2 Questions to Find Your Purpose in Life w/ Lynne Twist

Lynne Twist: We're all kind of guided. We all have a kind of in our innate uniqueness, something that's ours to bring, ours to do, ours to commit to. And I say that a commitment, or we also call it a stand, is not something you can check off and accomplish or actually even take credit for. So that's an important distinction here. It's something you can contribute to. It's larger than your own life starring you. 

Marie Forleo:

Hey, it's Marie Forleo, and welcome to another episode of the Marie Forleo Podcast and MarieTV, the place to be to create a business and life you love.

I cannot tell you how long I've waited to have today's guest on. Her first book made such a huge impact in my life, and today she's here to talk not only about that, but also her second book. If you're someone who's interested in a life of making an impact, if you're interested in having abundance in its true form, this is a conversation you do not want to miss. Lynne Twist is the author of the bestselling book, The Soul of Money, and founder of the Soul of Money Institute. She's been a featured speaker for the United Nations' Beijing Women's Conference, State of the World Forum, and Synthesis Dialogues with His Holines, the Dalai Lama. Lynne's latest book is Living a Committed Life: Finding Freedom and Fulfillment in a Purpose Larger Than Yourself.

Oh my goodness, Lynne, I cannot tell you how excited I am to have you here. I have admired you for so long. So first of all, you have this beautiful book, Living A Committed Life. I love this. This is your new one.

Lynne Twist:

Thank you.

Marie Forleo:

And I have to hold this up, The Soul of Money. Oh my goodness. I was telling you this when we were just talking before coming to record, your work has made such a huge difference in my life, and I just want to thank you. I've been looking forward to us having this conversation for so long. So we're going to talk about lots of things, but we'll start off with your latest book in this notion. You write, you say, "Ordinary people become extraordinary when they take a stand for something larger than themselves." Can you tell us about the first time that you took a stand for something larger than yourself and what impact did that have on your life?

Lynne Twist:

Wow. Well, there's probably been several examples of that.

Marie Forleo:

Sure.

Lynne Twist:

So I'll just say the first that comes to mind is when I got fortunate enough and blessed enough to be in the company of two great leaders who started The Hunger Project. The Hunger Project is now and was then the first organization or group of people to commit to something so bold, so exciting, so life altering that it just captured my heart, the end of world hunger. Not just alleviating the suffering, not just making it not so bad, not doing the best we can, but actually ending hunger and starvation. And the idea of ending something that I could be part of, something that bold, something that powerful, it lit up my life and it transformed my life and it reshaped me into the kind of person who could actually deliver something like that.

Marie Forleo:

And was that that speech that Buckminster Fuller gave in 1976 that you heard?

Lynne Twist:

Well, that had a lot to do with it. I mean, that was my first encounter with Buckminster Fuller, who was called the Grandfather of the Future, one of the great people of the 20th century. He was in his '80s when I first met him. So I didn't know him that long, but I knew him pretty deeply for the years that I did. And in this setting in Marin County, California, with 2,000 people in an audience, he told a lot of stories, but what he really communicated was the intellectual integrity of the universe and how powerful that is. And if we pay attention to that, the guidance is everywhere. And in that setting, he talked about his own life as being an experiment, a laboratory. Could one little individual make a difference that would impact all of humanity in a positive way?

That was the experiment of his life. And he did that. And that idea that one little individual, and he always called himself ordinary, could make a difference that would really literally transform the world was so compelling and thrilling to me. And Bucky said then, and I've found it to be true, that an ordinary person with an extraordinary commitment becomes the kind of person who can fulfill that commitment. You become extraordinary out of the commitment. It's not like you have to be extraordinary first to make a big commitment. It's kind of the other way around. It's really amazing.

Marie Forleo:

I feel like that is such a cool distinction because we were talking before the camera started rolling, you were asking me how long I've been doing this, and I was like, "About 22 years." And so I get this incredible opportunity to hear from people. And so many times they'll bring their doubts and their fears, their feelings that they're not enough, they're inadequacies. And I love what you just said because it turns it on its head. It's like, "Oh no, we can show up extraordinary." And the very active commitment of living a committed life is what can bring out the extraordinariness that we have. I love that so much.

So you also say, "When seeking a life of commitment, the mindset of scarcity can become our greatest challenge." You've also written this in your other book, "The fundamental misconception of scarcity on this abundant planet is at the root of all of our global crises." I remember when I first heard you talk about scarcity, and I want to get into the three toxic myths of it in a few minutes because it rocked me to my core, Lynne. So tell me more about how the mindset of scarcity can become our greatest challenge when we're seeking to live a life of commitment.

Lynne Twist:

Well, I want to make sure I acknowledge that Buckminster Fuller really taught me that. And then Werner Erhardt, who founded EST and the Landmark work, really deepened my understanding of the unconscious, unexamined mindset. So it's unconscious and unexamined. That means you don't know you have it. It's a lens through which you look and don't know you're looking through it. So it's before thinking, before consideration, before decision making, we have this unconscious, unexamined belief that there's not enough to go around and someone's always going to be left out.

This unconscious, unexamined belief system that we don't know we have, it's like looking at your own eyeballs, is the water we swim in in the consumer culture. Actually, the money culture, the commercialized culture actually fosters, foments, exaggerates, deepens this unconscious belief that there's scarce resources and there's not enough for everyone so you've got to get as much as you can to provide for you and yours, whoever you consider that to be even if it leaves some people out. You'll help them someday when you have way more than you need because there's not enough to go around and someone's going to be left out and you want to make sure it's not you and yours. And that notion, that unconscious, unexamined notion creates an us and them, creates unbridled and unholy competition for resources, financial and otherwise, and makes us into people that are inconsistent with our own humanity on a planet that's abundant with resources.

Really, truly, I learned that from The Hunger Project that there was plenty of food even in 1977 to feed everyone on the planet three or four times over. Yet we believed that there wasn't enough to go around. And to have, at that time, 44,000 people, most of them children under five, dying every day of hunger and starvation, every day, was so shocking to me on a planet just abundantly loaded with food. It became clear that it's an integrity issue, the hunger issue, and the integrity in the way we see the world, the lack of integrity of our relationship with one another, that we would let 44,000 children die every day on a planet that had plenty to feed them.

