Episode 178 (Transcript): Women’s Spirituality: A Conversation with Brittney Hartley

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Many thanks to listener, Alyssa Riddle, for her work transcribing this episode!

This episode can be found on any podcast app, or can be listened to here on Substack.

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SH: Hi. I'm Susan Hinckley. 

CW: And I'm Cynthia Winward. 

SH: And this is At Last She Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things, and the title of today's episode is Women's Spirituality, a conversation with Brittany Hartley. Hi, Brittany. 

BH: Hi. 

CW: Welcome! 

SH: We're delighted to have you today. 

BH: Happy to be here.

SH: We've never met and I don't think that you and Cynthia have ever met either, but the three of us have been kind of wandering the same halls for many years and kind of passing each other in the hall. So I'm so happy to have this opportunity to finally get to have a real conversation with you. I've admired your work for years, and your voice. 

BH: it's, it's my pleasure and, and I'm a big fan of the work that you're doing with this podcast. 

SH: Oh, well, thank you. I think we're all trying to accomplish some of the same goals with our work in this space. 

BH: I think so, too. 

SH: So you are an accomplished space maker when it comes to women's spiritual journeys, and kind of trying to open up the ways that women think about their own spiritual lives, the ways that they own them, and feel freedom to move within them, to change and grow, and all those kinds of things that Cynthia and I are also often talking about. So, could you give us a little bit of intro for our Audience members who don't know you, that would just give a little bit of context to this conversation and maybe why we asked you specifically to come on and have it with us.

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BH: Sure. So my name is Brittany Hartley. I currently work as a spiritual director at No Nonsense Spirituality, and I was raised LDS; I was raised Mormon. I really enjoyed seminary teaching as a paid position when I was more active in the church. And since then, I went on to get my master's degree in theology at a Christian seminary. And then went on after that to do a two year program in spiritual direction, and now I see a bigger clientele than just people on the Mormon spectrum, and really enjoyed this space of spirituality for women inside or outside of religion. Because either way you often get spiritual messages that come from men. 

And so even without trying even well intentioned men, sometimes that spiritual advice doesn't hit women in the same way. And this is true in patriarchal religion, but it's also true outside of religion where we will praise men, for example, for going to India for three weeks to dissolve their ego. But when a woman is cleaning up poo in the middle of the night, that's not seen as ego work. What I really love to do is help women to claim their spirituality and their spiritual practice and their spiritual voice.

And often that takes “de patriarchy-ing” if I'm going to make up a word here, your spirituality. And that's true for the Mormon spectrum and also outside of religion. 

CW: Totally believe that. 

BH: And it's something that I'm passionate about just because only one gender has had the microphone on what spirituality is for so long that we have missed part of that story.

So that's a little bit about what I do. 

SH: Gosh. And you went right to it there, Cynthia. She hit all the buzzwords that are going to introduce this topic for us. So I think Cynthia is going to lead us through this discussion. I'm going to just turn it over and have her take it from here. 

CW: Well, Brittany, you already gave a clue, I think, to some of the things you want to, that we want to talk about with you today, just in your little intro there. But I've been following you for a while, like Susan said, we've all been kind of running in the same hallways for a while, but it was about, I don't know, a few months ago that you had put out a TikTok/Instagram reel that went viral. But I remember watching this particular one, and we'll link to it in our, in our notes for anyone. You can go to our website and go see what we're talking about. But I sent it to Susan. We were talking about it, and then we had listeners who were sending it to us.

And then I had like, just girlfriends in my own life who started sending me this specific TikTok and it was just all the buzz, and Brittany in the video, you were saying that you don't take spiritual advice from men. And I think that was such an ‘aha moment' for so many women and why? It was just a new idea, and something that people wanted to hear more about. So I'm so glad that we can kind of break down that TikTok/Instagram reel today here with you. So we thought maybe we could play the audio, but even better, you said that you would maybe just reread the script. 

