WE DON’T DO IT ALONE: LISA WEINERT AND NARRATIVE HEALING

LISA WEINERT CONVERSATION AND BOOK SIGNING
Shakespeare & Co
2020 Broadway between Sixty-Ninth & Seventieth Sts.
Thursday, September 28, free with advance RSVP, 6:00
shakeandco.com
www.narrativehealing.com
www.lisaweinert.com

Lisa Weinert knows how to bring people together.

A speaker, teacher, and author born and raised on the Upper West Side, Weinert attended Ethical Culture Fieldston, among other schools, and graduated from Barnard with an English degree. She worked in corporate book publishing before starting Narrative Healing, a wide-ranging program that uses storytelling “to heal and transform lives.”

Everywhere she goes, Weinert, who exudes a natural warmth and charm, builds communities of friends and colleagues, who mingle and then form bonds and relationships of their own. For example, it was through Weinert that I met Make Conscious founder Jessica Kung, who I wrote about in my most recent Substack post.

Weinert’s program consists of lectures, classes, workshops, and now a book, Narrative Healing: Awaken the Power of Your Story (Hachette Go, July 2023, $30), arranged around six cycles: Awaken, Listen, Express, Inspire, Connect, Grow. “In my earliest memory of writing, I am nestled under my covers, in a kind of bedsheet cocoon. I am seven, and I am spilling my guts out. I am sending an SOS into the universe,” Weinert writes in the introduction. “When I am writing, I feel heard and seen. My journal is a portal to something larger than myself contained within me, and I am hooked.”

Weinert shares personal stories from her life, along with those from more than two dozen contributors, in such chapters as “The Best Protection Is No Protection,” “Quiet Wildness,” “Mindful Eavesdropping,” “How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything,” “Talk to Animals and Plants,” and “The Message That’s Needed Most.”

You can become part of Weinert’s ever-growing community on September 28 at 6:00, when she will be at Shakespeare & Co for a book signing and conversation with Knopf VP and executive editor Jenny Jackson, author of the novel Pineapple Street. [ed. note: Jackson can no longer attend the event; in her stead, writer, poet, and journalist Carla Zanoni will join Weinert.] From October 13 to 15, Lisa will be joining Jamia Wilson, Kim Thai, and Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona for a three-day retreat, “Listen to Your Ancestors: Bring Their Voices to the Page,” at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck. And on October 17 at 6:00, she will take part in a virtual conversation with gun violence survivor and Everytown Survivor Network director Keenon James, hosted by Brooklyn-based writer Susan McPherson, author of The Lost Art of Connecting.

Lisa, who lives in Chelsea with her husband, photographer and educator Barry Sutton, and their ridiculously adorable Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Ocean, recently spoke with me over Zoom, discussing storytelling and trauma, writing by hand on unruled paper, the mind-body connection, getting married in Central Park during Covid, and more.

twi-ny: You’ve been writing since you were seven years old. Do you still have any of those old notebooks and journals?

lisa weinert: I don’t have writing from when I was seven, but I do from when I was twelve, and I pretty much have every single journal since then.

twi-ny: Do you ever look back at them? And if you do, what’s the feeling to see your younger self doing what your older self is eventually going to do?

lw: That’s such a sweet question. I referred to them quite a bit when I was writing the book. I went through a process . . . I had them in different places and I laid them all out and I actually organized them chronologically and labeled them. I think it did a tremendous amount to provide them with so much care and order.

I read through them thinking I was going to find some kind of gem or aha moment. But there weren’t so many surprises, I think at this point I’m very well acquainted with my younger selves; they’re like very good friends. So it was more like hanging out with some buddies.

A childhood friend once said to me, “You’re just going to be one of those people that you’re going to wake up in your forties and have so many unpublished books that are just in boxes because it’s just writing all the time.” And I think that’s a little bit the case. In rereading, I find there’s a lot of stuff where I’m like, Oh, I could probably do something with that now.