So that notion of scarcity really started to, when I understood scarcity as a mindset, not a reality. Now let me just say there's plenty of places, and I've been there where there's not enough jobs, not enough clean and safe water, not enough opportunity, not enough food. I worked on hunger and poverty. I know that. I worked with Mother Teresa actually. I know very intimately that that's very often the case.

I'm really talking about the affluent world. Probably you and I and the people listening to us now, we may need this and we may need that, but we think as if there's not enough. And that's the first toxic myth in what I call the great lie of scarcity. That toxic myth governs our lives, it makes us think a certain way, it makes us compete with each other in ways that are inconsistent with our love for each other, divides us and creates a kind of you or me consciousness, which is what Bucky said. If either you make it, you make it at my expense. Or if I make it, I make at your expense. That's a way of thinking. It's not a reality, but a way of thinking. So that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? A you or me paradigm.

Bucky talked about the fact that at least when he was speaking about this, which was a long, long, long ago in 1976, before many people were born, probably including you, he said, "We've shifted now to a world where there's enough for everyone everywhere to have a healthy and productive life." And I remember when he said that in 1976, I was in an auditorium in Marin County, California as I said. I remember exactly where I was sitting. I remember what I was wearing. You know how when you have a revelation, everything becomes crystal clear. And when he said, "There's enough for everyone everywhere to have a healthy and productive life," I remember I started crying. I had a Kundalini thing go up my spine. My hands started to perspire. I was literally shaking. I didn't understand what he said, but I got it and it entered my being. And this experience of there's enough for everyone everywhere to have a healthy and productive life was so palpable, so beautiful, so moving.

And then when he said, "But the you or me paradigm in which we live won't allow us to experience that quite yet. We need to move from a you or me paradigm to a you and me paradigm, a paradigm that says you and I can both make it at no one's expense because there's enough for everyone." And he said, and I always want to say this because this was 1976, he said, "Even though that's the reality, it'll take 50 years or so," 1976, "50 years or so for us to realize this experience of enoughness because all the institutions we live in, clearly the economy, also the education system, also the governance system, all the institutions we live in, even," he said, "religion are rooted in a you or me understanding of the world. Clearly, the economy is. Clearly, governance is rooted in a you or me understanding of the world. Education is really, really unfortunately rooted in a you or me understanding of the world."

And then when he said religion, that was like the capper. Religion being rooted in a you or me understanding of the world. He said, "It'll take about 50 years for these great institutions to become so dysfunctional that we cannot repair them. We can't prop them up, we can't fix them. We'll need to let them die their natural death and we'll need to recreate the institutions of humankind from a new paradigm, a paradigm of you and me, a paradigm where there's enough for everyone everywhere to have a healthy and productive life." And I say, that's exactly where we are right now.

Marie Forleo:

That's fascinating. There's been some spiritual books that I have been dipping into, and some of what is revealed in them. It talks about this notion of these incredible tectonic societal shifts that we're experiencing and that yes, they can be quite scary, but a very natural part of life is the death and birth process. Sometimes things need to come to a close before something new can be born and open up. So much to talk about. Okay, we mentioned the first toxic myth, right? The not enoughness. Let's walk through the other two. And then I want to go back to The Hunger Project and how that put you on such an incredible path.

Lynne Twist:

Well, the first toxic myth is there's not enough. There's not enough time. There's not enough money. There's not enough vacation time. There's not enough sex. There's not enough square feet in our house. There's not enough shoes. There's not enough. There's not enough. There's not enough. We live in a there's not enough mentality. It's almost like the siren song of the consumer culture. And if you really believe unconsciously there's not enough, then you hoard. You take more than you need. You're scared you're going to run out. No matter how much you have, you think you've got to have more, which leads to toxic myth number two. More is better. More of anything is better. More of everything is better. More, more, more, more, more. And that's the source of so many of our breakdowns. It has us on a consumer culture track that is so intense that we're swimming in stuff. One of the largest and most challenging and most fastest growing industries in the world is storage. If you think about what storage is-

Marie Forleo:

Just more of our stuff that we can't fit in our houses and then we want to spend money and construct these buildings to just pack more of our stuff away that we forget about anyway.

Lynne Twist:

Yeah, it's almost like a little village outside of every big city.

Marie Forleo:

Completely.

Lynne Twist:

There's storage apartment buildings for our stuff. Now, in every big city, there's now thousands of homeless people. But we're not building houses for them. We're building houses for the stuff we can't fit in our houses, our closets, our garages. That's the sign of a culture that's lost its way. Also, waste is a burgeoning culture. I mean, sorry, burgeoning industry. It's also a culture. But I'm just saying the more is better culture has turned us from citizens, which we used to be, the word citizen means he or she who's responsible for the wellbeing of the community, the wellbeing of the state, the wellbeing of the world, to consumers. And the word consumer means he or she who takes, depletes, diminishes or destroys. We even call ourselves consumers. That's how we're spoken to. That's how we're marketed to, yes, but also how our political leaders decide what we care about, what do we spend, what do we consume, what do we take, what do we deplete. And that's a terrible label for a human being, yet that's who we've almost become to ourselves.

So second toxic myth, more is better. And advertising and marketing is very, very, very powerful and psychologically driven and algorithms. And now the bots are getting involved with deciding what we want. So it's very powerful. And if people are in that industry, you're doing really well. However, we need to realize that there is something off about that. It's too much. And we all know that and we can feel it.

And then the third toxic myth is, that's just the way that it is. And that's just the way that it is sounds not so bad, except it holds the whole structure in place. It's the source of resignation, it's the source of depression, it's the source of obesity. It's the source of over indulgent. It's the source of so many things that haunt us now. "Oh, that's just the way that it is. There's nothing I can do about it." So it holds this whole toxic myth structure, there's not enough, more is better, that's just the way that it is in place, and it's a way of thinking and seeing the world that has us by the throat.

