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Returning to Self w/ Kaighla Rises
75 Plays7 months ago
In this episode, I'm joined by Kaighla Rises, Pushcart Prize Nominee and award-winning author of Evryn, The Light, to talk about returning home to ourselves through creativity.
There is no one path to healing, but connecting with creativity, getting help for mental health, listening to our inner child, and leaving harmful religious structures and relationships have all brought Kaighla and I closer to ourselves. Get to know Kaighla's work at kaighlarises.com
References:
The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron
Things That Shatter by Kaighla Rises
Wellspring by Kaighla Rises
Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Peter Scazzero
[Image description: Photo of a woman in her mid-thirties with short pink hair, green eyes, wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh scarf around her neck against a black background. She's smiling warmly and looking directly into the camera.]
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Transcript
Introduction to The Ugly Podcast
00:00:04
Speaker
Welcome to The Ugly Podcast, the place where creatives are encouraged to make messy, ugly art and to redefine their relationship to their inner critic. Every other week, I am joined by creatives of all mediums and methods to discuss our creative processes and how we navigate the mental minefield of creativity. This podcast serves as a reminder that you and your art get to be whatever the hell you want to be, ugly and all.
00:00:32
Speaker
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to The Ugly Podcast.
Meet Kayla Rises
00:00:36
Speaker
It's me, Lauren Alexander. They them. And I'm here with an awesome guest who is a Pushcart Prize nominee and award-winning author of Ever in the Light, as well as her poetry collection Wellspring. Her work has been published in several magazines and anthologies, including Pulse and Echoliterary magazine. She was the featured poet in the 2022 inaugural issue of Hissup and Laurel.
00:01:02
Speaker
And she lives with her family in central Illinois, where she enjoys hiking, reading, painting, and collaborating with other local artists. Welcome. Can you please introduce yourself with your name and your pronouns, please?
Creativity as Escape
00:01:15
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much, Lauren. My name is Kayla Rises. I'm she-her.
00:01:20
Speaker
And yeah, cool. And so good to have you. We were just chatting before recording and having the best conversation about similar themes that we're experiencing. I'm sorry listeners that you didn't get to hear that, but we'll touch on some of those things as we go.
00:01:37
Speaker
Literally, we should have been recording the whole time. I'm sure we'll circle back around to it. But first, I want to just learn more about you and introduce you to listeners. So tell me more about your relationship to creativity. How has it evolved throughout your life in different stages and different iterations? What's creativity been for you?
00:01:58
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So I would say probably like when I was growing up, creativity was an escape. It was an escape from like the life that I was living and the hardships that I was facing. And I think that for me, it was about kind of connecting with my inner child and listening to what she has to say. And that's kind of what I've been doing in returning to myself like over the evolution of it.
00:02:23
Speaker
because there were a lot of years where I didn't create, unless kids count because I was making babies.
Religious Upbringing and Creative Restrictions
00:02:29
Speaker
But other than that, I wasn't actively making any art because I was part of a very, very, very strict sect of Islam where
00:02:39
Speaker
If you're going to make art, you can't have faces on the people or the animals because that's like trying to imitate God. And you can't, I was part of a sect that even believed that music, all music is haram. So unless it's just like a voice and that's it, only voices, then it's haram. Like, and it's the devil's, the devil, like trying to attempt you or whatever. So I had no art or creativity in my life whatsoever for like literally a decade.
00:03:05
Speaker
And I was so, so unhappy. I was so deeply unhappy. And knowing myself now, I'm like, well, of course I was unhappy. I live to create. I am here to create. I don't know if you've heard of the human design concept, but I am a
00:03:24
Speaker
generator. And that means I literally am here to generate. I'm here to create and make things. And I am ruled by my sacral chakra, which is basically my womb as a woman for me. That's what it means to me.
00:03:42
Speaker
So all of that together just means that I'm here to reignite the fire of connection with the earth, connection with the divine feminine, connection with myself and my fellow women. And to me, that looks like conversations like this, that looks like encouraging other people, that looks like creating art that encourages other people to reconnect with their own inner voice and create what they were born to create.
00:04:13
Speaker
I love that so much. What was it?
Reclaiming Her Story
00:04:17
Speaker
Do you remember like a specific moment or time that brought you back? So you had that like 10 year period where you didn't create anything aside from the babies. Um, but was there, what, what ultimately like pulled you back in? Was it like ultimately leaving the faith? How did that end up coming about?
