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You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is adrienne maree brown. adrienne maree brown is a social justice facilitator who’s focused on black liberation, a pleasure activist, a doula and healer, and the author of several books, including Emergent Strategy, Holding Change, and the New York Times bestseller, Pleasure Activism. In her book Emergent Strategy, here’s how adrienne describes herself: “I’m an auntie, sister, daughter, WOE (which stands for ‘Working on Excellence’), a writer, a coach, mentor, mediator, pleasure activist, sci-fi scholar, tarot reader, witch, cheerleader, singer, philosopher, queer, Black, multiracial, lover of life living in Detroit.” adrienne is indeed all of that.
She also inspires me to look at what I want to say yes to when it comes to being a change-maker in the world and not just all the things I want to say no to, and to honor and make good use of the place where we each stand. Here’s my conversation with the visionary and inspiring adrienne maree brown.
There’s a lot to talk about here, obviously, and as I said, a great joy and delight, adrienne maree brown, welcome.
adrienne maree brown: Thank you, Tami. It’s nice to meet you and be here with you.
TS: I’ve been immersed in your writing for the past couple of days and there are many things that really struck me that I’m excited to talk with you about. And the first is this notion—it’s a term I’d never heard before called—fractal responsibility, and how what’s in the most minute is happening in the whole. And I wanted to start off by talking with you about that, because often I think people think about this notion of taking personal responsibility—and there’s this idea, “Well, yes, but that’s not good enough. That’s not good enough. That’s never going to change the structures in our society if we’re all just focused on our personal responsibility in our growth work, how we are as a fractal.” So, I wanted to hear your view on that as a way to begin?
amb: Yes. It’s so interesting to me because I have always pushed. I’m like, “It’s not enough to just do your own thing. It’s not enough to just recycle your own stuff.” And simultaneously also true, it’s not enough to not do that. You need to do all those things. And I think so often, especially for people who are trying to change the world, we get very, very focused on what everyone else is doing and pointing our finger at everyone else’s bad behavior, racism, capitalism, greed. We don’t keep the lens on our own behaviors and on how these large systems of oppression manifest each one of us. And I feel like there’s the “both, and.” I learned about fractals as I was learning about emergence and complexity sciences and chaos theory and all these other things.
In part by reading Margaret Wheatley’s Leadership and the New Science, I started to have my eyes opened to this reality. Then I was like, “Oh, there are these patterns that repeat themselves from the smallest scale that we can document or measure up to the largest scale.” Some of the fractals that people might be familiar with this like ferns or broccoli, where when you look at it as small scale, it’s the shape of the whole. If you look at the Delta right now, the entire Gulf region is all flooded, and so the Delta riverbanks are all flooded and overflowing. That’s the same thing that happens in our bodies, right? We have these deltas of river veins, basically arteries, moving through us. I love that idea of pattern. The patterns on the small scale echo up to the largest scale.
Fractal responsibility is saying, “How do I operate in a way that is responsible to my vision, in a way that can echo out to the largest scale that it’s not just pointing fingers and asking other people to change, but recognizing the kind of change I can make in the world is directly related to the change I’m willing to make within myself.” And again, “both, and,” right? So, as I change, it requires new relationships. The fractal universe around me shifts as well and then as my community changes where we live has to change, as we change, we can change the world in that way.
TS: To summarize, you would say it’s a “both, and” approach that you embrace?
amb: Yes. I mean, it’s about recognizing that everything is connected and if you’re not willing to play your part, if you’re only willing to point fingers, nothing will actually change.
TS: You mentioned Margaret Wheatley. She is someone whose work I also deeply respect, and you quote her in Emergent Strategy, talking about how, what we need right now is not so much gathering a critical mass but engaging in critical relationships. What makes a relationship critical? And what do you mean by engaging in critical relationships?
amb: Yes. I feel like I’m learning this one all the time. And I think that the shared experience of COVID-19 has actually been a great teacher for what a critical relationship is. The way I think of it is a relationship that can stay connected and authentic and where both people can really be present under the pressures of change and under the pressures of crisis, under the pressures of love, right? When I think of it in a political sense, for a long time I always socialized as an organizer that I was trying to build as large of a mass of people moving in a direction as possible. And critical mass was that point at which the number that we grew was large enough to actually impact the thing we were trying to change.
Critical relationship, critical connection is where the connection we have is deep enough to actually allow our transformation to happen. I’m in several critical relationships now. It’s the question between a petition, signing a petition, and actually sitting down and engaging in a conversation until your worldview shifts in some fundamental way. I think too often, right now we have people who are willing to sign a petition, but not actually willing to engage in a hard conversation or intervene on an instance of racism or step up and take accountability for harm that they’ve done. I think critical connections allow for those kinds of acts.
TS: If you were to say these are the guidelines personally that you use to cultivate critical relationships, what are those?
amb: I like that question, Tami. I feel like there’s a piece of it for me that is, there’s something organic in my system that says yes to the connection. I learned that in Pleasure Activism that there’s something in me that’s like—there’s something I’m drawn to or something I want to be a part of here and I’m compelled. I’m not here from obligation. I’m not here to represent anything. I’m actually here because I want to be here.
TS: I’m just going to say yes right now. Yes.
amb: Yes. Yes. Right?
TS: OK. Yes. Right here.
amb: There’s a big part of it also, for me, that is about honesty. If I find that my instinct is to contort and to lie, to hide, to protect someone if I feel like I can’t tell the truth, then I’m like, “We can’t really be in a critical connection.” And sometimes you can shy. I’ve definitely been in situations where like, “Is that what you really feel right now? Is that what you really want to say? Is that what you really need?”
I’m really blessed right now. I’m in partnership with someone who regularly asks me to tell the truth, who really wants to hear the truth for me. And it has astounded me to recognize how much of my life has been being asked to tell the lies of kindness, the lies of politeness, and the lies that keep me from being able to actually take accountability for my own life and my choices and my responsibilities.
