Soulful Alchemy: Healing Relationships with Self & Other

Podcast Highlights

• Exploring the concept of trust amidst uncertainty.
• Lily’s lessons from being caught shoplifting at 13 years old.
• The importance of love and curiosity in relationships.
• Deepening inner awareness to foster healthier relationships.
• Lily’s perspectives from her unconventional upbringing in the wilderness.
• Lily’s story of reclaiming her authentic, uninhibited self.
• The sacred process of healing in relationship.
• How Lily works with group couples therapy.
• How to cultivate genuine self-improvement.
• Bringing humility to the psychedelic healing process.

Show Links

1. Lily’s website
2. Lily on Instagram
3. Thich Nhat Hanh
4. Sounds True
5. Deepak Chopra
6. Book, The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman
7. Psychedelic Coaching Institute’s Coaching Certification Program
8. Tony Robbins
9. Landmark Worldwide
10. (podcast) Moms on Mushrooms: Healing, Community, & Education for Mothers
11. (podcast) Question Everything: Destigmatizing Mushrooms For Mothers
12. (podcast) The Connection Experience: Psychedelics & Reinvigorating Relationships
13. (podcast) How Inner Reflection Catalyzes External Evolution
14. Join the upcoming webinar to learn about The Psychedelic Coaching Institute’s Certification Program

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Podcast Transcript

0:00:00.2 Joseph Anew: Welcome back to The Psychedelic Podcast by Third Wave, where we explore how the safe and responsible use of psychedelic medicines can catalyze individual and collective transformation. I am your host, Joseph Anew and today, I am speaking with Lily Eggers, founder of Rooted Relationships.

 

0:00:20.6 Lily Eggers: And I think that's what I love actually about doing medicine work with couples is it's like they remember that they value this person. Like they get stuck in these loops of unconsciousness where they're just complaining in their heads. You don't do this, you do that. And then you give them a little bit of MDMA or whatever, whatever the compound they're interested in exploring. And so often you can see the wiring shift into you, I've missed you. I've slept in the same bed with you for years and I forgot that this is what matters. This is what I care about.

 

0:01:00.9 Paul F. Austin: Welcome to the Psychedelic Podcast by Third Wave. Audio mycelium connecting you to the luminaries and thought leaders of the psychedelic renaissance. We bring you illuminating conversations with scientists, therapists, entrepreneurs, coaches, doctors, and shamanic practitioners, exploring how we can best use psychedelic medicine to accelerate personal healing, peak performance, and collective transformation.

 

0:01:32.1 Paul F. Austin: Hey, listeners. Today's podcast is brought to you by the Apollo wearable. I first started wearing the Apollo in the midst of the COVID quarantine over two years ago. It helped my body to regulate itself, to calm down, to stay more focused, and to meditate in the morning. And I use it to really regulate my nervous system in a time of incredible stress, and I've continued to use it on a day-to-day basis. It is indispensable in my daily routine. Here's the thing. The Apollo is a wearable that improves your body's resilience to stress by helping you to sleep better, stay calm, and stay more focused. Developed by neuroscientists and physicians, the Apollo wearable delivers gentle soothing vibrations that condition your nervous system to recover and rebalance after stress. I tell folks that it's like a microdose on your wrist that helps you to feel more present and connected, especially when in the midst of a psychedelic experience. It's a phenomenal compliment to any psychedelic experience.

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0:03:16.4 Joseph Anew: Today's episode of The Psychedelic Podcast is brought to you by Psyched Wellness. Psyched Wellness has this amazing product, it's called CALM, and it has been developed by wellness professionals, along with leading scientists, and is the very first over-the-counter Amanita muscaria extract that may help you reduce stress, ease muscular tension, and promote deeper more restorative sleep.

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0:04:45.3 Joseph Anew: Hey listeners, this is Joseph Anew Institute director at the Psychedelic Coaching Institute and your brand new cohost of this podcast. Welcome back to the Psychedelic Podcast. In today's episode, we explore what role plant medicines play in self-discovery and relational healing. How can shame and embarrassment become transformative experiences? In what ways do traditional therapy models fall short? And how may experiential methods fill the gaps? Today we have Lily Eggers on the podcast. Lily is a licensed marriage and family therapist and the founder of Rooted Relationships. She is also a graduate of our coaching certification program, which is how her and I were connected.

 

0:05:30.8 Joseph Anew: And for anybody out there interested in what we are doing at the Psychedelic Coaching Institute with the the coaching certification program, well, head on over to thethirdwave.co/webinar. That's thethirdwave.co/webinar. Paul Austin and myself are going to be hosting a webinar on September 26th, diving deep into all the ins and outs of the program for anybody that may be interested in becoming a certified coach in the psychedelic space. And on today's show, Lily and I explore the concept of trust amidst uncertainty. We dive deep into the lessons and really the impact that being caught shoplifting at age 13 had on Lily's entire future.

 

0:06:18.2 Joseph Anew: We talk about the importance of love and curiosity in relationships, how deepening inner awareness to foster healthy relationships is so essential. We talk about Lily's perspectives on her unconventional upbringing in the wilderness and how to reclaim our authentic, uninhibited selves and really cultivate genuine self-improvement. Lily Eggers is a mother, an entrepreneur, a somatic couples therapist, a singer, a dancer, a medicine woman, a psychedelic journeyer. And she believes that every relationship can be shifted out of monotony and stuckness and into sacred intimacy and spiritual evolution. Her life's mission is to transform the stigma and shame around relationship therapy and coaching. Raised and homeschooled on 75 acres of Maine wilderness, Lily delights in bringing the wild into her life and her work.

 

0:07:11.5 Joseph Anew: As a somatic couples therapist, she adores igniting kindness, connection, playfulness, and passion into her clients' daily lives. Lily has trained with notable practitioners in the fields of psychology, as well as couples therapy, and she incorporates sacred plant medicine, ceremony, and ritual into her practice. Lily is currently writing a book designed to bring her tools, tips, and exercises to a broader audience. She is also working on a one-woman play about motherhood, identity, and psychedelics. It's called Moms on Drugs, which is going to be a fantastic show if anyone listening gets the opportunity to see it on the live stage. All right, that's it for now. I hope you enjoy my conversation today with Lily Eggers. Well, you just go wherever you want to go and we'll roll with it.

 

0:08:03.8 Lily Eggers: Yeah. Okay. I think that we'll find our way, I find mostly in life that when I don't plan, it's sort of like a psychedelic journey, like you just plant the intention and then stay in the moment and the best things emerge when they emerge, and so I'm all about making space for what is emergent naturally.

 

0:08:23.4 Joseph Anew: I love that, I love just... My wife and I were just talking about parenting, and there's this... Right now, like respectful parenting, conscious parenting, it's such a thing, and we were talking about how... It's so now it's like you can learn how to be a conscious parent, like "Here are the four things I do that makes me a conscious parent," but there's just this embodiment, this awareness, this intentionality, this general embodiment. That's actually the thing. And so there's a difference between just knowing and learning or having rules versus living with some intentionality and awareness.

 

0:09:12.5 Lily Eggers: Yeah, I mean, I feel like you're describing the thing that is like the left brain and the right brain. It's like the psychedelic experience and integration. Like it doesn't... It's like moving it out of conceptual and into practice and parenting. Oh my God, don't even get me started. I mean, I could talk for a long time about parenting. It's the greatest teacher, the greatest growth. My greatest growth has happened [laughter] in the humility of being a parent.

 

0:09:41.1 Joseph Anew: It's a great segue, like, 'cause to share just a little bit about my current situation, my wife is nine months pregnant. We moved last week to a new house, as you can see I'm in an empty house. I'm leading a six day retreat in Costa Rica for Third Wave next week. I have a three year old.

 

0:10:00.0 Lily Eggers: Oh my gosh. [laughter]

 

0:10:01.8 Joseph Anew: And there's this... And he's not in school. And there's this... What's been alive for me, and I know it's alive in your work, Lily, is this, my life is my practice right now. [laughter]

 

0:10:15.3 Lily Eggers: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. I think that there's been nothing more generative for me as a human being is deeply accepting that fact and trying to remember it every single moment of my life because there's so many opportunities to resist what is and I don't know about your kids. I have my first... I have two kids also one is an eight-year-old boy and I have a five and a half year old girl and my eight-year-old is like he's bursting with life force and it comes out in all these sort of unchecked ways. He hasn't learned to contain at all and the number of times I feel that sort of ancestral controlling like no it should be this way or you should move that way or modulate your voice in this way or say please and thank you and all it's just like constantly trying to navigate and manage and just sort of squeeze in and parenting and life in general. But anytime there's that sort of that feeling of wrestling with a moment and then being like, okay, how do I show up differently to this moment so that I can more greatly find my ease, find my breath, find my presence, because there's constantly something to provoke and trigger and ask me to try to control it or resist it. And more than ever, I think I see this in relationships. I see this in psychedelic journeys, certainly in my own journeying.