Marie Forleo:

Yeah. Have you encountered Kate Raworth's work?

Lynne Twist:

I have. And I love Raworth's Doughnut Economics. She's brilliant.

Marie Forleo:

When I saw her Ted Talk, I remember I almost fell off my chair because everything that you're describing now, I have felt, and again, being exposed to your work now for years, I'm like, "Yes, it moved me so much." And I remember seeing Kate's talk about Doughnut Economics and this notion that GDP should always go up and that's the only model that we have and her brilliant notion of shifting us to a very simple doughnut, it made me think of you and I had wondered, I was like, "Wow, I wonder if those two have crossed paths," because it feels like there's so much synergy in this very... When you talk about it, Lynne, it's like, "Oh my gosh, this is so obvious." But it's this fundamental wisdom that we've all been kind of brainwashed out of. So that was just a little bit of a side note. Yeah, I think her work is brilliant too.

So The Hunger Project, let's go back to... I believe that's what took you to meet Mother Teresa for the first time.

Lynne Twist:

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Marie Forleo:

It was your...

Lynne Twist:

Right.

Marie Forleo:

Oh God, I love the story that you told in the book. I think when we start talking about money and scarcity and enoughness and even when we think about money and we start to have these conversations, there can also be so much judgment. Whether people judge folks that don't have resources or that have enormous resources, judgment's there. I'm wondering if you can tell us about your first experience meeting Mother Teresa and the incredible insight that you walked away with.

Lynne Twist:

Yeah, I'd love to. Well, first of all, Mother Teresa was a icon for me like she was and is for many, many people. I was raised Catholic so I really admired her. She was part of my religious tradition. When I grew up and went to India for the very first time with The Hunger Project, I realized, "Gosh, I'm in India. I'm working on hunger. Maybe someday I'll meet Mother Teresa." I shared that with a friend whose name was Indira [last name], I'll never forget her and she said, "Well, I know Mother Teresa." She said it like, "I know Mother Teresa," kind of like, "I know. I'll introduce you." I got so excited. I thought, "Oh my God, that would be the bees knees. That would be the purpose of my entire life. That would be a gift."

Two years went by before I actually saw Indira again, and I was in Delhi. I called her in the morning. I remember it was 7:30, and I called her, I said, "I'm in Delhi." And she said, "Oh, fantastic. Mother Teresa's here. She's at her orphanage for little girls. I'll arrange a meeting with her." And she called me back and she said, "Yes, Mother would love to meet you tonight at 7:30." So I had 12 hours to get ready for this. I had meetings all day with UNICEF and other organizations. I canceled everything. I think I might have lied and said I was sick. But don't tell them that. Yeah, don't tell. I didn't want to tell Mother Teresa that. And then I realized I haven't been to church in 10 years.

Marie Forleo:

Oh my gosh.

Lynne Twist:

I hadn't been a Catholic in a long, long time. I practically bathed myself in holy water. I was like... I did everything to make up for all these years that I hadn't been anywhere near what she stands for. And then I made my way finally that night across New Delhi to Old Delhi. If you've ever made that trip, it's a long difficult drive. When I got to Old Delhi, the car I was in was a private car that I hired because I was so nervous. We got to the square. It was a cobblestone square. Not that big, about as big as this room. Across the square was this beautiful picture of Mother Teresa with her blue and white saree and above the doors said Missionaries of Charity.

So I walk across the square. I'm a kind of an obsessive trash picker-upper person, so I pick up trash wherever I go. And in India, that's a big assignment. When I got to the steps leading to the door, there were two steps. I remember looking down and seeing a crumpled piece of newspaper on the first of the two steps. And I leaned over to pick it up. Inside of the newspaper was a tiny, tiny, tiny baby, a live baby girl. She was so small. She was the smallest human being I've ever seen. I know she couldn't have been this small, but she was almost the same size as my hand, a little bit larger than my hand. She was in this bundled up newspaper, left on the doorstep. So I took off my shawl. I wrapped her up in a little swaddling thing.

I knocked on the door of the Missionaries of Charity, and a nun opened the door and I said, "This tiny, tiny child was on the doorstep. I'm here to see Mother Teresa. My name is Lynne Twist." And she said, "Oh, thank you so much. Come in. I'm so sorry to say," she said, "Mother Teresa's not here right now. She went to the local jail to bail out some prostitutes, local prostitutes, girls, because we have so many babies, we need help. So she's bringing as many of them as she can back here tonight. But while you're waiting for her, would you help us?" And I said, "Oh, of course." So they put an apron on me and led me over to... There was a whole bank of sinks.

By the way, I walked through the orphanage main room first, and there were 39 iron cribs. I counted them. Each with two or three little babies in them. These were all little girls under two, unwanted. There was also a blue gymnastics mat with more little babies. I mean, there were babies, babies, babies, babies, babies, and one little boy. I don't know how many girls, but a lot of little girls, and all under two. So these were little people. I know it's impossible, but I did not hear anybody crying.

Marie Forleo:

Wow.

Lynne Twist:

Now this is my memory. I can't imagine that that's true. But it was just a state of absolute bliss. And I'm not kidding. The experience of being with all these little babies and the nuns and the lay people tending to them, hugging them. This was very modest. A wire with a light bulb. Every few feet, that was the lighting. No rugs or anything. We're over at these sinks. I was assigned to rinse the little babies after they were washed and then dry them off and pass them onto the next nun or lay person. I remember standing there washing these little ones. Many of them had no fingers or they were blind, or there was something amiss about the child had been born with some malady, or they were just unwanted. But they were so beautiful.

I remember standing at the sink and realizing Mother Teresa said, "To know me is to know my work. That's who I am," and I thought, "Well, this is my meeting with Mother Teresa." And the nuns were singing. It was just blissful. I was in absolute heaven. I kind of forgot about her. And then at a certain point, someone tapped me on the shoulder, "She's here. She's ready to see you." So I immediately get all nervous again, scared, and follow the nun down through the hallway past a chapel. And then there was this long skinny hall, I think you can picture it. And there was a table, a wooden table with two chairs against the wall in the long hall. The nun who took me there, she said, "Sit here. Mother Teresa will be here in a moment."

