STEVEN BARTLETT:

Dr. Martha Beck, within all your work, what is it that you’re aiming to do? And I guess most importantly, equally importantly, who are you aiming to do it for?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I could give you the normal answer, which goes down easily with most people, or I could give you the truth, which sounds really weird.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’ll take the truth.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I was hoping you would say that. So in all my work, and this means from the time I was little, I remember being dreadfully anxious about not having done enough toward it. On the night before my birthday one year, I was lying there thinking, I am supposed—there’s something I’m supposed to help with on the earth, and I have not done enough, and I’ve got to get moving here. And the next day I turned four. So ever since I was little, my whole intent has been based on this feeling that I was meant to help with a shift that would happen in the world during my lifetime, and I did not know what it was. So I would ask myself, what is it? I would spend hours thinking, what is it? And the only thing I got as an answer was this bit of poetry from T.S. Eliot. And it goes, I said to my soul, be still and wait without love, for it would be love of the wrong thing. And wait without hope, for it would be hope of the wrong thing. There is yet faith, but the love and the hope and the faith are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought. So the darkness shall be the light and the stillness the dancing. All right. As I got older and studied more, I began to think What I am meant to help with is a shift in the way human beings perceive and think. And that is why I couldn’t know what it was, because to explain to someone a fundamental shift in the way they think would have to be processed through the way they’re thinking now, and so it would be fundamentally misunderstood. Now I’m old and I don’t care what people think of me, so I just say this right out loud. It was a deep secret in my heart for decades. And now I just say, I think there is going to be a shift in the way in human consciousness. And I think it is going to change the way humans relate to the planet, relate to each other, relate to themselves. And I could be wrong, but I don’t care. I’m going to keep trying for it till the day I die.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 And what is that shift in human consciousness that you’re predicting?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Wait, without thought, but actually, no, I actually have a theory now. My undergraduate degree was in East Asian studies. I lived in Asia and studied Chinese and Japanese. And they have a concept in Asia that is not well known in modern Western culture. And that is the concept of awakening. And it’s awakening out of the dream of thought. Which is, I mean, the whole thing is now like half of our listeners are at this point probably thinking, Stephen has brought a lunatic to the program. I will not listen to this episode. But I’m promising you, it gets really cool if you focus on it. Because when you awaken, and it’s a shift in the way, a fundamental perception. This is also very strong in India, Tibet, and the other Buddhist countries. It’s a shift where you leave the aspects of your thinking that cause you internal suffering. You cease to suffer after you awaken. I think that’s actually an epigenetic shift that is inherent in the brain of every individual. and that many individuals throughout history have gone through it. The great teachers, I think Nelson Mandela went through it in prison at Robben Island. So all over the world, in different cultures, in different parts of the world, throughout history, individuals have described this experience with very, very consistent terminology. You awaken, you realize that the life you’ve been living is real, but only in the way a dream is real. and that the reality of the awakened state is much more real, and in that state, there’s no fear, there’s no suffering, there is infinite compassion, there is the desire to serve, there is love for all beings, not just every human, but every being there is, and there is a kind of fundamental peace and bliss, the bliss of being, they call it in Sanskrit, Satchitananda. the bliss of being becomes your everyday state. I think if a critical number of people experience that at the same time, we could just fix the problems humans have been causing for the last few thousand years.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

How could you persuade anybody that that state of being is even possible?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Well, I have a few tricks. There’s no persuading. I can show you a few things if you want that I tend to do when I’m coaching people.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So let’s get on to that then. Who are you in terms of your qualifications?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I am a person who has experienced intense psychological and physical suffering for decades. Absolute wreck of a human being. Physically, by the time I was 30, I had been bedridden for 10 years with autoimmune diseases. I had depression and anxiety in massive amounts from the time I was very small. And then I actually had an experience during a surgery, which was like a near-death experience, where I felt like I saw this light, and I felt connected to it. More than connected to it, I felt radically shifted. And I came out of that surgery and changed I stopped telling a single lie with any aspect of my speech, behavior. I would not lie after that. So in the next year, it was a very exciting year, I walked away from my family religion, which was very, very important in my home community. So that meant I lost my family of origin, my community of origin. Every friend I’d had before the age of 17 when I left for college, I realized I was gay, so that was the end of my marriage. I had to leave my home. I had to leave my, I left academia. basically threw everything into the bonfire. And I would not recommend this to anyone listening out there. Don’t do it. I did this so you would not have to. I can tell you there are easier ways. But through it all, through everything I’ve studied with my mind and through everything I’ve experienced with my body and my heart, I’m not saying I awakened. but I feel I know what awakening is. And for that reason, I feel very safe in the world and very joyful. All I can say is, this is in you. I may be able to help you find it, but I don’t need to create it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Who have you worked with on a one-on-one basis? What are the different types of individuals that have asked for your help and support?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I mean, I’ve worked with homeless heroin addicts on the streets of Phoenix because I truly believe that the experience I had in surgery with this light, this absolute homecoming and peace, I actually gravitated to addicts, even though I’ve never been addicted to substance, because when they say they can’t live without that first heroin hit, that’s how I felt after coming out of that experience, that light. I was like, I cannot live without that. And so I would tell the heroin addicts, I believe you’re meant to have that feeling you long for so much, but I also think you get to keep your teeth. There’s another way. So I’ve worked with people like that. I’ve had billionaires as clients. I have counseled people in prison because I’m a sociologist. And if I say something works for humanity, it has to work across cultures and in all situations, poverty, wealth, captivity, freedom, any situation, it has to work before I’ll say, I’ll put my stamp on it and say, yeah, I think that works.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And who, when you talk about, you know, helping billionaires, what do they come to you seeking? Do they just express symptoms or something?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

You know what? Almost everyone has the same major problem, and it’s not what you would think. They want to know their purpose. They want to know why the hell they’re even here. Humans are the only animals, so far as we know, that live on a day-to-day basis with the consciousness of our mortality. We are going to die, so why are we even here? What am I doing here? And it’s the same whether you’re talking to someone on the street or someone with a billion dollars. That desperation to know why we’re here. And I think it comes out of a culture that has fundamentally pulled us away from our inherent knowledge of what we’re meant to be and put us in a place where we are obsessed with productivity and consumption and production of material wealth. and has actually cut us off from our own sense of meaning. And that’s actually in the brain that you get stuck in a part of the left hemisphere that is obsessed with grabbing things and owning things and controlling things. And it’s always afraid. It’s always grasping. And it refuses to believe that anything but itself exists. But on the other side of the brain, there is the self that connects with meaning, purpose, relationship, connection. And living in a state of nature as everyone did until a few hundred years ago, almost everyone, we would wake up, a human would wake up hearing wind and birdsong and other people’s voices. They would rise and go to bed according to the sunlight and the temperature. They had intimate relationships with animals and with plants and with the earth itself. All of our biology evolved to be in that situation. And one anthropologist called it the weird societies. Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic. We have a fundamentally different way of living. We get up surrounded by artificial light, we push ourselves all day to do things that we would never have done 300 years ago. Spreadsheets. Sitting next to people we barely know who are assigned to be there because we have similar tasks, which is a system based on factory labor, which is horrible for people. Not to solve real problems that matter to you, but to catch on to something that an adult already knows who’s going to punish you or shame you, depending on whether you get the right answer or the wrong answer. It’s a bizarre, very left hemisphere dominated society. So Ian McGilchrist, my favorite philosopher and neurologist or psychiatrist, says the whole culture functions like someone with a severe right hemisphere stroke. We live in a bizarre, crazy culture, and we do not know why we’re here because we don’t have access to our sense of meaning.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I just wanted to ask you, you know, of all the things you could have written about at this exact moment in time, you chose to write a book about anxiety. It’s called Beyond Anxiety, Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose. Why did you choose that subject, and specifically this word anxiety, above everything else you could have written about?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

So after I wrote The Way of Integrity, where I say, look, if you—integrity to me means that you are whole and—that’s what the word means. It means intact. It doesn’t mean, like, morally. It just means structurally. If all your meaning-making systems are in order, are telling the same story—body, heart, spirit, mind—if those are all in agreement, there is a kind of grounding in reality. And in that reality, what happens when you get into that reality is you begin to awaken. You begin to experience spontaneously the things that Eastern sages have described about the cessation of suffering. So I was, you know, I’d been studying toward this for years and I thought, this is the last self-help book I’m ever going to write. I really believe this is it.” So people read the book, and then they would come to me and they’d say, I have put my whole life in integrity, but I’m so scared all the time. I am so afraid. So I started looking into it and realized that anxiety is skyrocketing all over the world. It is by far the most common mental health challenge that people face. Something like 284 million people, last I checked, were clinically diagnosable with anxiety disorder. During the pandemic year, 2020, anxiety went up all over the world by a full 25%. And here’s the thing about anxiety. It’s like one of those tire rippers that you drive across and you can’t drive back because the way the brain is structured, when you get into anxiety, it just keeps going up and up and getting worse and worse and worse. And then when you get a lot of people who are experiencing this intense anxiety and they can’t get out of it, they create a culture that reflects anxiety and fosters anxiety without really meaning to, but that becomes, if you’re stuck in this very mechanistic grasping way of being, anxiety is inevitable and actually lauded. So I was amazed to find that Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, says in his quarterly reports, and loves to say in many settings, that he tells all of the thousands of Amazon employees who work under him, he wants them all to wake up terrified every morning. And that’s the word he uses, terrified. And to stay terrified all day because that makes them productive. But most of these people are just getting by financially. He wants them to be afraid all the time so that he and the stockholders can get more stuff. and they already have so much stuff, you know? Like 1% of the world’s people own something like 95, no, 50% of the total wealth of the world is owned by the top 1%. It’s insane. And so we’re saying, yes, get up, be terrified, as long as you’re productive. And you know what? When you get really productive, and you earn a lot of stuff and that’s still your only way of being, you still wake up terrified every morning and you stay anxious all day long. Fear, see, fear is like being shot from a cannon. If a bear came in here, we would both go, whoa, and we’d get very clear instructions from our biology. to either fight, flee, freeze, hide under the table, I would feed you to the bear, probably. You could totally take that bear.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’m not going to risk it. I’d be out of here.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

