Re-Air: I Nearly Died so I Stopped Lying. Surprising Way to Overcome Childhood Trauma, Stop Anxiety, Increase Intuition, and Finally Heal! Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah’s Life Coach)

Summary

---

Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown – Episode Summary

Episode: Re-Air: I Nearly Died so I Stopped Lying. Surprising Way to Overcome Childhood Trauma, Stop Anxiety, Increase Intuition, and Finally Heal!

Guest: Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah’s Life Coach)
Hosts: Mayim Bialik & Jonathan Cohen
Date: May 22, 2026

---

Episode Overview

This episode features a deep and wide-ranging conversation with Dr. Martha Beck — author, Harvard-trained sociologist, and widely known as Oprah’s life coach — revisiting her transformational journey from personal trauma and cultural conformity to radical authenticity and the healing power of integrity. Dr. Beck unpacks how lying, even small daily deceptions (especially to oneself), fuels anxiety, disease, and loss of intuition, and how returning to honesty and somatic awareness underpins true healing. The discussion bridges science and spirituality, touching on near-death experiences, psychic phenomena, creativity, trauma recovery, and reclaiming the intuitive “compass” within us all.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Pain of Living Out of Alignment ([04:24], [06:40])

• Dr. Beck explains her life’s mission as stemming from a simple dislike of suffering, leading her to scrutinize her own actions, feelings, and cultural programming:

  “If something makes you joyful… do a little more of that. If something makes you miserable… do a little less.” – Dr. Martha Beck [05:20]

• She describes how socialization and the fear of losing group acceptance drive people to abandon their true selves for the approval of others, producing lifelong emotional pain.

2. Cultural Conformity vs. True Self ([07:39], [14:31])

• Beck discusses being raised in a strict Mormon setting, where suppressing her identity as a feminist, intellectual, and homosexual brought profound consequences but even greater harm when she denied herself.

  “It's not as difficult as living outside your true self.” – Dr. Martha Beck [09:20]

• The group explores how cultural rules, while sometimes useful, can insidiously override individual well-being and intuition, and how the body and psyche suffer when truth is suppressed.

3. The Physiology of Lying ([29:07], [30:32])

• Lying, even about small things, activates stress responses in the body—raising heart rate, sweating, weakening immune function; Beck references scientific studies and personal experience:

  “The moment we lie, a whole range of physiological responses kick in… most people tell each other at least ten lies within the first three minutes of meeting.” – Dr. Martha Beck [31:06]

4. The Radical Experiment: A Year Without Lying ([35:35], [40:27])

• Beck describes her experiment to not lie for an entire year, which rapidly caused her to lose her religion, marriage, and family of origin, yet brought immense relief and spiritual freedom.

  "I left or lost my religion, my marriage, my family... everything but my kids because everything else was based on lies. It was horrific and not as bad as living all the lies." – Dr. Martha Beck [48:48]

5. Near-Death Experience & Transformation ([41:16], [42:00])

• Beck recounts a powerful near-death experience during surgery, feeling united with a ball of light embodying joy, wisdom, and love:

  "Your whole job on this planet is to feel the way you feel right now while you’re still alive." – Dr. Martha Beck [44:00]

• This experience was a turning point, intensifying her commitment to radical self-truth.

6. The Body as a Compass; Somatic Wisdom ([89:36], [98:18])

• Beck highlights that the body reacts physically to truth and falsehood, offering guidance (the “body compass”) via sensations of ease or tension:

  “You cannot lie without experiencing some kind of psychological or physical suffering... and its name is suffering.” – Dr. Martha Beck [48:29]

• She advocates for re-learning how to sense these reactions, starting with gentle somatic awareness (“wiggle your toes”), progressing to integrating difficult emotions and memories.

7. Healing Trauma, Restoring Intuition ([50:15], [101:57])

• Cumulative, unprocessed trauma physically manifests as autoimmune disease, depression, anxiety.
• Social polarization, over-information, and modern disconnection increase the inner split.
• The antidote: honesty, somatic processing, and developing the skill of noticing bodily cues and trusting "glimmers" (moments of joy/positive associations).

8. The Critical Role of Creativity ([64:31], [66:53])

• Activating the right brain through creativity disrupts anxiety loops. Creative acts (from drawing, music, to arranging a song playlist) aren't about talent or productivity but about shifting brain states:

  "Anytime you can just get yourself to say ‘give me five minutes to create,’... during the time you were focused on that, what was your anxiety? Zero." – Dr. Martha Beck [71:04]

• Exercises like vision boards or playful activities provide experiential access to states of flow, play, and intuition.

9. Glimmers and Triggers ([73:44], [74:00])

• The concept of “glimmers” (term from Deb Dana) as the opposite of triggers: small, immediate sensory cues that spark joy or peace. Noticing and cultivating glimmers expands capacity for presence and creativity.

10. Intuition, Psychic Phenomena, and Spiritual Awareness ([89:36], [95:47])

• Beck describes developing psychic and remote viewing abilities, particularly linked to parenting her son with Down syndrome. She argues that such phenomena are normal in many cultures and a natural extension of deep embodied presence and honesty.
• The conversation critiques the Western split between body and spirit, and explores how mystics, meditators, and indigenous traditions have always linked deep awareness, intuition, and healing.

11. Manifestation, Synchronicity, and "Living in Peace" ([112:36], [114:19])

• Dr. Beck and Mayim discuss the sense of rightness, synchronicity, and guidance that accrues as living in alignment with one’s truth increases.

  “I have found that the one statement that puts people’s bodies and brainwaves... into most alignment is ‘I am meant to live in peace.’” – Dr. Martha Beck [111:43]

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On culture and honesty:

  "We use culture as our servant instead of taking it as our master." – Dr. Martha Beck [21:57]

• On somatic awareness:

  "When you start to heal the wounds of trauma, it gives you the ability to pick up on someone’s predatory energy from across the room and go, 'oh no,' and you stop doubting your instincts." – Dr. Martha Beck [100:51]

• On creative genius:

  "Ninety-eight percent of 4-5 year olds came out as creative geniuses... by adulthood, just two percent. They didn't lose their genius—they were put in boxes." – Dr. Martha Beck [85:10]

• On embodiment and rationality:

  "We claim to be a materialist, rationalist society, but the material body means nothing." – Dr. Martha Beck [98:18]

• On living one’s truth:

  “If you can examine everything you’re doing that isn’t in harmony with what you most deeply believe… you’ll find peace. That has been my experience.” – Dr. Martha Beck [56:11]

• On syncronicity and science:

  “I would entertain anything until I was really sure it was false… then walked into a completely different world.” – Dr. Martha Beck [114:19]

---

Timestamps for Key Sections

• Purpose of Beck’s Work, Pain vs. Joy: [04:24]–[06:02]
• Cultural Conformity, True Self: [07:39]–[09:52]
• Somatic Honesty, Bodily Discomfort: [14:31]–[19:51]
• Lying, Anxiety & Health: [29:07]–[35:35]
• Radical Honesty Year: [35:35]–[40:27]
• Near-Death Experience: [41:16]–[48:29]
• Suffering as Clue to Truth: [48:29]–[50:15]
• Autoimmune/Disease, Trauma: [50:15]–[56:11]
• Creativity, Anxiety, Flow: [64:31]–[72:28]
• Glimmers vs. Triggers: [73:44]–[77:12]
• Intuition, Psychic Experiences: [89:36]–[101:50]
• Somatic Awareness, Body Signals: [98:18]–[101:50]
• Manifestation, Living in Peace: [112:36]–[114:19]

---

Engagement Recommendations

• Experiment: Notice when you lie—externally or internally. Pay close attention to your body’s sensations before/during/after. [118:46]
• Try daily “glimmer” practice. Identify small, joyful cues around you and consciously soak them in.
• **Give yourself permission to do one thing you truly want—however small—even if it defies a minor social norm.
• Practice gentle somatic awareness. Start with noticing your toes, then gradually include other body parts.
• Dip into a creative act: Any simple activity you enjoy or that feels slightly playful/novel.

