The Tension of Emergence: Thriving in a world that remakes, not breaks

Fluency in Feeling with Lisa Olivera

• Jennifer England • Season 4 • Episode 3

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What if pain isn’t something to fix or escape—but a wise, living presence asking for our attention?

In this episode, Jennifer sits down with writer and therapist Lisa Olivera for a heartfelt conversation about relating to pain as a wise teacher, rather than an adversary. Drawing from Lisa’s personal journey—shaped by early experiences with a culture that teaches us to avoid pain—they explore:

  • The social narratives that keep us from feeling fully
  • The role of somatic practice in understanding our body’s intelligence
  • What it means to approach suffering with reverence 
  • The slow, courageous path toward collective belonging

This episode invites you to deepen your fluency with feeling —in your body, the mystery of life and one another.  

Links & Resources:


Gratitude for this show’s theme song Inside the House, composed by the talented Yukon musician, multi-instrumentalist and sound artist Jordy Walker. Artwork by the imaginative writer, filmmaker and artist Jon Marro.



Jennifer: [00:00:00] I have to admit I hate pain and when I'm suffering with any kind of pain, whether it's physical or even emotional, there is such a desire in myself to escape it, to make it go away. And it's the same with other people's pain or if loved ones or friends are struggling.

I wanna soothe it. I want it to go away. And sometimes I've noticed that my own discomfort with pain, especially when it's felt by others. It can make actually everything worse because someone else knows that I'm not comfortable with it, and then they feel like they need to take care of me, but as we've explored a lot on the show, we are not isolated individuals. We're not Atlas who is holding up the weight of the world, because if we go [00:01:00] there and we get caught there, I feel like we're back in that hero's myth that somehow we need to become exceptional to endure it.

But as we've been exploring here too, if we're living and loving through embodied ecologies of interconnection, which in plain English to me just means loving in the flesh, day in and day out, it makes more sense that not one of us can or should bear our pain.

Or that the pain only exists in the individual and that no one of us should bear the weight and the pain of the world. So this season we're exploring this tension between wanting to save the day, make our troubles go away quickly.

While also being able to relate and stay in the trouble of it all. And for me part of this work is challenging, [00:02:00] this commonly held view that pain is only a signal that something is wrong, and if something's wrong, that it needs to be fixed as quickly as possible. So instead, if we, we interpret pain.

As something that doesn't need to be controlled but listened to. I believe we get a different kind of story and a different way of experiencing the texture of our own lives.

I've been following Lisa Olivera's work for some time and have always felt that she's the kind of person that you could sit with at the ocean of your own life, a place where you can slow down and be radically honest and know that you'll be met with an arm full of compassion because you know that she's at home with her own grief, her own pain, her own rage, as well as.

Beauty and joy and tenderness. Lisa has a [00:03:00] gift of giving herself and us by extension, the permission to tenderly be with our messy human emotions and experiences. She doesn't flinch when they grip us or hurl us into the deep. And she's been a genuine companion on this journey of being human modeling, the kind of courage and kindness and curiosity that it takes to live with uncertainty in a way that feels far less overwhelming.

Lisa Olivera is a therapist, a writer, mother, and an ever curious human. She's deeply interested in unanswerable questions, the perpetual in between and the process of unfurling and how we can stay with the aches and the joys of being human in a more generous, open and connected way. Lisa writes the Human Stuff Newsletter, is the author of the book already Enough, A Path to Self-Acceptance and is currently working on her [00:04:00] second book, and she lives with her family in Sonoma County, California, on the Ancestral Lands of the Coast, me Walk People.

So with that, enjoy this conversation with Lisa. 

So Lisa, thank you so much for joining me on tension of Emergence. I feel like you're a kindred spirit in so many ways, and I feel that through your 35 millimeter camera. Little artistic glimpses that you offer us in your newsletter, and I feel it in your invitation to being more fully human and the quality of tenderness that you bring to your own experience and.

How that opens us all up to the ocean of life. I know you live near the ocean, but it just feels [00:05:00] like that, that feels so alive to me. So I'm just, yeah, feel so grateful that you're here.

Lisa: Oh, thank you so much. I feel that kindredness as well and yeah, it feels really good to get to be in conversation with you.

