What If You’re Not Meant to be the Hero with Stacey Simmons

Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:00]
Well, hello, Stacy. Welcome not just to the Writing Your Resilience podcast, but to the 100th episode of the Writing Your Resilience podcast. I am so excited to have you on, because let me just say to you and all my listeners, I am a huge, huge fan of The Queen’s Path. This is an amazing book—writers, you all need a copy, and by the end of this episode, you’re going to know why. So welcome again.

Stacey Simmons [0:30]

Oh, Lisa. I’m so excited—so excited to be here and thank you for such a beautiful endorsement. It really has been a journey, and I’m so excited to share the book with people. It’s truly been a labor of love. So, thank you so much for honoring my work. I appreciate it.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:45]

Well, the labor has paid off, my friends, and we are going to dive deep into this book. But before we do, I always like to give my guest the first chance to tell us about their projects. So, what would you like us to know about The Queen’s Path?

Stacey Simmons [1:00]
For me, The Queen’s Path started almost as an accident. I didn’t expect to discover it. I went in to get a master’s degree and be done with my entertainment-world, executive-world chapter and begin something new. And when I discovered The Queen’s Path, I realized I was already on it. It totally changed my life, and I couldn’t be more grateful to be the person who had the privilege of discovering it. So yeah—really exciting.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [1:28]
Well, a friend of mine told me about this, and as soon as she said something—Jessica Urey, shout out to Jessica—I was like, “Oh my gosh, I think I’m on this path too.”

Stacey Simmons [1:40]
Amazing. So how did you make that discovery? When she said something to you, what clicked?

Lisa Cooper Ellison [1:45]

There was something about—we’re going to talk about MIPA and MISOR in a moment—but there was something about that language. And when she started talking about the steps, it spoke to me, and I knew I had to learn more. Once I got to the “Curses and Mark” section—something we’re also going to talk about, listeners—I was like, “Oh, I knew it.” And then when I finally got to the final section—I was telling you, Stacey, before I hit the record button—there was a point when I was listening to the book (I also have a print copy), and I was just crying. I was like, “I have done the Queen!” I’m so excited about this, and I couldn’t believe it.

Stacey Simmons [2:28]
You got your sovereignty.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [2:30]

Yes, yes. Also, if you’re on YouTube, I’m going to show you this photo that I’ve had on my vision board for two years. I’ve been working through a lot of different things, and this has been here. This is me—the Queen.

Stacey Simmons [2:45]

That is, you, the Queen. That is so fantastic. I didn’t realize it had been on your vision board for two years. You didn’t say that part when you talked about the photograph before. So, you’ve been on a sovereignty journey long before you read the book.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [3:05]

Oh yeah, way before I read the book. Really, what I found is that I’ve been on the journey for a long time. Reading this book is helping me write the journey, and that has been so satisfying. So, we’re going to start with a quick vocabulary lesson for everyone to make sure we’re all on the same page.

There are great things about the hero’s journey—many stories follow it. And if you’re trying to learn how to write a book, it’s a great way to learn the model. It’s one way to write a book. Once you figure that out, you can learn other formulas. But something has always felt missing—something that hasn’t quite sat right—and your book addresses that.

So, before we get into all the nuances, we’re going to talk about a few vocabulary words.

The first one is sovereignty. So, can you define sovereignty for us?

Stacey Simmons [4:15]

Sovereignty is the inherent value of any human being, but especially for women. It is a recognition that you have value, and you can make choices for yourself regardless of your circumstances. You honor the full embodied human you are. You don’t sell that or exchange it for something—for safety, for awareness, for inclusion. Sovereignty is inherent to you regardless of your circumstances.

And for me, the thing that’s really important to understand is that sovereignty is not the same as freedom. Freedom can be granted, and it can be taken away. You can have sovereignty and have no freedom. You can have sovereignty and have full freedom. You can have sovereignty and be negotiating your freedom all the time. Sovereignty is the foundation of where we get to live in our embodied soul as women. And to me, sovereignty is non-negotiable. It’s saying, “I am inviolable in my identity. You cannot separate me from myself.” And when a woman starts to really feel that in her breath and in her bones, she’s transformed. She absolutely is transformed.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [5:15]

Yeah, absolutely. And I also feel like there’s this aspect of integration.

Stacey Simmons [5:20]

Yes—integration is a huge piece of it. It comes from—so getting into the vocabulary lesson, right?—the integration is because when women are growing up as little girls, around seven or eight, we get divided. We get separated from ourselves into either the track of being the “good girl” or the “outside girl.”

The good girl I call the MISOR—the Maiden in Search of Relationship (an acronym for maintenance of relationship). The outside girl—magical, isolated, powerful, and endangered—is the MIPA.

