📿Extra Laundry w. Special Guest Liza Kindred

On Meditation + Chronic Illness, Community and Parenthood

LISTEN TO THIS INTERVIEW HERE:

Welcome to a new monthly segment we call Extra Laundry, where we sit down with a meditation teacher friend and talk about how to apply meditation to daily life. Today Lodro talks to Liza Kindred about the power of community, parenthood and working with chronic illness.

The below is edited from the audio interview above for brevity and clarity

Lodro: Hello and welcome to Extra Laundry where once a month we get an extra set of hands in here to help us because there is simply too much laundry for just one of us.

With me today is our dear friend Liza Kindred, who's the founder of Holy Shift, which is a wellness teacher's community. She's also written several books, including eff this meditation and Calm Your Anxiety Journal. And she offers supercharged hands-on healing at Reiki for Badass Women in Miami.

Thank you for being here. 

Liza: Hi! I'm so happy to be here. I also have extra laundry.  

Lodro: This is a cliche that I never realized; we just are constantly doing laundry now that we have a kid.  

Liza: Yeah, especially with a baby. There's no end to it. I don't know what my excuse is. I'd like to pretend it’s because I work out a lot, but I don't work out that much. 

Lodro: Right. I have the same thing. Let's get going with how you ended up starting with meditation. When did that happen for you? 

Liza: I mean, a lot of it centers around you Lodro. I'm sorry, but it's true. It's true.

Lodro: And then you've been teaching meditation for seven or eight years now. 

Liza: I think that's right. Yeah, I did my meditation teacher training with you through MNDFL in New York City. I think that's right; it was about seven or eight years ago and doing that training was so helpful to me because it actually exposed me to a ton of different meditation styles.

I had gone so far down the path of this specific kind of Tibetan Buddhist meditation that it had kind of become like “the one” in my mind. And so being exposed to all these different ones was super helpful.

It has been really empowering and it happens where I teach formal meditation, but I also have [other] situations. I was recently getting an I.V. and the woman that I was with is like, “I'd like to try meditation” and I was like, “Yeah, sure.” And she's like, “Should I turn out the lights?” And I was like, “Oh shit. Oh, we're going to do it right now. Okay, cool.” So it's so great to be able to offer that to the world in all the different ways.  

Meditation + Community

Lodro: Speaking thereof, will you say a little bit about Holy Shift? I feel like this last year has been a blur with this baby, but how long has Holy Shift been around now?

Liza: About the same amount of time as your baby, but it's also a blur. So Holy Shift is a community for wellness teachers and healers. And I started it about a year ago. We're still in a beta launch process. We still are having a founding membership with amazing members so far, but we're going to do a full on out to the world launch this fall or this winter. What we do is we offer community and education and practice teaching to all kinds of wellness teachers and healers.

I originally thought it was going to be meditation teachers and yoga teachers and maybe some energy practitioners. I've been delighted that it's gone further than that. We have fitness professionals and we have some therapists; it's people who are basically like, “Hey, I want to learn more. And I feel lonely and I want to be around other people that are teaching.” 

Because there's a lot of offerings for meditators or people who want to work out, but the people who are teaching it, a lot of times, the community and connection ends when the training ends and they kind of end up being like, “Wait, I'm all alone. What now?" 

And so it's an offering for people at that point. We don't do any one on one training. I mean, we do overviews and a lot of different kinds of things inspired by the training that I did with you, but we don't, at this point, offer certifications. We don't offer long term trainings. What we offer is some stuff you should know about, say, holding space during difficult times, or how to market yourself without being an asshole, that kind of stuff. 

Lodro: Which again, is so helpful. And I agree that a lot of the meditation teacher trainings don't even touch that, but much less there's not the hand holding. You get a lot of hand holding during a teacher training, but then you leave and some people just fall off and never do it again. Like they never go out and teach because it's just feels intimidating. “How do I even like put myself out there? How do I market myself?”

Liza: “How do I get anyone in my class?” Yeah. 

Lodro: Yeah. All of that. So I think that's really cool that you're doing it. Overall you have been really good in the time that I've known you, which is this point is 12, 15 years, something like that, you’ve been really good at building different communities over time. Are there any recommendations or advice you would offer to someone trying to build more community in their life? 

Liza: Yeah,  first of all, we all need more community. Like, holy crap. To me, community is so vitally important because it is the antidote to the individualism that late stage capitalism wants us to have.

There's so much about the world that we live in right now that is trying to keep us separate, is trying to create these false binaries, we're against each other. Also, any kind of social safety nets are completely gone. And so we're having to look out for ourselves, look out for just our closest friends and family.

So to me, being in community is kind of like a radical act. And it is basically saying like, I refuse to be subjugated to the individuality of late stage capitalism and the systems of oppression that want to keep us apart. And I'm going to hang with my peeps. To me, it's powerful. 

I think that communities of course have to be done safely. Just having a community isn't enough. Just getting people in a room isn't enough. There has to be a lot of care and attention to the systems and the standards of the people that we get together. But for me, yeah. What I have found when community occurs the most naturally, it's when I'm being the most real and authentic about who I am and the most specific about it.

I think for a lot of us, our instinct is to be like “anybody” [can come in], but it doesn't really work that way. And so I'm like, okay, I want wellness teachers and healers who are genuinely trying to work for the benefit of all beings who are spiritual, who have a foundation and who like to swear and complain and laugh. So, it's pretty specific. 

Lodro: I love that level of specificity though. And it is not just the who, but it's the type of person, what they're doing, how you interact with each other.

Liza: We did a lot of research and there's so many different kinds of wellness teachers and healers and for better or for worse…well, I'm not even going to say my opinion. It's a lot of bad there. We live in an algorithmic society and the algorithms really encourage us to have or pretend to have expertise. And so having humility, holding the seat of the student, the algorithms do not like that. They do not want us to ask questions.

They want us to answer them with great confidence, regardless of if they're right or wrong. That is exactly what AI does, right? Like, you can go ask ChatGPT or any emerging technology a question, it will answer it with great confidence. There's a little disclaimer: "Oh, you should probably double check that. It might not be true.” That's what the algorithms want. That's what Instagram wants. 

But what I want is to be around people who are like, “I'm not sure. Good question.” It's hard to cultivate that. And technology is literally working against us on the level of how it's encoded.

So that to me is another radical act and it can bring the right people. We're not looking for people who want to be an Instagram superstar.  Go you, but probably do it somewhere else.  

Lodro: Totally. And I think that willingness to sort of grapple with the uncertainty of it all is a wonderful bonding experience.

I've certainly had that with teachers that I've worked with where it's the ability to say, “I don't know” if we actually don't know the answer to something…it might actually shock a student. But yeah, ultimately it’s the best thing; it’s okay for us not to know everything.  

Meditation + Parenthood

Lodro: I'm going to pivot though, because if there's one area where I don't know everything (and I think everyone in this role would probably also say they don't know everything) it's being a parent. You have actually been a parent for most of your life. And you've also have a really good relationship with your kid who's now a grown adult.

What advice or recommendations would you give to anyone who's a parent and hopes to have sort of a similar relationship down the road?