No, you would win. Anyway, it would eat me and then you would win. And then our fear, if we were like other animals, would subside. That’s normal fear. Anxiety, instead of being like shot from a cannon, it’s like being haunted. Something bad happens, or we hear about something bad happening. And we get that jolt of fear, but instead of acting and then relaxing, we turn it into a verbal story. So a group of psychologists, I think in the 90s, decided to try to figure out why humans, of all animals, are the only ones who commit suicide on a regular basis. And what they found out, the answer is language. We humans have the capacity to use language to create an abstract vision of the future that is more horrifying than the prospect of our own death. We choose death over the story of fear that we carry in our minds. And the spiral happens because there’s a jolt of fear, then a story about the fear. And then there’s a story about how we have to control the world so that we won’t be in danger anymore. And we have to control our loved ones so they won’t be in danger. And we have to control—we just have to control. But we, honest to God, really can’t control very much. So then we get even more scared. And that feeds back into these primitive brain structures that say, fear! and then it creates a bigger story and more control efforts and it goes up and up and up and it doesn’t go down because that part of the brain has a very peculiar, I don’t know how this evolved, it has this tendency to truly believe that nothing but itself exists.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So you’re going to have to explain the brain to me in the context you’re describing it for me to understand some of these points. Tell me what I need to know about the brain. I’m going to draw a little picture of it on my iPad here, so I can stay with you.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

All right, so you’ve got your brain, and it’s symmetrical, right? Yeah. Two mirror image, and there’s something in the middle called the corpus callosum that connects it. And I’m about to vastly oversimplify, and I’m not a neuroscientist, so neurologists, I beg you to forgive me. I know that the whole brain is working almost all the time, and that left-right simplifications about the hemispheres of the brain are oversimplifications. Nevertheless, there are very dramatic differences between what happens, and so I’m going to talk to those. So on the left side, you have this thing called the anxiety spiral, where there’s a little tiny part of your brain called the amygdala, and it’s very primitive. Every animal with a spine has one of these, or something very close to it. And its job is to make you safe by being alarmed when you see unfamiliar things. It feeds information to layers of the brain that are also ancient, but not as old. And these, on the left hemisphere, make you immediately start thinking of ways to control a situation. And then when it gets to the outermost layer of the left hemisphere, which handles things like time and language, it starts to tell a story defending the feelings it’s having. So that’s what the left hemisphere does in this one little compartment. On the right side, you also have an amygdala. You actually have two of all these structures. On the right side, the amygdala also goes, ah, something unfamiliar, a little burst of, ah. Then, in the right side, it creates curiosity instead of aversion. Have you ever rubber-necked at an accident?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 Is that when you’re like, what’s… Yeah, everybody slows down and you’re like, what happened?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

And I always think, oh, I should look away. I’m being voyeuristic, but I still really want to look. And the reason is that we evolved a tendency to move away from frightening things to stay safe, but toward them, insofar as we can figure out what happened and avoid that happening to us. So curiosity is intense around things we fear. That’s why the average American child, by the time they’re ready for college, has witnessed on TV or online 16,000—or is it 60,000—murders. We’re terrified of murder, so we’re obsessed with it. You do not have mystery stories written about robbery. It’s murder. Okay, so the right side of the amygdala goes curious, and then it starts to connect things. How can I figure this out? That’s like that other thing, so this is what must have happened. It’s a detective, and it starts to put together its own version of what happened. Doesn’t use language. But it uses very vivid images and sensory details. And it can connect things in ways that are highly original and inventive. So you immediately start to get creative. What I found in the wonderful books I read about anxiety, they always talked about how to get your anxiety to calm down. But for me, that wasn’t enough as an individual or just as a theoretician. Because that just gets you to the, you flatten your anxiety. But if you go into the right hemisphere of your brain and start to get creative, something really magical happens. Just as anxiety shuts off creativity, creativity can shut down anxiety. It’s like these two parts of the brain toggle. And if you go to any traditional culture, you will find the wise people, the elders, the medicine people of that culture talking about the oneness of all things. It’s not a new concept. What I realized is that if I deliberately chose to push my brain toward creativity and get the right side moving, my anxiety shut down. And then I started testing it on clients and on groups of people online. I’d design these experiments because I was trained as a sociologist. And consistently, I found that this is the way to get rid of this horrific scourge that is ruining so many people’s lives. And what I always hear is people say, well, there are real problems. We really should be afraid. My answer to that is if you were in a horrible car accident, God forbid, and you had many injuries, would you want the surgeons working on you to be in a state of panic or calm creativity? The only way we’re going to fix the problems we’ve made with our fear-based behavior, the only way to solve problems this big is to access the incredible capacity of human creativity. I believe we can do that as individuals and as a species.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So how would I go about switching into this right hemisphere? If I’m feeling anxious, what would you recommend that I do?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

It’s so easy. It’s so amazingly easy. Now, your brain naturally goes toward anxiety because of something called the negativity bias. And I always think of it as 15 puppies and a cobra. If I gave you a box and it had 15 puppies and a cobra in it, what would catch your attention? the snake, and that’s because in evolutionary terms, paying attention to the snake is a good idea. But we have such a strong negativity bias in our culture, and we have very little to pull us back into communion with oneness. We don’t have nature around us anymore. So we have to do that. We can trick our brains into doing that. And if you want to play a little with this. Sure. Okay.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Tell me what to do.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

First, I want you to think of something that makes you feel a bit anxious. Maybe not panicky, but anxious. Something you’re willing to, like, tell us what it is.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Okay. Something that makes me feel a little bit anxious.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

This is an interesting one. Sounds like a strange thing to say, but when my partner is not happy, and I know she’s not happy, but she’s not telling me why, and I’m around her, and I can tell from her vibe, her face, she’s not happy about something, and I have no idea what it is.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Okay, I think there will be many people out there who know what this feels like. You are describing a tiny domestic nightmare that many of us feel. So think about that. Think about what that feels like and just notice what it does to your body and to your emotions. what’s happening in your body if you’re in that situation with your partner.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

My breath is short. Yeah. Right. I just feel tense and I become quite impatient because I just need the answer to alleviate the anxiety. Yeah.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

 So you’ve gone to a fight-or-flight nervous system, arousal state, okay, uh-uh, something’s wrong.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’m very focused, yeah.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, I’m very focused and I’m very, like, I’m anxious but I’m also a little bit snappish because I’m fleeing on one side, I need to get out of this situation. But I’m fighting on the other side, like, tell me what’s wrong. So you’ve got a full fight or flight thing happening. So you can get into that by imagining the situation. Now I want you to imagine something else very vividly. And it would probably help if you close your eyes. Have you ever eaten an orange?

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

All right. So imagine that you are holding an orange. It’s a nice, ripe, heavy, delicious orange at the peak of its ripeness. I can tell you’ve already smelled it. So you can smell the citrus. You just take a bite of it to break the seal of the peeling and just feel that little spray of citric acid that It pops up when you bite the peel and then the bitterness of the rind. And then as you bite and the juice gets in your mouth, it’s sweet, it’s a little bit tangy. You can feel the filaments of the skin and the stringiness of the insides. And you can pull it back, you pull back the peel. You can feel it under your fingernails. You can smell it. Just put the broken part to your mouth and like squeeze the orange and let some juice get into your mouth and taste it completely and then swallow it. and then enjoy the sensation of tasting, feeling, hearing even this experience. Okay, how’s your anxiety?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 My anxiety went away.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

It’s gone.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Because I asked you to use sensory imagination. And that’s handled by the right hemisphere. It’s not in the left. So instead of verbal imagination, which can create horror stories, you were in a sensory experience. And what I don’t think people realize is that we’re always imagining what’s going to happen to us in the next few days, weeks, months, years. But we’re imagining it based on what we think is real, which is all the horror stories we’re hearing about. Oh, you know, I need to mind my health. I need to—there will be accidents. There will be, you know, my loved ones will die. We have all these stories that haven’t happened yet. They may. They’re not lies. But that’s in the mind as we make our choices. I need to get more money, that whole thing. When you imagine forward with your senses in a way that brings relaxation, how’s your body when you’re in the orange thing? You said it was tense when you were in anxiety. What happens to your physical body when you’re completely connected to the experience of this imaginary orange?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 relaxes, your body relaxes.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, you start breathing more deeply, you stop producing all the cortisol, the glucocorticoids, the adrenaline that you had in the fight-flight state, and now you’re starting to produce serotonin and dopamine and what they call the tend and befriend hormones. So you’re, say you could hold that energy and your partner’s still tense and running around but you’re staying in this relaxed state, can you then, instead of being afraid of her, start to be curious about what’s going on? Instead of saying, tell me what’s going on. It’s more like, wow, she’s really tense. I wonder what that’s about. And you could even ask her, honey, I don’t want to step on your toes here, but the vibe I’m getting is that you’re not okay. Like, can I help you? So it’s a very, very different thing to approach conflict. One of the people I wrote about in this book is Chris Voss, one of the FBI’s top hostage negotiators. And when he’s dealing with a violent, psychopathic terrorist who has people as hostages he’s ready to kill, Chris Voss says, this is how you deal with him. Gently, with a soft voice, curious about his experience and empathetic about it. And you’re just thinking, What? This is not in the movies. But the human amygdala is a frightened animal most of the time. And we all know that if you run at a frightened animal and say, tell me what you want, it doesn’t get less frightened. So what you just did was move your nervous system into a state where you can be a field of peace for someone else who’s anxious.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 Do you have to do the orange thing the whole time to get into that state?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

No, no, no. There are many tricks. Do you want to do some more? Sure, let’s do more. All right, here’s one of my favorites. And I got this from a brilliant artist and professor at Harvard, William Ryman, who I was lucky enough to be his teaching assistant for a few years. And this is one of the things that he used to do to get the students to shut down the left side of their brain. Well, not shut it down, but to use the right side of the brain as well. Because the left side of the brain can’t draw very well, I have to tell you this. So all I want you to do is put your stylus there over toward the right. center of your field, and write your first name the way you usually sign it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah. All right. The way I usually sign it or write it?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

The way you usually sign it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Okay. Yeah. Okay. So the way I usually sign it is a bit more complicated.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Ooh, that’s beautiful. Okay, so now put your stylus just to the left of the signature, and now replicate the signature, but this time write it in mirror writing backwards. Take as much time as you need.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Gosh, this is so difficult.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Just breathe.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Wait, I’ve got it wrong already.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Can I rub it out? Absolutely, you have as many tries as you need. Notice how the rhythm of your hand goes when you’re signing moving right and try to see if you can find that rhythm going the opposite direction.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I might need pen and paper.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Using pencil and paper because they’re tactile is actually, you’re going to have easier access to it because you’re going to have more access to the right side of your brain.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

This is so difficult. Why is my signature so complicated?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

You’re doing brilliantly. You did it!

