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Coming up next on Passion Struck.
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One of the common myths that I see in American religion is really fundamentally about, and this is where I think of it not as civil religion or worshiping the founding of America itself, but what stories do we have about Americans?
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And I think
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Among religions that have popped up in America, almost all of them share some common myths, which is in the power of righteous individuals, it s in the overwhelming faith in the power of the mind.
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I tried doing this in France.
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Go ahead and drop this theology down in the middle of Paris and be like, your optimism changes your life.
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These are deeply American beliefs that we have that counter a lot of wonderful European skepticism.
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And also it s a trajectory toward unlimited progress and unlimited resources.
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None of these beliefs assume that anything is ever a scarce resource, but more will always make more.
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Welcome to Passion Struck.
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Hi, I m your host, John R. Miles.
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And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world s most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.
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Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.
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If you re new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.
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We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes.
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Now let s go out there and become passion struck.
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Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 371 of Passion Struck.
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Ranked by Apple as one of the top 10 most popular health podcasts and the number one alternative health podcast.
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And thank you to all of you who come back weekly to listen and learn how to live better, be better and impact the world.
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If you re new to the show, thank you so much for being here.
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Or, you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member, we now have Episode Starter Packs, which are collections of our fans  favorite episodes that we organize into convenient playlists that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show.
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Either go to Spotify or PassionStruck.com slash Starter Packs to get started.
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In case you missed it, earlier this week I had two great interviews.
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The first was with retired United States Army Staff Sergeant and New York Times best-selling author Travis Mills.
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Kravis is not just a war hero.
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He s one of only five quadruple amputees to survive the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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His journey from the battlefield to where he is today is nothing short of awe-inspiring.
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In his latest book, Bounce Back, 12 Warrior Principles to Reclaim and Recalibrate Your Life,
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Travis lays out a powerful roadmap for how to face life s challenges head-on and emerge stronger on the other side.
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I also had a captivating conversation with Andrew McAfee, author of the enlightening new book, The Geek Way.
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Andrew is the co-director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
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I also wanted to say thank you for your ratings and reviews.
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If you loved today s episode or the other two that I mentioned, we would appreciate you giving it a five-star review and sharing it with your friends and families.
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I know we and our guests love to see comments from our listeners.
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In today s episode, we re diving into the profound deaths of human resilience and the quest for meaning amid life s most tumultuous storms.
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We re joined by the luminous Dr. Kate Bowler, who is more than an author, she s a beacon of hope, a testament to the enduring strength of the human spirit.
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Together, we ll transverse her thought-provoking narratives in Everything Happens for a Reason and No Cure for Being Human, where she weaves a poignant narrative through the joys and sorrows, the blessings and the grit of our shared human experience.
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When we discuss Everything Happens for a Reason, it isn t just about a book.
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It s Kate s raw, intimate account of grappling with a stage 4 colon cancer diagnosis at 35.
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A scholar of the prosperity gospel, Kate s life was a reflection of the very blessings she studied, until everything she knew about faith and control came crashing down.
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Her journey is a profound reflection on finding new definitions of faith and meaning in a world enamored with the adage that everything happens for a reason.
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We then discuss her book No Cure for Being Human, which is Kate s bold confrontation with the myth of the perfect life.
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It s an exploration of our own encounters with the limitations of life and the pervasive culture of relentless positivity that offers a sharp contrast to the messiness of the human condition.
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I m not just interviewing an author today.
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I m stepping into the world as seen through Kate s eyes.
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A world marred yet magnificent, filled with hope and shadowed by despair.
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A world where the human condition is beyond cure, but rife with beauty.
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Kate s voice has resonated globally through her New York Times bestselling work, her compelling podcast, and her role as a respected professor at Duke University.
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Her narrative promises to be a powerful testament to the human will to seek truth even amidst trials.
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Prepare for an episode that s set to touch your soul, challenge your perceptions, and perhaps change you in indescribable ways.
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Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.
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Now, let that journey begin.
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I am so excited today and honored to welcome Dr. Kate Bowler to the passion struck podcast.
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Welcome Kate.
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Oh my gosh.
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Thanks for having me.
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Well, it s my honor and I have been a follower of your own work and your podcast for a while now.
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And I can t believe some of the guests that you ve had on your program, Katie Kirk and Jenna Bush and many others that I someday hope I can get on mine as well.
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So congratulations.
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Oh, thanks.
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This podcast has been a long form exercise in well, just not to be honest and not being lonely and like having other wonderful people to talk to about the things that mattered.
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I m sure you feel the same way.
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Yeah, I really have.
