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I’ve had an advance copy of Siri Hustvedt’s Ghost Stories for months, and I still haven’t fully recovered from it. It’s her account of the two years since her husband of 43 years, the writer Paul Auster, died, written with the precision of a novelist and the honesty of someone who has decided not to varnish a single part of the experience. We spent close to 45 minutes together, and it is one of the most genuinely useful conversations about loss I’ve had. Here’s what stayed with me.

She started writing two weeks after he died. Not as a project, she says, but as a compulsion, a stabilizing daily force. She’d used writing exercises before with psychiatric patients and noticed the page itself created a kind of stillness. In her own grief and fragmentation, the same thing happened. At times, she says, the book had more coherence than its author.

Grief distorts time, and that’s not a metaphor. Siri describes being “thrown off her timing,” living outside the rhythms she’d relied on her whole life. What kept her tethered was what she calls “keeping up the forms,” getting up, having breakfast, going to her desk, eating a real dinner even when she couldn’t finish it. Ritual as scaffolding.

The marriage was its own entity, and that’s what she misses. Not just Paul, but “the and,” the third thing a long relationship creates between two people. She doesn’t miss the young, beautiful, famous man he once was. She misses the 77 year old who died, and the rich, accumulated world they’d built together over decades. That distinction feels important and rarely said out loud.

She talks about the loss of physical touch, which most grief memoirs leave out. The full range of it, from a hand on the shoulder to intimacy, and how the absence doesn’t get easier with time, it gets harder. She mentioned getting a massage a couple of months after Paul died and having to hold herself together in the room afterward, relief and grief arriving as the same wave.

Grief lives in the body, not just the mind. She rejects the mind body split outright. The cognitive splintering she experienced (forgetting a subway stop she’d used for years, feeling like dementia had “hit her like a truck”) tracks with what’s known about the hippocampus under trauma and grief. It regenerates, she says. That’s the good news.

She felt Paul’s presence once, the day they buried him, and she has a theory about why. Not a fantasy, not a dream, something closer to what the nervous system generates when a lifetime of daily perceptual input suddenly disappears, the same mechanism, she suspects, behind dreams or sensory deprivation hallucinations. She’s careful to call it a hypothesis, not a fact, but she’s read the neuroscience closely enough to make the case. It’s a phenomenon she found described across cultures, and one she thinks Western culture uniquely stigmatizes as a sign of madness rather than a normal part of grieving.

Grief is ordinary, and that’s oddly comforting. Universal, but as different as fingerprints from person to person. We talked about how disorienting that first experience of loss is precisely because nothing prepares you for how unfamiliar it feels, and how naming it, again and again, is its own kind of relief.

Paul’s unfinished writing lives inside the book. He’d started a short book of letters to their grandson and only got 35 pages in. Siri originally planned to include them as a single section, then realized the book needed a dialogic structure instead, her voice and his interwoven, mirroring the actual shape of the marriage. She described typing up his letters and feeling the music of his prose next to hers as one of the real pleasures of writing the book.

The title comes from Levi Strauss. The Raw and the Cooked, raw feeling versus cooked reflection, is the structure she landed on almost subliminally after finishing a first draft. The book moves between the two: unmediated grief and the meditations that come from sitting with it.

She still wears her wedding ring, and she’s not taking it off. Not out of obligation to convention, just because she doesn’t want to. We talked about how much of grief is inventing your own rules because no one hands you a script, and how useful it is just to see another woman make that choice out loud.

If you haven’t read Ghost Stories yet, it’s one of the most beautiful, honest books I’ve read in a long time. This conversation is above if you want to watch it.

Love,

Amanda

I met Tony when I was 14. He remembers it as a herd of teenage girls stampeding down Kings Road with an attitude he calls “a little mini suffragette movement.” Thirty odd years later, we sat down for a Live conversation, both of us sober, both of us in recovery, both of us somehow still standing, and it felt like picking up a sentence we’d left unfinished decades ago.

