Elizabeth Lesser and Oprah Winfrey discuss their webinar based on "A New Earth," reflecting on how they brought spiritual teachings to a wide audience. They explore what made the event resonate and the challenge of making deep ideas accessible to millions of people.
We met. Well, I can't remember when we first met, but then we really got to know each other a few years ago when Oprah was doing the webinar with me, the 10 week seminar on the Internet. And you were part of that?
Yeah, that was. I've had a lot of wonderful experiences here, but I count that as one of the great experiences of my life. I didn't know Oprah at all before that. I had been interviewed once by her, but she admitted later she was interviewing me to test to see if I'd be a good person to work with with you on this. Someone had told her that I had experience creating curriculum out of spiritual books, which I do from being here. And I knew your work. You had been here once before. So actually, I was driving in my car one day home from work. It was snowing, and I went to turn my cell phone on to call my husband and tell him I'd be late. And the phone rang and it was Oprah. But I didn't think it was Oprah, because if Oprah called you, would you think it was Oprah? I thought it was one of my friends pretending to be Oprah, but it was. And she invited me to do this. And I would meet with her to go over. It was all happening very fast. So I was living in a new earth. I was living in that book. She had chosen it, her first nonfiction book she ever chose for her book club, and she chose this. And I was so impressed, and I remain so impressed, that she chose a very subtle, not easy book to. To grasp for her audience of millions of people for whom are on all different steps in the spectrum of awakening. And it was her intent to bring the teachings into a language and a form that perhaps the most people could understand, because she loved it and felt it had changed her so much. So she would meet with me to help. We dive into a chapter, starting with chapter one, obviously, and try to talk about what did it mean to us. And then she would say, can you ask Eckhart to do this, this and this, and get me questions? And then I was writing a workbook that would go online so people could prepare for the next chapter all in that same week. So if I got to the airport and the airplane was canceled for six hours, I wouldn't care because I was just feeling the energy in my hands. And it didn't matter if I was at o' Hare and there were kids going stranded, going to Disneyland on school break. Like I was so present for all those weeks. I think it's the most present I've ever been for an extended period of time. And then I would come to you and say, like, Oprah wants some meditation exercises for chapter three. And you'd say, no. You'd say, exercises takes you away from the present moment. Just tell her to feel the energy in her hand. So I'd go back to Oprah and say, say, no, we just have to feel the energy in our hands. And we would laugh hysterically. And then, and she did such a masterful job. I just the first night, 8 million people tried to log on and it wiped out the entire Internet at Chicago, in all of Chicago. And then they got it together. And by the end, something like 15 million people were together in those two hours live Skyping in from Russia and Ghana and Brazil and Singapore and everywhere. And it was a true. It was a new Earth. And it was, and she often says it was one of the best experiences of her life.
Yes. Well, she said to me, it's the most exciting thing I've ever done. And she's done many exciting things.
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