Jennifer: So as we were warming up for our conversation, we were talking a little bit about the entanglement of our emerging work and. I've been grappling with this idea around saving and how much I have felt compelled to save what I perceive as broken, and I've really been wrestling with how I understand brokenness because the signs of it in my old story.

Has often been, oh, there's evidence of pain. Oh, there's evidence of suffering, therefore I'm broken. Someone else is [00:06:00] broken and it requires fixing or tending, and I, I would just love to hear you reflect on this impulse to fix, and from your experience how have you wrestled with that and how have you been able to relax that?

Lisa: I think I first just wanna name the goodness and love that. I think that impulse to fix so often comes from. And the desire to make things better, the desire to eliminate what hurts, the desire to change what we perceive as not working. And I think so much of my own relationship with fixing and saving and brokenness and. Change and, wanting to make pain go away. Really started in my origin story of being abandoned by my birth mother [00:07:00] and my own pain around that experience growing up, being the source of a lot of attempts at fixing and eradicating and making it go away and making it. And soften because of other people's discomfort with the pain that I was carrying and because of other people's inability to sit with my pain.

And so I think I got that message from so many different places, from our culture, from family, from the way that I was raised to think about pain and strength and softness. And so I, I held from a young age, this orientation, that pain is something that. Signifies something being wrong and that it's a problem.

And through many years and explorations and understandings of myself and my own story, I really came to see [00:08:00] with the help of so many teachers and guides and therapists and people who were able to help me identify, otherwise, I was able to really see. My pain as actually like one of the most truthful voices that I was carrying inside of me and one of the most honest sources of knowing and of wisdom and of recognition that I had. And as I look back now, I see the pain that I was carrying as just being so intelligent and wise, and. Holding so much truth that no one else knew how to hold. And so I think because of my own long winding experience of learning to meet my pain so that I could free it, not get rid of it, but free it from this grip of control and this grip of [00:09:00] trying to erase it and actually listen to it and learn from it, that I've able to practice. Orienting toward the world in that way, and this is such an ongoing forever practice that I get wrong so often but I think reorienting toward pain and fixing and this need to see something as broken. Has really been blown open by my capacity to hold my own pain with reverence and with curiosity, and with the kind of tenderness that I think all of our pain and all of the world's pain is asking for. And it has also caused me to really unlearn just all of the structural and societal messages around. Control and dominance and having power over and all these ways. I think we've been conditioned to [00:10:00] see and to see what fixing should look like and to see what our role in that is. I've found that to be so internalized from such a young age and.

It's just this constant unraveling and unlearning that I think really invites so much room for presence and for witnessing and for listening. And I think that is so often what pain is actually asking for is like, can you meet me in this and hear what I have to say? Can you accompany me in this and, and see what it is I actually need?

To get rid of pain is so often to get rid of the very core, essential parts of being human and the very experience of being like rightly affected by something and the very willingness to let life in which so often includes letting in what hurts. [00:11:00] And so it's just this, this deep unraveling that continues. And I still catch myself in so often. This tendency and impulse to fix or hear or whatever it may be, that feels so much more soft and human and fluid, but also feels a lot harder to do in some ways when we're surrounded by this impulse to fix and save and.

Jennifer: Yeah.

Lisa: Eradicate and erase and get rid of the discomfort.

So , it's such a swirly experience.

Jennifer: yeah. I love that swirly. And what I, I'm curious about as you, as you share, was there a moment where you can recall when you first found yourself taking a step to befriend? I. The pain as a wise teacher because I love that invitation that you're making 'cause pain. I'll speak from my own experience.

I think if [00:12:00] you're a sensitive being on this planet interpersonally with what's happening politically, what's happening with climate change, there is a way that it can feel so overwhelming to our nervous systems and being able to see pain as a sign of a deeper truth. I. That wants to be listened to and wants to be heard such that something different might come from it, or right.

Action might come from it is such a key invitation that I think enables a, like, I feel softened my own softening as you, as you invite us into that. So. What is a moment where you first felt a befriending of your own pain?

Lisa: I was sitting in a group therapy session at Kaiser with about eight or nine other teenagers and our families, and I remember sitting in [00:13:00] that space and hearing so many of the adults, even some of the therapists approaching the pain that these. Teenagers were sharing with this sort of fixing and wanting to take it away and wanting to explain it away, I, I almost witnessed this like dampening of very true and real pain in other people.

