How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety - Martha Beck

Chris Williamson 0:00 You say, "Anxiety always lies."

Martha Beck 0:03 Mm.

Chris Williamson 0:03 Always. Why?

Martha Beck 0:05 I say that at the end of the book. (laughs) And then-

Chris Williamson 0:07 Uh, spoiler alert. Sorry about that.

Martha Beck 0:09 And then, boom! Come at me with the biggest tr- no, here's the thing. We have brains that are very prone to anxiety, and we have a culture that magnifies our proneness to anxiety. But anxiety, unlike fear, which is a very, uh, uh, a response, a visceral response to a danger that is present in the physical moment. There's a, a surge of adrenaline, a surge of activity, and then boom, it's gone. Anxiety comes from, uh, the way we perseverate and tell stories to ourselves in our heads about the things that may or may not happen. As Mark Twain said, "I'm an old man, and I have lived through many troubles, but most of them never happened." So, anxiety is like being haunted. And if you sit with it, you will see that it is never with you in the room. It is never in a form that you can address in the present. It's always saying about- things about something that are s- something that's happening somewhere else in s- uh, somewhere on the line of time. And for that reason, it's never real, it's never present, and it's never true.

Chris Williamson 1:14 This interesting cocktail between our brain's predisposition and our modern society's reinforcement of that-

Martha Beck 1:24 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:24 ... I suppose. Yeah, I, it's an interesting one talking about anxiety because it's become so pattern-matched. People have used, "I feel uncertain," or, "I am worried," and the term has sort of concept-creeped itself out-

Martha Beck 1:40 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:40 ... to, to encompass all of this. So I wonder, I wonder how much of it is, uh, people giving a name which sounds way more pathological-

Martha Beck 1:48 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:48 ... to something which is a normal part of the human experience, you know?

Martha Beck 1:51 Well, there is that. No question, we are like over-diagnosing ourselves and over-assigning diagnoses to everything that happens. But it's also true that even like the World Health Organization looking with, with fairly objective tests, as objective as you can get, has shown a dramatic rise in the number of people who are suffering crippling clinical levels of anxiety, um, as diagnosed by independent observers. So that went up by 25% during the, the pandemic and has continued to rise since the pandemic. The reason for that is, I found when I started to study it, is that anxiety only goes in one direction. It always goes up, it never reverses for reasons very particular to the human brain.

Chris Williamson 2:39 Dig into that. What do you mean anxiety only ever goes up, it never reverses?

Martha Beck 2:43 Right. So if you've gone over a, uh, a tire ripper leaving a parking lot, and it's a, uh, there are these teeth, and when you go forward, they, they get smooshed under your wheels. But if you go back, they'll rip you apart. So it's a one-way process. In our brains, we have two things that make us capable of spinning anxiety up and up and up and largely unable to bring it down, down, down. Although that is possible, eminently possible. And the, the two things are something called the negativity bias, which I also call the 15 puppies and a cobra syndrome. If you went into a room and noticed 15 puppies and a cobra, where would all your attention go? It would go to the most frightening thing in the room because that's an evolutionary survival adaptation. Yeah? The problem is that when you see anything in your environment at all, you are likely to interpret it as something dangerous or negative because, and all brains have that, all ma- mammalian brains have that negativity bias. But in humans, it snags on the other capacity, and that is the ability to tell ourselves stories about what might happen, what could happen, what may have happened elsewhere that are so frightening to us that we actually, at a fairly regular rate, certain humans take their own lives rather than face what the story in their heads is telling them about a possible future. So you take the negativity bias, it sees the most negative thing in the room or online, the algorithms are written to give us more of whatever our attentions last, lives on the longest. You know, when we fixate attention, it gears those algorithms to give us similar material, which is an externalization of what's going on in our brains. We see something negative, we think it's gone wrong. We smell something, "Oh, that's strange." Then immediately it's, "Oh goodness, what if there's a gas leak? Oh my God, I know somebody who died in a gas leak. Oh my God." And that story, instead of being seen as fantasy, which it is, is reinterpreted by the primitive levels of the brain as an actual environment. So when you say, "Oh my God, the IRS is coming to take everything," your amygdala responds as if you are actively physically being attacked, and it can stay in that high fight or flight excitation level for literally years while you slowly die of degenerative illness because you were never meant to live in that high state of fear arousal. So yeah, it's, it's a one way, it's what scientists call an unregulated feedback system. It goes in, it feeds on itself.

Chris Williamson 5:23 Mm.

Martha Beck 5:23 It drives itself higher and higher. And unless you actively defuse it, to mix a bunch of metaphors, it's just gonna keep going up and up and up.

Chris Williamson 5:34 I'm interested in why, and I agree, I, I, I think it would have been maladaptive ancestrally for our, uh, great, great, great, great, great grandparents to have been stricken with anxiety and been unable to move and unable to think and-

Martha Beck 5:53 Mm.

Chris Williamson 5:53 ... permanently worried about going outside of the cave. But it does seem so universal to the human experience in the modern world-

Martha Beck 6:02 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 6:04 ... it, it almost seems surprising to me to think that we weren't designed to be this way. It almost looks like we were the anxious creature, you know?

Martha Beck 6:11 Mm-hmm. Yeah. I, I used to think that too. But I am a sociologist by training, and when I started looking at the difference between a healthy fear response and chronic anxiety, I saw basically that we have come from a place of anxiety and fear, and we have created institutions, media, and all kinds of other devices that are designed to reflect our obsession with what is dangerous. In the, uh, even 300 years ago, you or I might have woken up in a village where we heard, uh, mainly wind, uh, water running, trees rustling, each other's voices, bird song. We would get up and we would do things all day that we had evolved to interact with, animals, plants, each other, and (laughs) it's interesting that in the modern society, the things that we do on vacation, hunting, fishing, basket weaving, whatever it is, the reason we enjoy them so much is that they are what we evolved to do and they are highly regulating to our nervous systems. But we don't live that way. We get up into a world that is very, to, to cite the work of the wonderful Iain McGilchrist, who you may have heard of, brilliant Oxford neurologist and philosopher. He says we're, we kind of, we live in a world created by only the left hemisphere, which loves things it can grasp, and things it can build, and things it can predict and measure, and it loves to have things, and it's highly anxious. And we never get back, many of us never get back into the environmental situations that are meant to pitch our nervous systems where they really belong, and then we call that normal. Nothing about the world that you and I live in would be normal to a human 100 years ago, and humans have lived for hundreds of thousands of years.

Chris Williamson 8:14 Mm-hmm.

Martha Beck 8:15 We are in a wildly aberrant moment, and there are ways you have to deal with that that w- we can't wait to evolve (laughs) to a- adopt them.

Chris Williamson 8:26 Yeah, that's gonna be a slow, a slow long wait. And so the, the main difference here between healthy fear and anxiety is the duration of it.

