Interview with Louise LeBrun

Interview with
the Author

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

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 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 important.

What’s important to you about this book, for you and for your readers?

The 3rd edition of Fully Alive is fuller, richer, more complete and as I allow all of that to flow out of me onto the page, I can almost immediately feel new thoughts, new ideas and new considerations beginning to flow into the empty space that has been left behind. It never really stops! My life is a living example of that idea of ‘Space, Movement and Flow’ as a process for living. Create Space and there is room for something new to unfold.

I would hope that what’s important for my readers is that they discover that it never ends; that there is always more; and that this book, as a metaphor for living, invites them to look in their own lives and begin to notice how who they have been is not who they are now and far from who they can become! That all of it – our lives, our bodies, our families/friends/colleagues, our work – is alive and constantly in flow. If this book makes it possible for one person to notice that, it will have been worth the writing.

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

It’s 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?

It would be that 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! What I mean by that is, for example, you can never expect apple juice to come from an orange. If transformation is apple juice, then we have to notice how we are apples in order to be able to create it.

The quantum sciences that we so excitedly refer to offer us a gateway to the apples that we are! Newtonian science has told us, over and over again, that we are oranges – and it’s not true. Newtonian science and its platform for our ‘humanness’ is incomplete. We, on the other hand, are not!

We are not oranges trying to be apples – we are apples and have not yet noticed. Know what I mean?

Not really! Can you tell me that another way?

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! Trust that you’ve 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. Is this making you crazy, yet? 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.