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- [00:02]
A
I think that we lose the sense of home the moment we come out of the womb. And I think we spend the rest of our lives trying to find it again. When I started writing, I noticed that a lot of my articles and even books would end with the word home, as if that was the ultimate resolution of everything that I was seeking. And I think it gave me this huge, huge hunger for something I had never experienced. That homing instinct, I think, exists within all of us. And the physical environment of the home, I believe, always reflects the inner lives of the people living in the home. So houses became very important to me early, early, early in my life. And I knew that I didn't want the one I was living in. And I knew that it was a very crucial aspect of feeling safe in the world, on the planet.
- [01:01]
B
Hello, welcome to a new episode of Homing with Me, Matt Gibbard. Today's guest is the wonderful Martha Beck. Martha's a sociologist, best selling author, and podcast host who's also been described as the world's leading life coach. She's actually Oprah Winfrey's life coach, believe it or not. And, you know, if it's good enough for Oprah, it's probably good enough for me. Martha grew up in the Mormon community in Utah. Her childhood was marked by profound anxiety and depression, and she's written about being sexually abused by her father. Those experiences led to a lifelong search for safety and what it really means to feel at home. In this episode, Martha tells me why beauty became a lifeline during the darkest periods of her life and how she learned to meditate despite finding it completely unbearable at first. Spoiler alert. She sat in the woods with birdseed all over her body, so the animals came and fed off her. It's pretty extraordinary stuff. Inspired by the ideas in her latest book, which is called Beyond Anxiety, we talk about how play can be a powerful antidote to anxious thinking. She says creativity doesn't just express who we are, it helps us find our way home. This is another pretty powerful story of overcoming adversity. I know we've had a few of those recently, but Martha's absolutely amazing and I think there's a lot we can all learn from her. So here it is, Homing with Martha Beck. Great to meet you, Martha. How are you?
- [02:42]
A
I'm very well. So wonderful to meet you. What a great podcast.
- [02:46]
B
Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. Well, likewise. I'm a big fan and I'm really interested, actually, to sort of look at your work today through the lens of the home, because I think it's kind of fascinating. And so I think the first question that I'd like to ask you, that I often start with because it's quite instructive, is how would you personally define the word home, would you say?
- [03:09]
A
In one word, I would say sanctuary. To broaden that, I'd say it's a sanctuary of peace, beauty, comfort and harmony.
- [03:20]
B
That's lovely. Well, that sounds like it's quite an important thing in your life. But let's go back to your childhood home. First of all. Must be. I know, I know quite. I know, I know. Well, some of the people watching, listening will have come across you and know about your story. Other people won't necessarily. Are you, are you able just to tell us a bit about your childhood home, what the kind of emotional atmosphere of that was, like the context of what, where, how you grew up may be really interesting?
- [03:52]
A
Yeah, well, first of all, it was chaos. I grew up in a home in the heart of Mormonism and my father was a kind of a big wig in the Mormon Church. And this was in the 60s, 70s, and I was the seventh of eight children living in a very small house with a clinically depressed mother. I mean, everybody was clinically depressed. I was, you know, there were all these people crammed into this space and it was just filthy. And I use that word advisedly. I remember learning the word squalor and thinking, oh, this is living in squalor. Quite young, to the point where the house was a source of incredible shame for me and my siblings. And I was actually told they were in their teens when I was just starting school. And they said, if you start to make friends and someone wants to come over to the house to play, end the friendship, don't. It was like we were spies trying to hide the way we lived. It was a very dominant force in my childhood and very, very unpleasant.
- [04:53]
B
Wow, that is strong. Cool. Where was this?
- [04:56]
A
This was in Provo, Utah.
- [04:59]
B
Okay. Which is like, what?
- [05:01]
A
So if you go to Salt Lake City, Utah, there's a lot of Mormons there. If you want to find more Mormons, you go south 50 miles to Provo, the Utah Valley, the most Mormon place on earth. Also the place of highest use of anti anxiety and antidepressants in the world. So a very, it was, it was a very cult like atmosphere. Looking at it from here, I didn't know that. I didn't know anything else existed. But it was, it was a strange culture. It really.
- [05:35]
B
And did it feel safe as a child?
- [05:37]
A
No, no, no. I would go Outside for shelter, quite literally. I tried to spend all. All the time I could outside, be in the house as little as possible. And when I was in the house, I was either reading or drawing. I had my. My eyes fixed on something this far from my face. So I was dreadfully nearsighted, but it was like creating my own little cave within that place that felt like I could get beauty, comfort, harmony, peace. Yeah, we all have our ways.
- [06:13]
B
Okay, that's interesting. So the way you've described home really is the diametric opposite of what you actually had growing up. So you've obviously had to learn that. I mean, how did that lack of safety, as you put it, sort of affect your sense of home and how you would have thought of home at that point?
- [06:33]
A
Well, I noticed when I started writing, I noticed that a lot of my articles and even books would end with the word home, as if that was the ultimate resolution of everything that I was seeking. And I think it gave me this huge hunger for something I had never experienced, which was that sanctuary. And so home became this dominating force, which is why I love your podcast so much. That homing instinct, I think, exists within all of us. And the physical environment of the home, I believe, always reflects the inner lives of the people living in the home. So houses became very important to me early, early, early in my life, and I knew that I didn't want the one I was living in, and I knew that it was a very crucial aspect of safety, feeling safe in the world, on the planet.
- [07:29]
B
Yeah, couldn't agree more. So how then, did that childhood environment reflect the. In a life of your parents? I mean, did you have two parents?