That experience of being divided as children, being put on a track that says: “You will do this” or “You will do that,” without much choice… Anyone who was the weird girl at school, or the girl with—like me—a mohawk and blue hair, you’re automatically MIPA, right?

And most of us think the tracks are different. They’re actually the same. The woman is going through the same steps—she’s just doing it from a different position. She’s either walking backwards or forwards, and whichever way she’s going, those are the consequences for being on that track. But the fact that there are two tracks at all is just a trap to keep women from their sovereignty.

So, the integration you’re talking about comes at the end of the sovereignty journey—the end of The Queen’s Path. It’s the moment when a woman asks:

• Which parts of myself have I cut away or distanced from that are actually integral to who I am?
• What do I need to reclaim?
• And what do I need to kick to the curb because it was never mine to begin with?—things culture, family, or a job told me were mine, but they’re not.

That’s the integration process.

And it’s not integration as in healing. One of the things my practice partner and I noticed—we created a workshop and workbook for this—and she wrote “healing the divide” everywhere. And I was like, no. We’re not healing a divide. We’re not broken. We’re not wounded.

We’ve been divided by culture.

And the minute we take responsibility for a wound that isn’t ours, we’re playing into the patriarchy. We’re playing into the thing that separates us.

So, I’m really careful with language. Yes, do I have wounds as a person? Absolutely. But is this the wound? No. This is a construct handed to us.

And it’s important to note that taking your own journey on The Queen’s Path versus writing a story structured on The Queen’s Path—the story will feel clearer, more discrete. A real woman’s journey is far more nuanced.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [9:25]
So, honoring that nuance is important, and recognizing that the divide is an illusion applied to us.

And I also want to say: as a heavy-metal-loving Buddhist in upstate New York as a kid—total MIPA. I didn’t have to do anything else. “Oh, you’re MIPA.”

So, we get into this illusion of the divide, right? We find it, we see ourselves on a team and often discard the other part. We’ll talk more about that in a moment. But to continue the vocabulary lesson: We’ve talked about sovereignty—which so important to understand. But some people are new to writing or haven’t heard of the hero’s journey or heroine’s journey. Even if they have, a refresher is helpful, because we’re going to talk about something else—not the antithesis, but different.

Here’s my very shortcut version of hero and heroine’s journeys, and then you share yours. The hero’s journey is going out to slay the dragon. The heroine’s journey is going into the underworld to reclaim something. The steps are generally the same; the language differs slightly. So how do you define it, and how does that lead to what you’re doing—which is different?

Stacey Simmons [10:25]

Yeah. So, for me, I take Campbell’s original definition of the hero’s journey, which is very simple—two sentences. He’s like: boy hears a call to adventure; boy finds a teacher; boy goes on a quest; on the quest he achieves the elixir of life (or the boon) and returns home to share it. To me, that is the hero’s journey.

The heroine’s journey has been defined by a few writers—Victoria Schmidt, Gail Carriger, Maureen Murdock—and they generally share the same structure. The closest to mine is probably Carriger’s, because she talks about creating a community at the end.

But the first person to define it was Maureen Murdock, a student of Campbell. She went to him and said, “I think there’s a story here for women.” And he basically said, “No—the story for women is that women are the center the hero is trying to get to.” So, she’s like, “So I’m just a passive object waiting to be discovered?”

And he basically said, “Yes.”

Not good enough. So, she wrote her own model. But hers is very psychoanalytic—it was written in the ’80s—and it’s steeped in goddess language, feminine divinity, healing wounds, which for me is like, no. We’re not healing a wound. And when you read Murdock now, it feels dated—but it was crucial because it was the first to introduce what I’m saying in my discovery:

I didn’t create The Queen’s Path. The Queen’s Path is archetypal. It’s in everything. It’s in the Bible. In ancient mythology. Back to ancient Sumer—6000 years ago, the first poem ever written. It’s in movies, television, novels. Everywhere. All I did was discover something that already existed.

And what’s different is, if you look at women’s stories, we are always put on this track to be divided, and once we are divided, we go through the same steps. The MISOR and the MIPA are having the same experience—just from a different lens. And that story is the story of being divided from ourselves by culture in order to make ourselves safe.

And for most women, for most stories across the millennia, women’s stories have ended before sovereignty. So, fairy tales that end in “happily ever after”—that is a third-quadrant ending, and the woman never gets to her sovereignty. She is usurped. Her power is absorbed by a man and a family. And that is not sovereignty. That’s almost the middle—that’s getting you to the end of the story, and you’re giving up your power before you get there.

And, you know, there are older stories that show this—like the story of Lilith. Lilith and the story of Adam and Eve is actually the story of Lilith and Eve. It’s not Adam and Eve. Lilith wanted her autonomy. She was created at the same time as Adam, as his equal and peer. And when she would not submit to him, he got mad, and she said, “You know what? If I have to submit to you, this is not paradise.” So, she left.