Tony is a legendary DJ, the author of the memoir I Don’t Take Requests, and just released his second book, Recover Me: A User’s Guide to Overcoming Insanity, structured around the 12 steps, with input from his therapist, Tara, at the end of every chapter. We talked for close to 45 minutes, and it went everywhere. Here’s what stayed with me.

Getting sober isn’t the same as getting well. Tony was 15 years sober, doing five or six meetings a week, sponsoring half of London, opening rehabs in Thailand, and still stuck. He calls it “the Tony show”: a new behavior wearing the costume of recovery. His therapist finally asked him a simple question: when did you last drink? Fifteen years. Then why are you still raging about it every session? That was the moment he realized he was living in the solution to a problem he no longer had, while the real ones sat untouched.

The work underneath the work. For Tony, that meant trauma therapy, literal coloring in, drawing timelines with felt tip pens, mapping the people who’d hurt him. He didn’t consciously notice a pattern until much later: every person he drew who’d caused him harm had yellow hair. He’d been drawn to blondes his entire life, tracing straight back to the person who abused him as a child. We talked about how intellectual insight, being able to explain your own history, is a completely different thing from actually feeling different. That gap is something I’m circling in the book I’m writing now.

Desirability as the first taste of power. We both landed on the same memory: the moment we realized we were sexually desirable was the first time we felt like we mattered, counted, existed. For Tony, sex became “a new love behavior” he thought he controlled. We talked about how much of a life can get built on that foundation before you notice it’s not actually love.

Being fully known. Tony described meeting his now husband with nothing hidden for the first time, no skeletons, no performance. He’d already published the most honest book he could write; there was nothing left to protect. The hardest part, he said, wasn’t other people accepting him. It was that he was the last one to accept himself.

Sponsors, friendship, and finding your people. We talked about how relationships in recovery shift shape over time, sponsors who become family, sponsees who become chosen children, the slow work of finding people who’ll hold your hand rather than hang off your shirt. Tony dedicated Recover Me to his friend Eddie Queens, who built an online meeting during lockdown that grew from six people to hundreds before she passed away last year, a reminder of how much of recovery is communal, not solitary.

Higher power, redefined. Not a lightning bolt kind of faith. For Tony, it’s the energy of a room full of strangers moving to music, or a genuinely honest conversation. For both of us, connection itself does a lot of the work that used to be assigned to God.

The throughline for both of us, in different words, was the same: honesty is the hardest and simplest tool either of us has. Not the varnished version, the real one. Tony put it better than I could: “What works for me today is based on the most simplest of things, but the hardest of things, honesty.”

The full conversation is above if you want to watch it.

Love,

Amanda X

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Hello Friends!

In my opinion Jodi Kantor is one of the most important journalists alive. She and Megan Twohey broke the Harvey Weinstein story for the New York Times, the investigation that cracked open a silence that had lasted decades and changed everything. She’s now covering the Supreme Court for the Times. And this year she turned 51, had a major Supreme Court scoop drop, and launched her new book, all in the same few days.

The book is called How to Start: Discovering Your Life’s Work, and I have to tell you, I read it as an advance PDF on my phone and couldn’t wait to talk to her about it. The title sounds simple. It is not simple. This is a book for anyone who is looking at their life right now, whether you’re 22 or 52, and asking: what the hell am I actually supposed to be doing with my time on this earth?

I was thinking about my own kids as I read it. My oldest is 33. My twins are 19. They are all navigating a world that did not exist when I was their age, one where resumes get scanned by bots, where you can apply to 150 jobs and never once speak to a human being, where AI is doing first-round interviews, and where the message being broadcast to young people is essentially: you’re not needed. That message is damaging. It is insulting. And as Jodi says, it is false.