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Terrible.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yay! No, not terrible. Now, the torture is not over, Steven.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

It’s terrible. It’s beautiful. You said you wouldn’t lie.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I just meant your first name anyway. Now, while you were doing that, you might have felt intense frustration and a sense of, huh. But when you’re anxious about it, you actually can’t do it. You have to become engrossed with it in order to do it. Because your brain is creating new neuron synapses that have never existed before. You’ve never done this before. So you are fundamentally changing your brain, teaching it a skill it has never had. And this is what children are going through when they learn to write for the first time. But what you just did was connect to parts of the brain that are in the right side. So this is why we used to make these poor students do this. Because once they could, we had another book we worked with called Drawing is Forgetting the Name of What You See. As long as you call it a cup, you can’t draw it. You draw your image of a cup. But when you forget to call it anything, it just becomes a shape. Like your signature had to just become a shape. And shapes are on the right hemisphere. So what you just did was, it’s like power lifting. You forced your brain to create synapses that were brand new, that were taking you into a state of learning, deep learning. similar to what happens to children if you let them run around in nature. So there was a study done at NASA in the 60s to identify creative geniuses. And they found that 2% of the adults they sought out, like college graduates, were creative geniuses. After a while, a few years, they decided to try giving it to four and five-year-olds. 98% of them were creative geniuses. And I think that probably the other 2% were just having a bad day. What happens between the moment you’re four years old, a full-on creative genius learning new things the way you just did, day in, day out, and adulthood where your genius has mainly gone dark? It’s because you stop trying things that are brand new like that. You’re put in the factory line in school and taught to learn in a completely different way that’s based on shame and fear and artificial skills that don’t mean much to you. Right and wrong answers. Yeah. Everything’s right or wrong. Everything’s very judgmental in nature. Nothing’s judgmental. One of the things I’ve done with groups of clients is take them into a forest, and with the help of another coach who’s a great woodsman, we give them the tools to make fire with sticks and rocks, but they have to work as a team. And then we say, make fire, but you can’t talk about it, because language is in the left hemisphere. And sometimes they’re out there for four hours. And the whole time it’s like, ah, what are we doing? They try all these different things. And then I’ve never had a group that didn’t do it. They figure it out. And you end up with a little flame in your hands. And you feed it a few bits of dried moss or whatever. And you blow into it. And it starts to smoke. And then smoke heavily. And then suddenly it just bursts into flame. And there’s this feeling, there’s this Promethean feeling, oh my God, we can do anything. And the fact that that’s how we’re built to learn and there’s joy in it, there’s a kind of, it’s an achievement. But nature’s not saying, wrong, right, you get an F, you get an A, you get higher levels. No, you get fire or you don’t get fire, no judgment.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So what does this mean for me on a day-to-day basis? If I understand the power of this, does this mean that I should draw my name a lot? Or is there something that we could all be doing to alleviate our anxiety and to get us into the right hemisphere of our brain?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Well, to me, there’s a three-step process, and there are three sections in the book. The first one, I use it with the acronym CAT. Calm, art and transcendence. This is how it works. The first third of the book is just how to calm your brain. It’s been taught to be anxious. It is biologically pre-programmed to be anxious. So to calm it down, most people will say, they’ll come in and tell me, I want to fight my anxiety. I want to end it. I want to bring it down. I want it gone. Because they think it’s a broken machine, but it’s not a broken machine. It’s a frightened animal. And if you came in and I said to you, OK, I want to end you. I want to bring you down. I’m going to fight you till you’re gone. Would you be less afraid or more afraid? So they’re attacking the part of themself that’s anxious, and it makes it more anxious. And that’s what we’re taught to do, end it, force it to calm down with chemicals. One of the most ghastly things that ever happened in psychiatry was that they used to literally take people who had inexorable anxiety and literally put a screwdriver through the eye socket and up into the brain and just mix it around That’s how mechanistic we are about our own minds, we can fix it with a screwdriver. That’s a very left hemisphere way to think. And it’s literally attacking ourselves. But we’re all born with the intrinsic knowledge of how to calm a frightened animal. So if you found a terrified puppy on your stoop one morning and you decided to try to help it, you would instinctively know how to do that. What would you do?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 I would approach it slowly or not approach it at all and I would get down and I’d be very gentle and say hello and I’d ask it to come to me.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

And if it didn’t you’d give it space, you’d give it time, you’d sit there with it. And just the way your energy just changed now, you’d get down, you’d begin to smile in a very sweet way, and I could feel the tolerance and the gentleness and the space that you would give this creature. We’ve got to learn to be gentle to ourselves. We are taught to be violent to ourselves. Biohack that. Make yourself eat this and do that. And instead, if we could just go to the anxious part. Like, say you’re with your partner and she’s acting weird and you’re feeling anxious. Generally, what we do is we try to control the situation. What can I do? Can I make her happy? I’ll bring her flowers. I’ll do whatever, right? Have an argument. Instead of trying to control her, the best approach is go inside, find the part of yourself that’s afraid. So if you’re in that situation and she’s nervous and you just start to observe your own anxiety, like, OK, what does that feel like? Who is that in there? Who’s the anxious part of me? And just notice, I mean, try it right now if you don’t mind. She’s upset. She’s tense. She’s not telling you the problem. Notice the anxiety. Where is it in your body exactly?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

It’s like here in my chest.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Okay, in your chest. So allow that and say to it, I’m going to give you space. I’m here. I’m going to be here with you. I know she’s scaring you, but I’ve got you. It’s okay. She’s not going to hurt us. I can go in the other room with you if you need and sit with it and say, let me know, what are you feeling? Tell me everything. You get to feel exactly the way you feel. And I’m here to listen to anything you want to tell me and I will not hurt you. And I will not try to stifle you or make you go away. So how does that change anything?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah, for some reason it just, the volume went down. It’s just like the volume went down. And it made me wonder if, because just by you saying that, it made me wonder if in those moments I should be writing it out.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

That can be really helpful. There’s a psychologist named James Pennebaker who found that if he just had students—he just did this experiment once as a graduate student—he had students write for 15 minutes about something that was upsetting to them. And many of them came out of the experiment in tears. It really upset them for an hour or two. He had other students just write what they did last summer or whatever. So there was this brief period where the ones who had stirred up some turmoil felt unsettled. But they, in the weeks and even the years subsequent to that experiment, they had fewer doctor’s visits, they had less anxiety, they had better relationships, they had better everything. So he, for his whole career, just did these writing exercises where he would have people just express themselves, not to show anyone, not even to reread, just to express. The parts of us that are frightened need to be heard. The parts of society that are hurting need to be hurt. I’m astonished by the Truth and Reconciliation Councils held in South Africa after Nelson Mandela became president. These people who had been through absolute atrocities, and they were just heard. They were allowed to tell their stories to the people who had hurt them and other people who were on their side. And the telling of it, avoided what everyone thought would be a bloodbath. And it, of course, didn’t fix all the problems. But it unburdened, to a large extent, people who had been through things that I can’t even imagine. So yes, write it. Write it down. So she’s in the other room. She’s acting weird. Something might come up about, like, how old is that anxious part? Maybe it’s young. Maybe it’s not.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You said something at the start, you said that anxiety is like driving over a metal spike in those police chases, that’s what I was thinking about, like the police chases where they throw out the metal spikes and the car drives over. Why did you use that analogy? What are you saying there about the nature of anxiety?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

That’s what it’s like if you get stuck in what’s called the anxiety spiral in the brain, the anxiety cycle, some people call it. So what you have to do in that situation is, to extend the metaphor, get out of the car, disarm the mechanism, get that mechanism out of the way, you know, the tire ripping thing, and then you can back out. But the stopping and getting out, that’s the calming step of anxiety and that’s what you’re doing here. As weird as it sounds, when you write your name backwards and you come into a state of physiological calm, you are getting rid of the tire rippers. You’re building pathways that go into the calmer parts of the brain. So the same thing when you were imagining eating an orange, you’re calming yourself and it allows you to reverse. It allows you to leave finally. But our culture tends to not allow you to leave. It’s always telling you horror stories. So then once you get really calm and you’ve taken care of that part of yourself, I said the acronym is CAT. Once you get to calm, then very paradoxically, it blew me away when I realized this, then you need art. And I don’t mean drawing, I mean making things. Making things in three dimensions, making events happen, making a podcast. Like, what was the fire in you that made you make things? And how did it feel when you were in the making?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

In the making, it usually feels great. Like in the process of making. Actually, me and my partner went and did, last weekend, we went and made some art. And I was like stressed and stuff. And so when we went and did this art, I’d like never painted in my life. So we went to this like random loft and there was this guy there and he had these massive two pieces of cardboard and like loads of spray cans and paint and stuff and we just painted for maybe three hours or something. And I was totally lost in it. I mean that’s the way people describe it. They describe it as being lost in it, right?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah. And do you know that if people have been through a trauma and they’re allowed to draw about it, even if they can’t draw, you know, professionally, they have an 80% lower chance of developing PTSD. There’s something about creating stuff and it could be a company or it could be a spray paint on a cardboard. My partner started making bead bracelets a while ago. She’s very busy, she doesn’t have time for this, but it makes her so And we were talking about how if you go into a tomb in Egypt from 5,000 years ago, what are you going to find? Among other things, beaded bracelets. If you go to the Amazon rainforest and contact an uncontacted tribe, what might you find? Beaded bracelets. People are making beaded bracelets all the time, and they serve no function. They are precious, pointless things,” she said, that we make. And all cultures make—we make music. I mean, I think about the cultures in Jamaica, one of the worst slavery colonies in the history of the world. It was just—it made what was happening on the mainland look gentle by comparison. And out of that, you get these incredible art forms—reggae, dance—I mean, like in the middle of being crushed, having literally everything taken from them. People were still making art. This is a part of the human spirit that is just, it’s indomitable, and our culture pushes it to the fringes. Okay, Steven, you can do that on a weekend, that’s nice, but did you really make any money? You know?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Get a real job. Yeah. How does this link, again, back to the brain? So if I’m creating, I’m making some art, I was doing that spray paint thing with the paint and the… I’ll show you a picture of it after I actually think about it.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Cool, I want to see it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

But how is that helping me to calm my anxiety?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