And God saw that it was bad for the man to be alone (if you can’t see me, I’m making big, giant air quotes with my fingers), and so he made Eve out of a part of Adam’s body so that she would always be submissive to him.

And it’s like—this is the story we’re always telling: a story of a woman who is submissive and a woman who refuses to submit. And that is the Queen’s path. Both those women are on the same journey. They both want the same things: protection and autonomy.

And real women are doing this dance all the time—constantly straddling the divide. “Am I going on the journey to protection over here, or am I going on the journey of my own power and autonomy over here?” And when you’re constantly doing that straddling work, trying to figure it out, you don’t have the energy to go slay the dragon and do the quest.

Because it’s not that women can’t be heroes. It’s not that women can’t do the tasks of a hero. A woman can slay the dragon. A woman can captain a starship. A woman can captain a pirate ship. A woman can steal the money or reclaim the land. She can do all of it.

It’s not that a woman can’t be a hero because she’s not fit for the tasks. It’s because when she comes back with the boon, nobody wants it from her.

And every single one of us has had that experience: we bring our expertise and our knowledge, and we are met with the Cassandra syndrome that says, “No—not from you.”

The story I tell—the story of Atalanta, which is a Greek myth—in my book, it’s the perfect example. This goes all the way back to ancient Greece: a woman who is a better hunter, a better athlete than all the guys, and nobody would give her her due because she was a woman.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [15:12]
Yeah. And then there are all of the issues women face along the way—questioning their abilities, wondering if a sexual encounter will lead to pregnancy… so many different things.

Before we continue, I do want to show—especially if you’re on YouTube, and if you’re not on YouTube today, come see this on YouTube, it’s going to help. This is—when you’re talking about quadrants and what The Queen’s Path looks like—one of the great models you have in your book. And then you break each quadrant down, with more details later in the book. But I wanted to show people what we’re talking about, because when we think about the hero’s journey or the heroine’s journey in terms of shape, often it’s a straight line. It follows what would be called Freytag’s model—there’s escalating tension, we get to resolution, and then we come down. And this is something different.

And I also want to say—because I know so many writers who say, “I want to write an elliptical story. How do I write an elliptical story?” Okay, if you want to write an elliptical story, here you go, my friends. This is a great model to help you think through your memoir in that way. So yes, the divide is an illusion, and yet I would also say—kind of switching tracks—that it is real.

So how do we end up in this situation of the divide, if at one point, as you talk about in your book, we don’t know it exists?

Stacey Simmons [16:51]
That’s one of the steps. One of the steps is being blind to the fact that this exists at all. And it’s interesting—I was in Scotland doing a workshop, and it was fascinating to have this whole group of women (and one man in the group, who was a writer), and they were mad at the steps.

We got to the “blind” step, and they were like, “I don’t want to be blind.” Blind is the last step in the first quadrant. So, it starts out: Once upon a time… then Curse and Mark (which I know we’ll talk about in a second)… and then Blind.

And they were like, “I don’t want to be blind. How do I avoid being blind?”

And I said, “You can’t. It’s archetypal. You are going to be blind to something on the path.”

And you’re trying to do a hero’s journey instead of doing the Queen’s path—which asks, “How do I avoid the thing?” or “How do I show that I avoided the thing?”

You can’t avoid it. We are all blind to things in our lives. It’s part of being a woman, because we don’t want to believe that there is a system trying to divide us from ourselves. We want to believe in our wholehearted autonomy. And that doesn’t exist.

We live in a culture that tells us what our roles are, and we are constantly either agreeing with or fighting that. So naturally, you’re going to have a blind spot.

So yes—if you don’t believe this exists, that’s fine. Then this is not the work for you. But I promise you: your story will be better, and your self-awareness as a writer will be better, if you give yourself permission to let the archetypal unfold in front of you.

And the idea behind archetypes—if you don’t know about archetypes—is that there are different ways of understanding them: psychoanalytic or more pop-culture.

My perspective is psychoanalytic. Archetypes are universal and eternal. They exist outside of us. They cannot be changed. We change their names, that’s it.

But if you look at any culture, there’s a warrior archetype, a mother archetype, a hero archetype, a goddess archetype, a goddess of love archetype. Every culture has these because the archetype exists in us as part of us.

And the Queen’s path is archetypal. It exists in us as us. We’re living it, and it’s living us. It’s a relationship—24/7, all 365. You cannot escape this. And that’s not meant to be deterministic. It’s to say: it’s a cultural pattern that exists around us—one we produce.

So, did that answer your question?

