Rewind: How Do I Find The Courage To Be My Own Guide?
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WBUR Podcasts, Boston. The universe has good news for the lost, lonely, and heart-sick. Sugar is here. The both of us. Speaking straight into your ears. I'm Cheryl Strayed. I'm Steve Almond. This is Dear Sugar Radio. Oh dear song, won't you please share some little sweet days with me.

Check my device. Oh, and the sugar you see in my.

Hi, Steve. Hi, Cheryl. How are you? I'm doing great. We're going to do something a little bit different today on this episode of Dear Sugar Radio. So often, as you know, our letters present us with a specific situation or problem or struggle, and they're fairly focused. You know, this is the trouble I'm in right now. And today we're going to read and answer a letter that's

bigger problem. And it's one, I think, that so many people share. I know I've had this struggle. You've had this struggle. Our listeners have had this struggle. And it's about something a bit more existential and yet very direct and very real in our lives. And that is how do we learn to really trust ourselves after we have read all the books and listened to every episode of Dear Sugar Radio and talked to therapists and friends? How do we, at the end of that

journey, let ourselves be our own guides, trust our hearts, follow our guts. That's advice I've given so many times and you have as well. But what does that really look like and what does that really mean? We're going to have a really interesting guest. I'm so excited. India Ari is going to join us and talk to us about her own journey that she really went through via her music and her success as a Grammy winning musician, how she learned to create that music that came from her heart and

and I hope that we'll do some talking about our own journeys as well. Yeah, let's do it. Let's get to the letter. I'm going to read it to you. Dear Sugars, I'm a 34-year-old woman, and I'm recently coming to terms with the fact that I've spent my life being too afraid to do what I want to do. Time after time, I've let social norms guide me, or I've looked to others for their opinions about my next step, my purpose.

While I've learned a lot from many teachers, writers, philosophers, and therapists, it seems crucial at this point that I learn how to listen to my own heart and be brave enough to follow it. I want to be my own guide.

It may seem ironic then for me to be asking for your advice, but I'm not asking you to tell me what I should be doing. It's how. How do I learn to trust myself the way I did when I was a kid, before I decided that other people knew better than me and gave them all the power? How do I learn to recognize my heart's voice and stand up for what it wants? How do I avoid falling back into that safe prison of doing what someone else thinks I should, but not what

what I truly want to do. Emily Dickinson wrote, "The heart wants what it wants or else it does not care. I know this to be true and I don't want to find myself back in a job or a relationship or a pursuit my heart doesn't care about. How do I tend to my heart and keep at bay the people, the thoughts, the fears that threaten this fledgling relationship between my heart and me? Sincerely, Heartward Bound."

Powerful. Interesting. Have you asked yourself these questions? You know, when I first read it, I thought about our very first episode. And, you know, you're saying, well, what's sort of been your guiding precept? And thinking about these questions of how you kind of get actualized and start building a life that feels more authentic and what you want to be doing on Earth, because you don't have a long time. And I feel like we've got to, as quickly as we can, get to the things that really are meaningful to us.

And I thought about that John Prine lyric, you know, that I told you so many years ago, your heart gets bored with your mind and it changes you. And Heartward Bound is describing that. My heart is bored with my mind. But it's something even more than that in this case. It's that there are other people and other voices that are getting in the way of what she wants to do to whom she has been obedient and finds herself being obedient.

So, Heartward Bound, you know, when I read your letter, there are these questions that

that are kind of big abstract questions. And I'm going to ask you to be more concrete about them. I want to read back a couple to you. How do I learn to trust myself the way I did when I was a kid before I decided that other people knew better than me and gave them all the power? So my question to you is, what other people? And how did you give them power? And how are you in your life giving them power?

You write, how do I avoid falling back into that safe prison? I love that. Safe prison of doing what someone else thinks I should do.

