With Hardship Comes Ease – Illness, Surrender & the Return to Oneness

In this deeply moving conversation, Dr. Habib sits with interfaith minister and author Liza Rankow, whose book Soul Medicine for a Fractured World explores the healing that emerges from our deepest fractures.

Together they reflect on:

• Illness as a spiritual teacher
• Woundedness and wholeness as two sides of the same coin
• The Japanese art of Kintsugi as a metaphor for the soul
• Suffering as a “discipline of the Spirit” (in the lineage of Howard Thurman)
• The choice to open—or close—in the face of pain
• How personal healing becomes medicine for the world

From Crohn’s disease and near-death experiences to mystical union, surrender, and the return to our inner child, this episode is an honest exploration of how hardship can clear away the veils that keep us from Love.

Transcript

Beyond Names: Spirituality for Anyone and Everyone

YouTube Channel: Beyond Names with Dr. Habib Boerger

YouTube handle: @BeyondNamesPodcast

Episode: 36

Host: Dr. Habib Boerger

Conversation Partner: Dr. Liza Rankow

Title: With Hardship Comes Ease – Illness, Surrender & the Return to Oneness

Description: In this deeply moving conversation, Dr. Habib sits with interfaith minister and author Liza Rankow, whose book Soul Medicine for a Fractured World explores the healing that emerges from our deepest fractures.

Together they reflect on:

• Illness as a spiritual teacher
• Woundedness and wholeness as two sides of the same coin
• The Japanese art of Kintsugi as a metaphor for the soul
• Suffering as a “discipline of the Spirit” (in the lineage of Howard Thurman)
• The choice to open—or close—in the face of pain
• How personal healing becomes medicine for the world

From Crohn’s disease and near-death experiences to mystical union, surrender, and the return to our inner child, this episode is an honest exploration of how hardship can clear away the veils that keep us from Love.

Transcript:

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Welcome to Beyond Names, I'm Dr. Habib. This is a space for spiritual seekers and soulful misfits, for the curious and the committed, for those grounded in the tradition, and for those who are not yet sure what they believe.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Whether you call the Divine God, Yahweh, Allah, Elohim, Hashem, Great Spirit, Higher Power, you are welcome here, and if you're working and searching for language that fits, of course.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Together, we'll explore the intersection of spirituality and daily life, getting through the nitty-gritty, the wisdom of many traditions, and the ways we return to our true selves, to our source, to the light that each of us carry within.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I'm so glad you're here. Let's begin with introduction of our conversation for this episode.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Dr. Liza… am I going to say this right? Rankow? Is that how you say it?

liza rankow: Rankow [Rancoh]

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Rankow Rankow.

liza rankow: Dr. Liza Rankow is an interfaith minister, educator and activist. She has been a spiritual counselor and teacher for more than 3 decades.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Her life work centers around deep healing that is essential to personal and social transformation.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Liza is also an author, having published essays, creative nonfiction and poetry, as well as academic articles, and most recently, her book, Soul Medicine for a Fractured World: Healing, Justice, and the Path of Wholeness.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, to learn more about Dr. Rankow and her work… Rankow?

liza rankow: Liza is fine.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Liza, Rancow. Rancow, Rancow, please visit.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Liza Rancow, and that's spelled R-A-N-K-O-W dot org [https://www.lizarankow.org/]. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, Liza, welcome. Thank you for being here.

liza rankow: Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Likewise. So, if you would please, if you would tell us a little bit about your spiritual story in accordance with what you're comfortable sharing as a way of introducing yourself.

liza rankow: Hmm.

liza rankow: Well… I wasn't raised in any organized religion.

liza rankow: No doctrinal teachings, no worship services.

liza rankow: My father was, a Jewish atheist.

liza rankow: And my mom was a mostly non-practicing Lutheran.

liza rankow: But along the way, as I was growing up, they became spiritual seekers, and so I, I really, was nurtured in a climate of seeking, surrounded by books, right?

liza rankow: And it was the 1960s, so the books were spirituality, and psychic phenomenon, and reincarnation, and things, things along those lines.

liza rankow: The summer that I turned 9, I read the Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda.

liza rankow: And then, when I was… I don't know, 5th grade, so, like, 10 or 11, I used to get up before school and read the Gospels, right?

liza rankow: I was as smitten with Jesus as I was with Yogananda.

liza rankow: So I… I think I've always had a deeply spiritual nature.

liza rankow: And although I've studied many religions throughout my life, and I've learned from a number of spiritual teachers in different traditions that I've been more drawn to the essence of spirituality, rather than the institutional practice.

liza rankow: Today, I would describe my spiritual life as a nature-centered mysticism that's rooted in the oneness and sacredness of all that is, right. 

liza rankow: I believe that everything, everyone belongs to an infinite, creative, intelligent wholeness, and that everything emerges from this one common source. Right?

liza rankow: From the… from the tiniest nanoparticle to the vast cosmos and everything in between.

liza rankow: And that my practice is to continually open to that wholeness, to that… what I call the divine.