And I found myself almost wanting to, and at times, literally jumping in and saying like, actually it makes a lot of sense that you're feeling that and. Almost being able to see it in other people in this very clear way and seeing the ways that everyone sort of swooped in to try and rescue them from it without ever being able to pause and be in it with them.

And I think in that moment of, of witnessing it in other people, I was able to have this [00:14:00] slow reassembling of. Oh, maybe my pain is actually valid too and has something important in it. And it almost takes being able to see it outside of us sometimes to be able to recognize and hold it within. And I have found that to be so true in my own experience.

But I think that was the start of. Slowly beginning to listen to what it is my pain was actually trying to say, and I started to be able to. acknowledge where it was coming from and why it was there. And when I did that, I had this felt sense of trust in it that I had never had before. And I think I've been slowly growing that sense of trust when the pain arises, that sense of trust, that it's there for a reason, [00:15:00] and that if I.

Can relax some of the tendencies and conditioning that I have to try and get rid of it immediately. I can start asking it questions and it so often has so much to tell me and so much of what it tells me makes such perfect sense when I slow down enough to listen to it. And I think I've had that built in practice since.

I was a teenager and I was desperate for everyone else to do that for me too. And I started to recognize this gift and practice of self-compassion and self attunement and this recognition that we can so often give ourselves what we need from others. And that then invites us to receive from others in ways that we might not have been able to before. That was, yeah, very much my early experiences of [00:16:00] reorienting toward how I can be with pain, and I think that's expanded to not just my own inner pain, but also the pain of the world, the pain of the culture, and. Systems we live in the pain of witnessing harm and violence and sorrow and grief.

I think the more I attune to that in myself, the more open I am to staying with it outside of me.

Jennifer: What's coming up for me is a curiosity around, you know, the capacity to be and to stay with pain such that we can listen carefully enough to know its wisdom. Takes an incredible amount of resilience and patience. Like there's this tendency, to pathologize the pain to get rid of it.

I'm curious, and I know your work is really expanding in the somatic or in the [00:17:00] body terrain, and I'd love to hear what are you learning or what's surprising you about? This capacity to be with and stay with your own experience of pain through the body and using the body as an anchor.

'cause it's so easy to feel threatened by the sensations in the body. I know from my own experience it's any kind of anxiety that can feel so overwhelming in the body that kind of kicks me into this fight or flight must escape. So how, how are you working with the body and the wisdom of the body?

I.

Lisa: Yeah, for so long this exploration was very much a practice in thought and a practice in behavior and a practice in thinking and changing the way I approach how I talk to the pain and it's, it was a very cognitive process and I think that is so valuable and it's such a big part of this exploration. [00:18:00] That lot of pain that never got tended to including preverbal trauma and preverbal grief and pain that my body had been knowing and holding and signaling to me for so long that it needed attention and. Again, because I think we live in this very disembodied society that really encourages us to not listen to the body because goodness.

Like how much wisdom is there and what would change if everyone knew and was given the opportunity to do that. But I think something that I'm really learning lately is how difficult it is to. down where the mind wants to go, enough to be able to get to the sensation and how much compassion and kindness and forgiveness and patience it takes to [00:19:00] continuously reorient towards sensations that have long been something that I did not even know was there

Jennifer: Yeah.

Lisa: and has long been something that I. Did not know, held information that I needed. And I, I'm finding just how much stillness and slowness is needed to tune into that and also how easy it is to feel, what needs to be felt once I can get past this barrier that has been in place for so long around. Accessing the body's wisdom. There is so much underneath and within the walls that I have built around feeling for so long, and to get past those walls and underneath those barriers in order to access the felt sense can take. A lot of practice and willingness and patience, but once I get there, [00:20:00] it's almost like there's so much available that I did not know was available before that it, it's like learning a new language.

And it's like learning a language that feels the most natural that I could think anything could feel, but it, it also invites in.

Just so much grief around how long I had spent not knowing that that language was like asking me to become fluent in it, and not knowing that that language was holding so much of what I needed to process and to, to come into presence and to learn how to actually feel my feelings and feel the sensations and the longings and the grief and the.

