"Beauty In All Things" with Lisa Gungor
"Beauty In All Things" with Lisa Gungor
For years I have connected with the heart, beauty, and honesty of the Grammy-nominated band, Gungor.
I recently had the chance to speak with Lisa Gungor of the musical duo. Lisa is a gifted singer/songwriter who now writes music for her solo career, “Isa Ma.” Lisa also recently released her first book entitled The Most Beautiful Thing I’ve Seen: Opening Your Eyes to Wonder. In her book, Lisa details formational events in her family life; the beautiful, the painful, and how all of it has transformed her. Lisa is also a contributor to the Liturgists Podcast.
In my time with Lisa, she vulnerably speaks about seeing beauty in all things, including in life’s broken places and within herself.
The Interview
Audio engineering: Podcast P.S.
The Interview Transcript
Melissa: I recently just finished your book and it's funny because if, it's so interesting because I'm like I feel like I know so much about your life. It's such an interesting thing and I can imagine as someone being the writer of that... What an interesting thing to let people in on those really vulnerable spaces of your life and your thought process. Thank you for being that brave.
Your book was so good. It's so cliché, but I was literally laughing and then crying when you were talking about Lucy. You just pulled me into your story and some of the way you were processing, I was like, "This feels so close to home," though our lives are different. So, thank you for just opening up yourself in that way because, it's just healing and hopeful and unifying. Thank you for that.
Lisa: Thank you so much. Thank you for saying all of that. I appreciate that.
Melissa: Yeah, I can just imagine putting it out into the world and then, yeah, it's a brave thing. That's great.
Lisa: It feels wild. It felt wild to do. I was really excited for release day and then really glad when it was over because... Even my story being wrapped up so much in family stuff, it was nerve wracking to write about people you love and be honest about it. Yeah, it was definitely a scary and exciting day.
Melissa: I can imagine the mix of emotions probably. Just generally, I don't know if you had a chance to look over the questions or if you have any questions for me about what this whole interview series is. I don't know if any context would be helpful.
Lisa: Yeah, sure.
Melissa: This whole thing is nothing I had planned, but I just…sitting with women and adolescent females and having nieces and then also having my own struggles with body image and some struggles with an eating disorder, I just started to see the depth of the damage that our cultural narratives around beauty have and also how they limit women to see true beauty.
I just started to become really interested in what do other people think about real beauty? And then how do we actually go about finding that kind of beauty in a world that's really broken and there's suffering all over the place and basically, how do you see God in the midst of that suffering? That's almost the deeper question there, because I think God is my definition of ultimate beauty though I don't understand it and I'm seeking to understand it all the time.
I wanted to reach out to people who, I was like, “man, I feel like I would really like to know their thoughts on beauty.” It started as something called the Mentor Series because I thought of it as mentors of authentic beauty. We need new models of true beauty in our culture. Yeah, that's the premise for this.
Lisa: Oh great. Yeah.
Melissa: The first question is just super general I guess, but just how do you define beauty?
Lisa: I think beauty is found in anything. I think it is interesting to me how we've taken that word and applied it to very specific things and just how we've evolved as creatures and how we…what’s pleasing, normally or years ago I would've said beauty is anything that's pleasing to the eye. I think that's how our bodies are. …it’s the natural inclination to say, it's something that, when my eyes see it that I feel awe or wonder.
But I think I've tried to deconstruct what that is and just what it is I'm looking at. I've even down to concrete because I can look at, right now I'm looking at this bush in front of me and there's all these flowers. The initial inclination used to be for me to say the flowers are more beautiful than the concrete is. But that really just means I can't see the concrete, or I can't see it for what it is. And I'm putting boxes around what beauty is.
That's definitely deconstructed for me all of the past few years. I can honestly look at the concrete and be like, “Wow, how beautiful this is,” when there's the awareness of what is in everything and how connected everything is and how we all... That's more of something that people talk about now is like, “well, star dust is in everything.”
Everything's much more connected than we thought it was. I think those lines are getting blurred more, but we still do as a culture, really heavily ascribe beauty as one thing…there's the symmetrical face or something that makes our bodies feel pleasure or good the moment we look at it.
I love the practice of seeing beauty in everything, even in anger and pain.
How can we, I think that's just such a... it can become such a …yeah, I think it's such a beautiful key to living. If you, where are you seeing the beauty in your life? Is it only one thing or is it, can you find it in everything?