liza rankow: I mean, none of the words are sufficient to capture any of this, right?

liza rankow: But, but to seek to be…to live in relationship with it, and to live from it, and to be in service to that collective wholeness.

liza rankow: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I love that – to -- that your practice is to open to this wholeness, and to be in relationship with it, to be and to be in service to it.

liza rankow: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Because if we're in service to this wholeness, Capital W, wholeness...

liza rankow: Capital W for sure.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: If we're in service with a capital W wholeness, then we're in service to not only our own heart and mind, but also to the hearts and minds of the rest of our brothers and sisters in humanity.

liza rankow: Yeah, in humanity and beyond, right? Because we're also… In kinship with nature and every expression of life.

liza rankow: We're in kinship with ancestors and coming generations.

liza rankow: And to… and to be… in conscious relationship with all the dimensions of that, I think it, it, it changes not only…kind of the ethical imperative of how we live, but it also shifts our inner experience of life.

liza rankow: You know, we're… it's not just little me in the face of all the world's calamities and injustice and suffering, but that…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Right.

liza rankow: ...that we are… that we… we are informed by, we are guided by, we are sustained by this, this larger life.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: That's beautiful. I can't help but think of… my teachers… who talk about… the…plant world, the mineral world, the animal world.

liza rankow: Exactly. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And the… those that are bridges between the worlds, you know?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So… the idea of a wholeness, and I love the way that you talk about wholeness because, of course, how it relates to the concept of unity and oneness in my tradition, in Islam, and in Islamic Sufism.

liza rankow: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Mysticism, yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, I wanted to ask a follow-up question around your spiritual story, and I am fascinated by what prompts people's spiritual awakenings.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And so, I'm wondering if you… if there was anything in particular that you are aware of that prompted your parents' transition from, you know, Jewish atheists, and Lutheran…

liza rankow: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: to seeking, to spiritual seeker. Were you aware of anything in particular that in…

liza rankow: Hmm.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: ...that was the catalyst for that?

liza rankow: You know, that's such a great question, Habib. My parents are both, obviously, you know, in the ancestral world at this point.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: Otherwise, I would, like, call Mom and say, you know what?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: What was it, Mom? 

liza rankow: I do know that at the time they got married in the 1950s, it was not a normal or, in many circles, acceptable for a Jewish boy to marry a non-Jewish girl, for a non-Jewish girl to marry a Jewish boy, it wasn't… it was not popular on either side of the family, right?

liza rankow: And that… when I was really quite young, which… so it would have been fairly early in their life together that they were feeling the need for some kind of community.

liza rankow: They joined… this was in New York City, they joined the Ethical Culture Society.

liza rankow: So, apparently, my birth was announced at the Ethical Culture Society, which is kind of like a non-religious fellowship, I guess, of…

liza rankow: And that… How did they enter into this? Like, what was it that prompted that seeking and the spirituality part of it?

liza rankow: I don't know. I wish I did.

liza rankow: But I… you know, when I said it was the 60s, and so there was a certain degree, particularly on my father's part, of curiosity about psychic phenomenon.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm, interesting.

liza rankow: And they, you know, started reading Edgar Cayce, who was a trance medium who would give prescriptions for healing of physical ailments, but he also spoke about, you know, time's passed, and time's yet to come.

liza rankow: And there was a, a group, they… there were little home meeting groups, and they were called Search for God.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

liza rankow: So, how did an atheist land in a Search for God group?

liza rankow: I can only guess it was the work of the Spirit.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: The work of the Spirit is sometimes more mysterious, sometimes it's more obvious.

liza rankow: Yeah, but that… but that kind of led… that opened a door I think that, that fed their, their seeking.

liza rankow: They joined the Self-Realization Fellowship, hence the Yogananda materials. They would come every month in the mail.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: And, you know, it, it… the path…the path leads you, I think.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yes.

liza rankow: You know, once you plant your feet somewhere.

liza rankow: It will open and guide. It will guide you.

liza rankow: I mean, I certainly never would have planned out or imagined the journey my life has taken.

liza rankow: And I think that's true for many of us.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Oh, that's absolutely true, for me. Right, yeah. I love to find the humor in the fact that my entire lineage in the U.S. is from the illegitimate son of a German Jew and and that family became very conservative Christians, and many of them with very exclusivist views of Christianity.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And, and my last name is, of course, a German-Jewish last name.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, I find humor in how it certainly was not something that I planned, that Todd from small town Texas, yeah, would, would embrace Islamic mysticism… Islam and Islamic mysticism. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: But back to the question about spiritual awakening.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So now that I've asked about your parents, of course I want to ask about you.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: You mentioned that you were, as a child, very… just sort of naturally curious, and naturally engaged with the Gospels, and naturally engaged with the teachings of Yogananda. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Did you have… looking back from this point, where you are in present day, do you recognize that there were particular moments that were, like, impetus moments, or catapult moments for your spiritual awakening? 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Or do you see it more as this gradual unfolding?

liza rankow: I see it more… and, you know, I think… a lot of children innately are profoundly spiritual beings.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yes.

liza rankow: And that often it gets conditioned out of us.

liza rankow: And I was fortunate to… have… grown up in a context where there was… where seeking was good, right?

liza rankow: So it wasn't… it wasn't stifled in me. 

liza rankow: And I think, you know, I remember… I grew up in New York City, but there were a couple of summers that we spent, you know, about an hour outside of the city in what seemed to me like, you know, the woods, the rural universe.

liza rankow: And just having a favorite tree that was my special friend, a willow tree, and I would go, you know, willow trees make kind of like a hiding place...