Experiences that I long knew how to tend to on a cognitive level, but couldn't quite get to on a felt sense and body level. I think that's just where so much [00:21:00] connection and disconnection happens and where so much gets filtered through and stored. And so. more room to to be with reality rather than being with the stories that I have carried and to be with what's actually going on, rather than trying to explain or understand. It's almost like it just sort of zooms me into what's really happening here 

Like you said, that can sometimes be really overwhelming and, and sometimes I find myself wanting to zoom back out and go back up into my mind and go away from the body and dissociate and not not move into that space.

And so I think there's also this practice of like titrating and moving in and out and having permission to move at a pace that feels. Like it's meeting the need that I have in order to actually learn to stay there. [00:22:00] This sense of trust in pace, and trust in right timing and trust in capacity and trust that that capacity can grow and be built.

Jennifer: You've said this word a few times in our conversation so far, but this concept of holding, you know, and when you were little, when you're that teen in that room feeling like, oh, I want to be able to hold my own pain. I want us as a collective to hold the pain of others.

And then discovering that through self-compassion and working with that befriending and then. What I hear you saying is that, oh my God, the body is this whole other holding vessel, if you will, that has so much intelligence in it, but also this trust in the capacity for the body to not shrink away from the experience of reality, to not need to exert the energy for a plot escape, you [00:23:00] know, or, or like an intricate distraction mechanism, like this capacity of the body is incredible and it really tracks onto my own experience. I think being a very head centric human. If I can use this, I realize I'm using a bifurcation of the mind body as if it's the two separate things, and I don't believe that, but we can use the mind or rationality as, the primary vehicle for managing what we don't want to experience.

And so I'm curious, like for you, could you talk us through an experience where you've befriended sensation itself and. What that's brought you in terms of a deeper integration, I'm sensing of your experience of reality. I.

Lisa: I recently had an experience where I was able to really drop into [00:24:00] sensation, really like connect in a deep way to the body and to what was there, and I. All of a sudden my jaw started shaking and chattering and my whole face actually started doing these very small micro movements. And at first it was a bit frightening because I had never really experienced sensation in that way and, and release in that way.

But I was able to slow down and hold my own hand. And I can trust what is asking to be released in this way and I don't need to understand it. And what would happen if I just allowed the process to unfold? What would happen if I actually got out of the way so that this part of me that knows what to do can do the thing it needs to do? And. I ended up having this [00:25:00] deeply felt release of what I now understand was a lot of pre-verbal trauma that got trapped in my jaw, that I had been holding there my entire life with no idea. after that experience I had this. sudden a need to like hold myself like an infant and rock myself back and forth. And I sat and rocked myself and was saying to myself out loud like, you're okay. You're safe. I've got you. I'm here. And was rocking myself, rocking this part of me that needed something that it didn't get that I, because I was able to trust.

This what I perceived as this sort of strange thing happening in my body, in my nervous system. I was able to allow it to take me to a place of nurturance and a place of holding and a place of [00:26:00] what felt like deep, deep care for some of my younger parts. And I've been having more of these experiences lately of suddenly feeling.

A sensation in my body, feeling my shoulder needing to roll, feeling my breath, needing to go down to my belly instead of stay in my chest, feeling my feet like needing to feel like the bare earth underneath them. My body's needs. Opening up so much more space to actually get to show up for myself in ways that I haven't known how to before. And, and I find that that is bringing me into a much deeper sense of presence outside of me as well, and is really lowering. It almost feels like, it's like lowering me to the ground so that I can move and see and, and act and be from a more.

Rooted place. And [00:27:00] I find that that is so much of what I am experiencing as a result of listening to and connecting to the body in more intentional ways is this like rootedness and this sense of hereness and this capacity to meet the parts of me that are still not fully here with an openness and with a welcoming almost.

Jennifer: As you're talking, I could feel my, should my shoulders relaxing and just tuning into those moments that I've had where I experience a particular sensation that can feel very unfamiliar and for me, I can see if I haven't felt something before. It could be like a full body shake or it's in a context that seems odd or strange. It's so easy to pathologize it or to make it wrong or bad. And yet when you're describing the [00:28:00] sensation of the jaw and how your mouth and your whole face was sort of moving quickly there, there's no story.