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And in fact, loneliness is one of the core topics that we have covered, especially over this past year, because it has become such an epidemic and I think it s intertwined with hopelessness.
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Yeah.
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Based on what you have studied at Duke and your own podcasts and guests you ve had on, what do you think are some of the major reasons why not just in the US, but really billions of people around the world are feeling lonely right now?
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Hmm.
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Yeah.
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Well, I guess we just got a little too convinced that individualism was the way to go.
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It really is more convenient, of course, to bootstrap your way into a story about how life is all about your own choices.
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And then I think we find that.
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We struggled with seeking out, just taking all those small steps, not just to cultivate our own improvement, but to cultivate the community that we need to actually sustain our
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long, sometimes horrible, sometimes wonderful lives.
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Yeah, I think part of it is we re seeing a lot of confusion about the value of community and people often were involved in communities who disappointed them and they re not sure what to do then if they can t entirely replace what they ve lost.
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Yeah, I think that is definitely part of it.
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And I think another key aspect of it is that so many people right now feel like they don t matter.
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Or as you re saying, they are trying to be so individualistic, but they re being individualistic against a standard that is what society is comparing them to, I think, rather than being authentically who they were put on this planet to become.
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Do you think any of that is true?
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I m sure it is.
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It is a really strange time to be a person because we ve had about, from a historical perspective, the story that we had about who we are all supposed to be, at least in the United States and Canada, really emerged with Boomer adolescent spirituality, which was
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Hey, let s break out of the conformity of our parents, young adulthood.
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Let s be our own person, beach boys, et cetera.
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And I think what happened is we ve now had 50 years of a very, we would call like an expressive individualism.
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Like I am my preferences.
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I am my hobbies.
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I am my, and then the truth is inside of us, whoever we need to be, we re supposed to locate it inside of us and bring it to fruition.
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And a part of that is true and lovely and beautiful, but the rest of it is not just who we are.
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by ourselves, but who we are in relationship.
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And we don t have a lot of thick language anymore for service and belonging and those webs of love that in the end are what make our lives, I want to just keep saying sustainable, but everyone is like, Oh no, people will find meaning in their Peloton group.
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It s like, well, Peloton s not going to bring you a casserole when your life sucks.
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Now, while you and I both had the privilege of interviewing Arthur Brooks, and I loved your episode you did with him, I ve just released one myself recently.
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But one of the things I know that he likes to talk about is that to create a happy life, it s a combination of a number of things, and he puts faith, family, and relationships at the top.
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And I also had Bob Waldinger on, who leads the Harvard study of adult aging, and I m sure you know who Bob is, who also concluded that in addition to the things that we should be doing, drink less alcohol, eat a healthy diet, exercise, that it was relationships that were so key.
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And yet,
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As you re saying, we, especially today, are moving farther and farther away from these important relationships that have really sustained humanity and have brought people so much happiness in their lives.
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So as you re saying, it really is an interesting time.
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I think it s so stressful too, because we get it with that new year s feeling is we wake up and we see Instagram and then we worry that someone else is out there having their green smoothie at this moment and taking the five to seven minutes for a meditative experience.
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And oh my gosh, all the lists of the things that would optimize us are somehow getting away from us.
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But in the meantime, most of us are trying to.
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Figure out what carries the weight of our lives, kids, older people in our lives, careers.
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just all the kinds of belonging that crowd our schedules and our hearts with all kinds of obligations.
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And it can be confusing to feel like doing the right thing is actually making you a loser in a culture of a certain form of winners.
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And as someone who s been a loser for a long time in that definition, I really relate to that feeling of never being able to catch up with this kind of cultural vision.
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Yeah, you re so right.
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I remember a homily that I listened to, and this has been well over a decade ago.
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It was at a Methodist church I used to go to when I lived in Mooresville, North Carolina.
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And the minister was talking about
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Stephen Covey and the main thing about the main thing is keeping the main thing.
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And he was, his message was basically a good way to understand if you re keeping the main thing is to look at your calendar and your pocketbook because those two things will show you where you re devoting your time.
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And I think looking back, it s been one of the most powerful sermons I ve heard because he is absolutely correct.
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Yeah, totally.
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And I happened to be flipping through the channels on Sunday morning, speaking of ministers, and I happened to run across Joel Osteen.
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And when I think about Joel, what immediately pops into my mind is the prosperity gospel, kind of him and Jim and Faye Baker to me are poster childs of that movement.
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But for the listeners who might not understand what it is, can you explain what the prosperity gospel is and what led you to studying it?
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Sure.
