"Waking Up" with Steve Wiens
"Waking Up" with Steve Wiens
Steve Wiens is a spiritual teacher, writer, and pastor who has authored three books, entitled Beginnings, Whole, and most recently Shining Like the Sun: Seven Mindful Practices for Rekindling Your Faith. Steve also hosts a weekly podcast called This Good Word. Wiens is a gentle companion on the journey of spiritual development and loves coming alongside people in reconstructing their faith when old theological foundations have fallen apart.
Because of Steve’s thoughtful approach to faith, my conversation with him around authentic beauty is fascinating. In our time together, we talk about what it means to awaken to God and, so, awaken to the very real Beauty that is generative, communal, and very much alive and well in our midst.
The Interview
Audio engineering: Podcast P.S.
The Interview Transcript
Melissa: If you just want to get us started by saying a bit about your role as a pastor, author, if people are new to Steve Wiens, what would be the synopsis you might give them?
Steve: It's funny, Melissa. You know when someone asks you, "How are you?" And then you have that momentary like how do I even answer that? You know what I mean?
Melissa: Yeah, I know.
Steve: "I'm a little depressed, I'm a little excited. How much do you want to know?" And sometimes I feel the same way when someone asks me that question, "What do you do?" because I really do think I like to be involved in several things at the same time.
Melissa: Sure.
Steve: I don't like to be defined by only one thing. I sometimes blanche at even I am a pastor, I totally am, but I sometimes get really sensitive about that because I think some people, depending on their experience with pastors, it's maybe more and more it's bad. Sometimes, I don't like to lead with that.
However, I think how I'm enjoying thinking about what I do in the world these days is essentially I help people by giving them permission to be spiritually hungry and spiritually curious and to follow the truth where it goes. I think I help people reconstruct faith, whatever it looks like for them.
And I think when I'm noticing that I'm loving what I'm doing and enjoying life, I'm usually in one of those conversations and I find that for whatever reason like that's who ends up asking to talk to me or reading my books or coming to my church or whatever, it's people who are spiritually hungry, curious, something isn't working, something hasn't worked, they feel stuck. And I love not fixing, not doing any of that, but just listening and imagining and helping give permission to be where they are, so that they can eventually get where they want to go. And so many times people like I'll say something like, "Well, you can think that. You can believe that." It’s like, "What I can?" So, I love that. I love permission.
Melissa: Awesome.
Steve: I give permission, that's what I do. In all those works, I give permission.
Melissa: I love that. And that's a lovely example. I don't enjoy introducing people because I like them to speak for themselves around the things that they-
Steve: Oh, that's so good.
Melissa: Yes. However, you would name it, so thank you.
Steve: Yeah, thanks for asking.
Melissa: That's a really beautiful way to say it. Yeah. So, we are talking about beauty today and I have some set questions that I'd like to ask people and at the same time, let's take the conversation wherever you'd like to go. And given everything that you just said about permission and your approach to spirituality and spiritual journeys, I'm excited to hear how you think about some of these things.
Steve: Yeah.
Melissa: So, the first question is just a really broad one, it's how do you define beauty?
Steve: Yeah, so I really have been thinking about this one, because I listen to your podcast. I love it and you sent me the questions, which I half hated and half loved. It's like, "Oh man, now I think about it."
But I think I define beauty as generative potentiality, but that's a paradox, really because if something's generative, then it's creating life, but if it's something that has potential then it hasn't done it yet, you know?
Melissa: Sure. Yeah.
Steve: But as I think about it, that really is what's beautiful to me, is something thing that is generative but also at the same time has the potential to create even more than meets the eye.
A few years ago, gosh, this is more than a few years ago, but I'm in the backyard with my son, Ben. He's about four or five and I'm raking leaves and I'm kind of raking leaves to get that done, you know what I mean? I kind of want to just get it done, but he's doing something totally different. He's over in the side of the yard and he goes, "Daddy, come over here. Daddy, come over here." And he has noticed that a little plastic red rose that has been "planted in the crowd," and he goes, "Daddy." It is like late November. "Daddy, Daddy, look at this rose. It's so beautiful."
And on one level, I'm thinking, "Okay, dude, I hate to burst your bubble, Ben, but it's plastic rose. It's just plastic." But of course I don't do that, because in his mind, and not even in his mind, he has encountered something beautiful, so that plastic rose generated is generative in the sense that it created wonder for Ben.
It created a sense of delight and awe and you could say that's pretend or that's even not real because it's not really a real rose, but that just reveals the constructs that we put around beauty. Who is it to say what's real and what's not real?
And then so it's generative, it generates a wonder, even creativity, but that potentiality or that potential, it creates something in me as an adult where I now go, "Okay, so if I can see beauty in a plastic rose, I can see beauty in raking the leaves, I can see beauty in the bark on the tree, the willow tree that drops those leaves in my backyard."
So, it's the cycle like that generative cycle of life is embedded in then almost everything or maybe everything.
But I like to think about it as paradox because a paradox is an apparent contradiction that gets us out of the linear thinking that we're so rationally stuck in, like something's beautiful if it makes me feel a certain way, but that's a pretty limited way of looking at beauty, but we need those moments, those paradoxical moments to break us out of, but they lead us essentially to a dead end. They lead our rational, linear thinking to a dead end.
Because maybe we think about beauty in terms of it's beautiful if it makes me feel a certain way, a certain specific way like if I'm looking at a magazine and the cover of magazine has a certain person on it and I have a certain feeling. I'm not saying that person's not beautiful or even that that's not beauty. But typically, the rational, linear mind is conditioned to respond to certain stimuli as beautiful, the magazine cover even the sunset, which is beautiful, and even the magazine cover. I'm not saying it's not beautiful.