---

Tone & Style

The conversation is candid, compassionate, humorous, and deeply curious—balancing neuroscientific rigor and mystical wonder. Dr. Beck, Mayim, and Jonathan encourage radical honesty, embodied presence, and creative experimentation, arguing that real healing and intuition stem from an unflinching commitment to truth—especially self-truth.

---

Further Reading/Listening

• Dr. Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity and Beyond Anxiety
• Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) by Dick Schwartz
• Jill Bolte Taylor, Whole Brain Living
• Byron Katie’s “The Work”
• Deb Dana and the concept of “Glimmers” in polyvagal theory

---

For those who haven’t listened, this episode is a masterclass in why truth—both somatic and verbal—matters, and how pursuing it, with playfulness and creativity, can revolutionize your physical, psychological, and even spiritual wellbeing.

Transcript

[Dr. Martha Beck]

foreign

[Mayim Bialik]

bialik and i'm jonathan cohen and

[Jonathan Cohen]

welcome to our breakdown it is mental health month and in honor of mental health month we're going to revisit an episode from last year with doctor martha beck you may know her as oprah's life coach she's a harvard educated sociologist new york times best selling author and she is the leading authority on personal growth resolving childhood trauma and truly fixing anxiety she helped us reveal the link between stress and disease she broke down her cutting edge techniques with foundations in somatic experiencing sociology and psychology to really get to the root of anxiety she talks about chronic illness and how to tap into hidden powers you have so that you can live authentically martha also

[Mayim Bialik]

explains how trauma is actually hijacking your body and its ability to hijack have intuition to really know if you're sensing danger or not and how your muscles literally weaken when you lie martha was

[Jonathan Cohen]

also one of our early guests as we sort of delved deeper into science and spirituality she opened up about her near death experience how she harnesses feelings of love and happiness and her fascinating psychic experiences including remote viewing abilities the surprising connection between healing healing trauma and increasing your intuition and martha also has a special needs son and she talks about some of the incredible powers she discovered that he has as well as the incredible connection that they have just

[Mayim Bialik]

before we get to this episode did you know that forty three percent of people who listen to the podcast are not always subscribed go ahead make sure you're subscribed it's free and if you want extra amazing mind bialik breakdown material check us out on substack where we release content that is not available anywhere

[Jonathan Cohen]

else and now in honor of mental health month we hope you enjoy this episode with doctor martha beck break it

[Mayim Bialik]

down welcome to maybe alex breakdown is supported by helix sleep spring is in

[Jonathan Cohen]

the air and so are all of the allergens that come with it spring allergens means you need more sleep but there are a ton of factors that

[Interviewer]

can prevent us from getting a good

[Jonathan Cohen]

night's rest night sweats back pain feeling the person next to you when they roll over a million times we were so excited to hear that helix wanted to partner with us i've had my helix mattress for about five years now and i have been sleeping so much better jonathan and also our kids love their helix mattresses and all of those issues night sweats back pain motion transfer those things are significantly better with a helix mattress helix delivers your mattress right to your door which is so much fun with free shipping in the us they have a one hundred twenty night sleep trial and limited lifetime warranty plus they're happy with helix guarantee rest easy with seamless returns the happy with helix guarantee offers a risk free customer first experience designed to ensure that you're completely satisfied with your new mattress go to helixleep dot com breakdown for twenty seven percent off site wide that's helixsleep dot com breakdown for twenty seven percent off site wide helix sleep dot com breakdown

[Mayim Bialik]

hey sweetie your mother showed me this

[Dr. Martha Beck]

carvana thing for selling the car i'm going to give it a try wish me luck me again i put in the license plate it gave me an offer unbelievable okay i accepted the offer they're picking it up tuesday from the driveway i haven't even left my chair it's done the car is gone i'm holding a check anyway carvana give it a whirl love ya so good you'll want to leave a voicemail about it sell your car today on carvana pick up fees may apply the breakdown it's

[Interviewer]

really an honor to speak to you we're so glad that you you have the time to talk to us ah

[Dr. Martha Beck]

the honor is all mine huge huge

[Interviewer]

fan i've been looking over you have so many books but i in particular you know pulled out the way of integrity finding the path to your true self finding your own north star the science and magic of finding your destiny how i lost the mormons and found my faith you know a lot of your work is geared around this kind of journey and i wonder if in your own words you could sort of sort of explain kind of the overarching sort of purpose of all of the different kinds of work that you do

[Dr. Martha Beck]

it's really simple i do not like pain i'm not like other people suffering hurts me i just i really hate suffering and i started out my life as many many people do in dysfunctional circumstances that led to a lot of emotional pain and i just wanted to figure it out i was trying to get out of it and it led to me changing all kinds of things in my internal world and then that would trigger change in the in my relationships and in my behavior in the world and what i pursued and i was always because i didn't understand anything about being a human nothing i would just write everything down okay this is this works when i wrote finding your own north star i thought this is the stupidest book in the world no one does not know this because all it says literally and they all this is all they say all those books if something really hurts you and you're miserable and your health is declining when you're doing it consider doing it a little less and if something makes you joyful and fills you with energy and makes you love everyone in the world you maybe do a little more of that i know it's huge huge concept that's it so yeah they're all about that how i went from doing things that made me suffer to doing things all the way to doing things that allow me to be as i believe we are all naturally programmed to be really really content and happy almost all

[Interviewer]

the time it sounds deceptively and seductively simple but i'm sure you encounter as you have encountered for your whole you know career especially as sort of a public facing person you know people for whom it it doesn't seem like they sort of know how to get there

[Dr. Martha Beck]

no nobody does i i'd like you

[Interviewer]

to explain a little bit about maybe your upbringing and how you got to the point where you didn't know but but also you know what you've learned from your experience about what i think a lot of people are experiencing which is this not knowing yeah so the