I would say that, yes—and that a thousand percent honesty: I’d go out of my way to make sure I’m telling the truth and then accountability in the sense of—one of my very closest friends, we’ll make a joke to each other, we’ll be talking, blah, blah, blah, and the other person is, “Don’t punch me but I need to say whatever it is.” And a lot of times it’s those moments of intervention of like, “I hear you telling a story. An old story, a story that’s out of alignment with your values. A story that’s not aligned with your highest purpose. And don’t punch me, but I got to tell you that.” It’s related to the honesty but it’s also a willingness to hold up the mirror to people and just be like, “This isn’t it. This isn’t what you say you believe or want to be doing.” And then we go from there.
TS: I just want to underscore that, What I think you’re saying here, especially about this thousand percent or gajillion percent, whatever we wanna say.
amb: Yes. Totally.
TS: Honestly, it’s really tough. It’s really tough.
amb: It’s so hard.
TS: And here I started a company called Sounds True—focus on the “truth”—36 years ago and yet I still find whether it’s in my 20-year marriage now or in relationships with my closest friends, that I have to dig deep. I have to dig deep to be as honest as I feel inside and find the skillful ways to do that and not bury things. Just wanted to say that.
amb: How do you do it?
TS: I thought I was asking the questions! It’s OK. It’s OK. In the areas where I’m not, it bothers me. I can feel it. I feel disturbed, and when I feel disturbed, I toss, and I turn, and I wrestle. Then I find that I have to come forward in order to be in integrity with myself, but I’m just saying, it’s a challenge. It’s a real challenge.
amb: It’s really hard. I’ve got a perfectionist, organizer shape. So, at first, I was like, “I’m going to practice honesty, honesty all the time.” And I was so serious and so rigid, and it was painful. And I kept really coming down harshly on myself for the moments where I was like, “You know that you’ve thought this, and you didn’t say it, or whatever.” I had to really get softer with myself and I had to get a lot more curious with myself. Now when I notice that I’m out of alignment, if I notice someone hurt my feelings, and a lot of times it’ll show on my face. Someone will hurt my feelings and then it shows, and it’s like, “Well, are you OK?” Or like, “What’s going on?” I’m like, “I’m fine.” Right?
Just that little moment, catching that and just being like, “What is that?” Right? Why would I say I’m fine when actually my feelings are hurt and this person, I think, can handle that truth. The vulnerability of it, is so hard for me. And I love therapy for this. I love working with healers for this to kind of get up under, why wouldn’t I be honest in that moment? What am I attending to or protecting or taking care of? And are there other ways to take care of it that don’t require me to contort myself away from the truth?
TS: [Yes.] I want to talk more about Emergent Strategy and towards the beginning of the book, you share the principles of Emergent Strategy. And there are a couple of them, especially, that I really wanted to ask you about, that I was like, “I need to understand this more.” The first one, “Small is good, small is all.” And even though we began our conversation by talking about fractal responsibility, I want to hear more about this, because I think a lot of times people don’t feel “small is all”; they feel “small makes me a runt who’s not really contributing during this critical time.” People feel bad about themselves because they’re just doing something small.
amb: Yes. I love this one for me. It helps my shoulders relax a little bit and what I learned inside of it is, it’s not that things won’t become large, it’s not that they’re not massive things happening, but they’re all made up of small parts. And that’s true also of our species that we had this massive species, which for instance right now is having this horrific impact on the planet that we live on, that is our source of all life. We have a species that is somehow working against that and trying to dominate and pretend we’re the only one here, but that species is made up of a lot of small parts. And I can’t change what happens for the entire species, but I can absolutely change what I do as a small component of that species. And I can start to be in different relationships with the other small components of that species. Anything large we want to do is only going to be possible because of authentic shifts that happen in those small components and small relationships.
This really became clear to me as an electoral organizer, back in the early 2000s. I was doing electoral organizing, trying to get Bush out of office and stop the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I was like, “We have to stop the federal government from doing this.” It was so humbling for me to acknowledge that I as an individual person, I as an organizer, wasn’t able to have that scale of impact. I had to really sit with, what scale can I have? What I learned—and I started traveling around the country and asking people this—was, I wasn’t practicing democracy. I wasn’t, actually in my life practicing democracy. And I started asking other people this: “Do you practice democracy in your household? Do you have a democratic process around your budget for your block or for your community?”
Everywhere I went, the answer—some people might say like, “Yes, our household is some democratic process.” Usually if I probed a little bit, it was like, actually one person is radically making most of the decisions in the household.
But when I kept asking the question, what I discovered was at a small scale, at the local scale, at the intimate scale, most of us aren’t practicing democracy, but we’re astounded by the fact that our democracy keeps failing at the largest scale. It keeps not actually serving the majority of the people. It keeps leading to horrific decisions like, as we sit here having this conversation right now, we’re in this precarious place where Texas is overturning Roe v. Wade basically. I said, “Well, how could that happen when over half the nation needs to be in a position to be able to make this choice for themselves?” It’s because we don’t actually practice democracy until we’re in a crisis and it needs to happen at a large scale. So that’s some of what I mean by it, right?
TS: Let me ask you a question about that to make that real, because I’m trying to reflect in my life where I could practice democracy. And clearly in my intimate relationship, that’s a place for a true kind of relationship of equality and our [Inaudible] matter the same amount. At work, most of us aren’t in a democratic workplace. Sounds True is not a democratic workplace. There’s a lot of room for input, but it’s not a democracy. So, most of us don’t have workplaces that function that way and not all of us are involved in a community. We don’t know what that means, really. What does that even mean to be part of the democracy? So how would I make this real in my life, is what I was curious about?
amb: That’s great. So it can look a lot of different ways. One of the first things is just exactly what you did, to look around you and say, “Am I in community and in spaces where we all get to actually weigh in on what’s happening, and we get to be honest about the resources, the capacity, what we’re bringing to the table, we get to determine what are the priorities of what happens here?” And that doesn’t necessarily mean no hierarchy ever happens. Democracy isn’t a collectivist process necessarily, right? It means that everyone actually gets to play a part, be a part of the process, and I’ve started to practice this. I mean, it’s so fun as an organizer to realize you’re doing the exact opposite from what you wanted to do. But I definitely have come into spaces and been like, “Oh, this relationship only works because I’m totally in charge of everything.” Or, “This aspect of my family life only works because I’m trying to control everyone, right? It works for me because I control everyone.”
