why with seven women and one guy none of us got a vote. 

By the time I got to college, I was proud to call myself a feminist and have been so my whole life. I found that wherever I went, the work world, the culture and community, that same idea was present - that a man’s values and point of view were more important than a woman’s. For the past 20 years, I’ve been questioning this idea and wondering, what would power look like if women really had an equal voice? How would we do things differently?  Can women do power differently? When I started convening conferences around this idea at Omega Institute, Women in Power, I began to amass a body of work considering the questions, how did we get to this place in our culture where women’s voices aren’t respected? And, looking back at old stories that stick to us, all the way back to our origin stories and moving forward to now, how do we change the way women are perceived? That was the impetus of the book.

I’m really curious about your egalitarian streak. How did you hold onto your truth while knowing that the society within which you operated at the time wasn’t supportive of these ideas?

Elizabeth: I don’t want to give the wrong impression that I always knew who I was and I always had a strong voice or that I always stood up to injustice. I’ve suffered as much from questioning who I am and questioning my equal rights, squashing my creativity and my voice as much as anyone has, women or men.

I think all of us have to go on a journey to find our true self and to have enough confidence to express it. Whether a blessing or a curse, that egalitarian streak never left me. When you have such a streak in you, you see inequality everywhere and you want to fight for it, not just for yourself but for everyone, and it makes for an interesting yet complicated life. That streak always stayed alive in me, and at different times in my life I had to work hard to nurture it. I also had to find constructive ways to express it, particularly in times when my life fell apart such as during my marriage - I just had to speak up, I could not rest in inequality. 

Being a spiritual seeker, as someone who’s always wanted to look within and work on myself, has helped me find my voice but do it in a way that’s as kind and inclusive and loving as possible, not just angry and agitated and blameful. I’m an “innervist.” It’s a word I made up, and I go into this a lot in Cassandra Speaks. There are two streams within ourselves: the desire to work on the self and the desire to make change in the world. I give them equal weight in my life.

Why is Cassandra’s story the centerpiece of the book?

Elizabeth: I knew I was writing a book about how the old stories, the myths, the origin tales, the religious stories, the literary stories created our culture throughout the sweep of history. The ancient story of Adam and Eve from the bible, the Greek myths of Pandora, and Cassandra, the Odyssey and the Iliad - these stories have lived longer than any of the governments or countries they came from. Since most of the stories that molded our culture come from men, I wanted to look back and ask - what if women had also been the tellers of the tales? How would our culture change? 

One day I was watching the televised trial of Dr. Larry Nassar, who was the Olympic doctor who had been molesting gymnasts and other athletes for 30 years. Girls had been telling their parents, their schools, their universities, their coaches, even the United States Olympic Committee that this doctor was harming them, but no one believed them, not even their parents sometimes. 

Until one judge, this wonderful woman, Judge Aquilina, decided to allow any young woman who wanted to testify in the trial against Dr. Nassar to speak for as long as she wanted while Dr. Nassar would have to sit there and listen. The trial went on for days because 125 young women and girls testified about what he had done. I watched these girls and I watched their faces change as they got to tell their story and cry and be listened to with dignity by this judge. I thought - this is the same story, the story of Cassandra. In that moment, I saw that we could rewrite the story of Cassandra. 

Cassandra was the Greek princess who was given the gift of prophecy by the god Apollo. When she wouldn’t sleep with him, he punished her by giving her the gift of clairvoyance while also cursing her so that no one would believe her prophecies. You could say that the girls too were cursed, not to be believed - but now they were speaking out and believed.  Because of that and all of the things that were going on in the MeToo Movement; and not just sexual abuse, but women speaking our truth, being respected, being believed and therefore being given a chance to change the way our culture works, I knew the book was going to be called Casandra Speaks.

Also, when I decided to call the book Casandra Speaks, it wasn’t just about the big issues that women are not listened to or believed. It shows up in our everyday lives. Whether you’re in a meeting at work and something about the tone of your voice or what you’re talking about feels off and you look around the room, especially if it’s a room full of men, and you realize - they’re not hearing me, they’re not valuing me, they’re not seeing me. You may feel, I have to act like them in order to be taken seriously, I have to prove my masculinity here. This is what I’m interested in, not so much the bigger issues of sexual abuse. It’s more about the everyday changes we need in order for women to be taken seriously.

You touch upon mythology and religious text. The stories you share in the book highlight how women have been perceived as inherently deficient. Do you think these stories have had an impact on women’s psyche?

Elizabeth: For thousands of years women have been told - you were born second but you were the first to sin. That’s the story of Adam and Eve, that’s the story of Pandora, and many other mythologies around the world, where women are second and, as you said, somehow perceived deficient, not as valuable as men.

If that’s what you’re told over and over, you begin to accept abuse, roles that may not fit your personality at all, second class citizenship, and you accept it because you believe the stories. That’s why I believe it's so important to know the stories and go back and really read the story of Adam and Eve and really wonder why we may allow a man at work to talk to us poorly. Because that’s the story we all believed, that’s the water we’re all swimming in.

I love the section of the book where you focus on power and how uncomfortable women are with feeling powerful. Do you recall your first moment or moments when you consciously made a decision to embrace your power?

