Melissa Kiguwa:
Ooh, boofle.

Martha Beck:
As a life coach, I fell in love with it immediately because it’s a self-coaching book. It takes you through different prompts and exercises and ways to self-reflect. And if you go through it, I’ve just done the last few days, every day it asks you to do something audacious, which I love. And I’m going to assume, Melissa, that audacity is what has brought us here together because you have done more in your very, very few years on Earth than most people do in 10 lifetimes. And that must take a lot of audacity. Yeah?

Melissa Kiguwa:
Yeah. It takes a lot of audacity. Thank you for reading that. Hi, everyone. I can’t see you, but I feel you. I think audacity is the core sort of thing. I’ve been called bold all my life before I even knew what it meant. I didn’t understand it. And it wasn’t me trying. I just I went towards what made sense. And so I think that there’s no sort of study around this, but I’d like to see if we charted the world’s most successful people and also charted the levels of their audacity, I think that the line on that curve would be…

Martha Beck:
Fascinating.

Melissa Kiguwa:
The two go together. I don’t think it’s as much brilliance or toughness or savvy. I think audacity is something that we really underestimate.

Martha Beck:
That’s fascinating. It’s like if a voice in the back of your head isn’t going, “How dare you?” You’re probably not being audacious enough.

Melissa Kiguwa:
If you are not… Can I swear?

Martha Beck:
Oh, absolutely.

Melissa Kiguwa:
If you’re not scared shitless… And I can give a story about this to let people know. So I had told you… So first of all, Martha, you were on my podcast first. You were on The Idealists and we had such a beautiful conversation. And one of the big ways we connected was you come from Mormonism and I was born into a very conventional, traditional, missionary-esque Christianity, very tied to the colonial project. And so my decision to leave the faith, life altering and all of that. But I will say that during that journey, I felt this pull towards going back to Africa at Uganda. Had only been there once before, maybe for a week.

Martha Beck:
Wow.

Melissa Kiguwa:
Whole third culture kid born in the West. And I was like, I want to go back. I didn’t tell anybody because I knew people would be scared and I’d get all sorts of messaging around it. Bought a one-way ticket. I was 20, landed at the airport, felt like something told me, this is it. This is where you’re supposed to be. And ended up staying for four years.

Martha Beck:
Wow.

Melissa Kiguwa:
The political context around that. I started my career as a journalist. And so I had just come out to my family as queer. My mother had sort of disowned me and was like, “I don’t want any parts of it.” And at the time, if you remember, there was this big anti-homosexuality movement happening, especially in Africa. And Uganda was spearheading that with legislation that would criminalize people for being gay with the death penalty. So, I was going. I had just come out, bought a ticket, and I was like, “I’m going to go and be with my brothers and sisters fighting this thing.” Talk about audacity.

Martha Beck:
Wow. That just, I’m going to pull you back to that conversation that you and I had. And then I want to tie this back in because the reason I wanted to talk to you on the Gathering Room as opposed to any other forum is that this is where I’m explicitly spiritual and I did not come to you as a, you were not introduced to me as a spiritual person. But as you were interviewing me, we were talking about our various experiences and leaving our religions. And you said that while you were at the London School of Economics, you went into a professor and I don’t know exactly, please retell the story because what I remember is she told you you weren’t on a spiritual quest. And you were like, “Yes, I am.” Tell me where I’m wrong. Tell the story again for these folks, if you don’t mind.

Melissa Kiguwa:
Yeah. I was going back to school. So, this is after the Africa trip. So, I’m a little older than my colleagues. I wanted the pedigree. And so I’d gone gone to LSE and I was really struggling in my classes because it was so intellectual, but it wasn’t grounded in how does this impact us? What does this do for us? When we talk about these political things or we talk about these really big things, what does it mean for the soul? What does it mean for the heart? And a lot of the conversations where you have student populations that get very angry and they’re fighting injustice, it’s because where’s our humanity in all of this? And so I remember I was going to a professor and trying to, in my own way, talk about this. I don’t think I had good language for it, but I was trying. And she stopped me in the middle and said, “Melissa, you don’t come to the LSE for spiritual enlightenment. You come here for intellectual rigor. Get it together.”

Martha Beck:
That’s right.