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yes.

liza rankow: ...inside their cascading branches.

liza rankow: And that was my friend. That tree was my friend, and I would go sit there.

liza rankow: There was a lake that we walked to a couple of times, and there was…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: ...something very deeply spiritual about sitting there in the quiet by the water, and I was, like, literally 9 years old.

liza rankow: I also… I have, you know, I… I have, what would you call it? Artifacts.

liza rankow: Right, so… I think I even mentioned this in the book, I had this little hot pink paisley design cover memo pad that on the cover says, “Messages of Truth.”

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

liza rankow: And I would get little messages of encouragement from the divine, from ancestors, from spirit guides, who knows?

liza rankow: I don't think I knew, but I just would write them down.

liza rankow: And so… it's been fascinating to me now, you know, in my mid-60s, to, in some ways, feel closer to that little girl, or to be trying to get… to be more like her as I grow up, right?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: And that so much of what's central to my life today was present then, the spirituality, but also creativity and a concern for social justice, you know.

liza rankow: I grew up during the U.S. war on Vietnam.

liza rankow: And my parents were not particularly activists at all.

liza rankow: But I was.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

liza rankow: I was… I had my own, you know, one girl, third grade… protest movement going.

liza rankow: Yeah, so…you know, I… I really… I honor and I admire that child self in some ways, as my teacher now.

liza rankow: And, you know, I went… I never went too far afield.

liza rankow: But I did get caught up in all the things that humans get caught up in as we grow and meet life.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: And get busy with, maybe more than caught up, but get busy with.

liza rankow: And so, it's beautiful to see, you know, the spiraling, right? 

liza rankow: So there's a return, but it's a return from a different place, a return that is informed by the, by the experience of, of years.

liza rankow: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: It's interesting that you bring up that part of your journey now is looking back and -- forgive me if I don't use the right word, but re… I'm going to say recapture. It's probably not the right word, but…that… natural spiritness that you had… spirituality that you had as a child, and it's more like, perhaps the openness that you had as a child, and returning to that openness for that… to the flow of spirituality in you.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I've recently been processing… just how much the spiritual journey has its ups and downs, its ebbs and its flows, and how it is this rather unique mix of adulting, adulting and then honoring the inner child.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And… and that there's a place where… And I'm curious to see if this is true for you, but…there's a place in me where I feel like there's an inner child that knows what, in Islam, we'd say is Haqq, you know, that knows Truth with a capital T, and who knows Reality with a capital R. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: There's a… there's a part of that child that I feel like knows that, and then there's a part of my inner child, and perhaps these shouldn't be grouped together, but I think that it's important to say that they both exist. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And then there's that inner child that is very much an outcome of early childhood trauma...

liza rankow: Right.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: ... and carries, even, you know, decades later, carries those misconceptions about the divine from early childhood trauma and that there… there are layers of releasing and letting go of those misconceptions, and returning to… Truth, capital T.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And then part of the adulting is bringing together the knowledge that supports the returning to the Truth, and that cares for the woundedness -- both.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Is that… how does that…?

liza rankow: And also, it's not just caring for the woundedness as though the woundedness is a permanent condition...

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: ... butthat can engage with our wounds...

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Right.

liza rankow: ... to gather the learnings, the wisdom, the… the capacities that they might call us to develop.

liza rankow: And then integrate so that we're moving… from being in affliction, a relationship of affliction...

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah. 

liza rankow: ... to a relationship.... For me, it's, it's, you know, a lot of it was finding the wisdom in those wounds.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah. 

liza rankow: You know? It doesn't… It doesn't negate the experience of suffering.

liza rankow: But it, in a sense, redeems it by discovering the gifts within it.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I love that, that you use the image in your book, the Japanese art of… 

liza rankow: Kintsugi.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: ... of filling the broken, the filling the broken pottery with gold lacquer.

liza rankow: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I immediately thought of the wounds within myself and of picturing myself as a being with all these cracks and gold in the cracks, but that it was those cracks that allowed the light to shine forth.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So I especially appreciated that image.

liza rankow: Yeah, you know, the goal is not to smooth everything over so it looks like nothing ever happened.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: Right? Or to get back to how we were before.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm…

liza rankow: but to grow and deepen through our experiences and, you know, as you say, allow… the wisdom to shine.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: And even allow… you know, the stuff that's… still not quite settled to shine, because there's a way that it connects us with one another.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Absolutely.

liza rankow: You know, and I know you do spiritual direction; I do spiritual counseling.

liza rankow: But even just between human beings in relationship, or our relationship with the world, if we…you have never been through some hard stuff, how are we gonna hold space for… for other folks who are going through hard, hard things, and for a world that's going through an exquisitely hard time?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: So to me, my own walk with illness, which has been my primary area of suffering...

