[00:00:00] Lynn: And I think the pulpit has such an interesting sort of cultural power in the sense that some people think that if it comes from that space, it must be from the word of God. But if you put a female clergy in there who is simply just human and is not telling my story, I'm saying as another female, then that clearly can't be sort of the quote-unquote word of the day.
[00:00:21] Aneta: We often hear people wishing us a long, happy, and healthy life, but what if the length isn't what matters most? What if instead, it's the breath depth and purpose of each day that matters most? Welcome to the Live the Width of Your Life podcast. My name is Aneta Ardelian Kuzma and join me weekly as I interview guests who made changes in their own lives to live more fully with intention. Gratitude and joy. Be prepared to be inspired by their stories of how they shifted their mindset, took courageous action, and designed the life that they always wanted to live.
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Welcome back to the Live The Width Of Your Life podcast. My guest this week is Lynn Horan, she's an ordained clergy interfaith theologian and a leadership consultant specializing in women's leadership development in both the spiritual and secular context. She's completing her PhD. D right now through Antioch University's Graduate School of Leadership and Change, where her research explores gender and leadership boundaries, specifically the systemic scapegoating of young female Protestant clergy.
Her work on embodied social change will be published in the upcoming book, Leadership at the Spiritual Edge, Emerging in Non-Western Concepts of Leadership and Spirituality. She's a former health policy analyst for the New York state Senate, a cross-cultural family counselor, and has worked in homeless advocacy and domestic violence prevention and communities in upstate New York and Central Peru.
She's also a trained dancer and yoga practitioner. Lynn believes strongly in the restorative capacity of movement and embodied expression as a means of cultivating, healing wholeness, and reconciliation in individuals and communities.
This was a fascinating conversation. It was so interesting to talk to Lynn more about her background in the church and also why she has chosen to leave. We talked a little bit about her path to her career and how it's been a winding transformative road for her. And we also talked about her upcoming book and why she wrote it and what's next to come. There were so many things in this conversation that were so educational for me and also so inspiring for her story. I think you're going to enjoy the conversation. Take a listen.
Lynn, thank you so much for joining me today. I am so excited for our conversation.
[00:04:07] Lynn: Me too. Thanks so much for having me.
[00:04:09] Aneta: Of course. First I just wanted to say reading your bio. I was so excited preparing for today's conversation because you have lived and are living such a rich life such a unique one and so many different paths.
And I know we just shared a little bit in the introduction, but I want to hear from you maybe you want to just share a little bit about yourself, your journey, the things that sort of stand out to you as you think about your life and maybe even what's important to you right now
[00:04:42] Lynn: Thank you so much. That's such a nice just invitation a beautiful way to open this. Thank you again for having me. I mean I have good to agree with you I feel like I've led a really rich life and to be able to say that yet also say that I've made these major pivots in my life recently isn't to say that I'm turning away from this path of trauma or destruction or intense abuse, although there are elements of some psychological abuse, which we'll probably talk about religion in particular, but my life has been a good life and I want to acknowledge the privilege that I stand in and being able to say that because I think a lot of women who are making big pivots are making pivots that they had to out of necessity and survival to come out of places of severe oppression societally, culturally, financially. Racially gender oppression.
But I've had a life of opportunity and I will just say that in gratitude to my parents. I mean, my brother and I were raised in a middle to high-income family. My parents paid for both of our college educations. I then covered my further education, but I was handheld in a very loving and concrete way throughout my, growing years, as a reflective human being, I know that there are areas of my life growing up that stunted my personal growth or put me on a path that I needed to secure that and grab that sense of identity in ways that were life-changing.
I think within that privileged context, I grew up in a family where the marriage was not loving. My parents are still married to this day and are very committed to each other and to me and my children, but I didn't see love between them in the way that I then valued love in my marriage to my husband.
So I think observing from a young age, gaps in emotional sustenance for my mother and her marriage for my brother and his relationship with my father. I probably made out the best in terms of feeling loved and affirmed, by both of my parents, my mother in particular, I don't think I needed as much validation from my father as my brother did, which he didn't get growing up.