The book actually began as a commencement address Jodi was asked to give at Columbia, her alma mater, in the middle of all the chaos the campus was going through last year. Her friends told her to call in sick. She said, give me those kids for 15 minutes. She had one condition: she needed to meet with the students first, before she wrote a word. And when she did, they gave her a question she couldn’t stop thinking about. They said: our class, despite all its political differences, is united in one anxiety, how, in this crazy environment, are we supposed to figure out our life’s work?

That question became this book.

The framework Jodi offers is built on two things: craft and need. Craft is a special skill or expertise that other people don’t have, like surgery, investigative journalism, running a restaurant dinner service, designing a recipe that actually works. When you have a craft, you are a little protected against being treated as disposable. And this is the thing she says that I want everyone to hear: your craft can never be taken away from you. Need is what gives craft propulsion. You want to be doing something the world actually requires.

I asked her about the Weinstein story specifically, about how she bore the weight of that material. Her answer surprised me. She said that when she and Megan speak to students, the first question is always: how were you not completely traumatized? And they love to shock people with the answer. Because the day you get to sit across from Harvey Weinstein and put your questions to him, that is, she says, the best day in the office ever. That’s what craft does. It gives you the confidence to wield what you know, even when what you’re facing is terrifying.

There’s a paragraph she read from the book that I want every young person in your life to hear. Every parent, too:

“Do not give up before you even start. Frustration and disappointment are certain. Failure is possible. But if you abdicate the search for satisfaction now, you will put it further out of reach. Resist the urge to arm yourself with uninformed cynicism, masking as oh-so-wise pragmatism that’s just really good old fear of rejection. We do not yet know what the world will offer you.”

Write it down please .Send it to your kids.

We also talked about where the Me Too movement is today, and Jodi’s answer is more nuanced than the headlines suggest. Yes, the backlash is massive and led from the very top. But she pushed back on the idea that it’s over. Women are still coming forward. The Giselle Pellicot case. Stories inside Congress. Nearly nine years after she and Megan broke the original story, the work continues. Her view: the obituaries have been premature.

I love Jodi. I have known her for years. I was in the category of people in Hollywood who supported her during the Weinstein investigation. I was on the phone with her and Megan, connecting them to people I knew, watching how she spoke to sources. I was so impressed by her approach. She is someone who has made a career of doing things people said couldn’t be done. And now she’s written a book about how the rest of us can find that same conviction in our own lives.

This is for anyone who’s been told it’s too late, or too hard, or that the world has moved on without them.

Share it with someone who needs to hear it.

Love,

Amanda X

IN THIS EPISODE

• (00:00) Welcome: Jodi’s week, a Supreme Court scoop, a book launch, and turning 51

• (01:04) Amanda on reading How to Start on her phone and why it isn’t just for young people

• (02:46) Where the book began: the Columbia commencement address and why Jodi said yes

• (05:41) What the graduating class actually wanted to talk about (not Gaza, not Trump, something bigger)

• (09:41) The two north stars: craft and need, and why craft can never be taken from you

• (10:06) The AI job market: digitized, lonely, and why applying for a job has become fighting off bots

• (13:30) Amanda’s son, and what it feels like to apply to 150 jobs without meeting a single human

• (16:37) What craft made possible in the Weinstein story: the best day in the office ever

• (18:53) Need as propulsion: why doing a craft the world doesn’t need leads nowhere

• (23:13) The most damaging message of the AI age: you’re not needed, and why it’s false

• (29:01) The grocery store story, hiding the resume in the hoodie, and why in-person networking matters more now, not less

• (34:21) Amanda on watching Jodi work during the Weinstein investigation

• (39:34) Jodi reads from the book: Do not give up before you even start

• (41:33) Good struggle vs. bad struggle, and how Jodi belly flopped her way into journalism

• (46:32) Where is the Me Too movement today? The backlash, the resilience, and why the obituaries are premature

• (51:10) Closing reflections: on connection, on hope, on why this book exists

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The job market has become digitized and lonely. Kids with good grades and internships are applying to 150 positions and never speaking to anyone. This is new, and it’s damaging.