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

liza rankow: ... has been one of my greatest spiritual teachers. So, in a way, that speaks to your earlier question about my spiritual life. I didn't put it there, but I well could have, you know?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: As one of my most profound spiritual teachers.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

liza rankow: Not an easy teacher at all.

liza rankow: Not a fun teacher.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: But… I would not be who I am. 

liza rankow: And I would not be a good minister, a good counselor, probably as good a human.

liza rankow: And I certainly couldn't have written the book...

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

liza rankow: ... if… if not for that teacher.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, for our listeners who have not yet read Soul Medicine for a Fractured World, Liza, there's a, a chapter of, it's… tell us what the name… it's called “The Medicine in Our Wounds.” There we go. Yeah, so there's a chapter called “The Medicine in Our Wounds,” and it's on the relationship between spiritual growth, if I might say so, or spiritual practice, and the experience of illness, of your experience of illness. If I may, is that a… Is that how you would…?

liza rankow: Yes and.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yes, and. Yes, and.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Love it.

liza rankow: Yes, and....

liza rankow: You know, we've been speaking primarily about the individual, right? 

liza rankow: And how our experiences of wounding, of trauma, of suffering, can be doorways into something greater, something deeper.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: But it's not only for the sake of our growth, right? And, and our becoming?

liza rankow: But it's then, how do we put that in service to the larger life.

liza rankow: So the medicine is, yes, it's first… it's medicine that emerges out of our wounds. There's a wonderful quote by my friend Alice Walker that says, “healing begins where the wound was made.”

liza rankow: And I practiced medicine in one of my previous professional lives.

liza rankow: And… It's a literal truth of the body. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Right. 

liza rankow: That the cells that re-knit the tissues in a wound, they don't come from somewhere else. You know?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yes.

liza rankow: They…They emerge from within the wound.

liza rankow: And that healing is an alchemy that happens within the tissues of the wound itself.

liza rankow: And I think it's such a powerful metaphor for our emotional, psychological, spiritual, social collective wounds.

liza rankow: That it's not that we are trying to coax in, or find, or purchase something… out there, that we're missing to heal us. Right.

liza rankow: But it is going to that source that is everywhere and… inviting… the wound, even, to whisper to us, to guide us.

liza rankow: And then the medicine, in quotes, right, is something we can offer to others and to the world.

liza rankow: So it's, it's multi… multi-valent, I think that’s the word.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yes, of course. When I finished that chapter, one of the things that I was left with was this idea of how you talk about… I don't know if you use the word brokenness, but… I think what I did in my mind was I translated how I have in my mind, it, at times, equated my own wounds with brokenness.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I… and I loved how in that chapter, you really brought together that idea of woundedness and wholeness.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And so at the end of the chapter, I… I was saying to myself, woundedness and wholeness are two sides of the same coin.

liza rankow: Right.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Right. It's… It's one coin, it's the same coin.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: But one side is… is a revelation of woundedness, and the other side is a revelation of… of wholeness.

liza rankow: Yeah, you know, I use the word fracture in the title.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

liza rankow: And I use it a lot in the book, actually. The title came later, like, it had a different title when I wrote it.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Ahh.

liza rankow: Then, when we were… coming up with a different title, this one presented itself, and when I went back and read the book for the thousandth time, which is what you do when you're writing a book...

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: ... I was amazed at how apt the title was, and how often I used the word fracture, because it had not really been part of my… you know, usual lexicon prior to writing this book.

liza rankow: But part of why I like it, you know, we're talking about this capital W wholeness.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Right.

liza rankow: Right? Which, in a sense, can never be absent.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Right. We can forget or lose the sense of our belonging to it.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

liza rankow: Of its uninterruptibility.

liza rankow: We can have the experience of being fractured either in ourselves, or certainly are… there's…good argument to be made for the world that we're in now is one that is experiencing multiple fractures.

liza rankow: But it doesn't negate the wholeness. It becomes more like the kintsugi pots, right?

liza rankow: And… Yeah. And so those seams are highlighting, you know what we've been through, and they're highlighting our connection.

liza rankow: I've never said it that way before. I don't think I ever thought about it that way before, but I like it.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I like it too. They're highlighting what we've been through.

liza rankow: Well, that part I was onto, but the fact that the seams are actually highlighting the points of connection.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: ... is not something I had thought about before.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: It's interesting that you say the seams are highlighting the points of connection, because one of the things that I also got was that you we… that you seamlessly weave together the individual and the communal.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah, and I know I'm… I very much finished the chapter wanting to say, okay, I know that I didn't make it through the whole book, but I wonder how you answered the questions at the end of the chapter.