 

0:11:44.6 Lily Eggers: I remember before my first psychedelic, intentional, ceremonial psychedelic journey was with Ayahuasca, and it was maybe... I don't know, 2010. And I remember such a gift, a friend of mine gave before that first journey was trust the medicine, trust mama, grandmother Aya, trust that everything that's being shown to you is exactly right. And I feel like that invitation that she gave me, my friend gave me, and then I then had my first ceremonial psychedelic experience was transformative in some ways. It embodied this trust everything, stop arguing and negotiating reality. It's suffering. It is the root of all suffering, but finding how to show up, how to... It's like dancing. It's like dancing with reality instead of trying to arm wrestle it or something. [laughter]

 

0:12:50.7 Joseph Anew: I love that. And because dancing doesn't have a point. [laughter] Arm wrestling, we do it until one of us wins. And maybe we dance until the song ends, but there's a much different presence. So, Lily, what does it, I guess... So this idea of trust, because I think that's such an amazing permission and whether you're in an Ayahuasca ceremony or you've got small children, there's this awareness. So what more can you say on trust? When someone is told to trust?

 

0:13:32.1 Lily Eggers: There's something about, ooh, such a juicy question. Thanks for asking that. I like going into things deeply. I think it's twofold. It's almost like there's an embodying of personal responsibility of like, I am in this body. I have an opportunity to influence it. So I get to be with myself consciously, reflectively, with curiosity and openness. And I get to learn about how I bring myself to a moment. So there's that aspect of trust, which is, it's not just about the other person. It's not like... It's not just about, are they trustworthy and then I can trust them. It's can I embody faith? Like can I believe in I'm gonna be okay? Whether they do something unpredictable or unexpected or betrayal, whatever, that's using another person. It's actually an experience of like can I deeply, deeply relax into the reality that I'm held.

 

0:14:37.2 Lily Eggers: And that's where faith and the universe or God or spirituality comes into play for me is 'cause it really helps when you have... When you believe in that. [laughter] When you actually believe, I'm looked after I'm held, there's something greater than me. I find it's such a relief Joseph when I remind myself that there's a consciousness that's way greater than mine. I don't know, what a relief it is to relax into that reality of I don't know. And so when I really connect to my, I don't know, and I don't... And the way that I feel about certain, this is bad and this is good and this shouldn't have happened. This was wrong. But when I actually like, whew, just let that one go, then I can be curious about what the learning is, what the lesson is, what might actually, how could this actually look really bad, but actually be really beautiful.

 

0:15:33.3 Lily Eggers: When I was about 13 years old, I got caught shoplifting and it was like a great shame. Like, oh my God, Lily oh my gosh, shoplifting this and that. And I was... My dad is a family physician and he's all known by the town and the police officer knew my dad. It was just... It was so awful. And what happened was this really beautiful, unforeseen thing around receiving the parenting, the tending that I really needed. I really needed in that moment and having... And being listened to and held and what happened and how did that feel good to you and where did you go? Where did you go? And it was... When I look back on it, it was the greatest gift to me to have been caught shoplifting because it forced me into acknowledging my pain and my confusion and my need for reflective parenting and help that I didn't know to ask for. So in the moment, it felt like I was going to die. I thought I was going to die of shame and embarrassment. And I thought, it was terrible in the moment. And then I feel like so much of life. When we make this space and let it be a growth experience, let it be a learning, let it be something that we actually come away from to imagine ourselves as like, oh my gosh, that happened to me. And I grew something I couldn't have possibly grown any other way.

 

0:17:06.5 Lily Eggers: You can't read about it in a book. You can't hear a podcast about it and be lectured. You can't be told that this is how it goes or you learn this piece of wisdom. You actually have to go into the depths of it and let it carry you. Let it actually change you. And that's where I feel trust, coming back to your original inquiry, trust is really about an internal experience of trust and faith and deep knowing that there is a greater wisdom and that the only thing we actually have control over is ourselves. It's not about the external, that is handing out... That's handing off our responsibility and our empowerment, really, when it's everybody else or the environment or the boss or the partner or the kid. I mean, for me, it's been my kid, I can do it with adults where I'm like, you're you and I'm me. You're you and I'm me. Give me a screaming two-year-old and suddenly we're one. We're on a roller coaster together. So, yeah. [laughter]

 

0:18:15.6 Joseph Anew: Hey listeners, a quick break from today's episode to share a word from our friends at Magi. If you're looking to add a tool in your toolbox to help you deepen your journey of self-discovery, you'll want to check out Magi's Haoma Revelation Aid. Naturally derived and fully legal in all 50 states, Haoma Revelation Aid is a psychoactive plant medicine supplement based on extracts of Syrian rue, which was ritually consumed in ancient Iran in pursuit of otherworldly insights and revelations.

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0:19:54.2 Joseph Anew: I don't know why this is coming up, but there's in the cartoons when you're a kid, it's like the angel and the devil, and it's like the angels on this sleeve and the devil's on this one, and the devil made you steal that thing. And we call him a devil and he's bad, but he made you steal the thing. And that was bad for a... It caused... I shouldn't say it's bad, it caused pain for a short time. But now you see that, hey, maybe it was the angel that made me steal that thing.

 

0:20:23.5 Lily Eggers: Yeah, exactly.

 

0:20:24.3 Joseph Anew: Because it sent me on this new trajectory.

 

0:20:28.6 Lily Eggers: Yes, yes. Yeah. I think in some ways that that consciousness, that kind of consciousness... Existing in that consciousness is so transformative for people. And it's really in some ways why I love and what my... When I work with couples, that's what I'm vibrating all the time is love and curiosity, consciousness. Love, let's get to love and what's blocking love we're gonna work on. But also what is preventing you from saying yes to the person in front of you fully? What part of you is like, oh, I don't like that. I don't like this. And I... What part of you is wanting it not to be there because it's uncomfortable. Instead of pulling back and being like, I accept you now, let me use you as a reflection to show me what I can't see about me.

 

0:21:19.1 Joseph Anew: I can't see in there all the way, but you can show it to me [laughter] by being you. And I experienced my own trigger. And so it's... We're talking about experiential learning. What I love working about with couples and certainly psychedelics as well, is it's so experiential. It's the... It is not talking about something because that is not... Well, it doesn't help people a lot of the time talking about something. And that's what I think therapy, the therapeutic model is limited because it emphasizes talking about, and it's helpful. Sometimes people need to tell their story, they need to be heard. Okay. But then there's this point at which what next? And that's where somatic psychedelics, experiential learning, coming into the present moment, whether it's meditation or whether it's somatic experience, whatever it is, it's being in the moment and being with what is and having... Forming a new relationship to that thing, instead of just talking about it or thinking about it. It's a very different way of engaging the self.

 

0:22:25.0 Joseph Anew: Right. I love that. And yeah, everything has its place. And that talk therapy model, like some people get great results, but there's this... Sometimes that's great for diffusing current emotions or kind of talking things through. But then it's kinda like the shoplift. It's like you gotta go do the thing to really learn the lesson and to really get into it. And I love, Lily, what you said about in relationship and I think relationships, it's obviously core to your work... In relationship, I know there's a lot of kind of philosophies around like when you... My wife and I, it's like we get married, we're one now, but it's like you're one functionally at times, but there's this... What does it mean to be in relationship with somebody else?

 

0:23:18.3 Lily Eggers: So I see it as an... It's a verb. It's not a noun, relationship. It's a verb. It's a practice and it's a practice of the way I see it. I have almost like a visual [laughter] in my mind of emergent, things rolling out from the inside out. That what's coming from the inside is in the dark, it's unknown and it starts to come out and come forth. And relationship is the verb of naming and holding and experiencing with another person. So it's being seen and seeing ourselves and then them having an experience of their own and us hearing and seeing that while also staying differentiated. So it's this really, ugh, I wish I could... It feels very visual. I visualize things a lot, but it's... It is truly... It's actually funny.

 

0:24:17.1 Lily Eggers: I did a 5-MeO-DMT journey not long ago, and this is exactly the topic that was playing out for me, which is around self and other and oneness. How can I be one? How can I be one with all things and differentiated from another person all at the same time? You're you and I'm me, you're having your experience, I'm having mine. And then we have this shared oneness thing happening. So what is it? Which is it? And it's both and, and neither. It's both and, and neither it's like... And I think being in relationship, the verb relationshipping with a person...

 

0:24:53.3 Joseph Anew: Relationshipping. Yeah.

 

0:24:54.3 Joseph Anew: Is about... You know what I mean? It's the exploration and the live interaction of what is me, what is you, what is me? What is you, what is me? What is you? And through that it never ends. Actually, I was gonna say like there's some end result. There's not. It's just what is, that is what you do until you die.

 

[laughter]

 

0:25:18.6 Joseph Anew: And maybe you keep going after that, who knows.