00:04:35
Speaker
So I'll tell you, I had a very, very, very abusive marriage for about seven years, four of which happened in a village in the middle of nowhere in Egypt. And when I left him and I came home, one of the first things that I did after I like established my life was I decided to tell my story, because my throat chakra was completely blocked. He had not
00:05:03
Speaker
He controlled what I said, he controlled who I spoke to, he controlled where I went, he controlled how I spoke, like the tone of my voice. He controlled everything about me and he definitely controlled the narrative. So I wasn't allowed to tell anybody what was happening in my marriage, otherwise I'll bring shame on the sheikh, like I'll bring shame on the imam, you know? Shame on our family or whatever.
00:05:25
Speaker
So, I decided pretty quickly that as soon as I can, I'm going to tell my story because it's my right to tell my fucking story. And as Anne Lamott has said, if people want you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better. So, I started writing my story and I don't advise doing what I did. I'm actually a writing coach and I always tell people, if you want to write a memoir, I'll help you.
00:05:50
Speaker
But baby, you got to have some therapy. You got to have some coping mechanisms because I made myself very sick. I was very sick for years because I didn't have healthy coping mechanisms. I didn't know how to process. And once I felt safe and my life was kind of OK, I was remarried in a somewhat OK marriage. I had all my children. I was writing my book. I finished my college degree. I felt basically safe. So all of the like,
00:06:19
Speaker
trauma and pain and fear and anxiety that I shoved into a corner of the room in my heart was just like oozing out under the floor like just oozing out under the door into my life and just making me unhappy and so miserable. And it was like wanting me to stop like just no just stop like I can't relive these experiences you just have to stop.
Reviving Creativity with 'The Artist's Way'
00:06:41
Speaker
So I picked up Julia Cameron's book The Artist's Way.
00:06:46
Speaker
I was listening to a lot of podcasts at that time and somebody somewhere mentioned it. This is also around the time that I got very interested in stoicism, so it might have been a stoicism podcast. But she, her whole concept, the artist's way is
00:07:01
Speaker
beautiful. And basically what she argues is there's no such thing as writer's block, what you have is artist's block. And what that means is you have spent so many years ignoring your inner child, ignoring your inner artist, that now she is not going to give you anything. She's not going to, she's tried to get your attention. She's tried to ask for what she needs. You didn't listen. So now she's not going to give you any magic. That's how it goes. If you don't water the plant, the plant won't grow. So she has this whole three step system of like,
00:07:31
Speaker
Take yourself on artists dates do something that gives you joy that time is sacrosanct and no one else can come with you Just do something joyful
00:07:39
Speaker
romance your inner artist, make her feel special, make her feel like what she needs matters. I have all this important stuff, but I love you so much that I'm going to put it all to the side and we're going to do whatever makes you happy. Sometimes for me, that looked like going to the mall, to the fabric and art store and just looking around at stuff. Sometimes it looked like going to the coffee shop and just writing whatever came to me.
00:08:05
Speaker
Sometimes it looked like painting, sometimes it looked like just taking a long nap or taking a long walk out in the woods, right? I did whatever made my artist happy. And then the other aspect was morning pages, which is where basically as soon as you possibly can in the morning before you look at your phone, right after you go pee, sit down and empty your mind of all the garbage that's in there.
00:08:27
Speaker
And it's not supposed to be a journal in the sense that you're not really supposed to go back and read it and no one else will ever read it. The idea is there's a bunch of garbage in your brain and you can't get to the magic because it's so full of garbage.
00:08:42
Speaker
You know, when I say garbage, I mean like complaining things like, Oh my God, she's so annoying. Like, uh, you know, judgments of other people, judgments of yourself, criticisms. If you get it all out on paper by, she recommends three full eight by 10 pages. I never was able to write that much, but like, whatever works. And she recommends you do it by hand because there's like some special connection between your brain and your hand that has been studied or whatever. So I started doing that and it was life changing eventually after
00:09:12
Speaker
weeks or months of just like blah, blah, blah, way, way, way, you know, garbage, garbage, garbage. My inner artist was like, I'm going to give you some gems. You're going to empty out this garbage and then 15 minutes in, I'm going to hit you with a gem. And I was like, wait a minute. And then I would take that gem and like transfer it to my actual journal, right? Like, Oh man. And then like more garbage, garbage, garbage, right?
00:09:33
Speaker
And that made me become really selective in what I put into me. So what I mean is I became really selective about what I read as far as I'm not going to read something that is not going to take me closer to myself. That was the beginning of the end for me as a Muslim because I had understood that
00:09:55
Speaker
whether it's the religion itself or whether it's the very strict sect that I was part of, whatever it is, the deeper in I got into that religion, the further I felt from myself. And maybe that's because I was doing it wrong. A lot of Sufi Muslims I've spoken to are like, yeah, you were just doing it wrong. And I'm like, okay. If something like that, that's so important, if it can be done wrong, then I just, no, thank you. I don't, okay.