But I can say about my earlier journals, I found in a number of places, I would circle something with an arrow and it would say, “Don’t forget this” or “Read this,” and I had such a sense that I was going to read it again.

twi-ny: I still have my fourth-grade notebook. In it is a story I wrote called “If I Were a Pencil.” When I look back at it, I’m like, okay, first of all, there I am using the conditional subjunctive properly at ten. And I’m also writing about a pencil and what do I do? I become a managing editor for children’s books, using a pencil to write and to correct authors’ grammar and punctuation, or at least used to before the pandemic and working electronically from home.

lw: So beautiful. And in fourth grade!

twi-ny: Another thing I noticed in looking back at my writing was my handwriting. Did you get any feel for your handwriting?

lw: It’s very important to me to write with unlined paper. I find it very constraining, like somebody’s telling me what to do with lines. I’ve always written with big black artist notebooks and I like to write oftentimes in different shapes and do big circles or squares and end up drawing. So there’s a really dynamic quality oftentimes.

I think my handwriting now is practically illegible. Almost every morning I write by hand for a period of time. And when I’m working on something, my first draft is always by hand and then I type it into the computer. A lot of it is pretty illegible. I trust that the parts that are meant to be read will be legible.

twi-ny: That’s a good point. I scribble on lined paper and have trouble staying within the lines.

lw: I hate the lines. I feel like I’m all of a sudden in a dictatorship with my creative life. I want to be able for it to be big or small, whatever I want. Sometimes I just want to put a couple of words on a page.

twi-ny: Right. Yes. So in your case, the act of writing, especially since you say that you might add little drawings, it’s like the physical act of writing is a work of art in and of itself before it goes into the computer.

lw: Oh, definitely.

twi-ny: When you type words directly into the computer, you don’t get that. You can look at your words and know when you wrote them and what you were feeling when you wrote them.

lw: I’m an incredibly fast typist. I can type a hundred words per minute. Writing by hand slows me down in a way that’s really important.

twi-ny: You were born and raised primarily on the Upper West Side.

lw: Yes, we moved every couple of years. I had, I think, eleven different residences by the time I was eighteen. It was a combination of wanderlust and trying different things and opportunities. And I think my parents didn’t quite realize that it would have an impact on us in a certain way. This resulted in me seeking out consistency where I could find it and also in a really close relationship with my siblings.

twi-ny: You started Narrative Healing around 2014?

lw: The trainings began then. That’s when I started my yoga teacher training. And the first iterations of this workshop were actually a result of the five-hundred-hour yoga teacher training I did with YogaWorks. I brought together some writers and yogis and started exploring this kind of connection. But my program at Kripalu in 2016 was when this program really launched.

twi-ny: When did you decide to write the book? Did someone come to you and say, You need to put this in a book, or did you say it yourself?

lw: It was both things. On the one hand, as we’ve been discussing, I always had this fire to write, and to write a book. And with Narrative Healing, there was so much momentum to the program. It was just one of those moments in life where a lot of things were integrating and synthesizing within me, and these opportunities were coming my way. I had a brief conversation with a program director at Kripalu, and six months later I had a conference with 150 people; I was teaching a version of ths program at Wesleyan University for three years, and I had an event at the Rubin and so many other moments of synergy and opportunity. I saw the kind of impact it was having on people’s lives and that people were coming back and noticing the kind of feedback I was getting.

The desire to write a book was born from what books are meant to do. I wanted to be able to reach people who didn’t happen to be in the room with me. And it kind of came down to that. And I wanted to be able to endeavor to make the program really mobile and personal. So wherever you are, you could try it and explore with friends.

I was also really inspired by the publication journey of The Artist’s Way after interviewing Julia Cameron, learning more about that publishing history. I’ve been a fan of her and her work, but what really inspired me was releasing work into the world and letting it do its thing. What I started seeing in my program was people were coming and participating, and really deep, amazing friendships were forming rather quickly. They were staying in touch independent of me for years, and with me. But that was really it. People did ask me, and students would say, “Where’s the book? I want the book,” that kind of thing. But that was really the idea behind it.

twi-ny: I’ve experienced what you’re talking about in the friendship that Ellen and I have developed with Jessica Kung, who we met through you. You have a way of curating events to have people really become part of them and meet other people. At your book launch, Ellen and I both met people who we work with but had never met in person.