 

0:25:24.4 Lily Eggers: Exactly maybe until this body ends and then you do it with another one. But that's the process. And it's an internal process and an external process because you can't name what's true for you if you don't know what's true for you. And that's why I cannot stress inner work, inner work, inner work, inner work. When we focus too much on outside other, other work, what your work is. I'm very well aware of what my partner's problems are and where his blockages are and where he could do this or that to get better. But the lens always has to come back to. Always comes back to who am I? What is mine? How is this? And how is this that I see in my partner a reflection of something in me? And how can I keep being curious so that I can keep opening and sharing and being more and more real, more and more real and less and less defended, protected, performative, hidden, avoidant, fearful.

 

0:26:31.6 Lily Eggers: To me, those are all things for us to move through, to expand beyond. And we cannot know how to do that if we don't have that practice inside of ourselves. And then I do actually believe that another person that verb the relationshipping that is what... We can actually use other people in really beautiful ways because there is an end to what we can do ourselves. Psychedelics help, psychedelics open, turn the light on into our... This structure, internal structure that we can't access. Or it takes a very long time to access any other way. But I think relationships can do the same thing, frankly. [laughter]

 

0:27:22.9 Joseph Anew: So this and it seems, and I love the word... You kept using the word curiosity, and I think that's just such a beautiful word as well as it relates to trust and faith. And there seems to be these different elements of the self contribution. And so when we think about the self relationship, let's maybe dive deeper into this work you do with the self and self knowing. So I may be in a relationship, but right now, you and I were just talking about the work that I need to do, perhaps the self-work, where do you begin when you're working with somebody on that self journey, self-exploration to be a greater contributor to the energetic relationships that person may be in?

 

0:28:09.0 Lily Eggers: Yeah. I mean, just in that moment, you asked me that question and I closed my eyes. So listeners can't see that happening. But that's my first step is often I will first close my eyes and it gives me an opportunity to shut out this sensory input from my eyes. And then I get to be more sensitive and more attuned to the ways that my insides communicate to me. So it might be a thought, it's often a sensation or a feeling. It might be sort of an experience of something that I don't yet know exactly what it is, but I'll be curious about it and I'll make a little space for it. I might even breathe into it, and be curious. But it's a way of bringing my attention. And again, our attention can go wherever we send it. So if you were to say like, okay, I want you to notice all the sounds that you hear right now, like not right now you might hear my voice, but if your headphones weren't on, it might be crickets or birds, or the cars going by or a thumping three year old in the next room.

 

0:29:13.2 Joseph Anew: But either way you... We can attend to what we desire to attend to. And so the first step for me is about self, is about really deeply bringing your attention into your own inner experience with a heck of a lot of curiosity. That word, again, because curiosity is so open-ended and receptive, it's like, I'm here and available and I'm curious. I'm available, I'm ready for it. Send me a message, bring it on. And that's when the body can start to communicate with ourselves. We so often as human beings override our experience, especially our emotional experience or our feeling states. I mean, I was... From a very young age, I was an actress, I was raised in the theater, I was very involved in the theater world. And I learned very young that vulnerability is uncomfortable for me.

 

0:30:08.6 Joseph Anew: So I'm going to get extremely skilled at showing up like I know what I'm doing. I'm gonna be very confident, I'm gonna look... I'm gonna speak articulately. I'm gonna say things that are really firmly believe held beliefs, you know what I mean? 'cause that moved me out of the experience of vulnerability. And now as I've gotten older and older and I realize vulnerability is not... Actually it's actually a beautiful thing. It's so ripe and rich and gives so much permission for others to feel their own vulnerability. But I didn't know that, 'cause I was so built up, I was so defended. I had this performative person that was... That knew how to interface with the world in a highly successful way. And so it takes the humility being like, okay, okay. What... Who am I actually, who do I... What are the depths of me?

 

0:31:03.6 Lily Eggers: How can I be deeply, deeply me and be open to me not even knowing the depths of me? How could I possibly? They're so interdimensional and so layered and so rich and thick and deep down there. But I'm in a process of sharing those inner layers. So the first piece I think is about listening and not trying to put something on over. That's the thing about defenses is our brains, they're really... I mean, I love my brain, it's so great, but it's also... It's trying to manage stuff and control things. And it has a plan. And it doesn't necessarily wanna be... Back to that analogy of dancing, imagine you had two leads trying to dance. It would be a disaster. They'd both be pushing each other around. And then they're... But neither one's listening.

 

0:31:50.4 Lily Eggers: And so the process for me is deeply, deeply about listening. Listening. And it's almost like a different organization. There's the leading Lily. There's the part of me that's like, I'm gonna push forward. I'm gonna create, I'm gonna manage, I'm gonna do that. And then there's the listening part. And so I'd say, Joseph, the answer to your question is sort of that, it's the listening is the first step to exploration of those deepest parts of self. It starts with listening and not managing. Asking the lead dancer, would you mind just sitting this one out? We're gonna let the follower have some authentic movement. Have some... Hear his or her kind of dance, letting them find their way. And I think that that practice of listening to our insights is just so, so key.

 

0:32:46.8 Lily Eggers: It's so key to being the most realized and frankly, the most... Being on the right path to life. You have to hear it. I think as a therapist so much what I see is people being like, I'm not on my path. And the misery of that, the desperation, the what should I do? I'm a lawyer now, and I'm a... I have a job and a family. What am I supposed to do with myself? I'm so miserable. And it's like, girl, dude, you gotta go back. You gotta go back and put all that stuff. It doesn't matter that you have a law degree. It doesn't matter that you're practicing whatever. Have a CEO. It doesn't matter what you've created now something's off and I don't have the answer. You have the answer, but you don't know how to hear your own answer.

 

0:33:34.9 Lily Eggers: So first you have to go inside. And the practice of going inside again and again and again is what helps people find their way so that whatever they drive towards is the right direction. It's their direction. It's not mom's or dad's, it's not society's. It's not uncle whoever who said this about when you were a kid. We so much exist in this field of performing for others, and we lose what's most important to our internal selves, and then we don't know what to do about it. We don't even know that there's an inside to check in on. And it's so amazing. It's such a beautiful process, Joseph, to help people realize that. It's... They're like, oh, wait, I have a wise self. I have something... Somebody I can ask advice from that's inside of me all the time. [laughter] Yes, yes, yes.

 

0:34:27.3 Lily Eggers: It's there. The answer's there. I have done some of the craziest things in my life, Joseph, because I listened to that really young. I feel so blessed. I knew it really young. I knew it, maybe it was from the shoplifting or some that the years after, but I had this sense, this inner sense of knowing of listen to my insides because it will guide me in the right direction. And I joined a yoga cult when I was in my mid 20s because I got a yes. And again, that was definitely one of those things that in the middle of it, someone might be like, what? You did what? That's so weird. But on the other side of it, I was like, what a beautiful experience of self-knowing and self-trust. I got to be in a tornado of mind control, like techniques.

 

0:35:15.2 Joseph Anew: And it was also really beautiful embodied experience. It was a yoga, it was based in traditional Chinese medicine. And it was... The community was super beautiful and strong and lovely in certain ways, but it was dysfunctional. It was a dysfunctional organization. It was foundationally manipulative. But my insides at one time said yes to getting into it fully and signing up for that experience fully. And I got to have amazing experiences because of that powerful yes, that I heard. And then my yes to leave. Okay, now it's time to leave. I was engaged, yes to that. Oh, time to leave, yes to that. That hearing our, our little guidance, having that little arrow to keep following, I think is so essential to living a powerful, strong life and letting it come from your insides and then having full faith. This is my... I trust myself. I trust my gut. I trust my inner knowing, and I will follow that until... Well, until I get... It directs me in a different direction.

 

0:36:19.3 Joseph Anew: I love that, Lily. And what would you say, I know you grew up, we were just chatting offline. You grew up up in Maine, you were born in the Boston area, grew up up in Maine, kind of in the wilderness and really connected to nature. And I'm scared to death of kids at a young age getting too much iPad time and things like that. So this inner voice, you have Lily and this ability to have faith and trust and curiosity in that voice. What would you say your upbringing had to do with that? Do you feel it had some... Did that come from somewhere?

 

0:36:53.4 Lily Eggers: Yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think for sure. My parents, were both early... They went... They did a, forgetting his name, the guy who created the Landmark Education, he did six day and est, it was called before it turned into Landmark Education. And this was in the '70s and early '80s. And they did this stuff. It's all about personal responsibility and mastery. And my mom is really modeled listening to her guts. She listened to her guts and she followed it. Now she does a fair amount of override as well. We won't get into that here. [laughter] But one of her guides said...

 

0:37:37.1 Joseph Anew: She might be listening.

 

0:37:38.8 Lily Eggers: Let's, yeah, I know. Sorry, mom. One of her strong guides as a kid was moving to more space. We need to move north. We need to go from the Bos... From Jamaica Plain, Boston urban to a little suburban to 75 acres of Maine wilderness. And I remember when we bought our house, we had to look at houses and she would step outside and she would be like, everyone be quiet. And she didn't wanna hear traffic. [laughter] That was her criteria. Yeah.