So I think this family systems understanding has formed my life as someone who's deeply relational, and this led to my work as an ordained clergy. We'll talk about that, I'm sure, as we move forward. But I wanted to help people identify with a deep sense of sustenance, emotional sustenance outside of these systems that were born into and brought up whether that's cultivating a relationship with a higher power or a deeper sense of one's soul.
But this path to be a pastor, I think makes perfect sense in my trajectory, but one that I realized was not the totality of my spiritual orientation. And I have since left that path. But it's negotiating that family of origin system that has influenced me in ways that I'm super grateful for I would not be the person I am without it, but knowing that what I'm setting up now in my own life for myself and my children is markedly different and claiming that is a big part of who I am.
[00:07:59] Aneta: Thank you for sharing that. So let's talk a little bit about going your path into the ministry and also your decision, I think that you and I were just talking before to leave and to make a pivot in that. So what initially prompted you to want to study theology and to go into the path of ministry then tell me a little bit more about your experience once you got there, did it meet your expectations?
[00:08:30] Lynn: That's a great question. I was never intending to be a pastor and no one in my life is a pastor. I do not even really come from a very devout religious family. My dad grew up Catholic. My mom is Presbyterian by default. She went to church with a neighbor who was Presbyterian.
So my family, we went to church typically on Sundays, but it was never like, beaten down into us. I mean, we never prayed at the table. I'd get a Bible here and there for Christmas, but it was not heavy-handed. So it was in some ways, very surprising and unexpected that I took this path of ministry as a second career in my early 30s.
I've always been spiritually oriented. And I think that, to a certain extent, is again due to this family of origin context of kind of suppression of emotions, emotional conflict, anxiety. These were realities that I was accustomed to in my family of origin.
And so finding this deep sense of peace in spiritual curiosity, I remember as a 10th grader, my favorite project to date in terms of anything I've done even in higher education, was my English teacher assigning us this three-month project of building a Transcendentalist journal. And this was a public school, obviously there's no real promotion of religion, but I ate that up. I was like, yes, I will do that.
And Transcendentalism, if anyone isn't familiar, it's the tradition that Louisa May Alcott comes out of with her work with little women, but her family were the early transcendentalists in New England. And, in that kind of tradition, but it's a very spiritualist not organized religion orientation. And this exercise drew something out of me. I mean, we were asked to walk in a natural kind of context.
Went into my backyard and started taking pictures of the sun coming through the tree branches and the leaves and pressing flowers and putting them in this little journal and writing poetry and contemplating deep things even. The first time I contemplated my mother-daughter relationship with my mom was part of this.
So that was there from the start, but I pursued a career in politics early on. I worked for the New York State Legislature. I worked with reproductive rights, Planned Parenthood did a lot of travel worked with Indigenous women in Mexico as an undergraduate research project.
So there was this other aspect of my life not tied to religion, but as I realized, how much of a Spiritually oriented person I was. I was gated toward doing counseling and therapy, but I didn't want to be in a clinical setting sort of fixing or attempting to analyze people's mental states or emotional questions.
I wanted to journey with people in a way that pastoral ministry, as I learned the language was really about. But I ended up going to seminary in my late twenties, dual enrolled in a marriage and family counseling degree. So it was a dual master's degree with a master of divinity.
Cause I wasn't sure. I'm like, I'm not even identifying as Christian at this point. And to be honest, I never really have, it's always been beyond that. So I enrolled in Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary dual enrolled in this therapy program and Master of Divinity. And then I ended up just taking the therapy track kind of as a pause button and pursuing the path to ultimately become an ordained pastor, mostly because of this incredible Professor I had who put women's experiences in the biblical tradition on the map for me that was never really shared with me growing up in my kind of moderate Presbyterian church.