Martha Beck 8:35 Partly. I mean, the, the reality of it. Um, we were just talking before we started recording about how I once tracked up way too close to a rhinoceros, and then really, truly when I looked up and saw this rhinoceros right in front of me, wild rhinoceros, um, really, truly thought I was gonna die. And it came as a wave of clarity and exhilaration and peace, but also acute intense, sort of, visceral knowing that if I did certain things, that if I kept my body soft and slow and low, I would be less likely to be attacked. And I don't know where those deeper things came from. I hadn't been trained to feel them. But that kind of clean fear, there's a psychologist named Steven Hayes who talks about clean pain and dirty pain, and fear goes the same way. Clean pain or clean fear, it's about something that is right there, that is real, that we can work with, and it, it rises and falls very quickly. When the danger is gone, it goes away. I have watched a lion attack an antelope and have the antelope speed up to levels the lion wasn't willing to reach, and so the lion stopped, and the analope- antelope stopped on a dime and started grazing, completely relaxed, with the lion still there-

Chris Williamson 9:55 Mm-hmm.

Martha Beck 9:56 ... because he knew there would be no attack. That's how quickly a fear response is meant to fall. But this ongoing, brooding anxiety that we have that makes us, it makes us insane, frankly. It makes us act, uh, McGilchrist says like people who've had a, a massive right hemisphere stroke. We don't know anything to do but to try to ensure our survival and our victory over the oppressors, whatever we see as the oppressor, and the whole time we're just sort of sitting in a chair somewhere.

Chris Williamson 10:31 Yeah, that's not the... Well, I... So I'm wondering, wha- how do you think our, our ancestors, 'cause people would look at the way a gazelle operates and think, "Well, that's not us. That's not our nervous system." So how do you think humans would have dealt with this ancestrally?

Martha Beck 10:48 I think that they knew what they were dealing with much more intimately. So my friend, Boyd Varty, who was with me tracking that rhinoceros and would never have let me get close enough for it to kill me, but I didn't know that. I've watched him in situations where I was completely freaked out, and he is completely relaxed because he grew up in the African bush interacting with all these animals, with weather situations, with fires, with, um, you know, all manner of natural disasters, and there's a kind of, there's a kind of harmony to them all. And you can kind of tune into them, but you can't do it if you're anxious. I once watched, um, three or four horses that were tied to a post get into a fight. They were all tied to the post. And they started to fight and kick each other, and then they started, like, screaming. Horses can scream very loudly. And one of them kicked another one and fell down, and then they all got tangled and fell down. There were all these guys, grooms, who were there whose business it was to watch the horses, and as they spiked this intense adrenaline surge, I watched all these men get very soft and very gentle and very slow. These, you know, tough cowboys very... Their body language became kind of languorous and they moved in so gently and so calmly.... and they got those horses right. They knew that if you are actually able to calm your own anxiety, your own fear, you can actually entrain other creatures, including other humans, into a state of calm. That's what I saw Boyd knowing because he grew up surrounded by the environment we evolved to live in, and it does not work in what we call the civilized world. Tension and pressure and anxiety actually drive us to fulfill our society's sort of brief, but it's not good for us (laughs) .

Chris Williamson 12:50 Yeah. Talk about what anxiety does to our abilities in the moment.

Martha Beck 12:55 Oh my gosh. It makes everybody, um, who's ever studied creativity knows that any anxiety at all just shuts it down immediately. Even telling people who are solving a creativity problem that if they do it right, they'll be paid, creates enough anxiety that they can't think. They just can't think anymore. Uh, when we get anxious, we can't relate to other people. We project our fear of danger onto them. And as a coach, I'm often on the receiving end of this. So, I had a woman who was criticized by both her parents growing up, very traumatized by it, and at a certain point, we were doing something outside, and I said, "Um, are you an athlete? Because you move really beau- it's, it's a pleasure to watch you move. You're so athletic." And she got very silent and for the rest of the day, she wouldn't s- well, she wouldn't talk. She sort of hunkered away from the group. And finally, I said, "What? What happened?" And she said, "Well, I was fine until you told me I should've been an athlete." Like, that's how our relationships start to go-

Chris Williamson 14:00 Mm-hmm.

Martha Beck 14:00 ... when we're living in a state of continuous anxiety. It's horrible. And then we go to work and we can't tune into our customers or into the efficient processing of physical objects or into our coworkers. It's just very counterproductive, and yet we see it as a driver of productivity.

Chris Williamson 14:21 Yeah, very interesting. Uh, it's strange, it's strange to think about how much anxiety sort of reshapes people over time.

Martha Beck 14:34 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 14:34 If you, if you keep doing that, this way of seeing the world actually becomes your personality-

Martha Beck 14:39 Absolutely.

Chris Williamson 14:40 ... that you s- you start to look for it. You start to look for the, the red car that you just bought-

Martha Beck 14:44 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 14:44 ... but it's the equivalent inter-socially with-

Martha Beck 14:47 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 14:47 ... all of the people that are around you.

Martha Beck 14:49 Yeah. Yeah. It absolutely. What wires to- what fires together, wires together in the brain. So, if we're constantly being shunted by the negativity bias into the left hemisphere of the brain where most of the storytelling goes on, the right hemisphere doesn't really use language much, um, and that story keeps feeding back to our amygdalae, um, we are living in a fundamentally different brain than if we knew how to let anxiety subside and bring ourselves into a regulated nervous system.

Chris Williamson 15:22 Something else that I think everyone is very common with is getting anxious about your anxiety.

Martha Beck 15:26 Oh, yeah (laughs) .

Chris Williamson 15:27 The story that you tell yourself about how you feel-

Martha Beck 15:29 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 15:29 ... and your frustration at the story that you tell yourself and your... H- how do you come to think about the sort of fear of anxiety and the anxiousness is anxiousness?

Martha Beck 15:39 Yeah. It's, I call it the anxiety spiral because ultimately, I mean, what people who have phobias become more afraid of, they, they may be afraid of going outside, but what they're really afraid of is the panic attack that m- once got to them outside. So, it's this really intense escalated sense of fear in the brain that actually frightens us the most, as well it should. It's actually the creator of most of our suffering around anxiety. Very little out of- of it is based on actual circumstances. So yeah, it spirals up and up and up and up until people... Well, it's g- uh, the New York Times called it the inner pandemic. It's become so, such an a- egregiously dominant characteristic for people worldwide, um, that that's why I started studying it, and that's why the World Health Organization is, uh, saying we should look more closely at it (laughs) .

Chris Williamson 16:36 How do you come to think about interjecting into that spiral, about putting the brakes on it?