- [07:41]
A
Yes, I did. And. Whoa. They both, like everyone in the community, sort of lived in service of the church. Mormonism is what's called a life world religion, which means it's not a go to church on Sunday religion. It's a every thought, you think religion. And, you know, they'd been raised. My father was raised by pioneers who taught him that the church was everything. And so he. He taught religion, and he was an apologist. He was a scholarly apologist of Mormonism, considered the most important in the church's history. And my mother, this is a low blow, but when I was growing up a snarky teenager, I used to think that the only thing Mormon women were asked to do is prove that they could breed well in captivity. So, you know, you have as many children as you could. And she did far beyond her body's capacity to do it in health. And then she just lay down and cried for the rest of my life. As far as I know, it was bad. My father was intensely dissociated and strange, and my mother was just gone. Yeah.
- [08:54]
B
Wow. God, that's heavy, isn't it? Are they still alive?
- [08:58]
A
No, they both passed away. And, yeah, I'm actually really glad for them. It was not an easy life for either one of them.
- [09:07]
B
So when did you first realize, Martha, that this childhood of yours was not the ordinary childhood and that it was starting to affect you?
- [09:17]
A
Well, I know it's funny that we're talking about the house, the home, because that right away, I knew we were different in a negative way. I knew that it was not okay to be living the way we were living, and that it was. It affected everything that I carried. A sense of fear that someone would find out I was hypervigilant and sort of in internal chaos in the house. But then I grew up and went off to college, and that's when I realized that there was something I was not functioning like other people were functioning. I mean, just to give you an example. Sorry if this triggers anyone out there. I first remember contemplating ending my own life when I was 6. And that was just kind of a constant friend to me. The possibility of an exit, an early exit through my teens. And then I was 17 when I went off to college and was stunned to realize that not all of my classmates contemplated suicide on a regular basis. That was considered unusual. And I had no idea, like, how would you even. What would life even be like if you weren't always contemplating suicide? I knew then that I was very different and I was completely unable to connect. And I remember picking up my roommate's psychology textbook for beginning psychology and opening and reading things about having significant others and having a sense of safety and just thinking, this is how people feel inside. This is nothing like the inside of me. And I was so depressed, I took the next year off, and my brother took me to a therapist, thank God. And the therapist told me that when my brother came to see him, because my brother was in his 30s by then, he listened to my brother for the first hour of therapy, and then he said, how many siblings do you have? And my brother said, seven. And the therapist said, I'm gonna be rich.
- [11:23]
B
You're right.
- [11:23]
A
Wow. Yeah, it was messed up.
- [11:26]
B
Wow. God, that. Crikey. So having suicidal thoughts from the age of six, that's. That's really, really difficult, isn't it? I mean, we talk a lot on the podcast about the. The body being a home of sorts, as well, it's a link that so many people have made over the years. But if you can cast your mind back to being that young girl. How did you feel in your body, out of interest?
- [11:49]
A
Oh, horrific. Absolutely horrific. I remember reading Moby Dick. I must have been seven or eight. We had a lot of books around, and there's a statement. Ishmael in that book says, take my body. Take it. I say, it is not me. And I was like, well, yeah, everybody knows that. And by the time I was a teenager, I had a severe eating disorder. I was running up to 100 miles a week trying to eat less than 600 calories a day. I was drastically underweight and was very punitive toward my own body. I mean, it was, as I said, a mess in there.
- [12:28]
B
So would you say that our childhood experiences often sort of somehow program our nervous system? Do you think that's what happened in your case?
- [12:38]
A
Oh, yeah. And I think there's such abundant research and evidence that shows that any animal, if traumatized in certain ways, lacking a sense of home is one of the big ways, or encountering any kind of danger, which I always felt I was encountering, is going to develop associative anxiety. So anything that harms you is associated with what you were experiencing at the time. And the brain tends to associate the environment with the way you're feeling. So then if you go into an environment that's anything like the one you've seen before, you immediately get a trigger of, oh, this is a dangerous place. And I was hypervigilant to an extraordinary degree. Like, I almost never slept. That was probably the worst thing I've ever gone through in my life, is that I had horrible insomnia. I could not bring my nervous system into a state of relaxation deep enough to sleep well. So, gosh, I am sounding really whiny, like, my life has been amazing, Matt. I am a very happy person. But, yeah, that did not go well, that first part.
- [13:46]
B
Well, you say that, but I think you had a huge amount of adversity in young life. And I think what's amazing is you've turned that into a positive force, which I think is kind of the great thing about anxiety. You know, I've had experiences of anxiety myself, and if there is a plus side to it, it's that it is a driving force.
- [14:04]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [14:05]
B
Don't you think? You know?
- [14:07]
A
Yeah. I believe that we have this indefatigable ally named suffering, and it will tell us where we need to correct our assumptions about life and the world. Because I truly believe we are meant to live in joy and beauty and peace and harmony. And when there's something off in our environment, our psyches don't like it. And so they won't. They won't just lie down and accept it. They keep goading us with fear, with sorrow, with whatever the psyche has to say. Not this. Find something else. And I think that's a huge gift.
- [14:45]
B
Yeah. So thinking, then, you've made the link there between anxiety and the environment. Out of interest, what sort of places? Environments. I mean, in terms of, like, the built environment, when you were going through that stuff, did you find particularly difficult to deal with? I mean, obviously, home was not a place of safety. But where in the kind of wider
- [15:07]
A
world, was it good or was it bad?