It's just there are many things that we're also conditioned to see as not beautiful and so we need paradox to break us out of that, to lead us to a dead end where we can consider what might be generative and what might have potential to give life.
Melissa: I love that. I mean that's so hopeful, too. And it's almost like it creates this openness to life of you don't know where you're going to see beauty. I mean, it's more of an adventure than you're locking yourself into...
Steve: Yeah.
Melissa:... of what is or isn't beautiful.
Steve: Well, yeah. I can even remember, Melissa, I think this is the first time you and I talked it was at a wedding. We were sitting with your husband and my wife and we're talking and all of a sudden when you started sharing like what you're about, and I think this was before the podcast started, but I immediately, it was like my eyes widened and I became very interested in the things that you were thinking about and talking about because I could tell, and this is not the right word, okay, but just I just can't find the right word but, you were almost a little shy about it. Because I could tell like you were right on the verge of releasing something into the world and making something that had previously been private, you were about to make it public. And I became very delightfully, wonderfully interested in that and I had to rethink about that.
I had to remember that as I was thinking about talking to you, remembering sitting next to you, remembering. Like I tried to remember, "Okay, what drink did I have in front of me? What were we eating?" And I couldn't remember any of those things. But I could remember what your thoughts produced in me. It generated some creativity, even in me just listening to you. So, yeah, that is hopeful. And it was surprising because we were just at a wedding and whatever, and I didn't know, and I'm a little bit of an introvert enough to be like, "Oh, God. Who were we going to sit next to?" We have a lot of like, "Oh, it was terrible. Hey, it was boring. When can I get out of there." So I think it was delightful for me to be with you in that moment and be so delighted with just what you were talking about.
Melissa: Thank you. Yeah. Even that evening, I remember being surprised I was sharing what I was sharing with you and Mary. But I think it speaks to just an openness that you both have and I think the way that you've been defining beauty, I think is another way that you demonstrate that same posture of openness.
Steve: It's a great question.
Melissa: It's a hard question.
Steve: I know.
Melissa: But I appreciate it when people give me answers because it gives me more to opens the playing field even wider.
Steve: Yeah.
Melissa: I'm shocked how vast this topic is.
Steve: It really is. It's true.
Melissa: You spoke a little bit about the second question I have, but I want to ask it anyway, in case you have additional thoughts, just where in the world do you see beauty?
Steve: Well, I'm going to tell a story because that's just…I love to root things in a story, but this was another story with one of my boys, but it was after a soccer game. This was many years ago, well, not many years ago, but it was right when Islamophobia was sort of, not that it's not big right now, but it was when it was sort of reaching an early stage of heightened reality. And I remember thinking about it and talking about it, trying to talk about it with our kids, because they have some Muslim friends and so do I.
But after soccer one night, a soccer game, we're going out to our car, right next to our car is a car with a hood up and so it's broken down and there's these two Muslim women and I assumed they're Muslim because of their hijabs and I think I was right So I'm like, "Hey, can we help? Maybe we can jump your battery." We tried that, it didn't work.
So, it was this kid that Isaac just play against, so I didn't really know the kid but about his age, and the woman was not his mom. It was like his aunt or something, and she was pretty young. I mean, well, for me pretty young like she's in her mid-20s, probably, that's young. And everyone else was leaving, and we're staying, and it's this moment where, well, I've tried to help. I haven't helped yet. Isaac's there and it's getting dark, but I'm like, "Well, okay, hold on. I have Triple A, we could call a tow truck and I mean, I don't know." And, so, she's like, "Really?" I'm like, "Yeah, let's do it."
So then we're waiting for the tow truck forever, forever. Her cousin shows up and she's on the phone, but we're kind of talking about what she does. She's a social worker, blah, blah, blah. Her cousin shows up with three big Snickers bars and gives one to Isaac one to me, one to the boy, the other boy and Isaac and the boy are playing soccer, and I'm kind of playing soccer with them. And eventually, and I'm talking, like it took a couple of hours for that tow truck to show up. And I could tell Isaac's, he's not bummed out, but he's like, "What's going to happen next?" And he's a little nervous, but he's following my lead a little bit in it.
Melissa: Yeah.
Steve: And what was beautiful was, at one point in time, Isaac sat down with this woman in her 20s pulled out his or he didn't have an iPhone at that point, but she pulled out her iPhone and she was showing him different games that were cool and that she liked and stuff.
And the beauty was that we so easily overcame whatever differences that existed between this Muslim woman and this Christian dad and his son, we didn't ever certainly talk about religion, but we talked about everything else. And it just became very apparent that we're human beings that are experiencing life, the car breakdowns and you get hungry and soccer and social work and so I found beauty in the lingering.
It wasn't even, "Oh, so great to help someone." It wasn't that great to sit and wait for three hours and wait for the tow truck to come and then there's even a part that I felt yucky. I had the resources and that didn't feel great actually.
Melissa: Yeah.
Steve: But what was beautiful was in the lingering, in the waiting, in the “what do we talk about now,” there is generosity showed up and the Snickers bars and there was a story and there was play, her showing the iPhone with the games, I was the goalie as the two boys were trying to shoot goals.
So, there was beauty in the unexpected joy of not knowing when a problem was going to be solved by getting to know someone "different," and finding out that we're just really all one.
That was one of the ways I think that I saw beauty in the unexpected places of waiting for a Triple A tow truck to show up.
Melissa: Yeah. What I love about that example, too, so I was able to take a look at your book a little bit last night, and so you have this chapter on delight. And what I love about a couple of things that you named was just not having a spiritual/secular realm.
Steve: Yeah.