Martha Beck 16:42 Well, (laughs) there was something I stumbled into once during a very intense panic attack that I had 'cause I had, um, I had two... Well, I had one serious bout of anxiety. It lasted, it started at birth, and it lasted till I was about 60. Um, but there were (laughs) in- uh, I mean-

Chris Williamson 17:00 That's a pretty serious-

Martha Beck 17:02 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 17:02 Yeah, that's a pretty serious bout a bout still.

Martha Beck 17:03 I was born with a very sensitive nervous system and did not set it up very well. Until I actually started reading- uh, writing this book, I had never actually thought that I could bring it down to zero. Um, now I believe that we can bring it down to zero. I've experienced that. Um, and I know that it's reliable, so how do we do it? The first thing is something I call kind internal self-talk. Now the acronym for that, K-I-S-T, is KIST, which, you know, I went to Harvard. I don't, uh, three times (laughs) . I don't, like, walk around saying, "We should all kiss ourselves on the brain. It's really good." Um, but kind internal self-talk, uh, is something that I learned by studying the Tibetan Buddhist practice of metta meditation or loving-kindness meditation. Um, many monks before they do any other form of meditation do a year of loving-kindness meditation toward the self. So, all it is, is looking at any part of you that you can observe from sort of as- the short distance of your mind and saying to any frightened parts of yourself...May you be well. May you be happy. May you be free from suffering. May you feel safe and protected. May you be happy. Or even more like simply, I've got you. I'm here. You're all right. There's no danger in the room. We're okay. May you be happy. May you be well. I took myself from a point of maximum anxiety, this was in my early 50s. Um, I used that KIST technique to bring it down, down, down, down until it only rose periodically and then that was my first step away from the spiral of anxiety. And then when I started researching it, I found ways of sort of hooking my thoughts to a very different spiral. And by doing that, I managed to pull myself almost completely out of anxiety at a time when the world was getting increasingly anxious. So yeah, the, but the self-talk is absolutely critical.

Chris Williamson 19:14 Yeah, what's your advice for people who have a negative inner voice in that way?

Martha Beck 19:19 L- you have to love that too. So, um, one of the people whose work I, I cited in this book is Chris Voss. He was a hostage, the head hostage negotiator for the FBI for many years. Brilliant, brilliant negotiator and he was dealing with like psychopathic terrorists who were holding hostages with guns to their heads. These were not nice people. And, uh, what he knew was that no matter how crazy the person you're talking to is, especially if it's yourself, you're always at the basis dealing with an overcharged amygdala, an amygdala that, that sees fear where there is none. And the amygdala is cued to certain ways of reacting to it. So y- he says you adopt the late night DJ voice. You're like, "Hi, I'm here." And then you start empathizing with it. "I see you. I hear you. Tell me everything. I'm right here." He's great at it. Um, so if you have a critical voice and it's saying, "You stupid lump of lard. Why are you wasting space by existing?" Uh, I've heard that one many times inside my own head. What you have to do is not say, "Shut up," but to say to that critical voice, "Tell me everything. I see you. You're okay. I'm right here. You're gonna be all right." Because it's always a frightened self trying to keep you from being destroyed. And it takes anything bad that ever happened to you, projects it into the future and says, "I will make you so fearful that you will run from every danger before it even has a chance to get near us. And I will do that by screaming and yelling horrible things at you."

Chris Williamson 21:05 And then you mentioned this KIST, which is loving-kindness meditation. How long were your sessions? How frequently were you doing them? How long did you need to do them for?

Martha Beck 21:14 When I was in a panic attack, um, I did it for, I'd been i- in a absolute, like take me to the psychiatric hospital panic for like 72 hours. I think I kept it up for like eight hours before I came completely into calm, which was pretty amazing because I'd been given drugs that weren't working and hypnosi- nothing worked until I did the kind, the loving-kindness meditations. Um, how often do you do it? (laughs) It v- it's like breath. It gets to the point where every single moment of your day there's a part of you saying, "May you be well. I'm right here. I've got you." In IFS therapy, they call this Self with a capital S. And it's this part of the self that's always compassionate, always curious, always creative, always courageous. And once it starts to gently talk to you, you're, you're out of the woods already.

Chris Williamson 22:15 And then you said you learned how to hook your thoughts to a different type of spiral, so it seems like the first step is to befriend the negative voice, then it's to try and turn the volume down on that a little bit by putting some other positive voices in a little bit more.

Martha Beck 22:32 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 22:33 And then-

Martha Beck 22:35 I ... Yeah, and I didn't give you, uh, what you very, uh, reasonably asked for, which is a practice. Like, I, you get to the point where loving-kindness becomes the way you think.

Chris Williamson 22:45 Mm-hmm.

Martha Beck 22:45 But at first, I would give it, um ... If you can do it for 10 minutes a day, three times every day, like morning, noon and night, I think that would give you a really strong contrasting experience of what the rest of your day is like versus the time-

Chris Williamson 22:59 Mm-hmm.

Martha Beck 22:59 ... that you're doing the loving-kindness. That's a great motivator to str- to lengthen those and then string them together, because you can do it while you're doing anything else. It doesn't take extra time from your day. It's just a change of, um, perspective. And it doesn't actually turn down the volume. It, it doesn't smother or reduce your anxiety. It befriends it. Always think of your anxiety as an animal because that is literally what it is. In our culture, we treat an anxious brain as though it's a broken machine. That's how we treat our bodies. But it's not a broken machine; it's a frightened animal. And it's so interesting to me. Everyone I've ever met, if they found, if you found a really bedraggled, uh, scared, shivering puppy or horse or whatever and you were, and it was very afraid and you decided to calm it, you know how. Like, we learn all these advanced therapies and stuff, but all of us are born knowing how to calm a frightened animal. And Chris Voss just made it a profession, right? (laughs) So like, y- what would you do if you found a grungy little puppy that was terrified and you decided, it was on your doorstep and you decided to like take pity on it. How would you approach it?

Chris Williamson 24:23 ... slowly, softly, gently.

Martha Beck 24:27 Yep. Yep. You're off- you can go like that into the energy that changes anxiety into calm. And it's not turning down the volume. It's more like satisfying a thirst, that the anxious part of us is desperate to be told it can take a break, it can take a rest.

Chris Williamson 24:43 Mm-hmm.

Martha Beck 24:44 And then there's this huge, huge sense of relief when it starts to let go. And then you can start to move from initial sensation going into fear, which is the left hemisphere reaction, to, uh, an amygdala reaction that moves you toward curiosity. That's the first step that is really gonna take you away from anxiety completely, and it's, it's closely linked. It's like, do you ever, have you ever rubbernecked at an accident site? You drive by-

Chris Williamson 25:18 I, I try not to, but yeah.

Martha Beck 25:19 We all try not to, but we all want to. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 25:22 Hmm.