liza rankow: I would have to look and see what the questions were, Habib. You think I remember?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Well, if I may, just sort of give you a little… if I may give you a little leading....

liza rankow: Okay.

liza rankow: And just so that listeners know, each chapter ends with questions and practices for reflection, and that's what you're… that's what you're referencing.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: That's what I'm referring to, is your reflection questions at the end. And I reflected on them. And I… I was touched by… I felt like my reflection was just another example of exactly what you were talking about.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I'll share a little bit from my own life as a prompt, God willing, for you to share from your… from your life. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: But when I was reflecting on these questions of… and these are my paring it very down to short, brief...

liza rankow: Right. The Cliff Notes version.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Cliff Notes version.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: ... with your experience of illness, with your experience of pain, I'm posing this question to myself, and I hope to pose it to you, is with your experience of illness, with your experience of pain, with the difficulty that is associated with that, you know, what… what are you called to? What gifts are there for yourself? And what gifts come from that for others?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And, and in reflecting on… my experience of illness, I couldn't help but remember -- and you mentioned that you've had, you have been, with your experience of Crohn's disease, been on the threshold of death 5 times.

liza rankow: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I remembered in my own life, when I had a doctor saying to me, you know, your organs are barely functioning.

liza rankow: Hmm.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I had another MD who had left his medical practice and transitioned to spiritual healing say to me, you know, your life chord is separating.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I was having dreams about death every night, and so I definitely had this sense of, like, okay, I'm on the way out.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I also have this sense of choice, which is another thing that I'd love to speak to, because you talk about choice in that chapter.

liza rankow: Oh, yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: But I had this sense of… of choice and acceptance being… going together, being with each other, and part of me… part of my choice was saying, I'm not ready yet.

liza rankow: Hmm.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Because I want to be in a place with less veils over the pure light, or the essence, you know, the truth of who I am.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I wanted less veils of separation and more, like, embodied oneness, more embodied unity.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And so that prompted me to do a bunch of things that I hadn't done before in terms of spiritually.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Like, it prompted me to go study with a teacher that I hadn't studied with, it prompted me to do a 40-day retreat, it prompted me to go to Jerusalem, it prompted me to go on the Islamic pilgrimage, Hajj, so all these things that I had not done at that point. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And so, had I not… had not my health deteriorated to that point, I don't know that I would have said, oh, I'm going to go do this.

liza rankow: Right.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I don't know that I would have let go of the things of the world to the point that I would have said, this is what my heart is demanding of me, you know?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And then when I did -- the tears are starting to come --

liza rankow: Thank you. Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I feel like that what was unfolded over and over and over again...

liza rankow: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: were these tastes of what the oneness is.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: You know, that tastes of… what I would call a unitive love, or a unifying love – love where there is no self, there is no I, there is no other, there is only one, and there is only love.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So then the individual in the…the individual and the communal, you know, the multiplicity and the, you know, like…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So one of the greatest gifts for me, I think, is those tastes, and what those tastes bring in terms of if you've experienced that… if you've had spiritual experiences like that, then, you can't not have a sense of interconnectedness, or as the Buddhists might say, would say inner being, or, you know, the Sufis are going to say, the unity.

liza rankow: The oneness.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: The oneness, yeah.

liza rankow: Yeah.

liza rankow: So…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Again, the communal and the individual, the one and the other.

liza rankow: They enter be.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yes. Yeah.

liza rankow: Yeah.

liza rankow: But that… but that all of that profound experience that still yet moves you to tears came out of illness, near death, things that the dominant culture tells us are bad, we should avoid, we should get rid of, we should treat, we should, you know?

liza rankow: That that became the doorway for you as it did for me, as it does for many into this larger experience. 

liza rankow: It, you know… One of my…most profound spiritual teachers, and I… is a…prominent voice in the book is Dr. Howard Thurman.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yes.

liza rankow: who was a 20th century mystic, pastor, professor.

liza rankow: One of Martin King's great influences. He was actually friends with MLK Jr.'s dad, daddy King went to Morehouse together.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

liza rankow: And Dr. Thurman, among, among many other reasons why I love him, including his, his… real integration of mystic spirituality and social justice.

liza rankow: But he talks about suffering as a discipline of the Spirit.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: And the way he defines spiritual disciplines are those things that remove the barriers to our inner altar, is the term he uses, but to that experience of communion, of union, of oneness with the divine.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: And so we're used to thinking about things that we choose -- meditation, prayer, fasting, Sacred reading -- you know, go down the line.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Right.

liza rankow: But he says suffering is a spiritual discipline, because just as you and I have experienced, it pretty much clears away everything else.

liza rankow: When you are in extreme illness, suffering, when you are facing… your choice, or sometimes not choice, to stay on the planet or not, it… it creates a single-pointed focus.

liza rankow: But how we respond to that is up to us.

liza rankow: You know, some people shut down in the face of that.

liza rankow: Yeah. And some people open.

liza rankow: Right.