 

0:38:13.1 Joseph Anew: I love that.

 

0:38:15.7 Lily Eggers: Super intense. So yeah, totally.

 

0:38:16.3 Joseph Anew: Smart woman.

 

0:38:18.9 Lily Eggers: Yeah. And she also was not afraid to take big steps in unpredictable directions, so we were homeschooled. And what that meant was we, there was very little... This was the '80s, like no... Most people were homeschooled for religious reasons. My... This was. We were not religious. She was basically like, "schools are kind of dumb and slow and meandering, and they're not gonna... You're not gonna get to do what you wanna do or learn what you wanna learn. And so how about you go follow your interest, follow your curiosity." And so I had a really interesting childhood. It was, I did tons of theater, like I said before. And I also did a lot of adult ed classes. I worked at a pottery shop and painted, did watercolor painting. And my brother was very... He was building things with carpentry. His carpentry skills were incredible. So we just kind of did what we were interested in. And then when we went to high school, we did go to a local high school, it was such a funny topsy-turvy experience where I would complain about the administration, say, I'd be like, "mom, the vice principal, like, I got detention 'cause I had some violation of some whatever." And she'd be like, "just drop out. You don't have to be there." And I'd be like, "mom, shut up".

 

0:39:48.0 Joseph Anew: What?

 

0:39:48.0 Lily Eggers: "I'm not gonna drop out of high school. God." It was like, turned upside down, you know what I mean?

 

0:39:55.7 Joseph Anew: That's wild.

 

0:39:55.8 Lily Eggers: Yeah. So that's kind of things weird.

 

0:39:56.4 Joseph Anew: God.

 

0:39:57.5 Lily Eggers: Like I was really in a climate...

 

0:40:00.3 Joseph Anew: I mean, that is the opposite of any parent...

 

0:40:07.0 Lily Eggers: Right.

 

0:40:07.3 Joseph Anew: Which is great. I mean.

 

0:40:07.4 Lily Eggers: And I think it really, again, it was being given the space to listen to myself, like, what did I actually want to do? And I do think that was, there was such space. I was given tons of space. And I think it's really, really key to give our kids space as much as we can in this crazy world. I mean, oh, it's hard, but to give ourselves space, to give our partners space that we can start to listen when we actually aren't being stimulated outside of ourselves. And I think that was really, really, really critical, my upbringing around that. The other piece that was really important was that we... Because we lived in the middle of nowhere in Maine, if we were to go anywhere, we had to drive a substantial amount. It was usually 20 to 45 minutes to get anywhere.

 

0:40:58.2 Lily Eggers: And my mom, was... We got, Sounds True on cassette tapes. And so we would cycle through some of these amazing spiritual teachers, Thich Nhat Hanh, Deepak Chopra and Anthony Robbins. And I was like seven years old and I'm getting saturated by these deep, deep, spiritual concepts and spiritual beings. I still feel Thich Nhat Hanh is embodied in me deep inside. I feel really, really connected to him and to his spirit and to his teachings. And that was such a glorious, and such an unintentional, I mean I don't think my mom was making any effort. She wasn't trying, she's not even particularly spiritual herself. Almost not at all. And so it was almost like this gift, I don't know even why she did it. I gotta ask her. Interesting.

 

0:41:51.5 Joseph Anew: I mean, gosh. And it's... I mean, that is such a gift, you know, and I often wonder about my three-year-old, what is it? He sees me get into the 40 degree water every morning in my garage.

 

0:42:04.6 Lily Eggers: Nice.

 

0:42:05.4 Joseph Anew: And he often, he'll... Now he's at the point where he'll dip his hands in his stuff and as soon as he does he runs in, he says, "I did the cold water too." And so there's this exposure. I wonder what he's gonna be like when he is 25. And so, yeah, that gift your mother, I mean, Thich Nhat Hanh at seven is just, especially in the '80s. This is just such a gift. And what's so interesting, Lily, and I'm curious because it sounds like your mom gave you the space, as you mentioned, and this incredible self authority and from that also, I guess I'll call it permission to run your own life. Do you really want to go to school? And of course that is so polarized from the typical approach, but how often in your work, at least in my experience in this space is people need permission. It's like they... It's like they're dying for that permission to be themselves at even if they're 39 years old and you were so blessed with it at such a young age. So what is it? Yeah, it's space, self authority, permission.

 

0:43:13.2 Lily Eggers: Yeah. Permission. And really, again, I still think it comes back to even just acknowledging that there are really strong influencers in the world. In the old sense of the word, not the new, but influences words, ideas, concepts that are being pushed on you through our society, our culture, our families, our ancestry, that these are... And they're not necessarily in alignment with who you are. I recently... Growing up in rural Maine, one of my favorite things in the whole wide world was to jump into a freezing cold river. 'cause we had a creek that ran through our woods and Maine...

 

0:43:53.7 Joseph Anew: I love that.

 

0:43:54.2 Lily Eggers: I would go in May to October, it was freezing. And I would strip all my clothes off and I'd jump in and I'd shriek really loud. 'cause you have to when it's that cold. And I would feel my aliveness, I was alive and deeply part of the earth. And I felt really just part of the earth, just joyful in that place. And a few weeks ago, I went hiking in the Marin, in Marin, north of San Francisco, and I'm in the redwoods, and there's these beautiful pools of water. And I saw these pools, and I felt this like, wow, if I knew no one would come by here, I would jump in here in a second. I would just, I would so get in this pool naked and love, I'm so made for this. And then I started to reflect on, who would these people be that would be so offended? What is it? Am I actually afraid of them?

 

0:44:48.5 Lily Eggers: I don't even know who these people are. And so I started to... I kept walking and I was like, "I'm gonna leave myself open to potentially getting in this pool of water naked today. We're gonna see what happens, but I'm just gonna reflect and just be aware." And I walked by a couple with like a teenaged son, and I was like "yeah, I could see them maybe having an opinion about me being naked," and let's keep walking. And then there was another, some people going by. And then... And I sat down and I found my pool of... A0nd I was like, "I have to get in now." I actually have to get in because I'm living. I wanna do something. And I'm not doing it because I'm afraid of something someone might think in their heads. There's actually no consequence to me that's negative, except somebody's thought, no one's gonna beat me up.

 

0:45:39.2 Lily Eggers: No one's gonna like shake... It's just their thoughts. I'm afraid of somebody else's thoughts. And I was like, "I cannot let somebody elses thoughts keep me out of this gorgeous pool of water." And so I sat by this pool, Joseph, it was the most intense 30 minutes. And I'm like, "okay, this is super stressful." No one's come by for a few minutes. It's totally visible place, by the way. It was very visible. And I took my pants off and then I was like, "oh my God, what if I... What if all the moms as my son's baseball team, what if they all are on a hike together? Oh my God, I can't do it. I can't do it. They'll think I'm a crazy person. I can't do it." Pants come back on. I'm like, okay, all right.

 

0:46:18.1 Lily Eggers: But you know what? It wouldn't kill me. Actually, it won't... It wouldn't kill me. And so okay, okay, I'm gonna do this. So I took off my clothes, I get in the water, it's freezing cold. I can feel it. And I was just like, this is all my ancestral shit, telling me I need to be a certain way, telling me I can't do things. Shame on you. Who do you think you are? All this stuff. I was just washing it off, washing it out, freezing cold. And I get out, I stand up and like three people are coming towards me, and they see me fully naked out of the water. I pull on my pants, I pull my stuff on and they are talking about their manager shifted. And now they're reporting to somebody else, and they politely walk by.

 

0:47:03.2 Lily Eggers: Nobody looks at me. And I have this almost maniacal laugh, oh my God, the worst thing. I thought it was gonna be the worst thing. I thought I would be struck dead. You know what I mean? I thought I would be struck dead. And not only did I not die, but I actually got to embody overcoming my fears and doing something scary and vulnerable and kind of weird and dangerous. And I told my husband about it later. My husband's a... He's a pretty normal guy. He's a pretty... But he chose me. And so I trust that, I know he knows that I'm unpredictable. And I was like, "what do you think about this? What do you think if our neighbors came? Or what do you think that I got naked in our neighborhood? I got naked in our neighborhood, babe." And he was like, "awesome." He's like, "awesome. Go girl. Do it." And he laughed and I was like, "what do you think? What if our neighbors... What if our next door neighbors came by? What would you think?" And he's like, "whatever. Whatever you're you. Do you." So.

 

0:48:12.0 Joseph Anew: I freaking love that story, Lily. I... There's so much there. And the funny thing is, if, your neighbors came by unless they're all caught up in their own stuff, they might've laughed or they maybe they're like, "Hey, shit, I should do that too." That's the irony is like, when we step out it gives others permission to be them as well.

 

0:48:31.6 Lily Eggers: Permission. Yeah.

 

0:48:34.1 Joseph Anew: And it's just such a deficit. And I love that story, and I love that you did that. And the thing about your comfort zone. And I love the contemplation. Should I do it? Should I do it? No, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna walk. Eh, maybe I'll do it. Because if you don't utilize, if you don't push the bounds, it gets tighter around you.