00:10:24
Speaker
And before I was Muslim, I was an evangelical Christian. I went to Bible college. And again, the deeper I got into studying the academics of it and the science and the blah, blah, blah, blah, the further I felt from God, which is to say the further
Journey Away from Organized Religion
00:10:37
Speaker
I felt from myself, the part of me inside of me that is a portion of God that we all carry. So I realized that the closer I got to my inner artist,
00:10:50
Speaker
The less I needed an external religion, the less I felt like I needed someone to validate my experiences with the divine. I just couldn't really keep up with it anymore. It didn't make me happy. It was like I was in a conversation with God all day long, and then it was time to go make the salah or make the prayer. It's five times a day or whatever. And I'm like, hey, God, hold up a second. I need to pray real quick.
00:11:11
Speaker
you know what I'm saying? And then I would like go pray and then like, okay, so anyway, what I was saying was, you know, like, it just didn't feel natural, like at all. So yeah, like that was kind of the beginning of me like returning to myself. And that made me very, that made my ex-husband very upset, not the horrible abusive one, but the kind of okay one. Because he expected me to be a good submissive Muslim wife.
00:11:36
Speaker
But as I was writing my book and coming home to myself in that process, I stopped being pliable. I stopped being willing to abandon myself, as Glenn and Doyle would say. And I remember the first thing I did that was like the first real nail in the coffin in our marriage was that I had really long hair that was incredibly thick and unmanageable, and it made me really unhappy.
00:12:03
Speaker
but he was obsessed with my long hair and that's what he wanted. And I went and I got about three inches trimmed off because it was all dead ends. Cause I needed, like I just wanted something new.
00:12:14
Speaker
And he was so angry with me. He was like, you're not allowed to cut your hair without my permission. Like, how dare you? I have to look at you. You're my partner. I decide. Like, you can't just do that. And I remember thinking to myself, like, all of my mother and all my ancestors were just like, what the fuck? How dare he? Like, are you serious right now? I'm going into the past and the future. Just no. Right. Like, why are you doing this? And how is this different from your other marriage in Egypt? Like, what even?
00:12:42
Speaker
So the next day I went back to the hair salon and I chopped all of it off. Hell yeah. To like here, longer than this. But, and he was so upset he almost- For all listeners, she pointed to chin length, which right now she has a short like-
00:12:58
Speaker
Yeah. So he was so upset. He was like, I'm going to divorce you. And I was like, I mean, if that's so important to you that you need to control my hair, maybe you should like, okay, I don't know what to tell you. And then like, I, you know, would have conversations with men, which was like a big no, no, just like innocent, just like conversations at the coffee shop and like, Oh, you're on a date with a man. No, I'm talking to a person. Like, what do you mean?
00:13:23
Speaker
and things like that and it was just he couldn't tolerate it and so the more creative I became and the more in connection I felt with myself and with God the further we fell apart from each other and the further I fell apart from Islam in general and then
00:13:41
Speaker
I think I, in my heart of hearts, stopped believing in the fundamental tenets of Islam in about early 2019. And then he left me at the end of 2019. And then in like the middle of 2021, I officially was like, no, I don't, I don't need a religion at all. And certainly not this one. Like I just, God is right here and I go to the trees and God is there. So no, thank you.
00:14:08
Speaker
Yeah, I think I see a lot like, especially just coming home to yourself through creativity is going to fuck up your life in the best way. And I think any anybody
00:14:26
Speaker
So I was taking a drink. 100%, 110, 150%. If you are going to get married or do any kind of like big life commitment and you don't feel connected to your inner child and your inner creativity, do that first. That is your work first. And then see if you still want to have that big life commitment.
00:14:51
Speaker
OMG. Yes. Thank you. I was literally just thinking today, like I was telling you before we were recording.
00:14:59
Speaker
I like was like hardcore wing manning my man today. Like I was at a coffee shop and I saw a guy that looked kind of like my partner and I got into a conversation with him just gassing my partner up, just like, Oh my God, he's so cool. You would love him. Like you guys need to be friends. Like I was just going on and on. And I was reflecting on the drive home. Like if this were any of my previous partners, they would be so mad at me. Like you literally talked to a man at a coffee shop and gave him your number.
00:15:25
Speaker
and talk for like an hour and you hugged him, like I would be in so much trouble. But when I called my partner and I told him, oh my God baby, I found like your new S friend. He's like, oh my God, tell me more. I'm like, yeah, he's like this and he's like this and he's like this and your guys' energy is like so similar. He was like, oh my God, I love you so much for trying to connect me with people. Like thank you.
