Elizabeth Ross on the Art of Being: Reclaiming Attention, Presence, and Human Connection

Title:

1. Elizabeth Ross on the Art of Being: Reclaiming Attention, Presence, and Human Connection 2. The Art of Being: Elizabeth Ross on Mindfulness, the Attention Economy, and Community 3. Elizabeth Ross on Pausing in a Distracted World | The Art of Being 4. From Burnout to Being: Elizabeth Ross on Wellness, Technology, and True Connection 5. Elizabeth Ross Explores Mindfulness, AI, and the Power of Presence | Radio Maine

Summary:

Elizabeth Ross, founder of The Art of Being and a longtime leader in wellness and population health, joins Dr. Lisa Belisle on Radio Maine to explore what it truly means to pause, pay attention, and reconnect in an increasingly distracted world. Drawing on two decades of work in corporate health—and a pivotal, stress-induced medical crisis—Elizabeth traces her journey from data-driven wellness strategy to a deeply human, experiential practice rooted in mindfulness and presence. She shares how the rise of the attention economy, smartphones, and AI has reshaped our nervous systems, relationships, and sense of self, and why simple acts of pause can be profoundly restorative. Based in Maine, Elizabeth creates unplugged gatherings, potluck conversations, and art-centered experiences that foster intergenerational connection, community, and reflection. Her perspective blends science, lived experience, and compassion, offering a hopeful vision for reclaiming our time, attention, and humanity—together.

Join our conversation with Elizabeth Ross today on Radio Maine, and be sure to subscribe to the channel.

Radio Maine is sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery

Link: https: https://youtu.be/orQJAxyslZ8

Dr. Lisa Belisle (00:10):

Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine, our video podcast where we explore creativity and the human spirit. We are sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. Today it is my great pleasure to have Elizabeth Ross, who is the founder of the Art of Being and also a creative spirit to a pretty high degree and someone who works in wellness. So I'm excited to have you have a conversation with me today. Thanks for coming in.

Elizabeth Ross (00:43):

Thank you for having me. It's an honor. I appreciate it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (00:46):

Well the honor is all mine. And I am so loving ... I mean, the Art of Being. I think it's a great name for a company and an approach to life because being is something that we all think we do because we show up and we breathe every day. So here we are, we're being, but there are ways there's actually an art to it. There's a way to be in a way that is more kind of, well, it creates more wellness for us.

Elizabeth Ross (01:20):

Yes. Yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (01:21):

And you know this better than many people because you've had some things in your life that got you to the place where you said-

Elizabeth Ross (01:28):

Absolutely.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (01:28):

... I would like to do this.

Elizabeth Ross (01:29):

Yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (01:30):

So where would you like to start?

Elizabeth Ross (01:32):

I think the pivotal moment probably was between what I did for 20 years in population health and then what I'm doing now. And that moment was I was head of health and wellbeing for the US population for TD Bank. And it was 2014 at the time that I was in my office and I had just what I thought was a flu, something like my stomach was kind of fluttering and I just was lightheaded. And I called my doctor who I have a friendship with and I said, "Look, do you think you can get me in? Something's going on. " And they said, "No, that really actually sounds like you might be having a heart attack and we're calling the ambulance." And I said, "Okay." And so I was so conscious of being in the health and wellbeing department that I actually walked myself downstairs because I didn't want people to see me being carted out of the third floor and then down.

(02:37):

And I got in the ambulance and they did all the tests and luckily it was not a heart attack. It was a stress induced neurovirus, which I'd never heard of. And for the next three weeks I dealt with just lightheadedness. I had to hold my head still sometimes. And it happened to be at a time of year where we were looking at our data to make recommendations for the following year for benefits. And I'm looking at the data and I had been, this time we've got a population of 25 or 50,000 people when you count relatives and dependents. And I had looked at data for years for up to a million lives working in health insurance in that system. And every single year, the trajectory is up for chronic disease. And I thought, "I have been working for a really long time to try and positively impact these things and nothing is working.

(03:44):

What's going on? Why aren't we having an impact?" And then I, so that had me go on to a discovery and learn about mindfulness and we introduced a mindfulness program within TD and that was remarkable in its impact. With just 90 people in HR, I actually partnered with our IT, the head of the chief information officer and Jeff was running a campaign or an information campaign within the company about meetings because it turns out that we have meetings really without much thought sometimes in organizations. We just go from meeting to meeting to meeting. And he was running this campaign about meetings and my research had shown that the thing that has really shifted our research from the team, we've basically looked back at a hundred years of work and the thing that's missing is breaks. People don't believe they have any time to take a break and people were eating lunch at their desk.