Melissa Kiguwa:
I said, “Okay.” Put the mask back on and then went forth. But I was like, but I’m here because I care. I’m here [inaudible 00:07:41] because I have a soul. They go together.

Martha Beck:
And my experience at Harvard, when my son was diagnosed with Down syndrome and I started wondering about what is the meaning of a human life, it’s the same thing. You’re there to have intellectual rigor and this child will never have it. And I was like, but is that what makes life worth living? No, it’s about the heart. It’s about the soul, it’s about joy. And a lot of people don’t quite get how you can be in the culture that is intellectual or activist or whatever it is that you or financial. You’ve done really well there. How do you do that while carrying forward a pure spirituality? And how does that work into your life? And how is it all the many things you’ve done from your poetry to your business to your podcasts, your drive as a spiritual being seem to me to be at the bottom of all these things.

And I wanted you to talk about that with us here on the Gathering Room to tell us what is your practice? This journal has wonderful practices, but what is your practice to maintain this vibrant spirituality and go to these incredible adventures and do all these audacious things? How do you keep that up?

Melissa Kiguwa:
Yeah. I love this question. I’ve never been asked and I think the reason I’ve never been asked goes towards why it’s been happening. So if I think of myself, if I think of my little girl self, very precocious. But no, I wasn’t supposed to become this person. There was no model for this. I don’t come from a wealthy family. I don’t come from one of those black elite families that was like, oh, you can go to the ball and you can… That was not the story. I wasn’t even of the you’re going to become an engineer, doctor, or lawyer. It was just like, girl, I don’t know.

Martha Beck:
Good luck.

Melissa Kiguwa:
Good luck. Get it how you can find it.

Martha Beck:
Wow.

Melissa Kiguwa:
And I used to harbor a lot of sadness around that. That there wasn’t like a path or a specific intentionality about how me or those in my family were raised. But now I actually think that was my greatest gift because I was allowed to be whatever. Because there was no expectation that I’d become anything, I could be anything.

Martha Beck:
Sorry to jump back, but is that how you could go to Uganda during the anti-homosexuality crackdown? It’s one thing to be allowed to be free. It’s another thing to be so in your own, so self-possessed that you can go against a culture that is literally murderous toward you. Did you just grow up in your freedom? Did that give you this strength? Or you have said to me before that you’ve been through difficult experiences and it’s the bounce back from that that’s given you so much strength. Tell us a little bit about that because everybody here has been down and out. And that’s a time when you say, “Ugh, I can’t do anything.” Looking at your bio, it’s like you’ve never been down and out. But I don’t think that’s the whole story.

Melissa Kiguwa:
Yeah, no, no, no, no. So I… How do I say this? It’s reckoning. It’s reckoning. There’s the practical and then there’s what I’ve done. So if I think of some of the hardest moments I’ve had, again, we’re talking poverty, we’re talking all sorts of things, grow up seeing domestic violence. There’s so many things. Something that I realized, and this was just in being, just being in the world. So for example, I remember once I had such a heavy heart and a friend had invited me to this wooded area just to catch up and talk. This friend was very Bohemian and she had went on her own adventure. And I sat at the base of a tree, I sat down with my back against the tree and I just started wailing, wailing, wailing, wailing. I might have been there for an hour. People were coming, they heard me. They went the other way. I shed, but I felt like I was connected to the spirit of that tree that had called me to sit there and release it all out.

So when we talk about practices, I think some of it is just you got to get primal with it because you’re operating outside the bounds of the rules and the rule book. And therefore you need to find teachers that will speak to you from all angles. In your book, The way of Integrity, you talk about soul teachers. And it might be a book, a circumstance, it might be a person. And so I have just allowed that all things are my teacher because if I believed those who were put in my path as the authority, I would not have become. They were lying to me. You’re not supposed to do that. Don’t do that. Don’t become that. Why would you think that? Would you go there?

But if I look at the tree, you’ve been here a thousand years, a hundred years, you’re older than all this wisdom. You know what it means to be gnarled and grow outside of yourself. You know what it means to be rooted into the place. You know what it means to be connected to all things. You know what it means to be chopped down. You know what it means to grow in a suburban area or to grow in the wooded area. You know what it means to be alive. So you asked me what’s my practice? That’s the first part is finding teachers everywhere.