So I realized that women's stories had been snuffed out of Christian history in a way that I was angry about actually, and my feminist Hebrew studies professor and I became quite close and she said, you have a place in this tradition if you want to. And this is the reformed tradition is what Presbyterianism is from.
It's a progressive branch of Christianity. It's very much a politically active branch. Western Christianity, so I went that route and I got immediately ordained. I got called to a large church in Delaware and was their first solo female clergy head of staff. And then my second call, I returned to my home in upstate New York and also was their first female solo pastor in their almost 300-year history.
So I was sort of the trailblazer as a very young ordained clergy. I was 31 when I entered the ministry. Then I left when I was 40. So I was in the ministry and actively serving these 2 different churches for about 10 years.
[00:13:06] Aneta: What was your experience like as this young pastor and coming into these congregations, what did the congregation look like in terms of age and demographics? And were they welcoming to have a female pastor?
[00:13:18] Lynn: They both were. I mean, the Presbyterian church is very standout in the Protestant tradition as ordaining women, really the first organized denomination to do so in 1956. So I'm about the third generation of a female clergy, but the youngest coming in. So typically female clergy would come in after having raised kids perhaps after a lengthy career or just coming into it as a first career after kids have grown up.
So to see this young, I mean, I was pregnant twice in the pulpit with my clergy robe and for both churches, they had never had a female clergy or one who was of reproductive age. So I had to put maternity leave on the books and negotiate that and they knew that this is where they needed to go in terms of just being inclusive, but there was a lot of novelty around me being this kind of young, charismatic female having young children, I think that started to wear off for people when they realized that it wasn't just my physical presence that was different, but it was my way of leading, and my way of engaging with people that was different from this kind of heroic solo male model, which very much comes kind of from the Jesus tradition anyway.
So to have me even just physically in these spaces was different and unsettling for some people. I never got a sense that I was unwanted in these settings, but each of these different church positions a couple of years in, when I started to have more agency and boundaries in particular around the pastoral role friction began to occur and push back and actually from somewhat surprising places, although not as surprising now as I researched this.
But older women were the ones that bristled with young female autonomy and leadership agency which I've come to see is a significant mother-daughter wound within Protestant Christianity and something that's the leading cause of Gen X and millennial female clergy leaving the ministry. It's not just that, but that's a very prominent factor, unfortunately, and gifted, talented clergy just leaving the ministry.
It's just not a sustainable place when the narratives of female self-sacrifice are so strong that when you have a female leader who has boundaries and is self differentiated it butts up against these established gender norms.
[00:15:51] Aneta: Interestingly, it's the older females that have a problem with that.
Why do you think that is like, what in particular about your leadership style or the boundaries that you were establishing? You use the word bristled, which is a great word, made them have such a strong reaction.
[00:16:08] Lynn: I've researched this a lot. This is a focus of my Ph.D. research right now, is this mother-daughter wound in different contexts within the church setting or the home setting?
But this idea of the mother-daughter conflict is this age-old dynamic that unfortunately has been interpreted by kind of male psychoanalysis, Freud and Carl Jung as this archetype of the competitive, inherently competitive nature of female relationships, in particular intergenerational female relationships.
But that's inaccurate in the sense that this is not some innate quality that women have that we're competitive or we're prone to jealousy or envy. What it is that when women are denied agency voice and ability to express themselves in the full way that humans should when other women express that kind of agency, there becomes this competition over who gets to be heard.
So, when women are silenced, the automatic result of that is conflict with women who have a voice. And so I had a voice, a very strong voice institutionally approved voice as an ordained clergy. And the women that were again, the ones that bristled, I would say the most were those that had been denied agency, voice, autonomy, and choices in their lives.
Typically they were baby boomer women. So women, the age of my mom, the women who could have been my grandmothers. adored me and adored other women like me because that was never an option for them. They're just so thrilled to see, like, they're not threatened by my presence. Whereas I think the women who were in that one generation ahead of myself and these other clergy that I'm researching that dynamic of that one generational difference in particular baby boomers versus Gen X and millennial women is where that wound is the strongest.