The thing that’s happening is we’re trained to do hierarchy, we’re trained to do dominance, we’re trained to compete with each other, but we’re not trained to do governance, to share this sense of decision-making and to think about the relationships we have the lead to resourcing everything that we have. So, one of the first places to practice that is finding out what could we do in our workplace to make this a place where the majority of us spend the majority of our lives working, right? How could we make the places where we work more democratic? What would that look like? And it doesn’t have to be a top-down thing. In fact, it shouldn’t be, right? It’s really asking everyone, what would it look like for you to have more responsibility over the direction of this place? What would that look like?
The governance piece of it is also crucial, right? We’re not learning to govern. We have politicians who are also not really learning to govern. They’re performative. They’re learning to get our votes; they’re learning to campaign. But we see the mess that happens when most of them actually get into office. There are just all these places where we can start to be like, what would it look like to take responsibilities for that small-d democracy?
And you might’ve also read in the books I consider myself a post-nationalist. Part of that is because I think that the structure of the nation state is actually at odds with how humans need to be in relationship with each other. This idea of outsourcing governance, handing it over to the electoral college or to some representative body. Instead of saying, “We live here. The resources are here. We have to figure out how to move forward. How do we do that in relationship with each other?” I think eventually we’ll get back to that much more tribal organization of humans. I think for the long, long haul, that’s actually more functional than what we have now.
TS: I like that idea. And we’re going to talk about this future visioning that you’re so deeply engaged with. I want to briefly just return to the principles of Emergent Strategy.
amb: Yes, please. That was just one of them—small is good.
TS: I know, and there’s a couple here. I want to get to the one that’s most important to me. The second one you write about: change is constant; be like water. OK, we’re going to let that flow by here and go to number three, because this is the one that I got stuck on. There is always enough time for the right work.
amb: Yes.
TS: I thought to myself, “I don’t know if I believe that. I really don’t know if I believe that. I’ve got ask adrienne about that.”
amb: You’ve got to ask me. I was writing this book really for facilitators and organizers. And I was thinking—I’ve been facilitating for over two decades now and one of the pieces of feedback that I often get is like, “Wow, we ended early. We got everything done that needed to happen. We addressed the most important stuff.” I learned this one in that process of working, of facilitating. I was just like, “Oh, a lot of times it feels like we don’t have enough time because we’re really focused on the wrong things. We’re really distracted by either things that are beyond our capacity to work on, or by things that have happened in the past and we can no longer do anything about, or we’re trying to cover everything at once.”
One of the things that I love to do is help people figure out the right work. And by right work I often mean what is the most elegant next step—which is a question I learned from my friend, Gibran Rivera; what is the piece we can actually attend to here and now? I often think of it as like, you know when you’ve set up dominos in a space that’s like if you hit that first domino it’s actually going to knock everything else over? I will ask groups that, right? What is the domino? What is the thing that we need to start on that will actually open the way for some of these other issues? So an example of this, a lot of times groups will come in and they’ll be like, “We need a five-year plan and a compelling vision, a clear message, a clear communications plan; we need a budget; we need all this stuff.” The domino is you need a good decision-making process.
If you have a really solid functional proposal-based decision-making process, I lean towards consensus. If you have a good decision-making process, then the rest of those things can happen, because you have a really good way that you all have agreed to of doing that work. But the number of times I show up and a group has no real decision-making process and they’re surprised that they can’t move the rest of their work, it really shocks me.
The right work is what can we actually attend to in this moment that the right people are in the room for, that’s another big piece of it—is we waste a lot of time trying to make decisions that we can’t make because we’re not the right people to make those decisions or we don’t have enough information. The right work might be, we need to do more research, we need to slow this down, we need to clarify the process, but I find that when you’re doing the right work, often you end like five minutes early.
TS: All right. I guess I have to ask this, and I’m sure you’ve heard this from a lot of people, [that] when they hear the word “consensus” they break out in hives and think it’s going to take eons—not enough time to get the work done. Not end five minutes early. So how do you put those two together?
amb: Well, I’m blessed because my sister, Autumn, is a consensus teacher and she really blew my mind around consensus because I had that same—I was like, “Hmm, no.” And this one actually ties into another aspect of Emergent Strategy, which is around trust, and that when you’re building trust with people, it’s very slow but once you have trust with people, things can move a lot faster. Consensus works that way, where when you’re first starting to practice consensus, people first getting to know each other, consistence can be very slow because people don’t necessarily trust the process. They don’t trust that they can articulate their concerns or ask the question that might slow the process down a little bit. One of the main reasons consensus is slow is because people don’t speak up in the right time and then are like, “I want to block this,” at the last minute when it’s time to move.
Part of it is that trust-building work. The more trust you have, the smoother consensus is and the quicker it can move because you start to recognize, “Oh, we shouldn’t have a decision-making conversation until there’s a proposal on the table. The proposal shouldn’t just come out of thin air. We should have a conversation about what we want in this proposal.” So that by the time you’re having a decision conversation it’s like, “Oh, we talked about this. We said what we wanted. We developed a proposal for how that could happen. We’re discussing this proposal. We want to do it.” And I’ve been a part of groups where consensus was a two-minute process, right? I’ve been a part of groups where consensus was a three-day process. Both were right for what they needed to be.