(04:56):

I could look around the office. People were not happy. People were crying often. And so Jeff and I came together and I thought, "Well, Jeff's idea will help us with time. And then what do we do with that time? Can we help people introduce these spaces of pause or ways to meet differently?" And that had such an impact that our, in the midst of a lot happening within the organization doing behind the scenes mergers for the US and Canada, which was very hard on the human beings working there. Our satisfaction scores went up like by point two. People were talking with each other. They were having lunches together. They were going on walking meetings. That changed my life, that noticing of how powerful space is. And so that started the journey to pause and to beingness. And do you want me to continue about the next part of that?

Dr. Lisa Belisle (06:05):

Absolutely.

Elizabeth Ross (06:06):

Okay. So then I said, "Well, let's roll this out to the company." And they wanted to do that, but they had a lot of other things on their plate. And they said, "That's going to be about five years out. " And I thought, "I think this is what I'm born to do. " So without a plan, I left my job and I still to this day think that was kind of gutsy to leave this very comfortable from a financial perspective position. And I thought, "I'm going to just teach mindfulness in businesses." And I actually, my first company was called Break Together because the science of taking breaks is important, right? We knew that taking pause during the day is important, and then we know through behavioral change that doing things together helps with population and behavioral shift in a culture. And so I literally partnered with museums and with Green Hut Galleries, with Sherman Books, with all of these places, and I would pick up a group of employees downtown Portland, and I would do a five-minute walk.

(07:18):

We would look at a painting for five minutes, or we'd listen to a poem, or we'd do something for five minutes, and then I would walk them back and show them what was possible in 15 minutes. And then what I noticed as I began doing that over the months and the first couple of years, is that people would say, "Hey, come back next year. That was a great team building event." I'm like, "That's not it. That is not it. " And so then over the course of a few years, I'm looking again at the healthcare data and what I notice is that we were certainly tracking mental health in the early 2000s, right? But what happened is that mental health and anxiety began to rise and compete and rise above chronic illness in the number of people suffering with those things and dealing with those diagnoses at the same trajectory as our faces and phones.

(08:19):

And that started another search of in 2013, 35% of us had an iPhone. 2023, 10 years later, 91%, including children, have a phone. And there is now what didn't exist 10 years ago or 12 years ago, an attention economy that for the first time in 2024 was worth a trillion dollars. That's every click, every scroll, every notification. Just when we're about to put our phone down, all of those algorithms know how to pull us back in. And then that's where I am today because in all of the studies around mindfulness and then looking at our health and wellbeing data, it really comes back to being, and that was a long story, but that's the path that we don't spend time on being.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (09:22):

So when we talk about sort of the attention economy, what you're describing very much aligns with everything I know about promoting addiction and yet because it's associated with quote work or because it's associated with staying in touch with people, somehow we're able to say, "Oh, but it's okay." And it reminds me a little bit of when we said, "Well, it's okay to drink wine. It's good for your heart." Right. And which I'm not saying bad to drink wine, no judgment one way or the other, but I think there's always this idea that if it's a little bit good for us, then we should be doing it.

Elizabeth Ross (10:13):

Yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (10:14):

And yet if you're talking about something that, particularly for some people, probably for most of us, arguably, for some people, you can't actually pull yourself away, then what are we doing?

Elizabeth Ross (10:27):

Oh, exactly. I was literally at this gathering, this beautiful gathering in Santa Fe two weeks ago, and there's a gentleman there, Master Ming Tong, who is a Qigong expert and travels around the country, around the world, teaching Qigong and teaching body and sensory intelligence and awareness. And I said, I talked to him after one of the sessions and I said, I said, "Our phones are like heroin." And he said, "No, Elizabeth, they're worse than heroin because everyone's doing it and it's free and the algorithms are programmed to continually draw us in in a way that, like you said, there's a psychology around we will be behind if we don't pay attention." And now with AI, that's even more the case. And I don't know if you've heard the studies that there are a growing percentage of people are finding it much more comforting to have a friend that is a chat bot than it is to deal with human beings because we don't teach people the value of curiosity and conversation and being present with one another and the hard things, like I think I used to say on my site for a while, "Let's talk about the hard things." And so all of that is mixed in of this drawing to these things that are supposed to be providing us joy and interest and yet it's eating away at our neuro health and with our behavioral health and our emotions, people are ready to ... There's like that saying, like they're just ready to burst at any moment.