And it's something that can be healed, but I think understanding the roots of where that begins is key. Instead of just assuming that this is an inherently female trait. That's it's so unhelpful to assume that.
[00:18:21] Aneta: Absolutely. So you said that you're noticing people exiting, especially Gen X, and did you say millennials as well? Or
[00:18:28] Lynn: Yeah. And I'm a millennial, so I'm 40, and doing my dissertation research is the flight of female clergy in this age demographic. So women who are between 30 and 50 are this demographic of women who are the youngest clergy to be ascending these high-level senior positions, and they're the ones that are being attacked, scapegoated, bullied, and pushed out, and leaving, ultimately.
[00:18:53] Aneta: Have you connected with other women like you who are also choosing to leave?
[00:19:00] Lynn: Yes, I have. Initially, it was just out of my own need when I left my last church two years ago, I was extremely traumatized by it because it was an aggressive expulsion. It was a scapegoating mechanism that involved about five disaffected parishioners.
The rest of the congregation was just stunned by what was happening and they grieved my exit. I mean, these were people that I had loved dearly and baptized and buried their relatives and officiated their weddings and why was she leaving? But the aggression was just so unchecked and there was no ability to have any legal recourse.
Because of church-state separation is a very scary dynamic when you're a female clergy being sabotaged in this way. There's no legal recourse. So when I left, I felt very alone, very scared. I mean, one of these congregants was quite maniacal. And I found this group of women on Facebook through the Young Clergywomen International.
It's an association that I have been a part of. It's this Facebook group of female clergy who are leading active ministry. In sharing my story, I found this just absolutely grieving yet resilient community of Spirit-filled, intelligent, creative women, many of whom were mothers of young children, trying to piece their lives together after having turned away from what they thought was going to be a lifelong call, and I had already been part of this Ph.D. program in leadership and change through Antioch University.
I did a pilot study with about 20 of these women where I asked them to complete a survey talking about their exit from ministry, the boundaries that were violated, the threats that they endured, the psychological safety that was compromised, and each of them unique stories, but there were these overarching themes of insecure men who felt threatened by female autonomy.
Women, these older women who had an internalized sexism, and then kind of projected that onto these autonomous women. And yeah, it's a systemic issue and white, middle, upper-class Protestant America and it's a brain drain of this talented demographic of religious leaders who are trying to kind of expand what it means to be a faith-oriented person in this world. And they're being rooted out. It's incredible.
[00:21:29] Aneta: It blows my mind. I'm not surprised, I guess, in a very sad way. But I grieve this because as you think about it, we know that we're seeing a lot of younger generations who are leaving the church, even kids who are raised in the church or no longer feel like that is home for them or a safe place to be.
And now you've got, female leaders and clergy who are also choosing to leave because it's not a safe place. It's just going to be so interesting to see what will happen with the institutions with the spirit-led Christian organizations going forward in this country.
Because what will happen if we start to see that more women are leaving at some point, other women may reconsider whether this is a path that seems like a viable option for them. So what do you see as the future? Or what are you hoping to see? Maybe if enough people start to influence change, I don't even know what the answer is. I guess my question to you is, what does this look like? How do we write the course or change the direction that things are headed in?
[00:22:38] Lynn: Yeah, it's a good question. I've always held religion lightly and the idea of church lightly. So I have no qualms in saying I think it's on a fast track to complete collapse.
I mean, even within this progressive denomination, which I was kind of proud to be a part of. I just see it time and again failing to live into what it means to be journeying with people. I mean, there are so many great strides and attempts to be inclusive and socially justice or social justice oriented.
But institutionally it's a dying breed in many ways. I think how people like you, me, and the other women that you work with, I find there's just a deep desire to tap into the spiritual and the holy in ways that are not tied to institutional history, restrictions, or doctrine. And I feel lucky in the sense that I've got the benefit of having gone to seminary and studying some of the beautiful aspects of Christian theology that I hold with great love.