- [15:10]
B
Was it. Well, both, actually.
- [15:13]
A
I spent an enormous amount of time outside. I was obsessed with being outside of any structures whatsoever. But I loved school. The way that young children go into a schoolroom and put their drawings on the wall and the teacher decorates it with cartoons and things. That felt incredibly soothing to me. I was in church a lot, and though it wasn't, it didn't thrill me. Parts of it did, parts of it did. The acoustics of a church. Stained glass windows are a bit of an obsession with me because that was a source of such beauty. And that was pretty much it, because those were the only places I went. Homeschool. Church, really. I love the churches. Yeah.
- [16:01]
B
By the way, your book Beyond Anxiety is fantastic.
- [16:05]
A
Well, thank you.
- [16:06]
B
Yeah. No, it's really. It's genuinely. I mean, it's very practical as well as insightful, which I really like. But what mechanisms did you develop for yourself that where you started to pull yourself out of this kind of negative spiral you were in?
- [16:21]
A
First of all, I just decided that I would refuse to give up the idea that I was meant to experience joy. I remember sitting in the freshman library at Harvard where I went, and generations of students had carved messages into the wood of this little booth. And most of them were despairing. It was called the Lamont Library, but I called it the Lament Mint Library. And there were a lot of people who wrote, I don't want to live anymore. And I thought, really, why should I? I think this was the point where it really reached a point where I was very close to actually doing it. And I thought, is there any reason to stick around? And I remembered a quotation from Emerson, which is, beauty is its own excuse for being. And I thought, the experience of joy is a felt version of beauty. So if I If joy is a possibility for me, that is its own excuse for being. I don't need to know any further reason for my existence. If I can find joy, I will have found my purpose. And so I set out to seek it. And I was pretty relentless after that and see, seeking it any way I could.
- [17:44]
B
Wow, how interesting. What kind of things did you do?
- [17:48]
A
I drew and I drew and I drew and I drew and I painted and I drew. I was very, very obsessed with visual art. I now realize after doing a lot of neurological research that that was bringing me into the right hemisphere of my brain and sort of shutting down the part that is most anxious and most hypervigilant and bringing me into presence. So I kept doing that. Then my body started breaking down and I lost the use of my hands. I think I was actually in some way psychologically creating various symptoms to stop me from staying with that one solution. So when I lost the use of my hands, it was absolutely horrific when I was, like, 19. But I had to find beauty another way. So I turned to poetry. I turned to philosophy. I was very artsy kid. Listened to a lot of music and kept digging down. It felt like if I dug down deep enough into the part of me that could experience beauty, I would find myself there. And that proved to be true. But I had to. I mean, I wrote a book about how the only way to real psychological happiness is it patterned after Dante's Divine Comedy. And the first thing he had to do was go through hell. So I had to go deep, deep down into the underworld of my psyche, which got very dark. And in the Divine Comedy, the genius of Dante is he goes down to the center of the earth. And then his guide tells him, no, you have to keep going. You have to keep going down. He's like, there is no more down. And the guy says, keep going. And so he crosses through the center of the earth and is suddenly headed up, even though he hasn't changed direction. And that's what happened to me, too.
- [19:39]
B
Crikey. God. So interesting. There's so much in there. I mean, I think the first thing I want to ask you is your hand stopping working? Was that diagnosed in some way, or you just think it was a brain thing?
- [19:53]
A
No. After many years, I actually think I have something. Well, two things. One is a collagen disorder, and another one is mast cell activation syndrome, which was only named in 20. And it is very, very much associated with the brain. I had many symptoms all over my body organs, shutting down different parts of my muscle system. You Know, I lost the use of one leg for two years. Basically, I was almost bedridden from my late teens to my early 30s with excruciating physical pain. And it was always diagnosed as autoimmune, poorly understood, progressive and incurable, whatever the symptom was. And I set out to live, find my truth, find my joy, find all those things. And as I did that, all these supposedly progressive and incurable ailments just became asymptomatic. I don't have them anymore, but they were very real and very much associated with my psychology. Yeah.
- [21:00]
B
Wow. It is amazing, isn't it? I think we underestimate, don't we, how many of our physical symptoms are related to our nervous system in general, what's happening in the brain. I mean, there's this word interoception, isn't there? Where I think when you're highly anxious, you actually become hyper aware of your inner state in a way that you're probably not normally. Which is why a lot of people end up in hospital thinking they're having a heart attack when it's a. A panic disorder or something, don't they?
- [21:28]
A
Yeah, absolutely. It's so.
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B
It sounds like you were in a negative spiral on that front.
- [21:33]
A
I see it as my true self trying to pull me into alignment with my truth. When you literally cannot do the things that distract you. I mean, what. What was I able to do? I would get up, do the things I was meant to do. I mean, during that time, I got a doctorate, I had three kids, got married and had three kids, was working. But I would get up, I would function in extreme pain. And then as soon as I could, I would lie down and just shake. I think that's one reason my mother lay down for my entire life. She had. It's genetic, this whole thing. But as I began to tune in more to the pain instead of trying to escape it, I thought, what. What can I do? And the only thing I could think of to learn and master in that state was meditation. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna learn to meditate. And that's all about introception, of course. And at first it was God awful. It was horrible.
- [22:35]
B
What was it like? Describe it.