Martha Beck 25:23 And, you know, and we're, we're obs- we watch so many murders. The average American child, by the time they go to college, has watched 16,000 murder shows of one kind or another. Murder mysteries, movies about it, stories about it, everything. We're, we're fixated on things that make us afraid. And the reason for that is evolutionary, again. I was once in a field where, um, a bobcat was hunting, and he caught a ground squirrel, killed it, and ran up a tree.

Chris Williamson 25:58 Hmm.

Martha Beck 25:58 And from all around the field, deer came bounding onto the field and ran to the base of the tree and just sta- uh, stood there looking up, like riveted on the bobcat eating this ground squirrel.

Chris Williamson 26:10 Hmm.

Martha Beck 26:11 Um, and I learned that's, uh, that's a very common prey animal reaction. They're studying the scenario so they can try to avoid it later.

Chris Williamson 26:19 Oh, wow.

Martha Beck 26:20 And that's curiosity. And when you start to get curious... There's a great, uh, psychiatrist named Judson Brewer who takes anxious patients out into the... He takes 'em on hikes, get them in nature, it helps the nervous system, but then he'll stop at a pl- a certain place and say, "Hmm." And sometimes he even has another doctor go with him, and they both look in the same direction and go, "Hmm." And immediately, the depressed, anxious people with them go, "What? What i- what? What? What?" And there's a palpable mood, mood shift away from anxiety and into curiosity. And th- he, he said... He writes about doing this with a, an athletic team, an Olympic team, and they were training to bring down their anxiety. And when it would start to go up, they would all just say, "Huh." And then immediately, it would trigger a curiosity reaction, and they could get away, they could get some distance from the anxiety. And that's the first step toward, uh, toward what I call the creativity spiral, which I see as the antithesis of the anxiety spiral.

Chris Williamson 27:29 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 27:30 Uh, talk to me about this tension between creativity and anxiety.

Martha Beck 27:34 Yeah. Um, here's the thing. The left hemisphere has this strange tendency known as hemispatial neglect, and what that means is that it doesn't believe that anything except itself is real, itself and its own perceptions. So if someone has a right hemisphere stroke, and they only are working with their left hemisphere, tha- that's the part that r- runs the right side of the body, right hand and leg and side of the face, and they may shave or put makeup on only that side of their face.

Chris Williamson 28:09 No way.

Martha Beck 28:09 They ignore everybody who is on their left. Only, the only things that matter are on their right. If you ask them to draw a clock, they'll fill in all the numbers on the right and leave the rest blank. It's very bizarre. Oliver Sacks, the great, uh, writer and, and psychiatrist once went into a hospital where there was a man who'd woken up and had a right hemisphere stroke in his sleep, and he was screaming that the nurses had put a severed leg into bed with him as a kind of sick joke. And he was screaming and yelling and pointing at his own left leg. And Oliver Sacks came in, and, and (laughs) th- the guy picked up his own leg and threw it out of the bed. He said, "If nobody will get rid of this thing, I will." And he threw it up-

Chris Williamson 28:55 How do you throw your own leg out of the bed?

Martha Beck 28:56 Well, it turns out you're attached. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 28:59 (laughs)

Martha Beck 29:01 So he's lying there going, "Oh my God, it's attached to me!"

Chris Williamson 29:04 Yeah.

Martha Beck 29:04 "Get it off! Get it off!" And, and Oliver Sacks said, "Well, if that's not your leg, where is your left leg?" And he just stopped and he looked around and went, "It's completely gone. It's nowhere to be seen." (laughs)

Chris Williamson 29:17 Wow.

Martha Beck 29:18 Total irrationality. The right side of the brain does not have this capacity. Where the left hemisphere excludes things, the right hemisphere includes things. So when the whole brain is working or when the right brain is dominant, it's fully aware of all the data brought in by the left hemisphere. It can track the dangers and measure the things and know the words, but it's grounded in something more present, uh, more meaningful, more, um, in Self, capital S. It's basically in the right sides of our brains, so it's able to contextualize everything. If we're stuck in anxiety, we truly believe that nothing else exists. But when you get out of anxiety, you see so much more, but you also see the part of you that's anxious, and you can include it in a sort of circle of compassion. And that's, that makes the brain balance. And then you can use your left hemisphere for data to make and learn things that only human brains can learn. And that is a joyride.

Chris Williamson 30:26 What are your favorite way ... I don't know how to activate my left versus right hemisphere. What are some of the, uh, proximate ways for me to try and get that to, to get started?

Martha Beck 30:35 Well, um, one thing you can do, if you have a pen and paper there, is, uh, write your name. And then-

Chris Williamson 30:43 I don't, unfortunately. I'll let you do it.

Martha Beck 30:44 Oh, okay. Oh, I don't have a piece of paper here. Hmm. Okay, you write your name forward. Then, uh, this is in the book as well. Then you go to the left side of it. Oh, here's a piece of paper I could use. And you write your name backwards. So, I'm gonna do this here. I'll write Martha, and then I'll go to the other side. It's not as, it's not as clear, but I can do it.

Chris Williamson 31:13 That's unbelievably impressive.

Martha Beck 31:15 And then, well, it, it comes from learning to open your right hemisphere. I actually taught in the art department at Harvard under a brilliant professor named Will Reiman, and he did lots of these exercises to help awaken the right side of the brain. And, um, this was one of the things that he did. And, um, you can do it upside-down. You can ... Now, as I'm doing this, I'm writing my name upside-down, and then upside-down and backwards-

Chris Williamson 31:45 (laughs)

Martha Beck 31:45 ... I am less able to talk to you because as (laughs) ... Just lost it completely.

Chris Williamson 31:51 Hm.

Martha Beck 31:51 You can't talk and do this at the same time 'cause the right hemisphere, um, doesn't talk.

Chris Williamson 31:59 Mm.

Martha Beck 31:59 As it says in my favorite book, the Tao Te Ching, the Chinese Tao Te Ching, though, "That which talks does not know. That which knows does not talk."

Chris Williamson 32:10 Very interesting. Okay. So, try-

Martha Beck 32:14 So that's one way.

Chris Williamson 32:15 Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Martha Beck 32:17 Drawing anything is helpful. Drawing with your non-dominant hand, or with your left hand, um, if you're right-handed. Um, any kind of motion through nature. Tracking, uh, that we were talking about earlier, is one of the most powerful ways to wake up your right hemisphere that I have ever experienced. It's ... (laughs) I had a client once who was, he ha- ran a sports empire, and he specialized in what he called the spiritual sports. And these were skiing, surfing, golfing, oddly enough, um, I know, sailing, rock climbing, things that demand extremely focused attention on the body kinesthetically moving through space. That is ... You, you have to drive hard into your right hemisphere to make that work.

Chris Williamson 33:07 Hm.