[Dr. Martha Beck]

not knowing i'm going to start with that actually i published that book which says if it makes you feel good do more of it if you if it makes you feel horrible do less of it and people were amazed and they were like wait say that again no one's ever said that to me and the reason is that human cultures rely on conformity to retain their solidity and people get very bought in we have brains as you know better than i do that are primed for social agreement and gaining social acceptance so the natural path of an animal is to do what makes it feel healthier and happier but humans have this socialization tendency this very strong component of socialization that makes us want to please the people around us even more than we want to be happy so you're born a baby and everything's great and you're just doing baby things i was born sixty

[Interviewer]

five years old i don't know what you're talking about

[Dr. Martha Beck]

like benjamin button yeah everything's going along fine until you realize that the people around you like it better when you smile than when you cry the people around you if you're a girl baby they like it when you're demure and soft and when you're a boy baby they like it when you're brave and durable or whatever and when we encounter that mismatch between our true nature what our genotype tells us to be and our socialization we sell out ourselves hard and we do it with before we even learn to talk and once we do learn to talk we're full of instructions about what we should be and do and because we want so desperately and need so desperately to belong the true self just gets shoved aside and the social rules whatever they are for us particularly come to dominate so i was raised in the heart of mormonism in like one of the mormoniest mormon places in a very mormony family super duper mormon and the some twenty five years later i would learn that the three great enemies of mormonism according to the leaders in these latter days that means now three great enemies feminists intellectuals and homosexuals and i am all three oops so for me being true to myself meant that ultimately i had to go against a very strong cultural set of cultural rules and like lost a tremendous number of relationships family relationships friendships um pretty much everything that raised me and that is very very difficult but i can tell your listeners now it is not as difficult as living outside your true self you have to find your way back to that baby you sold out oh mind

[Mayim Bialik]

bialix breakdown is supported by incogni over

[Jonathan Cohen]

the past year data breaches increased by more than two hundred percent your name past addresses phone numbers even court records can be collected and sold by data brokers the easier you are to find the more vulnerable you are to scams identity theft harassment privacy isn't about paranoia it's about peace of mind and that's why we've partnered with incogni incogni works on your behalf to remove your personal data from data brokers and online databases and their custom removals feature goes even further if you find a specific page or listing that concerns you you can send them the link and a dedicated privacy specialist will handle the takedown process directly it's very simple create your account provide one time authorization and let incog do the work incog is the only data removal service independently verified by deloitte and offers a thirty day money back guarantee if you're not satisfied you can cancel at any time they can't harm

[Mayim Bialik]

you if they can't find you use code mayim at incog dot com mayim to get sixty off an annual plan

[Jonathan Cohen]

that's incog dot com mayim mind bialix

[Mayim Bialik]

breakdown is supported by bioptimizers i struggled

[Jonathan Cohen]

to get good quality sleep and i just thought like ugh it's stress but i learned during perimenopause and menopause your hormones shift and it affects your magnesium levels low magnesium makes everything harder not just sleep but focus mood stress tolerance that's why we added magnesium breakthrough by bioptimizers to our nightly routine it's a blend of seven different forms of magnesium designed to support relaxation and overall sleep quality quality try it see if you wake up more rested and refreshed you've got nothing to lose and a lot to gain bio optimizers offers a three hundred sixty five day no questions asked money back guarantee magnesium breakthrough is a fantastic way to improve that hormonal imbalance that especially happens with magnesium and then you have better focus you have better sleep hygiene in general bio optimizers makes it so easy here's what you get when you go to bioptimizers dot com breaker and use the code breaker fifteen percent off your entire order and a free bottle of massim that's bioptimizer's best selling digestive enzyme added to your order automatically when you use our exclusive code that's a twenty dollars product free on top of your discount this is a limited time offer while supplies last you cannot get this on amazon you can't get it in stores the offer exists in one place our link our code that's it so if you were already thinking about trying it this is the sign go to bioptimizers dot com breaker use the code breaker grab grab it

[Mayim Bialik]

before it's gone make twenty twenty six the year you finally start sleeping again mind bialix breakdown is supported by no

[Interviewer]

cd have you ever found yourself stuck

[Jonathan Cohen]

replaying conversations over and over trying to feel completely sure that your friend doesn't secretly hate you you might be surprised to learn that things like that where unwanted thoughts get stuck in your mind and make you feel like you have to try and solve it or stop it can actually be a sign of ocd obsessive compulsive disorder is a serious condition that can really focus on anything identity morals relationships your sense of reality it often fixates on exactly the things that you care the most about i've struggled with ocd myself so i know how misunderstood it is and how hard it can be to get the right kind of help that's why i'm here to tell you about nocd the world's leading provider of specialized ocd treatment their licensed therapists go through extensive specialty training to identify and effectively treat ocd in live face to face virtual sessions they'll help you reclaim your time your confidence and your freedom no cd is covered by insurance for over one hundred thirty eight million americans and it includes support between sessions so you never have to face ocd alone if any of this sounds like you or someone you love head over to nocd dot com book a free fifteen minute call with their team that's eight n o c d dot com to learn more and get matched with a therapist who can help

[Interviewer]

so let's let's talk a little bit about the true self because you know when we think of you know also kind of human development you know babies exist on not to use you know freudian terminology but sort of a pleasure principle you know they want to be they want to be held and they want to be fed they want to be rested they don't want to sit in their own feces or urine what when you talk about the the true self you know is the enemy religion is it culture you know how do we kind of get back to a true self if we have to exist you know for for all intents and purposes as social creatures and sometimes in in particular patriarchal structures like where's that

[Dr. Martha Beck]

true self yeah the true self the culture whatever it is tends at some moments in some ways to go against everyone's particular nature and that's not horrible when i give speeches i used to like stop right in the middle of a speech and i'd say before i go on are you all comfortable and everybody would be sitting in these hotel ballrooms going yes and i'd say no really tell me are you truly comfortable and they'd be like yes go on with your speech and i'd say all right then tell me this how many of you if you were home alone right now would be sitting in exactly the position you're in at this moment not a hand would go up and then i would say why would you not be in this position and there would follow ten or fifteen seconds of deep silence as they tried to figure out why they would like take their shoes off and lie down when they got home and then they would start to realize i am not completely comfortable which is not a problem doing things like it's a culturally accepted thing to get together in a room everybody sits up everybody is quiet everybody looks at the stage everybody follows the cultural agreement terrific they're slightly uncomfortable doing it that's fine we can handle so much discomfort the problem comes when they look me in the eyes in clear daylight and say i am completely comfortable and at the moment they say it they totally believe it and they know they're lying so this creates a fracture between the sort of the entire neuroception the feeling of the entire body and emotional system and all that and what they know of their own lives they don't know that what's really happening is that they're mildly uncomfortable but they've learned to put up with it for the sake of a function we all want to do together and it's the mismatch between truth it's the loss of the truth of what we really want of what truly makes us comfortable when we lose that we lose something very precious and irreplaceable and we go into psychological suffering i

[Mayim Bialik]

think this disconnect between ourselves what we think is required and that chasm can be so great that we have just separated from any notion like mime teases me that like i know when my feet are hot and she's like why would anyone even pay attention to that or you know the notion of sitting in a ballroom like i realized years ago there's no reason why i can't stand up in a business meeting in one of those boardrooms or ballrooms and stand on the side yeah and not sit down but and some people think that's crazy like i will get up in a business meeting i will pace and i'm like there's no reason why we've decided that everyone has to sit in these chairs being so restricted like it makes me go crazy and then i just hate being there so i decided that that should not be a rule that applies to everyone you are