TS: Yes. Well, I want to ask you a question about the trust, because it’s clear to me that being able to develop trust with other people in the groups we work with is supremely important. And you’ve already talked about this thousand-percent honesty and holding people accountable, but what else do you think in working with groups—I know you have a new book Holding [Change]—what helps us create groups of people who actually trust each other?
amb: Well, one thing is, trust is not a static thing, right? It’s not like, you’re just like, “Well, I trust you and that’s how it is forever.” I think of it more like, I think Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of aikido, talked about mastery this way. That’s like, it’s not that you never fall down, but it’s that you recover quicker and quicker each time. I think of trust that way. It’s not like you’re never untrustworthy or out of integrity, but you’re able to come back quicker and quicker to a place where you’re like, “Oh I was out of integrity.” And I think integrity and trust go together. They’re like two pieces of the puzzle. So, when I say integrity, it’s what you say and what you do, what you say and what you believe are as closely aligned as possible if not one thing.
For me, trust starts to shake and break when there’s a gap of integrity, when people are saying something but not doing that thing, and especially if they repeatedly do it, or they’re doing something and they’re not actually saying and acknowledging that they’re doing it—that gap of integrity opens. And when you recognize there’s a trust breakdown, you have to figure out, are we committed to coming back to each other? Can we knit ourselves back into relationship again?
There’s two pieces of it. There’s the extension of trust and then there’s being trustworthy. And there’s this beautiful quote from Lao Tzu, which I also included in Emergent Strategy—it’s in the Tao Te Ching. The original quote is: “If you don’t trust the people, they become untrustworthy.” And I flipped it to say, “If you trust the people, they become trustworthy,” which is what I have found happened in most organizations.
The addendum that added over the years has been, or the boundaries become clear. And that’s because sometimes, I think that anyone, given enough time and attention and extension of trust can become trustworthy. I do believe that, but we don’t always have all the time. We don’t always have forever to give to people. In our organization sometimes we’re working on a quick timeline and if someone’s untrustworthy, we have to set a boundary so that we can continue to move the work and hope that they can keep on their journey. So that’s some of the stuff around trust that feels important to share.
TS: Yes. Good. Thank you. Now, the fourth principle of Emergent Strategy: “There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it.” And what I wanted to understand is, as a facilitator for so many years, what is it that you’re doing? What’s your posture, the glasses you’re wearing, or whatever that you’re putting to hear the conversation that needs to be had in the room, what are you doing?
amb: Well, part of the reason I wrote the book Holding Change was because I was like, “I need people to understand the specifics of what happens here.” So for me, I tend to listen before, during, and after. I’m in a deep listening process all the time. I’m feeling the room and I’m really attending to what I’m both feeling and what I’m hearing, because that’s where I start to feel like, is there an alignment? Are these people actually saying what needs to be said? Or is there that tension? And I think we all know that tension when we feel it, but we don’t always know how to put our finger on it, but where there’s some conversation, energetic conversation or tension, that’s the unspoken, the elephants in the room. And I always think the elephants—they feel like energetic elephants. I’m like, “There’s something in this room that’s massive and pushing up against all of us and it’s not being spoken.”
Sometimes you can find that out with pre-surveys, right? It’s just asking people beforehand, what do we need to talk about? What are the top priorities? What’s not getting addressed in this organization? What could this organization do to actually grow? You ask these questions beforehand. Sometimes that needs to be anonymous because what’s happening is so tense that people are scared to say the truth or maybe there’s a pattern of firing people who say the truth and other things like that.
I have a good friend and comrade, Makani Themba, who actually wrote an essay in Holding Change. And one of the practices she does when we’ve co-facilitated together, that she’ll actually have everyone anonymously write on a post-it note what’s not being said right now and just write it there, put it in a bowl, take a break. And then we sit as facilitators and get to actually look at that and process it a bit and just learn a little bit more about the group.
One of the things that is important to me is you cannot hold what you don’t know about. You cannot have a conversation if people won’t speak. As a facilitator, I cannot force people to do anything that they’re not ready to do or willing to do and that’s why that conversation is like the right people in the right time. Sometimes I’m sitting in a room full of white people who want to talk about diversity and why it’s not happening in their space. And I’m like, “Y’all could talk about it, but you’re not the right people to necessarily talk about it because it’s too homogenous and you don’t actually know the answer to this. You might have ideas but the conversation you want to have would require inviting people who for some reason, are not interested in this space to come and give you feedback on why.” So sometimes the right conversation is like, who else do we need to invite here? Sometimes the right conversation is what are we scared to speak out loud?
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Now, one thing I noticed, adrienne, is when I referred to your new book, I think I called it Holding Space—and then you kindly slipped in that it’s actually called Holding Change.
amb: It’s called, Holding Change.
TS: And yet it’s probably a connection.
amb: Yes, it is. I said in the book.
TS: And I remember it that way because of my own sort of space-holding nature.
amb: Well, and also holding spaces, the way we talk about, it’s the way like those of us who facilitate often say we’re holding space. I mentioned in the book that I call it Holding Change for many reasons. One is that my sister and a friend of hers Maryse have done this powerful set of workshops called “Holding Space,” and I’m hoping they write a book called Holding Space at some point. But also the work that I’ve done is really how are we changing the world in ourselves? And so it’s not just holding space where anything can happen. I really want to hold spaces where transformation is possible.
TS: OK. The fifth principle here: “Never a failure, always a lesson.”
amb: Yes.
TS: So how do we have that attitude in our own life about so many things, especially things where we’ll sit down with ourselves, and we go, “Actually I think that was a failure.” How do we flip that?
amb: Yes. I mean, one of the things that it’s so funny because people are like, “But sometimes I do fail.” And I’m like, “No, we are failing all the time but the framework that we have on it determines whether it is a waste of our lives or a component that helps us to learn.” And I, in my own life, I’ll have a moment where I lose my temper or I knock something over, the things that can feel like minor failures in life. And even at that small scale, I have been teaching myself to slow down in that moment and be like, “What am I learning right now? What is the lesson of this for me?” When I knock something over it’s because I was moving too fast and I wasn’t being attentive generally, right? And then I ask myself, “Why is that? Why am I moving urgently?”