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Well, the prosperity gospel is the belief that God will reward you with health and wealth and happiness if you have the right kind of faith.
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And that if is a big one.
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Because faith in this version isn t just hope or trust or any of the more Sunday school versions that we might be familiar with.
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Faith, in this version, is like a spiritual power that you unleash with your words.
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So if you think positively and speak positively, then that s you demonstrating faith.
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And that will then bring all these wonderful things back to you.
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So we can think of prosperity gospel.
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I like to call it a kind of boomerang theology.
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The things that you put out will then come back to you.
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And so you put out good things you get good things you put out negative things and you get negative things, and this form of it grew up inside of Pentecostal ism certain form of Christianity and it really got very popular after World War Two, but it s
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You know, as a historian, I want to be like, it has a long and tangled history, but I will spare you that part.
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And just to say, it became very popular with the uptake of the middle class after World War II.
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And suddenly everybody started to believe, well, maybe God does want me to be like a little happier and have a little bit more of a dishwasher and indoor plumbing and a pretty nice car in the driveway.
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So it was part of an American story of upward mobility.
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Well, as I was getting prepared, I found some statistics that showed that 17% of American Christians identify explicitly with prosperity movement and 31% espouse the idea that if you give money to God, then God will bless you with money.
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Do you think those statistics are accurate?
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I love these ones.
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My sociologist friends are always being like, Kate, what is a certain kind of question we can ask to get at this?
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Because, and one of the other numbers was it s some 80 plus percent belief that God wants you to be happy.
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And it s a more general, the question, the numbers go up, right?
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But it s this, and it it s, there s very understandable
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beliefs here, which is, well, God loves me.
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God is good.
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Surely that means that God wants good things for me.
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I don t disagree with anything I just said, except what does it mean then to expect that all good things are then a reward for being the right kind of person?
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That is unfortunately not a Christian belief.
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We have a Jesus that died and whatnot, and an early church full of martyrs and suffering.
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Because we believe that faith doesn t always mean a good story.
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just for us.
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And this is one of the trickiest parts of figuring out what it means to be somebody who hopes for more right now.
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Like you and I both care a lot about equipping people with hope and practical, usable advice about how to grow as a person.
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And in Christian terms, we can call that sanctification.
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The problem is it can t be directly overlaid into our culture s understanding of success.
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And that s where we all got confused is
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I ll give you an example.
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About a lot of the biggest churches in Canada and the US started popping up in the late 1970s when people started to really believe that God wanted health and wealth and happiness for you.
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And I keep mentioning Canada because I m Canadian and I m from the very middle, the part that nobody goes to, but please come visit Manitoba where no one attends.
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But Canada s largest church popped up right in the middle of Manitoba and it exploded my scholarly brain for two reasons.
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One, it was mostly filled with Mennonites, which is a religious belief that says that you really shouldn t have nice things in the first place and you should always be building flat pack furniture from Ikea in a very frugal manner.
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They are lovely and simplistic people.
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And then second, that Canada of all places would have Canada s largest, would have the largest prosperity church in the area.
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It was a church that I thought was a factory emptying out on Sunday morning, but it turns out was 10,000 mostly Mennonites who believed that God really loved their senior pastor.
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And then they gave him a motorcycle, which he rode around on stage.
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for a new holiday called Pastors Appreciation Day.
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And I just picture a 22-year-old Kate Bowler.
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My brain died.
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I could not put it together.
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And that became my 10-year writing the history of the prosperity gospel because I was trying to understand why is it that all of us at some point or another
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feel confused about the difference between what does it mean to be a winner in our culture?
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And then haven t, I got this a little bit confused with some kind of spiritual story of endless accumulation.
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So that s been, that has been my life s work.
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And it s also been something I have a lot of personal investment in.
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I m going to go just a little bit deeper on this because I think it was a very interesting topic.
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How do practitioners of new thought like William James and Ralph Waldo Emerson and their belief in mind over matter relate to the prosperity gospel?
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Oh, sure.
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Yeah.
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Most of our ideas about the power of the mind come out of 19th century beliefs about exactly what you said about mind over matter, about the sense that the most powerful spiritual thing about us isn t our bodies or even our will.
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It s our harnessed thought.
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What we see right after the civil war is a lot of
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kind of, I want to say religious, but a lot of it was religious and psychological experimentation with, well, what does that mean to say the mind is powerful.
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So we need to remember here that this is like the rise of the placebo effect as being like,
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the power of suggestion, people are now experimenting with it for the first time.
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All kinds of religious movements are popping up to say, well, what if we applied the power of thought to our bodies and expected complete healing from illness just by having positive thought?