There's not even emotion. You're not giving it a name. You're not saying, oh, I feel this. It just is. It's just what is happening. And I can see you bringing total attunement and gentle curiosity to that experience. And as you do that, there is a total softening and, and a recognition of that part of you or what it is that needs to be moved or shared or tended to, and I, I can't help but think how could we do that with the collective.

Lisa: Yeah.

Jennifer: from the individual to the collective and knowing that we're in this constant reciprocal dance between, and really porous between individuals, our individual selves [00:29:00] and our collective body. But right now there's so much collective anxiety and collective fear. Or collective sort of hardening into these polarized camps of politics.

I just, I feel really curious about like, okay, how can we bring this wisdom of working with the body and our own somas to our experience of what it feels like to feel isolated or unsure or skeptical or frightened about the political situation as it, shifts. So I, I don't know if you're, you know, that comes up for you.

'cause I know you, I mean, you write a lot about that ex, you know, it sort of feels like an accordion. You're expanding from individual to collective, collective to individual. And there is no separation between me and you, you and I, and the beautiful trees outside and the mushrooms growing and the snow and the rocks where I am.

And I know that can sound maybe abstract, but I really [00:30:00] wanna land that for all of us. It's like there is a radical practice that we can learn from our bodies, I think in terms of the collective body. So I'm curious what that brings up for you.

I.

Lisa: Yeah. I think it is so deeply intertwined and I feel like I learned so much about how our own individual bodies interrelate and connect with the bodies of land, of people of place of. Society from teachers like Prentice Hemphill and Adrian Marie Brown, and there are so many people who continue to remind me to move my own inner experience into a place outside of me, which for so long.

I didn't really feel like something I knew how to do because things like belonging felt very threatening to me and things like being [00:31:00] woven with other felt like something that was not safe. And so I think as I, and we do this inner excavation exploration, this inner. Reattachment to ourselves from a place of safety and care and compassion that it invites us to be able to step into community in ways that other cultures and indigenous populations and other spaces and places and even land, has known how to do for so long. And I, I turn to that wisdom so often when I feel afraid of being. In community when I feel like it's easier to go at it alone when I have the tendency to want to stay hidden and safe in a little shell. I think that has been where so much of my own healing work has been, is stepping out [00:32:00] of what I have perceived as the safety of individualism so that I can.

Co-create with the greater web of things and co-create with the truth that we need the sense of togetherness to be able to tend to the aches that we are feeling as a collective. And I really have so much just tenderness and compassion for that path of remembering that individualism is a lie, and remembering that we are meant to.

Face and build and move together. I feel like every time I look up and see like a V of geese flying, I like really feel that sense of collaboration in my body. Like every time I see a line of ants like moving together and coordinating, I feel a sense of remembrance that I'm not meant to do it alone.

And. When I see the [00:33:00] forest working together to breathe and, and create life, I remember that I actually can't do any of this alone. And any of us thinking that we were meant to hold power over another is such a deep, deep part of the divide and the violence and the greed that I think we're seeing. And so I think so much for me has been about remembrance of what's true.

About what it means to be human amongst more than human beings too, and what it means to undo aloneness. And I feel like that's where my inner work and my sort of small corner of the world intersects what is needed at a greater scale that. I see so many activists and change makers and culture workers, like really building for and leading the way on and teaching and, and also nature, like nature is such a teacher in how we [00:34:00] can collaborate and listen and remember the strength in not doing any of it alone. Yeah.

Jennifer: Yeah. Beautiful. And, and as you are sharing, what's coming up for me is, for many of us feeling, that point about when we don't feel safe, we don't feel belonging 'cause we don't feel like it might be safe to, especially when we're so polarized. And I know this is a situation more in the United States than it is here in Canada, but I think this is an increased.

Experience across the world and, and even in these sort of crazy times where there's divisions that are being amplified when there isn't necessarily division. I'm thinking about, you know, the threats of Donald Trump to Annex Canada as a very good and relevant example. It's so easy for our nervous systems to get so heightened and to shrink our [00:35:00] understanding of belonging.

So whether we feel safe to belong to the collective or then we become very particular about who we deem safe to belong to. And there's pain there. And so I'm curious, in your own experience, how do you work with this tension of the pain? That you feel when there isn't easy belonging? When there is increased conflict or there's increased separation, the illusion of separation.