So I sat there praying and suddenly being totally religious all of a sudden again. I looked down the long dark hall. Ahead of her was her black Labrador retriever. She had a very, very beloved dog, which it was an old dog. He had a little beard, a little gray beard. He was a little crippled, and he preceded her. Behind the dog was this beautiful being, Mother Teresa. And I'll never forget when I first saw her, I burst into tears like I'm doing now. I ran to her and knelt in front of her. I remember kissing her hands and her feet and everything I could kiss. When I was kneeling, I was about her height. She was very, very small. And she had osteoporosis, so she was all bent over as everybody knows. Her little gnarly hands and a little gnarly feet. I mean, ooh, it was such a thrill to be in her presence.

She took my hand and said, "Stand up. Stand up. Come over here." And so we sat down in the two wooden chairs in the wooden table. She took my hands. The thing is, I don't remember the conversation, but I remember the experience of absolute total unconditional love for her and from her. It was as if the whole world was about love and unconditional love. Every time I tell this, I'm right back there now. And I was crying the whole time holding her hands.

At a certain point, I hear these loud angry voices behind me down the long hall. That preceded two very large Indian people, a man and a woman, pretty clearly a husband and wife. The man was a Sikh man. And Sikh man wear a turban. He had a very large topaz right in the middle of his turban. Plus I remember noticing he had a ring on every finger in one of his hands, including his thumb, because I remember that. He was opulent, he was overdressed, he was overbearing. He was over perfumed. He was over, over, over. He had a very fancy kurta, the kind of thing men wear in India. Behind him was this angry, noisy woman. She had a diamond in her nose and then a diamonds that went all the way to her ear on a kind of thing like this, and lots of bangles. She had a very, very fancy saree.

They were angry and pushy and rude and ugly and smelly. I did not like these people. In fact, they got me so upset that when they started interacting with Mother Teresa, and they went right to her and they said, the woman said in a loud, ugly voice, "We did not get the picture you promised us. I want the picture." That's what I remember her saying. And very loud and aggressive. So the woman handed me, this is a long time ago, an Instamatic camera, an old-fashioned camera, a little throwaway camera, and she said, "You. You take the picture." So then she pulled Mother Teresa up very violently, it seems to me, by the elbow from her chair, and said, "Mother Teresa over here." She placed Mother Teresa between her gigantic husband and herself. So there were these two huge people. And then in the middle, little Mother Teresa all bent over with her osteoporosis just being as sweet and kind as possible. And the woman telling me, "Take the picture. Take the picture."

So I took the picture. And then I was so angry with these people. They were so rude to her and rude to me, but mostly rude to her. And then the woman did the most unforgivable thing in my view. She said to Mother Teresa, "Chin up, Mother Teresa. Chin up for the photo." And she went like this... And pulled up Mother Teresa's chin, you know Mother Teresa had osteoporosis, and held her head up like this, and she said, "Take the picture now." So I took another picture. And then she took her hand away and they left. They grabbed the camera, they left. They didn't say thank you. They didn't embrace her. They didn't say goodbye to me. They just left. My blood was boiling. How could they treat her like that? Who were these people?

Mother Teresa sat down in her chair as if nothing had happened. I was just furious. She took my hands and continued as before, but I was tense. My body was tense. My veins were probably popping out of my forehead. I tried to calm down as we completed our meeting. And then she said she'd prayed for my mother and my son, who was sick at the time, and gave me a scapular medal. We embraced. And then I walked with her through the... Said goodbye to the nuns, through the babies. I started to calm down and I got in my car. It took about 45 minutes or an hour to get back to my hotel in New Delhi. During that ride, I realized that I had been in the presence of a living saint and felt the deepest and most profound unconditional love in my lifetime and the most profound anger, resentment, and hate in the same space. That wasn't true for her. She saw Christ in every face. Those people were Christ for her, but not for me.

So when I got back to my hotel, I realized that was my teaching from Mother Teresa. So I wrote her a letter and thanked her for the teaching of my lifetime. She wrote me back and she said something really profound. She said, "You're naturally drawn to the underserved, the underfed, those who obviously need support and assistance. But your circle of compassion, you must widen it. You must enlarge it to include the wealthy, the entitled, the rude, the angry, the misunderstood." She said, "The vicious cycle of wealth can be as intractable and as painful as the vicious cycle of poverty. And they too are part of your work. They too need your love."

So after that letter and that encounter, it became clear to me as the chief fundraiser for The Hunger Project that this was a lesson that I was meant to have. She was the person to deliver it to me. I've become very clear now that I have the great privilege and the opportunity to deal with people of enormous power and wealth. The rude, the righteous, the overbearing, the entitled, that's part of my world too, part of my capacity to love, part of my compassion. And I'll never forget that meeting with Mother Teresa.

Marie Forleo:

One of the other distinctions I think is so incredible that you've made is between sufficiency and abundance. Can you talk us through that?

Lynne Twist:

Well, I learned from Buckminster Fuller once again when he said, "There's enough for everyone everywhere to have a healthy and productive life" in this setting I was in an auditorium and it went right into my soul. I started to re-see the universe. I mean, everything showed up for me completely differently after that. Even though I didn't understand what he said, I got it. And I started to see the enoughness in everything. Even when I worked in Ethiopia after the 1984, 1985 famine, what I saw was the resilience, the courage, the deep, powerful spiritual power of life in the people that were bereft. And yes, they were hungry, yes, but the human spirit can't be crushed. It's incredible.

