New World Normal

·S4 E43

43. Being Good Shoulders: Purpose, Healing, and Staying Human in Trying Times with Dr. Liza Rankow

May 8
1h 1m

Episode Description

What if purpose isn't something you find — it's something you become?

In this episode I sit down with Dr. Liza Rankow — activist, spiritual teacher, educator, and author of Soul Medicine for a Fractured World: Healing Justice and the Path of Wholeness — for one of those conversations that makes you want to pull over and just sit with it for a minute.

Dr. Liza has spent decades at the intersection of healing, spirituality, and social justice. She's worked in pediatric oncology, LGBTQ health advocacy, and ran a nonprofit providing spiritual care for frontline activists for nearly 20 years. She knows burnout intimately — and she's found her way through it.

We talk about what it means to live with purpose not as a destination or a checklist, but as a quality of being. We get into how to stay rooted when the world feels like it's unraveling, why disconnecting is not actually the answer even when everything in you wants to, and what it looks like to be — as she puts it — good shoulders for the generations coming after us.

In this episode we cover:

  • Why purpose is a way of being, not a thing to accomplish
  • The false separation between inner healing and outer activism
  • How to stay informed without doom-scrolling yourself into uselessness
  • The worldview shift from separation to belonging — and why it matters more than any single policy win
  • What intergenerational responsibility actually looks like in practice
  • Finding meaning in a time of collapse without bypassing the reality of it
  • Practices for going deep so you can show up fully

"The doing comes from the being. Who are we called to be? And as we be who we are here to be — the doing arises from there." — Dr. Liza Rankow

Connect with Dr. Liza Rankow:

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