It’s because of the way the structures on the left side, they’re obsessed with grasping material objects, acquiring, controlling other people, always thinking about fear. And There does seem to be this toggle effect that anxiety and creativity just can’t work at the same time. So the moment you begin to create, like when you said, I could write this, that’s expressive writing, that’s artistic writing. And all of a sudden, the toggle switches off in anxiety and on in creativity. So I believe that there’s another spiral on the right side of the brain, but instead of spiraling tightly into fear, it spirals outward. And ultimately, you get to the final thing. There’s calming, there’s artistry, and then there’s transcendence, or awakening. When you’re there, sometimes we call it flow. Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who named it flow, really looked into this. And it’s a state of creating and performing at a level so difficult we almost can’t do it. Exactly the way you were writing your name. And you can have what’s called the rage to master where you’re just like, I can’t. But when you get it, and I’m sure you’ve had this with many things you’ve created in your life, it’s like flying, it’s heaven. And there’s a time in the process of creating where the sense of self falls away and the sense of control isn’t necessary and what you feel Is creation itself sort of moving with you and through you? And it’s blissful. And I believe that is the state in which we are meant to spend almost all our time. And I think that would transform our consciousness.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

This is a related but slightly unrelated topic, but there’s a lot of people and certain demographics suffering in different ways at the moment. There’s like a conversation I hear a lot about men suffering with meaning and purpose and those things. And I hear this other conversation about young women suffering and depression and anxiety being on the rise there. When you think about those two groups, so like men and young women, what is it that you think is the causal factor of their suffering? Because their suffering is similar and different.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah. Well, it’s conditioned by the way the brain works. It works very differently in pubescent girls than it does in, say, adult men. Young adult men, their brains work very differently from elders. That’s why in traditional societies, the young man would be herded together. And sometimes, for example, in some cultures, their faces would be obscured. They would leave their name behind. They would leave all the possessions they had or burn them. And they would be taken into the wilderness by the elders. And the elders would proceed to scare the living daylights out of them, making strange noises in the brush, putting them through a kind of trial. And the result of this is it kind of disintegrates the ego. And you still see it in, like, if you see movies about the Army and how the tough but hard of gold sergeant breaks down the young soldier’s egos so that they finally say, OK, I am not the center of the universe. I need my brothers to exist. I bow down in the face of nature, which is greater than I am. And then the elders say, all right, now you’re ready to be a man. Go back to the village and tell people your new name, which you get to choose. Young girls at puberty go through the opposite experience in many cultures. They are isolated in places away from all humans. Because the primary psychological task, according to some theories, of males is that they’re born sort of differentiated and very individual. And they need to learn to integrate with other people to be whole. Females tend to be born, or people identified as female, are born very integrated. And the task of female maturation is to individuate. So young girls who haven’t, they’re just at the stage where they need to find out who they are as an individual. And instead, they’re very integrated with networks of people who are psychologically attacking each other. in ways that are extremely harmful to their psyche at that stage. In a traditional culture, they might be put in, say, a hut that was dark and given food every day. But you’re in there by yourself until you learn, I’m OK. I can actually go inside myself and find the truth of who I am. On the other hand, the boys are out there going, ah, I can give up thinking I am all that. and I can kneel in reverence at the oneness of it all. And then they come back together and they’ve got a lot in common at that point.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Because the men now realize they need people and the women now realize that they have an independence.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Exactly. And so each can understand the other better. I mean the wisdom of these cultural traditions is incredible and we just don’t have it. We don’t have it. The internet in particular spins out the individuation of young men makes them feel like, you know—they do have bands of brothers, but it’s like, we’re under attack, man, and I really—I’m going to try to—I have to achieve. I’m going to try it this way, and I’m going to try it that way, and there’s a lot of battle games and stuff. But none of the humility that comes from the elders. And these young girls are just caught in whirlwinds of social toxicity when they might be taught to meditate. And we can still do all those things. We can still access those things.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You talked about suicidal ideation earlier on being unique to humans. When we think about suicidal ideation, it’s particularly prominent in young men. I think in the UK, the stat is still the case that the single biggest killer of young men is themselves under the age of 45. Wow. So why is that? We talked about meaning and purpose and stuff earlier. Why are young men killing themselves at alarming rates?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Because It is easier in the mind to take arms against a sea of troubles. Like it’s Hamlet’s speech. You know, why should I stay alive in a world where everyone dies? And we’re all assaulted by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. He’s just watched his father die. And he’s like, why would I keep going? I could just kill myself. Because men are taught combat as a way of control. If you’re afraid, every movie will tell you, get a gun. Like The Matrix, where the guy learns he can control everything with his mind. Everything he’s controlling with his mind. So what does he do? He says, we’re gonna need a lot of guns. You can control the universe with your mind. You don’t need guns, right? But there’s just this obsession with weaponry, and that’s kind of in the DNA. But when you get people in a spiral of fear, it becomes, intense and military. All the genocides committed throughout history have relied on really toxic leaders accessing vulnerable young men and militarizing them against other people, which is really easy. And if they’re on their own, isolated, and there are no elders taking them in groups doing things, they turn that on themselves.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So what is the solution then for young men?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I would say, look to our ancestors, you know. Let’s take young men. The coach, Michael Trotta, that I used to go with to make fire in the woods, he originally worked with, and probably still does work with, groups of young men. He was a disciple of I think it was the Odawa tribe of indigenous Americans. And he always wore this shirt that said, listen to grandfather. And he would take these confused, hurting young men out. And he would put them through the trials that they would have had in a traditional society. And they would have to learn to make fire together. And they would have to learn to feed each other what they could find and use their skills in hunting, building, all of that for the community. And I just watched him heal boy after boy after boy.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And that’s not that hard to do. Why is it healing for them, doing that, using their skills, hunting, surviving? Because it’s what we evolved to do.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Like the lives we’re giving people now, the lives most of us are living, are so alienating. It’s such an abnormal. This here is not normal. Right? This is not a forest or a beach or a desert. This is all man-made. It’s full of right angles, which don’t even very rarely exist in nature, only in crystals.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

For people that aren’t watching video, she’s pointing at the studio.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, I’m pointing at the studio, which is lovely, by the way. Absolutely state of the art. If you talk about human evolution and the incredible, sophisticated nervous systems we have, they evolved intimately for a totally different environment. And this is scary.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So what do we do about it? Because, you know, the more I listen to you, I think maybe I should run away. Like, maybe I should. I have the funds to run away. I could go forever. And I do wonder, I could probably be happier, maybe. Maybe I’d start creating though. And then I, this is what I said, I did a set up sort of my podcast recently. I said, if I ran away, then I’d start creating and then. You know, I might start a podcast on the beach in Bali and then… You would.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

You would create stuff. You can’t help yourself. And that’s why you are obviously, like, physically healthy. You seem incredibly balanced and wise. Like, you’ve been making stuff. So you’re very much like you’re… Sorry to use California language, but your energy is very calm, but also very exuberant.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Your story, is um it’s heartbreaking in many ways but it’s it’s so evidently shaped the person that sits in front of me today because you’re at a very young age which you’ve not we’ve not really spoken about much you were part of the mormon religion oh yes i was take me into that before 10 years old how that experience before the age of 10 has shaped the person you are

DR. MARTHA BECK:

So I was born not just into a Mormon family, but a Mormon community where everyone shared the same beliefs. You didn’t call people Mr. and Mrs. It was brother and sister. Brother Smith, Sister Smith. And I was told from very young, I mean you’re indoctrinated. At 18 months you start religious training and they tell you things like, You know, if men live well and they’re part of the Mormon Church, then when they die, they get their own planet and all the women they want. And it’s like, all right, like you’re three years old. What do you know, right? And Jesus is going to come over the mountains, and all the graves are going to fly open, and all the bodies, the literal bodies of all the dead people are going to rise up out and go join Jesus. which is why we don’t cremate bodies. We bury them because they’re going to come back to life. And I would have nightmares of Jesus coming over the mountains, the graves flying open, all the people around me are rising up, and I would run. As a little kid, this happened over and over again, this dream where I was trying to jump high enough to go with the people who were being saved, and I couldn’t do it. I just kept coming back down. So I lived in absolute terror all the time. And I also didn’t know what was real, because none of it, nothing felt real. So that was, it’s very disconcerting, but because I’d never had any other experience, I just thought, well, this is life. So that was rough.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And at 28 years old, you realized that you’d been sexually assaulted as a child.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, I think I had hints of it. Actually, friends told me that I had told them about it in high school, and I don’t remember telling them. So I had pretty much repressed it. My father was a very, very renowned scholarly defender of Mormonism. His job was to take the claims of the doctrine and validate them you know, academically. But in order to do that, I talked to many people who, many of, he had five people working with him to help him translate various documents of different languages. And they said he would just make things up and put them as footnotes in different languages so no one was likely to check them. And it was called Lying for the Lord. Which is so weird. I mean, it means you have a God who’s fundamentally interested in helping people be like God by lying. So yeah, I was twisted in knots when I was little. And then I think it twisted my father into knots as well. And I do have memories and a lot of physical scarring from sexual abuse that sort of blew up into my consciousness right after I had the light experience that came to me in surgery. And it actually told me during the surgery, you’re about to go through something very, very difficult, but I’ve always been with you and I’ll always be with you. Never forget that. And that’s why I decided not to lie anymore. And that’s why when I started having these memories, it didn’t matter because Because connection with that light and never forgetting it was the realest, maybe the only absolutely true thing that had ever happened to me. And I was not leaving again.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Abuse at the hands of your father.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yes. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 And you remembered that at 28 years old.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You recalled it at 28 years old.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Well, it sort of exploded into my mind. They’re called intrusive flashbacks. I’d had a lot of symptoms of PTSD my whole life without knowing it. But my oldest child got to be the age I was when the abuse started occurring, five years old. And she looked just like me at that age. Every time I look at her, I would just have these incredibly violent It’s not like a memory. It’s like it’s happening. It’s like You’re completely overwhelmed by it For a period of time and it was it was extraordinarily hard. I’m not gonna lie It was bad and I called my mother and she said well, yes, that’s what happened. I was like, oh What? You agree with me?” And she said, why shouldn’t I? I know him better than you. And I said, okay, so like, what do I do? She said, well, obviously, you have to protect the church.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 You called your mother to tell her you’d been sexually abused, and you realized, and she said, yes, she knows.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Well, she called me and said, what’s going on? Why are you not visiting us? And I said, all right. I had taken a vow not to lie, so I told her the truth, expecting her to go into a rage or something. And she said, well, yeah, that’s how it is.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

She said, well, yeah, that’s how it is?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, I believe you. That sounds right. That tracks.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

How did it track? What did she know?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