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And all of this kind of mishy-mash between religion
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and psychology coalesces in one religious form called new thought, which we might think of as just like early Oprah, but it went immediately into Good Housekeeping Magazine and all these other popular periodicals as being the go-to advice for how do you manage difficult things in your life.
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So people started saying, instead of just change your behavior or try to change your circumstances, change your thought and change your life.
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And that s where those beliefs come from.
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Speaking of beliefs, one of my favorite books since the time I was in high school has been The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell.
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And when I reread that, and I try to do it every single year, it s so interesting to me how all the major religions have so many
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in common between them.
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How do you think, as Joseph lays out, that myths have shaped our beliefs and religion?
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Well, there s a lot of fun ways to go with that lovely question.
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So in religious studies, we use the term myth to say not just that it s not true, but it s that it s a compelling and overarching story.
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It s like a synthetic account that pulls us in.
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I m an American religious historian.
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So one of the common myths that I see in American religion is really
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fundamentally about, and this is where I think of it not as civil religion or worshiping the founding of America itself, but what stories do we have about Americans?
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And I think among religions that have popped up in America or become very popular, almost all of them share some common myths, which is in the power of righteous individuals,
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It s in the overwhelming faith in the power of the mind.
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Try doing this in France.
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Go ahead and drop this theology down in the middle of Paris and be like, your optimism changes your life.
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These are deeply American beliefs that we have that counter a lot of wonderful European skepticism.
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And also that it s a trajectory toward unlimited progress and unlimited resources.
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None of these beliefs assume that anything is ever a scarce resource, but more will always make more.
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And I think these kind of founding American myths that have been dominant, at least in the last 120 years, are mostly what we talk about when we talk about both religion and spirituality.
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is if you give the average American like a little test of what they believe, the power of their own action, the power of their mind, and the idea that there s always more, I think would be part of the bedrock.
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Yeah, to me, it was always interesting because he wrote that book in the 80s.
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And even then he was saying that one of the things that hadn t occurred in millennia was the forming of a new religion.
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And he was trying to tie the fact that new religions were born because times were changing and people could no longer relate to what was being taught to them because too many years had passed to make the concepts relatable.
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And I think about that time from the eighties till today, and really nothing has changed to fill that void.
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It is an interesting premise.
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We make new religions all the time though.
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Otherwise I probably wouldn t have a job as an American religious historian.
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If we weren t constantly seeing new ones pop up.
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Yeah.
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What are some of the newer ones that you ve seen?
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Well, I can make a guess too, but I m, I imagine that we re going to see a lot of new religious forms pop up around AI.
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as people construct theologies around a self that they imagine to have self-consciousness.
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So yeah, I think AI is going to be a very fruitful time for new religions.
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We almost always have like prophetic figures that kind of come up and new forms.
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The last big American religions were Scientology and well, Church of Latter-day Saints.
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Really, those are the most successful probably American religions.
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Christian s New Thought, I could go on.
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Yeah, well, I live in Tampa Bay, so Scientology is right down the road for me.
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Yeah.
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Well, one other aspect of this I wanted to explore with you is in a recent episode, I think it was 332, I interviewed Rebecca Rosen.
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If you re not familiar with her, she s a spiritual medium and has been one for decades, but she came out with this book this year called What s Your Heaven?
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And she believes from her decades of work with
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the spirit world, that we are all here in something that she calls Earth School.
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And we are put back into Earth School to complete tasks that we need to grow into a higher version of ourself to somehow over time really receive a permanent place on the other side.
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From your studies about religion, et cetera, have you found any correlation to any of that?
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Those are not Christian beliefs, but they re very interesting.
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They re the idea that we are primarily that we are overwhelmingly spirit is so every like description of the human condition is always trying to figure out which part of us is body, which part of it is spirit, which part of us is mind, etc.
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So the idea that we re
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overwhelmingly spirit beings that then have these sort of physical cases like bodies like husks that we take on is what we would probably describe like a form of Gnosticism.
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It s a priority, overwhelming priority of spirit.
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The prosperity gospel has some versions of that because it believes that we are overwhelmingly thought and then it makes everything else incidental.
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That was actually one of the big controversies that in the late 19th century, when the prosperity gospel beliefs were developing, that new thought in separating from Christian science was trying to decide is how much of what is true about us is a body and how much of what is true about us is overwhelmingly spirit.
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And so Christian science decided it was overwhelmingly spirit and new thought was like,
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I think we re going to put a little bit more.
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And for the most part, American religions have gone that way.
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Americans are materialists and they don t tolerate religions that are overwhelmingly hyper-spiritualist for too long.
