Mark your calendars: I’m hosting a weekend workshop (via Zoom) on Human Design with Emma Dunwoody on Saturday, July 27th at 4pm PST—come join us! (Generate your chart on Emma’s site if you haven’t done this before and bring it with you to the call—Emma will be taking us through the basics and then we’ll dig into some questions. This is for paid PTT subscribers, I’ll send the link in the coming weeks!
I’ve been wearing my Costco sweatshirt a lot. For one, it still has its new sweatshirt fuzzy feel. But it also makes me laugh, and makes other people laugh—and everyone assumes it’s a high fashion collaboration and that I bought it at Kith. (I first spotted it on a teen in line at Disneyland…when I rushed him to ask him where he bought it he looked at my like I was an idiot: “Ummm, I bought it at Costco.”)
I’m happy to be a billboard for Costco. In fact, I realized the other day that I think Costco is the only club I’ve actually ever joined—aside from various gyms. I wasn’t in a Secret Society in college, and I wasn’t in a sorority. I’ve never belonged to Soho House, Chief, or YPO. I don’t even belong to the Admiral’s Club and I fly almost every week. That said, I feel like I’m always a guest at other peoples’ clubs, in part because they want to amortize their membership fee and dues by eating all their meals there. (I won’t be sad if I never have another meal at the San Vicente Bungalows, sorry SVB fans
I guess I understand the pull—after all, as I wrote the other week, I’m a creature of habit and there’s probably nothing more consistent or routine-like than a club. But I’ve never been compelled to beg for membership: It’s never occurred to me to join, particularly because I don’t love the intimations of class distinctions…if there’s one thing that we don’t talk about enough, it’s that class is mighty powerful in terms of determining the course of your life.
All that said, I’m as hungry for community as the next person—and am consciously trying to create one, which includes all of you.
I recently read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. It’s been on my TBR pile for years, and I felt like I needed to read something by Haidt—I have a mental block against The Anxious Generation, which is a conversation for another day. The Righteous Mind is fascinating and I’ll have plenty to say about it in coming weeks—specifically how in Haidt’s view, morality is intuitive and reason and rationality are simply tools to justify these intuitive inclinations (i.e. we use rationality and reason to hunt for proof of our point-of-view and not so much to suss out the “truth,” whatever it may be). But Haidt also spends a fair amount of the book exploring a comprehensive moral matrix (fascinating) along with the need for the divine—or specifically, a need to belong to something bigger than ourselves, balanced by a hunger for awe. He spends a fair number of pages exploring (and gently denouncing) the New Atheist movement for (willfully) misunderstanding the role of religion in peoples’ lives—he points out that people are motivated to show up for each other not because of shared beliefs but because of belonging. Absent something to belong to, we are adrift.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot in light of the retreat that Courtney Smith and I led last month in North Carolina—it was amazing, a story for another day—because hunger for community was a red thread shared by almost every woman who came. We all want community. Desperately.
To that end, I’m wondering how best to serve you, particularly because I’ve come to understand that many of you come here, and listen to the podcast, because you’re interested in the same things—and don’t necessarily have anyone to talk to about this stuff in your neighborhood, or at the office, or on coffee runs. I’m wondering how best to support this.
Some of you pay for this newsletter and some of you don’t (payment is deeply appreciated, particularly because it helps me prioritize this above other things)—if you don’t pay for PTT, what would you pay for? And if you do pay for PTT, what do you long for? Right now, a paid membership nets you my gratitude, access to the archives, and the occasional weekend workshop (see below). Would you want more newsletters (Q&A’s with healers and thinkers)? Would you want access to a community on a platform like Slack? Would you want more weekend workshops on Zoom? Would you want monthly office hours on Zoom to drop-in and chat? Let me know in the comments what would serve.
(And, if you didn’t catch the theme, I’m more interested in community than clubs so would never want $$ to be a barrier—I’m always happy to comp subscriptions.)
THE LATEST FROM THE PODCAST:
6/21: Cracking mental illness with Karl Deisseroth, M.D., PhD
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
6/14: Growing ourselves up with Ken Wilber
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
6/7: Connecting with the divine with Nicole Avant
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
6/3: Getting back into our bodies with Prentis Hemphill
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
5/30: The myth of resilience with Soraya Chemaly
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
5/27: Metabolizing our traumatic inheritance with Resmaa Menakem
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
5/23: Taking back your brain with Kara Loewentheil
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
5/20: The creation of somatic experiencing with Peter Levine, Ph.D
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
5/16: Choosing wholeness over wokeness with Africa Brooke
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5/13: A toolkit for transforming trauma with James Gordon, M.D.
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
THE LATEST POSTS:
What’s Your Zone of Genius? Hint: It Probably Doesn’t Feel Like Work
Do You Have an Upper Limit Problem? I Think I Do.
A Love Letter to Routine: May They Bring You the Space You Need
Making Decisions Right: There’s No Science, Just Gut
Who is “Manning” Your Basecamp: Some Thoughts on Last Week
We Need Privacy: Contemplating the Darkness of the Feminine with Helen Luke
What Are We “Really, Actually” Saying?: Carol Gilligan Offers Some Answers
Calling the Cassandras: What if We Stop Dismissing What We Don’t Want to Hear?
Accepting the Dregs: When You Want the Bigger Cookie
On Beauty: Do You Feel Invisible?
The Cosmic Egg: We are Missing THE Story
Intergenerational Anxiety: Understanding which Part is Ours
One Thing We Need to Learn: A Few Notes on Andrew Huberman
You Have to Start Where You Are
Synchronicity & Fate: Signs are Signs, But They Still Require Discernment
PART 4: The Achilles Heel of Women
PART 3: Who Gets to Be an Expert?
PART 2: The Perception (and Reality) of Scarcity
PART 1: Ending the “Manel”—Doing this Requires Understanding Ourselves
Full archive HERE
My New York Times bestselling book—On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good—is out now.
I'm here because I value your areas of curiosity and seek to learn through you and from you and your guests. That said, I'd be very interested in applying the theories, frameworks, principles, etc. to myself. Short-form generative, practical, or applied workshops would be super interesting to me, and I'd pay for them a la carte on top of my Substack subscription. Think mini 2- to 4-hour workshops vs. a weekend or week-long workshop many of your guests provide. Thanks for asking!
I appreciate what you offer. Your newsletter and podcast have changed me and with affirmation, inspiration and insights. I share your content frequently and use them as conversation with family and friends. And yes you should be compensated in a variety of currencies — monetary and in kind and otherwise.