lw: That’s so cool. Yeah, that’s what happens. That’s the real magic of this whole thing.

twi-ny: Did you write most of the book during the pandemic?

lw: Totally. I basically worked on the proposal in 2019. I spent a long time with the proposal. It was a really big transition moving from a live experience to what worked on the page, especially in terms of accessibility. Because when you’re teaching and you see what’s happening with someone, I just immediately amend my instruction. So writing it all out was a big thing. And then Covid hit, and with what it was like to live in the city, and the protests, and BLM, I did a huge pivot with the proposal and the book and really changed the format in some significant ways. I wrote the entire book during lockdown, essentially when my husband was experiencing severe health challenges. It was a challenging environment when I wrote the book.

twi-ny: Yes. You discuss this a lot in your book, how writing is a solitary pursuit. You’re at a computer or at a desk writing by yourself, and now you’re by yourself during a pandemic where it’s not like you can, after you’re done, go out with friends; you can’t. Did you find it more difficult to write under these conditions?

lw: Despite having the book out now, and publishing two pieces in the last couple of weeks in MindBodyGreen (“How We Listen Matters — Here Are 7 Tips to Help Get Better at It”) and the TueNight Social (“Why Is Publishing Making Authors Sick?”), I hadn’t written very much before, period. I’ve been writing all the time, but I had not written for other people. I really hadn’t. When I was writing the book, the world around me offered me tremendous drive and focus. I live in downtown Manhattan; there were sirens everywhere. There was a very extreme situation, and within my home there was a lot of stress. So I had to really do my own personal practice to find the focus that I needed. I felt tremendous drive and I was really grateful for that.

I sensed I must really have to write this if I’m able to write it under these circumstances. I was very protected by the cocoon nature of that time period. There was a fearlessness that happened. I didn’t realize or think about how vulnerable the writing was or how much I was revealing or how the tone of it was; I was just really focused on being truthful. And I was teaching online at the time, so I was really clear about my students and who I was talking to.

twi-ny: I can feel in reading the book, and knowing you, there are times I’m like, oh, she went there. I wasn’t sure you were going to go there. And so really it’s a very open book about who you are and how the program works. Among the elements it deals with are the body and trauma. And so here we are in a pandemic, stuck inside, and we’re more aware of our bodies than we’ve probably been in a long time. We live near Bellevue, so we heard the —

lw: Sirens. Oh, that’s right. You’re right there.

twi-ny: It was scary. We live on one of the busiest streets in the city, and it’s suddenly a quiet street, an empty street, except for the sirens. It makes you aware of your health, your body; you’re worried about anything and everything, like, Oh my God, do I have Covid? So one of parts of the book that I just love is your focus on the body. The natural idea is that we write from our mind. But what you’re saying is that it’s your body that’s always telling a story. That was a revelation for me.

lw: Yeah, me too.

twi-ny: I have a lot of weird pains that doctors have trouble diagnosing. But my chiropractor always says that pain is your friend. It’s your body telling you that something needs to be fixed. So those two things, your take on the body and my chiropractor’s, made me really listen to what stories my body’s telling me. How did that come to you?

lw: I think you just really described it. I think the first thing is, there’s a lot of consequences to not listening to the story of our body. It can become a very ephemeral kind of conversation pretty quickly, but in a very practical way. If you’re not listening to the messages your body’s telling you, you’ll quickly find yourself in danger and at risk. You can think of it like walking through life with earpods and not noticing what’s around you.

And there was a eureka moment for me. I thought everything happened in my head. I’m from a very intellectual family; I had a career in corporate publishing, working with ideas and stories all the time, and I felt very confident about it. I kept getting promoted. I had this idea that I knew everything about this kind of thing.

Like you, I had a moment of physical pain. I had a really scary medical diagnosis that turned out to be false, but I didn’t know it at the time. And I discovered in that moment that I was unable to access my voice. And this diagnosis wasn’t because I didn’t advocate for myself. The point is I had the experience of really knowing that when I’m actually paralyzed by fear, it’s really hard for me to articulate what I think. I didn’t think all of this at the moment, but once I was recovering from that experience and I had major surgery, I started thinking that a lot of the storytelling that I knew that was in my head was useless. What’s the point of all of this if I don’t know the rest of this?