liza rankow: So…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And some people do both. 

liza rankow: And some people do both! 

liza rankow: I mean… We don't... It's not like this is a graceful, oh, here's my spiritual doorway.

liza rankow: No! I am in exquisite pain. I hate this. Let me the F outta here. You know.

liza rankow: And this is not fair, and I am miserable, like, no, just no, no, and more no.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Right.

liza rankow: And yet… somewhere in there, the divine is offering us a yes.

liza rankow: And it sounds like you and I each… sometimes when there was nowhere left to go, but yes.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

liza rankow: Sometimes when we literally we've tried everything else, and it's that surrender of, you know, I just don't have anything left to fight with.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: It's that yielding of… being spent. Completely spent.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah. 

liza rankow: And then something opens.

liza rankow: It's, it's not… it's, you know, especially listening to your story, it reminds me how it's not unusual for people on a spiritual path to experience, a healing crisis, a life and death event.

liza rankow: Or people not on a spiritual path, and that's what leads them.

liza rankow: It becomes an initiatory experience...

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: ... to life as a healer, or life as a, you know, a spiritual companion, let’s say, or, you know, just to keep it really generic, right?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: I, you know… my… my conviction, Habib, is that it is a loving universe and it is going to keep opening doors until we walk through one.

liza rankow: And some of those doors, you know, are going to look like an amazing sunset that just opens something in us, that makes us weep and we feel, you know, the singing cosmos, right?

liza rankow: And some of those doors are in the midst of the most profound suffering.

liza rankow: Some of them are in, you know, the birth of a child, right? It doesn't have to be a hard and painful threshold.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Right.

liza rankow: Right?

liza rankow: But that it's all offered out of love. It's all offered out of -- Remember, wake up, remember. You belong, you're connected to this larger Loving, creative is-ness. Wholeness.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: And you… and you never were separate from it, we just, you know, we come into these bodies, and we get amnesia, you know, especially in this culture that doesn't reinforce the belonging.

liza rankow: There are many cultures that, you know, it's not conditioned out of children. It is… it is held as… a common awareness, value, truth.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And it's not easy. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: As you said, it is a choice, there is that choice aspect, and there's times where the choice seems -- it doesn't seem so easy to embrace the illness or to embrace the pain as…

liza rankow: It never seems easy, baby. It never… I don't think that's ever an easy choice to embrace suffering.

liza rankow: Who would? 

liza rankow: I mean, really.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: Who would ever choose that?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, have you got to the point in your own experience – and I ask this, because… because… as I shared before we started recording, you know, this is something that I personally relate to, and I mean, I didn't say this, but I woke up this morning in experiencing many of the symptoms that I frequently experience, you know, and I was just overwhelmed by… the…the experience of fatigue, the experience of pain, the experience of, you know, the… all the stuff that GI distress cause… you know, I was just… and I was just in that state of overwhelm by it.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And… my present, sort of, unfolding of this, of where I am in the journey in present day, is to be in the place of awareness with mercy, and to make an informed choice about it.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: You know, as opposed to being taken out, for a colloquial way of saying it, you know, like, it… I can be… I can be…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I can distract myself, you know, like, I could let my ego self, my lower self take me toward, like, food, or movies, or entertainment, or any of the other distractions that are available to us in the world. So it's… for me, I feel like it's very much of this place of how do I be present with honesty...

liza rankow: Hmm.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: and the mercy, and accountability. All of… all of that.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And so, where are you with it today? Are you… I know that you said one of your gifts was embracing stillness, and that the stillness is, in fact, nurturing for you, and… and it is, and up and down, and just where are you in relation to…?

liza rankow: It is an up and down. And you know, sometimes mercy is watching a movie.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yes. Right.

liza rankow: It's like, you know, we have this thing about, well, that's not spiritual. Well, sometimes we just need to be mundane. You know?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: No, I… I still… I still… It's still my teacher. It's still an active teacher.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: And… I definitely have conversations where I go, what!

liza rankow: Like, watch, what are you trying? What am I missing here? Why are we doing this? You know?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: Wouldn't it… wouldn't I be more valuable if I had health and vitality and I could do the things?

liza rankow: And yet, that's not what we're doing on many a day.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: So… you know, the one small thing I might add to your very wise sharing about your own experience is that we're in relationship with everything and that means we're also in relationship with our body and we're in relationship with the illness or whatever, you know, the condition that we're facing may be.

liza rankow: And if we… think about it as… like, I have really come to respect for me, the illness as… as something with intelligence.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

liza rankow: Not just as some random affliction.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: But as something that is inviting me to see, to learn, to cultivate.

liza rankow: Something that I need, something that the world needs.

liza rankow: And so… You know, after I'm done watching movies and feeling sorry for myself, or whatever that practice is, because it's a practice, too.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: On a good day, I'll ask, like, really ask… not, like… resentfully, you know, ragefully ask, but like, humbly and receptively ask.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: And or… I will engage some of the practices that I know bring relief, some of the energy meditations and practices that I've developed over, you know, 50 years of living with this condition.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: And then, once I am feeling the flow of spirit, of energy, of ease, then offer that to the world.