Martha Beck 33:08 Left hemisphere cannot do it. And that's why, I don't know if you do any of those things, but if you do, you may have found them almost addictive. Like, like, people just ... I've never surfed, but people will, like, they live to surf. I used to live to ski. Um, now I live to do so many things because I have a list of activities that turn on the right side of my brain, and I can always access one or more of them on any day. Skiing or no skiing.

Chris Williamson 33:36 What are the ones that you do the most?

Martha Beck 33:38 Drawing and painting. Yeah. So this painting behind me is-

Chris Williamson 33:45 Oh, very nice.

Martha Beck 33:46 It's just ... It's a painting of, uh, I went on a walk with some friends through the Cotswolds-

Chris Williamson 33:53 Mm-hmm.

Martha Beck 33:54 ... last October.

Chris Williamson 33:55 Mm-hmm.

Martha Beck 33:55 And that was a real place where we stopped, and I took a picture and did a painting.

Chris Williamson 34:00 What role do you think courage has when it comes to pursuing your creative purpose in this way?

Martha Beck 34:06 Yeah. Just to say, "I am going to step out, uh, and be creative," in our cultural context and with the anxiety most of us carry, is an act of courage. And most of us have been shamed for trying to do creative things and not doing them well enough. And if we're really good at them, we got praised for them, but as I told you a little while ago, even being praised for doing something creative, or being told that you'll be paid for it, increases anxiety. So, courage, it takes courage to say, "I'm gonna try this at all." And then it takes courage to know that you will fail, to achieve the sort of surrounding culture's definition of what's impressive, and that that is not the point. Uh, I throw away hundreds of paintings because the point is not the painting. The point is painting. You don't go to the gym to steal all the equipment. You go to the gym ... Or, or to lift it up in the air and let, let it stay there. You lift it and let it fall, you lift it and let it fall again, over and over, because what you take out of the gym is a different body because it has been involved in, uh, has been engaged in that activity. Anything you do that's creative, and everything we do is creative. Getting dressed, or buying our clothes is a creative act. It, it involves aesthetic choices. Making food is a creative act. Um, a conversation can be a creative act. A dinner party, um. Uh, pretty much everything humans do can be seen as creative. And if we go into that mode, everything becomes suffused with a sense of, uh, beauty and presence and even awe, which is why in Zen they say, "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water." But the same activities are imbued with a kind of sacred astonishment to the one who has left anxiety behind.

Chris Williamson 36:16 What if someone doesn't feel very creative or like they have much room for creativity in their life? How do you think about awakening your inner creative if it's something that's been hidden for a long time?

Martha Beck 36:26 The first thing is that most people are exhausted. And the first act of creativity the brain will undertake is returning us to homeostasis, to health. So, if you are exhausted by years of anxiety and pushing your body to go against its circadian rhythms and its ultradian rhythms and basically all its rhythms, if you've been, uh, robbed of peace and the kind of creativity children engage in, which is w- without any particular objective, you will first probably need to rest for a long time. Not that long. Four days. That's what it takes usually for when someone's totally exhausted. Four days of absolutely no agenda, like, lie on the couch eating ice cream and watching, you know, reruns of The White Lotus or whatever. And on the third day there will be a return of a flicker of hope. The first two days, you're just like, "I'm a waste of space and I hate myself." The third day, you're like, "Oh, I remember life. It wasn't that bad." And on the fourth day you'll think, "Huh." (laughs) "Maybe there's something I could do. I want to make ... I want to, like, build, to make pottery after watching the Great Pottery Throw-Down." Like, you start to get spontaneously creative after four days of rest.

Chris Williamson 37:58 Right. So, you are ... It's a battle of attrition, of boredom, to give yourself so little to do that you've got nothing- uh, no other choice than to become creative. Is that what we're doing here?

Martha Beck 38:08 No, no, no. I think of it more-

Chris Williamson 38:10 (laughs)

Martha Beck 38:10 ... as filling the well. You want to consume pleasures. Uh, and- and we're so resisted- so resistant to this, especially, you know, you're the kind of person who works out hard and performs h- uh, at high levels in everything he does. And everything in the culture says that's the right way to do it. But you will destroy yourself if you do nothing else. And for all that effort you put out, you have to drink in what is around you, uh, in nature, but also what's created by the creativity of other people, which has sort of a profound frequency of peace, delight, um, merriment. The- the right hemisphere only uses language for songs, poems, and jokes. You know, if you sat and watched ... (laughs) I remember when, uh, Boyd Varty, I thought he was very ... Sorry to name you, Boyd. Um, but I met him at a time when he was completely physically and mentally exhausted, and he came to see me in the US. And I made him lie down and watch Eddie Izzard routines, the- the comedian, Eddie Izzard, um, for three days. And he was like ... And I brought him ice cream. He and his sister were there, and I brought them ice cream and told them, "No, more comedy. More comedy. You haven't done (laughs) your comedy today."

Chris Williamson 39:26 Wow.

Martha Beck 39:27 A- And they talk about that as a kind of turning point, because no one ever told them that was okay. And I was telling them, "No, it's required."

Chris Williamson 39:36 What else is there to say about interventions that you found successful for the perennially anxious person?

Martha Beck 39:45 Sometimes it can help to plug into the energy or the presence of someone who's already gotten over the hurdle of, um, conformity to the culture. So, if you can be with someone who is a great meditation teacher or, uh, a poet or a musician, and if you can be with them in this field of ... You can actually experience almost tangibly a field of stillness and again, this phenomenon of entrainment. It may be partly because we have mirror neurons in our brains. We reflect each other's brain patterns. So, when I look at you and you look at me, our brains are actually moving to be more alike. So, if you're with someone who's profoundly calm, it can really help you entrain, but I actually think it's more than the mirror neurons. I think it's probably, um, something to do with electromagnetism. We have electrical systems made of meat. (laughs) Our nervous systems. And we all know that electrical things can con- can communicate without wires, so you feel things. You pick up things, and you become much more intuitive in those spaces as well, which makes it extra fun.

Chris Williamson 40:57 Okay, so you're using the, uh, social pressure of being around people who appear to have already done that work to help you to do yours?

Martha Beck 41:04 (laughs) Maybe. I ... No. (laughs) No, I would prefer that you be in a small room on the s- uh, s- you know, with the door closed, and the pers- the enlightened person is in the other room doing something.

Chris Williamson 41:19 Oh, I see.

Martha Beck 41:19 And you just get to eat ice cream. It is not about... Uh, n- in one way of looking at things, nature is the opposite of culture, yeah ?And so bringing culture in always ... Because we have an anxious culture, it's always gonna spur that anxiety, which is the way it immediately turns into, "Oh, now I've got social pressure." No, there's no pressure whatsoever. It is like falling when you are in the field of someone who is profoundly without anxiety.

Chris Williamson 41:51 Mm-hmm.