I had always wanted to do a deeper dive into yoga. It’d always been a big part of my life; when I started my yoga teacher training, I started learning from masterful teachers these concepts that our body is carrying stories and that our body carries stories both in narratives but also in the form of tension and hunger and desire and pain and all these other things. And that these are essential parts of living an integrated life as being sensitive and having an active conversation between those things because our mind and our body are actively connected. And I started studying this and learning and becoming really like, Oh my goodness, I’m just on fire about it. And then working with writers over the years who were writing narrative consistently, I think writers are more disembodied. We’re just head on the page and isolated.

But not only are you at risk of crossing the street and not seeing the car coming your way, but you’re at risk when you sit down at the computer not really having access to ninety percent of your creative energy, both in terms of actual energy and also memories and associations and senses. I discover every day again and again and again that when I incorporate a little bit of a mindfulness practice or a full yoga practice into writers’ lives, their writing changes in amazing ways — what they write about, how they write, how they feel about what they write. This doesn’t mean that great writing doesn’t happen elsewhere, but particularly for people living with physical pain or emotional pain or confusion, transition — who isn’t living that way right now? This is just a really helpful way to begin to integrate. And I think for us intellectual creatures in the West, writing has a way of acting like a translator between the mind and the body.

twi-ny: That’s a great point. Although I haven’t taken the program, I’m familiar with what you do. I follow your posts on social media and the articles you write, and I’ve told you before that what you do has impacted me in the way you describe. So coming out of a pandemic, I did a deeper dive into my mind and my body. I’ve been writing This Week in New York for more than twenty years, but I never used the word “I.” It’s not about me but the event I’m writing about. And it opened me up to the point where I now have a Substack where I write about extremely personal things. I’m sharing these stories that I’ve never told before. I’ve revealed things about myself that I never thought I would share in public. And people are reacting and responding in such positive ways. So I want to thank you again for that.

lw: Thank you for sharing. That means a lot to me. The other part that I want to add to this is some of the science behind writing as a healing practice. I think intuitively we might feel it or we might notice it in our writing, but this sort of thinking about writing as a way to connect the mind and the body is a two-way street. On the one hand, you might get a source of creativity and flow, but on the other hand, writing slows down and connects us to our mind. We understand as writers, you actually can’t really write clearly unless you’re connecting to your thoughts, but it can create a higher sensitivity to what is happening in the body.

So when you get those alarms, like something happening with the stomach or the back or whatever it is, you will more quickly address it, number one. And number two, there’s tremendous amounts of science, hundreds of research studies, that show a regular, consistent writing practice done in this way has a huge impact on rates of anxiety, depression, loneliness, PTSD, trauma. There’s a lot of research that cancer patients who write regularly recover or react better to the medicine. So while we experience the impact in a singular way, when you start to study it, it’s really astounding how impactful it is.

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twi-ny: It is amazing. And you make it clear that the writing doesn’t have to be for publication. One of the things the book gets into is that writing, meditation, and yoga, you don’t have to be an expert at any of those things. You don’t have to be, Well, I’m not going to write a book. It’s not about that. It’s not about getting published. What do you tell people who come to you and say, Oh, well, I don’t write, I don’t meditate, I don’t do yoga. This program, it’s not really right for me.

lw: Well, I’m definitely not trying to convince anyone to do this program. But I’ve been doing some corporate events recently where I’m walking into environments where people are not opting in but it’s part of a company program. I did a program recently at an art school and also at a law firm. I think in both cases people came but they didn’t really know what it was and were fairly skeptical when I arrived. And what I can say is people tend to feel better afterward. There tends to be an experience of relaxation and curiosity, whether people jump into a writing practice or not. I’ve been actually really humbled by how open-minded people are. I think we’re living in a time where people feel so bad and are so full of fear and trauma, and there’s so much division and so much stress.