Melissa: I feel like you speak to this a bit in your book, but I guess I'm curious for you, and this is probably a loaded question, but for you, what maybe transformed that for you? How did you go from this cultural idea but also I think it's hard to see the beauty in the midst of the suffering or the pain or the concrete. I don't know if there's a short way to say or it doesn't need to be short, but how maybe your view was transformed?
Lisa: I think it really started when we were going through a big transition in faith, because that was so painful.
I grew up just really loving the church and being what they would call a sold out, radical Christian and I was all in and I just loved it. It was Jesus was my life and church became my life when we were, we started traveling and playing all over with our band.
When faith started deconstructing, it was so painful and I didn't, I couldn't see the beauty in it until much later.
I couldn't see that that was a beautiful process. Ram Dass talks about like anything that can be shaken, should be shaken off. It's the true things that don't get shaken and I can look back on that and go, “wow, that was beautiful.”
It all depends on the perspective that you have of the story that is happening.
We can look at the... You can look at the plays or stories, Romeo and Juliet, they die. We all think that's a great story. But if you're living that story and you are one of those characters who are suffering in pain, to you that's not a great story. It's tragic. Even if you zoom out far enough and you can see that “wow, that was amazing. What a rollercoaster ride. How perfect of a story that was. What a beautifully tragic, wonderful love story.”
That's kind of how I can look back on a lot of the stuff that we've been through. In the moment, it was so painful and hard, but what can I say is good and what is bad that comes to us? It's all the river, it's all life happening. It's like you're in this river and whatever it brings and takes from you, it's just what it brings and it takes from you and we can still assign goodness and badness to it. These words “good” and “bad,” not having the sight to see what it's doing and then it's all just life happening.
I think that started with the deconstruction of faith and then it really took a massive turn when we had our daughter Lucy and, and for me it wasn't so much about even beauty at that point. I didn't look at her ever and think she's not beautiful, but it was more like, could I really see beauty in her…her essence, her value, who she really was. It took more of a turn there when I, the first time I held her and knew that she had Down syndrome.
Melissa: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Lisa: I think the word when they told us that Lucy had Down syndrome, immediately like this definition, this wave of definition swept over my body. I began seeing her as an issue cause that's just how I was programmed and it’s so gross and it's embarrassing to say and admit, but that was me.
But then when I looked at her, like when I really was just looking at her, it's like, "Oh this is… Oh like what have we been so afraid of? This is a beautiful baby girl."
I mean it was such a strange, surreal moment when she first was, when she was first born and just the excitement and then all that kind of filled the room, everyone was so excited. Then it was such a shift when we knew there was something wrong.
For her she also, I mean she was turning blue, she wasn't getting enough oxygen to her brain. There was a bunch of other…she had two heart defects. There was some tremendous health issues happening, but you could feel the shift in the room when the nurses realized and the doctors realized that she had Down syndrome and then they told us that she did.
That's the feeling that I'm talking about, when at first she was just a beautiful baby, and then she had this label on her that defined her as some other category that we should be, that she was somehow lesser or we should be scared of this syndrome that she has or scared of what her life would be.
They had told us that she had Down syndrome and she wasn't really…she was getting tested and getting medicine, but then when they put her back in my arms, that's when I was, that's when a huge shift came for me because I could really like “Oh, she's a beautiful baby girl. Look at her body was so intelligent, grew eyeballs and skin and a nose and a heart and lungs.”
It was in that moment that I realized how I had really divided up like what a beautiful body was, what a good life is, what intelligence is. All the intelligences I had up here in the brain and it just kind of like everything else was just holding up the brain and the heart, so that we could live.
I had no consciousness of the intelligence of the entire body and I didn't see the beauty of the entire body fully until then.
As she grew and communicated with us without words, the nonverbal communication that began happening, blew my mind. It felt like for me, every step of the way, they have milestones for kids. Every doctor's appointment or every therapy appointment where they're like, “we're going to make sure Lucy’s made her milestones.”
I was like, “Oh my God.” They can be such stressful meetings for parents because you're trying so hard and then you just you really want your kid to measure up. But eventually all that bull fell apart for me, because I realized Lucy was thriving and we have all these charts for what thriving is. How do we think we can measure that? I realized how much we were harming our bodies, our children, our culture by having some chart that lets us know, “oh good, we're measuring up on the right timeline.”
We threw that all out, because we saw all of the ability that Lucy had.
There's all these like we'll do all these…It seemed like the conversation wanted to revolve around all the things she wasn't able to do and it's like we need to shift that narrative, look at all that she is. It's not based on what…beauty and thriving is not based on what we can do.
But yeah, there, even the idea like your ability or your essence should be based in something is bullshit.