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And since this podcast is really about the power of intentionality, how do you think our intentions play into this whole topic that we ve been talking about?
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How do our intentions relate to the priority of body over spirit?
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Is that what you re asking?
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Yes.
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Well, I guess like it s a little hard to answer because Christian theology tries has this is why we fuss about the Trinity for so long is we re always trying to decide the exact right way to describe the relationship between body and spirit.
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And we don t believe that bodies are
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accidental properties.
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They re not just like bonus features of what s really just are.
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So all of it is trying to figure out the right language for how do we change?
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What does it mean to be a person, this combo platter of spirit and matter, and how do we grow?
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And I think that s why I really like the language of limited agency.
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When I think about what does it mean to be a person?
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So agency, right, just the theory of what we can do.
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Americans tend to have a belief in what I call hyper-agency, that we can do anything at all.
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And frankly, a lot of the, if we imagine ourselves just as spirits, for instance, without bodies, it is actually easier to get into that sort of territory, which is everything is possible if you believe, if you, et cetera.
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Now the rest of us are just stuck in human bodies and human bodies are made of car parts and garbage and also the spark of the divine.
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It s a really wonderful combination.
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But the truth is we are limited by our mortality.
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We re constantly limited by bodies that break.
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We re constantly limited by cells that divide.
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without our permission and the fact that we are all just headed toward 80 years if we re lucky.
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So in all versions we can t really say everything is possible because we know that is not true and we also don t want to say that nothing is possible because our spirits have a desperate desire to be more
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And so that s why I like to center it on the idea of limited agency.
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Not everything is possible and not nothing is possible, but what is possible today?
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What is possible inside these beautiful constraints?
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Well, I want to touch further on this aspect of mortality that you brought up because many people, if not most people have a fear of mortality at one point or another in their lives.
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And I think sometimes we go about our life, not even
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thinking about it or trying to put it out of our minds until moments happen that bring it full force into reality.
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And this could be seeing a loved one pass away, a close friend, suicide, sickness, something like that.
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And I understand that your life was going in a very positive direction and you had a pivotal moment in your own journey where you were faced with mortality hitting you.
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Can you explain that story to the audience?
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Because when I heard your story, it reminded me of my sister s story a little bit in that.
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She had this very vibrant life.
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She has a son and everything was going well in her life.
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And she was visiting my parents and was realizing when she was out on some walks, they happened to live in one of the mountains outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee.
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She just wasn t keeping up like she used to.
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And then.
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over the next couple weeks she noticed that she had some jaundice and went in to the doctor not expecting it to be anything and coming away from it that in her 40s she all of a sudden was told she has pancreatic cancer and I remember sitting
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with her as this transpired.
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And it s one moment, your life is on this incredible path.
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You re not thinking of mortality at all.
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And then the next second, all of a sudden you re faced with a complete new view of what your life is going to be like going forward.
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And it s something that you faced as well.
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Oh, I m so sorry though.
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Those I m so sorry.
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Pancreatic cancer is it s so punishing and it s finding a diagnosis and getting care is so difficult.
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So I m just I m so sorry that she s going through that.
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Well, that makes two of us.
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Luckily, Pan Can is there and supportive and she s had some good care teams.
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It really is one of those cancers where they catch it early enough.
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You have the opportunity to do the Whipple surgery.
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If not, you re really faced with clinical trials.
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Yeah.
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It s wild how we become experts so quickly in cancers we hadn t really heard about.
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And then all of a sudden things like Whipple surgeries.
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Yeah, I know a ridiculous amount about colon cancer with not a single bit of colon cancer in my family, but I had a life I really was hoping was going somewhere.
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I wanted to be an academic ever since I was little.
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My parents are both professors and we have just an unsanitary number of books in our house.
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I just wanted to do this forever.
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And it took a long time.
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I spent my twenties getting a doctorate and just like paying into a future that I thought I had.
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And then somewhere along the line, I started to believe maybe it was a future I deserved.
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which when you have a before and an after in your life, you start to look back and think about your sweet delusional befores.
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And mine was that I believed that my life was just, all of it was an accumulation of my good choices.
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And even though I wouldn t have said I was proud.
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of it.
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Not knowing of course, that like most of what happens in life happens to us.
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We re rarely given options to change.
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And if we are, we take them and we do the most with them.
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But when I started getting like pain in my stomach, I spent about four months in and out of doctor s offices.
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I just could not get anyone to take me seriously.
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I was sent home from the ER with Pepto-Bismol.
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It was just brutal.