So Bucky taught me about sufficiency. Let me just say what I think sufficiency is, because I actually think it's the radical surprising truth about life. There's a principle that I like to cite that I kind of invented or discovered, or I don't know what principles, or maybe they're already there. But if you let go of trying to get more of what you don't really need, which is what we're brainwashed to want more of, it frees up oceans of energy that's all tied up in the chase to turn and pay attention to what you already have. When you pay attention to what you already have, when you nourish what you already have, when you love what you already have and when you share what you already have, it expands.

So let me say that again. When you let go of trying to get more of what you don't really need, it frees up oceans of energy tied up in the chase to turn and pay attention to what you already have. When you nourish what you already have, when you make a difference with what you already have, when you share what you already have, it expands before your very eyes. A shorter way of saying that is what you appreciate, appreciates. What you appreciate, appreciates. So sufficiency or enough is actually, as Bucky said, not an amount. Not an amount. It's not halfway between more than you need and less than you need. No, it's a way of being in life. It's what you teach, Marie. It's who you are. That I am enough, there is enough, we are enough. That is the fundamental truth about life no matter who you are and where you are. Yet we chase more, more, more, more and more thinking that will give us "abundance."

I define abundance a little bit differently than most people. I know it's in all the holy books and I love abundance. But in the mindset of scarcity, abundance is excess. It's what's in our landfills. It's waste, it's storage. It's what's causing so many problems in the world. The distinction of enough, as I say, is not an amount of anything. It's a way of being where everything in life, you have reverence for it, you have respect for it. There's an integrity with the distinction of sufficiency. And in consumer culture, we race right past enough and we don't even know that it happened, towards more, but we never achieve more really. So it's a hamster wheel.

But when you rest in the distinction, "I am enough. We have enough..." And there's moments we all have that. When you see a newborn baby, when you're up early enough to witness the sunrise, we all have moments of absolute profound awe and wonder where there is enough, it is enough. Things are not only sufficient, they're profoundly, radically sufficient. So abundance, I think true abundance or what most people want is true prosperity. They really want to prosper. You can't get to true abundance or prosperity through the doorway of more because it will always lead you to lack and you'll need more again, which ultimately will lead you to lack, and then you'll need more again. That's a constant. It's never ending.

But if you go through what I call the portal or the distinction or the house or the being of enough, then it overflows into abundance, natural abundance, natural abundance. And all you want to do is share it because you know don't need it. So Brother David Steindl-Rast has this beautiful metaphor. Can I tell that one?

Marie Forleo:

Yes, please.

Lynne Twist:

So I seem to be drawn to these 80 and 90 year old teachers. Brother David Steindl-Rast is still on this planet as we do this wonderful conversation, and he's 96. He's a Benedictine monk with no possessions other than his little monk outfits and maybe a Bible or two. He's the happiest, most contented, most beautiful guy on earth. He's the icon of gratefulness, and he has a website called gratefulness.org. He's just awesome. In a conversation I had with him, I asked him, "What's the distinction, Brother David, between gratitude and gratefulness?" And he said the coolest thing that helps me just answer your question. He said, "Gratitude has two great branches. One is gratefulness, and the other is thanksgiving."

Gratefulness is the experience of life when the bowl of life is so full that it's almost overflowing, but not quite. When the bowl of life is kind of bowed at the top and not yet dribbling over the edges. When things are just incredibly exquisitely filled with contentment. And that's so fulfilling that you know you're in the great fullness of life. And when you're in the great fullness of life, the bowl of life starts to overflow. And that puts you in the other branch of gratitude, called thanksgiving.

When you're in the branch of gratitude called thanksgiving, the bowl of life is overflowing like a fountain. And you're so grateful suddenly to find out there's an other. Because all you want to do is give and serve and contribute and share. And that's so fulfilling it puts you over here in the great fullness of life. And when you're in the great fullness of life, you actually feel like you're one with God or the universe, and there is no other. It's all one. And that's so fulfilling that the bowl of life overflows and then you find out, "Oh no, there are other people and all I want to do is give to them because I have more than I need."

So this is sufficiency and this is true abundance. True abundance comes from the radical and exquisite experience of having enough which overflows into this beautiful thing called abundance. That's actually the source of our prosperity. You don't feel prosper unless you share. You prosper by sharing. We feel prosperous when we share.

Marie Forleo:

Let's talk about what I know you are so passionate about, the Pachamama Alliance, when we talk about sharing. Can you introduce people to what it is and why it's so important and your work in it for the past almost three decades?

Lynne Twist:

Well, I worked on hunger and poverty for about 25 years of my life. And then through a series of mystical events, I ended up being invited to the rainforest, actually, called, through a whole series of mystical experiences to the Achuar people of the Ecuadorian, Amazon. The Achuar people had very little contact with the outside world. And I was lucky enough with my husband and another person, John Perkins, and others to be in first contact with that indigenous group. Out of that encounter came something called the Pachamama Alliance. The word Pachamama means Mother Earth, Pachamama. It's all one word.

But to the Kichwa people whose language it is, it means more than that. It means the earth, the sky, the universe, and all time. I love saying that because it actually demonstrates that indigenous people have a much bigger understanding of the reality of the world than we do. We've kind of narrowed it down. But they believe that pachamama means the earth, the sky, the universe, and all time. The Pachamama Alliance is an alliance between the indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest and the Andes in the sacred headwaters region of the Amazon and the Andes, and conscious committed people in the modern world, like you and I, and the people listening to this for the sustainability of life. It's an alliance.

We work with the Achuar, the Shiwiar, the Andolans, the Waorani, the Zápara people. We work with indigenous tribes that have their total traditions intact, are living in pristine, tropical rainforests, much of it is totally [inaudible - “remote”] still. And they're protecting it fiercely with their lives, not only for themselves, but for the future of life. They see themselves as the custodians of the future of life. Working with them to empower them to succeed in that commitment has been one of the great privileges of my lifetime.

