Giving birth to a wiser self, by Elizabeth Lesser
Meditative Story
WaitWhat
4.6 • 3.2K Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2020
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
One icy morning on a Vermont farm, Elizabeth Lesser is witness to a miraculous thing: the birth of a bleary, bleating baby lamb. Years later, as a midwife, she is still filled with this sense of awe and wonder at every birth. It’s through that process of coaching new life into the world, she learns how to sit through the difficult – even the painful – moments in her own: a divorce, a new career, even death. She begins to understand that we must all stay open to the wild pulse of life to give birth to our wiser selves.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | All of the things we humans resist most. |
| 0:07.0 | Pain, unpredictability, lack of All of the things we humans resist most. |
| 0:23.2 | Pain, unpredictability, |
| 0:27.9 | lack of control, fear of the unknown. |
| 0:30.6 | These are served up in labor, |
| 0:32.8 | and not just literal labor. |
| 0:36.6 | Childbirth teaches me to stay open. |
| 0:48.3 | Through all the difficult transitions I meet over the years. When I go through a painful divorce, |
| 0:51.3 | when I transition from being a midwife and become an entrepreneur, a teacher, a writer, |
| 0:59.3 | when my kids grow up and leave home. |
| 1:03.0 | And of course, the biggest transition of all. |
| 1:07.4 | Death. |
| 1:09.3 | When my father dies at a ripe old age and my younger sister dies way too young |
| 1:18.6 | even death is a birth of a different order even loss can bring gifts of new life. |
| 1:30.3 | Elizabeth Lesser is an author and co-founder of the Omega Institute, |
| 1:43.3 | the influential Center for holistic education |
| 1:45.9 | in upstate New York, and it's a place I have great fondness and appreciation for. |
| 1:51.5 | I spent a weekend there as faculty on a course last summer, and was so taken, yes, by the beauty |
| 1:57.3 | of the space, but most of all by the generosity of the people there. |
| 2:02.6 | Today, Elizabeth shares a meditative story in which she learns to sit through the difficult, |
| 2:08.2 | even painful moments from her years as a midwife, and go on to birth a whole new openness |
| 2:13.4 | in life. |
... |
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