Usually is because I’m trying to avoid an emotion for me, right? Everyone’s different. Or I lost my temper. “What can I learn from this?” I’ve been repressing the truth. I’ve been repressing something I needed to say, and I repressed it long enough for it to build up into a problem and now it’s coming out of this way. Or I am full of grief and rage about something that’s happening in the world, and I haven’t given myself time to feel that, to sit with my alternative process—so jumping out at the mailperson. So, to me there’s that process of slowing down and being like, what is the lesson?
In group process, this becomes the difference between groups that feel like they are succeeding and actually can make a change and groups that constantly feel like they’re failing regardless of what they’re actually doing in the world. I see a lot of social justice groups that constantly feel like they’re failing, are behind the curve, and it’s like, we’re actually up against insurmountable odds. We have to pull off miracles if we’re going to save human life on this planet at this point. So, we could feel like failures all the time but that’s not going to save our lives. We have to be learning from everything that we’re doing, how to keep improving and how to keep growing.
TS: I’m curious if there’s something in your own life where you would say this was a really big thing that “felt like a failure to me and I was able to reframe it in time,” and how you reframed it?
amb: That’s a good question. Most recently I—there’s so many. As a human being I’m stacked full of things that felt like failures in the moment, but most recently when they started announcing like, “OK, people who are vaccinated can go outside with no mask and spend time with other vaccinated people and all this.” My partner was like, “I’m ready to go outside and hang out with people.” I freaked out and totally was having meltdowns and just like, “I don’t understand why you need friends. It’s not safe.” I wasn’t going about it in a good way. I wasn’t going about in a mindful way. I was just really acting from fear. And it wasn’t a quick thing—it wasn’t like I just realized that the next day. It took me a couple months of sitting in it and feeling so scared and unable to communicate well and frustration between us.
I finally was able to recognize, to get curious. I was like, “Why am I failing in this transition? I’m the change goddess, why am I unable to change right now?” And I had to really learn like, we’re in a stage where boundaries are super unclear and negotiating boundaries is happening at individual level when it actually should be kind of a collective journey that we’re in. And what I learned about myself in that moment was that I was trying to control the future and control the world and control my partner and control everything, things that were out of my control. And instead, I had to sit with the fact that there’s a lot that I’m not in control of. And I had to get back right-sized into myself. And I had to ask for the boundaries that I actually needed. The ones that were reasonable boundaries.
When I did that, instead of sitting in the fear, when I sat in, “Here’s what I need,” my partner was so open, so receptive. We had a totally different kind of conversation. We got on the same side. I was able to hear her. She’s like, “I’m not not afraid. I just need people. I need people to survive.” She’s much more extroverted than I am. I’m like, “I just need me and the turtle and you. That’s fine.” She’s like, “That’s also not true. You’re just terrified.” It was so helpful to learn that I was scared and to say, I’m not going to let the fear shape and control the rest of my life in this period of my life. So now we’re navigating boundaries, we’re making decisions, but I’m sleeping much better because I’m not trying to control everybody else around me. I’m just articulating the boundaries I need.
TS: [Yes.]
amb: Yes.
TS: Thank you. Thanks for sharing that example. It makes it really real.
amb: Yes.
TS: Now I want to understand from your work as a facilitator and all of this terrific discovery work that you did and starting to articulate the principles of Emergent Strategy, how Pleasure Activism emerged as the next book you wanted to write and as something that was so important to you to really stand in and stand for?
amb: I was really surprised that Pleasure Activism was the next book that wanted to be written. It kept knocking at the door. It just kept coming back and being like, “This is really important.” And I think at the time I was deeply immersed in some fairly large-scale movement work that I was seeing so much misery. I was seeing so many people who are trying to change the world but everything that was happening in their bodies, in their somas, in their systems, in their relationships was “no” and misery and repression. And they would secretly pull me off to the side to talk about drugs or sex or other things that were giving them some respite. So, I started writing this column that was about sex and about pleasure because I was like, “I just want to have anyone who’s thinking about changing the world needs to be able to touch into the yes.” You have to be able to have that erotic sense of yes. You have to have something compelling that is moving you forward. “No” is not a path forward, right?
I read, maybe for the 50th time, this essay from Audre Lorde called [“Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”] which I got permission to include in Pleasure Activism. And in it, she talks about how when we have experienced that erotic, yes, inside of ourselves, it becomes impossible to settle for a self-negation and despair and depression and these other states that are not natural to us. And I found that a revelation for people who especially have been marginalized and oppressed in some way—which, part of how oppression works is it is trying to pressure you into believing that you are less than, and that you should settle for less, that you should settle for being in service, that you should settle for a minimum wage, that you should settle for the scraps, the droppings, the drags of life. We’re trying to reclaim our humanity from that oppression. And it seemed particularly important to me that women, people of color, trans people, people with disabilities, people who had been cast out of society or cast down into lower classes of society, be able to reclaim that erotic yes and it’s been incredible.
That book process has been incredible. I get so many messages from people who are reclaiming some aspect of themselves and discovering that they have a yes. That they’ve always had that yes. We start off with the yes. If you’re around kids, kids are very clear like, “I want this. I know what I want. This is what I like. I want to play. I’m so alive.” And it’s, how do we reclaim that life force energy? And it’s so beautiful. I get a lot of really interesting messages from people too, who are like, “I just had an orgasm, I just did this.” I’m like, “Great. Yes.” But the thing that most excites me is that aliveness that, in the face of all this oppression, could make it very hard to want to stay alive and be alive, that that aliveness can be cultivated.