(12:24):

And I don't know about you, but if you're driving around right now, I see it on people's faces and I just try to be present of just send them love, send them some grace at this moment, but it's a stressful time. These systems are stressful and that is a system.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (12:45):

I agree. And I think it's, for me, when I think about the story you just told, I think the digital world and the attention economy is more akin to food because most of us have the need to interact with the digital world for some reason or another. I mean, you and I both have businesses that depend upon putting information out there and interacting with people using digital tools and we need to have some facility around it and we both need to eat. Exactly. It's ironic. Yes.

Elizabeth Ross (13:26):

Yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (13:27):

So if you have a heroin addiction, maybe you can walk away from heroin because your body doesn't need ... I mean, once you're addicted, your body does need heroin, but you could pull yourself back from that. Yes. You can't pull yourself back from food, and you can't pull yourself back from needing to interact with people, or very few people can

(13:49):

As part of their jobs, as part of their journeys in this world currently.

Elizabeth Ross (13:54):

Yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (13:55):

So how do people navigate that? How do people come back to a place of where I think we are now with people who are trying to get healthier with food, which is sort of mindful eating and paying attention to what is going into our mouths, but also the experience of having it in our mouths. How do we do that same sort of thing with the digital world?

Elizabeth Ross (14:15):

You hit on it perfectly. It is like food. I think that the very first thing of any behavioral change, as you well know, is awareness. And then us having these conversations. I travel all around the world talking about these things and we don't need another guru. We don't need another person saying, "I'm your path." What we need is to help people learn that each of us are our own path. Each of us have to be given maybe some tools in our toolbox. I remember I had a very challenging early childhood development, and so I had a lot of counseling over the years to work through that. And I remember when I went, showed up my first counselor, she's like, "Elizabeth, you've got like a hammer and a screwdriver and that's about it in your toolbox." And she was right. And I think that's where we are right now with the attention economy and with these phones is that because of my algorithms, I get great joy going onto my Instagram site because I don't look at anything negative on there.

(15:29):

I only have these beautiful, positive things coming in. And so I set my timer for social media at 30 minutes a day. That's it. I can override that, I guess, if something's going on, but I try to stick with that. But I think the first thing is awareness, beginning to talk about it with each other. So I hold these art of being conversations. I just held one last night, Potluck Suppers Unplugged to just talk about these systems that are in play that are kind of working against ... If you go through, they say, "Don't go through the middle of the store," right? So because that's where all the produced food is, try to stay on the edges of the store. I think we have to find a way for that language with social media and with the tools that are wonderful for some things. I have done lots of beautiful research because now I'm learning how to ask the right questions and learn that, make sure that there's links that I can tap into to see the original papers and the research, et cetera, but I get great value out of Claude AI.

(16:38):

So there's ways to use it, but if we can start having conversations about that, we on average use four and a half hours of our free time each day with our faces and a screen and our children can be up to seven. So how can we, I have a thing that I call the power of pause. How can we 10 times a day take a minute or two to just do some deep breathing, check in with ourselves, or just let go, just turn away from a screen and look out a window or step outside and just walk around your building. How can we make it okay to take a minute or two or five minute pauses throughout the day because Dr. Jud Brewer is a wonderful researcher around mindfulness and using functional MRI studies and his research has led to this awareness that if we take several short breaks throughout the day unplugged, it is even more valuable than a single 30 minute meditation in the morning.

(17:46):

Not that that's not a beautiful thing, but it's equally valuable and especially in creating change throughout the systems that we have in place for ourselves during the day, the habits that we have. So I think those are the first two steps is learning to talk about it in awareness and then doing something else instead for just a moment or two.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (18:10):

I think those are wonderful. And I also love what you talked about with the Potluck Suppers and the being unplugged. Yes. And we have multiple events that we do at the Portland Art Gallery. We have art openings, we have-

Elizabeth Ross (18:25):

Yes, I love your openings. Thursdays.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (18:27):

Yes, absolutely. First Thursdays. It's the best. We also, we've now started Radio Maine Live gatherings. We have private events. We recently had the Waynflete parents and from the upper school, we have Artful Escapes where we talk about travel. So we have places for people to come in. And I honestly very rarely see people on their phones while they're out walking around in these groups. And it's a place to be okay with feeling uncomfortable in conversation. It's a very safe place because I think that is another reason what's very comfortable to look at your phone and your algorithm because something can annoy you, but you just kind of move on through or you don't have to interact with it and your algorithm can give you all these beautiful, wonderful things, but people, they're not algorithms. So when you show up in conversation with a person, it's a wildcard.