Melissa: Like have that divided and I think just what you're describing, well, and also being able to see beauty anywhere, versus just the sunset or just having a beautiful evening with friends. But I think again, this posture that you have of the way you're describing beauty is everything is sacred and beauty can be found everywhere or I mean, you named delight is the way that you talk about it, but I found that very similar to just having this openness to beauty or delighting in so many different things in life.
Steve: Yeah, well, thank you. First of all, thank you for the shout out for the book.
Melissa: Oh, yeah.
Steve: It's called Shining Like The Sun. It comes out April 7.
Melissa: Yes. You got to say it. It’s a great book. So, I'll say more later, but yeah,
Steve: Yeah. Well, so that idea that sort of beauty is found in everything maybe can sound cheesy to some people, but it really comes from a mystical understanding of God through the mystics: Thomas Merton, St. Clair, Meister Eckhart is the 14th Century German philosopher theologian, and there's a couple of guys who wrote a book of poetry based on the teachings of Meister Eckhart and I want to read one of them.
Melissa: Yeah.
Steve: I sort of dog eared one that I think sort of speaks to this idea of beauty everywhere and beauty within. So again, this is a little poem, it's called Can You See, and they've somehow found a way, these two people, Jon Sweeney and Mark Burrows, the book is called Meister Eckhart's Book of the Heart: Meditations for the Restless Soul, but they're really just about, I don't know, maybe 50 or 60 poems. The poem I want to read is very short. It's called Can You See.
"If you want to be ready for and worthy of the Spirit of God, just look inside and see your spiritual being. Can you see how you already resemble what you seek?"
So, I'll read it again. It's called Can You See. "If you want to be ready for and worthy of the Spirit of God, just look inside and see your spiritual being. Can you see how you already resemble what you seek?"
And so the idea of delight and I think beauty, impossible beauty, I think, is that we go on this wild goose chase looking for God and looking for beauty and we think we have to become this thing through really hard work and maybe that's really hard work on our body by whatever like losing weight or gaining weight or getting muscle or sculpting or whatever or maybe it's spiritual, we're going to do the spiritual disciplines or the exercises or the practices. And it all starts to feel like such hard work, but the mystical idea of I think impossible beauty and generative potentiality is that the wild goose chase can stop and start right where we are, right here and now.
I think the idea of “look inside and find your spiritual being,” I would translate that as just like that's the truest you that exists within God. It exists within God and within God is eternal, conscious love. That's all…the true experience of the Divine is eternal love within which our truest nature is hidden.
Thomas Merton basically used to say, "If God could somehow stop loving you, on the count of three, 3, 2, 1, then in that very moment, you would cease to exist, because you're hidden within that love."
So if that's really true, then there's no wild goose chase and it's true about me, it's true about you, and then we can start trying to wake up to that.
So it's not about trying hard to get to a place or finally worthy of it, and that's why I even love that in that poem. There's this moment where if you're going to be worthy of, all of a sudden, we're tensing up or tightening up, I think that's intentional. Now our linear thought, remember the paradox, our linear, rational mind is going like, "Oh man, what do we have to do to earn this, figure it out?” and then our shoulders drop when we realize when at the end of the poem that we already resemble what we seek.
I mean, that's paradox and that makes us stop and go, "Wait a minute, maybe the plastic rose really is utterly beautiful, the definition of beauty," but it's not because it's sort of qualitatively, it's the most beautiful thing in the world, it's because the gaze of my son Ben, something erupted in the world when it was called beautiful and that's part of the potentiality of beauty as well.
Melissa: So many places I could go. Thank you for sharing that.
Steve: Yeah.
Melissa: That was a really beautiful way…A couple of questions about your book. Would you say your book is a guide to waking up then?
Steve: Boy, that's a great... I like that. So, I had a little fight with our publisher, right?
Melissa: Okay.
Steve: And they won and it's okay because I love my publisher. They were so generous and great. But the book is called Shining Like The Sun: Seven Mindful Practices For Rekindling Your Faith and what I really wanted to call it was For Waking Up To God. It was like, well, rekindling works better with shining like the sun. It follows the same logic, blah, blah.
But yes, because waking up is, again, if we're talking about reconstructing faith or even following the truth where it goes, we're really talking about awakening to a reality that's always been there that and that is there right now. It exists on a plain that is just a whisper away. The veil is very thin. We think it's miles and miles away, but actually, we miss it because we're working so hard, we're trying so hard, but it's really I believe it's just right there.
So, that's why I think I like waking up or awakening to reality as it is and reality as it is proclaims the beauty in a plastic rose because there's so many layers happening at the same time. There's a layer of father and son experiencing love, there's layer of beauty and there's a layer of mystery, like who in the hell planted a plastic rose behind this little pine tree, like you can't even see it. Someone did that and who was it and why did they do that? It's so dumb, but also so awesome and we'll never know.
So yeah, I think waking up to what really is happening is the work of human beings. Waking up to what really is happening, it's not so hard. There's this crazy weird verse and somewhere in the Bible it says, it's not across the sea that you have to look for it, it's not across the desert that you have to search for it, it's hidden right inside every words you speak. It's imminent, but it's also transcendent. And that's the paradox, again.
Melissa: Yeah. I think our culture, if any culture right now needs a book about waking up. I mean, from a Christian or yeah, more of that lens, I think. I mean, in so many ways, the church has gotten swept away by American productivity.
Steve: Oh, yeah.
Melissa: I mean, it's pretty sad and pretty crazy, but I love this invitation to slow down in ways that are really, really practical, too. Okay, so my next question is going to kind of transition us to this idea of brokenness. So yeah, to be honest, this is something I continue to think about is contending with the brokenness in the world. I mean, it almost comes down to do good and evil and all of those things.
Steve: Yeah.