Martha Beck 41:52 It- it actually can be disorienting, um, and give you a bit of vertigo, but it's so delicious. It's ... Because your nervous system is finding its place again, probably after years of being jacked up and anxious.

Chris Williamson 42:05 Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think, uh, my joke version of social pressure was talking about the way that mirror neurons work. If you hang around-

Martha Beck 42:12 Oh, okay.

Chris Williamson 42:13 If you hang around with happy people, you tend to be a little bit happier.

Martha Beck 42:15 True.

Chris Williamson 42:15 If you hang around with sad people, you tend to be a little bit more sad. Um, but yeah. Whatever, whatever you want to call it. Uh, mirror neurons, social consistency bias, just the vibe of the room. Uh, all of those things are ... So, one thing I've got-I think about this quite a lot. I wonder whether mastering anxiety is a game of control or a game of acceptance. And-

Martha Beck 42:41 100% acceptance.

Chris Williamson 42:42 ... it, it, it does seem to be the more that you fight it, the worse that it gets.

Martha Beck 42:48 Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 42:48 That's where that anxiety spiral, uh, the-

Martha Beck 42:50 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 42:51 ... anxiety cycle comes in.

Martha Beck 42:52 Yeah. We call it the fight-flight system for a reason, although it's fight, flight, faint, freeze, flop-

Chris Williamson 42:58 (laughs)

Martha Beck 42:59 ... falling out. They have all these other F words. But yeah, as long ... If you go into fight mode to get rid of your fight or flight, uh, arousal, it's going to exacerbate your flight arousal.

Chris Williamson 43:10 Mm-hmm.

Martha Beck 43:11 Yeah, that's why they say fighting for peace is like fornicating for virginity.

Chris Williamson 43:18 (laughs)

Martha Beck 43:18 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 43:20 Yeah. I didn't know that you'd had autoimmune issues-

Martha Beck 43:24 Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 43:25 ... for such, for such a long time. Can you tell the story of that?

Martha Beck 43:28 Oh, my goodness. They started when I was 18. Um, I was running about 100 miles a week. I was running marathons, um, finishing my freshman year at Harvard, and I got hit by a car, and it just dinged me on the hip and threw into a snow bank, and then I ran 11 miles home. But the next day, I was in a lot of pain, went to a doctor and the doctor said, "Well, we're gonna immobilize you until the pain goes away." And it was 12 years later that the pain went away. (laughs) It just ... Not only did it not get better, it got much worse and it started traveling. Um, I started having very, very high levels of inflammation in all different areas of my body, different organ systems. By the end of 12 years, I'd, I'd largely given up on medical treatments because they all told me, "We don't know what's wrong with you." Um, but I was diagnosed with three measurable observable, um, autoimmune conditions, all of which they told me were, um, poorly understood and incurable, and progressive.

Chris Williamson 44:34 (laughs)

Martha Beck 44:34 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 44:36 Thanks, guys.

Martha Beck 44:36 Yay. Yeah, I actually ... They gave me a pamphlet for one of the things, interstitial cystitis. All you IC people out there, three cheers. Um, constant, um, internal pain, and they gave me a pamphlet when I was diagnosed, and I opened it randomly and it said at the top of this one page, "To keep yourself from committing suicide, remind yourself of your religious beliefs." (laughs) And I was like, "That's your treatment?"

Chris Williamson 45:02 Wow.

Martha Beck 45:03 Yeah, it was gnarly.

Chris Williamson 45:05 Was that because of the impact? Was that because of the treatment?

Martha Beck 45:10 No.

Chris Williamson 45:10 Was it because of being sedentary?

Martha Beck 45:12 All of the above. Yeah. Um, what I had was, uh, I think now I would probably call it tension myofascial syndrome, but it did reach levels in my organs where it caused other disease. But it's basically just a spasmodic tightening of different muscular systems in the body. They don't really know. But, um, it actually ... I finally got that diagnosis when I was 31. I was 18 when I got hit, went 31. A doctor went out (laughs) and came back with one of his med school books. He was just a newly fledged doctor, and he goes through this huge book, and he said, "I think you have this." And it said, um, the only treatments they had were vacations and exercise. (laughs) And I said, "Can I have a note to that effect? Um, oh, and massage. Yes." And I went directly from there to the gym. And I was so weak I couldn't lift a two-pound leg extension weight. Leg extension, I couldn't lift two pounds. And, uh, it was excruciating, but they ... I had learned it probably wasn't harming tissue, and so I, I found that exercise was actually a magic bullet for me, as long as I also stayed very relaxed as lik- relaxed as I could and, this is the key, only did things I enjoyed.

Chris Williamson 46:39 Why?

Martha Beck 46:41 Because anything else ... You know, the reason lie detectors work is that when we, when we say things that we know aren't true, everything in the body reacts against that. Our muscles tighten, our perspiration incre- increases, our blink rate, um, our per- you know, hand sweat, they can measure immediately. All these things happen when we lie, and they can pick that up on a machine. Well, when you do something you don't enjoy and you show up without protest, you're kind of lying with your life. You're lying with your actions. And little kids won't do that.

Chris Williamson 47:19 Mm-hmm.

Martha Beck 47:19 They will scream their lungs out if they're taken to a place they hate, and we just beat it out of them. Well, don't beat them anymore, but a lot of people have been beaten for it. And it's ironic because what they're doing is they're following an evolutionary imperative to find what's right for them by following a sense of enjoyment. It's that simple. But the culture we live in does not really teach us to do that.

Chris Williamson 47:48 What would be your advice to someone that's going through a protracted period of chronic illness? I mean, you were bedbound for a very long time.

Martha Beck 47:56 Like 12 years, yeah.

Chris Williamson 47:57 Yeah. I mean, that's ... it's a special kind of living hell-

Martha Beck 48:02 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 48:02 ... with even f- less happening. So it's like-

Martha Beck 48:05 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 48:05 ... boring hell. Um-

Martha Beck 48:07 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 48:07 Yeah. What, w- how did you get through that stuff? And, uh, in retrospect, what do you wish that someone had told you sort of during that period of your life?

Martha Beck 48:16 Hmm. The first thing is that, um, please direct compassion to the parts of yourself that are in pain. I was at war with the, with my own pain. I was so angry at it for keeping me ... 'cause I was highly active before that, and, um, I directed hatred and violence at it internally.... when I learned to meditate, which is- that's another thing that I would really, really advise. The one thing I- (laughs) I decided I could do in that situation, the one thing I could learn was meditation, and so I started. And I sort of got into it before the general public sort of adopted it in the United States, and I'm really grateful that I did. What I would say to another person though is first be kind, be kind, be kind to the parts of you that are hurting. And secondly, realize that there is the capacity to increase your life's value and experience by going outward for experience, and then there is also the capacity to go infinitely inward. And when you are forced to go infinitely inward, you find that the inner space is as vast and interesting and full of information and experience as the outer world in which your body lives. It can be quite trippy, and it's worth doing.