• Craft plus need is the framework. Craft is expertise that makes you irreplaceable. Need is what gives you propulsion. The people who are happiest and most successful have both.

• In an age of AI homogenization, in-person networking is more valuable, not less. The human stuff (charm, directness, personality) is exactly what gets filtered out by bots.

• The Me Too movement is not dead. The obituaries have been premature. Women are still coming forward. The work continues.

• There is a good struggle and a bad struggle. The bad struggle is paralysis. The good struggle: experimenting, meeting people, taking humble work, staying curious, can bear fruit that lasts a whole career.

MORE FROM JODI KANTOR

How to Start: Discovering Your Life’s Work: her new book

She Said: co-authored with Megan Twohey

Jodi on Instagram: short videos about how people started their careers

Jodi Kantor at the New York Times

LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE

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Hi Everyone,

I sat down with Geneen Roth to talk about her new book Love, Finally. You might know her from Women Food and God, or from one of her ten other books about food and the self. But I’d argue this one is the most important thing she’s ever written.

On the surface it’s about her mother. The love she didn’t feel. The anger she carried. The phone call, decades later, when her mother — 94 years old — finally apologized. But what it’s really about is the story you’ve been telling yourself about yourself since you were a little person.

Geneen told me that most of us made a decision about who we were before we were seven years old. Something like: I’m not enough. I’m too much. No one really wants me. And we’ve been living inside that decision ever since. We’ve never questioned it. We’ve medicated it and therapized it and retreated it and Ozempic’d it. But we’ve never actually sat down and asked: wait, is this even true?

I’ve been thinking about this since we spoke, because I think she’s right.

There’s also a distinction she makes in the book that I hadn’t heard before.The difference between healing a wound and dissolving a conclusion. A wound is what happened to you. A conclusion is what you decided it meant. And it’s the conclusion, not the wound, that’s running your life.

We talk about all of it in this conversation. The food stuff, obviously, and her nuanced take on Ozempic. We talk about her mother and what it does to a kid to grow up inside someone else’s pain. We talk about Coco, the 80-year-old woman who helped Geneen finally reframe the beliefs that had been running her for 40 years. And we talk about whether she actually believes change is possible — not as a concept but for real.

Her answer to that last question is the one that got me.

Watch the full conversation below. And if it resonates, please share it. Love, Finally is available now.

Amanda X

On grief, going it alone, and the slow, stubborn work of becoming yourself in midlife.

I went Live with Poorna Bell this week; journalist and author of SHE WANTED MORE on grief, single life, and what it actually takes to stay standing when you need to flip the script.

If you missed it live, here’s the full timestamped run of show.

00:00 Welcome and a soft landing .

02:30 Into grief. Poorna on losing her husband Rob, and the cultural impatience around healing on a schedule.

05:45 The line of the day:

“Grief doesn’t get smaller. You get bigger around it.”

08:30 Mental health and midlife. Therapy as maintenance, not emergency. The anxiety that doesn’t announce itself.

11:15 Reinvention without the glow-up. What it actually looks like to edit your life rather than relaunch it.

14:00 Single life and solo joy. The pressure to be partnered, the assumption that solo women are women in waiting and the quiet, specific freedom of a life you built yourself.

17:40 Friendship as a primary love, not a runner-up.

21:00 Questions from the chat. How do you stop performing wellness? How do you tell healing from avoiding? How do you start lifting when you’ve never lifted?

26:30 What we’re each carrying out into the rest of the week.

30:00 Goodbyes.

The themes I left this conversation thinking about

Grief is not a project. It’s not something you complete and file away. It restructures you. The most generous thing we can do for grieving people, including ourselves is stop measuring their progress.

Midlife is an edit, not a crisis. The women I admire most in their forties and fifties aren’t reinventing themselves so much as cutting. Cutting performances. Cutting people-pleasing. Cutting the parts of the script that don’t fit.

