E215 - Elizabeth Gilbert: Love Addiction, Telling the Truth & Hearing Your Inner Voice
October 6, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readThe Voice That Doesn't Negotiate
Elizabeth Gilbert arrived at the Know Thyself podcast at a peculiar moment: she had just emerged from a six-month sabbatical, her first complete stop in decades. The instruction for that pause came from a source she has learned to trust—a voice she calls God that she accesses through a daily practice called Two-Way Prayer. "That voice started saying, we have to plan for you to stop," she explains. "You've been going really hard forever and you've never stopped and you've never paused. And if you don't stop, something's going to stop you and you won't like how that feels."
The sabbatical was not a project. She disciplined herself not to create, not to produce, not to travel or learn a language or get in the best shape of her life. She slept in, walked her dog, drove people to the airport. The first month felt like withdrawal—depression, fear, what she calls "purpose anxiety" and "relevance anxiety." But eventually she learned something she had never known: how to be available to life without needing to prove her worth through output.
The Practice of Listening
Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.
Read Full Summary →Free • No credit card required
Never miss an episode of Know Thyself
Get every new episode summarized in your inbox — free, ~5 minutes to read.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
What you'll learn
- 1 (02:01) **Sabatical as Spiritual Practice** - Gilbert explains her six-month sabbatical was commanded by a higher power through her daily "Two-Way Prayer" practice, not a voluntary break
- 2 (05:53) **The Withdrawal from Manic Living** - Gilbert describes the fear and withdrawal symptoms she experienced when she first stopped her relentless productivity
- 3 (08:44) **The Texture of the Guiding Voice** - Gilbert distinguishes her understanding of God from traumatizing religious concepts, describing a voice that allows freedom but offers direction to minimize suffering
- 4 (10:54) **Negotiating with God About Psychedelics** - Gilbert shares a pivotal moment in early sobriety when she tried to bargain about keeping psychedelics
- 5 (16:33) **Learning to Spot-Check with the Voice** - Gilbert describes how the practice evolved from a morning ritual to an ongoing moment-to-moment guidance system
- 6 (20:35) **How to Distinguish Ego from Higher Voice** - Gilbert identifies the tells of her ego: grandiosity, self-hatred (which she calls "another kind of grandiosity"), and the narcissism of despair
- 7 (26:23) **The Three Selves and Writing from Healed Scars** - Gilbert shares the García Márquez framework of public, private, and secret selves, and why she chose to reveal her secret self in her memoir
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Elizabeth Gilbert joins me for her first public conversation after a six month sabbatical, a stretch where she stopped writing, producing, and planning so she could simply be available to life. Liz is the author of "Eat, Pray, Love", "Big Magic", and her memoir "All the Way to the River". In this conversation she speaks openly about the daily practice of two-way prayer that guides her choices, her recovery from sex and love addiction, and the story of loving her partner Raya through terminal cancer and active drug addiction.
What We Dive Into:
1. Liz describes feeling trapped many times in her life, most painfully while caring for Raya through cancer and active addiction. Each time, the only way out was the truth she least wanted to tell, and naming where she was lying, hiding, or manipulating is what finally set her free.
2. Recovery taught Liz that no partner, payoff, or praise could fill her sense of scarcity around love. Sitting with the part of her that wailed for someone else at three in the morning, and promising to stay anyway, slowly built a secure attachment to herself that no other person could provide.
3. Liz no longer believes everyone must create, but she believes everyone is invited. Success can never be promised, yet telling the story within you will change who you are by the end. As AI grows more capable, the lasting reason to make things may be the one our ancestors had: it is pleasing.
Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.
https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com
✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS:
Waking Up: Get your 14 day free trial!https://www.wakingup.com/knowthyself
Try LMNT & get a free sample pack https://drinkLMNT.com/KnowThyselfUse code KNOWTHYSELF for up to 43% off sitewidehttps://www.mudwtr.com/knowthyself
___________
00:00 Intro
02:30 The Call to Stop
08:30 Listening for a Higher Voice
19:25 How to Recognize the Ego
26:05 The Public, Private, and Secret Self
29:12 Writing From Healed Scars
33:43 Love and Secrecy With Raya
41:10 Codependency and the Truth That Frees
47:06 Generosity With Strings Attached
53:43 Searching for Enough Love
1:00:42 The Inner Child Left Unchecked
1:03:29 Life After Seven Years of Recovery
1:11:46 Redefining Creative Living
1:19:42 Buried Treasure and Ancestral Joy
1:22:44 Ideas as Living Entities
1:30:16 Creating Without Assurances
1:33:44 The Discipline Behind Inspiration
1:38:56 Art Scars and Reclaiming Play
1:45:32 Creativity in the Age of AI
1:50:43 The Practice of Two-Way Prayer
1:55:13 Asking for Our Instructions
2:01:26 Five Days in Darkness
2:06:21 What It Means to Know Thyself
___________
✨MORE FROM ELIZABETH GILBERT
↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elizabeth_gilbert_writer
↳Substac
More from this podcast
Know Thyself →