TS: One thing that I imagine coming up for people who are so in touch with pain and the world is, “How do I start on the path of Pleasure Activism without denying or pushing away or putting on top of, like lipstick, this pleasure on top of the heartbreak I’m feeling?” And I wonder how you work with that?
amb: Well, one of the things that I explore in the book is that pleasure it’s not hedonistic activism, right? It’s not only the good, only the indulgent, and it’s not excess activism, right? And I actually write about that, that it’s not about the capitalist version of these things but it’s more about being able to really feel yourself and feel the truth inside of yourself. What is a yes? What is a no? What is your boundary? What is your consent? What is a coping mechanism? What makes you feel more alive? And getting clear on all that. And pleasure is only actually possible when you can feel the widest range of your emotions. So if I’m denying that I’m angry, I can’t have a good orgasm, right? I can’t actually access a deep connection with a friend if I’m pushing down something that really needs to be present and accounted for, if I’m grieving, I need a shoulder to cry on.
Sometimes the pleasure is in that moment, right? Of deep connection. So that’s part of what it is, is can we return to ourselves the full range of our emotional being, the full range of our lives and the full range of our erotic knowing, and the erotic actually has room for all of those emotions, right? So that’s how I deal with it, is like, on a day like today I start my day with my altar, I think about New Orleans and New York and Afghanistan. And I think about my friends in Haiti. And I think about all the folks in my life who are displaced by wildfires. I think about my friend Malik, who I’m grieving; I go through kind of the suffering and I’m with it. And I honor the lives, the lives that were lived, the lives that are being fought for. That’s a huge part of how I start my day.
Then I look at, “What is it that I can do in this day? I’m one person. What are the messages I need to share? What are the connections I need to cultivate in a given day?” And then I attend to that. I recognize that in the face of my grief, my work is to live fully, right? To live as fully as I can, not knowing how long I have left, right? Which I think a big part of—and I know this sounds maybe strange to some people—but for me, pleasure activism helped me really get in touch with my mortality in a different way. And I was like, “This isn’t promised. None of it is promised.” And each day I have a choice to numb, normally move through the day, to give the entire day away to some corporation that doesn’t care about me or to make the choices over how I want to live the day. And if it’s up to me, I choose poetry, I choose writing, I choose family, I choose love and lovemaking and cooking food and touching the earth. If it’s up to me, I choose pleasure.
TS: [Yes.] When you were talking about being at your altar in the morning, I was reminded of something that I read from your writing on your website, that you light candles for what you can’t carry. And I thought that was so beautiful, so I just said that.
amb: Yes. It helps me to humble myself to the fact that there are things beyond my capacity to even hold. There’s more grief. My friend, Reverend angel Kyodo williams taught me this, that we basically had the explosion of technology that allows us to know everything that’s happening in the world, but we didn’t have the simultaneous explosion of our soul’s capacity to hold all of that suffering and all of that grief. So, if you go back 200 years, humans only knew about what was happening in their close circle and news moved very slowly while you were expected to hold in a given day was very different than it is now.
Now you have to hold what grief is happening in your own local life. And you also have to be like, “How do I sit with the suffering of every everyone else? And how do I deal with what’s happening to the Amazon?” And I’ve definitely given whole days over to the grief of all that is. And then I found that—I’m like, “What did I do to contribute to the good on those days?” I find that it really helps to light the candles. And some days there are 20 candles, some days there’s just one, but I light those candles. I give it over like, “This is what I can hold, it’ll burn.” I liked the way for those souls that need to transition and find their way on and then I bring my attention back to the living, the life that I have to live.
TS: [Yes.] I want to ask a question that’s maybe a little edgy, that came up for me in reading Pleasure Activism. It has to do with this notion you were talking about how sometimes people can mix up coping, how we’re using, and I was thinking specifically of someone that I knew who seemed to me like a sex addict. Now this is just my impression from the outside. And maybe I was falsely judging this person, I’m not sure. But I thought, how do we know the difference—this is the core of the question—in our own life when we’re using something like erotic stimulation as a coping mechanism versus a way to know our full liveliness? How do you sort that out? How does anyone sort that out?
amb: I love this question actually. I don’t think it’s too edgy. I think it’s a great question. I have found in my own life I’ve been on all of the different parts of the spectrum, right? I’ve used sex and drugs as ways to cope, ways to escape, ways to cover things up. And I’ve also had the experience of being deeply present and deeply mindful and deeply transformed by those same experiences. So much of it is what’s happening internally and what’s driving the decision-making internally. So, as I’ve gotten older, and I’ve done more meditation and other things, a lot has come to me around attachment and agency. And what I think of as making the difference is, am I attached to a good feeling that is not actually aligned with what’s going on in my life? Am I trying to escape what’s happening in my life? You can escape it and then you wake back up the next day after that binge and it’s still there and you have to escape it again and escape it again. That’s not a way to live, right?
For me there’s this beautiful framework in harm reduction that’s drug, set, and setting. And I think about drug has any substance, right? So, it could be sex. It could be a specific drug, prescription drug, or might just be some experience. Some people get this from the gym or something else. But whatever it is, [it’s a] thing that gives you an intensity of feeling.
“Set” is the mindset. What is your mindset? Are you in a state of depression, agitation, confusion, or are you in a state of clear mindedness where you can actually look at this?
Then setting. I think of setting both as the immediate setting. So when I was learning this, it was for people who were using injection drugs. And I was like, “OK, you’re using this drug, you’re feeling depressed and you’re in a public park.” That’s a high, high, high-risk situation, right? Versus you’re using this injection drug and you’re maybe in an agitated mindset but you’re in a safe injection site. That’s a lower risk situation in which to do it, right? I think of that all the time in my own life, even with something like ice cream, which is one of my indulgent places.