 

0:48:49.3 Lily Eggers: That's right.

 

0:48:50.5 Joseph Anew: So the longer we stay in our comfort zone and we just do what we're supposed to do, and stay at your desk and ask permission to use the bathroom. And as long as we like do that the less and less free we become. And like I bet you felt just so amazing after that.

 

0:49:05.6 Lily Eggers: I was elated. It was...

 

0:49:09.1 Joseph Anew: So awesome.

 

0:49:09.2 Lily Eggers: It was elating, I felt so joyful. I felt deeply, it's like filled with joy because it was referencing a version of myself that I had kind of domesticated. I was feral. I was a feral Maine homeschooled kid. I was part of the earth. And now I'm this adult with all these responsibilities and this reputation and fuck that, fuck that shit. It was like, I got to reemerge. I remember a part of myself that was so spontaneous and filled with vitality, and I think that's what felt so good to me, was this vitality of, I am here in this body. This is the good stuff. This is the good stuff. I really do believe that so often we cut off our pleasure and our joy and our delight and our fun. Ugh. We're so unfun in so many ways. We get so serious as adults. And I really, really am a proponent of keeping the playful and keeping the fun and keeping the spontaneous. And, yeah, that was a joyful day.

 

0:50:21.8 Joseph Anew: I just thought of something funny. And it's what would the person have said if they caught you, if they saw you or if they cared? They probably would've called you a maniac and they would've been absolutely correct, because that's what we call people from Maine in Boston.

 

0:50:40.2 Lily Eggers: Right. Totally.

 

0:50:40.8 Joseph Anew: It would've been right on.

 

0:50:41.0 Lily Eggers: Totally.

 

0:50:41.4 Joseph Anew: Lily, I wanna share that. There's a book that I loved. It was actually a book that I read a long time ago and it like shattered because I was so in the... I was so in the Tony Robbins optimism at all costs type thing. It's not just Tony Robbins, it's all of them. And it's this... It's a book called "The Antidote" and many years ago I was kind of going through some health challenges and things like that, and Tony Robbins kind of saved my life because I did like the personal power programs and it really... But then a couple of years later I was starting to almost feel depressed about the lack of... I've been doing the thing, I've got my goals written down, and where is it?

 

0:51:25.9 Joseph Anew: And I picked up this book and it was so triggering, at first, and it's called "The Antidote" by Oliver Burkeman. And it was so triggering at first. And I was raised in a Catholic household and the whole first chapter was just like... But it was an audio book. I was in traffic listening to it, and it was just great. But what I wanted to share was later in the book, he talks about going to a psychiatrist in New York City, and he lived in London at the time, and I think he does time in both places. And the psychiatrist told him, "when you get back to the underground, to London, I want you to get on the train. And as the train is slowing down to the station, I want you to scream at the top of your lungs the name of the station." And like...

 

0:52:16.1 Lily Eggers: It's awesome.

 

0:52:16.2 Joseph Anew: He like he... In the book, he describes this experience of palms just dripping with sweat as the train starts slowing down. And by the end it was just the elation that you're describing, like gosh.

 

0:52:33.2 Lily Eggers: Yeah.

 

0:52:33.3 Joseph Anew: And being afraid of other people's thought...

 

0:52:33.7 Lily Eggers: It's funny, when I was 15, I did Landmark for Teens in the World Trade Centers, actually. And one of the assignments for the teenagers is find an elevator. There's billions of them in Manhattan. Find an elevator, get on there and start leading the singing of row, row, row your boat. So be like, "okay, I'll get started. Let's sing a round. I'll start row, row, row your boat. Okay, come on in." In an enclosed space in an elevator. And I couldn't do it. I was 15, I couldn't do it Joseph, and I was like, yeah, I just couldn't do it. And I couldn't... It was almost like a freeze response. I was in a trauma response. I thought I would die if I did that.

 

0:53:18.0 Lily Eggers: The humiliation and the weird... What will people think? All that stuff, it was too powerful. And something feels like... I feel like I could do that now. I wanna go do it now. And it's that same thing about publicly, like being public. It's like our egos can't stand it to step out of what we're supposed to do and be, this kind of caricature of what other people think of us, which is just so limiting. Of course they have a caricature of you, you only show off a piece of you. And why don't we sing in public and why don't we... It's like there's so much holding things back. I've realized in my life, Joseph, how many times I've held back a compliment for some, a stranger. I've remembered seeing people who are just dressed up to the nines or have beautiful eyes or really weird, funky hair and I'll be like, or a great smile, or I like how they engage with their kid.

 

0:54:18.2 Lily Eggers: It's not just their external. There's something about them that I see and I value and I don't say it. And I've been like, "why don't I say that? Why don't I tell that person that I can see them in this moment? I can see an aspect of them that they either know about or don't." If they dress themselves up, then they probably know that they look fly. But if they're... Maybe it's their... It's a twinkle in their eye or a way that they just described something to their children or taught them about something interesting. And I see that and I'm like, "beautiful. Thank you for letting me witness you in this moment." And I don't tell them. And anyway, because society doesn't give me permission is why I don't tell them. And I feel like, what a miss. How much beauty, or how much sweetness have I held inside of me and not given because I've been afraid of these rules that, who even wrote them, like fear rules around interaction with strangers. It feels sad to me. I'm like, "okay, time to get on that spread that, spread that appreciation and that seeing and that gratitude."

 

0:55:36.9 Joseph Anew: Yeah. And it gets back to, well, the, I guess the Bostonian approach to the homeless versus the San Francisco approach. But it also gets back to that idea of it being our responsibility to be ourselves. I have a friend who, her daughter is a... She's a dancer or something. Like a really, and it's like... And dancing is definitely her thing. She's gonna do it professionally and all this. Definitely her thing and she tells the story. And this was, I don't know, maybe six months ago. And she says, "we were at the beach, she was like four, and she was trying to surf or something, and some guy walking the beach said, 'you should be a dancer.'" And kept walking and it planted this seed. It's exactly what you're talking about. And so it's...

 

0:56:28.5 Lily Eggers: Yeah. Yeah.

 

0:56:32.4 Joseph Anew: It's like we are trained and conditioned and programmed to keep all that in and don't tell people they look fantastic and don't tell them they look like they have a perfect marriage, and don't tell them that... This or that, but it's you might literally change their life if you do that.

 

0:56:46.5 Lily Eggers: Yeah, Exactly. Yes. And I feel, honestly, Joseph, this is such a... There's all different ways of being a therapist. And one of the ways that's very common is sort of withholding. And I do think it really matters that we share ourselves with intentionality. We can't just be telling stories about our lives when someone's paying us for their work. So it's very conscious when we bring ourselves forth as therapists. But I notice myself, particularly with couples sharing a lot of myself, because I actually think that my journey with my husband, the challenges are as inspiring as the protocols and strategies I'm teaching you. So I have... I run groups for couples, and so much of it is about being in the realness of relationship, which is mucky and murky and annoying and getting stuck in patterns and coming out again and having a good day and having good sex, and then having boring sex again for a while.

 

0:57:43.2 Joseph Anew: And then having good sex it's like there really is a... There's this... We're ecological. And we have seasons. And the relationship itself, the connection, the relationality, the connection of relationship has seasons too. And really it's about being able to stand back, be curious, try to get an idea of where you are, remember the other person, what softens them, what can move us into, out of disconnection and into connection. But ultimately, it's still I do this with my hands. Moving my hands in and out with a breath, like in and out, in and out, And this is relationships. And anyway, the key for me around supporting couples in a group setting is often telling stories and really being real about what's hard for me and what's hard for my partner and the ways that we struggle with each other, and it's so...

 

0:58:38.0 Lily Eggers: It's more than okay. It's actually like, it's more than okay. It's the process and it's the sacredness. I really believe in teaching about the sacredness of the process and the sacredness of the relationship because ultimately we show up with more intentionality when we treat something with the respect and the care and the love that it deserves. But it starts with our... I don't wanna say it starts with ourselves, but it... We are... We have to be looped in there too, treating ourselves sacredly. I don't come from the frame. This is sort of an aside, but I don't believe that you need to have yourself figured out before you're ready for relationship. I don't believe that. I believe you can work yourself out in relationship [laughter], and just be, just know that you're projecting and working out your trauma.

 

0:59:26.1 Lily Eggers: And just like your partner is, just like everybody is, we are in relationship to heal. We heal. We heal in relationship by eliciting our wounding in... With another person because we care so deeply about them. So the wounding comes up, whatever it is, I withdraw, I get clingy. I feel like I need more of you, or I need less... The thing shows up and then we act, we share and we open ourselves and we heal that. But if you think you're supposed to have an ideal relationship, if you think it's supposed to look like all the people on Instagram and all the fake stuff, then you're gonna be miserable. You're gonna compare yourself and think that somehow you're failing or you're uniquely bad at something, and it's just not true. You're not uniquely bad. You're actually in a process of emergent unfolding. It's like the shoplifting thing again. It's like you don't know why it's happening in the moment, but stick with it. Stick with it. Because very often you'll understand it when you're on the other side of it. It's a tornado or a hurricane or something that you just survive, get through and then reference and make sense of it. Integrate what you learned from it. And part of really embodying the journey aspect.