Lisa Cooper Ellison [19:36]

Yes, it definitely did. And it got into archetypes—these representations that live inside us, these schemas or ideas we have about things. And as you were talking about that divide, I had this very specific moment. I mean, I think there could be many moments, but this was the moment when I went from being blind—believing I could do anything—to suddenly realizing, “Wait a second… there’s a difference.”

And it was this moment when I wanted a camera. Okay, and now I’m going to date myself—this was the 1980s, the little Kodak camera that had the small film cartridge. It was super cheap, but I wanted one. I was like, “I’m going to become a photographer one day. I want to have this.”

And my whole life, my mom had said, “You can get such-and-such when you’re this age.” I could get a bike when I was six, I could get this camera when I was eight. And I grew up in a neighborhood with all boys—I was the only girl—and I could roll with all of them. I saw myself as equal in strength, intelligence, capacity—you name it.

My brothers, who were two years younger (I have twin brothers), wanted to play with the camera. And I was like, “No effing way. I waited until I was eight. You’re six—you can’t have this camera.”

And my mom said, “Let them play with it.” And then she said to me—in the kitchen, I can picture it vividly—“Your brothers will always be able to do more things than you, and they will be able to do them earlier, because they are boys. That is just the way it is.”

Stacey Simmons [21:15]
I know. Oh my God. Oh yeah. Yes. I have a very similar story. Same thing. If you’re listening to us, we’re on camera and we’re both wearing purple shirts, which is hilarious.

But when I was—this isn’t in the book—when I was six, I grew up in the ’70s. I’m 56. And I was the only girl in a neighborhood of boys my age. We played games, running around like feral children—as Gen X did, right? One day—we didn’t know any better, this was the ’70s—we were playing Cowboys and Indians. I was on the Indians team. All the boys took their shirts off, and I took my shirt off, of course. And the neighbor saw me and went to get my mom, and said, “You can’t play. You have to put your shirt back on.” And I said, “But then I won’t be on the team.” Then she’s like, “But you’re a girl.” “But then I won’t be a brave with the boys.” And she’s like, “But you’re a girl.” And I just refused. I just refused, and it wound up with me going home with my mom, and she said, “Well, you can play by yourself then.”

So, I played for about two minutes in the backyard by myself, was bored to death, and then went into my room and read books. And that became my life. I became a reader because I couldn’t do— I was blind to the rules, right? To what it meant that there was this distinction that I didn’t agree with at all. The consequences escaped me, but they were not subtle. They were very clearly delineated: You will not do the same things.

Same kind of story: they will get to do more because they’re boys. And it’s infuriating—and it should be. If we’re blind to the impact that has on us as women, then we’re doing ourselves a disservice, right?

Lisa Cooper Ellison [23:15]

And I think, you know, when I look back at that moment, I’m pretty sure I got sent to my room for arguing, because I was like, “No.” And then, in my head—even though my mom “won” the argument in the sense that I had to go to my room—I was like, I am going to defy this at every turn. This is not going to be the way it is.

And so, there’s a way that I set my life up on a certain trajectory, as you talk about—but that trajectory was all about denying, and that was the opposite. So I think this is a great way to talk about: there’s that period where you’re blind, then you wake up to it.

And then there is this: we have our curses, and we have our marks, and we do a lot with them in the wrestling and the story. And if you want to know all of the nuances of this, you just have to buy the book—we can’t do that in the amount of time we have.

But tell us about these curses and marks and how they impact our journeys—whether that’s the journey of life or the journey on the page.

Stacey Simmons [24:00]

So, I want to start with the journey on the page, because I think it’s really important to show that the curses and marks—they’re in our stories all the time, right? Think about Frozen, right? The two characters. Anna gets the streak of white hair. That’s her mark of her curse—of being struck with magic by her sister. Her sister has the magic power; she wears gloves all the time. That’s her curse—her magic. Her mark is her gloves.

So, there’s always something in a story, and I guarantee you can look at any story and you will see it. It’s right in front of you, right? “Agatha, all along, she’s got this weird witch power where she can steal other people’s power. That’s her curse. She’s lost a child—that’s her curse, right?

And we all have multiple curses, by the way—it’s not just one. But in a story, you’re always going to see that. So, bear that in mind. The problem is that we often think the curse is—that it’s for us, or that it’s personal, when in fact, it’s archetypal, right?

The curse—I’m just going to use Frozen because it’s easy and most people know it—Elsa’s curse of magic and power is not her problem. It’s everybody else’s problem because they’re afraid of it. And she takes it on personally and so moves into isolation. And it is the isolation that is the mark of her curse. It’s the same in Wicked, right? It’s her power that is a problem for everybody else.

And as real-life women, we have this too. We know this very well. I was talking to a client this morning about this very thing. You cannot help but— I mean, in her case: yes, you are smarter than those people. So what?