I’m like, “OK, ice cream is the thing I want. What’s my mindset right now?” If I’m depressed, I wait on the ice cream and I try to sit and figure out—can I feel the feeling? How much can I handle actually being present with the feeling? And something that started happening to me a few years ago is I would hold back just a bit and then tears would come. If I could wait and not open the freezer, there was actually so much that wanted to be a motive, but it was showing up in the form of “Go eat ice cream.” Does that make sense?
TS: It makes a lot of sense, yes.
amb: Yes. So for me, that’s been the measure is, and I think about it with a lot of things, especially as I found myself in a much more stable place mentally and emotionally, I’m like, “The world is going to shit. It’s very overwhelming but I’m actually doing OK.” And so how do I want to engage in the things that bring me pleasure from that place? How do I make sure I’m not turning away from the world to indulge myself, but being, right now I really think about, how do I let my orgasms and my ice cream and my joints and whatever else I’m using, how do I let that be of service to my health and my wellbeing and being a good channel through which I can hear what the universe wants me to write and say?
TS: OK adrienne, just a few more questions for you. One more in this area of Pleasure Activism, which is, I think one thing that’s hard for a lot of us is to have a full pleasurable embrace of the shape of our body, the size, the contour, the age, all of that. There’s something about us that we don’t feel satisfied with, would be a nice way to put it. That we would be a problem or accurate way to put it against—“can’t stand,” “loathe.” And I’d like to understand more from your own journey, with Pleasure Activism and yourself, how you’ve come into this pleasurable embrace with your own body?
amb: That’s great. I love this question because I think many of us, I grew up immersed in a societal obsession with fixing the body, changing the body, dieting, exercising that there’s something wrong with all of our bodies. And I’ve never really met someone, even people who had bodies that seemed totally perfect to me. I’ve never really met someone who, when I talked to them, it wasn’t like, “Oh, here’s what I’m trying to change about my body,” which I think is, in and of itself, fascinating, but then I grew up as a fat girl. Basically, as soon as puberty hit, I started gaining weight and it’s gone up and down over the years. And the socialization was, you have to fix this. In my family, in my friends circles, every other space—you have to fix, you have to fix, you have to fix it.
At a certain point in my late ‘20s, early ‘30s, I woke up one day and I was like, “I don’t want this to be the obsession of my life. I don’t want to feel constantly like there’s something I need to be fixing about myself.” What would it look like to intentionally choose to love this body, to accept it as it is and to love it and to listen to it? Because there might be changes that are needed but I don’t want them to be externally driven. I really want to listen to my body from the inside out. What I’ve later learned is the Ayurvedic approaches, your body is healthy. And you’re always trying to return to health if you fall away from health, you just returning to health. I was like my own version of that.
I started with my left pinky finger. I would look in the mirror and I would look at that body part and offer love to it. Just like, “Thank you for everything you do to help me when I’m writing and grasping onto things and being a part of hugs.” Just really kind of going in on that. And the left pinky finger was the place that I could start because it was really, I couldn’t argue with how lovable my left pinky finger was, right? And I had to work my way up to places that were much, much harder, much more challenging to love, like my arms, my thighs, my belly. These were the parts that society told me where impossible to love, right? Like they’re fat. I have stretch marks, there’s cellulite, there’s all the things. And yet it’s a miraculous part of my miraculous body that is carrying my reckless life through this world. And there’s something massive and strong and beautiful about the particular body that I have, and it’s full of stories.
One of the things I did, I don’t know if people will be able to see this, but I found creatures that inspired me. For my arms, I put an elephant and a cow on my arms. So that when I walk around, if I start to forget how beautiful the big, wide, massive shapes of life can be, I’m reminded of these creatures that are the most peaceful, beautiful, powerful, righteous in many places, sacred creatures on earth. And I’m like, “I’m also like that, right?” I don’t imagine the elephants walk around like, “Ah, my butt looks big.” It’s like, “I am massive. Being big is the beautiful thing about me.” And I also want to say to people who are in this, it’s not, again, a static thing. It’s not like I just got to that place and I was like, “That’s it. I’ll just love my body now and forever.” Every day I have to re attend to this work.
I had 30-plus, 40-plus years of being trained not to love my body and to think it needs fixing and to think I need to diet and all this other stuff. So, every single day I have to do some kind of intervention. I find with myself still to be like, “Wait a second, you are not wrong.” You as an existing body are not wrong, you’re miraculous. And if you’re in pain, there’s a lesson there. What is the lesson? Was your body trying to communicate to you? And now I feel like I’m in that zone of my life, where I’m like, “I’m aging. I have arthritis. I’m getting lines. I have gray hairs. How amazing is that? I made it this far. I’m going to keep making it. An old body is a blessing. I’m still here. There’s still life to be lived.” I’m learning that every day.
TS: It’s interesting you brought up the elephant and how the elephant feels in its body. And one of the parts of your writing that I just really enjoyed, that titillated me, was your many references to different species and what you’ve learned from them. And there’s a lot we could cover here, but let’s just go for two of your favorites that you referred to a lot—the mushrooms and the mycelium network and what we can learn from them, and dandelions; let’s cover those.
amb: I’m super into mushrooms. I’m super into mycelium. I’ve been learning so much about it. I actually just was checking, I have a mushroom log in my backyard that I’m hoping will be sprouting any minute now, but I’m trying to actually, it’s got a mycelial network growing inside of it that eventually will spout the fruit of mushrooms, right? But mushrooms have been blowing my mind. There’s this writer named Paul Stamets who I think a lot of people may be familiar with. I’m kind of obsessed with. There’s a movie called Fantastic Fungi. The thing I love about them is that they are like the great detoxifiers of the earth. They can process almost anything into nourishment for themselves. So they’re the composters, right? When something dies in the forest, fungi, fungi, fungi, is what comes in. It figures out, “How do we compost this? What do we use it for? How do we communicate that this is here to the rest of the known world?”