00:15:44
Speaker
I bet it felt so good to be in his presence. I'm like, it really did. He doesn't have any possessiveness or jealousy or control at all in his body. He loves me so much that he just wants me to be well. And whatever makes me well, he wants it. And that's when I tell you that I couldn't possibly have asked for a better partner for myself.
00:16:10
Speaker
2021, I was intentionally single after a very long and
00:16:15
Speaker
miserable hofays after my divorce. I was intentionally single in 2021. And I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted in a partner. And I spent a lot of time, you can call it praying, you can call it manifesting, you can call it whatever you want. But I would just lay in bed and be like, will you just please come to me? Like I'm ready for you. Like I know you're out there. I am designed. Like some people do well when they're single. I do not. I really am designed to be in relationship in romantic relationship. It's where I thrive the most.
00:16:44
Speaker
Obviously, in a healthy one. So I remember being like Universe, I want them to be like this and this and this and this. And one of the key things I said to Universe was, I want my partner to make sense in the way that
00:17:00
Speaker
If we're out somewhere and somebody sees us, they're like, oh, of course Kayla is with that person. Of course that person wants Kayla. They just work. It's obvious. And that's exactly what my partner is to me.
Mental Health and Creativity
00:17:13
Speaker
He's a painter and I'm a poet and we complement each other and we challenge each other to grow and get on each other's nerves a lot of the time.
00:17:23
Speaker
He makes me better. I'm such a better person than I was before I met him. And by better, I mean closer to myself. I'm closer
00:17:33
Speaker
closer to myself, closer to creative source, closer to nature. I could, we could have a whole conversation about why I love Jean, but he's just a really good man and a talented artist. But anyway, anyway, yeah, so being loved by him and the healing experience of being with him really, really like brought my creativity to the next level, seriously. And then the other thing that really helped, I started taking drugs and by drugs, I mean medicine.
00:18:02
Speaker
I have severe PTSD, crippling anxiety, a bunch of satellite issues from the fact that I've just had chronic trauma. I've never really known a life without trauma. And then what happened to me in Egypt was so big. If you want to know, I don't recommend it, but you could read my memoir, Things That Shatter.
00:18:24
Speaker
It's not fun. It will make you sad and angry, and I just don't recommend it. But one could, if one wanted to know more about that story, could read it. It's available on my website. But basically, I was really unwell for a lot of years, and a lot of doctors were like,
00:18:43
Speaker
you could try an SSRI. And I was like, but maybe, maybe not because I don't want to be dependent. And like, what if, what if everything goes to shit and I can't get access to that drug? And then I like, I knew, I like, I, for a minute, I knew what it felt like to be well. And like, now I just can't cause I need the drug. A lot of things I told myself because I've lived in poverty my whole life and I have like a very scarcity mindset because there's never enough of anything for us.
00:19:09
Speaker
So, but you know what, um, my mom died a couple of years ago and like a lot of things have happened since then. And I said, you know what? She raised me to be afraid of medicine. She raised me to be afraid of doctors, to not trust them. And I said, I think that I'm willing to give it a shot. I've been through years of therapy. I know what's wrong with me. I need to actually get better and I can't get better. I mean, I had to quit so many jobs because I was having like
00:19:37
Speaker
panic attacks on such a regular basis that I physically could not work. I was not able to be there for my children. At one point, Lauren, I couldn't even drive. I was so unwell. In January of this year, I bit the bullet and I said, okay, I'm going to do it. I started taking an SSRI. When I tell you
00:19:58
Speaker
I'm not even going to cry, but I was so afraid that I was going to become like a zombie, that I wasn't going to have my creative energy, that I thought that it was my sorrow that gave me creative drive. But it wasn't. Ever since I started taking this SSRI, now it's been about four months.
00:20:21
Speaker
I have such access to such a higher level of thinking. I don't feel so afraid all the time. I don't have crushing chest pain. I have clarity of mind. I know the next right step. I listen to myself.
00:20:38
Speaker
I feel calm. I trust myself. My relationship with my partner is better. I could go on and on. I wish that I had done this years ago, but I know I wasn't ready years ago. It's truly been life changing. Any creatives out there listening, if you're struggling with your mental health and you think,
00:20:58
Speaker
Oh, if I got on the right medication or if I tried medication or something, it's going to take away my, you know, my, I won't be able to connect with my inner artist or I won't. Honey, it's bullshit. Like when you feel well, you're going to have an even stronger connection to your inner artist. You're going to be even more creative, I promise. And if you're taking a drug, like a medication from a doctor that is making you feel less creative, you're not on the right medication. Go and get on another one. Try another one.
00:21:24
Speaker
I can't say enough about how important it is to take care of your mental health, get adequate sleep, get movement.