I mean, there's separation on certain elements, but I feel like that's really where I'm wanting to bring so much attention in my own work to is like, how do we go there? And I feel like your wisdom of working with your, own pain can give us some clues as to how to deal with this. The sticky point of like, yeah, we're all, we're not all flying in the same v, we're not all in the same ant colony and some of us wanna take over other ant colonies.

So there's that friction that feels really [00:36:00] scary and upsetting to some extent in my own soma, but also in the collective.

Lisa: Yeah, I even noticed like a wobble in my throat as you said that because it is so upsetting and it can feel so big and so out of the bounds of what I. Any of us can actually tend to, and I find that sense of overwhelm within myself often when I think about what is required in such a big way that we can only tend to in small doable ways, that tension feels really heavy and brings a lot of grief.

And I know for me. One of the biggest pieces in slowly learning to face all of this and slowly learning to plant myself in it rather than stay on the [00:37:00] outside and, and feel like it's not something that I'm part of has been like feeling the grief of how hard it is and feeling the grief of how lost we can get in the separateness in the.

Power structures in the, things in place that keep us from remembering what is true and from remembering what is needed. And I find that being with the grief and the pain and the, just the, the bigness of that is part of what allows some sense of possibility to unfurl.

Like Adrian Marie Brown who says small is all, I think of that phrase probably every day. It's part of what allows like some sense of the next right thing to unfurl. And I think for me and for my work, that is where [00:38:00] I'm doing a lot of practice right now is trying to figure out. How do I weave what feels so small and tiny and intimate and personal into something that can expand outward and be an outreached arm even, and, can I let that be enough rather than thinking in order to belong or to contribute or to.

Weave with other people that I need to do everything. So I think it sort of circles back to what we were sharing at the beginning too. This sense of saviorship and this sense of fixing. Like how can I let go of thinking that that is my, or any of our roles, and how does that actually get in the way of seeing the ways we can relate.

Seeing the ways we can connect, seeing the ways we can slow down enough to notice what's coming up within us so that we can actually see the person, the people, the world in front of us more [00:39:00] clearly and less from that lens of fear, from that lens of protection, from that lens of needing to guard ourselves.

And I think that's where so much of my personal work still lies, honestly, is feeling this sense of those walls coming down within me and feeling this sense of my heart opening which I have not been used to for most of my life, and asking myself like, what could I do now from this stance that I am still somewhat unfamiliar with?

How can I be really tender with how unfamiliar it is to feel my heart more open? In the world to feel some of the walls down, to feel this longing for connection, this longing to live into belonging. Coming forward more in the place where fear once was, and knowing how much again, like how much patience and kindness, and [00:40:00] asking for help and.

Undoing this idea that I have to get it right and letting go of this idea that there's a timeline it needs to happen on like letting go of some of these notions that have been such barriers feels like such a personal practice. And it also just feels so related to like how that can bridge with what's happening outside too.

Jennifer: Hmm. Yeah, as you talk, I have all these little images of the micro that you've, peppered in this conversation so far, the ants and the geese, and the trees and the sensations in body, and I just appreciate this returning, this returning practice around being able to just be in this moment so fully without story, including the story of what I should do, like I should fix.

I should [00:41:00] jump in, I should. And rather just returning to what you can do and what feels right to do that feels authentic and fresh. And I think for me, that freshness of response or responsivity feels so important and it requires me to drop all stories and identities too.

A story about who I think I am, who I think we are in this moment. And that feels like the practice for me. And I know, both of us, we talk so much in our work about practice, and I wanted to ask you, what's a practice that's changing you right now? And how do you hold practice?

Because I think it's a really interesting question in this moment because in some ways, some days that is all we can do is to practice what we have what we can return to, what we pay attention to, and then [00:42:00] how we choose to show up in the world.

Lisa: Yeah, I think practice is everything and I think of everything as practice, and I think that invites the possibility of starting over at any time. I think that creates such an opening. For anyone to begin again at any time. I think it creates a humility that like we're all just practicing and that we're all doing this for the first time.

And I think the idea and embodiment of practice is such a human thing. It's so related to just what it means to be human and to be. Becoming new again in every moment. And I think practice really invites and encourages and like allows that.