And then I also love that they can be used to detox actual spaces. If, when we start to recognize that we have put so much toxin to the earth and that needs to turn around, mushrooms are one of the ways that we can say, “OK, let’s put mushrooms on this ground and let the mushrooms actually detox this soil and bring it back into health.” I use it as a reference point for thinking about people who folks want to dispose [of], and behaviors, human behaviors, that we want to dispose of, is what would it look like to instead be like the mushrooms and figure out how to detox that negative behavior or that violent impulse into something that we let it nourish and we let it move out of our system?
I’m also obsessed with how mycelium communicate between trees and other stuff in the forest. So anyway, that’s one whole vibe, and then dandelions are another magical healing property. You can eat dandelion roots and drink dandelion tea to actually heal the human body. They’re thought of as a weed. You often hear them referred to as a weed, something people try to get rid of, but dandelions carry their entire society in themselves. So when you blow a dandelion that is ready, it’s that soft white, I think of it as a little soft, white afro of a flower, but when you blow that and all the little dandelions seeds go out, each one lands and it can reproduce an entire field of dandelions. And that to me is just astounding. It’s like, how do we be as fecund as a dandelion can be? How do we access the healing properties that we have to bring to any circumstance or situation?
I love the misunderstanding of being seen as a weed when it’s like actually a healer. I think of that when I look at the communities that I love and come from, that a lot of us have been seen as weeds, as something to control, as something to remove or exercise, and actually we’re healers unto each other. We can be healers unto the planet. I think that Indigenous communities, those who are still in touch with the original instruction of this earth are dandelions, right? Each of them carries within them whole tomes of wisdom of what we need in order to be in right relationship with the planet.
TS: We started our conversation, adrienne, by talking about fractals. It’s like the mushrooms in us and the dandelions in us.
amb: Exactly. Because I think that’s the thing is we’re all of the same stuff. We’re all nature. If we think of nature as something other than human, that’s where we have gone astray. We are of all the same stuff. Literally, we have ancestral lineage to mushrooms. We have ancestral lineage to stars—and that’s not being woo-woo. That’s just science shows us that, that’s the stuff we’re made of. So I like drawing on that aspect of the lineage, especially as someone who’s been displaced from so much of my lineage, I like knowing that it’s like, “Well, no matter what, I’m of earth.”
TS: adrienne, I have to bring our conversation to a close, even though I’m finding it extremely challenging inside myself here.
amb: Yes. It’s a good problem, though.
TS: Yes. It’s a good problem. You mentioned that you’re a post-nationalist and you shared briefly that, in the future, you could see us living more in a tribal configuration. And I mentioned in introducing you that you’re a sci-fi scholar. One of the things I loved learning is from you is your love of science fiction and what could be called speculative fiction, visions of the future. I’d like to end on the note of understanding why you think envisioning the future is so useful now, even though we have all—“Come on. Isn’t that just fantastical, like really? Come on,” you know?—and what your vision is, if you were just to say, “OK, not only why it’s important, but I’ll go ahead. I’ll share my sci-fi.”
amb: That’s what I’ve been doing.
TS: Yes.
amb: Well, yes. I mean, I think that the thing that makes the future important to me is that the world that we currently live in was imagined by other people. So, we’re walking around inside of someone else’s imagination of how this world could work. Someone imagined white supremacy. That’s not real, there’s no science basis for it, but someone imagined it and then they shared that imagination until it took hold in people’s minds and some people actually believed it and structured entire societies around it, right? Someone imagined our current incarceration system and was like, “Oh, this is how we’ll handle justice.” And even though it doesn’t work, the imagination that it will work, the imagination that it will rehabilitate people in some way, keeps us committed to this dysfunctional system.
When Mike Brown was killed, right? He was killed because a police officer imagined that he was in danger, even though this was an unarmed kid who was walking home from the store. And that imagination was so powerful that it held up in court, that they were like, “Oh, he imagined he was in danger and that’s more important than what was really happening.” So, I think imagination is so important.
Then I think thinking of the future is a way that we recognize that the circumstances, the thing that we’ve been imagined and living into now, doesn’t actually work for the majority of us. We want to imagine the futures that actually work for the majority of us. And I think we have to imagine it before we can begin to structure it, begin to practice it.
Already people have imagined abolition and already people have imagined socialism, people have imagined cooperative economics, people have imagined a disability justice framework for the world. So now we’re practicing. How do we live into a different way of being in right relationship with each other? My vision for the world, my vision for the future is one in which everyone feels like their imaginations matter. Everyone feels like their bodies matter, and they have sovereignty over what they get to decide to do with their bodies. Everyone feels a sense of responsibility to the collective, to the whole, and we make decisions together. So, it’s, I get to choose what I do with my body and I’m in relationship with a whole bunch of other people who I actually care about and we make decisions together.
And in my vision of the future, we’re in a totally, wildly different relationship with the planet and it’s a direct one and it kind of scares me to think about it. Like, “Ah, what would it feel like to do this?” But I love the idea that, and I think we are structured to be in communities that are growing our food together and raising our children together and where people get to feel safe. I imagine these mycelial networks of human beings where we still get to have a global experience but it’s not one where we’re taking advantage of each other or warmongering, but one in which we are sharing what we figure out, sharing what is delicious, sharing what is pleasurable amongst us, and of course, we’re in touch with aliens who are very cool and it’s awesome.
TS: I’ve been speaking with adrienne maree brown, and I have to say I feel a big yes inside as I listened to the description you’re offering as our possible future and the power of imagining it together. Thank you so much for the depth of this conversation and really all the work you’ve done, deep work on Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism and your new book Holding Change.
Thank you for listening to Insights at the Edge. You can read a full transcript of today’s interview at SoundsTrue.com/podcast. And, if you’re interested, hit the Subscribe button in your podcast app. And also, if you feel inspired, head to iTunes and leave Insights at the Edge of review. I love getting your feedback, being in connection with you and learning how we can continue to evolve and improve our program. Working together, I believe we can create a kinder and wiser world. SoundsTrue.com: waking up in the world.