Advice for Creatives
00:21:32
Speaker
One of my favorite places, Lauren, to think and feel creative is in the pool at the local YMCA because you can't have your phone. There's no TVs. There's no distraction. It's just you and the water.
00:21:47
Speaker
And I'm not like an athlete or anything. Like I just get in the water because I'm large and I have my joints cause pain and I have a bad leg and stuff. So it's like a good place to get movement without hurting myself, no impact or whatever, right?
00:22:02
Speaker
Yeah, but I'm such a I'm such a silly little goose in the water. Like I just lay there and I just like float and just like listen to the water and think about how it sounds like I'm in my mother's womb again. And I just like close my eyes and just kind of float around. And then I'll like do a little doggy paddle lap to the other end. And then I'll do some pull ups on the like diver bar thingy, you know, because it just feels really good to be able to lift up my own body weight because the water helps.
00:22:29
Speaker
And then I'll do a backstroke. It's just very lazy, very soothing, but I have so many creative ideas that come to me there. Get fresh air, get outside, get away from your screen, disconnect from people that don't believe that you might be a little bit magic. That's my unsolicited advice for artists that feel blocked.
00:22:55
Speaker
Listen to yourself and get outside and get movement and take care of your mental health and get on the right medication if you need it. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. And all of those things help to also like figure out how to listen to yourself.
00:23:10
Speaker
I also grew up like very strict Christian home and like I felt so disconnected from myself for so long for like the first 28 years of my life. If someone asked me what do you want out of life or what do you
00:23:27
Speaker
What do you want to eat? I'd be like, I don't know. Like I'm a complete empty vessel. I have no feelings or opinions. And like, Oh my God. Listen, I'm like shooketh right now. Yeah. No, I'm shooketh because that same, that same conversation. Listen, I remember one, I remember one night when I was in Bible college and I'm sitting in the dorm room and there's this girl.
00:23:51
Speaker
who lived in the same town as my college, but she didn't go to the college. Like we just met somewhere and became friends. And she was also Christian, but she asked me, like I was thinking about a certain mission trip that I was going to go on or not. I'm not really sure. And she was like, well, what do you want to do? And I was like, it doesn't matter what I want. I'm a vessel for God to fill and I'll just like do whatever God wants me to do. And she was like, has it occurred to you that God cares what you want?
00:24:14
Speaker
And it was the most baffling fucking thing anyone had ever said to me. I was like, what? God literally like killed Jesus. Pretty sure he didn't want that. Like we're not supposed to want things, bro. Like I was so confused by that. And that was like the beginning awakening for me of like, Oh, wait a minute. And she was literally like, haven't you considered that maybe God cares what you want and that maybe God understands that with your happy doing what you do, you'll be better at being good. Like you'll be better at being a Christian if you're happy. And I was like,
00:24:44
Speaker
What? Blasphemy. You know, like unreal.
00:24:50
Speaker
Like how dare you try to tempt me to the devil, get behind me, Satan. You know, like it was so confusing for me. And I was like, like 19 at a time or whatever. But that's what I'm just, when you said that, I was like, bro, when I tell you that organized religion in general, bro is like a, let me back up. Sorry. I don't use bro as a gendered term. I hope that doesn't offend you. I actually like bro bro. It's kind of gender affirming for me. I like it.
00:25:16
Speaker
Okay, good. I just like call everybody bro. It's just my thing. I call my kids bro, even my you get it. So I feel like when I think about what organized religion took for me
Reading 'Fitra' - A Poetic Insight
00:25:32
Speaker
just not having that connection to yourself because you really do. I mean, in Islam would say that that is you killing your nuffs or killing your ego. Like you have to kill your nuffs in order to like be what God wants you to be because your nuffs wants you to be evil. Your nuffs wants you to like not follow your inner knowing of God's, God's sovereignty over you. Like your nuffs just wants what it wants and you have to like kill it. You have to ignore it. You have to fast in order to kill it. Like there's all this,
00:26:01
Speaker
You know, the best way I can say this is I wrote a poem. Uh, it's in my book, Wellspring and the poem is called fitra and I, it's not long. I'll read it for you. Um, is that okay? Yeah, please. Okay. Um, this basically just like sums up exactly how I felt about what it took for me. Uh, so again, the poem is called fitra, which is an Arabic word that means intuition.
00:26:26
Speaker
It's the idea that we were all kind of born with an inner knowing of like right and wrong, not necessarily.
00:26:33
Speaker
what Islam says is right and wrong, but we all just have an inner knowing that some things are wrong, like murder. It just feels not good, right? Okay, so Muslims would argue that we all are born with fitra, we're all born Muslim in that sense, that we just understand that God is sovereign, and we just like, even the trees know that God is God or whatever. And they argue that if you're not worshiping God, it's because you don't have,
00:27:00
Speaker
Wow, where is the book? Sorry, here it is. It's because you don't have connection to your fitra. It's because like your nafs is in control or whatever, right? And I rejected that when I left Islam. I was like, you know, even before I left Islam, I was like, I'm not really sure that's what it is. Okay, so the poem is called fitra, and it's in my book Wellspring, which is also on my website.