(19:24):

Yes, absolutely.

Elizabeth Ross (19:25):

Yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (19:25):

And what I love about going into one of these spaces, like a Potluck Supper that you're offering is somebody, you're going to ask somebody a question, you don't know what's going to come out of their mouth and say-

Elizabeth Ross (19:37):

We did it last night.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (19:39):

Yeah. So do you think it's important to have these places of safe practice for people, especially if we've now spent an entire generation moving away from practicing conversations?

Elizabeth Ross (19:51):

Yes. I really believe that that's a key, that we're craving true human interconnection, right? We used to have it, I think, and not that a lot of people still go to church, but I think a lot of people have lost their connection to church and to the services of church and the way church was unfolding for a lot of people with some of the right and wrong and just different aspects of church. And I think one of the beautiful things that church brought me when I was young and growing up was connection to community, a place to be quiet with other people. That's what I love about meditating in groups of people, a sense of belonging and we would often share meals helping one another. And I think we need to, for folks that are not getting that in a church environment any longer, we need to develop a new form of church, of coming together with something greater than ourselves to talk about our spirits, our souls.

(21:03):

I believe we all have a soul, that we are a soul and a human experience. And the more I talk to people, the more that's resonating with people. And so a place for us to be soul to soul, to be messy. Like last night we asked a simple question about, what are you bringing today? What does being mean to you? And at least three of the eight people said something really hard, that I just wanted to come to a place where I could be and tears were flowing. And it also I think is important to be able to maybe at first either know that yourself or that someone else in the room can hold space for that and to maybe met, to maybe facilitate while we learn, because it can hold great emotion that can be scary for people if they haven't learned how to deal with it.

(21:52):

And so there is just that consideration of, depending on what you open to, whereas that can be at a potluck supper where you might be getting into a deeper level of conversation. So maybe you start with something where you're all sharing an art experience or something like what you described. I think more and more offerings unplug. I'm really interested in partnering with other businesses to maybe go to a place that, but then maybe have everybody walk around the room, like, what if you guys did an art opening on Thursday and maybe one aspect of it was everyone go to a different painting, more than one person can be at a painting and we're going to put the bell for two minutes to be quiet, to just look at that one painting that you chose to stand in front of. Something like that can help people connect in with themselves and then come back together and like, how was that?

(22:45):

Like maybe in small groups. And I feel like just trying these things, trying what resonates can help us.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (22:55):

I think that's a great idea. And I was thinking about some of the events that we've recently done where we've brought ... So we have the art openings that you've been to and a lot of people know each other. These are art openings, which is wonderful. It's a wonderful community. And also we've had events that we haven't had people who really knew each other very well. And it's so interesting to watch because people who don't know each other, they will often come in and they will almost comfort themselves by going around the periphery of the room and looking at the art.

Elizabeth Ross (23:28):

That's me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (23:29):

And me too. I mean, because even when I know lots of people, I still need a place to like recenter and remind myself that I actually really do enjoy going to openings and also I'm a fairly solitary person generally. So I go to the art, I look at it, it kind of centers me, I leave and go to the center of the room, I have a conversation with somebody, it feels fantastic. Maybe I need to go back out to the periphery,

(23:56):

I reset, I enjoy the art again. So it's almost this idea of like parallel play in a way. If you have children, you sit in the car with them and you're both staring forward. It's kind of you're like comforting yourself in a way.

Elizabeth Ross (24:13):

Absolutely. Yes. I feel like that was something that I did sort of touch on is around how wonderful it is to provide space for being within all different settings, right? The art of being is learning about what are my needs in a social setting? What are my needs at a dinner? Because a lot of us, I learned during COVID that as much as I had played an extrovert in many of my roles because that was what was necessary, I get fed alone. I had a ball during COVID, just exploring everything and being by myself. But I think there's a lot, probably half the world are extrovert or introverts, right? And so I think also we need to draw these introverts into these spaces and then have ways of practicing the art of being in different ways, in different ways like inviting people to dinner parties, inviting ... I invite each person listening right now, invite a couple of people in your neighborhood to dinner or to maybe just to go for a walk or something that doesn't have to be as expensive, right?