I've always been a bit of a skeptic and a hesitant religious person, but I felt those three years in this cohesive community-oriented seminary experience. I was able to find the threads of this tradition. that I want to hold on to and just let the rest go. And I think that my hope moving forward is that there can be more people in many ways, these former clergy that become these modern-day mystics that have this education slash training or orientation toward some of the real holiness aspects of this tradition and other traditions as well.
Judeo and Christian combined. And also the Abrahamic faiths, there's not a lot of difference between them and universalism and theological psychology, all of these threads that just can be a little bit more fluid and that people can hold a little more lightly, I think is going to be the path forward for our generation and particularly women, I don't think I would continue to be fed In the ways that I need to be fed if I stayed.
I was in essence pushed out. I didn't leave on my terms, but I probably would have maybe stuck around for another church. Hopefully a healthier church and leave when my kids are a little older. But now that I'm out, I do thank the universe for putting this big closed door to that path because I could have wasted another 10, or 15 years. My children's entire childhood trying to please this system that was never going to have enough space for what my heart needed to be as a human, as Lynn, and as a woman, I feel now two years later, grateful. And I hope that this exodus will just create more pathways for genuine spiritual seeking.
[00:25:35] Aneta: Yeah. Well it's so interesting because you mentioned before that when you studied with your professor and you learned about the rich female leaders within the early churches and even within the pre-Christ in the Old Testament, there are so many examples. Some that we see, some that are probably not even included in the canonized scripture.
So what did you learn as you are studying that? And in my mind, I'm like, how does that tie into what happened to those early female leaders to what's happening right now? Do you see any correlation between sort of minimizing the impact of females in the past and the early churches and what's happening now as well?
[00:26:17] Lynn: Yeah, I do. And that's probably the one thing that makes me hang on to the Bibles that are in my basement currently because I can't let these stories go. And a lot of women don't know these stories. And I say women as the readers I have in mind, because there's not a lot in the Bible that's for us, at least what's been presented through Western Christianity.
But one thing that it wasn't even my professor who put this on the map for me, I spent a year in Peru before going to seminary, working with survivors of sexual abuse, and doing dance therapy it was an incredible period in my life. And the story of Ritzpah, which comes out of first Samuel in the Hebrew scriptures was a story I had never encountered before.
And this is a story that is on the lips of just about every faith-oriented Peruvian, in particular, Peruvians who have survived injustice and oppression. And the story of this woman is someone who is on the periphery of society. She comes to the forefront of the biblical narrative because she gets the attention of King David to give a proper burial to her children who have been slain.
In this awful political uproar. She sits on a mountaintop for the entire harvest season guards these bodies from vultures and the weather, and eventually gets the attention of this king to honor their lives. And that resonated with the people of Peru who have gone through a lot of atrocities in the past several decades.
And I realized that story needs to be told in every pulpit in white Protestant America. And lo and behold, the day that I preached it in my first call was Mother's Day and I got feedback from a lot of women, how dare you preach such a vulgar sermon that was so violent and so disturbing. And I said, well, you missed the point in me doing that.
That she was the ultimate sort of protector mother over these slain bodies. It was a provocative sermon, obviously, but it was well-intended. So that was my first glimpse that maybe this kind of upper-class white Protestantism doesn't want some of these stories as part of their lexicon.
And that was deeply sad to me. So I think the more that that kind of stories can be lifted out beyond sort of the institutional religious setting, the more that these narratives can be reclaimed in a powerful way for women. And that's just one of my favorite ones. Every opportunity I have to talk about Ritz, but I will. And now I can do it with the freedom of not having the restriction of that pulpit, what that represents for people. So that's just one example, but I love her.
[00:28:58] Aneta: As you were talking, I just kind of have this image of the four walls that are trying to contain God and trying to constrain spirit. And you as the minister it's so interesting that someone can have an opinion on what it is that you felt called to share, like, it's just so strange because each of us, of course, if you believe that we are vessels and that if we have a relationship with spirit, with God, and we're called to share something, you hope that is coming from a very pure place. So odd for someone to say, how dare you share this message as if you created that story yourself?