A practice that I have been leaning into lately that feels new [00:43:00] is dance and just the practice of dancing, the practice of moving my body in a way that feels free, in a way that feels uncontained, and a way that feels like so deeply joyful and so deeply here. It almost brings tears thinking about like how much joy dancing has brought me and how I did not think that it was for me for so long.

I keep having just this urge to dance and this urge to put on music and dance and this urge to be around other people who are also moving like in freedom. And that practice feels like it's budding with spring. It feels like emerging with the flowers that are growing.

It feels like it's still growing in me, but it's been calling me so much, which I have just found so interesting that my body's wanting to do that more during this time. That feels so [00:44:00] chaotic and so overwhelming that dance has felt like such an anchor in a new way.

Jennifer: So cool. I, I am a big dancer. I'm a big living room dancer. That's how I often I, if I came back in another lifetime. I would love to maybe make that my life's work, but dance is, is a huge part of my self-expression. And so I'm just, I'm like 

lit up by that. Maybe, we'll, move and dance together at the end of this, but what's so cool is that it's your body that's leading the way.

Lisa: Yeah. Yeah, it really is.

Jennifer: And the impulse to move brings release and freedom as a counterpoint to this sort of constriction or this sense of, you know. We're, we're skeptical of other bodies in a way, especially different bodies, you know, and any body that is perceived other, particularly with political, I mean, you see this in hockey games right now between the United States and Canada [00:45:00] as a good example.

This sort of body in this polarization. I'm so curious, like. And maybe from my own experience, I've also craved being with other bodies like moving in freedom with other bodies that are equally self-expressive, that don't need to do things in a particular way. It's not choreographed, but there's a sense of, oh, this is what it means to be together and just trust strangers, and to be.

In an intimacy and unfolding intimacy of who we might become. And it's through just that direct felt sense of sensation.

Lisa: Mm-hmm.

Jennifer: That is the cues of like, oh, we're safe here. And I remember reading a beautiful story about at the beginning of the the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

There is still underground DJs and dances happening. You know, as, as a way of resistance, as a way of still reclaiming joy. And so I [00:46:00] just am feeling how drawn you are to that and how it is a portal to resistance that comes through our body's wisdom that moving in that way remembers us home to each other.

Lisa: yeah, yeah. I so deeply. Feel that perhaps for the first time, and I, you know, now that I'm talking about it, I actually don't think it's a coincidence that that's coming on in this time. That is, that is feeling so divisive and, and so easy for us to sort of retreat. It feels like such a wise response actually, to want to.

Let my body move to crave being with other bodies who are also moving to crave that and need that remembrance at the body level. It feels like such a gift and, and something that can be accessed at any time. [00:47:00] And I think it's helping me remember like who and how I want to be right now. And that's another practice that I have had lately is just when I find myself.

About to react instead of respond or about to move in a way that doesn't feel good. I come back and ask myself, like, how, how do I want to be in this moment? And usually that even just asking the question helps me access some like innate part of my essence that.

I want to return to in moments when it feels far away and I think dance is something that is surprisingly helping with, like, remembering the essence of how I want to move in the world and remembering the essence of how I want to be with everything that is happening inside and around me.

Jennifer: Hmm. It feels very disarming, I'm just getting this image of like, there's a act of [00:48:00] disarming. Into a spontaneous expression of the fullness of who we are in this moment. And I think that really touches me so much as you share that because dancing requires a vulnerability and a willingness to give up control of how we think we should move.

I need to look graceful, I need to look cool. I need to, you know, do the right moves. But there's a way of like, oh, how does the body just teach us how to move in a way that is so spontaneously and freshly human? And how can that become, what I hear you saying is that dancing is becoming your teacher of what's required in this moment, this cultural moment.

Lisa: Yeah. Yeah.

Jennifer: As we slowly close our time together. You know, there's so much. This impulse to save. Our impulse to fix, as you said in the [00:49:00] beginning, comes from this beautiful place of wanting to alleviate harm, alleviate suffering, violence, oppression, and as you're working with sometimes these feelings of despair or feeling at a loss of what to do, and then as you say, what is the aligned action that's calling you?

What feels like the right action for you in this moment to bring your fullest expression, your belonging to yourself? Your deep compassion for your work, your family, and us. What feels like you are called to do.