BH: Yes. So I'm a better writer than I am a speaker usually. So everything that I put out content-wise, I write beforehand. So I can just bring up the notes of that one that got you guys talking. So it goes like this:

 I don’t take spiritual advice from men anymore. Now, I will still listen to men, and TED talks, and scripture, and research, but when it comes to actually improving the quality of my life, I've stopped trying to make my life look spiritually acceptable to men. And it's because men have certain criteria for what is spiritual based on the reality that only men have ever written religious scripture or religious rites. I'm going to add here specifically priest-class men. So it's a specific, even within a gender, it's a specific kind of man in that gender, which is someone in a priest class.

So that means what is called spiritual by definition is male centric. For years I did things like try to dissolve my ego, which I didn't really need to do as a woman, or I tried to have a daily meditation of breathing practice and do the 5 am cold plunge every day and meditate or breathe or pray in specific ways and do the correct rites inside and outside of religion.

And I internalized that maybe I'm just not spiritual or maybe I'm bad at this. And it wasn't until I “de patriarchied” my spirituality that I realized that I was trying to live a spiritual life written by people who don't have children, and aren't the default parent, and don't have to wake up every day and adjust to the needs of others.

Because in those books written by men, going to lunch with girlfriends isn't spiritual. It's social playtime. And writing poetry isn't spiritual, nor is it academic, because it's too feelings-focused. And creating a meal and ritualistically cleaning the counter after feeding little people isn't a ritual or a sacrament to be put on a liturgical calendar. It's just women's work and growing flowers to give to others is a cute little hobby, not a spiritual practice. 

So I stopped listening to the men define what is spirituality. And I started paying attention to the crones in my life. The ones at yoga class, the ones gardening, the ones at lunch together, the ones making a birthday party for their kids in the middle of the night while no one is watching.

And I started to see and name everything they do as spiritual and a spiritual practice. And that is when my deeper spiritual life emerged. That's when I started writing, and talking, and cooking, and podcasting, and TikToking without caring that the men will never look at it and see it as spiritual at all.

SH: As a Latter day Saint woman, that makes me need to lie down because I realize everything has been given to me through a man's lens. Everything. I didn’t have anything else.

CW: Mm. So good. So good. We need an applause button here. 

BH: I think the interesting thing for me as I reread that is I've been now inactive in the Mormon church for some time, and this wasn't something that happened in my Mormon journey, or even kind of in the beginnings of my post-Mormon journey, this was something that is 10 years after what I would say a good 10 years after what I would call my Mormon faith crisis. And so it was so internalized that even when I was outside of Mormonism, in either Christianity. or my work as a spiritual director, or my work in kind of these meditation, new age, spirituality places, it's so embedded that I didn't notice it at all until I started reading from female mystics and realized that, wow, I am still defining spirituality from this place of men telling me to do ice baths at five in the morning. Uhh, I've been up all night with a sick kid. Like, I'm not going to do that.

So it took me a long time to realize the waters of spirituality that I've been swimming in my whole life, both in and outside of Mormonism, were really dictated by this male lens because men have had the privilege either in religion or outside of religion to be able to be the ones that write what is spirituality. And so women, we just unconsciously do this, and try to be spiritual in these kinds of ways that sometimes doesn't fit our very real lives. And so once I started to become more awake to what made me feel connected in my actual life, that's when really my spirituality deepened and it's much less regimented and it's less prescriptive and it's less, you have to do this and you have to start your day with this and make sure you do your yoga poses in the morning and dah, dah, dah. And it's more embedded in my life, which we see from crones who really have a spiritual life that is inseparable from their life in general. It's just how they're living their life. And when it was that, then after all of this - all of these studies in religion and spirituality -  only after it became embedded in my real life, did I really give myself the permission to call myself spiritual. Because before it always felt like I wasn't doing it good enough.Because it didn't fit my life. You know what I mean?