[00:29:36] Lynn: Yes. And I think the pulpit has such an interesting sort of cultural power in the sense that some people think that if it comes from that space, it must be from the word of God. But if you put a female clergy in there who is simply just human and is not telling my story, I'm saying as another female, then that clearly can't be sort of the quote-unquote word of the day.
And I will say the other side to that was I got a couple of women who said after you preach that sermon, I realized I need to stay in this church. I need you to be my pastor. I got that kind of validation. Fortunately, those I think words of support and encouragement spoke louder to me than the other couple of women who I think from their limited understanding of their own Christian experience weren't able to receive it in the way that I had intended. So it's interesting how things come out of the pulpit and reach people.
[00:30:30] Aneta: So how are you now planning? You're working on your Ph.D., but what are some of the ways that you want to take everything off your experience because you've talked about this journey of being in politics?
I know you've done a lot of advocacy. You've worked with the homeless population with domestic violence. And so you have such a rich history of serving, of loving people. And that's what comes to mind is just loving people trying to work within these different systems that are all broken, what comes next?
How are you able to unleash what you have this love within you and this desire? I think for advocacy and taking care of people, how will you use that going forward now that you're no longer contained within the four walls of maybe a church setting?
[00:31:15] Lynn: That sounds so liberating. I feel that and that's what I am feeling. This sense of no longer being contained. It's this breath of fresh air. Now that I've sort of overcome the trauma of having left the church. I do feel this deep exhale that I just turned 40 last year. I just had my last child last year. I have three children. This is the beginning of the second half of my life.
And instead of it being a midlife crisis, it's this midlife blessing of being able to carve out and design the life that I love. Not that I didn't love my life before. And I felt that it was very intentional, very spirit-led, full of discernment. But there were aspects of my life that I think have gotten reduced in that over-emphasis on that path of being a clergy.
And the one that comes to mind right now, which is coming back joyfully is my background in dance, modern dance in particular finding that this embodied awareness is a huge part of my coaching work with women. And even just the breathwork we did, in the beginning, is my home base.
It just feels so natural to me to just stop and return into my body and invite other women to do that. So right now I'm developing over the past couple of years since leaving the ministry, a coaching practice that very much focuses on women reclaiming voice, value, and purpose beyond toxic work, religious, or family systems.
And I just want to, in many ways, continue this pastoral journeying that I've been doing for much of my career, but in a way that is so expansive, so women centered. That really honors the feminine sacred, which is part of a beautiful aspect of Christianity, but it's just not a big enough space.
And now I feel like I can really settle into that in a way that I'm not just trying to compartmentalize that sort of feminist, women centered theology, like, that's the bread and butter right now of my work, not in a financial sense, but in a calling sense and it feels wonderful.
And it's continuing to evolve and continuing to define who I am now and in many ways, I joke that I'm rebranding myself because saying you're an ex clergy is a bit of a liability for some people because the church has been so harmful, traumatizing, silencing. So I have to really tread carefully and lightly with the women I work with and understand where they're coming from spiritually. And if my past and previous work as a clergy from within organized religion is something that's triggering for them, I really need to honor that and hold space for that, but for many women who have themselves left the church or never stepped foot into it, they're so curious, they just like, okay, I think being an ex clergy is actually more fun and interesting than actually being a clergy because it just gets people like, huh, what's that about? And I can tell my story and demystify a little bit of it and let people reclaim their spiritual paths.
[00:34:16] Aneta: I love that so much especially in the spaces that I'm in and I am also from a Christian background and I have a very close relationship with what I call God, but there are many people that are within my community and the space and clients that I work with as well that have suffered trauma at the name of religion or church or whatever their upbringing was.
And sometimes you have to leave the confines of that definition and find your own way through maybe spiritualism or through different paths, through somatic healing, as you were talking about through dance, through breath, through these things being fully embodied, because in the end the spirit lives within, it's not outside. It is not somewhere else that can be contained and confined.