[Dr. Martha Beck]

an unusual individual sir oh yes he

[Interviewer]

is that's just the tip of the

[Dr. Martha Beck]

iceberg but i i mean you're both like way ahead of the curve on this because i think you both live very exam i'm guessing with jonathan but what i know of you mayim is you live very examined lives and you're actually using what in a lot of cultures not just therapy is is called a compassionate witness or a watcher a part of the self that is looking at behavior and emotion and saying huh that's interesting wonder if that's true and that tendency to question is extraordinarily useful in order to heal from suffering we don't need to immediately take big strides toward some set of mental health criteria that somebody put in a book all we have to do is say okay no wait i'm doing this my feet are hot i'm wearing shoes why and that right there breaks the cultural trance but i bet people were shocked when you did that jonathan were they it

[Mayim Bialik]

took some getting used to what did they do i mean thankfully i started to be able to do this in environments where i was amongst others who you know it wasn't a very conformist environment and independence was was celebrated but like you know there became times where i'm like i don't think this meeting applies to me and i would leave

[Dr. Martha Beck]

now i love that so much and

[Mayim Bialik]

when someone said hey where what you know i'm like i think this doesn't impact me or i don't really have anything to contribute here i'm going to talk to you later and let me know if there's things that i can contribute later on and it required some conversation but yeah lots of people think get upset by it but i don't know that they get upset because it's actually wrong or they haven't given themselves permission to do the same so that they're struggling by these notions of conformity and they're upset at anyone else who chooses to act differently i think the

[Dr. Martha Beck]

second definition and i think people the more they have repressed some natural thing in themselves and they're holding themselves in this position of suffering because they're telling themselves it's the right thing to do those are the people who most aggressively attack others who break the mold and it's it's so interesting because you can watch people like that get more and more and more rigid until they can't bear it anymore and then they kind of some of those people will just kind of completely explode and just like go completely outside of culture i've had clients who when they started breaking the rules got so excited about it that they they started sort of running amok and ended up in some really awkward situations having to deal with a lot of drama but the way you're doing it i'm thinking about this i'm not comfortable is there any reason not at this moment this is not about me okay i'm going to get up and go oh everybody's upset that's all right what i'm doing is rational i will tell them that and the calm with which you said that shows that you long ago left the straight jacket because people in the straitjacket explode at each other because they're so repressed there's so much pain and if they're going to tolerate that pain then by god so is everyone else boy did i get a lot of that as a mormon

[Mayim Bialik]

woman well it's interesting to think about like what is the spectrum of acceptable because for and i still have this experience where i get checked or mine will be like i don't know that you know this particular behavior in this particular situation is the right choice you may be rubbing people the wrong way but depending on the environment that you grew up with like i grew up in a kosher home eating non kosher food in the home would have been considered sacrilege i didn't see it like that but it wasn't my home so i bumped up against the people's whose house it was and my mom was like why can't you respect this but like i have a very hard time adhering to things that make no sense

[Dr. Martha Beck]

to me that is just that is beautiful and i bet you have less suffering than almost anyone like what you're creating there is a culture there is no such thing as a culture that serves everyone's true nature but there is such thing as a culture that is seen and known and discussed and is seen as a function of how people get together so so you're just coming at it from this oh there will be times when we conform with each other and there'll be times when that's not optimal so we're going to talk about whether it's optimal and this is the definition for me of a functional relationship whether it's a family couple community we talk about how the culture is serving us and where it's like maybe steering us in ways we don't want to go and so we we use culture as our servant instead of taking it as our master and that is we'll always have culture but when culture is serving us it's wonderful so it's

[Interviewer]

a song i guess maybe you could can you speak a little bit to how this this you know kind of perspective doesn't descend into chaos because when you were describing this ballroom i instantly was thinking of like there's always one person who's like standing in the back like needing to be their own person and then jonathan mentioned it but i think you know but i think it's it's true there's certain parts of that that you know really feel like oh that you know we all know that person who like doesn't really have a regard for rules and like if they want to like smoke in someone's face then someone can just walk away if it bothers them and they don't wear shoes and like you know whatever like we all know that person or at least you know one of them and honestly oftentimes you know the that kind of energy can can in in some cases be chaotic it can sometimes be

[Mayim Bialik]

can be off putting to some the

[Interviewer]

couple instances i'm thinking of are women who are very very bright beloved women i'm not gonna name names you know both came from a lot of trauma and this was kind of an extension of a personality which i'm not saying that all people who don't wanna sit in a chair had trauma but the two women i'm thinking of in particular are what other people might describe as kind of energy vampires meaning they're people for whom you know they kind of they whirl you know kind of they whirl things about them and if everyone doesn't get it there's something wrong with you and you're weird right so where's this balance between you know are we talking about like a cultural revolution where we all have a different understanding of culture itself or are you talking on a more kind of personal level how do we balance being honest with ourselves from kind of descending into chaos you know for lack of a better word

[Dr. Martha Beck]

yeah it's it's it feels from the culture's perspective like a very dangerous bet we're going to let everyone have their true nature and what is to keep people from just running around humping bushes and eating things that don't belong to them and that that has been the sociological question since the discipline was created and some people came down on the side of we are good and noble and some people came down on the side of we are horrible and rapacious and must be controlled i used to think that we were horrible and rapacious and must be controlled and then i started actually working with groups where we were talking openly about making the culture the subject of our of some kind of relaxed interrogation and what i found was that the people who were chaotic they were very often wounded as you said these two women were so they weren't you know they weren't acting in a way that's just quietly reassuming their true nature which is what jonathan is doing they're saying i i'm hurting i'm really really hurting and if the other people around them had not been constrained by culture to be super polite and pretend it wasn't chaotic or run away because couldn't handle it if a sort of critical mass of people sat them down and said my goodness they're so so much chaos around you it's really hard for us to feel comfortable with it but i'm guessing you must be in pain to be acting this way you know tell me tell me where i'm wrong that's the first thing i tell life coaches when i train them is that you you offer your interpretation of what might be happening in another person's heart and mind and then you immediately ask to be disconfirmed which is the scientific method you're looking for an antithesis hypothesis antithesis this is what i think may be going on with you tell me where i'm wrong and the adrenaline comes down so fast when people feel like they're being heard but also when the people listening feel that they are being heard by the chaotic one you're making me really uncomfortable but i'd like to help you and after many years of going back and forth on this after thirty years i really am prepared to state that the vast majority of people are agreeable compassionate empathetic social beings and that the few who aren't cannot get away with being too crazy once the whole group is honest i

[Mayim Bialik]

think it's fascinating the idea of this is what i'm hearing or this is what i think is going on for you prove me wrong because it then doesn't label them they don't feel like you're trying to impose something onto them there's an out there's a dialogue that's a a great turn of phrase and i think a lot of people want that interaction they want to be helpful but they end up sort of bulldozing someone with their opinion instead of being