A solo life is not a smaller life. It is, very often, a more deliberate one. There are women reading this in partnerships who need permission to imagine a life on their own terms, and women already living solo who need to hear that what they have is more than good enough.

The unglamorous work is the work

. Therapy you don’t post about. Sleep. Boundaries. Lifting heavy things. Saying the true sentence instead of the polite one. All of it changes you.

A small invitation….

If you watched, tell me what you connected with. If you didn’t, the replay is up.

I’ll be back in your inbox soon. In the meantime: keep having honest conversations.

— Amanda X

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Hope you enjoy this video .

AmandaX

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In this episode, Belle and I talk about what happens when the life you believed in disappears overnight. We talk about grief that lives in the body, about the stories we tell ourselves to survive, about shame, loneliness, and the terrifying moment when you realize you don’t actually know who you are without the roles you’ve been playing.

Belle speaks with such courage and honesty about when her husband of 20 years left without warning, about questioning her own reality, about the immense weight of heartbreak that made it hard to get out of bed, and about the long road back to herself. We also talk about money, autonomy, trauma, motherhood, love, and the belief so many of us carry, that we need a man to be safe.

This conversation is for anyone who has been through a rupture.
For anyone who has felt untethered.
For anyone rebuilding.

I’m so grateful to Belle for sharing her story. And I hope, if you’re in the middle of your own unraveling, that this episode helps you feel a little less alone.

Amanda

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Interview Breakdown

00:00 – Welcome + NYT #1 moment
Belle shares the surreal feeling of becoming a bestseller.

02:10 – Why she chose radical honesty
The moment she realized she had to tell the truth.

04:00 – Talking to her children
How she shared the book with them.

06:10 – Consulting her ex-husband
Why she didn’t want to—and how he responded.

08:00 – Two realities in one marriage
“How could I not see it?”

10:30 – The weighted blanket of grief
The physical experience of heartbreak.

13:00 – Identity collapse + fear
Losing emotional and financial security.

15:30 – The belief you need a man to be safe
And why she no longer believes it.

18:00 – The sandwich moment
What it symbolized.

23:30 – Generational infidelity patterns
Why we repeat what we try to escape.

27:00 – Being called “too angry”
The cost of telling the truth as a woman.

29:00 – Gaslighting + rewriting reality
“I didn’t leave you. I changed residences.”

31:00 – Moving the spotlight back to herself
Letting go of the “why.”

33:00 – Rediscovering joy
Writing, walking, solitude.

35:00 – Financial autonomy
Why it’s the key to freedom.

39:00 – Loneliness + feeling unlovable
Healing after rejection.

41:00 – Trauma and the body
Why feelings linger.

44:00 – Therapy + medication
How she survived suicidal ideation.

47:00 – Grief for her father
Abandonment wounds.

48:30 – Why this book resonates
Women wanting the truth.

50:00 – Closing reflections
Using pain for purpose.

Are New Year’s resolutions just another way to tighten the grip of self improvement and will many of us inevitably just end up feeling bad that we weren’t able to fulfill those commitments ?

The thin line between “helpful” and “harmful” is of course, different for everyone but when we become too focused on self-care and improving ourselves it can become detrimental.

In the beginning discovering a new way of being, a different way of living, thinking, working and loving is exciting .Suddenly there’s language for things you never had words for: boundaries, attunement, nervous system care, attachment wounds. You discover entire corners of TikTok devoted to mental health. Trending soundbites about boundaries and self…

Read more

For me, it’s been one of the biggest transitions of my life.

When I first started feeling off, experiencing unexplained exhaustion, anxiety, and brain fog, I was convinced I was depressed, or worse, that I was losing my mind. I remember standing in my kitchen one morning, unable to recall why I’d walked in there. I actually thought I might have early dementia. I called my friend Davina McCall, one of the first wo…

Read more

Hello Friends!