And what this program offers is something that’s really pretty accessible, welcoming, inclusive, and free. And there’s just not that many things like that that you can try out that will make you feel better. Maybe you’ll take some of the classes, but they’re really pretty affordable. Someone who might not be a great fit is somebody who is really hell bent on having a New York Times bestseller. For those people, I tend to recommend someone who might help you more than what I’m doing. I haven’t ever been in a situation where I’m trying to persuade someone to get into it.

twi-ny: Yes, yes. So the genesis is 2014, and in 2016 you’re really getting into it. So much has happened between 2016 and 2023. Do you find that either the people coming to you or the kinds of stories that they want to share have always been the same, or because of all this daily pressure we’re talking about, racial injustice, the DEI movement, social media, are the students and their stories different from when you started even only seven years ago?

lw: That’s such an interesting question. I think I’ll have to reflect on that a little bit more. When I started the program, it was oriented in a little bit more of a medical way. There were a lot of people living with chronic illnesses, so the shares might be more about illness narrative and trauma, people who are identifying that way. I often teach with groups where I have a sense of where they’re coming from, with gun violence or corporate burnout or whatever it is. So there is what I think is sort of a difference that I wouldn’t have expected. People are very willing to share.

I’ve been in a number of situations where it’s a big group, and by big, I mean maybe more than thirty, but where people don’t know each other. I used to be much more careful about how I would curate the sharing, but we always have some kind of writing in these programs. And I’m finding people just shoot their hands up and have so much they want to say, so much they want to share, and it’s often emotional, about love. That’s what I’m seeing — love, grief. I don’t think the topics are that different, but I think it’s a little bit more on the tip of their tongue.

twi-ny: That brings me back to the essay you wrote for TueNight Social, “Why Is Publishing Making Authors Sick?”

lw: It’s such a great headline. I didn’t come up with it, but it’s really good.

twi-ny: Working in book publishing, I understand it, but it also addresses what we talked about earlier, the loneliness of being a writer, especially once the book is put into production and you’re getting toward the book being published and the marketing surrounding it. So this struck me. You have, from what I can tell, a tight-knit family. I know you have a caring husband, you have a large community of friends and colleagues who you care about and who care about you, but still you write in the article about feeling vulnerable and insecure as the book comes out. It almost seems like it was a surprise to you, and you used to work in the business. What do you think that was, and are there any easy answers to get over it now that you’ve gone through it?

lw: I think what that piece is really about is sharing honestly with people that you trust, which is really what the whole program is about. And the part that was difficult about it had less to do with any realities of my personal life or the skills of the amazing people that I got to partner with on this publishing journey. What I really felt was that the publishing process, the structure of it, taps into attachment wounds. And that with attachment theory, that felt like the real aha! moment, when you have a vulnerable story that you’re sharing and then nobody’s there with you. Your partner and your friends are not with you on the publishing journey because they’re just not inside of you, with you all the time.

It’s not something that you think to share because this wonderful thing is happening, and it’s not something that you’re complaining about. “My dreams are coming true but I feel miserable.” So I was really taken aback by how powerful it was, and it was a deep psychological thing that was tapped into that I know all writers connect with because of the kind of feedback I’ve been getting. During my years of working in corporate publishing, I witnessed authors being like this, and I truly didn’t understand it. I was surprised because I’ve witnessed authors, I’ve coached them, I’ve supported them. And I would be frustrated, honestly, as a publicist, saying, “Why aren’t you doing more right now? This is what you’re supposed to be doing. You signed up for this.”

I used to give talks at writing conferences where I had a line I used about comparing publishing a book to having a baby and that once your baby’s born, you don’t drop it on its head, you’ve got to take care of it. That’s what I would say to authors. But then I started understanding. I wrote another piece for a newsletter for my community that many healthy cultures, after a baby is born, the parent, the mother gets to rest for a while, and loads of other people started the forty days, come in and help. And what I didn’t understand, it started happening to me. I mean, I had some expectation; everyone has a particular story, but the second it was finished, I was profoundly depleted and exhausted. I’ve been working on this since 2016, through the pandemic, and then all the extra stuff you have to do, and now I’m being asked to write extra pieces and go do this and go do that.