Who are these someone else's? You have to be specific about who they are and how to try to counteract them actively and specifically. And there's only one way to really genuinely counteract them, and that is to decide that they are not the voices who will determine what you do with your life. At this point where you're at, heartward bound, you're still bound up actually in those other voices and those other people or those social conventions. The fact that you wrote us this letter says

It's an indication that you're stepping away from that. And so you ask, how do you do that? How do you learn how to trust yourself? And the first thing I want to say is that this is not something you learn one time and do one time. It's something that you do every day over and over again for years and years and years. And the meaning of that life that you put into action looks different at different times.

But it's always returning to the idea that you really need to trust yourself. And I'll say that for me, I love this phrase, brave enough. I mean, aside from the fact it's actually a title of one of my books, I love that you use this phrase bravely.

I need to learn how to listen to my heart and be brave enough to follow it. And the way you do that is you just get brave enough not to have some big glorious life that you just cast off all conventions and other voices, but you're brave enough to make one step in the direction that you want to go. And that is a

For you, Heartward Bound, I actually think it's you writing us this letter, that you've even popped your head above that sort of surface enough to say, you know what, I'm not going to listen to all these people anymore. I need to trust myself. That's the first step. In my life, in really practical terms, in every arena, I've had to do this as most, I'm sure Steve, you've done as well, where you have to say,

Okay, this would be the thing that would be like the conventional, the norm, the thing that would be easier for other people around me and in some ways for myself to do. I mean, anyone who's a writer, for example. You know, we stepped into this profession knowing that it was probably a bad idea because, you know, most people need a career because they need to pay their bills, right? And the minute you decide to be a writer or an artist of any sort, you're saying, okay, I'm going to take this risk.

And I'm not going to listen to the voices of reason and security and all that stuff. I'm going to walk this path. Heartward Bound, you mentioned relationships too. We're supposed to make nice. We're supposed to be in relationships that please people around us. Sometimes you have to step off that path. You have to adopt a position in relation to all the people who love you that disappoints those people.

Yeah. In your case, Cheryl, I keep thinking about, you know, you have to go off and do something that's crazy. Yeah. And it's not just the idea of going off and hiking the trail. And it's not the inspiration, the realization, the moment you say, I'm leading a life that doesn't feel real enough to me. It's the perspiration of at every point where it seems impossible and doomed, you battle through it. The backpack is, you know, ridiculous. You brought all this stuff along. Your feet are bloody. You're, you know...

reason Wilde resonated with so many people is because at every point you ran up against the real hard work of making a difficult, inconvenient decision. I

I would also say that within this letter is this idea of how do I get back to a childlike state, a state where I trust myself, an instinctual state. And what I say oftentimes to writing students, and I try to say it to myself, is, look, consciousness is by nature obsessive. Children come into the world obsessed. That is, they care about things too much.

And what happens with obsession is that it's socialized out of us. We beat down the voices that care about things too much and that feel too much. And part of the artist's journey, I guess, is to say, screw that. I do care about it too much. I am too invested in it. I'm obsessed with it. And I'm going to be honest about that obsession rather than trying to lead a safer, more conventional, approved life.

But it's an emotionally and psychologically inconvenient arrangement because you feel more and you face certain things about yourself that bring you away from arrangements that are there, especially in our culture, to kind of keep you insulated from deep feeling. Yeah. But, you know, I love that you singled out this.

this phrase because I thought the same thing. I want to trust myself the way I did when I was a kid. And you know how kids will sometimes be at play and they will say these absurd things and create these sort of outlandish scenarios and worlds. Imaginative play, yeah. My kids are always up to it. Those worlds don't make sense to the people around them, but they absolutely make sense to them. I remember, you know, like...

My son, one time, he found a deck of cards in a room, in a sort of far-off room in the house. And one by one, he took one card at a time and ran to the other end of the house until he had stacked them at the other end of the house. And he was so determined, and it made sense to him. Oh, yeah. And the only person it didn't seem crazy to was...

was him because he was so engaged in doing it. And when you said, oh, maybe you have to go off and do something crazy, what I think about that is it doesn't matter if what you're doing seems crazy to other people. If it feels right to you, it's right. And that's how my hike was. Never did I feel so right, actually, than when I went off and did something that many others perceived as crazy. Yeah.