Melissa: But the question for you is, have you had an experience of brokenness, where in the midst of that you've seen beauty breaking into the midst of that experience of brokenness?
Steve: Yeah, I mean, I think I'll start answering that question revealing a personal thing, where this last year has just been a hard year for me, professionally, vocationally, relationally. It's been one where I've had to wrestle with people's disappointment of me, but in a way that and I don't want people to feel like, "Oh," but in a way that is justifiable and justified, like it's okay that people were disappointed because of some of the things that I maybe said or did.
And I had this moment, gosh, maybe three or four months ago where I was driving my son to school in the morning, I do every morning, and it's about a 25-minute drive usually and, Melissa I'm not much of a crier, I'm not a person that's easy, that tears come, but I could just really feel the tears coming during the drive like almost. And I dropped him off, and I just pulled around the corner and pulled over to the side and just started really weeping.
And I found myself talking to God in that weeping and saying, "I just need some real help."
And that felt like a moment of brokenness, a moment of, how do you define brokenness? I mean, I might define it, personally, as coming to the end of your rope, kind of like…And I remember talking to, I think, Mary later on and I remember telling her about the story and telling her. And she knew, obviously, well, not obviously she knew what was happening in my life and some of the dark feelings I was having. And I said this thing, I said, "Well, I guess we're all going to find out what it feels when for like to experience a Steve Wiens that has run out of gas." And that was terrifying, too. I'm a three in the Enneagram.
Melissa: Sure.
Steve: I don't know if you talk about the Enneagram much on the podcast here, but a three really actually needs to feel successful and sometimes that's really, really bad and dark and I think sometimes it's okay also. So, for a person like me to be in that place of brokenness, but what that led to, and this is where the beauty comes in, right?
So, there was a thing that I was going to have to do, and it was the right thing to do, okay? And it was around this relational conversation that I was going to have to have, but it felt so hard that I said to myself and then to Mary and a couple of other good friends, "I know it's the right thing to do, but I just can't do it, like I cannot do it, but I have to, but I can't."
And so, Mary, really sensitively, because if she would have said like, "You're not doing it, because what are you?" That wouldn't have worked, but she just very slowly asked enough questions to where I realized that I could ask for help and I could say, "I'm not ready to do this and I don't know if I'll ever be ready.”
But there was two people that I went to and specifically asked for help and they gave it. And it doesn't even matter how it all turned out, but it led to, over the course of months, something that really was beautiful in terms of how I was able to show up when I finally did do it and I finally did do it later, months later, had this conversation and it led to a kind of beauty that would never have been possible, I don't think, had I just pushed through.
So the beauty there I think is several fold, several fold, I never say that, several fold, thus. One was the listening that my friends did and Mary to me in that place. Two was the gift of tears in that moment where I just, "God I need help, and I really need help." And then I think three, walking it all the way through and seeing the result which I will point out, I'm not talking about like beautiful reconciliation. In fact, it wasn't that.
What was beautiful was I was able to show up later in a much better place, much more generative place and that was beautiful.
I was much more able to just show up and then let the outcome be whatever the outcome was, which I really don't believe it would have been possible had I just pushed through like Brené Brown calls it the dig-deep button, like if I just press that dig-deep button. And the last thing I was going to say is it was like there's also a beauty in the fact that I truly did come to the end of my ability to even use the dig-deep button. It just was broken, like I couldn't.
Melissa: Yeah.
Steve: And there was something beautiful about that, about getting to that place. Even that, it didn't feel good at all in that moment, but it was beautiful because it generated back to the paradox of generative potentiality. It generated something eventually that was really good.
Melissa: I love that. What keeps coming to mind, too, is just this, I don't know, this is a weird way to say it, but like soul formation.
Steve: Yeah.
Melissa: Or beautifying our souls because on the outside, people might not name, I just think what you're explaining is this deep refining of... I mean, you named the term, true self and so who we are in God and so it's almost like you were getting, I don't know, there was a soul formation as you felt love from other people, as you were able to get to a place where you could offer genuine conversation with that other person.
And, so, it's just so interesting because I think so often we think about external beauty, but this is this internal beauty that... I mean no one else we just probably... I mean so often, I know [it’s] autopilot like [I] certainly don't think about, "Is my soul beautiful today? What do I need to do?" Thank you for that example and for offering that.
Steve: Yeah. Well, thanks for everything you just said there. It made me go like it's tender, like tenderness. There's something about tenderness when you're treated with tenderness, when you treat yourself with tenderness, when you allow yourself to ask for help, and then you get tender help, not fixing help, not fixing help, but just tender coming alongside. There is something very formational about that for your soul. I think your soul blooms in a certain way when it's treated with such kindness, which makes me...
Yeah, I'll save what I was about say for later, because it may fit into another question, but yeah. Well, let me just say it and then I'll stop and I won't.
But the amount of self-hatred, self-harm, whether physical self-harm or emotional self-harm that we do, it actually prevents generativity.
Like it hides…and that's such a tragedy when we're stuck in it, and we can get stuck in it so easily.
Melissa: Yes. So that's a great transition to the next question I actually aske about is just what are some lies about beauty and so, in my mind, it is. I don't know if that's where you want to go with it, but-
Steve: Yeah.
Melissa: Yeah.
Steve: Well, I mean, there're some of the obvious ones, "Oh, my gosh, I mean, can I even say this?" I went to my doctor because I was up for my physical. Well, you've been around me so you know what I look and I'm 5'8-1/2" and on the BMI scale, that's obese. Okay, that's over 30 and so that's considered obese. And my doctor was talking about that, like, "Man, you really got to lose some weight," and whatever, whatever. And sure, okay, but oh my God. And I know all the things, like I have some body dysmorphia for sure, but it's also not crazy. It's not like way out of bounds.