I had underestimated the actual exhaustion, depletion I would feel. And also in terms of attachment theory, having that one trusted person who’s your secure person; the way our publishing system is set up, just the dynamic of it, you really don’t have that because you get passed along like a conveyor belt. My husband was very supportive throughout, but he doesn’t know anything about publishing. I have lots of people I’m close with, but what I found was that doesn’t prevent the feelings you have inside of “I’m not doing enough. Oh my gosh, I needed to do a million things as of yesterday and now I’m not taking care of it, and now it’s not good enough and now it’s not going to do this.” I didn’t think I was going to have those thoughts because I thought I knew better. I thought I was immune to that.

And I just was really, really run down. And then I got Covid and got super sick, and I noticed that it was late August, early September when my energy came back and feel very motivated and excited. I’ve written a couple of pieces and I think there’s a real truth to this gestation period, or the fourth trimester, where you need to rest and you need to be taken care of. And what I talk about in the piece in terms of an antidote was something I found very compelling, the idea of having a publishing buddy and somebody who, not necessarily a family member or friend, but somebody who truly could believe in your work. One person you go to, who you check in with daily, someone who can respond and give you support. It’s made me really motivated within Narrative Healing to continue to create creative support. I guess I have so much to say about this.

The other part about the support system is there’s just very little community out there for authors after the book comes out that’s not extremely expensive or competitive, and that’s not what your nervous system needs. Your nervous system needs to feel safe. You’ve done enough. The emails and text and calls I’ve gotten since that piece has come out have really overwhelmed me. And authors who look on paper like they’re killing it are emailing me, “I’ve never felt so alone in my entire life. I thought I was the only one.” And so I think it’s tapped into something. It’s not at all a takedown of publishing. It’s more how we haven’t addressed it enough. What kind of care do you need at this point? And having been through a wedding also, it’s not that different from that, leading up to it, it’s not necessarily a stress-free time for a lot of people, even though it’s a wonderful occasion.

twi-ny: I like the comparison to giving birth because a lot of people now, they celebrate their book’s birth date on Instagram and Facebook. I remember how excited you were when you posted a video of you opening your first box of books. Opening the box to take out that first printed book is, in a way, like a baby coming out of the womb and now it’s out in the world. It’s very moving to watch the pure joy of that. But then knowing that it’s not as joyous the next day, dealing with these other aspects that you didn’t anticipate.

lw: It’s also like that six months later, actually. I think many writers going from such a cocoon state of me in my apartment creating this thing to being out in the world is just a big adjustment.

twi-ny: Yes. You also mentioned your wedding, which my wife and I attended. It was such a wonderful experience. It took place in the North Garden of the Conservatory Garden in Central Park, and you had different people from different parts of your lives share stories about you and Barry under each of the floral arches. We walked around the fountain and listened to the stories; it was very moving and intimate, especially because the pandemic was far from over. But what was it like for a writer who has edited or worked with other writers on their stuff? You’re now listening to stories about you; you are the subject. What was it like walking around and hearing what these people had to say about you and Barry?

lw: In some ways, it was a similar experience. Coming out of Covid, it was the first time I’d been around that many people in two years. And then it was sort of the same when my book came out; I guess I’ve been in seclusion a lot the last couple of years. It was very similar. I think for both the wedding and the book, I had a very big laser focus on service. I never wanted to have a wedding. I’m not somebody that ever wanted to get married. I never dreamed about it, never thought about it. I always wanted to have a book, but I never wanted a wedding. And then I met this person, but also Covid. And I felt this different urgency to — not urgency, but responsibility, of sharing the joy and bringing people together and doing it safely and doing it with care.

And so I felt very clear about why I was there, and it was super-overwhelming. I kind of knew what one or two people were going to say. Other people, I didn’t know what they were going to say, but I totally trusted them. I just remember having my hand on my heart the whole time to just make sure that I was breathing, and that was kind of it. And letting myself off the hook if I wasn’t fully experiencing everything because it was so overwhelming. The book experience has been very similar in terms of things being really overwhelming. The launch party that you came to was almost like a reunion from the wedding. It was so many of the same people, and just trusting others to help me care for this thing, understanding that we don’t do it alone.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]