 

1:00:48.2 Joseph Anew: I love that. And Lily, even the setting the frame as like, yo, this is seasonal. The good times and the bad times, and the awkward times and the boring times. It's like that is so empowering, because when you're in winter, it's like you think you're never gonna get out of it. And when you're in summer, you want it to last forever. And there's these attachments that come in and so like that just like, oh good. So yeah, my wife and I are in this patch right now, but I know spring's right around the corner. That kind of thing.

 

1:01:24.5 Lily Eggers: We'll come back together. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And I think, so our fear is what makes the rigid belief systems that actually keep us stuck in that place. I don't know, maybe we're just not right for each other, other, or this is just how I am. Or maybe this is a deal breaker, or these kinds of things. Those are just fear because you don't see the way through. You don't see the way through, and it scares you shitless. And, but the truth is you just don't even know the way through. But if you stay with it and you stick with it, and you just name what's happening, your anger is really scaring me, or your distance is really making me uncomfortable, then you actually have a chance to let something move. So I a lot of times the first part of my work with couples is often starting to help them step into a paradigm...

 

1:02:19.4 Lily Eggers: That's growth mindset. It's growth mindset oriented. You're... There's only growing. And where something is stuck, it just means it's stuck. It means you're preventing the growth of that thing that in invariably, and this is... I love that this is so deeply part of the psychedelic, the sort of the psychedelic paradigm of most people is that we have innate healing inside of us. We are innately healing beings. If I were to fall and skin my knee, I'm never gonna be like, "is it ever gonna heal over [laughter]? Is it ever gonna... Am I gonna be like this forever? It's bleeding down my leg." Like, no, it will, just don't pick the scab repeatedly and it will. But the problem is, we get all anxious about our healing processes internally, because we can't... We don't understand the mechanism.

 

1:03:06.8 Lily Eggers: And in the same way, I don't understand the mechanism of my knee creating a scab and healing over. I just trust it. I just trust it. And here we are again with trust. Trust your healing and relationships are the same way. Stay with it. Be in it. Be curious. Soften the certainty. Because when you have certainty, that's a stuck, there's something stuck when there's certainty. The only certainty is that you're growing and evolving really. And when couples move into that paradigm, it's transformative. Joseph, it's transformative. Like really, really, really, people just start engaging so differently. Oh, my partner's being misattuned. Instead of it being like, "fuck this, I can't stand it. I can't take it anymore. They need it... This is just not working for me." It's like, "okay, they're having a hard day. How can I help them?" Maybe they need a cup of tea. Maybe they want a shoulder rub. Maybe I can help them in this moment instead of make it all about my experience of them and wronging them in my mind. It actually creates a new paradigm of team, of being on the same team that's super supportive, but also very owned. It's not merging. It's owned.

 

1:04:22.0 Joseph Anew: Yeah. I love that. And Lily, you mentioned that your couples work, I imagine you probably do individual couples, but you said it's also a lot of groups. Yeah. Are these virtual or are they all in person?

 

1:04:30.9 Lily Eggers: They are.

 

1:04:31.9 Joseph Anew: How do your groups work?

 

1:04:35.3 Lily Eggers: Yeah, so it started during Covid, when I got a bunch of couples [laughter] virtually all at the same time. Not surprisingly. And I found myself repeating the same stuff because it's essential. People need to understand, they need to have ideas of paradigms. They need to understand their nervous systems. Oh my God, if there was one thing people could understand and really get it, it would transform their relationships. Nervous systems are vital to understanding, looking at routines, looking at attachment styles and love languages. These are just things people should know. And I found myself talking, talking, talking, talking to couples who are paying me for private therapy. And I felt like it was inefficient. I was just like, m"you know what? This is not the best use of your money and my time." I shouldn't be saying this 10 times.

 

1:05:25.0 Joseph Anew: I should be saying it once. And then, when we are in our session, you be talking to each other. Like you... That's what needs healing here. Not, let's listen to Lily lecture. So that's how it began, was actually feeling like, I shouldn't be repeating this. I should be teaching people at once. And then what I discovered, which I didn't anticipate, is that people love... They don't think they want to be in group, but no one says, "let's do couples therapy. Let's look for a good group." [laughter] Like, that sounds like hell, most couples are like, "Ooh, this is private. This is private stuff. Keep it to ourselves," whatever. And so I have some paradigms, we're not doing therapy in the group work that I do. We're not doing therapy. I don't want people to be in deeply regressed states.

 

1:06:13.7 Lily Eggers: I don't want people to be really activated, because it's not safe. The container is too loose, it's virtual. So I do that work with them. So I I politely say... And I haven't had it happen barely at all. But sometimes I'll just say, "this is so important. This feels really tender. Let's have a session about this. This is clearly really, really important." But the... But so the group is more of discussion. It's more like learning about things, discussing, but you get to know certain characters and certain couples. And what I've found at the end is in this, in the survey at the end, people are really surprised at how much they loved learning in the group model. They actually were like, "wow, I had no idea that watching that couple, I could see myself in her."

 

1:07:02.5 Lily Eggers: "And oh, I have a deeper understanding of how I show up and how my partner feels, because I was all about... " That kind of thing. You can't lecture on that. Again, once again, it's, you can't teach it. You have to see it and experience it. And so I actually think now that I've run it nine times, I actually feel more and more that it's better... In certain ways for certain couples it's better than private therapy. It's better than sitting with me and rehashing what your... Is annoying to you. Because I also... It's also very systemic, meaning that your relationship is not just built around your conflicts. And you think people, the paradigm, so much of couples therapy is, let's come in and let's dig into what we can't work out on our own. We need communication help because we try to talk about things and nothing moves.

 

1:07:55.7 Lily Eggers: It's just stuck here. You don't hear me. I don't hear you. We're stuck. And what I've actually found is that we put those aside. Let's not even talk about what's hard right now. We're gonna talk about what's good, what do you do well together? What's your shared vision together? What are your shared values? What do you care about? What are you co-creating? And for me, that is everything. The co-creation. When two people get together and they get clear about what it is that they are creating, it's such a different experience than what it is that they are... What it is that they're struggling with. And that co-creative energy, the creative energy to make things happen is actually, I believe, more powerful than the frustration and than the stuckness. And so the... What I love about the group is it's, you're watching people get better and you're watching them co-create, and you're watching them bring in playfulness and fun and care, and acknowledging and gratitude and all these things that like actually offset the conflict. So then when we get to the week on fighting, people are like, "does it even matter? Okay, fine, this thing annoys me about what you do. Okay, I hear you. I'll look at it. Thank you for sharing that with me." And it's not a big deal, actually. So anyway, I think that model works a lot better.

 

1:09:23.8 Joseph Anew: I love that. And it's just a, a paradigm shift. And it... There's so much there that you just articulated, Lily. It's just this thing that you don't wanna do is probably the thing you need to step into. And I think that's fantastic. And as you said, the energy of the group and seeing yourself in another, and also maybe being a little bit more self-aware of what you're bringing up, if it was just a closed container. Because there's, you know how you were analyzing what everyone else is saying so it might be a little bit protective.

 

1:09:55.2 Lily Eggers: Right feeling judged. Joseph you bring up such an important point, and I'd love to just outline this for couples who might be listening, is that we put in a lot of energy about how we wanna show up when we're talking to a boss or a colleague or some sort of person that we care about. We wanna dress well, we wanna sound articulate, we wanna be careful with our language, and yet with our partners, we think we should be able to just blow up at them. And you're supposed to just handle it 'cause I'm me. And you're you... This is how it goes. And I really... That's where the sacred language, the use of the word sacred, I really believe. Why would you do that? Why would you ask your partner to be so expansive and flexible when you wouldn't expect your boss to be, when you wouldn't expect your friends to be like... We need to bring intentionality into how we show up in our partnerships, just like we bring intentionality into most aspects of our lives.

 

1:10:57.6 Lily Eggers: I think acting unconsciously and reactively, it creates a tremendous amount of suffering, a tremendous amount of suffering. When we bring intentionality, it's just so different. And you're right, the group really helps with that because people start to be seen in their own relational dynamic. Like, "ooh, if I were to say that thing, which I probably would say if we were by ourselves, I suspect those people might think I'm being rude or disrespectful or unkind or blatant attacking. Whoa, ouch. That doesn't feel good now." It's a different consciousness. It stimulates a kind of expanding consciousness, I think the group component.