Chris Williamson 49:43 So you learned to meditate.

Martha Beck 49:44 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 49:44 What a- what about when it comes to, uh, don't, uh, rail, don't sort of fight, don't have violence against the parts of you that are the ones that are struggling or the ones that are falling behind?

Martha Beck 49:58 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 49:58 What else? What else sort of have you come to reflect on about that period?

Martha Beck 50:04 I wanna tweak that a tiny bit. So love the parts of your body that are hurting, and also love the part of you that hates it-

Chris Williamson 50:12 Ah.

Martha Beck 50:12 ... the part of you that- that hates the pain, that hates the restriction. Say, "I get it. I'm here. I'm- I hear you. Tell me everything." And just allow yourself to, "I poured it all out in journals when my hands worked," which wasn't always. Um, and self-expression is another way that has been shown very effectively to reduce levels of stress and anxiety, especially when you're in a tough situation. Does that answer the question?

Chris Williamson 50:41 Self ex- self-expression as in journaling, just being able to get your words out in a relatively judgment-free way?

Martha Beck 50:46 Yeah. And- and you don't even have to use words. You could draw pictures. You could, um, uh, you- you use music, uh, play songs that help convey your emotions. Uh, it's almost as if getting the experience of all the difficulty of human life into a state where it can be communicated is not only, uh, a really, really positive way to get out of suffering, but also an incentive to connect with the world and other people in a deeply authentic way-

Chris Williamson 51:20 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Martha Beck 51:20 ... which, again, we're not taught to do. And unless we're in a lot of suffering, most of us never even think of doing it, so I'm really grateful for that horrible experience. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 51:33 Yeah. What are the, for the people, whether they're sick or not, what are the most common limiting beliefs that the people who you work with tend to have? I think a lot of the time when we look at our inner landscape as kind of like a personal curse or blessing in some way-

Martha Beck 51:52 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 51:52 ... but no matter what we think of it as unique to us, and, uh, upon hearing the way that other people think or feel, you realize that this is probably much more of a feature of being a-

Martha Beck 52:05 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 52:05 ... sensitive human than it is a bug of being broken and you.

Martha Beck 52:08 Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 52:08 Uh, so I'm just interested in what those common self-limiting beliefs are.

Martha Beck 52:12 The first one is, "I'm not good enough." Um, "There's something wrong with me. I'm not enough. I'm too much." It's about the quality of the being you essentially are being maladapted to the world and unacceptable. That is universal. And I think it's because you have these... (sighs) We're born with really, really active brains. I mean, we have so much going on inside our brains when we're just born. And if we're cared for by people who are really tuned into our needs, that is great for us, and we develop brains that trust the world. But the moment the person we are inside starts to run into, um, contradiction or social pressure, for example, they don't like it when I cry all the time, um, we- when we get that socialized, uh, pressure, we (laughs) in- instantly sell out our true nature and do what people want us to do. And then there's something called the just world hypothesis, which almost all children have, which is being misunderstood by adults who frankly don't even know how to connect with you because you can't talk or make... You- you know, it's- it's a ridiculous fail-fail situation. The parents can't win. The baby can't win. It's bizarre. But the baby, uh, has this conception of the world that says, "Well, these people that are supporting me are absolutely necessary to my wellbeing. So if I've got a problem with them, the world is full of demons and I cannot bear to exist. So what must be going on here is that I'm not good enough for them."

Chris Williamson 53:51 Mm-hmm.

Martha Beck 53:51 "I did something wrong. There's something bad about me. I need too much. I'm not giving enough." And, you know, the twig gets bent in the first months of life-

Chris Williamson 54:00 Mm-hmm.

Martha Beck 54:01 ... and then we all bump into various small and large traumas along the way and internalize all of those into our self-concept. There's always this shame-based feeling of the es- the essential self that I am is somehow just wrong.

Chris Williamson 54:16 How do you advise... I mean, this seems like such a- a basic assumption that people have about themselves, so- so much-

Martha Beck 54:24 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 54:24 ... so that it's- it's not even an assumption. It's more like the physics-

Martha Beck 54:28 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 54:29 ... of their system, um, you know, the thermodynamics of the inside of their mind. Uh-

Martha Beck 54:33 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 54:35 ... what sort of wormhole do you need to break through in order to change that?

Martha Beck 54:40 It's funny that you use, um, the term physics because I wrote a book called The Way of Integrity where I said you have to be in the truth, the truth of your own experience. And integrity was not meant in a moral sense, but in a structural sense. A plane that's in structural integrity can fly. A plane that's not in integrity often can't fly or will crash or whatever. So what happens, I think, is that you- you start to look at... And- and I said in the book, it's not morality, it's just physics. So here you have a world view and a set of beliefs, and if it's in perfect integrity, that is all your sense of what is true, at all levels of your body, mind, heart, soul, if they're all in alignment, there is no psychological suffering. If you have psychological suffering, if there's anything wrong with your, um, your mood, your relationships, your career, anything, the physics are off. And in there somewhere is something that's out of true, and that will always, 100% of the time... Sometimes it's a trauma, an internalized trauma that happens at a very physical level, um, but most of the time it's a story held in the brain very deeply, and it gives us a message that we're not safe and things are not okay. And that's out of alignment with the truth. It may be absolutely in accord with what we're taught in- in our culture, in school. You know, a kid is dyslexic and he's failing and everything, the school will say, "Yeah, you're wrong." Something's... If they don't know he has dyslexia. "You're not trying enough. You're not working up to potential." And he internalizes that as- as self-hatred and shame. Um, but it's wrong, so the- the physics won't work, so he can't move forward, he can't feel at- at peace, he can't be settled, he can't... And it will not leave us alone.

Chris Williamson 56:35 Mm.

Martha Beck 56:35 Any failure of integrity causes structural issues that make our lives unable to work well. So if you have something that's wrong, go in and find the physics of belief, find the belief that you are holding that is not in accordance with what you feel to be true at the very deepest level. And anxiety is one of the things (laughs) that is most often out of true, especially in our culture.

Chris Williamson 57:01 Yeah, there's... It's strange thinking about digging a little bit deeper and working out sort of who you truly are, what integrity looks like, because I think it's very easy to distract, swipe, uh, dopamine your way out of hearing that. That voice in the back of your mind, I- I did a lot of therapy, uh, last year.

Martha Beck 57:24 Mm.

Chris Williamson 57:25 And one of the best things that my therapist taught me was pla- pay attention to fleeting thoughts.

Martha Beck 57:29 Oh, I love that.

Chris Williamson 57:30 Yeah, it's gorgeous. And, um, I don't think she means fleeting as in flimsy or as in fickle.

Martha Beck 57:37 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 57:37 But fleeting as in quiet.