[Dr. Martha Beck]

in dialogue with them whenever we're afraid we try to control and if you can learn to not be afraid which is i know i mean my book that's coming out is all about how to not be afraid if you can be unafraid with someone and say if you're troubled then stay with me for i am not which is a quote from hafiz it seems that everybody who's been pushed out of their natural shape by cultural pressures or trauma which may also be from cultural pressures everything wants to go to that level of peace there's a line from lao tzu that says all streams flow to the sea because it is lower than they are humility gives it its power so when you come in and you're like here's where i am here's how i feel i see how you're acting i'll tell you the truth about me and i'll tell you the truth about how i experience you and i one hundred percent may be wrong about all of it that's anticulture that is the most countercultural thing we can do because every culture says agree with me this is right

[Interviewer]

i wonder if you can tell us a little bit more about lying and you know many of us think of lies as you know kind of something other people do in fact you know i would say most well meaning loving compassionate people feel that part of their job as a loving compassionate kind person is to lie small lies all the time and some of the lies are to other people i mean i've seen you know people lie to other people's faces like oh i you know i'm busy at that time taking my son to the dentist and i'm like what you don't have a son like what but you know people are not taught that it's okay to say no thank you you know i was taught that no is a complete sentence right but there's so there's that kind of lying that i wonder if you can talk a little bit about but also this notion of kind of the lying to ourself i think you know you say that every verbal thing we say that is not true hurts our bodies hurts our psych leads us to anxiety and depression so it's kind of like i was going to ask you why is everyone so anxious and depressed it's probably because we're lying all the time to ourselves and to other people talk a little bit about lying okay so first

[Dr. Martha Beck]

of all it has a horrific effect on our bodies we're the only animals in nature so far as we know that can tell elaborate lies like coco the gorilla once the talking gorilla once ripped a sink off a wall and then when the keepers came and said what happened she blamed it on a kitten not a good lie very poor lying but moving toward us and the reason i think that our bodies don't like to lie and that animals don't like to lie is it detaches us from the reality that we're actually dealing with in any present moment if we go outside and we say my feet are hot and we're pretending that they aren't and they're in a fire and we lie to ourselves lie to other people and say no my feet are fine our bodies can suffer i think that's why we evolved in such a way that the moment we lie a whole range of physiological responses kick in and this is why lie detectors work so for most people barring psychopaths our blink rate goes up our sweating goes up our heart rate goes up our immune function goes down the second we lie we're not very good at it and studies show that most people tell each other ten at least ten lies within the first three minutes of meeting

[Interviewer]

each other okay give us examples what are some of the examples that of the lies people tell within three minutes

[Dr. Martha Beck]

of meeting each other lies people tell it breaks down a bit by gender women tell lies that make the other person feel better like oh you know you look so great today oh how are you doing i just don't know how you do it i could never do it whatever we say to make the other person feel better or i like that yes it's but that's a pattern that is ingrained into females for males it the lies are to make themselves look better that's just how it breaks down i'm not saying that jonathan is a case in point i'm just saying that's how it works so we start telling these little lies and then we end up and you watch there are so many comedies i mean think back to the sitcoms you were on almost all the episodes come out of either a case of misunderstanding or lying somebody is trying to do something but they don't tell other people about it

[Interviewer]

i'm thinking of three's company three's company was always right a lie a misunderstanding also a sexual innuendo but yes yeah

[Dr. Martha Beck]

but all comedy is that literally all comedies that aren't just pure pratfalls and farce revolve around misunderstanding or lies and the lying is more hilarious to us we're delighted by that because we've all been caught in the awkwardness of telling social lies and then having to deal with the fact that we've said something that's not true and then it builds and it builds and it builds in my case for example i was taught this really strange theology a theology that to me sounds strange i was told when i was two three four years old you know if you're really good you're going to someday grow up and marry a righteous mormon man and then you'll both die and you'll go to his planet which he's going to get because that's what good mormon men get after they're dead and you'll join him and his other wives on that planet i was like okay if you wear this special underwear it will protect you this man in world war two was wearing his and he was in an explosion and his arms legs and head burned off but the part covered by the underwear was untouched i remember sitting there as a little kid going his head burned off like why is this good my father was known as the foremost apologist that is scholarly defender of mormonism and he just told outright lies all day every day and it was literally called lying for the lord because you couldn't tell people in the late twentieth century all this stuff about mormon doctrine without putting them off their feet a little bit so it all had to be so i grew up in this miasma of lies in a house with ten people my seven siblings my parents all of us depressed and anxious like but really depressed and anxious miserable suffering trying to live this strange code of ethics and just devastated by it and horrible health problems i had horrible health problems by the time i was twenty years old i was in pain almost all the time i had autoimmune conditions because the body will try to attack you if you're the one lying it like you are the greatest threat to its well being so it'll attack you so i was when i was twenty nine i decided i would not tell a lie for a year a

[Mayim Bialik]

whole year were you mind bialix breakdown is supported by mud water jonathan and

[Jonathan Cohen]

i really love our mud water i'm a fan of the turmeric latte it makes us feel energized without those jitters and i've noticed it makes a difference in what sometimes feels like a brain fog mudwtr's original blend is a coffee alternative made with cacao chai turmeric and functional mushrooms like lion's mane and reishi or try their low calf coffee made with organic arabica coffee beans l theanine and the same functional mushrooms you get in their other blends it's rich smooth and only forty five milligrams of caffeine mud water makes it ridiculously easy to start the day feeling good and now you can grab it at target and sprouts nationwide making better mornings easier than ever to use mud water you just drop the powder into your favorite mug pour some water on it and give it a mix you can drink it hot or cold and the thing that people notice first is that the energy just stays there's no spike at nine no crash at two it's steady all day ready to make the switch to cleaner energy head to mudwtr dot com grab your starter kit today right now our listeners get an exclusive deal up to forty three percent off starter kits plus free shipping and a free awesome rechargeable frother when you use the code

[Mayim Bialik]

break that's right up to forty three percent off with the code break at m u d w t r dot

[Jonathan Cohen]

com after your purchase they'll ask how you found them please show your support let them know we sent you

[Mayim Bialik]

mind bialix breakdown is supported by mudwtr jonathan

[Jonathan Cohen]

and i really love our mud water i'm a fan of the turmeric latte it makes us feel energized without those jitters and i've noticed it makes a difference in what sometimes feels like a brain fog mudwtr's original blend is a coffee alternative made with cacao chai turmeric and functional mushrooms like lion's mane and reishi or try their low calf coffee made with organic arabica coffee beans l theanine and the same functional mushrooms you get in their other blends it's rich smooth and only forty five milligrams of caffeine mud water makes it ridiculously easy to start the day feeling good and now you can grab it at target and sprouts nationwide making better mornings easier than ever to use mud water you just drop the powder into your favorite mug pour some water on it and give it a mix you can drink it hot or cold and the thing that people notice first is that the energy just stays there's no spike at nine no crash at two it's steady all day ready to make the switch to cleaner energy head to mudw dot com grab your starter kit today right now our listeners get an exclusive deal up to forty three percent off starter kits plus free shipping and a free awesome rechargeable frother when you use the