You don’t have to dumb yourself down for coworkers. Why is that a thing? You know? That doesn’t mean be unkind, but you don’t have to dumb yourself down for anybody.

So, whether you’re writing a story or you’re trying to identify, in your own life, “What are my curses and marks?”—you may have ten you can use, right?

If you’re trying to tell an elegant story, pick one or two.

If you’re looking at your own life, look for the throughlines and where the curses are related to events in your life, because there will be. It will be its own unique journey through the Queen’s path that’s associated with that particular person.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [27:02]
Yeah. And what that means is that you could have multiple memoirs, right? So, if you want to know, “How can I be a serial memoirist?”—you can go through this path with many different curses and marks. And so, yeah, we have these experiences, and they are affecting us all of the time, but I want to get back to this: we have the curses and the marks, and that is what we’re really confronting and addressing. You said something—and I may get it wrong in terms of where it shows up in the book, so if I do, feel free to correct me—but you said this path is dangerous. Talk about that for a moment.

Stacey Simmons [28:10]

So, the path is in four quadrants. The first and the fourth quadrants make up the top hemisphere, if you will. So, there’s an x-axis; the top hemisphere—from, if you’re looking at a clock, nine to twelve and twelve to three—that’s the fourth and the first quadrant. Then below the x-axis is kind of the underworld—that’s probably the closest language I can give it.

Most people want to skip the second and third quadrants. They want to go from their first quadrant to the fourth quadrant. They want to go from undifferentiated and innocent to all-knowing and understanding and not having any kind of pain.

But you can’t get to sovereignty without pain and understanding. And to do that, you have to go through the danger.

At first, in the second quadrant, it starts with a little bit of danger, and then you get cleaved. You get separated into either MIPA or MISOR. And then you have to confront what that means. And then you get hunted nearly to death, right? That’s either you are hunting something that almost kills you, or you’re being hunted and they almost kill you. You can see this in movies like Promising Young Woman. That story ends in the third quadrant. She dies before she gets to sovereignty.

“Happily ever after” is the danger of giving up your life to somebody else’s identity—of becoming a wife and a mother, of not having a last name anymore, of not having an individual identity. That story is also a third-quadrant ending. “Happily ever after” and death by annihilation are the same ending—just different faces. MISOR or MIPA—they both end there if you don’t move forward to sovereignty. So, it’s dangerous, because in real women’s lives and in women’s stories, the story really can end before she gets to sovereignty.

There’s—I was having a conversation with a screenwriting professor at USC, and she was saying, “What I love about this is that the hero’s journey always… if he doesn’t succeed, we don’t even think about it. He’s going to succeed. You’re reading the story to get to the success of returning with the boon or returning with the elixir. That’s the hero’s journey. We know it. There’s not a lot of danger. It’s predictable.

A woman’s story—a Queen’s path story—this story can really end in tragedy, and it happens all the time. We live it all the time. We live with the risk of it all the time. Do I…? You know, I find myself pregnant, and now what do I do? Do I give the baby up for adoption? Do I have an abortion? Do I marry this man I maybe just met? Maybe I can love him, maybe I can’t, I don’t know the answer.

Those are all—three or four—real endings for women. And we don’t know the outcome. Sometimes we’ll get to sovereignty in those endings, and sometimes we won’t.

And we know the risk—we know it in our bodies when we’re faced with those options, like, this could end me.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [31:02]
Yeah, there is real danger.

And what I would say is that the danger—especially if you’re a memoirist and you’re writing about your own life—it’s not a matter of, “Oh my gosh, if I start going on this journey of writing my book in this way, I’m going to face all these dangers.” No. The dangers have always been there. Now you’re becoming aware of them.

And so, I’m going to give two really concrete examples. When I was a child—and this was not a danger I faced, but it felt like the danger of annihilation when it was taught to me—it was a very benign thing. My grandmother was trying to teach me how to address envelopes, and she said, “When you get married, your name will be your husband’s name.” So, in her case, Mrs. Howard Biggs, right? Her name was erased. And I remember thinking, “Oh my goodness, this is what really happens.” It was shocking to me. But when I look at her life, I see how that happened to her. And she lived that out. In my own life…

I got Lyme disease, and part of that journey was working myself to death—trying to prove myself in a way that wasn’t working. And so, listeners, if you are on this path, yes, you might find the danger, yes, you might have to confront some of these things, but there’s freedom on the other side if you do.

Stacey Simmons [33:15]

Yes, yes. Well, and as a writer—and especially as a memoirist—the more real you can be, the more your story is going to connect with your readers. And that’s true regardless.

Somebody asked me recently, “You write this in such a way that’s kind of a hybrid memoir—hybrid telling stories about your life, about your patients’ lives, and then bringing in movies and television and novels. Why that?”