I agree with you that can be a very hard life when you first step off the path. But I think the harder life is never stepping off the path while always aching to do so. I really was submersed in this question earlier.

Recently, I did a talk at Oprah Winfrey's Super Soul Sessions. And it's a live event that's one talk after another. I was given about 25 minutes to give a talk. And I also sat and listened to talks by all of these other people. And people talked about forgiveness and about how everything is figureoutable and about any number of the things that we have to contemplate when we try to learn how to trust our hearts. Yeah.

And one of the people who really touched me the most, and my husband, I was sitting in the audience next to him. I turned over to him and tears were just streaming down Brian's face, was when we were listening to India Ari tell her story. And so when I read this letter, I really thought that she could speak so much to the questions that have been presented to us. Should we give India a call? Yeah. Yeah.

Hello? India Ari, this is Cheryl Strayed. Hello. How are you, my dear? I'm good. How are you? Really great. I have Steve Almond here with me. We're really excited you're on the show. Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. You're welcome. I'm excited I'm on the show, too. Oh, so you're on the show.

So we sent you a letter from Heartward Bound. Did you have a chance to read it? The woman who is asking us how to listen to her own heart, how to learn how to be her own guide. And I was telling Steve earlier that you and I met at Oprah's Super Soul Sessions, and I felt like your talk spoke so directly.

directly really to some of these questions that this woman is asking. Yeah. Would you tell us a bit about your journey and your struggle to find your heart and listen to it? Yes. Well, the reason why I gave that talk is because that was the turning point of my life when I decided to take that journey of getting to a place where I could be my own guide because

What I now understand is it is a journey to that place. But being willing to take the journey even while you're afraid, that's the point. I mean, how did you come to that moment where you realized you weren't living your truth?

The truth is, it wasn't that I came to a point of realizing that I wasn't living my truth. It's that I came to a point where I couldn't ignore it anymore. And that's the point that you feel something different than what you're living. You feel that rub. That's the rub. And I always felt the rub. I always felt it all along. But then it got to a point where I just kept having health issues. I had ulcers and I had skin eruptions. And I finally just had a breakdown.

And I still went on for a few more years after having a breakdown where I just now in hindsight, I look at it as my personality and my soul separating so that my soul could say no to these people. But at the time, it just felt like a nervous breakdown. Right. Can you tell us about this moment? Where were you and what were you doing when you when you had that big awakening that you say it's like a breakdown, but it was really your soul separating? What was happening then?

It was in a dressing room. I was backstage before I was getting ready to go on to do a concert. It was actually a television appearance that my business team wanted me to do, and I just couldn't manage it. I felt like I couldn't manage it logistically. There would have been a flight all the way from the East Coast to the West Coast overnight and get off the plane and go straight to the soundstage and then try to be together. And I was already on tour, and I just felt like I couldn't do it, and I kept telling them no.

but I wasn't saying it strong enough. And so instead of just being able to say, no, I can't do it, I had to like scream and yell and break things and kick things. No. - That's a no, right. - And I came to, and it literally was like I came back into my mind and I was on the floor crying. And I knew my phone was broken and my foot was hurting. And I didn't really, really know what happened,

But I still had a few more experiences, not that dramatic, but a few more experiences after that where I had ulcer. I had an ulcer and I was just traveling and touring and I had issues with my adrenals where I was just tired all the time and I was trying to be happy and perky and daytime TV and do my interviews and be nice to people. But my adrenals were slowly burning themselves out. I was burning them out. Yeah.

And so all the stuff I was trying to keep at bay, trying to keep my money together and keep myself relevant and keep myself going and not to make anyone upset with me, all the stuff I was juggling, the flip side of all of it happened.

