If you’ve ever wondered, “Is it too late for me to...” the answer’s NO and The Uplifters are about to show you why. This space is for purpose-driven women who want to do big, brave things in the second half of their lives. I’m your host, Aransas Savas, and I’ve spent the last 20 years at the intersection of behavior change research and coaching.
It’s officially spring 🌸, so we are celebrating new beginnings all month long. Here’s who’s on tap:
Ally Bogard — a transformation teacher and somatic guide, who helps us finally confront all the sh*t we’ve been avoiding. She was nominated by the incomparable Elena Brower. Listen HERE
Blair Glaser — a memoirist, organizational consultant, and psychotherapist who joins us to talk about her years inside Siddha Yoga, a near-cult experience that cracked her open and ultimately led her to a deeper understanding of who she is. It's a conversation about the stories we tell ourselves, the ones we're afraid to tell anyone else, and what happens when we finally do.
Then, science journalist Sadie Dingfelder shares her extraordinary midlife experience with face blindness, memory, and how we make sense of the world in Do I Know You? — one of the most fascinating conversations we’ve had on the show.
And we’re closing out April the best way we know how: live. Join us for a conversation on funding our dreams with legendary VCs Lorine Pendleton and Katie Cella, in conversation with Whipnotic founder Tracy Luckow, at Uplifters Live.
Let’s go.
I love watching movies on airplanes. It’s rare that any book could trump the immersive joy of watching a juicy action or romance on a tiny screen with earplugs crammed in all the way to my eardrum to drown out the engines and crying babies. But on a recent long flight, I read Blair Glaser’s entire memoir, This Incredible Longing. In one sitting. Because it’s that good. It’s so full of surprises and twists and honest emotion that I found it difficult to even talk about on the podcast because I didn’t want to spoil it for you. So mostly we talk about how Blair came to write this book.
Her story isn’t a simple “I was lost, then I found myself” arc, and I think that’s exactly why I love it. She describes herself as a “professional vocationalist, ”someone who is compelled to walk every chapter to its fullest point and then, when the boredom and the antsy feeling arrive (and they always do), find a way to move on. Some of the titles she’s held so far: Actress. Drama therapist. Licensed psychotherapist. Leadership and organizational consultant. Memoirist. Aspiring fiction writer.
The through line in all of it is her ability to sit with someone in emotional distress, help them find their footing, and hold steady in the middle of hard things. She discovered those gifts, of all places, inside Siddha Yoga, a spiritual organization some have called a cult. And then, over decades, she kept answering that question in new ways.
Menopause, she told me, was actually the thing that pushed her out of being a therapist and into consulting. As her hormones shifted, her desire to sit back and absorb and validate just evaporated. She wanted to get in there and say: here’s what I see, here’s where you need to go, here’s how to make this better.
And now, in her 50s, she’s taking it a step further by publishing a memoir that exposes her most personal chapter to her professional world.
In this episode, we talk about what it actually takes to tell the whole truth of who you are and where you’ve been. We get into how midlife is often when we go back and excavate the earliest chapters, and why that’s not nostalgia but actually a key mechanism for moving forward, and how to stand up to the inner bully who tries to talk you out of being fully seen.
What the research tells us
Memory researchers and psychologists have found that the reason so many of us in midlife become obsessed with our early twenties is that we’re actually training ourselves to move forward. Midlife is a kind of blank slate: the careers we were building and the children we were raising no longer organize every hour. So we look back to locate ourselves, to see who we’ve been and who we still want to be. Looking way back down the road, it turns out, is one of the most effective ways to see clearly where you’re going.
Her Courage Practice
In the middle of the night before we recorded this episode, Blair woke up with a familiar fluttering in her chest. She lay there asking herself, is this fear or excitement?
When she felt into it, she realized it was fear. And not just low-grade nervousness. It was her inner bully, the one who shows up in the schoolyard of her own mind and starts putting her down. The one who tells her she’s going to be scrutinized. That she’s going to be exposed. That this is going to be bad.
And she said, out loud, in the dark: “No. You get out of the way. Don’t fuck with me.”
Blair’s point, which I think is one of the most important things in this episode, is that inviting the fear to tea and being with it is okay for a while. But at some point, when the fear is throwing its clothes on your living room couch and making itself at home, you have to kick it out. Not with anxiety or self-improvement or a coping strategy. With sovereignty. With the deep-voiced, embodied, protective voice of the person who has survived everything that fear predicted would destroy her.
4 Ways Blair Glaser Shows Us How to Build Our Courage Capital:
Follows the signal, even when it costs her. When menopause shifted her desire to be the absorbing, validating presence her therapy clients needed, Blair didn’t override the signal or white-knuckle her way through. She upskilled into consulting, studied business models and leadership, and followed where her gifts were actually pointing. The financial stress is real. But, she decided that was worth it.
Holds two truths at once. Her experience in Siddha Yoga was both formative and flawed. Writing the memoir meant refusing to flatten the story into something simpler. For those of us in midlife who have complicated histories (and that’s all of us), she models how to honor your own experience without submitting to the pressure to make it all bad or all good.
Looks back to move forward. Blair spent much of her 50s writing about her early 20s, and found that memory researchers would call this adaptive: midlife is the natural time to excavate early chapters as a way of locating yourself for the next leg.
Names the inner bully and sends it home. Rather than a soft practice of sitting with fear, Blair has developed a very specific, embodied, don’t-mess-with-me NO that she deploys when the fear starts performing. This isn’t aggression. It’s sovereignty. And it moves the needle in a way that endless evaluation doesn’t always do.
Lift Her Up
This Incredible Longing is available wherever you buy books. Buy it, read it, tell someone about it. You can also follow Blair on Instagram and LinkedIn at Blair Glaser, visit her at blairglaser.com, and find her beautiful writing on Substack at The HI Stack (human intelligence, as opposed to AI, she calls it, which, yes).
If you loved this story...
Start with Sari Botton, the founder of Oldster Magazine, who nominated Blair and has spent her career championing honest storytelling. Then explore other conversations with women doing the brave work of telling the truth: Melissa Petro’s episode and Kate Tellers’ episode, Peabody Award-winning storyteller and Director at The Moth.
Let’s chat about it!
What’s the most complicated chapter of your own life that you haven’t quite let yourself own yet? The one where you’re still sorting out what was good and what was harmful and what it all means? Drop it in the comments, or just tell us you have one.