It’s been a while, but I know this interview with the formidable will just make your day, as it did mine.

What happens when everything you thought you knew — your wisdom, your insight, your hard-earned experience — suddenly stops working? That’s the place Elizabeth Gilbert found herself in. And instead of avoiding that reality, she’s written about it with true Liz honesty and humility.

I felt truly honored to sit down with her for this Conversation as I have long admired her. She vulnerably shares about love and sex addiction, the absolute chaos it created, and the radical surrender it took to begin again. What I admire most is her willingness to say, quite plainly, “I lost the plot” For someone who has inspired millions, that admission is no small thing. And yet, in the sharing of it, she offers a real kind of hope — the reminder that no matter how far we fall, there is always a way back to ourselves.

If you’ve ever struggled with destructive patterns, grief that felt unbearable, or the fear that you may never find your way through, Liz’s story will meet you right where you are.I know it did for me.

I hope you’ll listen. It’s raw, it’s vulnerable, and it’s the kind of honesty we need more of in the world.

Love,

Amanda X

Leave a comment

IN THIS EPISODE:

• (02:00) Elizabeth identifies sex and love addiction with lifelong relational issues

• (04:37) Surrendering to a 12-step program, a higher power, treating love addiction like substance abuse

• (10:33) Defining top-line behaviors and bottom-line behaviors in recovery

• (12:46) Elizabeth discusses the destruction of lives around her

• (19:00) Self-love over outsourcing validation and reframing intense attraction as a warning

• (25:01) Role-playing with your teenage self

• (30:59) Gaining support in a 12-step program for true surrender

• (32:56) Discussion of a practice called Two-Way Prayer

• (35:42) Elizabeth admits why she has gone public with her addiction

• (37:04) Discussion of Raya, Elizabeth's best friend

• (43:52) Navigating rage-filled grief and spiritual bankruptcy after loss

• (47:10) Switching from rage to self-accountability

• (51:42) Elizabeth made decisions on not hurting people in the telling of her book, while recovering in public

• (56:24) What is the definition of sobriety

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Surrendering to a higher power through a 12-step program is crucial for overcoming sex addiction and love addiction, fostering lasting recovery.

• Cultivating self-love and self-accountability by adopting top-line behaviors helps break destructive cycles and achieve emotional sobriety.

• Facing grief and withdrawal from love addiction requires honest introspection to heal and build trust in oneself.

More from Elizabeth Gilbert

The New Yorker Re: All the Way to the River- LinkedIn

Elizabeth Gilbert - Website

ALL THE WAY TO THE RIVER - Instagram

BOOKS REFERENCED:

• All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation: Gilbert, Elizabeth: 9780593540985: Amazon.com: Books
  Listen and Subscribe on Your Favorite Podcast Platform:

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The Latest From the Podcast:

2/13: Redefining Prayer: A Conversation with Heidi Smith
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1/22: Jillian Turecki on Self-Love, and the relationship secrets from her New Book
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10/15: Rapid-Fire Wisdom: Donna Lancaster on Life, Success, and Authentic Living
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10/8: The Power of Stories: Brittany Snow and Jaspre Guest Discuss ‘The September Letters’
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10/1: Embracing Integrity: A Conversation with Dr. Martha Beck
Apple | Spotify | Substack

9/24: Unlocking the Power of Menopause: A Conversation with Alexandra Pope & Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer
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By Amanda de Cadenet

In case you missed my live with Dene Logan today here it is …..Weirdly it sounds like I have a lisp ( which i don’t ) so here it is, lisp and all.

We talked about all the things I love to get into; emotional honesty, inherited identities, the myth of certainty, and what it actually means to come home to ourselves. And if you’ve been in the thick of questioning what it means to belong (without betraying yourself), this one’s for you.

Here’s what stuck with me.