In the very first encounter with these indigenous people, they told us, and this is a very famous indigenous quote, "If you're coming to help us, don't waste your time even though we invited you here. But if you're coming because you know your liberation is bound up with ours, then let's work together." And that is the ethic of the Pachamama Alliance because they know that we're in trouble, they're in trouble. They have a forest to protect and they know that it's endangered and the source of life, which is what they're protecting, they know that's endangered. We're living in a way that we know we're off course. We all know that. This is not right. Destroying the very life support system on which we depend, we all know that. We don't know how to stop that. We're trying our best, but it's very difficult. And so the indigenous people and the modern world people, or people like us, have come together in the Pachamama Alliance to work with each other to create what we call an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, socially just human presence on this planet. That's our mission.

Marie Forleo:

That's incredible. Well, I don't know how deep you want to go into it, but maybe just a little bit of a dip, because I felt that it was so powerful. You said, "Okay, well, the way I was called to this, I had some mystical experiences." And I will tell you in my audience, when we think about the context of living a committed life and we think about what is it that we want to commit to, sometimes it doesn't occur to us from necessarily our mind. Sometimes there are messages or we feel called, or we have experiences that are beyond what most of us would encounter every day. So can you tell us even just a little bit about the mystical experiences? Because I think it's fascinating.

Lynne Twist:

Well, okay, let's see. I'm going to give you my short version because it's a very long one. But I was lucky enough to be in Guatemala with a close friend named John Perkins, who was in the Peace Corps in Ecuador as a young man. He and I were middle-aged at the time. We were working with the Mayan people. John could feel, because he had been trained in Shamanism, that there was a shaman directing the activities of the people we were working with but they weren't letting us know that there was a shaman involved. They were a little nervous about Americans. And this is in 1994. But John, with his skill and his capability, ended up connecting with that shaman and having us get invited to be in a small ceremony with the shaman on a hilltop in a rural area near Totonicapán, Chichicastenango in Guatemala.

It was a starry night. We met the shaman at midnight in this rural area. There were no lights anywhere around. He had built a big fire, and there were 12 of us. When we got there, he didn't speak Spanish or English, but John spoke a little Mayan so he was translating. We were told to lay down on the ground, on the dirt around this fire that he had built in the middle of a circle. And so we arranged ourselves like a wagon wheel around that fire. And then the shaman, he started drumming. There were stars and the crackling fire. I mean, if you can imagine, this scene was so awesome. It was midnight, so it was the middle of the night. There was no moon. The fire was crackling and the stars were incredible. You could see forever the Milky Way. It was so bright you could correctly read from it.

And the drumming. John was drumming and the shaman was singing and chanting. He started to whistle and sing and chant. And a shaman's voice, they have some incredible power that comes through their singing and chanting. He told us to journey, close our eyes and journey. It was midnight so I kind of figured I would end up sleeping through whatever this was going to be. But no, that's not what happened.

Through the chanting and the drumming and the crackling fire and the night air and I closed my eyes, and after a while, I started hearing the shaman's voice and it went, almost entered my body and I started to have my right arm shaking and quivering and I could not hold it next to my body. I had to extend it. And then my left arm wouldn't stop quivering and shaking. And I had to extend that. And soon I felt something hard and difficult and kind of crusty grow on my face and I realized, "I think it's some sort of a beak, and these are wings, and I have to fly." I began to lift my body up into the sky, and I felt the architecture, the skeletal body interior begin to change and reshape. And I was able to fly in slow motions up this glorious starlet night sky. It was so glorious and beautiful and gorgeous and awesome. And I'm flying in slow motion.

I can still hear the shaman's voice and the whistling and the drumming. It was still right there, but I was far away from it, but I could still hear it. And then it started to become dawn. I looked down and I was flying over a vast, vast, literally unending forest of green. It was so vast and so beautiful. It was exquisite and it went forever. And in the sunlight, it was glorious, and the mist came up from the trees. And then there was this amazing thing where these disembodied faces of men with orange geometric face paint on their faces and yellow, red, and black for their crowns in their heads start to float up from the forest floor through the canopy and call to me the bird in a strange tongue. It was one of these kind of amazing mystical encounters that was deeply moving. I couldn't understand what they were calling for. I couldn't understand the language, but it was beautiful. It was an encounter. It was a divine appointment of some kind.

And then they would float back down into the forest, just the faces, and I would keep flying in slow motion like this. It was so glorious. I can feel my body doing it again. And then the faces would reappear and come up through the canopy and call once again to the bird, and then they would disappear again. And I would keep flying and then they would appear again. And then they'd disappear. And it went on for a very long time. And then there was a big loud bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, a drumbeat. And I remember being sort of stunned by that different noise. I remember opening my eyes and sitting up, and I had no wings. I had no beak. It was just me. And I realized, "Oh my God, that was some dream." Unbelievably real.

So then the shaman, through John, asked each person to share their vision. Everybody had become an animal, a snake, a wolf, a butterfly, a hummingbird, et cetera, until it got to me and I shared my story. And then it went all the way around to my friend John. John had had a very, very similar vision, almost the same. Then the shaman, he was kind of a strange looking guy. That fire had gone down to embers, so this was quite a while. He kind of looked weird across the circle from me. And then he completed the ritual, dismissed everyone, and asked John and I to stay. And he sat us down and he said, that was not a normal journey or a vision. That was a communication. Someone is communicating with you and you need to go to them. Well, I could not... That just didn't compute for me. I didn't know what to do with that.

Marie Forleo:

Yeah, it wouldn't compute for most people.

Lynne Twist:

No.

Marie Forleo:

And by the way, did you do any plant medicine or that was just...

Lynne Twist:

No medicine actually.

Marie Forleo:

No?

Lynne Twist:

I forgot to say that. No medicine.

Marie Forleo:

Damn.

Lynne Twist:

Just his voice.

Marie Forleo:

Okay.

Lynne Twist:

He told us we need to go. And I said, "Go where?" By the way, I didn't say this. I had taken a two week leave from the work in The Hunger Project to do this Guatemala trip for my friend John. But John said, "Lynne, I know who they are. I know where they are. They're the Achuar people. Just before I came here, I was in the Amazon with the Shuar, the neighboring indigenous group, and an Achuar hunting party came into the Shuar camp and said, "We're ready for contact. We're going to be sending contact messages to the modern world to bring modern world friends to us, because we've seen that contact is inevitable. It will come in the year 2000. So we're going to initiate it before it comes to us in ways we can't control."