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So by the time I found out that it was a stage four cancer diagnosis, I was in emotionally really rough shape because I felt so worthless, really worthless.
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I just hadn t been believed for such a long time.
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And then all the beliefs that I did have was that I m somebody who can shape my own destiny was like coming apart pretty quickly.
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It was a massive breaking point emotionally and physically and in my life as I tried to figure out how to rebuild myself and whatever I had left with like pretty unsustainable beliefs.
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Yes, I can t put myself in your shoes for what you went through, but I myself had experienced memory issues and cognitive decline for year after year.
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And I kept on going to the doctors being told I m completely healthy, nothing s wrong, similar to your months leading up to this.
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And I had a number of traumatic brain injuries, both playing high school and college sports.
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But then while I was in the military,
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And I kept on researching it and finding that there are millions of people who have post-concussion syndromes.
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And as time went on, I eventually went to the VA and was told by the head of the neurology department that was treating concussion syndromes that there is no way that I had anything that was post-concussion that was causing me any issues.
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And then I started talking to other veterans, specifically those who had experienced traumatic brain injury, a lot of them with special forces folks, and about 99% of our symptoms, and I m not talking across one or two people, I m talking across dozens and dozens of people,
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were exactly the same.
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And so I eventually found a polytrauma treatment center here at the Haley Center in Tampa.
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It s a VA center where they were the first ones who looked at you holistically to figure out what was going on.
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And lo and behold, it was post-traumatic syndrome caused from having many traumatic brain injuries that had never healed properly.
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And so I know in a way how you feel because your life
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It s so disrupted and you, I poured myself into research.
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I would tell these neurologists, I feel like I have a doctorate myself because I ve read so much on this, but no one knows yourself as well as you do.
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And one of the most important things that I came out of that experience realizing
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is that you have to be the CEO of your health journey and that so much of the medical system today is fundamentally flawed and it treats everything in the form of protocols instead of looking at the person holistically and what could be going on with them and causing these myriad of symptoms.
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I m just gonna throw it out there.
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Because it is not only so frustrating, but it s so sad for me to see so many people who become bankrupt because of their health and because the healthcare system is not adequately serving them so that even if they are coming out of this in some form or shape healed, they re carrying these huge economic burdens that weigh on them for years, if not the rest of their life.
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And I know this is something you re passionate about as well.
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Yeah, the way that bankruptcy is the number one form of medical bankruptcy is the number one form of bankruptcy in America.
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It s the flooding that comes after the initial storm.
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It is wild.
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how tragedy doesn t just strip you down to the studs, but it appraises the worth of everybody else s bungalows and threatens to take everyone else s livelihoods away.
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That was probably the biggest source of not just like the horror of being told you re probably going to die that year, but it was the feeling that I was the bad thing.
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That was then going to happen to other people because my illness, my treatment, my everything was going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that we just did not have.
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And so if I could just wave a magic wand to remove just even the post diagnosis feelings, it would be, I wish that I could take away all the shame that people feel when they re being saddled with.
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The consequences of things they just, they didn t choose.
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And I m glad you brought up shame.
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I think another aspect of illness and adversity is mattering.
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How for you, as you were going through your sickness and your recovery, and now your life living with cancer, how does that redefine what it means to you to matter in life?
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It makes me want to ask you, so in all of your experience with people who ve been sick, with your own needing to overcome massive health obstacles, do you feel like what you landed on was that it becomes such a difficult, dark, and lonely place unless we really know, that it s hard then to act unless we know that we matter?
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Is that where that landed for you?
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Well, I think that s a part of it.
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I think that when you go through something like this, and for me, I wanted to get my cognition backed because I knew I had a greater purpose that I wanted to fulfill and that I couldn t be a podcaster.
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I couldn t be a writer.
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I couldn t get up on stage and talk.
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If I kept on having moments where I would lose thought or couldn t remember things that were critical, especially if I were openly talking like I am now.
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to do.
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And so for me, my mattering started to get crushed because I was put into a situation where I wasn t able to do the things I needed to do because my mind was just not processing the way that it used to.
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And so for me, it s something because a lot of people don t have an experience.
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So you start going inward in your pain and you don t want to talk about it and you feel shameful because you don t want to talk.
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about it and I remember being in my fortune 50 jobs and sometimes I would say something completely out of context or I d mispronounce words and other things and you re just sitting here like punching yourself inside especially when you re being told that you re completely fine.
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But I know from observing my sister and other people I know who have faced cancer diagnosis or other sickness whether it s ALS or something else you really start
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narrowing from what I ve seen the focus to what really matters the most in your life.