liza rankow: So it calls me… It's also like a call to prayer in a sense.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: You know?

liza rankow: Maybe it's a call to stop pushing so hard, or it's a call to go out, you know, sometimes I just go out and, you know, take off my shoes and socks and put my feet on the earth, and just ask for the elements, the earth, the air, the fire, the water, which are what we're comprised of, as well, you know, to, to minister to this body.

liza rankow: Yeah.

liza rankow: So there's… it's not like there's a…here's the 3 easy steps, and if you just do these every....

liza rankow: It's about learning how to listen.

liza rankow: It's about learning how to listen.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: Yeah, and then following what begins to open.

liza rankow: You know, my listening isn't that I hear a voice. Some people do. I don't hear a voice. I have an intuition.

liza rankow: And I've learned with practice, to follow that, and to trust it.

liza rankow: And sometimes I'm just miserable for a while, you know, if I'm really in a lot of pain and it just be’s like that.

liza rankow: And that that's part of, part of what bodies do sometimes.

liza rankow: But it's not punishment.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: What was that?

liza rankow: It's not punishment. There, you know, there are certain schools of…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

liza rankow: religion...

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: ... that say, well, if you just got right with God, you know, you wouldn't have that affliction, or whatever. Or even, you know, the, the, the new…new thought, something's wrong with your consciousness, and so why are you calling that experience to yourself? You know, none of that, I think is true.

liza rankow: Human life includes suffering.

liza rankow: I think that's part of why we come.

liza rankow: Part of why our souls come to this dimension. Because if we wanted all just sweetness and you know, beauty and ease, why come into a body?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: That this is a place where we can exercise the muscles of our soul, if you will, right?

liza rankow: You know, we go to the gym, we lift weights against resistance, we swim, moving our body through the resistance of the water to strengthen our physical muscles.

liza rankow: It makes sense to me that we would come to a planet that includes struggle and suffering and challenges to strengthen our spiritual muscles, if you will, our spiritual capabilities, to find qualities within ourselves that, and, you know, that a laying on the couch, kind of a life would not… would not demand.

liza rankow: Yeah.

liza rankow: And that helps, you know, it helps me in terms of framing.

liza rankow: Right.

liza rankow: You know, what have I… what are the qualities that… that I need to get through whatever it is I'm facing. Right?

liza rankow: What are the qualities I'm being called to cultivate?

liza rankow: And then how can those qualities be placed in service to the larger, the larger body of all of us.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: It's interesting, I feel like part of the listening is -- there's this… there's a verse in the Quran that says, with hardship comes ease, with hardship comes ease.

liza rankow: I almost, I almost raised that one.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: You all… yeah, well, you did.

liza rankow: Hmm.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I, I got, I got it, and...

liza rankow: yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: ... and so I think part of the listening is… Where is the ease in relation to the hardship, or with… that comes with the hardship. So when we're in those moments of pain and so on, distress, difficulty, that seem so strong.

liza rankow: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: To listen to where is the, where's the ease with that?

liza rankow: Yeah. What, what arises? Thank you, I, I like, I like that question. 

liza rankow: What arises for me -- It's actually something I read back in the 80s?

liza rankow: I don't know if you remember an author called Stephen Levine, or Levine…

liza rankow: But he worked a lot with people who were at the threshold between life and death, or who were dealing with life-threatening illness.

liza rankow: And he offered a meditation about how you… to work with pain in the body.

liza rankow: And it was really about creating more spaciousness.

liza rankow: So for me, the way I interpreted that is that if pain is like this hard, opaque, you know, condensed, ball of energy, I can use my breath and begin to see those molecules expand, separate, so there's more space between them.

liza rankow: So literally, it might be the same number of pain molecules...

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Right.

liza rankow: ... but if they're spread out over a wider expanse, the experience of pain is no longer intense.

liza rankow: And I think spiritually, this is, again, not something that I've thought about this way before, which is why I love being in conversation, you know, emergent conversation.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: is that so much of the answer for so much of the things we struggle with is to open to something larger.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yes. 

liza rankow: Right. So… You know, how do we… expand… if I can't hold the suffering in this instrument, or in my psyche, or in my being, the practice, then, is to expand my being, to open my being to that larger life...