I can say, "Well, maybe I have more muscle mass," or I don't know, whatever, whatever, and maybe I don't, but even with all that stuff like that has thrown me. So even, okay, men and body image is a funky thing. I think it's different than women and body image because I think there's a way in which men, we don't necessarily look at other men. I may say, "Oh my gosh, that guy has got great abs or look at that, he's so lean." And I might feel like I wish I was a little bit more lean, but I don't…I think it's qualitatively different than some of the really, really… stuff that happens, it seems between women and it's not absent.
Melissa: Sure.
Steve: So, I would say physically, body dysmorphia, body shame, those are some of the lies that I feel and like men and women, you can get a job or not get a job based on BMI, right?
Melissa: Yeah. Oh, totally. Yes.
Steve: I mean, 100%.
Melissa: Yes.
Steve: You can be trusted, respected, solely or not. Melissa, I read a thing on Facebook the other day. It was like, "Just be honest, would you trust a life coach more or less if they were overweight?" And then a bunch of people respond. And I was like, I'm not reading the comments on that one. I'm not going to do it, but that's another lie. Your vocational trust about your effectiveness has a correlation with your weight. I mean, that is bullshit. Can we say that? Is that okay?
Melissa: Thank you. Yes, please do say that.
Steve: You can edit that maybe, but that is really a lie. That's really, really a lie.
The last thing I'll say is I grew up with a really bad stutter. I mean, I stuttered a lot. So now I think, man, I make my living really with my mouth, my words. That's such a bizarre… But have you ever been around someone who stutters?
Melissa: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Steve: Yeah. Whenever the subject comes up, I always get really intense with people and I say like, "Please, whatever you do if you know someone, if you love someone who stutters, you just are going to have to really, really be present and be patient and don't try to finish their sentences, don't try to anticipate what they're trying to say because it only makes it worse." And because if like let's say being overweight gives you a gauge on effectiveness on your job, stuttering affects people's perception of how intelligent you are.
Melissa: Sure.
Steve: And so I grew up in some ways feeling like I was less than in terms of intelligence and no one would ever say that, but, man, you make people so uncomfortable when you stutter that no one really wants to spend much time and they assume that something's wrong with you because you stutter.
So, gosh, there's a whole lot more of course, there's skin color and body shape and all that stuff we could say, but I think those ones that I brought up are a little bit more like personally, here's how I've experienced a lie.
Melissa: Yeah. And thank you so much for sharing those things. I just think so many people resonate with them and I think oftentimes, we just assume like we all know this, we don't need to mention it. But first of all, thanks for naming it.
Steve: Yeah.
Melissa: And then also thanks for naming them for yourself, too, because I think, again, there's just so much power when you can be like, "Oh, it's not just me." I'm so with you on some of the stuff is just so ridiculous and even naming the ridiculousness of it, I think it's helpful.
Steve: Yeah and I think it's important to name it to, implicit bias. Most of us, well, is going to say, "I don't think that." "Well, yeah, you probably do." And it's okay to just plumb that a little bit because I think the next thing is like, "Well, how do I do that? How do I judge people's effectiveness based on their body size or weight?"
The only way to get underneath implicit bias is to actually make a mistake that you didn't know. I mean, that's one of the only ways, like really and truly.
I've had a couple of experiences where I've interviewed on my podcast some Latina X women and both of them, it was so great. I had great experiences with both of them, love both of them, and I think they loved to do. Both of them had the courage like later to come back and say, basically, "Hey, I enjoyed it and when you said this, boy, that just triggered me so and you just need to know because I think you're probably going to interview more people with brown skin and just know that."
And there was a momentary feeling of like, "Oh, damn it. I wasn't perfect." That's the thing you, guys. You have implicit bias, you do, and the only way to get underneath it is by wading into some categories where you're not that sure, making a mistake and then hoping that someone has the grace to come back and say, "Hey, by the way, loved it, but you might want to work on that. You might not want to say that again.”
And actually, I didn't feel dumb when they said that. I was like, "Thank you. Oh my gosh." And I felt a little dumb, I did. I felt a little dumb, but I wasn't washed away in shame. I was like I want to learn, so there's beauty in that. There's beauty in someone confronting you and inviting you to see your implicit bias.
Melissa: Yeah, and thanks for again, modeling that open posture because I think those of us that are such a perfectionist, trying to do everything the right way and sometimes we're just not going to do it. And so, having that openness of like, "Yep, I'm going to probably botch some of this up, and that's okay, and that doesn't define me." So, thanks for modeling that.
Steve: Well, I think I only can do that because I've just stumbled enough, but I've stumbled enough to be like, "Oh my, this is really the only way." Perfectionism, and I struggle with it, too. I'm not singling out perfectionists but perfectionism as it relates to woke-ness especially is actually going to push us further into the poles around which we cluster, because in our desire to be fully woke, fully inclusive, fully whatever, we'll be so terrified of saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing that we will actually remain, our implicit biases will stay underneath our cognitive awareness.
Because you can't go to a seminar, you'll miss what you need, if it's just a seminar. The only seminar that's really going to teach you is the seminar of failure. That's the only way. It's not the only way. I don't like absolutes like that, but it's probably the best way to teach you.
Melissa: Sure. Yes.
Steve: Yeah. Doesn't that suck though? Isn't that worst?
Melissa: It really is.
Steve: I want a seminar.
Melissa: Right. Yeah. I think we all do. So, there's just one thing that you mentioned that, do you mind if I just loop back to it?
Steve: Love it, yeah.