Elizabeth: Well, there are some of those…I call them “swinging door moments.” The door swings one way and you know you can never go back. There was a moment in my life at work when I knew that if I didn’t speak my truth to power, that I would never be able to live with myself. I had been allowing a certain person to prevail at work even though I knew not only was he belittling me but really tainting the whole company. It was a moment when I thought, well, I could actually lose my job or just forever be disempowered even more. So I thought - I have to speak my truth or I won’t be able to live with myself. I think of that moment often as one of those “swinging doors.” 

That said, learning to embrace power is a slow accumulation, a long and difficult process. There is claiming your power and your seat but then once you get some, how are you going to do it differently? Do you just want power so you can recreate the same ego-based, hyper-masculine, competitive world or do you want to try to do something different? Do you want to listen within, to your deeper voice? In many women, that deeper voice is about care taking, it’s about cooperation, it’s about valuing everyone’s voices and empowering, “power with” as opposed to “power over.” Are you interested in becoming a new kind of leader rather than the type of leader who is constantly trying to prove their masculinity by being violent or dominating and using fear to motivate? Do we want to just recreate that or do we want to create a new way of being powerful?

Keeping with the theme of power, I’ve noticed that women have such a hard time accepting even the smallest of compliments. How do we move from something so basic to embracing power? How do we help ourselves and each other?

Elizabeth: So many different ways. There is our own inner way which requires doing inner work. I see it as both psychological and spiritual. To me being in psychotherapy, having a therapist, or a coach is actually a very radical and powerful act. With most good therapists, the work comes down to listening within and paying attention to those voices that tell you you’re not good enough or you should stay in the background and support other people but never shine your own light too bright.

When you’re in therapy you begin to ask - whose voice is that? Is that my mother’s voice, is that my father’s voice, is that the culture’s voice? Why do I act like this? That’s what therapy is good for. And then having a meditation practice where we can sink into a deeper place and begin to validate our own voice while silencing the voices that dominate us instinctually so much of the time.

Another way is to have what I call “womances.” You know how there are bromance movies? Well, I call relationships with women “womances.” This idea that women don’t support each other, that’s a myth. Finding a band of women at work or at home who you can go to and get a reflection of your power from, women who will compliment you, tell you what they see in you that you can’t see in yourself, women who really have your back -  this is so important. Finding a tribe of “womantic” friends that celebrate women’s voices helps us get over our impostor syndrome and assert that we belong. 

We’ve all seen women who are educated and accomplished who still feel like an impostor. You talk about overcoming impostor syndrome. Do you still ever feel like an impostor?

Elizabeth: All the time. On the phone with you right now. It’s crazy! 

It’s so ingrained in us as women not to, as you said, accept a compliment, not to think of ourselves as strong, valid individuals. Now a part of the impostor syndrome is a quality in myself I don’t want to let go of - having a humble spirit, having a sense of wonder about oneself and the world and never getting too seduced by one’s ego and power, staying real, staying authentic, staying always open to ways one can change and improve. That’s a beautiful part of oneself and I think women, because we have that tendency to care and to love and to take care of others, it adds to our humility. But, it also can make us never take care of ourselves, never really take credit for who we are.  

So it’s important to find this beautiful balance of staying humble and knowing who you are. I actually offer a practice at the end of Cassandra Speaks that I call “do no harm but take no shit.” It’s a meditation practice, a Buddhist practice but I gave it that name. It’s where you have a strong back when you sit but you also have a very soft and open heart, trying to keep that sweet spot between doing no harm in the world and taking no shit, that’s my daily practice and prayer.

This balance you’re talking about reminds me of the practice to learn how to get comfortable with staying uncomfortable.

Elizabeth: Yeah. If every time we feel uncomfortable, we shut down out of fear or shame, our creativity dries up. Discomfort is often the fuel of creativity. If you feel the discomfort, it makes you want to change things and to do something new, such as help build a movement or create a better gadget. So staying open to discomfort, staying open even when things are difficult or painful is an important practice. In my first job in life, I was a midwife. I delivered babies and for anyone who has had a baby, this metaphor of staying open during the pain of contractions will make sense. If you clamp shut because of the pain, your labor is longer. If you open to it, and it feels so counterintuitive, then you are opening the womb and the baby comes out.

Birthing process! If that’s all we learn as women, trusting the body to know what to do, feeling the discomfort and relaxing into the difficulty and then out of it comes a new life, new creation.

You are the cofounder of Omega Institute. What advice do you have for someone who is following their own inner guide on a path that may be less traveled?

Elizabeth: It’s the ultimate birthing process. It’s like having a little stone in your shoe and you keep walking even though it’s uncomfortable. Again, meditation and therapy and things like that are so handy because if you just never let yourself feel the discomfort, really feel it, and listen to it and tend to it and ask it what it has come to teach you, you just go through life doing what everybody else does. So I would say, if you feel something in your shoe, in your soul gnawing at you, calling your name at least listen to it, at least dignify it, and at least quiet the negative voices and allow yourself to dream a little. I start the book with a quote from Toni Morrison who says “As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.” It’s the thinking, it’s the nagging mind that says you can’t or that somebody else did it better. Allow yourself to dream.

Learn more about Elizabeth and her work at elizabethlesser.org