You're a human. You're intrinsically beautiful. That is I think so crucial for everyone to realize and know. I think if we all knew that at our core that would end a lot of our suffering.
Melissa: Yeah. You kind of hit one of the other questions I like to ask is just like what are some lies about beauty? And it sounds like almost some of those metrics that we have for beauty or thriving or the boxes that we have. I don't know if you'd label that a lie.
Lisa: Yeah.
Melissa: I don't know if anything else comes to mind around that either. Different lies that you've believed about what beauty is that didn't prove to be helpful.
Lisa: Yeah. I think there's so much that I bought into that even when I was pregnant with our first daughter, I tried to stay really healthy for her and for me. There was this big health aspect of it that I was aware of, but I was also very aware, I had some people tell me I wasn't attractive anymore because I was pregnant and I was yeah.
Melissa: What! Oh my gosh.
Lisa: It was so hurtful and harmful. I remember trying to still stay sexy in pregnancy. My body was working overtime to grow a baby, to be desirable by other people. And then after I had her, it was, yeah I tried. I felt the intensity to like, “Okay, now you’ve got to get fit like right away,” instead of just really relaxing and taking care and sleeping.
There was a lot of like, “okay, now you've got to do, do, do.” And beauty revolved around, not even just my body, but also how I measured up as a mother. I was beautiful if I'm doing all the right things as a parent and as a mom and I'm taking all the pressure off my husband so he doesn't have to feel pressure of getting up at nighttime. I look back on that, “oh, poor girl.” Like there was so much beauty as well. I had a wonderful time being a new mother. But in retrospect I see the unhealthy that was there as well.
And now, I'll turn 40 this year and it's such a wild feeling, because I can feel so loving of my body and I love the wrinkles that are coming on my face. I love how my body has changed and I say that and then I can still catch myself at times just like, “Oh, but I wonder…it would look better if…” and I grew up with people always commenting on…it’s such a terrible phrase, “You should put some paint on the barn.”
Melissa: Oh yeah, yep.
Lisa: Like it seemed so…it seemed fine. My dad would say to my mom, people would say it to me and my sister. Or they’d comment about how much better we look with makeup on. Countless comments, how much better I look like if my stomach is flat and even from people that you would think would be progressive, more body positive people.
But it's so ingrained in all of us. Even with those people, I think it's ridiculous that they're making these comments, but I think they just go to show how deeply ingrained the way we see beauty and how we've defined it. The metric system that we use, it's so deep in us that it just kind of comes out when we least expect it.
We try really hard even to show our girls…to not just show them, not just tell them what is beautiful and tell them to be proud of the body. The way they're going to learn that is if I'm proud of my body and I love everything.
My oldest daughter, Amelie, the other day, she saw me putting on makeup because we're going to a party, and she was like “you keep talking about beauty and you keep telling me that everything's beautiful without fixing it. You don't need to fix anything and you don't need to wear makeup.” She's like, “but every time you go to a party you put makeup on.”
I was like, “God, you're right.” I think in the moment I was trying, I was like, “well, I mean makeup isn't bad in and of itself. It's fun to dress up. That's not the bad thing.”
But I was telling her, I was showing her with every single time I went out that I was trying to look good for other people's approval.
There was that sense of, "Hey do I look good?" Because I've had the experiences when there is no makeup on or I haven't like tried, that people are like, "Oh are you okay? You look..." And then when you have makeup on people are like, "You just look like you're glowing." I’m like “What? It's makeup. You could have the glow too if you put stuff all over your face.”
Again, I'm not opposed to make up. I'm not opposed to people doing things, but I do think it's important the root behind that and why you're doing what you're doing. I can see these times I totally missed it for my daughter and not, I'd only told her the words and haven't really shown her in my own body that I fully love my own body. But she's….my kids are teachers for me.
Melissa: Yeah. How they notice everything too it seems, which is helpful and sometimes like shoot. Really?
Lisa: Yeah. You're really going to call me out on all my stuff?
Melissa: Okay. This next question isn't what I usually ask, but I am so curious and I don't know if this is too whatever personal or something, but because you were talking about…going back to talking about Lucy and how your perspective shift of seeing this essence of her and just this innate beauty, but then you like were talking about the challenge then of directing that, and the importance of us directing that, toward ourselves.
I think that so often, that can be the hardest part of this. I think it's so interesting how I think that opens us up then to see that more fully in other people. But I'm curious for you if there's been anything that's been helpful or transformational about making that shift to seeing that “no, the beauty I'm seeing in Lucy or in everything is in me too” and making that real. Because I think we can speak those words, but I think that the transition from the head to the heart is tricky.