Melissa: Yeah, you just named, when it comes to body image, I just want to circle back to that piece, that's one of the messages I try to talk about. You know how we can judge people based on their body image and I think that that's oftentimes a missed implicit bias, I think we don’t…but what I was noticing about myself is I generally tend to judge or evaluate people based on the same measuring stick I evaluate myself. And, so, I realized, "Oh, if I don't want to judge people based on that because I try to be a loving person, I need to offer that to myself."
Steve: Yes.
Melissa: And when it comes to body image, I just think that can be such a tricky one because those aren't the messages, I've talked about this a lot, but just with culturally. So, yeah, I think some of these things that you've named earlier about the mystics and recognizing God, the image of God in us and I don't know if that's the language you'd use, but being able to truly love ourselves and continue to work on that when it comes to body image because I think, I mean, for me, that's part of my journey of getting rid of trying to work toward not making some of those judgments and yeah.
Steve: Yeah. Can I ask you a question?
Melissa: Sure. Yeah.
Steve: How have you learned even if it's tiny steps, okay, but to be more self-loving, self-compassionate, especially as it relates to your body?
Melissa: So for me, actually, the practice of yoga has been huge and being able to slow down and honestly, that's why I really resonate with your book, too, because I think we need these practical, tangible embodied things to help us slow down and also, this might sound a little crazy, but using my imagination thinking about what does God's love look like or feel like and embody, noticing in a yoga practice or something like that, embodied practice pairing that with actually believing that God is totally unconditionally loves me and I'm inviting my senses into that experience.
Steve: Yeah.
Melissa: And I think slowing down enough to notice or to ask God, "What does your love look like or feel like in this moment? What image do you want to give me to make this real?" Yeah, I mean, that's one thing...
Steve: I love that.
Melissa:... that has been helpful.
Steve: Well, it's interesting, too, that you go to yoga and embodied practice, because really what I'm learning about and I think even the phrase mindfulness is sort of an unfortunate phrase a little bit. I mean, we all think we know what we mean by that, but really the problem is we're stuck in our minds. Our mind, whatever we mean by that, is our thinking, our thinking self, our minds are dualistic. They solve problems. They're alert. Our brains are wired up still prehistorically to alert for danger and to move towards safety and to move away from danger.
So the embodied practices that you talked about breathing and yoga and stuff, really are designed to just gently move us away from our thinking because we're not our thoughts, we're not our thinking and we think that we are and reality isn't our thinking and isn't our thoughts. So, when we can return to an embodied way of being and living, even meditation and breathing, like you wonder like why do people do that?
And I was meditating this morning, breathing, falling my breath in and out, and then I'm thinking about the email that I have to send, and then I'm going back to my breathing. But instead of looking at that as like, "Well, you just failed. You're thinking about email when you should be breathing," that over and over again, returning to your breath, returning to “I'm not my thoughts, I'm not this email,” if you do that for 10 minutes every morning, then you'll start to automatically…You have this self-shaming thought. You look at your belly and I look at my belly when I'm sitting down and kind of hunched over and go like, "Oh my God, you didn't use to look like that?" But then before I know it, I'm going to return to self-compassion. You know what I mean?
Like because meditation and breathing it's this constant returning to reality is breath, reality is in and out, that's what reality is. So, I'm kind of in a shame spiral about my belly or about my double chin or about my whatever, I can more easily return to thoughts of self-compassion. So, I think I love where you went there and I think there's some real science behind. Obviously, I'm preaching the choir, I'm just rambling because I love this.
I love this and this is what I'm trying to get to in my book with the seven mindful practices. I have this quote, that's like, "We'll actually get where we need to go by learning to be where we are." And that sounds almost like a cliché, maybe it is, but what I mean by that is like, "Oh, hi, belly. Oh, hi, sweetie." Breathe in, breathe out, okay. And I'm not even going to try to cognitively work my way out of that, like “Your belly's fine.”
That's even getting caught in thinking. It's returning to this place inside yourself, and when we say inside ourselves, we really mean both inside ourselves, imminent, and then beyond ourselves, transcendent We are connected to the universe that's humming right along and has no construct of thin belly, fat belly, wide shoulders, narrow shoulders, thigh gap, whatever. You know what I mean?
Melissa: Yes.
Steve: That's all construct. It's all a construct, and the unified field that Richard Rohr talks about and the other mystics, too, is a consciousness in which we are all connected and we are all held together by a love that really won't let us go, and that begins to dissolve the silly, understandable constructs of value judgments of thigh gap, thin belly, wide shoulders, whatever, cut jaw.
It would be so fun to name what do we think of as the idealized…I was in a conversation with some dudes. No, it wasn't. It was my two sisters on a run and we're on vacation. And I just go, "Can I go there?" And they're like, "Yeah." I go, "What part of your body do you have the most trouble with?" And we love each other, so they immediately went there. And it was for me, it's my face. My face gains weight first and I hate that. I'm like, "Give me a gut. If I could have a cut jaw but a gut, I would take that." You know what I mean? And then they said, whatever they said, but even that, that is such, why is a cut jaw desirable? Answer that question.
Melissa: Right.
Steve: There's no answer. Well, it's because we've been conditioned lately to, yeah.
Melissa: Totally. And I think, you say that, I mean, in a casual way, but I do think until we start naming these things and opening our eyes to this cultural conditioning, I think it's so easy to name that as our reality. So one thing I was thinking is, another potential thought or idea would be, if you notice these messages coming up, “is this a cultural message or is this a message from eternal love of like the eternal reality?”
Steve: Right.
Melissa: I mean, yeah, just the way you describe that or juxtapose that together was really nice.
Steve: Yeah. Well, this is the mystery. This is the mystery. It's like we can't think our way out of it, but we need to just like in meditation, we become aware that we're now not following our breath, we're thinking about our email.