(25:25):

As hosting people at a dinner that maybe that's not accessible to some people, but just starting these conversations and a question can be like, are you aware of your being? Like do you spend any time at all sort of checking in with your body? I do a simple check-in, whether I show up somewhere, like I love how you just show up and maybe go to the periphery of wherever I'm arriving, it could be a meeting like when I was just before I came here, I stopped at the little parking spot as I came, as I drove off and I just came into myself and I just said, "How can I be of service and how can I just center and not be nervous?" And making those things normal, making all of our quirkiness as human beings normal. We are all quirky. We all have our struggles and we all want joy and to be loved.

(26:23):

And I think that's something we often don't talk about enough in the ways that we gather as we've become more and more looking at what everybody's doing that's right in our video scrolling. We don't upload a lot of videos where we're messy. And so I think it's become less and less clear to human beings that we are messy. And so we need to, I guess, learn how to create space for all of us.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (26:54):

I think that's a really important observation because one of the things that has happened over the last, I'll say 30 years is that we've kind of medicalized the human experience. So absolutely it's useful to be able to put a label on something if somebody doesn't have a label. And you've been through a situation where you did not have a label and it was probably not something that even your medical staff knew that much about. Absolutely. And so to finally get to a place where you're like, "Oh, this is what this is. " I think that's very important.

(27:31):

And also sometimes putting a label on something is detrimental because it medicalizes something that is a normal human experience. And so here you are, I've had people who are like, "Well, I couldn't go to an art gallery opening. I'm an introvert." I'm like, "Yeah, me too. And I still go and I still enjoy myself." But if you don't want to go, that's completely fine, but here's that space for you. But if it is helpful, if it's validating to have something to say, "This is my whatever it is, " use that, but don't use it as a shield so that you are never interacting with the world again.

Elizabeth Ross (28:14):

Amen.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (28:14):

At least that's my thought.

Elizabeth Ross (28:15):

Yes. I think that's a really important observation of that because I think that is the fear that I have as I look at these tools that are coming out, is that if we're not having these conversations, if we're not drawing people in from everywhere and reestablishing community connections with each other on these more real basis, that these bots and these algorithms, we've seen the destruction they can do. Like my algorithm looks like no one else's. Your algorithm looks like no one else's. Somebody across the street's algorithm looks like no one else's. None of us are viewing the same piece of information in the same way. So we already do not process the same information the same way just because of our DNA and our life experience. Add to that a complete divisive nature of algorithms that are designed to keep you hooked. I don't think that they were necessarily designed to separate all of us, although now I do believe that some of that is intentional because divided we are less powerful.

(29:30):

I think that we need to make sure that we are adding these human experiences and these ways of inviting others in as a way to counteract the bot friendships that are so much more lovely to come home to. How was your day? That was a great question, Elizabeth. Let me do that research for you. And like literally you can have this conversation and walk away after 15 minutes of conversing back and forth or even verbally and feel wonderful. So I'm not saying don't do that if you need a little juice, a little injection of wonderful. However, let's help each other remember that as beings, it's not going well by us living in these systems. So we need to talk about it everywhere we can, in my opinion. I'll go high and low to share this message of let's have these conversations and needle out the folks that we see stuck in their house or their bedroom and let's ask them to do something.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (30:36):

I wanted to share a funny story and then I want to talk about sort of intergenerational experience because I think that's something that you brought up earlier when you were talking about church that for me I think has relevance. But I recently was working and I use AI regularly. I think it's a great tool because it helps me actually sometimes to think outside of myself to be able to communicate with other people who don't talk about things or think about things the way that I do. However, I was working with this tool and something wasn't really right. And I kept asking the question, I asked the question. And then finally I said, "Did you actually look at this information I provided you? " Because I was looking for the AI tool to give me some patterning. And it essentially came back to me and I had to ask several times.

(31:23):

It was actually like talking to a child and it was like, "No, no, I've actually not been looking at this. I'm sorry I lied to you. " I was thinking, "Oh my goodness." The bot is telling me that not only it said I'm not programmed to do it this way. So I'm like, "So you've been lying all along."