She said, I know him better than you do. And I said, I don’t remember. This was 30 years ago. But I said, he’s really, he’s not an honest man. And she said, no, he’s not honest. And then she said, you better come and make him a cake, which is It’s weird, frankly, to say, yes, I believe you were raped by your father at the age of five. And by the way, the surgery I was in when I had the light experience was surgery to correct some of the scar tissue left by the abuse. It had ripped internally, and I was bleeding internally. And they just found all this scar tissue, where it probably shouldn’t have been. And so for a mother to say, oh yeah, I completely believe that’s true, and what I think you should do about it is to make your perpetrator a cake, kind of sums up the way I was raised. And I just, I tried. I made the cake. I went down, I served the cake, and then I just couldn’t go back. I just couldn’t.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Did you confront him?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I did, yeah. I confronted him at first, and then years later, 10 years later or so when he was 90, 91, I was born when he was 52. I wanted to meet with him after I’d forgiven him to tell him that I’d forgiven him so that he would not have to carry that because he was a very, very miserable, strange, disassociated human being, like really, really weird. He was brilliant, but very, very broken. And I think he had to choose between his entire sense of reality and his religion, and he chose the religion. And he chose the job of talking other people into believing the religion. And I think it just completely broke him. And that plus he was in World War II and saw a lot of action there. And it was, I forgive him, you know. By the way, anyone listening to this, you do not have to forgive your perpetrator. Find a way to be in your own truth, in your own integrity. You will heal. You will be happier. Then you will notice that there is no more anything to forgive. You’re done.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Did he acknowledge that he had done it?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

No. It’s very strange about it, though. He didn’t say, I never did that. He said, oh, but that was the evil one, meaning the devil. And that was my family’s story, was that I’d been sexually assaulted by the devil as a child. And that’s why I had scars and so on. And so he said, yeah, that was the evil one, I think meaning the devil, but maybe he meant part of him that was evil. He never really talked to me my whole life. We never had like conversations. He would switch languages. He would literally physically run away from me. It was very, very strange. Yeah, it wasn’t a normal childhood or adulthood.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And after that phone call with your mother where you confronted her about it and she said, that sounds about right, I read that she then denied it after that.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Oh, she totally retracted it, yeah. I mean, she had to live with him and she couldn’t very well, like, agree with me in his presence. So when I asked her, I met with both of them in my therapist’s office, and I said, why did you tell me that you agreed with me and that it made sense to you? And she said, oh, I just assumed you were joking, which was like, nah, that, no.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 So… Did she ever admit that she had said that?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

No, she never did. I never saw her again. And, but actually I have to say, if I had to, as a child, if I had to choose one of my parents to be around, it would have been my father because my mother was just a big ball of misery and rage. And I never once remember feeling safe around her.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Why?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

She, I had the distinct impression she hated me. Really? Yeah, because Mormons believe that children choose to be born to specific parents. And so, and she had had five children and one stillbirth, and her body was over it, and she was done, and she was sick and depressed and miserable. And then she had three more children. I was seventh of the eight surviving children. And the last four of us, she was really angry that we had forced ourselves upon her. She did not want us. And she was angry because we had been born.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And she was depressed, right? I was reading through your story about how she spent a lot of time in bed, upset, crying.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, like all the time. I had a weird privilege of watching her funeral on, what do they call it, closed circuit TV during the pandemic or just after. One of my sisters had gotten back in touch with me after 30 years of no contact. It was the strangest thing, because I was going to go do something that day, and then I thought, no, I’ve got to go lie down in bed, which I don’t do. And then I’ve got to watch TV, which I never do during the day. And then I got a text from my sister saying, our mom’s funeral is on TV right now. at this link. So I sat there and I watched it, and it was quite validating. One of my brothers got up and started out by saying, if you came here expecting to hear stories of motherly love, you are at the wrong funeral. Yeah, and my siblings said things like, it’s not so much that she was depressed, it was kind of like depression is who she was. I feel tremendous sadness for my mother, tremendous compassion and empathy. To the point, I mean, heartbroken about the life she lived and the lives that many other women live, sort of in crazy systems, feeling they have no power. It just destroyed me to feel how much pain she was in. But yeah, she didn’t like me.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Did you ever figure out why your parents were the way that they were outside of the influence of the religion? Was there anything that happened to them?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Oh yeah, tons of things. They were, my grandmother, my mother’s mother, I think was a complete psychopath. She was pro-Nazi in World War II. What? Who does that? She was Swedish and she just thought that was the right thing to do.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Was there a suspicion that your dad was abused?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Oh, he was definitely abused by his mother.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

He was sexually abused by his mother?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yes, yes. And that was known. My mother had told me this before. Yeah, she would do horrible things. She would put, she would wound him and put bee venom on his genitals and be very sexual toward him. I mean, it was a mess. It was horrible.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

The things that happened to you at that age, they left their fingerprints on you as you went through your teen years.

SPEAKER_04:

Oh, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I was listening to an interview you did where you were describing being I think 17, 18 years old and you were thinking about ending your own life?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Oh, constantly.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Constantly?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah. Like, it was a daily struggle not to.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Through what period of your life?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I would say about 16, well, it started right around 13, but by the time I was 16, it was pretty constant. 17, 18, 19, it was all I could do to not commit suicide. And then, It kind of went to a level of, like, I can hang on during my 20s. But I think I was 32 the day I realized, it was the first day I remembered that I hadn’t wanted to kill myself. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Why? Why do you think that was so present in your life, those thoughts?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Because I was in tremendous amounts of physical and psychological pain.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And are the two linked?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

They were for me. Yeah, they were very much. Psychogenic pain, you know, the body mind interface is not, there’s not much separation. And for me, one of the things I talked about in the way of integrity is that when we lie, our bodies get very weak. So like I could do a simple little hokey test with you where I could, oh, you want to do it? Okay. So stick your arm out and hold it up. Don’t let me push it down. Okay. Now, I want you to do that while lying, and the lie I’d like you to say is, I love to vomit.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Okay. I love to vomit.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Say it holding your arm up.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Say it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I love to vomit. Why? That’s so weird.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Now say, I love fresh air.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I love fresh, I love fresh air.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I’m trying my very hard. Say it again.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I love fresh air.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

 Now say I love to vomit.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I love to vomit. Why is that? That’s so strange.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

This is why polygraph machines work on everybody with psychopaths.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Just for people that couldn’t see that because they were listening, when… I don’t know if I’ve just been like messed with in some way, but when I said I love to vomit, she could push my hand down. But when I said I love fresh air, she couldn’t push my hand down. And she was trying both times, she was pushing hard both times. And I would think that I’d be able to resist both forces. But when I said I love to vomit, it was like, the only way I can describe it was, I wasn’t actually connected to my strength. Yeah, exactly. It was like I was inside my head so I couldn’t also at the same time think about you, you’re about to push me. Right. It was like there was two different systems.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yes, because the body lives in reality. The body is honest. Only the mind and only the verbal mind can lie to us and tell us things that we can believe even though they’re not true. So, I love to vomit is a statement that says it’s okay for me to feel horrible. But a smaller version of this is I often speak to groups, and often they’re in like hotel ballrooms or in auditoriums. And I’ll stop right in the middle of the speech and say, apropos of nothing, is everyone comfortable? And they’ll say, yes. No, really, truly, is everyone? Are you genuinely comfortable? Are you really comfortable? And they say, yes, go on with your speech. And then I say, so how many of you, if you were sitting at home alone, if you were at home alone right now, how many of you would be in exactly the position you’re in at this moment? And nobody raises a hand. And then I say, why not? And they have to sit and think for a long time before someone finally says, I’m not completely comfortable this way. And I would say, well, that’s OK, because humans can tolerate a lot of suffering. And this is mild. What concerns me and should concern you is that 30 seconds ago, you swore to me in broad daylight that you were absolutely comfortable, while you knew you weren’t. Your body knew you weren’t comfortable, and your mind was doing this little trick where it goes very quickly through this, okay, in order to listen to speeches, we sit in uncomfortable positions, and that’s okay because it’s worth the benefit we get out of it. So given that, I am tolerably comfortable. But all you think is, I’m comfortable. when you’re not comfortable. So people come to me and they’re in jobs where they’re not comfortable, in relationships where they’re like sometimes in intense suffering, in religions where they’re not comfortable, in all kinds of places. And they think they’re comfortable, but they’re getting sick. They’re getting physically sick or they’re getting addicted to a substance because they’re trying to numb the discomfort they won’t acknowledge. And so pretty much all I do is help people get in touch with a really, really benevolent friend called suffering. When you know what makes you suffer, you’re getting accurate information from your entire neurological system about what’s working for you and what isn’t and what would be better, what would be more comfortable, just a little bit. And if you keep correcting, I call them one degree turns, I would be a little more comfortable doing this. So I did it like run off a cliff method. Don’t do it my way. Do the one degree turns. If you’re in an airplane and it turns one degree north every half hour, over 10,000 miles, you won’t even notice you’re turning, but you’ll be in a completely different place. And that’s just noticing. Oh, this isn’t very comfortable for me. I would rather do this. You know, my girlfriend is anxious. I could break my back trying to figure out what’s going on and getting her enough presents to make her happy. Or I could go in the other room, sit down, be gentle with myself, maybe do a little writing about how I feel. That would be a little more comfortable.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 It almost feels like we’ve been trained not to listen to how we feel.

None:

100%.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

100%. As Sir Ken Robinson says, you know, we’re trained to think of our bodies as mechanisms that take our heads to meetings. You know, that the meetings are all important and our heads are all important and all of the rest of our evolution is meaningless to us. That’s a very left hemisphere dominated way of thinking. And that’s why Ian McGilchrist says we live like people with right hemisphere strokes. We’re not even in our bodies. I think maybe you are more than most people. The way you talk about it and the way you’ve made decisions really, it speaks to me of a person who finds what’s right for him. Very, with a lot of integrity.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah, well, I think, I think, yeah, one of the things I, the reason I say that is because I’ve been saying on stage and I wanted to see if you thought it was true, this idea, because people ask me all the time, they ask me about meaning and purpose and what decision they should make and should they quit their job or quit the relationship. And my response for the last, I’d say, 12 months has just been to try and impress upon them that they were born with this thing inside them, which is how you feel. and you’ve learned not to listen to it because your mother’s opinion of which university you go to has like superseded it and Instagram has. But I know it’s there because I know like evolutionarily you wouldn’t be here if your body didn’t have signals to tell you to run, to tell you to be scared, to tell you to move away from this person. So I know it’s there but you just probably tuned it out.

SPEAKER_03:

 Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And I say that to people and I’ve almost never asked them if that resonated with them, but I’ve just been saying it for a while. So I don’t even know if it’s like true, but it’s just how I experience life. I suspect it does. Because my decision, like the reason why I’m sat here now is because of just, I quit a lot of stuff.