00:27:22
Speaker
The most rebellious thing I have ever done is believe with absolute certainty in God's unconditional love for me, in a world bent on convincing me that I have to work for it, that I need scholars to help me understand it, that I must guard myself against my intuition for fear it could be the voice of the devil.
00:27:44
Speaker
And now I know what they don't know. The devil does not revel in my freedom, in my strength, in my autonomy, in my empowerment, in my rising up. It is God who smiles when a woman finds herself, stands in her power, reconnects with her intuition.
00:28:02
Speaker
because she is irresistible to other hungry women, creating a chain effect of women uplifting other women, changing the world like nothing else can. And there is nothing Iblis hates more than being defeated by mortal human beings made of clay and water. Thank you for sharing that. You're welcome.
00:28:28
Speaker
Yeah, so I empathize with you, that feeling of having to abandon yourself and not even know what you want, not even know who you are, not even know how you truly feel. And the problem, Lauren, is that this sets people up to be abused. It sets people up to be abused in every kind of way because it basically says...
00:28:49
Speaker
Yes. And to abuse themselves and to abuse others. It feels inherently icky to hurt people, right? But if you have spent so many years not listening to your intuition, not caring how things make you feel, ignoring the signals from your body and your spirit that something isn't right, because, oh, it might be the devil or it might be like, if you have trained yourself to think like that, then you will allow anyone to pull the wool over your eyes because you'll say, oh, well,
00:29:17
Speaker
You know, like the Christians say, you know, the devil often comes disguised as an angel of light. Like, you're never going to trust your own perception. You're never going to, someone can say, oh, well, you know, it's just really easy to be roped into things that are bad for you if you are programmed and socialized not to listen to yourself.
00:29:39
Speaker
And I mean, that's, they like that. That's kind of the point. Like, you know, join our religion and everybody like have group think and just do what you're told because like, that's the whole idea is these tribes or whatever, like, we're going to compete with each other and know my religions better, know my religions better, and so on.
00:29:59
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And like, it's, it's so tied also to like, you're not, if you think that about yourself, you're not going to give that allowance to other people to follow, like to ask for what they need, which is how you get like, they think that, you know, queer people are just making it up or asking for too many things when they ask for equality and equity and like,
00:30:23
Speaker
It's like, well, you shouldn't complain because I don't complain. And it's like, you could complain about more things. You do understand that, right? Like if something's bothering you, you deserve to say, this is bothering me. And just because this person is saying, this is bothering me, this hurts me. That doesn't mean that they need to swallow it and shut up. That means you should speak up more when things hurt you. It means you are like harming yourself and harming others by this perpetual thinking that I can't ask for what I need.
00:30:50
Speaker
because I don't deserve it or it's the devil or whatever and that means that none of you deserve things either. It's just this awful like perpetual cycle of violence and repression and yeah. Absolutely. I've had that exact conversation with my partner before because he's not as many years out of that kind of thinking as I am. So there's a lot of times where he'll
00:31:14
Speaker
He'll be in the middle of telling me how he feels, which is so difficult for him anyway, because he was not really raised to ever be allowed to have an opinion. I remember he told me a story that he didn't even know that you could get customization on your burger at McDonald's. Because his parents were like, you're going to get what you get and you won't be upset. You're going to eat what we give you. Oh, that breaks my heart, thinking of children, and that's not fair. But anyway, anyway.
00:31:39
Speaker
He, he'll be telling me how he feels about a thing and I'll be listening and then he'll stop himself and say, Oh, but you know what? I'm not going to complain. Some people don't even have feet. And I'll be like, John, you don't have to do the suffering Olympics with me. I don't care if some people don't have feet. You're allowed to complain that you don't like your shoes. You're allowed to complain. Like that's okay. I don't know. I can't stand this mindset. And I understand that it's like a fundamental
00:32:04
Speaker
aspect of like some cultures and the way that they raise their children, but just very much like, no, you're not going to complain. You're not going to ask for too much. You're not this, this mindset of like abnegation being holy, not ever acknowledging your own needs and just always thinking of everybody else and so on and so forth.
00:32:21
Speaker
And one of the things from Islam that I still very much believe and hold on to is that Prophet Muhammad always talked about how the middle path, the middle way, the way of moderation is best. So you can't fast all the time. There's a time to fast and there's a time to eat. You can't sleep all the time. There's a time to work and a time to rest. And I think the sect that I was part of definitely did not take that to heart. They were very much like extreme balls to the wall.