[Mayim Bialik]

code break that's right up to forty three percent off with the code break at mud wtr dot com after your

[Jonathan Cohen]

purchase they'll ask how you found them please show your support let them know we sent you

[Interviewer]

expedia and visit scotland invite you to come experience the beauty that awaits in scotland the sweep of wild coastlines quiet lochs and untamed landscapes fresh cuisine that feels rooted in the land come experience the kind of stillness that stays with you long after you leave plan your scottish escape today at

[Jonathan Cohen]

expedia dot com visitscotland married at this

[Dr. Martha Beck]

time yeah i was married i had three kids i was married to a gay man mormon man looked good on the surface i didn't know i was gay i just thought i identified with gay people i was lying to myself so deeply right because i never even got a chance to go talk to somebody who said let let are you comfortable what's the real truth of your life it was just be like this be like this be like this and within so i i had this sort of a near death experience during a surgery and i felt connected to this warm and loving power that wanted me to be happy and everyone told me the truth will set you free so i decided well to get back to that energy i would just not lie at all and i stopped and within the next year i left or lost my religion my marriage my family of origin my home my my job my whole industry i left academia i basically left everything but my kids because everything else was just based on lies and it was horrific and not as bad as living all the lies and it's true the truth will set you free even though as david foster wallace said it has its way with you first

[Interviewer]

what was that year like of not lying did things come quickly slowly so

[Dr. Martha Beck]

fast so fast because i like really wouldn't lie at all and so i remember i stopped going to see my parents i had all these memories of sexual abuse as a child it's very common in mormonism and i stopped going to see my parents because i was so conflicted and my mother called me after four or five weeks of no contact it was i was the one who usually initiated and she said so you might want to come around we miss you which was not a common thing to say in my family and i remember saying i miss the concept of having parents oh that went downhill very fast yeah can you share a

[Interviewer]

little bit of this near death experience as you described it um the reason i'd like you to talk a little bit about it is because it is similar you know in flavor to a lot of people's moments of clarity um it's similar to what some people experience after a psychedelic journey that gets at deep trauma and you know kind of puts them in touch with something greater than than themselves and you know not uncommon you know for people to also you know report these kinds of things you know when they have sort of revelatory experiences in therapy or transcendental ones can you talk about this near death

[Dr. Martha Beck]

experience yeah and i would add that ifs therapy internal family systems therapy which is going great guns now it's just the therapist asking people about which parts of themselves are coming forward and they almost always if not always i mean dick schwartz the creator of it says that he believes that always they reach a point at some time where they say wait there's inside me deep inside me there's this part that is perfectly calm perfectly compassionate perfectly gentle full of humor full of wisdom and he'll say well what part of you is that and they say that's not a part that's that is me so so it's not necessarily even a power that is greater than us it's a power that is us it's very difficult to describe because it's sort of paradoxically beyond duality it's both each of us particularly and all of us and maybe the whole universe i don't know but what i can tell you is i was rushed into surgery because i was having spontaneous internal bleeding from scars that were left by sexual abuse so i was bleeding and it appeared that i was growing tumors very rapidly and they rushed me into surgery and they knocked me out and started operating and then i looked at the ceiling for a while i looked at the surgical lights and then i sat up and i watched them operate and i thought this what what about this is odd oh i am actually lying down on a table with my eyes taped shut huh and i was so bemused by it and they were saying wow there's no no tumor it's just scars a lot of scar tissue and i lay back down and looked up again and in between these incredibly bright surgical lights there a ball of light appeared about the size of a golf ball and i've read we see about a trillionth of the available light spectrum and i swear to god this had them all like i cannot describe it a ball of light so what it was the most beautiful thing beyond way beyond any description was it

[Interviewer]

the planet that was promised to your righteous mormon husband that was it

[Dr. Martha Beck]

damn i should have just checked out right then and gone home to i was just obsessed with looking at it because it was so beautiful and it started to expand in all directions and it sort of went into things instead of bouncing off them it seemed to have the quality of making everything shine from within and then it touched me oh my god i really really feel for like heroin addicts and people i've never done addictive drugs but if that drug makes them feel a hundred millionth part of what i felt when that light touched me i'm like yeah we gotta get you some of that you cannot live without that and maybe it would be nice if you could also keep your teeth so maybe not the meth and heroin but that feeling is what we're supposed to be feeling all the time it's coming out of all the discomfort and realizing that our natural state is beyond bliss it is oh my god it's incredible so i started to cry my body started to cry out of sheer joy and i sort of was united with this light it was just part of me i knew it was me i knew it was everything and the surgeons saw the tears sliding down out of my eyes and they thought that i was feeling the operation but was too anesthetized to say anything so they panicked and they're like oh my god oh my god and they said to the anesthesiologist you know give her more and he's like on it and then i just i didn't even bother with them anymore i just was with this light and it said look here's the thing you don't die and then feel this way the way your religion's been telling you your whole job is to on this planet until you get to the other ones that your husband will have your whole job on this planet is to feel the way you feel right now while you're still alive and i came out of that surgery in the recovery room just sobbing with joy and i looked there was this janitor mopping the floor and i opened my eyes and i looked at him and i said i love you so much there was nothing but love to express to anybody and so he got alarmed and ran off to get the doctors and i asked to see the anesthesiologist because i wanted more and he i started asking cagey questions what are the side effects what does it do to the brain blah blah blah blah and he finally said look what happened and i said because he said i was about to increase the anesthesia and this voice said to me don't do that she's crying because she's happy and he just was pale and he said did i do the right thing and i said okay this light came i told him a little bit and he was like wow you know how many times this has happened to me in thirty three years of practice i said no he said once and then he kissed me on the forehead and walked away and wrote me a letter afterwards just validating his experience i came out of that surgery decided never to lie again and almost immediately lost everybody and everything that i had held dear but it kept me in touch with that feeling and that is all i care about and it's now thirty years later and it is still all i

[Mayim Bialik]

care about when we're lying so deeply to ourselves it's very hard to know if we're lying or not we we actually people stop having an awareness that they're lying they're just an autopilot and they think they're telling the truth and they think you know they're so conditioned to make other people feel good or to get the approval or to fit in that they they've actually have no clue that they're lying anymore yeah but

[Dr. Martha Beck]

we have one clue and it's our greatest ally and its name is suffering because you cannot lie without experiencing some kind of psychological or physical suffering and if you don't come up with your truth when it's a little lie the suffering increases and increases and increases and that had been happening for me it was weird because i'd never had a relationship with a woman but i married a man who was gay and shortly after we were married i was like dude you're gay and he was so relieved i was like oh i like your gay self even better than your straight self but i was in this weird thing because i still wanted to be married to him and i feel bad for him about it but i started to like get myself it's like i was somehow getting myself ready to accept that i was gay and that the very special friendship i felt for some girls was a very special friendship and so that was i remember the day i like realized it i was in so much pain from my back it was in a horrific spasm and i went to i had signed on with a therapist who helped me tell the truth and i could barely drive to her office and when i got in there we talked about what was on my mind and i ended up just blurting out i don't want to be with men i want to be with woman and the pain just disappeared boom gone like from full i need hospitalization to i am completely comfortable when i broke through that lie but it was hard you're right it's hard can