SPEAKER_04:

 Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So like, and I quit, people go, you’re so young. It’s like, actually, it’s not that I made great decisions. It’s just, I think the skill of quitting was one that just came naturally to me. So like, I don’t like being at school. I stopped going. I don’t like university. I left after the first lecture. I started a business, did it for two years, quit that business out of the blue, start another business, did that one for six, seven years, quit that one out of the blue. I love it. And, um, it’s, it was all like, I didn’t need to have a place to go to. I didn’t need to have like a better option. It was just, this doesn’t feel good.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

 I love that.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

But that’s kind of running off the cliff.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, it is a bit. And the thing is, the costs are high and the rewards are high. If you go gradually, you’re going to get a smaller amount of gain by the year. If you run off a cliff, you can have a really rough ride, but you might come out with a lot of positives. And your skill of quitting, it reminds me If people come to me, I try to give them all the value in one session. Like, hear this and go away. All right, take notes. If you don’t really want to do something, and you don’t really have to do something, don’t do it. Now, give me my money and go. Because that’s the whole thing. If you don’t want to do something and you don’t have to do it, don’t do it. And that’s a really quick way to find out what you do want.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What if you don’t want to do it, but there’s something telling you that you have to? So it could be like a horrible work meeting or that event you’ve been invited to with that person, which you don’t particularly like anyway, that baby shower you don’t want to go to.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

So you have to get more and more attentive to what’s going on inside. And I think some form of meditation, whether it’s expressive writing or painting or just sitting still, is very helpful at noticing these fine details. And I’m kind of joking when I say if you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to do it, don’t do it. But ultimately, that’s true. And the way you decide, there are things that you don’t want to do, but you actually do have to do them. Not because people want you to, but because you have to do them. And the way I experienced that, I like to describe it with something the Buddha used to say a lot. And that was, wherever you find a body of water, You can know if it’s the sea because the sea always tastes of salt. And wherever you find enlightenment, awakening, your own truth, your path, you can always recognize it no matter what form it takes because enlightenment always tastes of freedom. He did not say happiness. He did not say benefit. He did not say, you know, mania, true love. He said freedom. And when you know, like, I did not want to meet with my parents, for example, in my therapist’s office. I was terrified of both of them and of the whole community. My therapist could have been run out of business in the town we lived in. But if I had not done it, I would not have been as free. So I had to do it. But that’s a really different I have to do it than my mother really, really would be happier if I became a doctor.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Freedom.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What is freedom in that definition of the word?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

When I asked you what your body felt when you started paying attention to it and you said it relaxed. It’s a sense of, I also mentioned flow, which is the sense of being completely almost the sense of self-disappearing and being in complete harmony with something that is moving through the world. My undergraduate degree is in Chinese and so I know I found out about Taoism earlier in my life and it’s not really a religion the way we would think of it. It’s the sense that there is an energy that flows through nature and that if you don’t fight it you will You will live the life you were meant to live. And the sense of letting go of everything else, except letting that thing work with you and through you, that to me is freedom.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

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DR. MARTHA BECK:

I just went back for the first time in years. I had a gig in Boston, so I went back to Cambridge, which is next to it, and I went with my wife, something that couldn’t have happened when I was 17. I had the sense of tapping my younger self on the shoulder and saying, I am from your future, and I can tell you with 100% certainty that it is possible for you to live in a state of almost continuous joy and that you can get there without dying. You can get there. In fact, your job in this world is to find a way to live in a state of continuous joy without dying.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And if she turned to you and said, Dr. Martha Beck, what is step one? What would you say to her?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I would say, sit down with yourself and find a part of you that can say to your suffering, which is huge, I love you. It’ll be okay. I’m right here. And that’s something, I call it kind internal self-talk. And the acronym is KIST. And I didn’t tell anyone about it for decades because it’s so corny sounding. But that one thing in Tibetan Buddhism, they might call it the basis of loving kindness. For years sometimes, the monks who are trained there and the nuns will sit in meditation for days and days and do nothing but offer kindness to themselves.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Themselves?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, it has to start that way. So you sit with your miserable self and you say, I would sit with her and I would say, may you be well, may you be happy. May you be free from suffering. May you feel safe and protected. May you live with ease. And as I offer her those wishes, I become the part of myself that is real. Because the suffering is part of the dream world. And the reality is infinitely loving. and intelligent beyond, so far beyond our silly monkey minds. And we can align ourselves with that. And it’s like a lifeline that I could throw my younger self. Sometimes I wonder if I did.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

The suffering is part of the dream world.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Oh yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 When you say that, are you referring to the anxiety spiral and those kinds of things?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Oh yeah, but also the whole thing about we’re all going to die and everything’s awful and what point is there to it anyway? You know, suffering is certain and death is certain. Why don’t we just get off the bus now? That kind of thing. That’s the dream. Everybody who’s had the awakening experience, Dante said it, Shakespeare said it, they’re like, we are such stuff as dreams are made of. Dante, in the last part of the Divine Comedy, which I believe is his description of his own enlightenment, He looks back at the earth once he’s learned to love himself, and he calls it the little threshing floor that so incites our savagery. It’s nothing compared—now he’s with the source of love in paradise. And he describes it as a rose unfolding and unfolding and producing light, and in Asia It’s a lotus, same thing, a many-petaled flower that keeps opening and opening. Very similar imagery. And that’s, I kind of feel that way. When you mentioned the part of me that used to be so unhappy, it’s like, oh yeah. Yeah, she thought that was real. But I haven’t, and it is real, the way a video game is real. It’s something that I believe our consciousness projects, this life of misery and even materiality. Matter is not—consciousness is not made by matter. Matter is made by consciousness, and consciousness is primary. And nobody has the vaguest clue what consciousness actually is, but we have it, so it must exist. And that was what Descartes said. He actually—we say—he said, cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am. He actually said, I don’t know anything. But I doubt everything, and the fact that I doubt means that I’m thinking, so I must exist. He said, dubito cogito ergo sum. I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am. So when you get to this place where you’re willing to let your mind go wide open, not closed around, oh, there’s an afterlife where we sit on clouds, and no, I have no idea what happens when we die. But my mind is open. And the minds we are taught to have by this culture are closed like fists, whether it’s around a religion or a sort of atheistic science. Because real science has to be open to the mystery. People experience it. You can’t just rule that out. So, yeah, I think that what we’re experiencing is a real projection of consciousness, but I think consciousness is something much vaster and more infinite and enduring than matter.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

One of the things you talked about was when you saw the light during that surgery. Like, when people hear you say you saw a light during surgery, people think, well, you’re on morphine or something.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Were you on morphine?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I don’t remember exactly which anesthesia they used, but I asked. So I’m in surgery. They’re operating on me. I look around. I sit up, and then I think, why am I sitting up? I’m having surgery. I look down. There’s my body. They’re operating on it. I was like, this is weird. So I lay back down, and there were bright surgical lights. And the light that appeared between them was just small at first. like a golf ball. And it was, they tell us we only see a trillionth of the available light spectrum. We only see a trillionth of the colors that we could that exist. And I think I could see trillions more colors than I’d ever seen before. And it was It was absolutely mesmerizing. You could not, you would never want to look away from it. And then it got bigger, in my case, and it touched my body and this feeling of absolute exquisite joy just coursed through me. And it was the realest thing I’d ever seen, so much realer than the body that was being operated on. And it was laughing with joy, and I was laughing with joy. And I started to cry because I was, it was pure relief, pure happiness. And the surgeons noticed tears coming out of my eyes, and they thought I could feel the surgery and that the anesthesia wasn’t strong enough. So they were like, oh my god, oh my god, she’s feeling this. And the anesthesiologist was freaked out. And then I really didn’t notice the rest because I was busy with other things. But the moment I woke up, I was like, bring me the anesthesiologist, please. Actually, I couldn’t stop crying for hours because I loved everyone so much. And I was just like, everybody that was there, there was a janitor. I was like, I love you so much. So they brought me the anesthesiologist, and he seemed terrified, which I didn’t understand. Now I do. He was afraid that he’d done something wrong. So I said, what did you give me? What are the side effects? What happens to people under this surgery? What goes on? And he said, just tell me what happened. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, I was going to give you more medication. And then a voice said, don’t do that. She’s crying because she’s happy. And he said, I just listened to it, and I don’t know why. And he was like, did I do the right thing? And so I told him a little bit. It was still, I never thought I’d tell anyone this story. I have ended up telling it over and over. And the memory of it never fades at all. It’s not like a typical memory. And he said, do you know how many times this has happened to me in 33 years of giving people anesthesia? I said, how many? And he said, once. And then he gave me a kiss on the forehead and went away. So I don’t think it was a drug effect.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Why truth emerged from that? Because you say, from what I’ve understood, that you vowed not to lie.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah. In any way. Like, not with my actions, not with even my facial expressions. And the reason was I had heard the truth will set you free. I had studied so many wisdom traditions, looking everywhere for a reason not to commit suicide. I mean, I had really looked. I knew a lot of religious texts, philosophical texts. I had done my homework. And over and over and over and over it said, the truth will set you free. I was like, in Mormonism they said the truth is what we’ve written down here and it was bogus and phony and I was like, no. But the light was far more true than anything else I’d ever experienced. It was far more real. So I was like, okay, if truth takes me there, and it told me, not verbally, but it said, look, you’ve been thinking that you could kill yourself and feel better. And I am telling you that you are meant to learn to feel this way, the way you feel with me now. when you’re alive, always. So go and do that. And what I really did was I made, it wasn’t even a choice. It was a, ooh, it was an absolute obsession. I would not live in such a way that I was not conscious of the presence of that light. And that meant every time I lied, you felt how weak you got when you just said something that wasn’t true. I felt it withdraw. Or myself, you can’t withdraw from it. It’s everywhere, I believe. But I felt myself less conscious of it. And I was like, okay, that’s not gonna work. So I decided what I’m gonna do is I’m just gonna say what’s real, do what’s real. If a thought comes in that feels like it’s pulling me away from that light, I will question that thought. It can’t be real. It doesn’t set me free. Bring me into that. I’m going to just investigate everything until I find what feels truest to me. Knowing, by the way, that, as one of my favorite Indian sages says, the only true statement the mind can make is, I do not know. Because we could be dreaming all this. We could be fed misinformation. We could be deep fake. I don’t know anything. I mean, with this little monkey brain. I don’t know. But in Asia, they have this concept of don’t know mind, where the mind is wide open and not clenched around anything. And then you can experience a sort of, it’s the humility of surrendering your primacy, the primacy of human intelligence, to something so much bigger. And still being human and having that be a good thing, but just not mistaking it for godhood.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Hmm. As part of you stepping in, when you step into your truth, so the body knows, from what you said, the body lives in a better state, a less anxious state, I imagine.