And so being able to find that journey sort of back to yourself, back internally, but back to that highest self is the inward work. And then I see that people are starting to come back, maybe using the word God and defining it in a way that feels natural, that feels good that isn't limited, that isn't tainted and so it's interesting because I think there's a lot of people on the spiritual journey and path and doing so many beautiful things in the world, but it doesn't look like traditionally what we expected it to be and I don't know if that's your experience as well.
[00:35:43] Lynn: Yeah, I think that human beings I do feel are innately spiritual beings. And I think the human structures, the human institutions just really suffocate that in ways that people do find hard to reclaim or find or give voice to. I think there's such limited language around it, and as you said, reclaiming what these words and images are for people is so powerful but I am finding so much more now in the work that I'm doing outside of the church. There's just such a vibration and energy coming from people.
And I think coming up into this season, we're in now where we're moving into kind of the holidays, I'm really big about reclaiming Christmas and Advent in particular as a place for feminine exploration in ways that it hasn't and not necessarily even through the figure of Mother Mary, because there's a lot of problematic aspects to that as well, but a deep sense of the bringer of light, the fire tender, which I find as a very feminine energy, the woman who kind of tends the hearth, not just for other people, but for herself. And there's a real resonance there. There's a real thirst, I think, for people in our life stage for that.
[00:36:57] Aneta: I agree. So what's next for you? What are you most excited about that you are willing to share with us?
[00:37:06] Lynn: It's so funny. I don't know. Very simple thing. I'm excited for my 1 year old to wake up from his nap in a little bit, but I just have this, there's this sense of wonder in my life right now. I've got 3 kids, 7, 5 and 1. And I'm so much more available to them emotionally right now that I was not maybe I didn't have as much bandwidth for when I was a pastor.
So I'm enjoying being present with a much smaller circle. It's very energizing for me to be able to look at the different, onion layers of my life and relationships and really ask myself, who are my people, who are sort of my tribe, and in many ways, and letting go of these peripheral relationships that are no longer meeting me where I am now.
Or perhaps are expecting me to be who I was even just 2 years ago when I was still working, getting a paycheck from the church. So I think finding much more intentionality with a much smaller circle of like minded souls and also that creates space for new relationships.
When I came across your work, it just was a no brainer. I really want to connect with you and your work. So it's a very exciting time. I feel like God in the universe is just placing people, conversations, opportunities in my path. I just never would have had the time, let alone emotional energy for before. So I'm looking forward to literally each new day much more than I have in a while.
[00:38:39] Aneta: That sounds so beautiful. And I saw that you have a book coming up or you will be mentioned in a book that is coming out as well. Leadership At The Spiritual Edge. Can you tell us a little bit about that too?
[00:38:49] Lynn: Yeah, it's a co edited volume. Leadership At The Spiritual Edge, indigenous and non western perspectives. So it's sort of my playground right now. And it's a co-edited volume by three colleagues of mine from Antioch University, where I'm studying for my PhD. And I've written a lot and published a lot, but this is sort of my coming out in a sense, because it's putting me right in the kind of work that I most deeply see myself doing, and in fact it's a chapter on embodied social change that I've written that reflects upon my work doing dance therapy in Peru.
And the ways in which movement creative expression was and is a pathway for people whose bodies have been absolutely stripped of humanity to be able to find their untouched, untainted inner soul, and actually the chapter doesn't even really talk about my work, but the openness within this community to dance and movement as a pathway to healing.
So I'm very excited for it in a sense that it's going to be my first larger publication as a scholar practitioner, as opposed to a religious clergy. And it feels like the right time for it to come out for other people, too. And I do encourage people to take a look at it. It's through Rutledge Leadership Studies is the publisher. And each of the chapters is just incredibly eye opening. Just a wonderful book.
[00:40:18] Aneta: I can't wait to read it. We'll definitely include the link. I want to read more about it. I just believe so much in somatic healing and doing work through the body and releasing the traumas that we store within.