Emotional Honesty > Performing Perfection

Dene doesn’t flinch when she talks about truth. Not the kind you post on Instagram with a carefully curated caption—but the kind that lives in your body. The kind that makes you ask, What am I really feeling right now, and can I be with it?

She reminded me that emotional honesty isn’t a performance—it’s a practice. And it’s messy. But it’s also the only way to build a life that feels like it actually belongs to you.

The Cult of Certainty

So many of us are taught to seek certainty like it’s a moral high ground. But Dene calls BS on that. She says that growth doesn’t live in certainty—it lives in the not-knowing. In the pause. In the discomfort of being in-between.

And truthfully, that’s where most of my healing has happened, too. In the liminal space. In the questions, not the answers. It reminds me of what Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in Letters to a Young Poet:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves... Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Dene echoes this. We don’t need to rush the answers. We just need the courage to stay with the questions long enough to let them shape us.

Belonging Without Betrayal

This one resonated with me.How often do we shrink ourselves, soften our edges, or put on a mask just to be accepted? Dene calls this “self-abandonment in exchange for belonging.” And it’s so normalized, especially for women, that we barely even notice we’re doing it.

But there’s another way. A slower, braver way. One that invites us to reclaim who we are before the world told us who we should be.

Discomfort as Data

Rather than avoiding discomfort, Dene sees it as sacred information. It's the body saying, “Hey, something’s out of alignment here.” What would happen if we listened to that whisper before it had to scream?

The Work of Unlearning

We also talked about what it means to decolonize our sense of self. To untangle from systems that told us how to look, behave, and belong. Dene speaks to this with such grounded clarity—it’s not just about rage (though that has its place), it’s about responsibility. It’s about choosing who you want to be, again and again.

Healing in Community

Maybe the most important takeaway?

Healing doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens in safe, honest, tender relationships. The kind where your nervous system can take a breath and say, “Okay. It’s safe now.”

I left that conversation reminded that there’s no arrival point. No finish line. Just layers of truth waiting to be unearthed—and the bravery to be with ourselves in the process.

So if you’re in the weeds, questioning everything, feeling a little raw—welcome. You’re not broken. You’re waking up.

And that’s where the real discovery begins.

Keep having meaningful conversations.
Amanda X

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We had such a great live chat about Ione’s life—so much to cover, and somehow not enough time. We talked about everything: her wild, fascinating childhood, what it’s like raising kids in a world that feels so different from the one we grew up in, and of course, the famous exes—because the media loves to reduce a woman’s story to the men she’s dated. Can’t believe that is still a thing, but it is.

We fondly remembered life before social media—when we could just be, make mistakes, and get up to all kinds of craziness and not worry about it being screen-captured for eternity. We talked about being a rock wife (or, at least, Ione did), what it means to be pansexual, and this indie film moment we had back in the day when Ione, Andrew Durham, Sofia Coppola, and Spike Jonze made a movie from Ione’s house—with me in it. Just one of those very unique moments that could only have happened then.

There’s so much history between us—decades of friendship, deep talks, and wild times—that we couldn’t possibly fit it all in. But we gave it a good go. And for everything we didn’t cover, well, you’ll just have to read her book.

Such a treat to have a live chat with one of the O.G trailblazers from my early life in L.A.

Ione Forever..

X

For those of you who joined us today, this was an incredibly special meeting with the profound wisdom from the wonderful and wise Rabbi Steve Leder.

As promised here is the recording of his talk, I have left out the sharing to respect the privacy of the group.

Please feel free to share with anyone who may need to hear his words.

See you next Sat, same time, same link .

Amanda, Heidi, Bird and Tracy.

When I was navigating my father’s death two years ago, Rabbi Steve Leder reached out to me to offer his much needed support and kindly sent me his incredible book, The Beauty of What Remains. The words in that book gave me the oxygen I desperately needed and I held onto it for dear life. This week in the Grief Circle, I am so honored to have Rabbi Leder join us to share some of his profound wisdom with grief and loss.