SPEAKER_03:

Oh, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You know what it is? When people think about stepping into their truth, the reason they probably don’t is because there’s consequence to that, or at least there’s a short-term apparent consequence. I might lose my job. When people think of truth, they think of speaking your mind. In the modern world, you speak your mind, you might lose everything.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

You ask yourself, is it kind? Is it true? Is it necessary? So you don’t say every little thing that crosses your mind, and you don’t do it in ways that are unkind. But yes, you may feel that, you know, I felt I had to formally leave Mormonism, which to my entire community of childhood and young adulthood was the sin worse than murder. I was going to outer darkness. I used to walk down the street once I’d done this, and people would physically turn their backs. Friends, right? But I had to. So that was a place where, yes, there was a huge consequence, and there will be. I sort of position it as your true nature versus culture, and by culture I mean anything from a couple’s culture, to a family culture, to a religious, to an ethnic, national, whatever. If you serve your true nature, there will come a time when you become counter-cultural. You do something that is not what your parents approved of, or it’s not what your religion taught.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

How do you know what your true nature is? Is there such an exercise one can go through to figure it out?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

 Yeah, the absence of all suffering, psychological suffering.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Okay, so the absence of all psychological suffering is my true nature. Yeah. So is my psychological suffering caused by being not in my true nature?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, it’s caused by innocently believing lies you were taught by one of two forces. Socialization or trauma? Trauma tells you, oh my God, everything’s dangerous all the time, and it gets lodged in the brain. And socialization says things like, you’re not good enough, you should try harder, that was a bad choice, you’ve got to please your mother, all kinds of things. We all have them. And if you want to please your mother and you have that, it’s great. If your true nature and your culture go together, there’s no conflict. Like, I loved school. My true nature fit that culture. But then my oldest child, who’s brilliant, it did not fit that child’s culture. And yet I forced my kid to go through school. And we’ve talked about a lot since. I wish I hadn’t done that. I was young. I had my kids young. And I forced my child to conform with a culture that went against her true nature. And it caused a lot of suffering. Do you suffer? Oh, still, yeah, I was really, really kind of, I was deeply sad after the last American election. Deeply sad, but never afraid anymore. Not anxious. And even, you know, the grieving process, when you lose someone, you’re gonna grieve deeply. And that’s a sequence of, you know, denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, there’s kind of They put them in a list, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross put them in a list of things you experience when you lose someone or you’re going to die. It’s actually more like being in a cement mixer. It just all happens at once. But I actually wouldn’t count that as suffering. It is a process. A Peruvian shaman once told me, compassion is the evolution of consciousness in the healing of trauma, and the healing of trauma is the grieving process. So if you’re grieving, I would sit with you and I would bring you, you know, warm drinks and put a blanket around you and I would cry with you and feel with you and love you. But that’s not the same to me as psychological suffering, which is that anguished feeling of, I just don’t want to be here. This is bad.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 As part of you stepping into your truth, you realised that the relationship you were in with your husband at the time was not the relationship you wanted.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

No. He was gay and trying so hard not to be gay. And he was Mormon, so it was very convenient for me because I was in love with him, very much in love. And I think he really, really loved me, too. I know he did. We got married when I was 20. We were delivered by the same obstetrician. Like, we had a very similar life path. And then we both went to Harvard, which was very unusual for people from our hometown. So we had so much in common and we were best friends and loved each other deeply. And he was trying desperately not to be gay. I wasn’t conscious of being gay because I wasn’t conscious of anything much. I was so disassociated because of sexual abuse that I just didn’t know where I stood. He just made me feel safe. And I loved that. But then when we started questioning Mormonism and the sexual abuse came up and everything, I was just—and even before that, it was really obvious that I said—when I was pregnant with my son, I started having psychic experiences. I’m sorry, they just happened. I had to allow them. getting my doctorate at Harvard, and now I was having psychic flashes. What do you do with that? You either throw it away, which means throwing away the evidence, the data, or you blow your mind open. And one of the things that happened was I started to be able to see what was happening with people I loved when I wasn’t there, just in flashes, but very verifiable, I could call them and do it. And when that would happen, my husband was traveling a lot. I just knew he was gay and I knew that’s what was right for him and that his joy was part of homosexuality. And he was still quite religious and wanted to be a good boy the way he’d been taught to be. And so I think he went through a lot of anguish. I know he did. We talked about it. And it wasn’t until we both left the church that I said, you know, I’m gay, you’re gay, why don’t we just be gay? And so he started dating men and I fell in love with a woman and I’m still with her. And eight years ago, As I said, you go into countercultural things when you follow your truth. Another woman who was visiting us at the place where we were living, the three of us started hanging out and we could not stop hanging out with each other and it’s very weird for three people to all fall in love with each other. But that’s what happened eight years ago and it was so It’s a good thing we were living out in the forest, because the cultural pressures against that are huge. But we were living in a national forest. There were no people around. And it was just like, well, OK, then. This feels awesome. And eight, nine years later, it still feels awesome.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

There really is something to that. There really is something to this idea that when you follow your truth, you’ll live a counter-cultural life. Yeah.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Do you know how embarrassing it is for me to sit and tell people, not only am I gay, but I have two partners.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I don’t think it’s embarrassing. I’ve got friends that, I’ve got a good friend of mine that is married, but also in love with another couple. So they’re like a four and they like raise the kids together and stuff. Yeah. I mean, there’s nothing it’s, it’s, this sounds so strange to say, but for me, to me, it’s actually quite inspiring because it must take a lot of something to accept that people are going to be judgmental and to do it anyway. So I’m like, oh God, I wish I had the, like, if that’s how I felt, would I be the type of person that would be strong enough to follow that feeling? If that’s like how I felt, or would I just bat the feeling away? I actually think I’d bat the feeling away and I don’t like that about myself because of consequence. And the consequence for me would be, in my head, it would be quite grave.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

 Yeah, because you’re a public figure.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah, so it’s going to be written about everywhere and people are going to tweet me all day saying, oh, Steve’s dating five people or whatever.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Oh, when this happened, when I realized, when the three of us realized we were actually, for several weeks we were like, this is normal, right? It’s very normal for three people to sit very close together on the same couch and talk for hours. And then finally I was like, oh my God, I’m in love with both of you. And they were like, yeah, we’re all in love with both of each other. And I said, it’s fine for you two. I’m on an integrity cleanse and I have to tell the truth all the time to a lot of people. But it was like being hit by a train, the joy that came with that. I remember Karen, my original partner, who’d been with me for like 22 years at the time, she came to me and she sat me down and she said, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Rowan.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 Who’s this other lady?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, this writer from Australia who had come to do some work in the US. And she was staying with us for a while, but not with us, with some other people on a neighboring property. And Karen said, yeah, we’ve been hanging out and I just, I’m having very, very strong feelings. It’s kind of like a fire hose of love, and I don’t know if it’s like maybe spiritual. And I remember just smiling at her the way you do with your friends when they are in love and going, you’re in love with her. And I looked inside myself for Any fear, any anger, any jealousy, nothing. It was like an explosion of pure joy, just joy beyond joy beyond joy. And I was like, this is amazing. Does she feel the same way about you? Bring her. Tell her to come here. Let’s all get to know each other. This is awesome. And I’ll move into the guest room, and you guys can have the master bedroom. And there will be more love in this house. And that’s just how it felt. And that’s how it’s felt to me ever since. And that’s my alternative to feeling suicidal. Ro calls it feeling good by looking weird.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And is that, it’s been how many years now? Four years, did you say? Eight. Eight years, wow. Is it difficult?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

It’s like now I just think about how do couples do it and it’s like a two-legged stool. How would that even work? Like you need the balance of three. Like if somebody gets in an argument, who’s the referee? And like how do you even do that with two people? So it very quickly, it felt so natural. You have to communicate a lot and there is, one of the things is none of us is capable of lying. We just, we’re out of practice. I don’t think either of them ever had a tendency to lie to themselves or anyone else. So you’re always telling each other the truth and there’s not, there’s a weird kind of harmony among people who are forming community with total authenticity and openness.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

We talked earlier on about meaning and purpose. You said the billionaires when they come to you, but really anyone that comes to you is all trying to figure out their path in life, their meaning, their purpose. It’s a big, big question. What are the lies we’re sold about finding our purpose? Because I have a lot of kids in my DMs that DM me and say, Steve, I can’t find my passion or I can’t find my purpose or I can’t, and I never really know what to say to them.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I think one thing I wrote in one of my books a long time ago was that I realized this when I was pregnant with my son and I realized he would have Down syndrome and be intellectually delayed. And I thought, what is the meaning of his life? What is the purpose of his life? And then somehow I realized because of my love for him, that the meaning of life is not what happens to people. The meaning of life, your purpose in life, is what happens between people. So it’s in the meeting. You have a home in South Africa, so you know about Ubuntu, yeah?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I bought the house this year, so I’ve been working a lot, and it’s only really at the end of the year that I get to go there, so I don’t really know South Africa well yet.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Well, the concept of Ubuntu, I think, is dominant throughout a lot of Africa. And there’s no English translation. And it is completely the opposite of our cultural individualism. And the meaning of Ubuntu is basically, I am me because we are us. I am fundamentally different because I know you. and you matter to me. And I used to be confused in South Africa because I knew there were a lot of AIDS orphans, and I never saw them on the streets or anything. And then I realized that Ubuntu is a real practical thing there, and that the children who are left are absorbed into community by people who may have nothing except Ubuntu. And Ubuntu, There’s a Chinese proverb that says, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. So we’ve been going really fast in this culture, fast toward our own destruction. Because I am because we are is the closest thing you can say to it. But conceptually, it means the space between us. So that’s another thing you can do, an exercise you can do to get into your right hemisphere. So we’re looking at each other. But if you look, without moving your eyes, look at the distance between us. Look at the openness between us. Do you feel how it changes your gaze? Yeah. How it changes your heartbeat? This is how people like Carl Jung, the psychologist, had a dear friend who was a Pueblo Indian, and he said, what do you really think of us Anglos? And he said, we think you’re insane. And he said, why? And this guy’s name was Chief Mountain Lake. He said, you’re always staring at things, and yet you never see each other. You never see what’s between you. and our eyes are soft and yours are hard. And when you and I just did that, my whole body went into a state of, it’s like the light, you know? It’s like that light is more, I’m more conscious of it when I’m looking at the space between us and I feel you. I don’t just see you.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I felt like my heart rate dropped.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, so did mine.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