It's so encouraging to hear that there are people all over the world that are doing this and discovering something that's been around for a very long time. It's just we haven't necessarily talked about it until very recently. It seems like in the Western world.
[00:40:44] Lynn: That's very true. The main thesis of my chapter is lifting up the indigenous roots of embodied social change, because I think there's kind of this bad trendy thing right now in terms of business culture and even clinical psychology and just more some of these mainstream Western modalities of, let's bring in the body as if it's a new concept. And as you just described.
It is returning to something that's so deeply ancient, and I would definitely say female centered coming out of that life giving breath of the female experience that instead of sort of co opting that, saying this is something new that we're bringing and aren't we hip and fat. It's a deeply ancient and indigenous tradition and it's lifting that up out of these spaces of silence and oppression and it's very exciting and it's absolutely what I see you doing in your work, which I just love.
[00:41:40] Aneta: Thank you. It's amazing. And just experiencing it for myself, it's just been so healing in so many ways and also just brought me so much closer to spirit and to myself through the process. I could talk to you forever, Lynn. So let's talk about if people would like to work with you, who are some of your ideal client or the women that you are typically working with and how can they find you if they'd like to learn more and to work with you.
[00:42:13] Lynn: Sure, I'd love to. Yes, I am currently working with clients mostly in this Gen X, millennial age bracket, kind of getting into their seasoned professional lives in their 30s, 40s, 50s. It's women who are very interested in addressing harmful narratives in their lives that they have maybe unwittingly sort of taken on that are no longer serving them.
And so I work with sort of 5 areas of what I understand is the holistic self. And we explore spiritual, physical, relational, familial and embodied and it's understanding that our wholeness has to take into account all of these areas. And so it's sort of an individually driven coaching relationship.
I come in with some kind of slight loose structure, but it's very much coming from the vein of spiritual direction, which is something that I've done a lot in my life and have had spiritual directors where instead of there being a clinician and a patient, we are two equal human beings in the same playing field.
And then there's a third chair. And the third chair is really where my work sort of centers around. And that third chair can be understood in different ways for each person, but it could be the higher power that one is feeling, nudging them and calling them. It could be that sense of deep inner peace or that still small voice of calm, but that third chair.
is this presence that I really like to draw out in our conversations. And so it's typically what I do is work with women over a three month period with the option to extend for sort of more in depth focus. And my website is where people can get to know me the most, which is Lynnhoran.Com. And then there's a coaching page on that with another specific page just for female clergy trauma recovery which is a particular demographic that I work with, but happy to work with anyone who wants to dig deeper and to find their real authentic self and rewrite those harmful narratives.
[00:44:13] Aneta: I love it so much. So good. Thank you for doing this work in the world. Thank you for being a bright, shining light. Thank you for not allowing your own experience and difficult experiences to stop you, but instead to sort of be this fire to say, you know what, what's the other door I'm going to go through if this one closed so I appreciate you and I am so grateful for our conversation today. And I ask all my guests, the final question, which is what does it mean to you to live the width of your life?
[00:44:44] Lynn: Yeah, I love that line. I love that you've used that as the basis for your work. The width of my life right now is just constantly attending to the different layers of myself, instead of just being these compartmentalized selves, a mother, a daughter, a pastor, a dancer, these separate things, really finding this integrated sense of self and pouring in to the different areas of that at different times when needed. I kind of look at it as a little like a muffin pan where you're going to scoop the batter into the different little cups and some cups are going to need more filling than others. And it's going to get a little messy in between.
And you keep on using that pan over and over again. And you just kind of just do it in a way that enables you to feel more sense of balance because of not neglecting these core senses of self. So that's my focus now and what allows me to live that width
[00:45:39] Aneta: That's beautiful. Thank you so much, Lynn. And I know we're going to have continued conversations.
[00:45:45] Lynn: Thank you so much. This has been such a treat. I appreciate it.
[00:45:48] Aneta: Thank you.
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