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: to the… to the wholeness, to the oneness, to the divine, however we may conceive it, imagine it. You know, for some people, it's God, it's… it's Buddha consciousness, it's Jesus as, you know, a personal energy. It's, you know, the Orisha.

liza rankow: But wherever… whatever it is that each of us finds that connection to the larger life.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: Practice that.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

liza rankow: And so, just like with the physical pain, you know, spreading it out over a wider field shifts our experience of it with the emotional, psychological, life, suffering, opening to that larger breath, that larger life, shifts our experience of it.

liza rankow: And I think… It's true for so much.

liza rankow: If we're trying just, you know, our… our little ego… selfness is not equipped to handle the… the enormity of suffering in the world, or even in our own lives.

liza rankow: But being in relationship, literally, with other humans, with other life forms, you know, even petting a cat, you know, is…is connecting with some other being, being in community, being in, you know, the collective of, of nature. Right?

liza rankow: That all of that…not only creates more spaciousness, but then it gives us more resources to meet whatever it is we can call on.

liza rankow: The strength of ancestors, or the strength of a mountain. Right?

liza rankow: We can call on the radiance of the sun. You know, we, we… we can call on, somebody who… in their life demonstrated qualities that we need to help us through right now.

liza rankow: I call on Howard Thurman, you know.

liza rankow: I call on a lot of people. 

liza rankow: But yeah.So… So… It's… it's getting out of this… atomization that the dominant culture here in the U.S, you know, just is so hell-bent on… on… training us into, but it's not helpful, and it's not true.

liza rankow: It's not true.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I can't help but think about my own experience and how it can bring the focus to… to…the self with a lowercase s, as… when you're talking about this invitation of in… of…greater spaciousness, and greater strength through connection, the… what happens there is that the focus moves from the self with a lowercase of s, it moves to… the… the whole.

liza rankow: Yeah, capital S, yeah. But remember that that lowercase s self is not the enemy. Right? 

liza rankow: The goal is not to ablate it, right.

liza rankow: But to hold it with compassion.

liza rankow: It's got its role in our life on the planet as human beings, but it should not be left to its own devices to be the only, the only one driving, you know, the vehicle.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Right.

liza rankow: So, yeah…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yes, it's to hold it in loving care, and that sort of, for me, brings the conversation back to the circle in terms of what we were talking about at the beginning around the child. Like, to bring together the… the knowledge of belovedness, you know, that I think we inherently came with into this life.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And… and through our spiritual walking, our knowledge of the loveness that we have of the adult, from an adult perspective, like, bringing those… that knowledge of belovedness together.

liza rankow: And the experience of it.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yes.

liza rankow: The embodiment of it.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: The embodiment of it.

liza rankow: As well as the knowledge, because we can know it cognitively, And still not… feel it.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yes, it's so true.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And we can have glimpses of it that motivate us and inspire us to keep going on our journey to embody belovedness.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah, because I do really feel like that that belovedness is…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: That's the place of our connection.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: That's the place of oneness.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: If we can… If we can access the belovedness within then… then we can act not for ourself but for… all of us.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: This has been a wonderful conversation.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, thank you.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Is there any last closing thoughts, or… anything…?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: How would you like to wrap up?

liza rankow: I know we've been going for a while, and we had talked about a reading from the book, which may or may not be helpful.

liza rankow: I'll leave that to you.

liza rankow: So I could either… wrap with that, or I can offer a word of encouragement.

liza rankow: Actually, maybe I can do a reading from the book that offers a word of encouragement.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Perfect, that sounds great.

liza rankow: But I need glasses to do it.

liza rankow: I definitely need glasses to do that.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Just as a reminder, this is Soul Medicine for a Fractured World: [liza rankow:] Healing Justice, and the Path of Wholeness.

liza rankow: Let's see…

liza rankow: Alright, let's see…

liza rankow: This is from the last chapter, which is called “Healing the Soul of the World.”

“There is no map for these times. And only the compass of our hearts to guide us. Yet there is wisdom in the ancestors' whispering. There is vision in the dreaming of the coming generations. We stand at the nexus between past and future. Praying to be faithful to both in the crucial role entrusted to us. And they are with us, urging us on.”

liza rankow: And I'm going to skip to the very last paragraph of the book.

“If you are alive on the planet, you have gifts and purpose that are part of the healing. It may be something you aren't even aware of. Or something you take for granted. Or it may be that thing that you have always shied away from, but somehow known was yours to do. It may be something no one ever sees or finds out about. A prayer you offer in the quiet hours before dawn. It may be the way your eyes meet and hold somebody in pain. Or the love you give a child. Perhaps a poem or music or maybe putting your body in the streets as part of a mass movement. Perhaps you grow food in harmony with the earth or aid the return of salmon to a river. It is less about the thing than who you become in the doing. The medicine that is needed in the world lives within each of us. We must go deep enough to find it and bring it forth as our offering to these times.”

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Well, thank you for bringing forth.

liza rankow: Thank you, thank you, Habib. This has been a gift of a conversation.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Likewise.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Thank you to all listeners for joining us on Beyond Names. Before we go, if you would pause briefly, take just a moment to reflect on what stays with you from this conversation with Dr. Liza Rankow.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: May something you heard today help you reconnect with the light in your own heart. May you grow in compassion, clarity, and courage.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: May you find your way again and again back home to the divine, back home to yourself.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: If today's conversation spoke to you, please like, share, and comment on this episode. Please follow and subscribe to Beyond Names.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: To make an appointment with me, please visit https://www.habibboerger.com/. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Until next time… May you be light. May you consciously participate in growing your light. And may you share your light.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Peace be with you.