That’s kind of how I just felt really calm. Yeah. And I was thinking about, I was trying to look at the space in between. Yeah.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

So I’m trying right now to start building communities of Ubuntu. I started one online just to foster people’s creativity and help them move into this state of being. And it’s called Wilder because when we were wilder, that’s how we looked at each other. That’s how your dog and your cat look at you. That’s why we love being with them because they look at us and they look at the space between us and their eyes are soft. And if there’s a fly that goes by, they’ll get sharp. And that’s the hunting instinct. But then when they’re looking at something they love, they’re looking at the whole space and feeling each other.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So if someone sends me a DM and says, I can’t find my purpose in life, what do you suggest I respond?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I’d say, first of all, sit down and offer love to the part of you that’s in so much stress because you can’t find your purpose. That’s a horrible feeling. You know your purpose, but you can’t find it because it’s being drowned out by what you’ve been taught. And that hurts. And I’m really sorry because I know that pain. Go and sit down or find a friend, find someone trustworthy, find community, and tell them what Mary Oliver says, tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. And she talks about the wild geese announcing your place in the family of things. When you can communicate your despair and feel heard and feel connected, And what happens between people will fill in the gaps in your knowledge and you’ll realize, ah, my purpose is where my deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. And I can feel that when I love. And love is not like goopy-gippy.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

It’s my deep gladness.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, that’s from Fred Boettner, who was a theologian, German theologian. He said, your mission in life is where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. So what you just described, a young person reaching out to you and saying, what is my purpose, and you are asking yourself, what do I say? So you’re looking at the relationship between this young person and you, and you are in Ubuntu. You’re looking at the space between you, and your deep gladness is to heal the scars and wounds in this person you’ve never met, but who is deeply hungry for something the culture is not giving him or her or them. that’s your deep gladness and their deep hunger. And you’ve been serving that really well, like so much better than most people I’ve met in my life.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And by deep gladness, how I interpreted that was the thing that makes me happy or the thing that makes me feel good?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, that’s kind of, People could take that a number of different ways. This is deep gladness. It’s something you feel in your viscera. It’s something, it’s like the most, here’s another way to get into it. Imagine a time when you were with a creature you loved, and it’s probably easier if it was an animal than if it was a person. If it was a person, it has to be a baby. So somebody who couldn’t talk. My son can’t really talk so I get this with him a lot. And remember a time when you relaxed completely into the presence of this other being and the cat was purring on your chest or the dog had his head on your lap and there was no pressure to do anything. You’re being human. with this other being in a space that you have created that we’ve all created with our consciousness for the joy of its beauty and its darkness and its light and there’s just Psalm 46, Eckhart Tolle says, it says the name of God like six different ways. Be still and know that I am God. Be is a name for God. Stillness is a name for God. Know is a name for God. I am is a name for God. And God is a name for God. And when you When you feel all of that as what you fundamentally are, and it’s connecting with another person, the gladness doesn’t even touch it. No word can touch it. But it’s two aspects of a consciousness that thought they were separate joining hands and meeting each other again. And the reunion is overwhelmingly Beautiful. Relief. Joy. Gladness. Light. All of it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

How has the internet messed this all up?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

It’s messed it up and it’s made it possible. It’s messed it up horribly by feeding on our culture’s obsession with those left hemisphere, what bleeds leads, right? We have that negativity bias. And what people want to do is monetize their position on the internet. And the best way to monetize your position is to get the lion’s share of attention. And whatever gets the lion’s share of attention is a cobra versus a puppy. There’s a psychological and monetary pressure always pushing the internet to frighten us more, or to make us more angry at each other, to divide and polarize us. It’s like this left hemisphere weapon that has just gone berserk. And so like in America, there are these pockets of such extremely polarized political belief systems that all have their own information sets, and I don’t know what the hell’s true, but they all believe absolutely the way the left hemisphere believes. There’s no open mind. On the other hand, You know, when the brain wakes up, when it has the awakening experience, the fruit ripens and ripens and then it falls. Okay, so that, I think, may be this epigenetic switch going on in the brain and it flashes to the whole brain and changes everything. And I like to think of fractals, the different units of nature that tend to reproduce at larger sizes. Like a twig is like a branch is like the trunk of a tree. So our brains may be like us. Our neocortex is very thin. It’s just this thin surface of cells around the surface of the brain. Very, very interactive. And we are kind of like that. We’re running around the surface of a sphere being very, very interactive and teaching each other ideas. And if just one person awakens, you know, Buddha was awake. Jesus was awake. And Buddha never tried to save anybody but himself. You know? But other minds caught that configuration. They switched on. And because we have the internet, What used to take a whole national government to do, to communicate with everyone in the world, could happen from, like, a poor kid in Malawi who suddenly awakened and was able to put that into a message. Or, you know, Malala Yousaf. Like, everyone knows what this 15-year-old girl went through. Even though the information would have been suppressed by the Taliban if they could have done it, but they can’t do it anymore. So one awakened person now has the potential to touch the lives of literally everyone virtually for free.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Do you interact with the internet much?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I do. And I know that I am shaping an algorithm that is totally unrealistic because my world online is primarily otters. Otters. I loves me an otter. But, like, it’s all the examples of love and joy that occur between people. And then I look at the headlines and I’m like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, when I first went to Africa, I’d heard, it’s the dark continent, everything is bad. Ebola, war, the Congo, all these terrible things, the heart of darkness. And then I went there and realized that for every horrible thing that legitimately does happen in that place, there are maybe a thousand acts of completely selfless love. I would walk around, every time I go there, I look at the people who have been colonized, you know, the original people, and I think, I’m white, If I were you, I’d be really mad at me. Like, why? And yet I was there. My wife had a little girl a few years ago. She’s a bit younger than I am. And she got sick in the airport in Johannesburg, really sick. And she was barfing everywhere. And we were just pushing the stroller from one tourist store. We’d get a bunch of t-shirts, and she’d throw up on that. And we’d put her in another one and throw the first one away. And people came running to us from the different stores. And they were from, you know, there are 11 different national languages there. There were people from different tribal legacies. And instead of running away from a vomiting child, they ran toward us with everything they could find to help. Someone lit a fire and sterilized a spoon. Someone ran down the airport to the only pharmacy to get the right medication and ran back with it. People were holding the vomit-stained clothes. I mean, these are people we had never met. And this was the place I’d been afraid of because I had let myself believe the stories that polarized me and said, oh, that’s a dark, scary place. Every place is dark and scary. And everywhere there are human beings, there is the capacity for Ubuntu. And what there is to love, the part of us that loves is infinitely more powerful than the part of us that doesn’t.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Amen. What is the most important thing in your new book, Beyond Anxiety, Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose, that we haven’t talked about yet?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I would say it’s, I wish I could, I don’t know how to get it, how to say this clearly enough, and I’ve said it here, But what is the most important thing that anyone listening to this, you specifically right now, wherever you are, and I just mentioned Mary Oliver’s The Wild Geese, one of the things she says, no matter who you are, no matter how lonely, no, whoever you are, no matter how lonely, The world offers itself to your imagination. And you are part of the family of things. So whoever hears this, you specifically, in your essence, you are safe. No matter what it looks like, you are fundamentally going to be okay. I promise.

SPEAKER_04:

That’s it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Dr. Martha Beck, we have a closing tradition on the podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they’re leaving the question for. Okay. And the question that has been left for you is… This is a tricky one. And you can interpret this however you wish.

SPEAKER_03:

Okay.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What do you think separates a great story from just a good story? Easy.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

In a good story, bad things happen to good people. In a great story, bad things happen to heroes. Because there’s always conflict and there’s always suffering. And that can be just like, oh, that was awful. But the great stories, the ones we keep telling, are the ones where the person who would be a victim becomes a creator who says, I’m not going to stay in fear. I’m going to make something from this. And they stand up and they go out on an adventure. and what looks like it could have been a tragedy becomes an adventure. That’s what Shakespeare did at the end of his life. I was taught at Harvard that he wrote the four great tragedies where everything ends in horror and annihilation. That was his high point. And then he started writing these romances which are so stupid because they have like magic and forgiveness and happy endings. And I was actually told he did that because he was senile. He was 50, you know? The tragedies are amazing stories, and the romances, those are the great ones as far as I’m concerned, because that’s where the tragedy becomes an adventure that ends well.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

A good story is when bad things happen to good people, but a great story is when bad things happen to heroes.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Heroes. Because it’s what the good people do with that. Do they suffer it, or do they make it the material of invention? Do they let it be a weight of lead, or do they perform an alchemy that turns it into gold? And all the great stories that last forever are the ones about alchemy, where suffering turns to something wonderful.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Is this a choice that we have?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I do believe it is, not always. Like if you’re a little kid or if you’re a young person out there, if you’re a working mom or someone in poverty or someone who’s just had a terminal diagnosis, of course you’re going to feel, you’re not just going to want to jump up and do something heroic. Be kind. Be kind. Be kind. Be kind. Be gentle to yourself. And if you’re gentle for just a while, you’re going to start to say, instead of, what am I going to do about this? You’re going to say, what can I make from this? And that shifts you into the mode of the creative. And as you start to make something of your situation, you become part of the creation. And that’s when you wake up from your nightmare. And to me, that’s the best ending of any story.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You clearly have a great story. Oh, thank you. So do you. Because you are clearly someone that is a good person that bad things happen to. Now you’re a person where bad things have happened to someone that me and many others consider to be a hero. because of all the wonderful things that you’ve done. It’s interesting because I thought I understood the subject matter of anxiety. And I think I was of the mind that it’s something you attack, you throw things at. Much of society says the key to curing anxiety is just you throw pills at it or something else. but you’ve given me a whole new perspective on what it is and also how to navigate in a world that’s increasingly more anxious. And I’m sure you’ve done that for many other people. In a way that’s really, really honest, really rooted in science and really accessible. I hope so. Thank you so much. That’s genuinely the words that I mean. I’m not lying to you. Thank you. I highly recommend anybody who’s resonated with any of this conversation, please go and get this book. It’s fantastic. It has these wonderful areas where you can engage with the book and there’s some sections that you can write in. But it’s just a wonderful book. And I think it’s a wonderful book for anybody that’s struggling. And I say struggling or suffering in all your forms. That’s trying to understand what that means. how to channel it into your own hero’s journey of sorts. So, Dr. Martha Beck, thank you so much. It’s been such an honor and privilege to meet you and I hope we have more conversations in the future.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I hope so. The honor is all mine. Thank you so much.