00:32:51
Speaker
But I think that you're absolutely right. If we can be persuaded not to listen to our own intuition, then we can be persuaded to silence others. And this is what I mean when I tell people that patriarchy hurts everyone, including men.
Challenging Patriarchy
00:33:06
Speaker
And some of the best, most wonderful, successful cheerleaders for patriarchy are women with internalized patriarchy.
00:33:15
Speaker
women who silence each other, women who silence themselves. The most like smartest thing men have ever done is to like control women by convincing women to control themselves on each other. And that's, that's what I want to burn to the ground. I don't hate men. I love men. I love men. I love masculinity. I just want for men, for people in general to understand that patriarchy strips you of
00:33:45
Speaker
It strips you of your gentleness. It strips you of your compassion. It strips you of your humanity. It strips you of your sense of communal concern for others. It's very individualistic. It's very, you know, hyper focused on right now and in gratification and more, more, more, more, more. And it, you know, it hurts everybody. Nobody is benefiting from the patriarchy at the end of the day. Really they're not. Yeah.
Creativity and Spiritual Connection
00:34:10
Speaker
Absolutely. I love where this conversation has taken us and I want to talk about like how, I mean, we've been touching on this, but like how creativity is kind of after like so many harmful experiences with religion, how creativity is like, it's an avenue back to a healthy spirituality and
00:34:38
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know if you have immediate thoughts that jump to mind with that, but... I do, yeah. Yeah, go for it. I remember when I was still Christian. This would have been when I was about 20 years old, so still in Bible college. I remember reading a book, a book written by a Christian called Healthy Spirituality.
00:34:55
Speaker
Sorry, emotionally healthy spirituality is what it's called. And that again, you know, kind of like the conversation I had with my friend really opened my eyes because he argues in that book that you cannot be spiritually healthy if you're not emotionally healthy. Like that doesn't exist. And I remember being like, wait, what? My emotions matter. My inner life matters. Like what?
00:35:16
Speaker
I think that we're all just experiencing, we're all just the universe experiencing itself. Alan Watts argues that we're all just God pretending to not be God, playing a game of hide and seek with ourselves. Obviously, I might change my mind later, but my understanding of
00:35:39
Speaker
all of the things is that I carry that light in me and you carry that light in you and I honor the light that you carry. And the trees also carry the light. And unfortunately, some pieces of shit also carry the light. And I have to honor that light in everyone. And sometimes the way I honor that light, for example, if it's like, I don't know, a genocide defender, sometimes the way I honor that light is calling them back to themselves. Like you need to return to who you really are and who you really are.
00:36:09
Speaker
In some ways, I am more Muslim than I ever was when I was Muslim. Because I really believe in fitr. I really believe that we all need to return to ourselves that if you return to yourself, you are returning to God. And you know, I've had people, I have a tattoo on my wrist that says memento mori. And that is a big, it's a big thing in stoicism. And the concept is to ponder on your own death, understand and accept that death is waiting for you. Death is stalking you around the corner.
00:36:37
Speaker
you will die and to live with such a mindset rather than YOLO, you only live once. Yeah, you do only live once. So live a life of honor, live a life you can be proud of in the sense of you have this chance to do right with this version of yourself, with this in the multiverse, do right by yourself. And for me, the whole idea of Memento Mori is
00:37:02
Speaker
I am intimately familiar with my darkness. The things that I have been through, the multiple waves of trauma have stripped me of ego over and over and over and over. And believe me, there's always another veil of ego behind that one. But it stripped me of so many veils of ego that I have seen to the core of who I am. And she's so beautiful.
00:37:23
Speaker
And you also are that underneath it all. And so are the trees. And I honor that. I honor that in everyone. And I think that
00:37:34
Speaker
we, life is a spiral staircase going downward, going inward. We think we've learned a lesson. We think, okay, yeah, I got this one. We're good. I got it. Won't do it again. And then we come to the same lesson, but at a deeper, at like a higher, more difficult level, right? But it's just, most people imagine a spiral staircase going up, right? But I imagine going in, going down, because now you're at a harder level, which means you're getting closer to the fire. You're getting closer to, or if you prefer closer to the darkness, like,
00:38:06
Speaker
what the magic that is going to propel you forward into what you are designed to do, what you are here for, waits behind a massive veil of darkness. It waits behind
00:38:20
Speaker
a chasm of unknowns. And in order to truly reach your potential, you have to have the courage, the chutzpah, what have you, to be willing to jump into that chasm and say, I trust myself. I trust myself to handle what will happen if I am not liked. I trust myself to handle what will happen if things don't go the way I thought they might go.