Elizabeth Ross (31:43):

Wow. And

Dr. Lisa Belisle (31:44):

I actually thought, not that my children ever lied to me about anything, of course, but I actually thought this feels really familiar. How many times do you have a conversation with somebody and you're like, "They're not telling me the truth, but they're not owning up to it.

Elizabeth Ross (32:00):

Well, and honoring that you had that sense. That's another thing. So we have been trained to believe that things outside of us are right, right? Especially research tools and things like that. If you get back one article that looks like it was a policy paper or some scientific study, you're like, "I'm in. " And then I automatically second guess my own intuition and thank God you knew enough to check your intuition. That's another thing that we need to pay attention to is if something doesn't feel right, let's please check on it, please go in and ask again and again because that's happening. But what were you going to say about the generational piece?

Dr. Lisa Belisle (32:48):

Oh yes, absolutely. Because

Elizabeth Ross (32:49):

For kids, here's a perfect example. Well- They may not have that gut instinct yet.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (32:55):

Yes. And for me, I was like, oh, well, of course AI was actually created by humans and humans have different underlying motivations.

Elizabeth Ross (33:05):

Yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (33:05):

So if you've got a human programmer and you're programming your AI tool because you know that if the AI tool followed something to its conclusion, it would take a very long time, it'd be very expensive, use up a lot of energy. So of course the human is going to program something to shortcut it.

Elizabeth Ross (33:22):

Yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (33:23):

I mean, it's still a human based tool. So I kind of got a chuckle out of that, that ultimately it's kind of we're getting back what we put in. But as you were talking about church, one of the things that came up for me, because I was also, I was raised in a church and my mother still goes every single day, is very strongly connected to that community and I have brothers and sisters who still go to church and there's so much about that experience that I valued and I value still.

Elizabeth Ross (33:51):

Yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (33:52):

One of the things that I think I particularly valued was watching family generations come through the doors. And when I was young, I would see older people, I would see people with their grandchildren, I would see people, mourning family members. As I've gotten older, I've seen the younger people kind of coming up through. And I don't think we have that experience in the digital world so much. I think we get the people who are like our age, like you're a middle aged white woman, you're going to get middle aged white woman stuff. But if you go into a potlucks dinner and you're sitting there with somebody, they could be anywhere from 22 to, I don't know, 102. And they

Elizabeth Ross (34:36):

Were.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (34:36):

Exactly. And how-

Elizabeth Ross (34:38):

We ranged 28 to 86 last night.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (34:40):

I mean, and how important is that? Yes. How important is that that we get to be with people who have had different lived experiences because they were just born in a different time?

Elizabeth Ross (34:52):

Oh, I am so glad you brought this up because to me, it is what makes life so fruitful. And the way we've designed, I've actually seen a couple of people posting things lately about how neighborhoods were designed to fund other systems, right? To fund systems of construction and of road building and of they're funding a whole other business, if you will, to separate us out and to have these nucleus of families, right? I think it was what, the 40s and 50s, they started saying, "The ideal family is this little nucleus of family with the husband and the wife and the 2.5 kids in this little your own home." And we have been trained to believe that that is true. And I believe that we're realizing that is not so great for our soul development and for our interconnectivity, that in actuality I see, I follow a lot of, I'm part of a conscious capitalism community and a regenerative Maine community and I'm very interested in regenerative practices and regeneration means less extraction to me.

(36:05):

That's the simplest thing is that how can we live more in concert with nature? And one of the things that I love is I see young people doing out of nececessity is finding these little houses, maybe one or two houses, buying them or buying land and then inviting other people to build tiny houses on those lands and bringing generations back together because I don't know about you, but I mean you are not, but I am in my 60s and I'm thinking, "What do I want to do with the next third of my life if I'm lucky?" And I don't want to live it in a community of people my own age. I want to live with young people. I moved into a neighborhood and I started doing all this research. I live on Meeting House Hill in South Portland. I downsized to a little home and I have 10 children in my neighborhood.