That question that you just posed can be a self-awareness question. Am I following the breath? Translation: listening for the voice of love, the voice of God, the divine embrace that is really there for all of us? Am I tuning into that frequency or to that WIFI signal, metaphorically, or am I addicted to the cultural message? Not even addicted to it, but just am I just so tuned into that that I'm not even aware that I am.
Because awareness, I had a therapist one time that said, "Awareness is almost always the prerequisite for change." So, I like your question, am I aware? Is this a cultural message or is it a cut jaw….is it related to the reality of if I have a cut jaw or not? Oh, my gosh. Everyone's about to this is a total Pete Holmes thing. Do you like Pete Holmes? He's a comedian.
Melissa: I know about him. I've been meaning to get him to podcast.
Steve: Oh, my God.
Melissa: I just haven't yet.
Steve: You know watch his... he's got a couple of Netflix specials.
Melissa: Okay.
Steve: Start there.
Melissa: Oh, okay.
Steve: But he has a way of doing what we're talking about like combating self-shame and stuff and getting outside of himself, getting outside of his mind by imagining he's watching, like if he's in a tricky situation or if he's caught in self-shame, or if he's got a conflict, whatever, all of a sudden, he tries to imagine that he's watching himself on TV, like he's a character in one of his favorite TV shows. And then he goes, "Oh my God. How is he going to get out of this one or oh, he's so sweet. He's always thinking he has too big of a belly, but he doesn't. He's so perfect. We all love him. I wish he just knew how much we all love that guy. He's perfect and he's perfect because he's quirky and kind of sometimes whatever."
That works for me somehow, that gets me out of overly self-referential “I am my thoughts, I am my realities, I am my judgments. I am the cultural message,” and it gets me into observing. "Oh, well, that guy. I actually kind of like that guy. I like that character.”
Melissa: Yeah. I like that. Thank you.
Steve: It works somehow. Yeah. It's fun.
Melissa: Yeah, that was great. I will look that up. I noticed I could just keep going on other things here. I will go ahead and move us on to the next question I have if that's cool?
Steve: Yeah.
Melissa: So, you have this pretty developed idea around beauty. And, so, I'm curious, have you had any particular experiences that have shaped or transformed your ideas around beauty?
Steve: Well, yeah. Okay, so what comes to my mind is something that I'm not sure if I'm answering the question, okay? So I'm going to do it quick and then you can redirect me if.
Melissa: Sure.
Steve: So, I love interacting with, working with men and women and I mean, I'll extend that to some non-binary friends as well, but what I want to say is like, I had an experience recently with a woman that I just met her and then I felt this energy that's really fun energy. And I was like, "Am I attracted to her?" You know what I mean?
Melissa: Yeah.
Steve: I've been married to Mary for almost 25 years now and of course, I am attracted to other people. Let's just say that out loud, too. You are going to meet people that you're attracted to and that is not the worst thing in the world, that's okay.
Melissa: Yeah.
Steve: But there was a spark there. There was like a thing and I checked in with myself in the moment, like, "Hold on, And I feeling sexually attracted?" And I was like scanning like beep, beep, beep, beep. And the truth was, I was like, "Is that what this spark is about?" And the truth was, it wasn't. It was because this person had a kind of generative potentiality and thought about life a little differently and it was just sort of interesting. So, I was like, "Well, I think we're okay."
And so, we decided to do a couple projects together remotely and stuff and it wasn't…So, I guess my answer here, and I don't know if I'm answering your question, but I realized, because this person objectively is beautiful, okay? But well, whatever that means. What does that even mean, what I just said, okay? But I think you get what I mean, okay?
Melissa: I do. Yeah.
Steve: Okay. So, but sorry if that's weird or something but because it is weird. Anyway, we're going to move on. But when I realized no, actually, men and women, especially in the Christian traditions. Oh, my gosh. You know you got to be so careful if you meet with someone alone, the next thing you know you're going to be having sex like crazy. That's bullshit, too. That's what I want to say what I learned and what was transformed is that just because you're around someone and you have a spark, that spark is not necessarily, now, you got to be aware, you got to check in and there are boundaries.
I mean, I believe in that, but there's also this really generative fun energy that happens between men and men, women and women, but men and women that if we just ignore and “oh, that's dangerous,” there's just so much to lose. There's so much that we lose out on if we're afraid. And so, even from that standpoint of, well, you get around someone…I guess what I'm trying to say is unless you're aware, you might think that spark, that the only thing that that means is you're sexually attracted to that person, so you're either going to go for it and be inappropriate or whatever or you're going to pull way back because you're afraid. And I'm saying there's a third option there, does that make sense?
Melissa: Right. That totally makes sense. Yes. Yeah. And I love that. I do think that sometimes we feel that spark or that energy around, I don't know whether its personality types or whatever, but I love just seeing that, to have your eyes to see or even seek out where is that vitality in the people that I meet. Because I just think that there's this beautiful, dynamic force field of life, I don't know this sacredness that we all embody. And, so, thank you for naming that, too, that it doesn't always mean that it has to be sexual if it's exciting.
Steve: Yeah and I think that's beauty. I mean, that vitality, that connection, that spark, that's beautiful in and of itself and it doesn't have to be sexual. It just doesn't have to. We're not animals.
Melissa: Right.
Steve: Okay, can we go too far? Yeah, we've all had stories of that, blah, blah. That's the caveat. Okay, no emails, but there's something beautiful there, too, to be enjoyed, to be delighted in, to experience.
Melissa: Yeah, no, that's great. Thank you. So, this last question is, is another one that I don't know how I'd answer this, so I'll go ahead and ask you. If there was one thing you wish people knew about beauty, what would that be?