[Interviewer]

you talk about some of the other things that you experienced physically you know we're in kind of an epidemic of autoimmune conditions you know women being affected by perimenopause in ways that seem i don't wanna say exaggerated compared to what our you know previous generations of women had to experience but there's some sort of intersection between like thyroid conditions autoimmune diagnoses anxiety depression and you know i i watch game show network cause it's what i do and you know most of the ads on the game show network are just you know probably what ads are like on television in general and what they say is if your antidepressant isn't working add this medicine add this one oh you may be bipolar which these things may be true i'm not saying i don't believe in diagnoses or western medicine but but the the information that we're being given and when i speak to in particular women sort of in my age bracket you know give or take ten years it's kind of like western medicine doesn't really know what's happening they keep kind of piling on and what ends up happening is that people are told microdose just take edibles just have another glass of wine like everything's like have an affair or leave your marriage like everybody's leaving their marriage and maybe these are marriages that need to be left like i don't know but i wonder if you can talk a little bit about some of the physical and physiological things that are happening and your experience experience with what you know release can look like and also i kind of want to then get into your book about the role

[Dr. Martha Beck]

of creativity yeah yeah okay fantastic so yes i i'm a particularly strong somatizer that means i drive every psychological issue into my body and experience it as pain so there were for two years i couldn't use my hands i had casts on them and i would use i typed my phd dissertation by putting a pencil with the eraser down between my claw hands and like hitting the keys with the eraser because i couldn't use my hands at all i was in a back brace for like ten years i couldn't use my right leg my knee in particular for a long time i developed granuloma annulare which is a skin disease i developed interstitial cystitis which usually means you have to have your bladder removed and then i developed i was just sort of told i had fibromyalgia everywhere now stress exacerbates all disease conditions that's been firm tell me where i'm wrong stress is just big and lying is stressful to the body that's also been really well established when you were telling me earlier about how people you know young people you know who are in mormonism now seem to be leaving and the reason is that because there's so much free flow of information whatever your culture is doing that's that's causing you harm is now something you can google and you can find other alternatives so young people in mormonism are googling do the native americans are they really descended from a group of people that came from jerusalem in six hundred bc no turns out they came from a bunch of siberian folks who walked across the aleutian strait and the guy who figured that out with dna was excommunicated from the mormon church for knowing too much about dna and when you're trying to stay in your culture and the and the flagrancy of the lies is confronting you because you have so much more information than people have ever had before in their lives it's harder to lie to yourself you have to do it harder you have to pay more attention to reinforcing the lie one thing you'll see you know in any number of areas of our of modern culture is this incredible polarization as people double down on what they believe to be true in the face of evidence saying that they're not i mean statistically when people say you take a group of people who believe something political very strong very strongly or they believe something about science very strongly and you give them dead to rights evidence that that is physically not possible it increases the strength of their belief it increases it they know they're lying and they're increasing their investment in holding the lie and that starts to make the body break down and i hit it early because i was in a really weird fundamentalist sort of cult like situation and then i at seventeen i go off to harvard it was different there and that's when it all started that's when i started getting pain everywhere because i was trying to be two different people i was trying to be the good mormon girl that got all the approval from the people i loved and i was trying to be the good scientific thinker that got approval at harvard and this schism between those two sets of those two parts of my identity was so overwhelming that it started to break

[Interviewer]

my body when i think about kind of all this autoimmune disease what is there some increase is it because there's kind of more information out there which is allowing more people to lie more is it you know kind of just the compounded culture that we're living in i mean especially you know your book is tackling anxiety that's like everybody's word everyone has a spectrum of you know anxiety that we're now all on you know is something else shifting and what do you see as sort of the way to turn that around well things

[Dr. Martha Beck]

are getting more extreme i mean we can see this a lot with young people on social media in particular girls the schoolyard taunting that used to break our hearts and make our lives miserable has become so intense and it spins out of control so fast into something much bigger than it used to be and so people are getting more hurt by their socialization so what once would have been an encounter with a bully can become a horrific situation where you're being attacked in multiple ways by people who may not even know you that is hurting young girls in terrible ways and young boys get the same thing and we all have the capacity to be more targeted so our culture is very intense and very chaotic at the time same same time so it's kind of hard to find your truth in the middle of all that but at the same time it's become more and more important to find your truth so i wrote the way of integrity saying if you can examine everything you're doing that isn't in harmony with what you most deeply believe that means integrity integrity just means one thing whole and unbroken so it's undivided and you'll find peace and that has been my experience and then people came to me after reading that book and they said i'm in total honesty but i'm terrified of everything after spending like i don't know how many thousand hours in meditation looking at my own anxiety which is was extremely robust there's a point in meditation where you break away from your own fear and realize that everything's going haywire in the world and everything is out to get me is almost never true in the moment you're just sitting there so you break through this very very deeply reinforced cultural lie we have that says everything is going to hell in a handbasket you should be very worried oh my god they're all everything's everything's melting down it may be true i don't know but one thing i do know is that you don't solve those problems by getting more anxious but we do get more anxious and we're told to get more anxious jeff bezos off and on the richest man in the world proudly says and often says that he tells every amazon employee to wake up every morning terrified and get more scared throughout the day because that's productive that's

[Interviewer]

what people are told like i mean i and i i believe martha beck i believe you about everything but i also know a lot of people who have to work jobs they have to support kids like they don't have access to so many things you know so i'm i'm also thinking like you know how how do you kind of hold this right up to a lot of people's reality because that is the way companies i mean people are being worked to the bone we've taught we've taught a medical structure where you have to stay up for three nights without sleeping because that's the best way to decide that you're gonna be a good doctor

[Dr. Martha Beck]

like what yep yesterday i talked to a group of physicians and they were like we have to do this i mean we are they're in i think medicine is one of the most extreme cases of that fear based anxiety based sort of life philosophy being pushed to its maximum to try to create excellence and it breaks people oh my god the trauma i've heard from people like i asked a group of doctors once what was the worst thing that you ever did to your own body to become a healer of others bodies i thought it would be a question to occupy the morning at one o' clock the next morning i staggered out of that room going if i get sick just hit me with a shovel i'm never going to a hospital it's nightmarish okay this is the thing and and the biggest lie is that we have to be anxious about that if you can shift and i did this last book i looked pretty closely at the brain you would be able to do much better but i remember long ago reading this study of why humans are the only creatures that reliably take their own live you know certain population and no other animal does that if you i mean lemmings run into the sea but if you fish them out they don't shoot themselves you know they're they're just running west that's what they do and this study came up with the one reason that people will override their own desire to live and the the answer was language language allows us to create horrors by remembering things from the past that may not have even happened to us because we heard them as language and then projecting a future in language using language that may never exist that probably won't exist because the factors are so uncontrollable about what will actually happen so we have this language the part of the brain that does language the left hemisphere roughly is also the part that gets roped into what's called an anxiety spiral where there's a bolt of fear and then there's a story told about the fear this is jill