00:38:44
Speaker
And so having touched the deepest part of myself, I have walked through all the veils of my darkness, not all, most of them. I have made friends with my shadow. I have welcomed her with open arms and said, I can love you like that. The more I do that, the more I can extend that to others. To me, religion is a codified,
00:39:06
Speaker
rule book for one person's experience of the divine and I don't need that. If you wrote a book about your experience with the divine and I wrote a book and he wrote a book and she wrote a book and they wrote a book, each one of those books would be different, right? None of us needs to copy your experience with God. The whole concept of Islam is
00:39:25
Speaker
Muhammad had this experience with God, and he chose to respond to that experience in this way. He prayed like this, and he washed himself like this when he made wudu, and he had sex literally, literally, he had sex like this, and he stepped the right foot before the left foot into a room like this. He brushed his teeth like this. They became so obsessed with the things he did because they thought, alas, if I be like him, maybe God will also
00:39:51
Speaker
you know, want to be close to me. And what they don't understand is that each of us has that opportunity to have that relationship with God experienced in a way that's as unique as each person is. There's an infinite, infinite number of iterations to experience God, infinite number of ways to experience God.
00:40:09
Speaker
And we can't codify it for other people. I can't say to my partner, you know, if you do it like this, you might have better results. Like God is some kind of vending machine. But if you do things right, you'll get better positive results or whatever. All I can say is this is what I've done and this has been my experience. And I want to hear your experience and what you've done. And let's try new things and try other ways to come nearer to God.
00:40:33
Speaker
That to me is really the fundamental crux of what's wrong with religion and where they've gone wrong is you can't codify an experience any more than you can codify a romance. You can't codify an experience any more than you can codify someone walking outside and looking up at the sky. This is everybody's individual experience and we can't rob ourselves of that or one another without causing irreparable harm. Yeah. I find that for me,
00:41:04
Speaker
I've been, I've, I've always been, not always, obviously, but ever since leaving religion, I've been very resistant to any kind of feeling of like divinity or spirituality. And then as I got in touch with my creativity and got closer to myself, that is when I actually started to experience what
00:41:30
Speaker
wholly meant to me and be able to define that word according to my own experience. I would not have been able to do that if I didn't get back in touch with that little kid who just wanted to draw or wanted to be silly and playful. Like that little kid brought me back to a connection to something that I had written off as
00:41:58
Speaker
just total bullshit, you know? And like, and now I can be like, yes, now I am like a secular spiritualist while I bring in my like scientific beliefs. And then also like, yeah, I totally believe in tarot because this thing is real as hell, but it's not real, but it is to me. And it's like, it's
00:42:18
Speaker
And so being creative has allowed that avenue. And I think that it allows us to bring that individuality into our experience and rediscover what holy means to us and actually create what you're talking about, this connection to God or self or purpose or whatever you want to call it. But it can open up these floodgates to allow you to sit with that darkness and rediscover something that you didn't know was there.
00:42:49
Speaker
Thank you so much for being here and for chatting with me and for telling us all about the magic that you've created in your life and the spirituality that you have found and just ways that we can all open ourselves up and connect. And just thank you so much for sharing all of that. Of course. Thank you for having me.
00:43:11
Speaker
Of course.
Conclusion and Embrace Creativity
00:43:12
Speaker
Can you share really quick, and I will have this down in the show notes, but just say it here as well, where people can support you. How can they find you? Yeah. So if you go to KaylaRises.com, it's K-A-I-G-H-L-A Rises.com.
00:43:27
Speaker
That's R-I-S-E-S. That's my website where I have all of my updates, poetry stuff, author stuff. If you are wanting to learn how to tell your story and you don't know where to start, I'm a writing coach as well, so you can look into that. All of my books are linked on my website. You can also get them on Amazon, Barnes & Noble. You can follow me on Instagram. My handle is KaylaRises. Again, K-A-I-G-H-L-A Rises.
00:43:55
Speaker
TikTok, Kayla.rises. Let's see here. Facebook is author, Kayla rises. And I think that's it. Yeah. Awesome. Amazing. Thank you so much. And everybody out there, keep it ugly.
00:44:11
Speaker
The Ugly podcast is created by me, Lauren Alexander of Scribe and Sunshine. It is produced and sort of edited, also by me, and written and directed by absolutely nobody. If you like the podcast, be sure to rate and leave a review on your preferred platform and share with the creative people in your life. If you're interested in learning more about what I do, head to scribeandsunshine.com to learn more about my Ugly Art 101 course, my perfectionism workshop, my editing services, and the Writer's Helm, which is an online community for writers, co-captain by myself and Gabby Goodlow. As always, keep it ugly.