 

1:11:41.2 Joseph Anew: I love that Lily, and, and I don't know why this is coming up, but when I was a kid, I went to the UK, London, and I sat in on Parliament and it was, so it... 'cause they have all these rules, around language and energetics and all this other stuff. And at one point this one guy was getting super triggered, but anytime you speak in parliament, you have to begin with the honorable gentleman. And so he's like "will the honorable gentleman, please see what I'm trying to communicate here." And there was this restriction and it was just like... It was almost comedic to see, but there was just like, wow. But like the energy of the container is so regulated as opposed to maybe what some of the things we've seen stateside. So.

 

1:12:34.2 Lily Eggers: Yeah.

 

1:12:36.1 Joseph Anew: But as you said, just to kind of reiterate it, is we take... We have so much intention. We have... We give so much care to how we come across with all of these other relationships. And then we get home and it's like, ah, throw my cap... Throw my jacket on the table. And just like kick off the shoes.

 

1:12:40.5 Lily Eggers: Yeah. Yeah. And now I can relax and just yeah. And not be so honoring and intentional. And I think that's what I love actually about doing medicine work with couples is it's like they remember that they value this person. They get stuck in these of loops of unconsciousness where they're just complaining in their heads, you don't do this, you do that. You're never there for me in this way. And you're this la, la, la. And then you give them a little bit of MDMA and it's, or whatever, whatever the medicine, the compound they're interested in exploring. And so often it's like a oh, it's like... You can see the wiring shift into "you, I've missed you. I've slept in the same bed with you for years, and I forgot that this is what matters."

 

1:13:44.7 Lily Eggers: "This is what I care about." And so often I find that when you can elicit... When I can support the eliciting of that experience between two people, I don't need to drill in communication tools and strategies. I mean, I do it to help people regulate their nervous systems, but they know them. When you love and when you're valuing another, you say the right thing, you show up in an honoring way. You don't have to go over the list and like, "how do I say I statements?" You know how to do it in your heart of hearts. Everybody does. And I think that is what a lot of this stuff is, is people think they know what they want, they want the boundaries, they want the rules. And I give them that I am a... I'm good at giving people what they want in that area because it does matter.

 

1:14:29.9 Lily Eggers: It's the left brain. You gotta have that agreed upon and named. And then the right brain experience is simply bringing them into their heart space. And heart space is, I really do believe is the most powerful energy that exists. Heart love. It is really, really powerful. And it is... It's almost like a... It can clear out so many sticky resentments and things like that. It's just gone. And then the practice gets to be keeping the channels open. It really is so, so transformative.

 

1:15:12.8 Joseph Anew: Well, it shifts that energy you bring to the container. And Lily, I would, I would ask you what sort of... What is it if you're working with couples that are interested in, say, doing like a couple's MDMA thing, like what is the lead in look like? What prerequisite therapy do they need or... 'cause I think these days I think we're headed to a place where it's like, oh, you're having marital problems just go drop in and you'll be good.

 

1:15:43.4 Lily Eggers: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

1:15:43.5 Joseph Anew: And so I'm curious like what that looks like.

 

1:15:48.0 Lily Eggers: Yeah. I mean, ideally I would... I only work with couples who've done my group, because it's 10 weeks and it is a foundational, it's like a to the studs remodel on shared agreements, shared understandings, co-creative energetics, like how to process feelings, the rules and paradigms. So it's all there. And then inject a little bit of medicine on top of that, and it's like, it integrates, it totally expands and everything becomes easier. So it moves out of the left brain and into the right, in a really deeply embodied way. So suddenly people are... They don't need to think about it, they just do it. It... They stop having to be like, "oh, my wife likes it when I make her tea in the mornings, I'm gonna remember to make tea." You just are like, "oh, I'm making tea. I love my wife." Like, boom. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's like... It really helps with that.

 

1:16:50.6 Joseph Anew: That's this, we kinda were talking about that offline. Is this like the difference between doing something, some of the people I've worked with is like, "yeah, I want you to meditate in the morning, but not if it's like on your list." And the next thing is check your email and the next thing is make coffee. And that... You gotta like get the... Just do it 'cause you love yourself and like... And it doesn't matter if it's seven minutes or 21 minutes or an hour. It's just like doing something.

 

1:17:19.0 Lily Eggers: It is where is it coming from? Where is it coming from? And that's when you asked about listening to that self and reflective self, it's really important that people know where something is coming from. And one of my sort of... One of the things that I've done, and this is again, also referencing our conversation about when you think something's bad and it's actually good. One of the ways that I have kept myself conscious is around my relationship to food and body. So in my mid 20s, I developed a binge eating disorder. I would binge and binge and binge I'd eat and eat eat. And it was suffering because my clothes stopped fitting. So it hit me right in the vanity space where I was like, okay, people, we need help. I need to deal with this. This needs... I need to... I can't buy new clothes all the time. This is not working for me. And, but what it did is it got... Gave me... It gave me the experience of being like, okay, time to go inside, time to listen, time to go inside. That's when I joined the yoga cult. 'cause it was like all about going inside. And what the yoga cult was really, really involved with was creating these...

 

1:18:28.0 Lily Eggers: Creating these challenges for ourselves. So we would do like 21 days, wake up at 4:00 AM and do like a thousand bows or something that was like super intense. It was like bootcamp, go do this crazy thing for 21 days. And I loved it. I was like, fuck, where am I gonna get the chance to do this without going to bootcamp? It's so weird and intensive. And so I really got into this I'm gonna create a challenge for myself from the top down. I'm gonna say I'm gonna do it, and then I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna say I'm gonna do it, and then I'm gonna do it. Say I'm gonna do it, and then I'm gonna do it. And then something happened where I came out of this paradigm of I actually don't like doing things for that reason.

 

1:19:09.0 Lily Eggers: And just like, I can't go on a diet or do something around my health if it's because I wanna be thin, that that actually is not a motivation that motivates me enough. It doesn't motivate me. In fact, not only does it not motivate me, but I have a big fuck you inside of me that I'm like, "I will not do things for that reason. I will only do them for the deepest rightest reason in the world. And so I will not do it." And so I go in the opposite direction. I pendulum swing. And so, so much of my learning has been, and actually just after I did, I completed... I did a 5-MeO journey a few weeks ago. I had this inner resolution to start sitting meditation again. And I haven't... Since 20 years since I was in the yoga cult, I haven't done a top down protocol for myself because it was coming from the wrong place.

 

1:20:00.8 Lily Eggers: And so 20 years later I hear from my inside saying, "it is time. It is time for you to sit, and it is time for you to be in the expansive. And you stay there and you just be with yourself." And I can't tell you, it's been a couple months now. And it is so beautiful. It's unlike anything I've done with meditation before, because it came from my insides. And it is perfectly timed because it came from my insides, not from some person saying it's a good idea to do that. It's came from my insides. So I am such a proponent of meditation when it comes from your insides, because you're right. If it's a to-do list, you're missing the point. It's actually missing the point.

 

1:20:48.0 Joseph Anew: Yeah. And it's amazing how, in my personal experience, I've got a pretty consistent practice. But there was this stretch of time where... So I've got this morning routine. I get up earlier than my family that gives me like two hours. And I do the meditation, I do the cold, I get on the bike. I have this whole thing. Well, there was this period of almost two months, maybe two and a half months, where all of a sudden that meditation time that is anywhere, typically from 10 to 30 minutes, all of a sudden it was the whole two hours. And it was like, I could just sit forever.

 

1:21:31.0 Joseph Anew: And it was like every morning. And it, like, it eventually got to the point that it was like, okay, like my health will actually improve more if I shorten this and get on the bike for a while and like the diminishing returns.

 

1:21:46.8 Lily Eggers: Right, right.

 

1:21:46.9 Joseph Anew: But what's important about it was this, it was leading me somewhere. So I had this thing, this time, and I had the most profound breakthrough of my entire life, after two months of that. And it was almost like, oh, it was preparing... Time isn't linear. It was preparing me, it like knew that that was the next kernel that I was gonna kind of tap. And it was like I needed this big thing. And then after I got into that, then it started to come alive from within. Like, "hey, you kind of like do like 40 minutes again and then get on the bike and then do the cold and stop using the whole two hours for this. You just needed to do that upfront because we were gonna burst through this big doorway." So it's just so interesting too, when it comes from within, it's often not... It's like there's... It's contextual.

 

1:22:35.7 Lily Eggers: Yes. Yes. It doesn't make sense. And that's the thing, our brains wanna make sense of things. Our bodies just trust. Our bodies just do, and that's sort of.

 

1:22:45.7 Joseph Anew: Feel the cut.

 

1:22:45.8 Lily Eggers: I love that you listened. Imagine if you'd interrupted yourself because you had to get on the bike or because you had to... I feel like human beings we're interrupting ourselves all the time. And what a tragedy when we don't see, actually seasons are playing out constantly. There's often a beginning, a middle, and an end. There's... With hunger, we're like hungry and then we eat and we're satiated. There's an arc to so many things in life. And then we think we know how it's supposed to be, and we try to interject ourselves and what a loss that is. 'cause we don't know what we missed by not interjecting ourselves.