Steve: I think that it's mutual and participatory and what I mean by that is go back to the story with Ben and the plastic rose. So, on one level, there was a beauty in that plastic rose, just as it was on one level, but when Ben noticed it and was delighted by it and filled with wonder about it and then when he called me over there and then when I saw his delight and wonder, because that's what I was so intrigued by. So, you could say like in some weird way the rose emitted a smell, a sound, a something that beckoned to Ben to come and see. So, there was this initiation, there was this spark or something, but then Ben responded and invited me over and looked.
And so, there's this mutuality and participatory nature where it's like that's not consumptive. "I'm going to consume that." It's like a dance. It's a dancing with beauty that reveals beauty in you as you reveal beauty in it, that was always there, always present, but something about the dancing together, the mutuality, the participatory nature of it makes a crowd gather in a sense.
Melissa: Yes.
Steve: And I think when we have more and more people willing to participate in beauty and see where it goes, I think the world would be more full of wonder.
And we are in a really scared time right now with the coronavirus and we're right now in the middle of lots of fear and I think to have people cultivating the participatory mutuality of being beckoned by beauty and then responding to beauty is…that would be irresistible for people right now, irresistible. Yeah.
Melissa: Thank you.
Steve: Thank you. What a great question. What a great set of questions. We can talk for hours about this.
Melissa: Thank you for this. I know. Okay, I just have to name this one quote that you say in the book because it feels like it's related and sometimes I don't know if it is until I speak it.
Steve: Yeah.
Melissa: But you talk about Joshua Heschel.
Steve: Yeah.
Melissa: And this is your chapter on delight and you're talking about Kairos time versus Chronos time. And here's your quote, "He said that time is a synonym for the way creation continually regenerates itself." And this is his quote, "Every instant is an act of creation." Heschel wrote, "A moment is not a terminal, but a flash, a signal of beginning. Time is perpetual innovation, a synonym for continuous creation. Time is God's gift to the world of space."
Steve: Yeah.
Melissa: And so the way you're describing beauty, this mutual process and this generative potentiality like what a beautiful way to think about life on the cusp of creation and this mutual creation with God if we're open to see the invitation, that felt a connection to me.
Steve: Yeah, I'm so glad you brought that up and I think you're right that is connected to how I'm thinking about beauty. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the great gifts of the Jewish mind, as it relates to creation, like think about the creation story in day one, day two, day three, all seven days, was that the act of God creating was not a start and a stop in the sense that it's not a historical event. It is a way to understand God's continual creating in every moment, that's a pattern, the seven days of creation. That poem really is what it is and fanciful, imaginative way of saying, of trying to describe the indescribable of creation. How to describe that? “That's seven days.” I'm like, "It's so great."
And then we get so caught up in the linear world. "It's got to be seven days. Day one, day..." But if we can see it as a pattern for all becoming and not to be super cheesy, but I'll just say it, that's my first book, that's what it's all about. It's called Beginnings: The First Seven Days of the Rest of Your Life and it's all about how to find your own problem, journey, process as one of the "days," so that not in a formulaic way, but you can know when you are.
So knowing when you are is sometimes more important than where you are and so that's why Abraham Joshua Heschel's “God gave us the gift of time” in the sense of the creation, the ongoing creation story, so that we can know when we are, so that we can figure out who we are.
Melissa: Okay, Steve, I could talk to you for a really long time. I'm recognizing I'm looking at the time now and yeah, it's almost two hours. So, I appreciate you taking this time.
Steve: You're welcome. Thanks for having me on. It really was so fun. Yes, it was almost two hours. Oh, my gosh, but I had so much fun.
Melissa: Thank you so much. So many good things. And again, when does this officially come out your book, Shining Like The Sun?
Steve: April 7, and you can go to my website, stevewiens.com and get that book and my other two books, my podcast, etc. or just go to whatever, if it's Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, Books-A-Million, wherever you like to buy books, you can find it there. It's on Kindle as well, and we're working on an audio, but we don't have that down yet, so we're still negotiating on that one. So hopefully, we'll have an audio book for that as well.
Melissa: That would be awesome. And I think, we had this theme of waking up, I think it came up a couple times and I think what is really one of the awesome parts about this book is it gives you tangible ways to do that, because I think waking up can sound so abstract and like well, that sounds nice, but how do we actually do that? And, so, I think this is just really nice and yeah, it walks you through different practices that you can do and it's really the way you write, I really like it. It's just very real and it's profound and really down to earth and real at the same time, which I think is a hard thing to accomplish in writing.
Steve: Thank you. I really wanted this book to be beautiful, delightful, but also very accessible and mindful practice that actually we're mindful and actually were practices, so not another devotion that you're supposed to go do or try hard to do, it's like how do we root in being here now in this moment around ideas like simplicity and restoration and delight and conversation and ordinariness, and attentiveness and stuff like that. So yeah, I hope people are delighted by it and meet the divine love that really does, really, I think is hopefully, I say hopefully because of course, I'm not certain, but is pulling us along toward love.
Melissa: All right. Well, Steve, thank you so much for your time, for your book, all of your insights. I really appreciate it.
Steve: Thanks, Melissa. Thanks for your good work in the world and I'm very much cheering this idea which I won't even name, but that I know you and a few of your friends are thinking about doing in the world. I'm watching and kind of jealous a little bit, too, like I want in on that, but then it's not my thing. It's my wife's thing, so anyway, but I'm cheering you on, big time.
Melissa: Thank you.
Steve: Okay, well, peace to you.
Melissa: Okay.
Steve: Thanks for having me on.
Melissa: Yes. Thanks, Steve.
To learn more about Steve, his podcast, or his books, check out his website.
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