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A
Okay. So I would say, I'm gonna sit here, you know, or lie down sometimes when I was too sick. And I say, I'm gonna follow my breath and not really think. And I remember the first time I did it. I had this little book on Zen and I was reading the instructions, and then I started to breathe and I let Go of the constant intense stream of thinking in my mind. And within five minutes I had spiked a high fever, I had a rash all over my body, there was pain everywhere. And I was in a panic that I cannot even describe. And I literally jumped up and shouted, I will never do that again. So of course now I do it three hours a day. But I was, you know, that was enough to make me very curious, like, look at that reaction. Because my intellect was always sort of off to the side making observations. And so I thought, well, that's a very interesting reaction. I'm going to do that, I'm going to investigate that. So I started digging inward and it was horrible. It was horrible. Like the first five or six months, it was just panic. I would just sit there in panic for an hour and not let myself be distracted. It was the hardest thing I've ever done.
- [23:55]
B
Wow, how amazing that you stuck with it then. So how did you turn a corner Eventually?
- [24:01]
A
I remember one day I was sitting and I was the sort of witness, what I now call the compassionate witness, this sort of level headed peaceful being that is not emotional and not intellectual, but something other. I've had a sense of becoming that and watching myself as if I were a tiny animal in a round cage that just was running, running, running, running in terror for its life. But I was not the animal, only I was the watcher. And I thought, oh, the watcher isn't terrified. The watcher is not in pain. The watcher is quiet and still. It was home, Matt, it was home. I found home just for a few seconds at first, right. But then of course, that's where I set out to go. And I went there again and again and again until my brain, I believe, started rewiring itself to go there instead of going into panic and hypervigilance.
- [25:07]
B
That's so brilliant. I am someone who would describe themselves as not really able to meditate. Right. I'm that person that you started out as. Not as extreme as that, but still fidgety, can't bear to be alone with my own thoughts in that way, you know, And I'm sure a lot of people are like that. So if you're quite a restless spirit, would you. Would you say that it's. How would you say that? You kind of get to the point that you got to. And I guess the follow up question is, you know, why should we, like, is it worth doing? Is it worth persevering?
- [25:45]
A
Yeah, the first thing I would do is to make things soft. So because I was in pain, I gradually created an environment of physical objects that helped me not be in pain, which meant like a good bed, soft blankets, soft pillows. As I said, I had three children, and there's a deep emotional softness that comes from that connection. And their skin is so beautifully soft. Babies were very healing to me, my babies. And if I were to do this again, I would. And what I do with clients as I coach them is create softness in your physical environment and then start to create softness in your self talk. So if you find yourself thinking cruel, sharp, negative thoughts about yourself to yourself, you are locked in with your worst enemy. So it can happen. Like, you know, I think, oh, I'm such a loser. And then if I catch it, I say, all right, sorry about that. There's part of me that thinks I'm a loser, but none of us is a loser in the end. Like, point me to the baby in the nursery who's a born loser. Everybody's perfect. Just softening. The way you talk to yourself and the way in which you go through the physical day, and then within that container of softness and sanctuary, take five minutes and say, terrified self. I know you're not going to like this, but I'm going to sit still because I want you to be able to rest. And for me, being able to rest was the key to healing my body, ultimately healing my psychological problems, and going more and more deeply into the sense of home, which I think you celebrate on the podcast, but when it comes. There was this moment when I was meditating in the woods in California, because I moved to the woods at a certain point, I wanted. I was in a house almost completely glass, where I just was in a forest all day. And I remember sitting there, and I'd been meditating for hours. I would put birdseed on myself and sit there immobile, and then the birds would land on me, and the chipmunks and the foxes would come to check me out, and I would just sit there, absolutely still. They knew I was alive, but they learned I wouldn't move. So they just came. And one day I was sitting there, and I was just in love with these little animals and with the forest itself. And then it was like I had been drilling down in some kind of bedrock inside me that I thought was eternal. Like it went forever, and something punched through it. Was almost audible, boom. And from that perforation emerged a sense of sweetness, this delicious, incredible blend of love and connection and peace and the celebration of the beauty of the planet and of being human. And it reminded me of sacred texts connecting a State of spiritual centeredness to water. I think in the New Testament it's called a well of living water. It felt like water to me and it was so quenching and so cooling and yeah, I would say I know a lot of people who have done many substances. Anti anxiety stuff, psychedelic stuff, heroin, all kinds of drugs. I. I haven't taken all those drugs, but I suspect they're trying to feel the way that feels. Wow. So, yeah, it's worth it.
- [29:38]
B
That's. How amazing. Is that something that you've felt numerous times or is that kind of a one occasion thing?
- [29:45]
A
No, no, you can go back. It's all about wiring your brain to go there. Your brain is capable of all these emotional states. It's a physiological instrument. But we're constantly doing our own brain surgery because anything thought we think create, especially if we think it with strong emotion, will create literal wiring that enables us to think that thought again more easily and with more of a sense of conviction, of belief. So if you say I'm a loser a thousand times a day, that's a very strong connection and very believable. But if you return to the place where you are infinite and unspeakably peaceful over and over and over again, that's the nerve path that gets myelinated, Wrapped in this fatty substance called myelin, which is like the way we put rubber or plastic on an electric cord. And the more myelination you have, the easier it is to go back.
- [30:46]
B
Okay. I mean, what I picked up on as well, based on what you said is quite a lot of this is environmental because you've talked about connecting with nature, being outside. Being outside when you're a child was your happy place. And it sounds like just the act of being in the soil, lying down, touching the earth, is a massive thing. And then you also said making the place where you meditate or rest as comfortable as possible using soft materials. Is there anything else environmentally that you think about that sort of helps you on a daily or weekly basis just to kind of enter that state or just generally makes your life better within or outside the home.
