VividLife Radio’s Ed and Deb Shapiro welcome Eve Ensler, New York Times bestselling, Tony Award Winning, Activist and Author, to discuss her new book In the Body of the World
From the bestselling author of The Vagina Monologues and one of Newsweek’s 150 Women Who Changed the World, a visionary memoir of separation and connection—to the body, the self, and the world.
Playwright, author, and activist Eve Ensler has devoted her life to the female body—how to talk about it, how to protect and value it. Yet she spent much of her life disassociated from her own body—a disconnection brought on by her father’s sexual abuse and her mother’s remoteness. “Because I did not, could not inhabit my body or the Earth,” she writes, “I could not feel or know their pain.”
But Ensler is shocked out of her distance. While working in the Congo, she is shattered to encounter the horrific rape and violence inflicted on the women there. Soon after, she is diagnosed with uterine cancer, and through months of harrowing treatment, she is forced to become first and foremost a body—pricked, punctured, cut, scanned. It is then that all distance is erased. As she connects her own illness to the devastation of the earth, her life force to the resilience of humanity, she is finally, fully—and gratefully—joined to the body of the world.
Unflinching, generous, and inspiring, Ensler calls on us all to embody our connection to and responsibility for the world.
As the great Zen master Alan Watts said: “We all need to go out of our minds at least once a day!” Going Out Of Your Mind with Ed and Deb Shapiro is a chance for you to drop your analyzing and intellectual mind and come into the immediate experience of present awakening. We are irreverent spiritual teachers and don’t take ourselves too seriously so our discussion show has a great sense of humor while also exploring in depth what it means to live with integrity, awareness, kindness, compassion, and humility.
We will be talking with some of the most luminous women and men about how their lives reflect that luminosity, how they relate to the trials and tribulations of ordinary life, and how this can be of benefit to you. They are people from all walks of life: scientists, actors, activists, musicians, comedians, and business leaders – people whose lives you would never have guessed were rooted in meditation and freedom.