I was embarrassed. I made everybody mad. My health failed. Everything happened. And that's why I say I use the word decide loosely. I don't know if I decided, but it was just like, there's nothing else to do. There's nothing else to try except for to take a chance on the truth. Take a chance on the truth. What a beautiful way to put it. Yeah, because you don't know how it's going to turn out.

until you do it one time and then you realize that you can do it again. Right. And that's the thing, right? That's the thing. You take that first leap and then you realize you had wings all along, kind of. Yeah. Well, that's before you got on the phone, I was saying, you know, I think that it's a lifelong, you know, how do you trust your heart? It's not one. You don't do it one time. You do it. You're brave enough to do it one time in one way. And then you and then you keep being brave enough to do it another time in other ways. Right.

In my full session talk, I call it my journey of breakdown, breakthrough, break the shell, elevate and fly. And for me, the breakdown is overwhelm. The breakthrough is getting the courage to begin to act. Break the shell is action.

The action I took was I had to talk with everyone, my management. I especially had to talk with my mom and my brother. And I went into nature and took time for myself. I know you guys are in Oregon. I went to Seattle, to Vashon Island. I didn't take medication. I didn't change the way I ate. My stomach cleared up. My skin cleared up. Right. The depression that I was carrying, it was gone, like in two weeks. And that's when I knew that I was doing the right things, that elevation.

And then what I talk about when I say fly, for me, fly is the embodiment of the wisdom. That's when you realize that things are going to happen again. Life's going to happen again. There's going to be another reason for a breakdown, breakthrough, break the shell, elevate. But you realize that first time you realize you can do it. The embodiment of the wisdom. So it's not the idea that now you've won and you've achieved everything and you're never going to struggle again, but rather embracing the idea that you're going to have to keep struggling. Yeah.

That's the hard part. I don't know how you tell a person to go ahead and trust yourself and do it. I don't know how you can tell a person take that leap. But all I can say is I did it and it worked for me. But then you realize that everyone has a leap that they end up taking in life. If you can talk to people about the leap they've taken, you can see that there is one there for you. Like she said, how do I recognize the voice of my heart?

First of all, you do it by going inside. But going inside means something different for everyone. Like you hike the Pacific Coast Trail. For me, I went to get somewhere where I got really quiet and I wrote and I wrote songs and I wrote essays to myself about my life. And I feel like especially a person like Heartward Bound, people who are thoughtful will find the impetus to take the jump inside of that time.

Because you realize there's a truth there that you want to honor more than you want to honor not making people mad. Yeah, I think that's true. I feel like this is heartward bound. She knows what she doesn't want. And that's where I was. You know what you don't want, but you're not exactly sure what you do want. When you take the time to get clear about what you do want, that thing that you want pulls you forward.

Well, one thing that fascinates me is there's kind of this word courage that gets thrown around in the culture. And as you were talking, India, it was like, well, the problem is partly we're defining courage the wrong way. People like Heartward Bound may be thinking of courage as the absence of fear. And that's just all wrong. Courage is actually action in the face of fear. It's somehow taking action even though you are.

Yeah.

And like you said, there are people who want the best for you. But I also realized the difference between the people who love me and wanted the best for me and the people for whom I serve their agenda. The people for whom I serve their agenda, I put them to the side, left them there, and moved on. Dealing with my mother was different. I had to have a really big talk with her because all she wanted was for me to be okay. And my father was a professional basketball player.

And he lived that paradigm of the basketball player who comes from really poor family, ends up being a millionaire and loses all the money because they don't have the right self-worth or the right education to save their money. Right. And so with me, when I became successful and I started making my own money and made a lot of money fast, her whole thing was, I want to make sure that you always have that money.

And I had to sit her down and really explain to her that I felt like I could die. It wasn't like, you know, on my deathbed physically feeling, but it felt like this is going to lead to an early death. Like I felt like I could die. And then she finally could hear me. Like this is not, you know, I want the money too. And at the end of our conversation, my mom said, well, you know, you can always come back home.