- [31:29]
A
I'll just always, always, always be on a search for beauty. Felt beauty, beautiful music. But for me, visual beauty is very powerful. So it's not just the softness of the textures, but I would also put physical objects that make you think it's its own excuse for being. That's why I love stained glass windows. I see them and I go. And that right there, this sort of gasp of admiration that if you can bring everything you can into your environment that makes you feel like that, you start to weed out the things that are less beautiful. And so it's this constant. I think life is this constant slow evolution of my physical space where it keeps getting more beautiful because I find objects that are meaningful to me visually, emotionally, that just ring the chimes inside me. And as you start to put those all around you, that becomes your inner life.
- [32:30]
B
Okay, and with those things, is it because they're beautiful or is it also because they tell you a story about someone you know or a place that you've been? What do you think?
- [32:40]
A
Absolutely. I was very influenced by a book called Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore when I was finishing graduate school. He was a monk. Not the old timey Thomas, more monk, better, more recent one. And he lived for 20 years with like a cup and a spoon. And that was it, you know, he was in his little monk cell. But then he left the monkhood and became a psychiatrist. And when he went to furnish his first apartment, because he was a contemplative, he noticed that every time he made a choice, he had to choose one bar of soap out of many bars of soap. He noticed that the choice reflected something inside him. Why he chose a blue soap instead of a yellow one, for example. And he noticed that everything he put in that space was a kind of three dimensional self portrait. And he started going into his clients homes to read their inner lives. And I thought about my childhood and how, you know, everybody was in inner chaos and despair and depression and madness and how that was reflected in our home, how everything changed. I really think you can't change your inner life without changing your living space and vice versa. If you make a change in your living space, something changes in here. And they're always reflecting each other.
- [34:04]
B
Well, yeah, I mean, that's obviously in the context of this podcast. That's a fantastic statement, and I really agree with it. Out of interest, then, in your childhood home, how did that sort of disorder manifest itself? What did it look like? What was going on?
- [34:21]
A
You know what, it's always a chicken and egg process. One thing creates the other. So living there was not a fun experience. But. But the despair that everyone seemed to be feeling was reflected back in an inability to create order. It was a profoundly disordered place. It wasn't just cluttered, there was something despairing about it. And I think both my parents were in a kind of existential despair. Both of them had given their lives to this faith, which I think literally drove my father mad and sent my mother into a lifelong depression. So they reflected that in the way they arranged the space. And then the space affected everyone else so that we felt more that way. It was just, yeah, everything's cyclical. But the good news is the moment you start to make a change in a direction that improves things, that initiates a cyclical change in a different direction.
- [35:24]
B
So can you give us an insight into your current home that you live in now then, and from a sort of orderliness perspective? What's that like?
- [35:33]
A
It's so funny because I always lived in very new houses that were immaculately clean. And then last year, my family and I moved to a place in upstate New York, which is about 10 acres of forest and, like, garden beds. It's a beautiful property. But the house on it was quite old. And when we moved in and I had to be around, like, surfaces that weren't absolutely clean, the woman who sold it to us was a house flipper. So she bought it, painted everything white without sweeping the floor, and then sold it again. At one point, Matt, she painted over a dead mouse. Like, this was not an orderly experience for us. I went into an absolute depression. I was like, this is so pathetic. I write self help and I am just descending into madness again because it reminded me. I had nightmares about it. I was just, you know, more panic, the whole thing. But it's been profoundly beneficial because as we've started to make the home more beautiful, I've watched it transform. And the best thing, the best, best, best, best thing, I have my own studio for the first time in a life of painting and drawing. And it used to be a chapel. We have an actual chapel with a stained glass window, which is this huge, airy space. The previous owner had, for some reason, built another room inside that room. It was bizarre. I smashed it down with a sledgehammer and that was very therapeutic. Got myself a 40 pound sledgehammer, named it Dr. Love Taps, and just smashed that thing. And now it's like I walk in there and it's this huge, bright, airy space with a stained glass window where I go to paint and feels as though the world has given me this incredible gift because that's what I was creating inside. It's a perfect reflection of that place inside myself where that quenching sensation occurs. And it's just, I didn't really know that that's what I was moving into. I had to create it when I got here. But the more I discover about this house, you know, we cleared away all this, you know, brambles and things and Underneath it are these sacred sites and statues of the Buddha and Guanyin. It's the place turned out to be a bonanza for my soul. But I also had to learn that you can clean up. I can clean up a mess and be okay.
- [38:17]
B
So what's it like for you now? If things are a bit disordered or a bit chaotic in your home environment, what's that like for you?
- [38:24]
A
Oh, my gosh. I mean, we had one of the worst winters in upstate New York history, which is saying something. And we had something called an ice dam where these huge icicles formed all around the house. And it was so cold, they didn't melt for weeks. But the house is warm, so the icicles started melting into the walls, into the electrical system, into the roo roofing, and the whole house started to rain inside. And we weren't allowed to mess with it because of the electrical stuff. Right. It was ridiculous. And I was so angry. I was like, why did I. I'm like in my 60s, and this is where I end up. And then I realized that the parts of the house that were melting were the parts I hated. And I was like, oh, my God. I am somehow paranormally, metaphysically melting the house. The part of the house I don't like. This is astonishing. And because of that, we get some insurance to redo those very spaces. And as we rebuild them and just fill them with beauty and with. It actually is better than some sterile new house. It is integrated with the landscape. It's filled with peace, harmony, beauty, freedom, belonging.