Martha Beck:
And was that one tree, did it feel a certain difference for you? Was it magnetic? Was it lit up? Do you find are there teachers that show up every day? How do you find the teacher?

Melissa Kiguwa:
Ooh, these are good. I’ve never been asked these questions before, Martha.

Martha Beck:
I’m just asking them because I want to know. I need help. Seriously, I love the idea of going out, looking for teachers. And your book encourages a type of perspective that makes you look around you to see what will inspire you. But when you saw that one tree, how was it different?

Melissa Kiguwa:
It was a pull. So, one of the questions that I ask in the book is how do you know when you know? How do you know? So, for all of us, it’s different. Some people hear it. Some people feel it. Some people it’s an… Intuition can show up in a number of different ways. Some people dream it. So, it’s important to be connected to that. I know that if I’m pulled towards something, I should probably go in that direction. It’s not for my safety, it’s for my evolution.

Martha Beck:
Oh, that’s really interesting. That’s fascinating. And that pull, as you know, my whole thing is to break free of culture where it doesn’t honor your true nature. And actually Row and I, my partner and I were doing this podcast with Eric Zimmer and his partner Ginny. And we were talking about how we all live spiritual lives and they talked about this pull, this magnetic pull. And we all had felt this and now you’re saying it too. And we were talking about living life without a script.

And a lot of people see that as a problem. There’s so much change that nobody has a script for how the world is going to be and what they should be within it. And you were given no script from the beginning except for a really, really difficult script of bad social situations in every way. And yet you’ve turned that into the freedom to live a spiritual life while succeeding in a non-spiritual world. And I want to just highlight that for a minute. Just let everybody breathe in the image of this woman who has taken situations that look very troubling and discombobulating and uncertain, and found a way to be pulled through life to an incredible string of incredible accomplishments. We’ve got a question here for you, Melissa, from Jim, who says, “Would you say that many people are caught in a mental battle between doing what is audacious and doing what is comfortable?”

Melissa Kiguwa:
Oh, 100%. I think here’s the funny thing about life. I’m not someone who would ever say we all need to be audacious because I don’t know your life path. I don’t know what you are here to do. I’m not religious anymore. But when I was Christian, I used to be fascinated by the story of when Jesus would go to every city, he had a home to go to, people to feed him, clothe him, people to take him. So it meant that you could be Jesus and one of his disciples and one of the people going with him. Or you could be with your home, building a homestead, living a very traditional status quo life. So you could welcome Jesus and his entourage when they come.

So, I think it’s important to come back to self, which is why I’m all about how do you know what you know? What are you here to do? Because that also, it shapes your relationship with audacity. Are you supposed to shake things up or are you supposed to hold people who shake things up? Or are supposed to go out and feed people right after they’ve done the shake up. Everyone’s going to the march. Some people are doing strategy, some people are going to the people. Some people are just bailing people out of jail.

Martha Beck:
And you just get up in the morning and you go where you’re pulled. And I have more questions for you too, but we’ve also started getting more questions from our viewers. So Donna says, this is one of the things I was wondering, “How do we stop fear of judgment from others that stops us from being audacious?” And also, I want to add to that you didn’t just go out and be audacious and everybody said, “Oh, Melissa, how wonderful.” I’m sure you had pressures coming back at you and bad days and days when people were mean. And even that conversation with your professor who said, “Get it together.” When you have a smack in the face like that or when you’re afraid of it, how do you get up and keep going, and being so purely yourself, even in the face of pain and the fear of pain?

Melissa Kiguwa:
Well, it’s not intentional while I’m doing it. I’m not the oracle sitting on the mountain going, I have no… We show up to the moment. So the question is how do we deal with judgment? Judgment will never leave. We’re social creatures. We live in a real world. And our audacity is not just impacting us, it’s impacting everyone around us. So, you have to reckon with that. My wound in a wound, it’s around sacrifice and love.

Martha Beck:
Oh, interesting.

Melissa Kiguwa:
So even though my family didn’t have much, anything we had came from individuals’ immense sacrifice. I am here because of my mother’s immense sacrifices. My mother exists because of her mother’s immense sacrifices. My grandmother had her first child at 16, would go on to have 12 children after that. No literacy, couldn’t read, couldn’t write. Would dig in the field to grow maize or to grow different things like this.

Martha Beck:
Wow.