Because there was no other way to tell this story and have it be honest. Yes. I couldn’t have done it with just my patients, or just movies, or just me. It wouldn’t have connected. I don’t think it would have felt honest to read—it would have just been another movie theory book or writing theory book.

But I think women gravitate toward it because I agreed to be frightened in writing it. I agreed to look at the things that would scare me if someone knew them. Like, what’s going to change if somebody knows this about me? So, I had to do it, and I had to go to the fear.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [34:01]

Yeah. And I think that for me as a reader, it didn’t just make the experience more real. It wasn’t just a theory of how stories work or a theory of screenplays. It wasn’t a theory—it was real because it was something you had lived; it was something others had lived; and then we also had characters. And because I could feel the realness in it, when I got to the places where I felt a little crunchy—where I didn’t want to look at this stuff while reading the book—I thought, you know what? She’s gone on this path. I can do this. And that allowed my resistance to melt away.

One of the things I love about this book is that it’s not just a book with all of this information. You have tons of great exercises to help the reader pause and say, “Okay, I’ve shared this theory with you. I’ve shared this information. Now—how does it relate to your life right now?”

So that you can go on the journey as you’re reading the book, which is different from other craft books that I’ve read. And I read a lot of craft books—that’s just part of my job. I’m wondering if we can give listeners just a taste of an exercise—something they can think about right now while they’re listening that might give them a sense of the type of work they would do on the Queen’s path. And you know… just give them one more reason to buy your book.

Stacey Simmons [35:45]

Oh, well, I appreciate that. Before I give an example of an exercise, I’m going to tell you what I tell people in workshops: Even if you’re a writer doing this for your writing, when you’re in the workshop, I usually ask everyone to put your own life in this first. Use yourself as the model first. Even if you never share the information in your notebook or workbook, it’s going to help you embody it and understand it in a way that will help you reproduce it in your writing.

And I think because women—my experience so far—I’ve been so fortunate to have women confirm, “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” every time I meet with them about the book. So, that being said, one of the first exercises is to identify whether you’re a MIPA or a MISOR. We go through questions in the book like:

• Did you like playing with dolls or being “girly” when you were a kid?
• Did you resist anything girly when you were a kid?
• Do you feel like it’s your job to be receptive to men, jobs, kids, husband, family?
• Or do you run screaming from that stuff?

And that helps you figure out, “Am I more MIPA or more MISOR?”

That’s just one example.

But to be fair, no real woman is all one or the other. You’re always a blend—because you’re a real person. A character can be more discretely one or the other, but a real person is always somewhere in the middle. She’s always doing the work of figuring out, “Okay, today, with my kid’s teacher, am I going to be more this? And at work with my law firm, am I going to be more that?”

It’s always a balance for a real person. Characters, yes, can be more cleanly drawn.

Another exercise—probably my favorite, and the one most people hate—is in the Commit stage, which is in the second quadrant. The commitment is almost always a commitment to either the scar, the mark, or the track. There’s a moment—either in a story or in a real woman’s life—where you go:

Okay. I’m failing. I’m going to double down. And what you double down on is the scar or the curse. And until you’re on the other side of it, you don’t see it.

For me, I was working this high-profile, high-pressure, very well-paid, very high-powered job at a university. And when things started to go wrong, I just worked more. I worked harder. I got up earlier. Made more calls. Tried to make more deals. I thought, I’m going to be even better than I was before.

But that’s the problem: you don’t fit, and you’re trying to be better at the thing you think they’ll reward you for. And they’re never going to reward you for it—because they want you to be the helper. They don’t want you to be the leader. And it broke me. It absolutely broke me. But that’s the Commit step.

So, the exercise is: Where have you doubled down on the thing that only cut you into more pieces?

It’s one of the hardest steps. But yeah—that’s an example.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [38:12]

Yeah, I love that. Well… I can’t say I love that, right? That would be disingenuous. But I love that kind of exercise. And what I would say, listeners, is: if you’re thinking, “Well, I can’t tell where I doubled down,” go to the place where you were broken, and then look backwards. Sometimes it’s a matter of walking backwards to find the step.

But the more I saw that in my own life, the more I understood how all of this was working through me—whether I wanted it to or not—and how unconscious it is.

Because we’re navigating a world of patriarchy that has a lot of different requirements of us. And what you have to do to be successful in each individual situation in real life depends on what is being asked of you and what will help you get your way or maintain some modicum of power in a situation where you may be powerless.

Stacey Simmons [39:02]

Yes, 100%. And recognizing that not having power is often not your fault. It’s often structural. And that’s an important recognition. If you’re up against structural power, you have to find your sovereignty through whatever circuitous route you need to take.