- [39:48]
B
Yeah, it's very cinematic, the way you've described that. The melting away of the bits that you didn't like. That's serious manifestation, isn't it?
- [39:55]
A
It was like a horror movie, and it exactly mirrored what was in my head. I'm telling you, you can't change your insides without changing your house.
- [40:03]
B
So interesting. So you've talked about being a painter and an artist. You talk in your book about the left and the right side of the brain. So could you. And the kind of. The way they toggle. Right. So could you just tell us about that?
- [40:16]
A
So I, A few years ago, did a seminar on creativity and researched all the neuroscience of what makes people creative. Then after the pandemic, people's anxiety worldwide skyrocketed. It went up by a full 25% during one year. And when the pandemic sort of eased off, the anxiety did not. It's continued to rise, and they call it the inner pandemic. So I wanted to figure this out, and I Started reading the Neuroscience of Anxiety. And about halfway through my reading, I realized that the same brain structures that I had been reading about being involved in creativity, but they were on the right, in the right half of the brain, Those structures in the left side of the brain were actually creating and sustaining anxiety. So we have this very primitive little part of the brain named the amygdala, and there are actually two. One on the right, one on the left. The whole brain is basically mirror structures, but they're not exact mirrors. For example, the right hemisphere of the brain is a different color than the left hemisphere because the. The left hemisphere is doing analytical thinking, and it creates a lot of gray matter. On the right side, you get these long neuron connections associated with creativity. And because they take so much myelin to sustain, it makes that side of the brain paler. It's more white than gray. Anyway, the amygdala is in there. And its only job, it's very ancient, it's in all animals, is to keep you safe by being alarmed by anything unusual. So you get this jolt when you see something unusual. Now, on the left hemisphere of the brain, this fear signal gets picked up by the neocortex, which is the part that talks. Even though both sides of the brain are involved in everything, if you lose the left hemisphere of your brain to a stroke, you will not be able to talk. If you have a stroke on the right side, you will still be able to talk. So it's fair to say that it's divided that way. So if the amygdala is alarmed. Oh, no. It sends a fear impulse to the neocortex. The neocortex's job is to tell stories, to string together meaning for us. And it believes that the fear coming from the amygdala is real, even if there's nothing frightening around us. So we can be lying in bed, perfectly safe and warm, and we think about taxes or something, and there's a jolt of fear. And instead of looking around and saying, well, there is nothing in the room that's going to hurt me right now. I might as well go to sleep. Instead, we pick that up as a story. Oh, my God, taxes. What am I going to do? What's this going to do to my fortunes? And what if I get audited and different stories come back? That feeds back. That storytelling feeds back to the amygdala the way an amplifier can feed the sound back into a microphone and create something called an auditory screech. So the amygdala says, be afraid. The neo cortex Says, oh, there are many reasons to be afraid. Then the amygdala goes, oh my gosh. It reads the story as reality and it says, oh, be very afraid. Then it sends that back to the brain. Feedback screech. That's what it's called. And you get panic and you get long term anxiety. Now on the other side of the brain, the amygdala goes, ah, something unusual. But instead of wanting to run from it, it wants to find out about it. Because there are two evolutionary advantages when you see something strange. One is to look out and be very careful. The other one is to figure out what's going on. So if you've ever passed an accident and found yourself wanting to look like rubbernecking, that's a very strong evolutionary drive because understanding that is important. So curiosity is what happens on the right side of the brain predominantly. And then it goes to the neocortex on the right side of the brain, which is not verbal, but it's very present and it likes to observe. I think it's the part of my brain that was watching the panicky self and it says, oh, what are the connections I can make with this? What is the meaning I can make of it? What does this mean? So it's calmer than the left side. One of my friends was a neuroanatomist who had a massive left hemisphere stroke and she said, without the left hemisphere there was nothing but beauty, peace, awe, presence. And that feeds back to the amygdala as, ooh, keep going forward. And that pushes us into new territory that ultimately makes us very creative. What I realized reading the literature was that we know from lots of research that anxiety shuts down creativity. If you make someone even slightly anxious, they cannot solve creativity based problems. But there was no research to address the idea that maybe creativity can shut down anxiety. I think anxiety wins and we stop doing research. So I started doing my own research. I was doing research zoom calls with sometimes thousands of people during the pandemic. And I would have everybody put in the chat a number reflecting their level of anxiety, 1 to 10, and it would be 10, 9, 10, 8, very high numbers. Then we would do some exercises to help shift the locus of thought to the right side of the brain. Very simple things like vividly remember three things you love to taste, and then vividly remember three things you love to hear. And then go through each of your senses and try to imagine all of them present at once. There's no neurological energy left for the anxiety spiral in the left hemisphere. And then I'D say, okay, so now everybody rate your level of anxiety. 00,000. So it was not. It was not a formal bit of research, but I was trained as a sociologist and I like big numbers. And I was getting them this incredible response when people went to the creative part of the brain that their anxiety disappeared. And that's why I wrote the book, thought that was worth knowing.
- [46:33]
B
It's absolutely fantastic. And you talk about doing something called the Right Hemisphere Month. Oh, yes, tell me about. Tell us about that. What was that? What did you learn from that?