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And that means getting things out of your life, whether they be activities you re doing or people or other things that are tearing you away from what truly matters.
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So you want people around you who are supporting what you re doing, who you enjoy being with, but most importantly, who you want to
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to share the love with because at the end of the day, love is the most important thing I think that we have and having fun and joy and other things.
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That s what I was trying to ask when it comes to mattering, because I feel like when we don t matter, it s hard to love anything, including yourself.
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Yeah, I m so glad you told me that because I landed on a different, I think we have the same conclusion, but I landed on a different place because when I think before what had caused me pain was in believing that I was special.
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And then when I got sick, I realized, well, I am about as special as everybody else.
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And what I needed was, I did need to believe that I mattered, certainly enough to be cared for.
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I deserved a thousand times better support than I got.
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But in feeling like I wasn t special anymore, I did feel much more cracked open to other people s pain in a way that I hadn t been.
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And so no longer believing that I m special means that I believe that things are about as likely to happen to me as anybody else.
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And that kind of humility, like leveling feeling,
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has put me in a different space.
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I find it s like a softer place.
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It s easier for me to then have kind of an insane amount of compassion for everybody else s equally ridiculous circumstances.
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I do think too, though, just trying to figure out though, what is, because I do, I m also a big believer in the language of purpose.
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And the feeling like our gifts, that we need to be called into the love and service of others, which makes our befores and afters much more meaningful.
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Like it s certainly in the after, in the aftermath, I have become insanely laser focused on the only things that I know are really, I hope, going to matter in the end.
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And all of that, I think we probably share a very similar language of passion and purpose.
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For the listener who can t see the video and what s behind you, um, your tagline has become everything happens for a reason.
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You have a bestselling book of the same name, uh, your podcast.
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And to me, the book in many ways, you were just talking about purpose.
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It to me was a memoir about how to find purpose, even in the midst of pain and uncertainty.
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And I wanted to ask, how do you balance now the desire to make a difference in the world with this acceptance that you have of human limitations?
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Yeah.
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Well, cause the subtitle of the book is everything happens for a reason and other lies I ve loved because I don t believe that everything happens for a reason.
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I think that s part of the great dilemma is when we re surrounded by most of the things happening to us without our permission or without knowing that it s not all trying to improve us.
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How then do we find our own very good reasons?
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for moving forward.
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I think what helps me is I ve become wildly intolerant of platitudes.
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I really try hard not to be reductive in my life.
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God is not usually closing doors and opening windows.
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God is pouring love out into the world, but we might not always be able to tell why things happen to us.
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I think taking things less personally in that way is a call toward greater courage.
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to know that we won t always get to have the satisfying story, but we do have to, but we are called forward into love, into hope, but not necessarily without the tidiness of an Instagrammable life.
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My life sometimes might look like garbage, but I hope that it will be incredibly full of love.
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Well, I think that s beautiful.
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And I think a lot of people today are trying to navigate this tension between ambition and contentment while staying true to their core values.
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What would your advice be to listeners on how they can do that if they re struggling with it?
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Yeah.
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Because especially for women, we re often told not to be ambitious.
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So often ambition is wonderful because it can pull us out of self-pity that doesn t help us, despair, which threatens to drown us.
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Ambition really helped me in the months and years after my diagnosis when it reminded me, oh, hey, you used to be good at something before.
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What was that?
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Maybe you should do some of that.
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So I think
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being able to press the gas in our life is a wonderful reminder of why our gifts matter and does help rev the engine and pull us forward.
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I do think the problem for a lot of us is that we re like completely lead-footed on that gas pedal and then we wonder why we feel
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scared, fearful, and overwhelmed.
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And it s because we usually only have a version of ourselves if we re only good if we re being ambitious.
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So I think ambition is wonderful, but we might practice.
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Do you feel as loved if you re just lying in a hammock?
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Do you feel as loved when somebody else actually needs to take care of you because you re the one whose life is difficult?
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A friend of mine who
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is comes out of the Alcoholics Anonymous community said that she likes to think of every, she and her friends think of it as the rowing club.
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Like sometimes you re the one in the boat and then sometimes you re just the one at the oar.
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Everybody s got to take turns.
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I think our self-perception has to be enough that we don t mind taking our turn at the row, at the oar, but sometimes we don t mind just taking a nap.
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Well, thank you for that.
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And what is your definition now of a life well-lived and how has it evolved through your experiences?
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Hmm.
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I think before I had a bucket listy attitude toward life, like life was a series of choices and accumulated circumstances, collect all dozen.
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And I no longer believe that there s ever going to be that completion feeling on anything.