Lisa: I think to keep, connecting to the heart so that everything I do can be filtered through that place and to [00:50:00] keep connecting to what I long for. Knowing my own longings are so intertwined with everyone else's and knowing my own longings have a lot to tell me about what I desire and what I want to see in my own life, in my child's life, in the greater collective, and doing everything I can to stay rooted to those things, letting it be imperfect and letting it be.

Wobbly and knowing that that imperfection and wobbliness is part of all of it, and also has wisdom and just turning back toward presence as often as I can and, and being really compassionate when it's hard to and, and meeting myself there with a bolstering and with [00:51:00] an. Outreach hand to someone that I know can hold me in it too.

Jennifer: I love this image of reciprocity of hands, you know, with longing, my longing, reaching yours hand outstretched when someone else needs support and asking for help when we need it. And it just reminds me how much we're made through each other that. I think your work is pointing to, like, this isn't a self-improvement project.

You know, that's not the point. We're the, our sense of belonging, our sense of becoming is made in the messy human moments of this interweaving, you know, there's nothing we do that isn't impacted by others and vice versa. It's a constant reciprocal dance and I think that as you speak, what gives me so much.

Hope is just like my sheer love for people for us. No matter how much we fuck things up, like our [00:52:00] capacity to love each other through it even if we always aren't in contact with that felt experience, there's always a potential. And so I just wanna thank, thank you so much for.

Offering so much of your, radical honesty and your willingness to share the depths of your own life's journey and your pain and your evolution and your constant willingness to be tender with yourself. It really invites the rest of us to do the same, and it's medicine for our collective soul.

So thank you so much.

Lisa: Thank you. Thank you. In a meditation. I recently had the words come to me like how silly that I ever thought I was alone. And that just remembrance of unallowed ness and yeah, the, the outreached hands feels so [00:53:00] present lately, which is a gift in these times. And I feel that in your work as well, like the outreached hand and the, the weaving of togetherness.

So thank you. Thank you for that too.

Jennifer: Until next time.

Lisa: Yeah. Thank you.

Jennifer: So here's the essence of what I'm taking from my conversation with Lisa. She reminds us that pain is not to be feared or fixed, but to be listened to in fact, when we give up the idea that we should eradicate it before it has had a chance to speak. Pain becomes a truthful, honest source of wisdom.

And when we listen for what lies underneath pain, beneath the screech of our bodies or the gasp of our grief, a spontaneous right action can emerge and as we explore together, this insight isn't [00:54:00] just for our own individual lives, but also extends to the collective body, to all of us. Acknowledging that sometimes we've become too busy, too distracted, too unwilling to slow down and bear the tears that live in our throats.

Lisa reminds us that nothing is more important than to build our intimate capacity to be in conversation with what wants to be heard. And I love that we're not here to just listen to pain, but to be a conversationalist, to be willing to be surprised by the secret ways our individual and collective bodies speak, and then to decide how to respond.

Our bodies are the fleshy, soft underground extensions of a communal heart. And it strikes me that this gift of conversing, even with our most painful experiences, [00:55:00] is our awkward invitation or initiation into a new language, one that holds more wisdom and intelligence that we thought possible.

To learn more about Lisa's work, their first book already enough, you can find resources and links from this episode in the show notes. And if you know someone who would appreciate this conversation, who may be going through a lot and would like a reframe on how to work with pain,

how not to feel alone in the midst of it. Please share this episode. We are weaving a wholehearted web here based on kinship, not kingship, the speed of one heart opening conversation at a time. To stay in touch with me, Jennifer, and receive practices, radical encouragement and offerings to support .

You're a creative emergence as you lead and live. Come sign up for my newsletter to stay [00:56:00] connected at www dot j england slash substack. And before we close, just a reminder that after each deeper dive like this one, I offer you a bonus practice episode. And these are micro, just five minutes or less, and are designed to.

Help you apply what you've learned today into the field of your own life, and by the end of season four, my hope is that you'll have an additional bundle of new ideas and practices to take forward. You can download these, save them, and share your favorites, and return to them again and again as the seasons change.

So that is all for now my friend. Be sure to follow the show so you don't miss the next episode. I'm Jennifer England. Thanks for listening.[00:57:00]