- [46:44]
A
You can tell by the way I'm talking. It was a wonderful. I got up, it was January. It was the middle of the pandemic. Nobody was coming in, nobody was going out. It was perfect for an experiment. So I thought, I am going to do. And I hadn't been drawing or painting as much as I had as a child for a long time because it doesn't make money. And you have to make money, see? So I thought, I'm just going to give myself a month to just activate the right hemisphere of my brain and I'll start with drawing and I'll move on to other things. And I never moved on to other things. And I just got. In the first couple of days, I was a little rusty. And then I went into a state of absolute giddy joy that was just. Whoa. I mean, it was just. You cannot keep it from bubbling up when you're creating like that. Sometimes I get very angry at the drawing or painting. Why can't I make this work? But the joy was just incredible. And then I get to the next month and I couldn't stop. I was supposed to stop and write the book. And part of me was going, no, no, I will never stop. Never. So I actually called a therapist and she taught me about this one type of therapy. I said, I need some therapy on this. I've been painting and drawing every day and I can't stop. And she's like, well, how do you feel about that? All this stuff? I feel wonderful about it, but it's the wrong thing to do. I know it is. And after about half an hour, this very academic, very professional woman, full transparency. I am taking an oil painting class and I also cannot stop.
- [48:21]
B
Really?
- [48:23]
A
So, Matt, I never stopped. I never stopped. I had to wash the oil paint off my hands to do this interview.
- [48:29]
B
Really?
- [48:30]
A
Yeah.
- [48:30]
B
So do you have any formal training in it or is it just something you took?
- [48:34]
A
No, I did. Took my first year at Harvard. I took a drawing class. And the next year they hired me to help teach it. So most of my training was as a teaching fellow at Harvard in the art department, working under this brilliant professor. But I was mainly just self taught.
- [48:52]
B
Amazing. So obviously the thing about creating in that way is it's playful, isn't it? And I think what you're describing is getting into a state where as an adult, you're playing a little bit more like you did as a child. Why do we lose that instinct when we get older, do you think?
- [49:11]
A
Well, I think, you know, there's a brilliant neurologist and philosopher named Ian McGilchrist of your great country, and he has looked at these vast issues of anxiety, the hemispheres of the brain, the arts, and he says our entire modern society behaves like a person who's had a bad right hemisphere stroke. The way I put it myself is we're like a huge ship that has fed all of its maps and compasses into the engine. We've burned our sense of direction and meaning and purpose and goals in order to just move forward, move forward, produce, produce, produce this massive amount of wealth that is going preferentially to just a few people. And it's very, very dysfunctional system. And it's what the left hemisphere of the brain does, according to Miguel Christ, when the right hemisphere isn't getting to come to the table. It's cultural.
- [50:09]
B
Yeah. What about children as well in this? Because how do we encourage them to be creative and to be playful in a world that is very distracted, in a world that's full of technology now? And technology has huge benefits, we all know. But there is obviously drawbacks as well. So. Yeah. Do you advise people or work with people with their kids and trying to engage them in that way a bit more?
- [50:33]
A
Yeah, I do. And I think there are two ways we can go off course. And the first one is to treat creativity as a nice fun thing we get to do after the real work is done. Because if you look around you right now, everything that exists in both our spaces exists because someone was creative. It is not like the factory version of work has only existed for the last few hundred years, couple hundred years. And it's absolutely inhuman. But it's come to dominate everything. Schools were set up like factories, same size children learning the same task at the same desk in order explicitly to create factory workers who would just sit and do the same tasks. So saying to our kids, that's the real work. And over on the sides we do these frilly little things with like music or acting or art or whatever and treat it as something marginalized. That's one way to go wrong. And the other way is to say to the child, just move your body. Just put color on the page. You don't need to make it look the way you're thinking in your head. Just, you know, do something crazy and it'll make you feel good. No, art, the way children feel about it, the way I remember feeling about it, and the way my clients still feel about it, is a really intense, joyful, but also very directive effort to create home, to find home in the world, to make things of beauty and peace, to express whatever's going on inside us. But I think a bad artist makes everything look fuzzy and fun. A good artist can show you the difficulty and pain of the world, and a great artist can show you the difficulty and pain of the world and find the beauty that goes beyond it. And that is something that is a noble effort. And it's hard and to be able to say to your child, I had one child who's. She's 30 something, but she was a piano prodigy. She begged for lessons when she was 4. And it was not enough to just make a sound. She wanted to make a specific sound. And I gave her all the space and all the time that she. I even put a piano in her room, even though I couldn't afford it because I didn't want her. I wanted her to be able to practice without feeling embarrassed that she wasn't perfect yet. I would do anything to give someone the means of creating beauty.
- [53:02]
B
That's great. You put me in mind of my own eldest daughter, who's 13, so a bit younger. But she is a really brilliant artist, and it's innate. You can see it in her. She needs to create stuff, which is wonderful, but there's also an element where she does it for external validation. Because what she'll do, she'll make a drawing or a painting, and then she'll leave it on the kitchen table.
- [53:27]
A
Yes.
- [53:28]
B
She'll wait for you to come across it and then she'll gauge the reaction. Right. And what she wants is a big reaction.
- [53:34]
A
Sure.
- [53:34]
B
I'm always conflicted about how to react, because as a parent, I want her just to enjoy it for doing it. I want her to enjoy the process equally. I think it looks great, so I say it looks great. But if the reaction is not strong enough, she picks up on that and goes, oh, you don't like it?