So John said, "That's the Achuar. They're calling for contact. Lynne, this is a huge privilege. You have to come with me. We've got to go to Achuar territory. I know who they are. I know where they are. I recognize the markings, the headdresses." I said, "John, I have to be in Africa and I needed to be in Accra, Ghana for a board meeting." So I told him, "You go, that's your thing. I've got to end world hunger and we're not even close to done."

So I went to Ghana. I was in the Accra, Ghana, Novotel at a board meeting just a week later with eight Ghanaian people, five men and three women sitting around an oval table in a conference room on the main floor of that hotel. We're sitting at this table, the Ghanaian people have very, very, very dark skin, almost blue, black. We're sitting at this table having this conversation. I'm not leading it. I'm sitting in for the global office. And at a certain point in the conversation, and very slowly, the men, only the men, the Ghanaian men started having orange geometric face paint appear on their black faces. And I was like, "What is going on?" And no one said anything about it. So I realized, "Oh my God, I think I'm hallucinating." I didn't say anything. But what I did was I excused myself and went to the ladies' room, splashed my face with water. I thought, "Oh my God. Well, that thing in Guatemala, that weird thing is haunting me. I can't function now."

So I came back into the room. Everybody was normal. They're still talking. And a few minutes later, maybe 10 minutes later, it happened again. Slowly but clearly, orange geometric face paint appearing on the black faces of the men, only the five men. And I just burst into tears. And then everybody said, "Well, what's wrong? What's wrong?" And I realized no one sees this but me. So I said, "You know what? I'm feeling very, very ill. I need to go back to the United States. I've been in too many time zones, too many countries. I'm just exhausted. I was supposed to stay for six days. I can't do that. Please, let me just go up to my room by myself."

Now, this is 1994, no cell phones, no internet. I just packed, went to the airport, flew to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to New York, New York to San Francisco. By the time I got home, I was so rattled because the faces just kept coming. I told my husband that I felt that I was having hallucinations, that I didn't understand them, but I didn't tell him like I'm telling you because I thought there was something wrong with me, you know, how you are. But the faces didn't stop.

I just was desperate to reach my friend John, who went straight to the Amazon from Guatemala and wasn't home and wasn't reachable. So I left him faxes and voicemails until he came back. He was just loaded with messages from me. And he called me and he said, "Lynne, we need to go. They want 12 people from the modern world, people that have global voices and can be heard around the world. 12 of us. People who have open hearts, very important to them. People who know the rainforest is critical to the future of all life. People who know indigenous wisdom is critical for the modern world and people who will respect the ways of the shaman."

And so John and I put that group of people together. I picked my husband Bill as number one. And then we put a really beautiful group of 12 people together, and we traveled to Quito, which is the capital of Ecuador. We went over the eastern side of the Andes, down the Pastaza River Canyon to the edge of the vast, vast Amazon rainforest which stretches all the way across the continent to Brazil and to the Atlantic Ocean. It's larger than the United States.

When we flew in little tiny planes to Shuar territory, then a Shuar pilot picked us up and took them in little tiny planes three at a time into Achuar territory. And when we got there, eventually when all 12 of us arrived, they came out of the forest with their orange geometric face paint, their yellow, red, and black feather crowns and spears. It was both remarkable and otherworldly and confusing and beautiful and moving and everything you could possibly imagine. That encounter lasted about six or seven days with the Achuar leaders, and that was the beginning of the Pachamama Alliance.

I knew then that something was calling me that I couldn't explain. They didn't make any sense to me. I hadn't been to South America. We weren't working there. We were working in Africa and Asia on hunger. I didn't speak Spanish. I wasn't thinking about the environment. I wasn't even aware that much of the Amazon Rainforest, and neither was my husband Bill. He was a business guy. But somehow we did take medicine there, and we were the first white people the shaman had ever seen or worked with. Something took place in us and we knew this is not an accident, this is not a one-off. We're being called, this is our destiny. And that was the beginning of Pachamama Alliance.

Marie Forleo:

Was there a challenge for you, because you are such a committed person and your experience with EST, and I've had not experience with Landmark, but something similar, and this notion of integrity in keeping your word, and you had committed to The Hunger Project, and now there was clearly this incredible calling that was otherworldly and you could not deny it, how was it navigating winding down your participation there? Or did you to really commit to Pachamama?

Lynne Twist:

Well, in 1994, 1995, I had become a kind of folk hero for The Hunger Project. We had hundreds of thousands of volunteers all over the world. I had said to everybody, "I've been here since the beginning and I'll be here till the end of hunger, the end of my life, whatever comes first." And I meant it. But somehow this thing that happened to me jarred me so deeply and I didn't know what to do. I was trying to do the Pachamama Alliance. I was trying to do ending world hunger. I was responsible for the fundraising operations in 57 countries, I believe, at that time. And I had three kids by the way. Bill got involved right away, but I was trying to do both. It was just I was stretched so thin, I was just a wreck. And then I got really, really, really, really sick.

Now, I don't recommend this, but I got malaria. I got it not from the Amazon. I got it from Lake Tana in Ethiopia and from India. Two strains, vivax and ovale at the same time. So I was so sick I couldn't do anything for anyone. I look back on it now as a huge gift, that intervention, I was sick for nine months. It's interesting. Nine months. Not eight months. Not 10 months. Nine months. And when I came out of that illness, The Hunger Project had found a way to replace me. I mean, they had to because I couldn't even be on a conference call, I was so sick. And I knew that this was a... You could say a pivot. This was a reboot-

Marie Forleo:

It's your next evolution.

Lynne Twist:

Yeah, the next evolution. But how I made sense of it, Marie, which was really amazing, I went back to Ghana after I got well and I was with elders on a sandy hill overlooking the ocean that was a desert. The elders, they were probably 70, 80, 90. These old men, it was all men. We were sitting in the sand and they told me they were raised in a rainforest. I said, "Where?" They said, "Right here." I said, "You're kidding. This was a rainforest." And they said, "Yes, it's been gone for 40 years."