Lisa: Yeah, it is. It really is about getting it in our body; embodying beauty, embodying all these ideas that we can talk…we can talk a good talk and so it really is about letting it sink into our body.
For me, it's been a lot of telling my body that I love her. Seeing my body or as a…I'll just talk to it, to her, whatever pronoun I want to use in the moment. I do a lot of body meditations so every morning I'll just lay in the bed…kind of go from my, from the inside, I'll try to hit on every part of my body and have my awareness, my sense of self like in that part of my body.
Sometimes that could be a visual. I'll imagine a light or just a warm glow being in my head or in my hand or my arm. Sometimes I'll do it in places of my body that really hurt. For a while I was having so much pain in my body and I knew it was from a lot of emotional things I was going through. For a little while there I was angry because it really hindered how I went about my day and how I interacted with the girls. I was angry at those parts of my body and then I realized that I was causing further harm to my body.
I would sit there and place my hand on the part that hurt and just say, “I love you. Thank you.” There were some times I didn't want to do that because it hurt so much. It was so painful.
Even before that, I had had a really bad snowboard accident and had chronic pain for years from that accident. I think also had chronic pain in my body just because of some crazy shit we did as kids. I mean there's so much that we did as kids that parents just don't do now with their kids. I mean I’m talking like adventure wise; like jumping from the roof of your house to the trampoline to the pool and then hitting your head on the sidewalk while you're falling off the bike from being tied to the back of the car.
They were just crazy things that we did. I think that finally my body was like, "You've put me through a lot of stuff and you need to listen to me. I'm hurting." All that pain was speaking and saying, "You need to listen."
I would just lay there and listen when it was really hard to, and I would love, I would just give love my body. And it took a while. I did that for months and this chronic pain that I had, and I know this doesn't happen for everyone. Sometimes, surgery is needed. Sometimes different medications are needed to help that. But for me, this particular pain that I was having in my body went away, it totally went away. I think it was because of all the love that I was finally giving my body.
I didn't need to go somewhere else. I think retreats are great. Solitude is really great if people can get that space to just go off by yourself alone. But that's really hard to do when you have kids or if you're a single parent or you're barely making it. And, so, something as simple as laying in your bed for 15-20 minutes each morning and telling your body that you love it and you're thankful for how it's carried you through life, even if in the moment you don't believe it and you're angry at your body.
My body just started opening up and it's like this relationship between myself and my body, I started to repair this thing that I had damaged. That's really what has changed it for me and I still do that in times that I feel like it's stress or waves of life coming and hitting me.
I'll lay in bed and I'll just hold, physically hug myself and tell myself, "I love you. You're doing a good job, you're okay."
I think that's especially important for emotions that we don't like that come up. Then we're like, "Why am I feeling this again? Why is this trauma coming up again? Why is this jealousy or this anger or this gross thing that I really hate about myself," Because when we just look at those emotions and we call it bad, it's cutting it off. We're severing and pieces of ourselves and creating shadow selves.
When we can look at the things that we don't even like and you say, “I love you, thank you.” That integrates us as one body, as one self. At least that’s what it’s done for me.
Melissa: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I love that. I don't know if any of that is new to people who are listening too, just if they're like, "Oh, I don't know if I could do that." Just to state too that, like how the neuroscience backs up what you're saying too. It's amazing how, just everything you're saying. I'm like, “yeah, well that makes so much sense.” I mean that's beautiful. Thank you. Just thinking about that embodied knowledge of… because I think that can be such a challenge. Super helpful.
Lisa: Yeah it is.
Melissa: Thank you.
Lisa: Thank you. I find therapy so interesting. I love therapists. I know that you guys have the neuroscience behind that and the why. I think it's all so fascinating. I'm actually doing a bunch of modules right now on trauma therapy and it's amazing.
I think the most fascinating thing to me is how our bodies heal and how we can do that within our own self. And yes, it's, we help each other heal and connection with other people is beautiful. But even if you don't have that and you feel very alone in the world, you are whole within yourself and your body can heal itself. I just think that's amazing.
Melissa: Yeah, definitely. Pretty miraculous and beautiful. Thank you.
The last question I like to ask people is just if there is one thing that you wish people knew about beauty, what would it be?
Lisa:
I think that would be that beauty isn't just one thing and that if you think something is ugly or unattractive, ask yourself why and what programming has happened to cause that reaction. Look under the reactions of why you think something is beautiful or not beautiful.