Yeah. Right? And everybody doesn't have a mom that can say that to them, and I know that. I know that. But what I do know is I think everyone has something that matters enough in their life that they want to be alive for it. Oh, nice. Yeah. Yeah. And during this process, one of the things a friend told me, I'm probably not going to say this exactly right, but we hear about the phoenix rising from the ashes. Yes. And what my friend explained to me is that in the mythology of the phoenix, actually,

the phoenix sets fire to its own nest. That's so cool. I never knew that. Because what is important for us to remember is that even the people who love you the most, and I'm telling my mom is my girl. She's my girl. She taught me everything I know about songwriting. She taught me everything I know about being a woman and she's my friend and I admire her and I respect her. But,

The thing that makes empowerment a journey is because no one can give it to you. You give it to yourself. You set fire to your own nest. You set fire to your own nest. It's how you find empowerment. You give birth to a new you. Yeah. And what I found is...

That I thought my mother was like usurping my power. But what I realized is that I was giving it to her. That's right. We blame it on other people, but it's because we can't, we're not strong enough yet to take responsibility for our own actions. And I think that that's it exactly, is that the way to stop letting people be your guide is to stop letting people be your guide.

That's the answer to her question, right? You do it by doing it. That's right. And you have done it beautifully. And yeah, what a wonderful story. And you're such an inspiration. I know to me and to millions of people around the world who listen to your music and who hear your message of really strength and courage and humility and

all of the things that you are. So thank you for gracing us with your voice on Dear Sugar Radio. Yeah. Thank you for letting me join you. I love your podcast because it reminds me that there are people who think and feel the way that I do. I'm happy to be on. Aw. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you.

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That was great. Yeah, I love this description and how much of the experience was really in her body. Yeah. It's like her body had to seize the narrative

from this dutiful daughter and also just all the pressures of essentially kind of reliving her dad's experience of having a whole bunch of success and acclaim and money young and her having the wisdom again or at least some instinctual core part of her to say, hold on, don't make the same mistake here. You need to figure out what you want to be doing, not what the world is demanding of you because you've been blessed with these talents.

That phrase she uses of, I had to take the time to go inside. And she went outside to do it, just like I did, which is really, I think a lot of people, that's what we talk about the power of nature. But like in a real way, going to a place that allows you to be alone with your thoughts. Steve, one of the things I'm so...

interested and intrigued by as we started talking about this letter and at the beginning of the show saying how abstract this was and how we were really kind of taking on not a situation but a much larger question. And the advice we came up with in spite of the fact that this is this big question is really some of the most succinct that I think we've ever come up with. How do you listen to your heart? As India said, you do it by doing it.

And the heartward bound gets it. You know, she does write, you know, before I decided I was the agent that other people knew better than me and gave them all the power. You know, we say this all the time that people are authoring their own answers here. It's almost as if we have to say heartward bound. Look at what you just wrote.

You're giving away all of this sense of volition and who you are. And like, that's got to stop doing that. You already know that. So now it's time to muster the real courage, not the kind that, you know, acts because you don't feel any fear, but the kind that acts because you feel fear. And then go out into the desert and figure it out. It's like, well, you got to burn the nest. Indeed. Indeed.

And the agony and the beauty of it is you can only do it alone, but you can also know, as India said, the way you learn how to do it is looking around and seeing all the other people who have done it too. Think about Cheryl Emily Dickinson.

There she is in her family home for her whole life in that little garret writing these astonishing poems. Very few of them even found their way into the world. But she was in conversation with herself. She was going inside. Every day she would sit down and do that work. And, you know, we're still talking about her and, you know, relying on her because she went that deeply inside of herself. Yeah.

She's one of those people who was an inspiration to me. In fact, Wild opens with a quote from Emily Dickinson, Wild the book, and also it's in the movie. If your nerve deny you, go above your nerve. Go above your nerve.

Dear Sugar Radio is produced by WBUR in Boston. We're produced and edited by Lisa Tobin. We're recording here at Talkback Sound and Visual in Portland, Oregon. Josh Millman is our wonderful engineer. We have this amazing new theme music, which is by the Portland musicians known as Wonderly. The vocals are by Liz Weiss. Please listen and subscribe to Dear Sugar Radio on iTunes, and please also write to us at dearshugarradio at gmail.com.