Melissa Kiguwa:
So when I think of, oh, I want to do something audacious or want to do something that’s not necessarily going to be financially rewarding in the beginning. Entrepreneurship, the creative arts, these are not things that we’re like, oh, throwing the money at. I had to deal with a lot of my own conditioning around what a failure I am. What a way that I am not making the most of what’s been given to me of the [inaudible 00:21:43] I have.

Martha Beck:
Really?

Melissa Kiguwa:
Yeah. And that would be the loop in the head, get it together, get it together. But as a business person or as a creative, that the first is not always going to get you what you want. And you got to keep going. And you develop skills and you knock your head and you got to meet people who can come into your life and who will hold your hand. And it crumbles. And that is the way.

So you could almost say that for the person who asked this question about judgment, instead of thinking about, I’m getting rid of judgment, that’s not a real thing. Think of it as how do I practice the ability of looking at my wound very clearly? Saying how do I show up today so that I can untangle some of this? I will always come from a lineage of people who sacrificed for me. It will always be a thing that I stand on the shoulders of others, but I don’t have to carry that every day in the sense that it weighs me down. I can play with it. I can play with it and I can bring it in the room with me. And that relationship, I think there’s no one, it’s not going to happen in one day. You’re in play with yourself.

Martha Beck:
How do you play with it? How do you play with a big legacy burden like that? I love the idea. And I’m thinking, okay, well what could I do? Could I go out and run around in the woods and play with my burdens? How do you play with it?

Melissa Kiguwa:
Is that what comes up for you?

Martha Beck:
That is what came up for me, yes.

Melissa Kiguwa:
Tell me more about that. How would that look for you?

Martha Beck:
Oh, I love being coached by a coach. Right now, it’s going outside with a two year old and following her around the woods and watching her discover things. And the whole, all my years fall away. And I get to be this two year old again. And it’s the purest play that I’ve known for a long time. And when I’m there, I don’t really care what people are saying about me. It’s such a wild thing with this little wild kid who’s never really been conditioned.

And the other thing is I wanted to talk to you again because I felt like I wanted to play with you. As I talk about this, I think I had this same feeling when you were interviewing me that I have when I’m out with this lovely baby. That there’s someone with such a bright, pure soul who’s engaging with the world in such a delicious way. And I don’t know how you got through to being an adult with that so shining from everything you do. But maybe you were just born with a gift of being able to continue playing joyfully with things, even when life got really hard. Were you always this joyful person?

Melissa Kiguwa:
No. No, no, no, no, no. In fact, I like to say that when I was 20, I looked like I was 60. And now that I’m in my 30s, I’m aging backwards. It’s the unshedding. It’s not a gift. It’s one core element about my personality. I get sick of myself. I get sick of my bullshit.

Martha Beck:
I love it.

Melissa Kiguwa:
I get sick of my bullshit.

Martha Beck:
Do you ever just sit… Is there a point where you’re basting in it and you go, okay, that’s it.

Melissa Kiguwa:
Yeah, 100. Oh yeah. After a hard knock. I’ve been an entrepreneur. I’ve gone out to raise money. I worked in the creative arts. The aggregated number of nos I’ve heard across my adult life trying to just do what I do is probably more than a thousand. I hear nos every day. And some nos hit you harder than others. But it’s a practice. Now I get a no and I’m like, ah, I’ll circle back in six months. I’m a mosquito.

But I want to come back to this question of how, so a few things. One, you know, get sick of your own bullshit after a while or you get sick of life’s bullshit. You just get tired of being down. You just get tired of being down. We’re supposed to enjoy life if we can. We have people around us who make us laugh. I like to laugh. I like to have a good time. So after a while I’m just like, “All right, we got to figure this out and get back up.” You mentioned laughing, being wild. I had mentioned the tree, but also being out in nature and not just being out in nature, but being loved up on nature, letting its wisdom come to you. There’s something about recognizing that we’re so primordial. We’ve been around for a long time. What’s happening today will not last forever. It can’t. It cannot. Mountains that have been around for thousands of years, love seeing those because it’s almost like they talk to me and they say, “Get over your shit.”

Martha Beck:
I love this. I can’t believe that a half an hour has almost completely just gone away. And I’m getting messages saying, “You need to invite Melissa back. We need more of this person.” People are saying, “Where can we find out more about you? Social media? How can we get the journal? What’s going on?” They don’t want to lose you. They’re feeling the same way I did. So, can you say a little bit about people can get the journal and get more of you?

