E215 - Elizabeth Gilbert: Love Addiction, Telling the Truth & Hearing Your Inner Voice

Elizabeth Gilbert (0:00)

We all start with this beautiful innocence and these beautiful unmet needs, but they can make us into really dangerous people who hurt people. Sex and love addiction, which has done me in so many times. My will was like, I want this person at any cost. And God's like, okay, at any cost, go for it. Here comes the cost.

André Duqum (0:18)

So what happened with you and Raya?

Elizabeth Gilbert (0:20)

We were secretly in love with each other, but she was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer and given six months to live. And so she got addicted to cocaine, but God's got jokes. She lived actually for 18 months.

And then now you're a hospice patient who's also a drug addict. And then she died. She was doing her drug, but she was my drug. There's no way out. It turns out there always is, and that is to tell the truth. For me, that's what it means, know thyself. I will never abandon you. I will never turn my back on you. You excavate yourself, you find a lot in there. You find a lot of darkness, but you find a lot of light too. What if somebody told you, you're not a good singer? This person is a good dancer, you're not. This one is the writer, you're not. Creativity is taken from you. And for some people, that's the end of the story. I can absolutely promise you that if you sit down and tell that story that is within you, you will be a different person. Don't you kind of want to know who you'll be if you actually do that then?

André Duqum (1:14)

And if somebody wanted to do it tomorrow morning, what would they do?

Elizabeth Gilbert (1:18)

Oh, well, yeah, you got it.

André Duqum (1:25)

Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Know Thyself Podcast. Our guest today is one of the world's most decorated authors, most notably Eat, Pray, Love, Big Magic, her memoir, All the Way to the River, amongst many others. She is somebody that is incredibly inspiring to me. The way that she lives her life courageously, authentically, shares how to unleash your creativity and it's been a long time coming. I'm so excited to have you. Liz Gilbert, thank you for being here. Hi.

Elizabeth Gilbert (1:52)

I'm so happy to be here. We did it.

André Duqum (1:55)

We did it. Yeah. You made it.

Elizabeth Gilbert (1:56)

We made this occur.

André Duqum (1:57)

Yes.

Elizabeth Gilbert (1:59)

Or didn't stop it from occurring.

André Duqum (2:01)

I'm honored that I'm one of your first back off of your sabbatical that you're just coming off of.

Elizabeth Gilbert (2:07)

Yeah. Actually, this is the first thing I've done public facing in six months. After the first time in my life, I've ever dropped working and talking and producing and even creating.

So I don't know if I remember how to do this. Let's see. We might just have to have a normal human conversation.

André Duqum (2:26)

We can always just, yeah, let's just plan on that. What was the impetus for the sabbatical?

Elizabeth Gilbert (2:33)

Well, let's just get right into it.

I take my direction from a higher power who I call God. I do that every day in this practice that I've done for years. That's called Two-Way Prayer, where I ask on the page, like first thing in the morning, what do you want me to do and who do you want me to be today and where do you want me to go? And then I just write the answer and then that's what I do. And that's been like that for quite a while now. And about two years ago, that voice started saying, we have to plan for you to stop. You've been going really hard forever. And you've never stopped and you've never paused. And if you don't stop, something's going to stop you and you won't like how that feels. So let's orchestrate that. And it's going to take a minute to plan because you know, like a life is sort of like a, it's like an aircraft carrier. It's like moving at this trajectory. You can't just stop it on a dime. Like you've got to sort of slow it down. So I spent a year and a half. We, that voice told me to set the dates from the beginning of March till the beginning of September of this year. And just start telling everybody in my life, I'm out, like don't, I don't plan anything. Don't count on me for anything. And I've been enforcing it with just ferociously because things arise that are really tempting and or that other people really want me to do. And I've just been really firm, like absolutely not.