Melissa: Yeah. Thank you. Is there anything else? I feel like I've totally led with my questions. Is there anything else that like on this topic or just in general that you'd like to share?
Lisa: Yeah, I think that for those people who are interested, something else that has really helped me are non dual teachers. So, when we talk about how we've split up what beauty is and isn't, we've split up the relationship between self and body. There's all of these differentiations that we've created that are really helpful to live as human beings and they've helped us survive and develop coping mechanisms. Definitions really help us. It's a beautiful thing to be able to separate yourself from your body if you're experiencing trauma. So, that's just bad.
But integration in all things has been really helpful for me.
And so, any non dual teachers that I've been able to find or listen to or read because I think non-duality speaks to all of this and, for me, it has furthered the practice of seeing everything as one beautiful thing, one beautiful organism happening.
That also has helped me love my body, love myself, love others more fully.
I know that there's a list of non-dual teachers that I don't even know about, but some that I've loved is Ram Dass and this woman Judith Blackstone. She has this audio book I've been listening to called The Realization Process.
I host retreats with Hillary McBride. Hillary McBride is a therapist and a PhD candidate and we do these retreats called Sacred Feminine. We do a lot of these practices of putting things together that were never meant to be apart.
And these practices with Judith Blackstone about fundamental consciousness…So, it's all like this building block… because even if you are aware and you can see the connection of all things, there's still trauma in the body. There's still what a lot of people call the pain body and there's work to be done in the body.
And I think that was really confusing for me for a while, when I started realizing the connection of all things and I thought, "Well why will I still have things rise? Why will trauma still come up? That's just a story that's been told and it's in the past and it doesn't matter anymore.”
So, I was really frustrated with myself when I was having these “negative,” what I would call negative emotions or, what I was calling in the past, negative emotions arise. I think slowly, I began to see that all of it is important, the trauma work is important. Then also letting go and see it as a story that’s happened. It's all been part of it.
So, Judith Blackstone, Ram Dass, Ken Wilber's really out there for a lot of people, but he has a really interesting book that talks about different types of therapy and how they work for different stages of consciousness. Ken Wilber wrote a book about spiral dynamics, which is all stages of consciousness and then this other book talks about how different therapies all correlate to those different stages of consciousness and it's really fascinating. It's a hard read.
Melissa: Sure. It sounds like-
Lisa: I think you would really, as a therapist you would find it incredibly fascinating, but it's dense for sure. I'm trying to think off the top of my head. I'm always so bad with taking names off the top of my head. Those are the ones that have been super influential for me, and Alan Watts is great. I mean I do all kinds of reading, but the things that have been most helpful for me recently is books on therapy and books on non-duality.
Melissa: Sure. Yeah. No, thank you for providing that too for me and other people who are interested in exploring the non-duality piece. Also, I should mention too, if people are interested in the Sacred Feminine retreats, is there a good place to look into that online?
Lisa: We don't have a website. We keep going back and forth. We're like, "Should we have a website, should we not?" Because it's kind of this little like secretive thing that we don't talk about a lot because we want people to feel safe and we don't want it to become like, “now it's about Instagram” and it's a very sacred space for people to heal.
The only thing right now that we're doing, and not that it wouldn't be that if we had a website, but that's just our struggle that we go back and forth between. But we want it to feel intimate and not like this big corporation. So, the only place that we post about it is on Instagram.
So, I know that's difficult for people who don't have Instagram, but that's just the place that we say, "Hey, tickets are going to go live in a week." Then we put tickets for sale. So, my Insagram is “lisagungor” and Hillary’s is “hillaryliannamcbride.” We probably will have a website in the future called sacredfeminineretreats.com. Now it's just Instagram and we love the retreats. We love it so much and it's been…weird saying that.
Melissa: No.
Lisa: It's like “I host retreats that I love.” I love it so much, what the women bring and what they do. I've never experienced anything like it in my life. Anyone who's interested in coming, they should definitely come.
Melissa: Okay, cool. Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it and I totally learned from what you said, and I know a lot of other people will too, so I really appreciate you taking the time.
Lisa: Thank you.
Melissa: Yeah.
Lisa: Well, thank you for doing this. I love that you're doing this podcast and that you’re a therapist and that you know what you're talking about. Thank you for having this conversation.
Melissa: Yeah. Well thank you so much.
Lisa: Yeah, thank you so much. See you.
Melissa: Okay. Bye. Bye.
Find out more about Lisa here.
Buy Lisa’s book, The Most Beautiful Thing I’ve Seen, here.
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