- [53:52]
A
I identify with that. Try this question, look at something and say, how did you do that? Because we all, when we create something, I Could say that about you in this podcast. How did you do that? You know, it's not by accident. You've. You've crafted this thing and you create it, and you're very careful about, like, the techniques, technicals of it, and also the. The prep, everything. You're a real artist of podcasting. And so if I just said, wow, that's amazing. It's kind of deflating in one way, because you're not understood. If I don't comment at all, you're like, what do I have to do to get a good word? But if I say, oh, my God, I've listened to so many podcasts, and yours was so did this better than anything else, how then you're engaging in the creative conversation. Then you're artists together. Whatever you're doing, even if it's computer code or math, it is. And that, I think, is part of the joy of being together, to be creating instead of frightening each other.
- [54:58]
B
Yeah, that's. That's fantastic observation. I really like that.
- [55:03]
A
You.
- [55:03]
B
You also talk in beyond anxiety about squirrel interests, which is such a funny phrase. What does that mean, and how do those help us?
- [55:13]
A
I was working with a client who had a chemical sensitivity, and it could have killed her, but she had a service dog that was trained to sniff the chemicals and literally physically drag her away from them. And this dog was so well trained, it was at a seminar, and they came up on the stage, and he was absolutely sphinx, like, just still. And then she said, you know, the only thing we can't get him to stop doing is chasing squirrels. He loves squirrels. And we had this conversation about how frightened she was of the world. And I said, well, what do you think this dog is trying to tell you about squirrels? And she said, maybe that there's danger everywhere, but there's also fun. And the dog whipped his head around, just going from absolute stillness to. And just stared at her face. And she said, yeah, I guess there is fun. There is beauty. There is. And the dog went nuts. She started to laugh. He jumped onto her lap and licked her face. Then he jumped onto my lap and licked my face. And we have film of this. The dog went nuts. And I realized, for me, like, when I started, when I painted for a month and then couldn't stop, I was chasing my own brand of squirrel. Right. Like, that's what I want to do. And I think we all have squirrel interests. I hope we do. And if you don't have any, meditate for a while. Maybe you'll find them.
- [56:40]
B
That's really Good. If someone who's listening is feeling quite anxious, they're feeling quite disconnected from their inner self somehow, what would be your advice to them through the lens of the home? I mean, thinking about, we all exist in a space, a living space of some sort. What sort of one thing would you encourage them to do or to think about in relation to their home?
- [57:08]
A
Be gentle. So many of us try. Even when I say to people, creativity shuts down anxiety, they try to push themselves to be creative so their anxiety will go away, which creates more anxiety. And. But if you say to this, if you're in a place and you don't have the energy to clean your house because you're sick, which was often true for me, be gentle. Clean off one surface a few centimeters and say, that's enough for today. You did well, now rest. You don't like the way that looks? All right, we can talk about that. But just breathe first. It's not an emergency. Everything is always changing, the physical world. Everything comes and goes. Even mountains come and go. It's safe to be where you are. And then as you start to feel safe, you'll find yourself moving things, objects, and that cyclical thing begins where the gentleness toward your own amygdala is creating a calm response, which is causing you to make things calmer around you, which then increases the calm response for your amygdala and you get a benevolent cycle going.
- [58:14]
B
Yeah, it's good advice. So you described at the start of this conversation a very difficult first home, a very difficult childhood experience of home. And you've also, and I'm really pleased about this, described a really positive current situation with your home, which sounds like it stimulates you creatively. It's a safe space. Right. So through that journey, how would you summarize what you've learned about the importance of home in your life?
- [58:50]
A
Would you say, I think that we lose the sense of home the moment we come out of the womb. And I think we spend the rest of our lives trying to find it again. And the one thing I would say is that we don't do that because it's meaningless. My own personal belief system is that we do that because it is the great adventure. It is the hero's search through the underworld for the apotheosis, the sense of what is sacred and what is holy. And when we go on that journey ourselves, then we find the gift of the underworld, which is anything that is that sanctuary of beauty, peace, harmony, love. And our job in life is to bring that back to the upper world where we can make it physically real and then bring those we love to share it. And that, I believe is pretty much the meaning of my life.
- [59:51]
B
Brilliant. Thank you so much, Martha. You're such an incredibly wise soul and I think you're very generous with sharing your story, which is endlessly fascinating.
- [60:03]
A
Thank you.
- [60:03]
B
But yeah, thanks to all of your work. I love your podcast, your book, your recent book, as I say, was brilliant. So, yeah, thank you.
- [60:10]
A
Thank you for everything you put out into the world. It's. It's just made everything so much more rich and yummy for me too.
- [60:17]
B
Oh, thank you. Huge thanks to Martha and thanks to all of you for listening along. A special shout out this week to everyone who's joined as a homing member on Patreon. The Ginny Blom episode really seemed to resonate with you and I've had a lot of new subscribers, so big, big thanks for that. Lots of love to everyone who's joined. I really appreciate it. My wife Faye kindly listens along to every episode of the podcast. Or perhaps tolerates it is the best word. I don't know. But she decided to watch Ginny's One on YouTube for the first time and she said that she found it really, really interesting. So I guess there's something about being able to see the guests facial expressions that makes it quite a different experience. So I mention that because most of the homing episodes can be watched on our YouTube channel in case you wanted to take a look. So if you go onto YouTube and search for Homing with Matt, you can find it that way. All that remains is to say thanks to the producers of the show Podshop, and also to Simeon with Walker for making the original music. I'll be back again next week, so look forward to talking to you then.
- [61:28]
A
Bye bye.