Interview with Louise LeBrun

Overview

The Book

The Author

Table of Contents

Reviews

Interview with
the Author

Order Now

Fully Alive: Awakening Health, Humor, Compassion and Truth is your invitation to step into the consideration of a new era in human evolution.

Six years and several thousand copies later, the book that has so profoundly transformed the lives of so many is now in its 3rd edition. The following conversation with its author picks up the intensity with which this new edition is now infused, given the changes we face.

What made you decide to write a 3rd edition of Fully Alive?

Well, I guess the simple answer is that I’m not who I used to be. I’ve grown and discovered and explored and expanded my own thinking since the first edition of Fully Alive in 1999. Since everything that I write is intended to offer others what I’ve discovered in my own life (sometimes the hard way!), it became clear to me that a more complete and current edition of Fully Alive was essential.

I"m also aware that the world I live in is also not what it used to be. There is an ever-increasing intensity associated with the coalescing of forces that are accelerating what's happening around us. Climate change, social upheaval, religious conflict; more wars, more hunger, more rage, more fear.... all of these are telling us that we're running out of time to make the kind of difference that will allow us to redefine ourselves. There is an urgency to engage or our lives will be redefined for us. The new Fully Alive speaks to this urgency - and invites an awakening in kind.

What’s important to you about this new edition?

That we get on with it! I've seen the difference that this material can make in someone's life. I've seen diseases disappear; fears evaporate; conflicts resolve themselves. I've witnessed awakenings that have allowed someone to transform their lives in the blink of an eye. From where I sit, I think we're in desperate need of just such potential in all of our lives.

The 3rd edition of Fully Alive is fuller, richer, more complete. It is also more compelling, has sharper edges and sounds the call to pay attention or risk losing more than our place in line! I'm clear that our time for pondering and allowing one more day to go by while I do nothing is a luxury we can no longer afford. We are at the point where we are either a part of the solution or a part of the problem. I prefer the former.

Where were the greatest challenges for you in creating this new edition?

Trying to say what I believe is important to be said without scaring the bejeezus out of everyone! When it was all said and done, I think I chose what is my truth rather than what you might be comfortable with. After all, what else would matter?

It's also tough for me to do the same thing more than once! I seem to have a very low tolerance for repetition and for sure, writing the 3rd edition meant that I had to also incorporate the original two. That was a tough one for me. The good news is that I had to read the last edition to know what I wanted to create in the new one. As I read, I found myself really enjoying this book! Strange sensation, since although I am the author I had never been the reader! I’m sure other writers can identify when I say that when I write a book, I don’t read it.

I knew this was an important and powerful book. I did not want to lose what was, and wanted to create and capture what could be. I’m happy to say that I think I did that; and I trust that this new edition is fuller, richer, more complete….and is a more compelling invitation to get on with it!

If you were to identify what you think is the most compelling idea in the new edition, what would that be?

Evolution by Intention and Emerging Futures are two new perspectives that make history irrelevant in creating the future. I know that's a tough one for some people to swallow given that cultures around the world are so intent on looking back to guide our moving forward. Personally, I'm very clear as I look around my world, that understanding the past has never made it possible for us to create a different future. It is not our knowledge of the past that matters; it is our ability and willingness to integrate its impact into who we must become for a different future.

Our efforts at transformation (and I hate that word and can’t think of another one that folks will identify and recognize!) and having failed so miserably over so many decades is not a byproduct of our ineptitude. It is a natural outcome of engaging for transformation in ways that cannot possibly allow that outcome to occur! The quantum sciences that we so excitedly refer to offer us a gateway to the potential that we are and yet, we overlook its implications for human behaviour and settle for its technological offerings. Newtonian science has told us, over and over again, that we are not the god we seek – and it’s not true. Newtonian science and its platform for our ‘humanness’ is incomplete. We, on the other hand, are not.

Newtonian science spawned the mechanistic view of what a human being is and all the things that go along with that. This model of the world has defined not only how a human being behaves (i.e. how it works, when it’s broken and how to fix it, etc.) but has actually defined WHAT we ARE.

The quantum sciences invite an immensely different interpretation! However, what we’ve historically done is taken the information that comes to us from the quantum sciences and put it all in the box of what we’ve been told we are from Newtonian science.

What I’m saying is that we are a very different box! Not only are we a very different box, the box that we are is alive and organic and constantly moving and shifting and reshaping itself. That kind of changes how we move through the world, don’t you think?

If you were to offer one thought for your readers that you think would make the biggest difference when reading ‘Fully Alive’, what would that be?

Be brave! Get honest with yourself. Trust that you’re up to it and that no matter where the read takes you, you’ll be just fine! If you really want to take a walk on the wild side, re-read Fully Alive every six weeks and discover all the things that you notice that you did not notice the last time. Why? Because as you read, you change and grow and become. When you’re done, you’re not the same person you were when you started – and this ‘new you’ will notice things in the book that you could not possibly have noticed the last time you read it. That’s what I mean by what we are… we’re organic and in perpetual evolution. It’s impossible to be otherwise. It is the essence of what we are.