 

1:23:23.4 Lily Eggers: And that's actually, when I think about psychedelics, I think the greatest gift most guides can do is actually not do, is to sit in presence and to be just like holding the natural innate healing of people having an experience. And that I think when people get really excited about being guides or facilitators, they run the risk of interfering. And they run the risk of blocking a natural flow of an experience. And I think that that's really, really critical and really key for people to know if they're thinking about doing that work. Because it's easy to do.

 

1:24:07.6 Joseph Anew: I mean, it's funny Because you and I are both graduates of CCP. It's a really big part of that program we're trying to instill in folks. And it's funny 'cause I've been in this space for quite a while and people often ask 'cause I don't guide anything. And it's because I like, hey, you might think I'm ready to guide, but I don't think I'm ready to guide because there's this burden of responsibility. And also just you have to know everything about your projections and also your... That sort of just what we're talking about with the cognitive. This is what comes up for me when I think about ever guiding anything is just this will I have that ability to fully allow them to have their experience.

 

1:24:51.0 Joseph Anew: And even if they were to ask and say... Even if they were to ask for advice, but you still kind of have to... There's a maybe like a double-dutching that needs to happen there to make sure that even if it's painful, they have their path. And that I don't... The guide anybody doesn't try to save, doesn't try to redirect, doesn't try to... So there's just an understanding that I think require... There needs to be, and it's why we're blowing out the practicum of CCP from 10 or 15 to 50 hours of experiential time because there's this incredible amount of experience that's required maybe in a co-facilitation role or... And I would defer to you.

 

1:25:35.3 Lily Eggers: Totally.

 

1:25:36.0 Joseph Anew: But this has been on my mind a lot lately because people are asking me and I'm like, "Hey, no, go find... Maybe go talk to Lily or someone."

 

1:25:42.0 Lily Eggers: Yeah. It is, it's a learning. I think you said it so well, the projections. And in some ways, I think the being the... Your naming that it's a big deal and there's a lot going on, indicates that you have awareness and consciousness of the bigness. You're aware that there's stuff you don't know, which is huge. And I think what I'm concerned about is the people who think they know everything and that it's easy or it's simple, or that it's straightforward. And it's like when you unlock psychedelic experience, you're unlocking, you have no idea what's in there. And you can do all the assessments you want. You still don't know what's under there when you are sitting with someone who starts to go in and starts to open up. And anyway, it's a juicy conversation for sure.

 

1:26:32.0 Joseph Anew: Well, it's so important. And, you mentioned... I was talking to a woman the other day at a birthday party, 'cause psychedelics come up all the time. So three-year-old birthday party is a perfect place to talk about it. And she had just done 5-MeO first, this was her first psychedelic experience, no.

 

1:26:49.3 Lily Eggers: Oh my gosh.

 

1:26:51.4 Joseph Anew: No microdosing, no tilling the soil, just like, let's rock and roll. And she was like, "it was so beautiful. I think everyone needs this." And I was a joyful, like, I wasn't gonna like cut, but I was like, "you kind of like lucked out and I'm so glad you had a beautiful experience." But that is the exact sort of... It's like the vegan diet. It's like the exact thing. It's like everyone's gotta do it. Do it now. It's like, and there's this, I think that's maybe this space right now and it's why at Third Wave and Paul and everything we're doing here to try to do what we can to provide information and protect the, so to speak, like the third wave. Because it's so easy to have a positive experience of mushrooms and say, "Hey, I wanna bippity boppity boo everyone else, because... 'cause I had a great experience." Yeah.

 

1:27:47.7 Lily Eggers: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all things. I mean, it's really... It's showing you to you and that isn't always pretty. And I think that like, sure, it's showing you to you in a bliss state because you are a light being, you are pure, unconditional love, you are all of that. And there's some stuff in the way of that that also will be shown to you. And I think what I love about medicine is you don't always know what it's gonna be. Is it gonna be bliss or is it gonna be your layers of not bliss? Fear and discomfort and whatever you don't know. And to have someone there who understands that it could be anything, and it could be all of it, and they're there with you don't have to be in it alone. And I think that's so healing for people. You're not alone. So healing. So Joseph, I'm so bummed, but I actually have a hard stop at 1:00.

 

1:28:41.3 Joseph Anew: Yeah. We've been cruising and I didn't get to ask you about Mom on Drugs, so.

 

1:28:47.4 Lily Eggers: Oh my gosh.

 

1:28:48.3 Joseph Anew: Can you give us like the 60 second...

 

1:28:50.0 Lily Eggers: I sure will. I will happily do that. So.

 

1:28:52.6 Joseph Anew: And then I have one more question.

 

1:28:54.6 Lily Eggers: Okay, great. I can go a little over. But Mom's on Drugs is a play, a one woman play that I've been writing for years now. And it is really a... It's my process of learning how to be me after the shock of having children. That after having kids, I feel like I sort of... I became this mom archetype and I was sort of like, well, what happened to the Ripper and that chick and what happened to this biker and the dancer and the all the ways that I know myself, the skinny dipper? How does a mom, how does this identity kind of integrate? How do I become all of it? And at the time, I did the Artist's Way and I was like, okay, I just need to sing.

 

1:29:37.7 Lily Eggers: I'm a singer. I need to just sing and remember myself as a singer. So I was like, okay, let's find 10 songs. I'm just gonna put together 10 songs and do a show for my friends, or something like that. And then what I realized is that I had a lot to say about how I picked that song, and that's actually where the play started was what would I say between each song? And then it it became this emergent exploration of identity and of growth and of challenge and of heartbreak and of this path that we have as human beings. And I do wanna explore how I've used compounds, how compounds have supported me, how I've used plant medicines and other medicines that really help me see myself and help me integrate myself and help me remember myself when I can't remember when it feels really hard to remember.

 

1:30:34.9 Lily Eggers: And so the play is... It's really taking form, especially in the past few months I've really been working on it, but I can tell that there's one little piece of me that's not ready to perform it. I'm not quite ready to perform it and share it, but it, the process of creating it has been so ugh, so growthful and beautiful and so deep for me. And I'm really looking forward to being at a point of performance. It will happen in the next few years, but I have... I can feel it inside of me. I don't wanna be acting, this is about me, this is my story, and I don't wanna be acting my story. I wanna be embodying my story. And there's some little piece of healing or consciousness I still need to work on so that I'm not acting my story. And I don't know what that means for my play, but that is the piece that I'm still in exploration around.

 

1:31:26.8 Joseph Anew: I love that, Lily, I wish we had more time to dive into it, and I know... And I love the awareness.

 

1:31:31.5 Lily Eggers: Me too.

 

1:31:32.0 Joseph Anew: I love the awareness that you know the piece that's missing and the consciousness that needs to come in. So last question. I know you gotta go. What... I've been wanting to ask you for two hours, what did you steal?

 

1:31:44.5 Lily Eggers: Oh my gosh.

 

1:31:44.5 Joseph Anew: What was the actual item?

 

1:31:44.6 Lily Eggers: Isn't that funny. What did I steal? I think when I got caught it was like pants and a bra, clothes.

 

1:31:51.7 Joseph Anew: Oh, so this was, you've been doing this for a while?

 

1:31:53.1 Lily Eggers: I've been doing it for a while and it was usually like dumb stuff. Yeah. It was usually like chapstick, lip gloss and things, makeup, things like that. But the day I got caught it was a pair of green pants and a pink bra and it was at the local Kmart or something like that. And I just walked brazenly into the bathroom, shoved it in my backpack, and walked brazenly out. And, yeah, it was brazen. I was just try to get me and I got gotten.

 

1:32:26.2 Joseph Anew: Goodness. Well, thank you so much, Lily. This has been such a joy.

 

1:32:31.7 Lily Eggers: Yeah, thank you, Joseph. What a pleasure.

 

1:32:33.0 Joseph Anew: Where can people find you? Website?

 

1:32:37.2 Joseph Anew: Yeah, my website is lilyeggers.com. That's L-I-L-Y-E-G-G-E-R-S.com. And it's always, I'm expanding offerings and things that I'm trying to have all kinds of new offerings in different ways, so check that out as I grow there. My Instagram and Facebook presence are very limited. I sometimes feel inspired to put something on there, but I... Please feel free to reach out. I love dialoguing, I love meeting new people. I love sharing about this, the consciousness shifting work. It's really great.

 

1:33:08.0 Joseph Anew: Thank you so much, Lily, and we will link in the show notes to all of your stuff. So thank you so much for being here, and I'll talk to you soon.

 

1:33:13.4 Lily Eggers: Thank you, Joseph. Thank you so much.

1:33:22.6 Joseph Anew: Hey, listeners, Joseph here. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Lily Eggers. To go deeper into this episode with full show notes, transcripts, and any links that we mention in the conversation just follow the link in the description wherever you're downloading this podcast, or head over to thethirdwave.co/podcast and scroll down to episode 212 with Lily Eggers. All right, everybody, thank you so much for listening to this week's show. Until next time.