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I think that part of the ache in us is knowing that we never get to feel completely full.
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I think if we can have a little honesty about that.
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than to me a life worth, a life well lived, a life worth loving.
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is one in which we live with courage, knowing that it will never entirely be enough, but that every now and then we will feel that little, the like breadcrumbs, the little sparkle dust.
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And those are the moments that we should collect, the ones in which we feel like time is taffy and we are close to people who love us.
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And we were doing something that matters and we tried and it hurt just a little, and then we kept trying.
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I think it will feel a lot like that.
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I have another question along these same lines.
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I have tried to put a lot of effort into the topics of effortless perfection and this toxic achievement culture that so many people find themselves in.
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What advice do you have for those who are striving to live intentionally without succumbing to unrealistic expectations that they in society place on themselves?
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I wrote a whole book called Good Enough, which was trying to deal with my own exhausting perfectionism.
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I think this is part of the secularization of the prosperity gospel where we all have become televangelists of good, better, best.
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So I think realizing that just what you re describing, that we are now officially at
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peak perfectionism in our culture, and that no one is going to hand you the permission slip to take it down 20 notches.
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But if we do, I think we ll find we actually what we need is a greater tolerance for that, for not judging ourselves for never getting to that.
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checklist feeling.
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I think it s deep in some of us.
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You cannot get me away from an airport kiosk with an ironic book called The Happy Inbox.
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I m going to create a time management strategy where there s none warranted.
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Trying to constantly undo that in ourselves, I think is a life project.
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Hey, the last thing I wanted to ask you is I especially love to have guests on who have podcasts because we understand just how much work it takes to put one of these on.
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And I never like to ask anyone who s their favorite guest because Lord knows when you ve had hundreds, it s so hard to pick.
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But can you just pick maybe one guest that you ve had on that comes top of mind that you ve had a recent impactful conversation with and why?
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Oh yeah.
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And this is the problem too, is I immediately fall in love with the podcast guest and then expect to vacation together in a way that it s probably too much, but never too much.
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I think the conversation that comes to mind on this topic is there s a beautiful book called The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Rinkle.
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She writes for the New York Times a lot and her essays are just gorgeous.
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because she knows how to pay attention to every small thing.
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Like she s so good at the thing that I am not, which is like the beauty of ordinariness.
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So yeah, that conversation was a huge challenge to me to slow down and learn to fall in love with the world again.
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Thank you so much for sharing that.
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And Kate, if a listener wants to learn more about you, where s the best place for them to go to learn everything about Kate Bowler?
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Oh, well, sure.
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Well, there s Kate Bowler.com.
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And we often have free resources, especially around Lent and like Christmas and going up to Easter and, and at Kate C Bowler on Instagram and in all social media needs.
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Oh, and if you want a medium sad podcast, it s called everything happens.
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Well, Kate, thank you so much for giving us the honor of being here today.
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It was truly a joy having you.
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It is my great joy.
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I really thank you for sharing your story with me.
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I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Dr. Kate Bowler, and I wanted to thank Kate for the honor and privilege of joining us today.
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Links to all things Kate will be in the show notes at PassionStruck.com.
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Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show.
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Videos are on YouTube at both our channels, John R. Miles and PassionStruckClips.
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I also have some exciting news that my brand new book, which I m holding here in my hands, Passionstruck, 12 Powerful Principles to Unlock Your Purpose and Create Your Most Intentional Life, is available for pre-order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or anywhere else that you purchase books.
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Links will also be in the show notes.
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Advertise your deals and discount codes in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals.
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I m on all the social platforms at John R. Miles, where I post daily bits of inspiration.
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You can sign up for my LinkedIn newsletter, Work Intentionally, or you can go to passionstruck.com and sign up for my personal development newsletter, Live Intentionally.
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You are about to hear a preview of a very special Passion Struck Podcast interview that I did with Jim Kwik, founder and CEO of Kwik Learning, New York Times bestselling author of the book Limitless, speed reading and memory trainer and host of the Kwik Brain Podcast.
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You know how there s like personalized medicine based on your genetics or personalized nutrition based on a test like your microbiome?
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Well, we created a model for personalized learning because everybody learns a little bit differently, right?
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They have a different style based on their brain animal and that informs how they could read better, remember names, learn another language, focus when they need to, and so much more.
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It literally affects every area of your life.
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The fee for this show is that you share it with family or friends when you find something useful or interesting.
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If you know someone who could use the advice that Kate gave here today, then definitely share this episode with them.
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The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those that you love and care about.
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In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen.
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Now, until next week, go out there and become Passion Strong.