If you have been directly affected by the LA fires and need support, please join us @ 9:30 am PST/12:30 EST on Zoom. If you previously attended, it’s the same link. If this will be your first time joining us, please register and feel free to share this invite with anyone who you think could do with some support.

Amanda X

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Hello Friends!

What’s your relationship with prayer? If you prayed when you were younger, does it feel different now? Does it feel like you're just talking into the void and hoping someone - or something - hears you? I’d been asking myself the same questions when I found The Uncommon Book of Prayer by Heidi Smith. The moment I read it, I knew I had to have her on the podcast.

In this conversation, Heidi offers a new take on prayer, one that isn’t about rituals or perfection. It’s about connection, presence, and creating something sacred on your own terms. She shares how she reimagined the rigid, traditional ideas of prayer she grew up with into something new and deeply personal.

If you’re looking to reconnect with yourself, heal on an emotional and physical level, or just curious about what prayer could mean for you now, Heidi’s perspective is quite refreshing.

I hope you’ll listen and explore this with us. It might just shift how you think about sacred practices entirely.

Love,

Amanda X

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IN THIS EPISODE:

• [1:09] Heidi shares why she wrote The Uncommon Book of Prayer

• [4:50] Discussion on defining prayer, focusing (a psychosomatic integration tool), mindfulness, meditation affirmation and power

• [10:04] Discussion of benefits of prayer, healing, self-reflection, validation, co-regulation, grounding presence, and the nervous system

• [17:13] Discussion of trauma survivors, dissociation, faith and how to pray

• [22:55] The reaction of men to the book and Heidi describes her work and just being

• [32:11] How to begin to pray

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Prayer is redefined as a profoundly personal, sacred agreement between oneself and the divine. It emphasizes that it doesn’t have to follow a specific structure or tradition. It can evolve, adapting to one's changing beliefs and circumstances.

• Prayer and mindfulness practices can support nervous system regulation, fostering emotional self-soothing and reducing reliance on external coping mechanisms like substances or validation. They also promote improved mood, energy levels, and even healthy aging.

• Developing presence is fundamental in healing and spiritual growth. Whether through prayer, grounding practices, or co-regulation with people, animals, or nature, cultivating a sense of safety and connection is key to emotional and physical well-being.

More from Heidi Smith

The Uncommon Book of Prayer - Book

Heidi Smith Instagram

Heidi Smith Website

Listen and Subscribe on Your Favorite Podcast Platform:

Apple Podcasts 
Spotify

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The Latest From the Podcast:

1/22: Jillian Turecki on Self-Love, and the relationship secrets from her New Book
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10/15: Rapid-Fire Wisdom: Donna Lancaster on Life, Success, and Authentic Living
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10/8: The Power of Stories: Brittany Snow and Jaspre Guest Discuss ‘The September Letters’
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10/1: Embracing Integrity: A Conversation with Dr. Martha Beck
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9/24: Unlocking the Power of Menopause: A Conversation with Alexandra Pope & Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer
Apple | Spotify | Substack

8/30: Navigating Grief with Marisa Lee: Four Essential Strategies and Three Ways to Support the Bereaved
Apple | Spotify | Substack

If you would like to share the meeting with anyone else who needs it please feel free to forward this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/dgN-A_3OTZaXymaWkG65ag#/registration

Until then,

Amanda, Heidi, Bird and Tracy.

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This isn’t about fixing or moving on—it’s about making room for grief, learning how to carry it, and finding connection with others who understand. Our goal is to create a space where vulnerability is met with compassion, and where each participant feels heard, seen, and valued.

The first session of The Grief Circle is happening this Saturday, February 1 at 9:30am PT/12:30pm ET via Zoom.

Register Here

Register Here

What to Expect

Each session of The Grief Circle offers an emotional refuge and a sense of connection for those navigating l…

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