And then it started to occur to me and I started to realize and found out, and I'd never known this, that much of where I had been working in India, in Bangladesh, in Nepal, in Sri Lanka, and all across Africa had been rainforest. Much of it was totally gone, particularly in Africa, from colonization, from extraction and had become desert. And that to go and work in the Amazon was to get in front of the coming problem, be on the preventive end, because South America, that continent will become a Savannah like Africa if we don't stop the destruction of the Amazon.

So I was able to create a context large enough to include the Pachamama Alliance as a part of my commitment to end world hunger and to create the transformation of the human family. So that allowed me to make sense of it. And also just being sick and having quiet time and having no responsibilities for that long, I really went deep into my soul and knew that I needed to pay attention to what was calling to me.

Marie Forleo:

Yeah. Isn't it amazing how sometimes experiences like that, being sick, which we wish upon no one, the experience of pain or being taken out... Like I loved reading in your book, you're an all in kind of person.

Lynne Twist:

I am.

Marie Forleo:

I love that you shared being overwhelmed and pulled in a million directions. That's kind of home for you. And for me, for so much of my life, that was home, I'm like, "Oh, this is comfortable. This is normal." And I just really appreciate that there's wisdom in illness for all of us. It was a couple years ago I got taken out for a while and we discovered these tumors around my uterus. It was the first time as an adult, I've been working since I was nine, it was the first time in my life that I had to take six weeks off. That was unheard of for me. There was so much that came to life because I couldn't do my normal things. You know what I mean?

Lynne Twist:

Yes.

Marie Forleo:

Because it was like the body was just like, "Nope. You are going to sit and you are going to heal, and you're going to look at everything differently." Lynne, you are just so amazing and I'm so happy that we're finally having this conversation. Obviously, the how-tos of Living a Committed Life. People can get the book, which is amazing. And The Soul of Money. But if they're excited by hearing your story and someone is watching right now thinking to themselves, "God, what's the first step to take?" if this notion of finding freedom and fulfillment in a purpose larger than yourself sounds really exciting to them, what would you suggest?

Lynne Twist:

Well, there's lots of guidance, I think, if we say so and we listen. I got heavy duty guidance when I got malaria, so for example. But I didn't realize it was guidance until kind of later. But I would say that there is guidance for all of us, and especially now because we live in an epic, epic, epic time in history, and we know that. Everybody can feel it. It can either be discouraging and you can be in despair and like, "Oh my God, it's hopeless." Or you can step it up. And to me, that's what's happening. The climate crisis is guidance. The climate crisis is not happening to us. It's happening for us. It is this horrendous, huge, incredible crisis, yes, but it's here to help us evolve to the next level of what it means to be human. You could say that. Whether that's true or not, I don't know, but that's one way to look at it.

And so I often say to people how to find what your calling is or what your dharma is or what you're meant to do is to look and see what breaks your heart and what makes your heart sing, and how do those two things relate. That's one way of looking at it. Another way is to look at when you were a child, what were your natural instincts? I often talk about the playground. There's people on the playground who are bullies. There's people on the playground who would always pick the kid for their team in kickball that was the one that was the least able. And that's somebody who's all about diversity, inclusion, and access, you know? You can see you. We're all kind of guided. We all have a kind of in our innate uniqueness, something that's ours to bring, ours to do, ours to commit to.

And I say that a commitment, or we also call it a stand, is not something you can check off and accomplish or actually even take credit for. So that's an important distinction here. It's something you can contribute to. It's larger than your own life starring you. It's not something you can say, "Well, she did that." No, it's more, "She made a huge contribution to that and was in that flow of history" because I think we're being used by something larger than we know. We're the instruments of something. And we all have a role to play on this planet right now, I think. If you're alive today, you have a role to play. Maybe it's not a big role, maybe it's not a small role, it's just your role. And if you play it with all your heart, your life will have incredible meaning.

And the noise in our head, "Am I good enough? Am I doing the right thing? Who am I? Who are my friends? Do I look cool?" all that noise in our head, that doesn't go away, but it moves to the background. And what moves to the foreground is what you've given your word to, what you're committed to. That's louder, has more grip, a more pull, more vision, more juice, more joy than the noise in your head. And the noise in your head starts to calm down. It doesn't go away, I can report that, but it's not interesting anymore and you realize it's just noise because you're so busy making the world work. So I say that that's the key to a life of fulfillment, prosperity, and knowing who you are.

Marie Forleo:

Lynne, thank you so much for who you are. Thank you for making such a difference to me personally and taking the time out of your incredibly full and rich life to be here with us today. I just adore you. Thank you.

Lynne Twist:

Well, I adore you too. And thank you for the work you do, for the voice that you are for people to find their own fulfillment, their own enoughness, their own dharma, their own path. You are one of the great seers on our planet right now, and I'm really, really grateful to sit with you. Thank you for all you do, all you say, and the example you are. You're an inspiration. I'm sure people admire you. But more powerfully than admiration is inspiration. And you in spirit people. You bring their spirit to the fore, and you've done that with me and I'm deeply, deeply grateful.

Marie Forleo:

Well, that was pretty amazing. Thank you so much for tuning in. And of course, Lynne and I would love to hear from you. I'm super curious. We talked about many incredible things today. What's the one thing, the insight that's standing out for you? And most importantly, how can you put that insight into action starting right now? Leave a comment below and let us know.

As always, some great conversations happen over at the magical land of marieforleo.com. So head on over there and leave us a comment now. And until next time, stay on your game and keep going for your big dreams because the world really does need those very special gifts that only you have. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll catch you next time.

Now, you might be super pumped to go live a more committed life. And if you are, I love it. You might be feeling some fear like, "Oh my God, can I actually do it?" You have to watch this next episode. It's right here, How to find the courage to do anything. It is so good. Perfect follow up. Click here. Go watch it now.