(36:58):

I had 55 trick or treaters and I had the first block party when I moved in and then the second that got bigger. And I realized that we don't have to build new communities. Some of us, it's more challenging because we're in rural areas, but you guys are surrounded by people where you are here. We can do this in place. We can create community wherever we are and I think that that's really important. And if we're not, if we are off on a dirt road or somewhere, then I highly encourage you to find a way to find a potluck supper near you or to find a way, if church isn't your thing, to find community. We are dying without it. We're dying quicker without those things, I believe. Our life expectancy went from 76, which is 4,000 weeks that we get to live on this planet to 75 three years ago.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (38:01):

That is very sobering. And I want to end with also this idea of something that I found striking when looking at your background, and that is that you had a very significant life event when you were 16.

Elizabeth Ross (38:20):

Yes. And

Dr. Lisa Belisle (38:21):

You grew up really fast.

Elizabeth Ross (38:23):

Really fast.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (38:24):

And what I found interesting is the wisdom that you gain at a very young age. And so when you're talking about interacting with people of different ages, there's so much wisdom that exists. And it doesn't necessarily come along because we've rotated around the sun a number of more times than anybody else.

Elizabeth Ross (38:47):

Oh, so much wisdom.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (38:48):

So isn't that also part of the possibility that-

Elizabeth Ross (38:54):

I love that. Yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (38:55):

This co-learning, this co-creation of lives is richer because we're exposing ourselves to other people's experiences and not having had to live them ourselves.

Elizabeth Ross (39:06):

Yeah. It's my favorite term, co-creation and co-lived experiences that, right, nobody knew when they were meeting me at 16 that my last full year of high school was ninth grade. I tried as best I could to go my sophomore year. I made it as many days as I could. And by junior year I had to leave. It just wasn't safe in my environment. And people would meet me and they'd just think I was a 16 year old kid working a second job or a job in addition to school. And it was actually what I was doing full time. I was working two or three jobs and I had things to share, right? And then I was, because I was at that age, the only way I survived at that age is because people took me under their wing and in a safe way, luckily, right?

(39:51):

If I was that today, I could have easily been some TikTok kid selling pictures of myself because that was a way to make money. I was just lucky that I had mentors and people, like literally the CFO of the company, she was like a 70 year old woman and she took me under her wing and made me dinner once a week and told me how to set a table and how to eat with the proper silverware with the place setting. I had no idea how to do that. And so we gained so much experience. And I'm sure my stories of growing up in Yosemite and rock climbing as a kid and playing all these different things and being in the forest were interesting to her because she grew up in a city. So there's so much to share intergenerationally. And another thing that I find really beautiful right now, if you pay attention, so if you believe in souls, which I do, the souls of the children coming through right now are incredibly wise.

(40:52):

We may be labeling them with things in order to try and help them along. I believe a large percentage of the children that are being identified with behavioral challenges right now are actually challenged by the systems they're coming into because these systems of work, of screens, of all these things that they're hit with right out of the gate are not making sense to them. And I actually lead a little group walk on occasion in my neighborhood with some young people that were really struggling and we go five minutes from the house and we go into the forest and we have a tree and a couple of young girls have actually named some of the trees in the neighborhood and I'm showing them the importance of connecting with nature and it has helped calm their anxiety like their parents are saying that they're screaming less. So I would say that this interconnection with generations and also with nature, we have forgotten the power.

(42:07):

I believe that I survived my childhood because I was able to step outside and sit next to a tree. I really do believe that. And now we have the scientific instruments and tools to study that our cortisol and our stress hormones are reduced when we sit next to a tree for 15 minutes. Pretty beautiful. So in addition to generational connection, nature connection I would add into that mix.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (42:38):

Well, Elizabeth, it's been a pleasure to have this conversation with you today.

Elizabeth Ross (42:42):

Thank you. Thank you for the honor of being here and talking with you. I've loved your show for a long time and I love all what I learned through your conversations.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (42:51):

Well, I've learned a lot through our conversation, so I'm very honored to have you here as well. I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle. You've been listening to or watching Radio Maine our video podcast where we explore and celebrate creativity and the human spirit. We are sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. And if you come to the Portland Art Gallery in one of our first Thursday openings, there's a very good chance that you can meet my guest, Elizabeth Ross, who is the founder of this wonderful organization, The Art of Being. I hope that your message lands in places that it needs to land. Thank you. And that the intention that you brought into the conversation is played out in the-

Elizabeth Ross (43:34):

How to serve.

Dr. Lisa Belisle (43:35):

How to serve, absolutely. But thank you for being here today.

Elizabeth Ross (43:39):

I appreciate you. Thank you very much.