And that might mean you play girl games. It might mean you reject the girl games and say, “Screw this, I’m not doing it.” Whatever it is—it’s about maintaining your individual sovereignty, that inherent worth and awareness of your authority and agency. That’s the right answer. And that might mean keeping your job and paying the bills. It might also mean telling everybody to eff off and working at Denny’s. Who knows? But it’s about finding the way that’s authentic to you, yes? And owning that. There are a lot of different options.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [40:16]

And something I found really helpful around the divide—which relates to all of this—is how it’s not our fault—yet we can believe it is our fault.

So here are some of the things—this is on page 97:

• If I had been stronger, I would not have been abused.
• If I had stood up for myself, they wouldn’t have treated me this way.
• If I can just find the time to work harder, I’ll be able to catch up and show them my value.

And of course, there are others.

But you know, these are things imposed upon us that we accept, and then we start telling ourselves these stories that take away our power.

That’s right. That’s right.

Stacey Simmons [41:20]

And it’s really about understanding the difference between personal and structural impediments. You can do a lot with personal impediments. You can do almost nothing about structural impediments unless you’re working with other women—which is why, at the end of the sovereignty journey, part of the work is to find your tribe, gather your tribe, and have other women who support you and whom you support.

Because when women work together instead of being divided—which is what patriarchy trains us to do—when we’re together, we’re hard to stop. And there are great stories—Lysistrata, from Aeschylus, I think—about the women of Sparta saying: “Why are we doing this? Why are we letting the guys go to war, then come home and have a good time, then go back to war? No more sex. We’re not doing sex anymore.” And the guys lose their minds. When women band together and come up with solutions together, we usually win. So yes—sisterhood is real.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [42:59]
So yes—sisterhood is real And, it’s so important.

So, listeners, here’s an exercise I’d like you to do:

Write down who’s in your tribe. Then think about who else you want to be in your tribe and think about how you can go out and connect with those people. Because when we do this work together, we are so powerful. And imagine the world we could create if we all had our sovereignty and if we guaranteed it for each other, because sovereignty isn’t a male–female thing—it’s for everyone.

Stacey Simmons [43:40]
I have more than two male clients, but two in particular read the book—mostly as a kindness to me, I think. They’re both avid readers, and they wanted to give me their male perspective. One of them is a screenwriter, and they both came to me around the same time after the book came out and said, “I think I’m a male MIPA.” And I thought, “Oh, that’s very interesting—tell me more.”

So, I’ve had to rethink this as well. Because I didn’t talk about this in the book, but I talk a lot about it in workshops. Before the book was written, I was still workshopping, teaching, making sure I was getting it right.

I did a screenwriting workshop. I walked into the room—it was all men. I thought, “Am I in the right room? This is my class?” And the guys were like, “Yeah—The Queen’s Path, right? Female characters.”

I said, “Okay… all right.”

And these guys asked really good questions. One of them said, “We think the Queen’s path is for everyone.” And I thought, “I haven’t tested it on male characters. I don’t know.” He said, “Well—what about Superman? What about Batman? What about Harry Potter?” And I thought, Oh my God, you’re right. Those characters are definitely on the Queen’s path. They’re not on the hero’s journey at all—none of those three. And I was really taken aback.

I haven’t had time to go do a male version—looking at screens, movies, novels—but I think there’s something there. And to your point: sovereignty is for everyone. It’s not just for women. It’s for everyone. And sovereignty is taken from everybody, especially if you have any degree of marginalization.

Yes, absolutely.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [45:10]

Well, I will be excited if there is a part two of this book, right? I don’t know. I don’t know—The King’s Path? I don’t know.

Stacey Simmons [45:23]

My practice partner and I were talking about this the other day because we just did a workshop on psychedelics and the Queen’s path together, and all the women there wanted a couple’s version with their partners. So, we were knocking around this idea—like “King’s Path,” right? Or do we call it “The Sovereign Man”? Or “The Sovereign Couple”? How do we do that? So, we’re knocking the idea around right now.

I have talked to my agent about a version that might be couples first—or maybe a men’s version. I’m not sure yet. My practice partner, Jenny, likes the idea of “The Knight’s Path,” which I think is kind of nice. So, we’re knocking the idea around. More to come, for sure. And I don’t have any other workshops planned for this year—2025—but around, like, before Christmas, I’ll have some workshops on my website for what’s coming in 2026.

And if you have an event—like if you run a writer’s workshop or something—and you want me to come speak, I’m more than happy to do workshops for people. I’m not expensive.

I love this work so much. I really love working—especially working with writers—on how to free their story so they don’t feel confined to the tropes we’ve been trained in, especially because writing has been dominated for so long by the hero’s journey. Women get stuck sometimes, trying to make it fit—and it doesn’t fit. So, I feel like if you do the Queen’s path work, you wind up freeing your story. And it’s pretty amazing. So yeah.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [47:16]
So we have The Queen’s Path out now. We could potentially one day have The Knight’s Path or The Sovereign Couple. I love both of those ideas, by the way.