Melissa Kiguwa:
Yeah, 100%. So you can follow me on Melissa Kiguwa on Instagram. I’ve just started getting active there. You can listen to the podcast, www.theidealistpodcast.co. From there you can find a link to find the journal. I also wanted to, there’s a question in the journal that also speaks to what you just asked about. How do you do this? So was it in one of those old schooly, metaphysical entrepreneurial books? Not Grow Rich-

Martha Beck:
Napoleon Hill?

Melissa Kiguwa:
One of those kind of books. And he talks about the council of advisors he had. He would call on Abraham Lincoln or Vanderbilt or something like that and speak to them when he had issues. And I think that part of the reason why some of those books can feel really disorienting to those of us who come from historically marginalized communities is because it’s a bunch of old white men talking to other old white men. But I ask a question in here where it’s like, When you’re going through an issue, think of three women, either in your legacy or who are dead, contemporary, historical, or today, what would they tell you about what you’re going through?”

Martha Beck:
I loved that one. That’s one I… Yeah, that’s great.

Melissa Kiguwa:
So it’s like I think of Madame CJ Walker, first millionaire in the United States. Black woman started out as a maid. If I am having a bad day, and I am like I can’t even think of it. How about a woman living in the 1920s?

Martha Beck:
Wow.

Melissa Kiguwa:
Black woman made, who was like, “I’m going to make it happen.” What she tells me about resilience, grit, strength, and getting up again, next level. Wangari Maathai, first African woman to win the Nobel Prize.

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah, amazing woman.

Melissa Kiguwa:
Tells me about planting the tree, being a tree woman. It’s okay. She’ll tell me, “You’re speaking the language of the trees.” Cleopatra spoke multiple languages, sang, had an empire in it’s profundity. What does she tell me about grace, leadership, being of the feminine and the masculine? So, we play, we can play. Everything is here for us. It’s all here for us.

Martha Beck:
This is brilliant. So my whole thing in life is that I’ve been looking for people I call the team, and now I call them way finders. People who are, and I always thought I’d be here during a time of change when everything gets rattled and the normal things fall apart. And then as I grew older, I started to see these individuals who are lit up. As I asked you if the tree was lit up, certain people look lit up. And I noticed that they didn’t have any particular demographic commonalities, but they had this spirit of joy and a divine consciousness that was here to make things work for themselves as individuals, but also to find a new way through the world. And that it is joyful and it’s spiritual and it’s also of the material and social.

And you are one of the most shiny examples of this that I’ve ever seen. And it validates my theory that people like you exist. And so I just want to sort of wrap up here by saying here we have a way finder par excellence who has gone all over the world, done a million different things, been down, down, down, and up, up, up and is telling us every day that there’s a practice of audacity and of not taking your own that is propelling her through life. And I just want everybody to drink that in as an example we can all follow. And any last words before we close out the Gathering Room for today, Melissa?

Melissa Kiguwa:
Oh, Martha, what a gift this has been. Thank you for you and for seeing me in this platform. And I hope we can continue to play together. And for those who are listening in, just know that you are here for a reason. You’re here for a reason. And we had someone on our show and she said, “You’re not cursed. God doesn’t hate you. God has not forgotten you. Your soul is just here to do what it’s supposed to do, which is to evolve.” Every single one of us has challenges. It is what life comes with. Every rose has a thorn. It’s just the nature of things. And so when things are hard for you, instead of saying, it’s hard for me, you say, oh, this is the challenge that life has given me. This is what I’m here to do.

Sometimes when I’m running a business, I’m like, why is this so flipping hard? And I’m like, oh, well, I’m supposed to have a challenge. So this is the challenge. I’m supposed to. It’s supposed to be. So you’re not forgotten. You’re not. You’re doing it. You’re here. And every day you show up, you face yourself and you say, “What am I here to do for myself, for those around me, and what’s my spirit here to do?”

Martha Beck:
And you go where you’re pulled. Well, I felt very pulled toward you and I’m so grateful that you have been here with us today. And I hope you’ll come back. And in the meantime, everybody, thank you for joining us. Love you all. Melissa, thank you so much. Get the journal and we’ll see you soon.