Martha Beck 57:40 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 57:40 Uh, but typically repetitive, right?

Martha Beck 57:42 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 57:42 It's the same thing that you've heard a few times over and over again.

Martha Beck 57:44 I love that.

Chris Williamson 57:45 Yeah, it's great. Um, pay attention to fleeting thoughts. But the problem is, uh, and I noticed this, you know, as I was heavily caffeinated in a car, just having finished an episode or, you know, I'm on Slack but I've taken a call at the same time.

Martha Beck 58:00 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 58:00 And then I'd get in and shoo, there's just this huge deceleration.

Martha Beck 58:04 Huh.

Chris Williamson 58:04 Okay, now- now I'm on the cushion and let's see what happens for 50 minutes.

Martha Beck 58:10 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 58:10 Uh, and it would be, you know, there would... The first 20 minute, kind of like meditation, of-

Martha Beck 58:15 Yes.

Chris Williamson 58:15 ... almost all of the overhead that you're paying is getting into the process of meditation, which is one of the-

Martha Beck 58:21 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 58:21 ... disadvantages of only doing 10-minute sessions or 15-minute sessions.

Martha Beck 58:24 (laughs) Right.

Chris Williamson 58:24 You spend all of these, pay all of the overhead to get into it, and none of the sort of profit of being in it. Um, and then, yeah, after a little while, fleeting thoughts would be a little bit louder, but it just-

Martha Beck 58:35 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 58:35 That comparison between how I was when I was going in and how I was when I was first there and how I was toward the end of the session, um, before I got, I tended to sort of run out of gas. I th-

Martha Beck 58:46 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 58:46 It's so funny you think, you look at 50 minutes and you think, "I can't achieve anything in 50 minutes." And if you're 45 minutes into a therapy session you actually think, "Yeah, I'm ready to be done-"

Martha Beck 58:54 Right.

Chris Williamson 58:54 ... "now," typically. So it's, it is, it is a good length. Um, but yeah, just that- that quiet voice in the back of your mind isn't able to shout all that loud.

Martha Beck 59:06 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 59:06 And I- I get the sense that if you have got to the stage where it is shouting quite loud-

Martha Beck 59:12 Mm.

Chris Williamson 59:13 ... it was quiet for a much longer time before that-

Martha Beck 59:15 Yes.

Chris Williamson 59:15 ... and you could have learned this lesson probably half a decade ago.

Martha Beck 59:19 Yep, yep. I learned that from no less than Oprah herself. She talks about-

Chris Williamson 59:23 How so?

Martha Beck 59:23 ... how, she says first something comes to you as a whisper, like, "You might wanna do this," but you, very rarely do we hear that. Then it starts to be a message where it's like something tapping us on the head going, "Hello, hello, you may wanna do this." Uh, "You may wanna, like, fireproof your house," or something. Then if you don't listen to the message, you get a lesson, "Oops, something set fire to the drapes." Okay, lesson. If you don't pay attention to the lesson, you get a problem. And if you don't pay attention to the problem, you get a crisis. And if you don't pay attention to the crisis, you're dead. (laughs) So, yeah, and I noticed when you're talking about the fleeting thoughts, um, repeatedly you've brought your right hand up and gestured toward the back right side of your head.

Chris Williamson 1:00:08 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Martha Beck 1:00:09 And that is a physiological communication that anyone would understand in any culture because it comes from the right sides of our brains.

Chris Williamson 1:00:16 Mm.

Martha Beck 1:00:16 And you're sort of indicating the area where the fleeting thoughts are connecting with the rest of your cognition. And it's- it's a lot like I used to... Once I- I moved to California, uh, in my 50s and I had this craving to do long meditations, so I'd go into the forest and cover myself with bird seed and then I would just sit there unmoving for hours to see what would come. (laughs) ... it was awesome.

Chris Williamson 1:00:43 Why were you covered in bird seed?

Martha Beck 1:00:45 To attract animals, of course. And-

Chris Williamson 1:00:47 But wha- Why? I'm, I don't understand. Is that a com- a performance enhancer?

Martha Beck 1:00:52 Oh, my goodness. No. It's, to have a bird land in your hand, to have chipmunks... I, I had two chipmunks, these little soft, warm furry things, have an actual territorial battle in my hands, like two tiny little sumo wrestlers. See, for me, that, it's like Emer- Emerson said, "Beauty is its own excuse for being." Two chipmunks wrestling in your hands, that is its own excuse for existing.

Chris Williamson 1:01:18 Mmm.

Martha Beck 1:01:18 That is just fun. That is pure fun. I figured as long as I'm holding perfectly still, why not get them to think of me as a source of nourishment? And they did. (laughs) And, and what happened was, I could feel the energy of an animal coming in that very part of my, not just my brain, but my whole right back side would sort of tingle, and I could actually tell what sort of animal was approaching me before it reached me, and, um, what kind of birds were planning to stop and they just fall on you. And now, when I'm looking for creative thoughts or ideas about how to cope with a disaster or a personality clash or anything-

Chris Williamson 1:02:01 Mm-hmm.

Martha Beck 1:02:02 ... I, I remember that, how the energy sort of ta- tickled the, the field of my awareness as a fleeting thought, and I learned to be more and more still. They didn't come and climb on me for weeks. I had to be there every day, perfectly still, and I had to keep myself from getting excited when they actually decided to come visit, because they can tell when your adrenaline goes up, they don't want any part of that.

Chris Williamson 1:02:27 Mm-hmm.

Martha Beck 1:02:28 And I, now I do the same thing with my whole life, and it really is that the brilliant ideas and the loves and the, the experiences that are waiting to, to, like, light you up, they come as those fleeting thoughts. And if you hold very still and allow them, they will come to stay.

Chris Williamson 1:02:49 Heck, yeah. Martha Beck, ladies and

Chris Williamson 1:02:51 gentlemen. Martha, let's bring this one into line. That was so beautiful. Uh-

Martha Beck 1:02:54 Thank you.

Chris Williamson 1:02:54 ... where should people go if they wanna keep up to date with-

Martha Beck 1:02:55 Oh.

Chris Williamson 1:02:56 ... all this stuff you're doing?

Martha Beck 1:02:57 Uh, just marthabeck.com. I also run an online, um, community called wildercommunity.com, so if you wanna, like, hang out with people who think like this... (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:03:08 (laughs)

Martha Beck 1:03:09 Yeah, uh, it's fun. It's weird, but it's fun. Our motto is, "Feeling good by looking weird."

Chris Williamson 1:03:15 Okay. Yeah, good. I like that. Uh, that's cool. Martha, I really appreciate you. Until next time.

Martha Beck 1:03:20 Thank you so much. Take care.

Chris Williamson 1:03:22 Congratulations. You made it to the end of the episode. And if you want more, well, why don't you press right here? Come on.