And you also have another book out which is enhancing this conversation around The Queen’s Path, and that is Mushroom Pharmacy: A Practical Guide to Psychedelic Mushrooms. So, tell us about that book, and how it enhances this conversation.

Stacey Simmons [47:47]

So, I’m a certified psychedelic therapist. I work with different kinds of plant medicines and mostly with ketamine in California, because that’s what’s legal. But my agent had brought this up to me—he’s like, “I really do think there’s a market for a psychedelic book.”

And psychedelics are actually a great tool on the path to sovereignty. They can help—whether we’re talking about something simple, like a cacao ceremony that’s heart-opening and totally legal, that can help open up this idea of: Where’s the compassion I need for myself so that I can see the steps on the path and the places where I need to find kindness for myself?

You know, at that level—versus going all-out ayahuasca or something, like, “Help me on my journey. I need to get through this Objection step, and I don’t think I can do it without help.” Psychedelics really do help make that better.

I’m also doing something that uses no drugs at all. It’s called auto-induced cognitive trance, and I’m going to be the first person trained in it in the United States. It’s a modality that’s only available in French-speaking countries right now. I speak French, and I’ve been doing that training for the last three years. Next month, I’ll be certified, and I can offer that to people as well.

So yeah—but having a route to the unconscious is part of what psychedelics and any non-ordinary state of consciousness help someone do.

And as artists, that’s what we do. We access the unconscious all the time in order to create worlds and create stories for people—and even to tell our own stories.

How many times have you either seen in an interview, or been interviewed, and somebody says, “Oh, was this a conscious choice—this symbol, or this part of your story?” And it’s like, “No, not at all.” And yet, if you look at it at the level of continuity and how those symbols in the story work, they’re perfect—because the unconscious has been invited into the storytelling.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [49:41]
And I often tell people the unconscious is way smarter than this prefrontal cortex area—our thinking brain. There’s so much more we can access for our creativity and our wisdom in general.

And so, I’m going to put you on the spot, Stacey, and feel free to say no, because I always tell people no is a complete sentence. I would love to have you back on to deepen that conversation, because I think there’s so much more we could talk about that’s related to writers and related to this path of sovereignty, and there’s only so much time in the day.

Stacey Simmons [50:52]

You are so kind. I would love to. Oh, Lisa, I would be delighted to come back. I love talking to you. I love your work, and I’m so grateful that you’re doing it. So absolutely, I would come back anytime. You just say the word—I’ll be here.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [51:16]

Yay. So, I will be in touch about that. We’ll talk about that after I hit the record button, and we stop this. But for now, if people want to know more about you, they want to learn about these workshops you’re going to have in 2026, they want to buy a copy of The Queen’s Path—what are the best ways to connect with you and buy the book?

Stacey Simmons [51:32]

So, the book is available everywhere. You can get it at Target. You can get it at Barnes & Noble. You can get it at Bookshop. You can get it on Amazon. Anywhere you buy books, you can get it.

You can get a Spanish copy from Siria Libre Serio in Spain. You can get a copy from me. You can come to a workshop. I have a bunch of videos that help break down the book on my website if you need some support. I have a bunch of freebies—like in the book, the steps are all given in quadrants, but I have a full map where you can see the entire path on one sheet of paper. If you’re writing, it’s useful to have on your desk.

My website is StaceySimmonsPhD.com, and my name is spelled S-T-A-C-E-Y S-I-M-M-O-N-S P-H-D dot com. Everything you need is there.

The book is available from Penguin Random House, so you can go on Penguin Random House’s website, or you can go to Hay House, which is the imprint that published it. And yeah, it’s available everywhere.

So, yeah—go find me on socials as @StaceySimmonsPhD on TikTok and Instagram. I’m also on TikTok as @TheWitchMom, because I do witchy stuff, so I have some witchy stuff there. That’s @WitchDaily on TikTok, and @StaceyInPsychologyQueen on TikTok—but it’s @StaceySimmonsPhD there as well, and same on LinkedIn. So, if you want to find me, those are all the places you can find me.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [52:41]

And all the links will be in the show notes. And yeah, we’re going to have to have a witchy conversation as well, because I’m a certified Akashic Records reader, and I’m becoming an Akashic Records healer, so we have lots and lots to talk about—to be continued. But for now, thank you so much for being here for my 100th episode. It has been an absolute delight.

Stacey Simmons [53:01]

Thank you so much. I really am grateful to you and to your listeners for giving my book a little bit of love. So, thank you very much.