[Interviewer]

bolte taylor this is whole brain living this is yeah we're good friends we just had her on and the other part of the left hemisphere besides the one that we think of that explains things is the one that feels things and then needs to explain it and

[Dr. Martha Beck]

when it explains it like oh my god this is really bad have you seen these last statistics let me tell you what else is here google google and the story of what horrors are around you that story becomes the environment in which the more primitive part of the brain is abiding so what it sees now is not the room where you're sitting but an absolute nightmare story that feels like it's real genuine environment and the other weird part of the left hemisphere is that if you lose your right hemisphere you can get hemispatial neglect which is the brain's inability the left brain's inability to acknowledge that anything besides its own perspective is real it's a very weird thing so people with certain right hemisphere strokes they don't even acknowledge that their own left arm and leg is theirs because the left side of the brain only owns the right side of the body and it doesn't care about the left side so it'll only shave the right side of its face or put makeup there it's a weird thing but the right hemisphere doesn't do that it doesn't exclude and it doesn't leave the present moment it is very deeply saturated with the present moment as jill can describe so beautifully and it really doesn't have very much language and so it's not creating a nightmare that may exist somewhere but really isn't right here and when you come back to the reality of what you're physically experiencing which is what science supposedly is you're basically as byron katie a spiritual teacher i love as she says you work and work and you worry and you worry and you're always just sitting in a chair somewhere you know of course people go through real trauma but and i've done work with people in prison people on the beggars on the streets of africa lots of things in the moment of trauma if you are completely present it doesn't torture you with anxiety real fear gives you a strong quick jolt of energy with a really clear idea of what to do next get you out of danger and then drop it that's what animals have but because of language we get stuck in anxiety and it's so convincing and yet it's causing untold suffering and the way out of that is to force yourself to use the right side of your brain and the way to do that is to make stuff become creative so

[Interviewer]

a lot of people might be thinking like i can't draw i'm not musical i can't hold a tune i can you can you talk about why you essentially chose to write an entire book specifically focusing on not just creativity for creative people but the specific significance of activating the creative brain i also want to mention just to your point before we get into that and kind of as a bridge to it you know what we're talking about the right hemisphere experiencing is things that cannot be put into words and when do people talk when do people say i can't even put it into words when they're ecstatically in love when they are spiritually or religiously moved meaning on a higher level than the church or the synagogue right when people have psychedelic experiences or transcendental experiences that is as as jill baltee taylor talks about that's a feeling state of ecstasy that has no words and is a healing force physiologically and you know science of course has to catch up with what mystics have known for thousands of years and what you're talking about but kind of can you take us into that this is not a book for creative people this is a book about the significance of creativity as an antidote to anxiety yeah this is

[Dr. Martha Beck]

just and if you're anxious and someone says be creative you're gonna get incredibly anxious cause you're not good at being

[Interviewer]

creative i can tell you right now the first time i was told to make a vision board and i'm forty eight years old and i've written a thesis and i've raised children and i'm a lactation educator and i'm very very science brained and i thought well what do i need to make a vision board for and this friend said how did you make it through the nineties the aughts and the two thousand ten s without making a vision board and so when i first sat down to make a vision board i cut everything in very specific squares and i lined up all the images my squares and it had to be perfect and everything was right and then my second experiment that this friend is helping me with she said what if you cut around the image and i thought well then nothing's gonna fit together what do you mean so that's the project that she and i are working on now it makes me incredibly anxious i didn't want to do it i didn't want to talk about it i was very grumpy about it so talk to me about your book as if i am that

[Dr. Martha Beck]

person because i am everyone is anxiety cuts off creativity there are tons except

[Interviewer]

jonathan who's like i'm going to stand in the back of the room and take my shoes off during a board

[Dr. Martha Beck]

meeting and then i'm going to make

[Interviewer]

a vision board instead of going to

[Dr. Martha Beck]

a meeting that is a creative act taking off your shoes when your feet are hot is a creative act it's anything you do that disrupts the existing status quo and moves the circumstance in some direction so i would say this is not about you making anything for the sake of showing it to other people i would specify we're not going to show it to other people unless you really really want it to show it but what we are going to do is show you what it's like when you get a moment of relief from the terror or whatever level anxiety you've reached that's spinning through you all the time and the first thing i would do and i actually took all these ideas because i was a teaching fellow in studio art at harvard for four years with a great professor named will ryman and we worked with books that were specifically about activating the right side of the students brains because they were very left brain thinkers this one woman brought in a picture of her dog his face was in the front and then his body was just out to the side and i said to get the dog to do that you would have to cut it like saw it apart the dog is not that long when seen from the front and the next day she came back and she hadn't changed the drawing at all and she said i measured the dog it's exactly that long i was like okay but the whole time we were trying to trick people into letting go of that left side analytical thing because it turns out when you do that almost everyone can draw really well but don't try to draw really well that's a separate thing what i want people to learn to do is to open the door between the terror which is a hall of mirrors a horrible freak show and walk into that beautiful awestruck mystical transcendental space that you just talked about which is always there for you it's always just waiting literally in your head for you to check in with it there's tons of experimental evidence that shows that if people are trying to be creative and they get anxious it just shuts it down there's almost nothing that asks the opposite question if you're anxious and then something causes you to be creative will that shut down your anxiety so i started experimenting with this during the pandemic i would get up every morning and just do things that made the right side of my brain wake up i found that washing the dishes was could be really because i love it and i love the feel of the water and i love that i have taken dishes that were dirty and i have made them clean that's a creative act putting together a list of songs you like because they make you feel good that's a creative act it's just make something make anything and the right side of your brain has to come into play and if you're really intent on making something like that beautiful vision board of yours tell me something when you were actually cutting out the squares and lining them up it's probably too far back to go there but while you're actually using the scissors what's going on with your anxiety as your total focus is on getting the

[Interviewer]

right square yeah the well i i like cutting i like cutting yeah because it's also like there's something about kind of removing negative space like removing what i don't want and having what i do want so that i can definitely focus in on that is a huge

[Dr. Martha Beck]

expression of human creativity dividing things apart so while you're getting the cut exactly right or while you're learning to moonwalk because you always wanted to do it or while you're trying to make your baby laugh because that's what you like to do there are these moments that are completely anxiety free but we don't even notice them why because the left side doesn't think they're important so it doesn't record them in language and it doesn't record them in time and that's why when you get into something really creative like a conversation with a new love you look up and all this time is gone and you don't know where it went because you've been in the right side of your brain and the left side of the brain goes oh my god you're so unproductive how could you do that be afraid be very afraid but anytime you can just just get yourself to say give me five minutes to create and i've been doing this online with hundreds thousands of people at a time and i'll get them all whipped up to their anxiety and have them list in the chat the zoom chat what their anxiety levels are from one to ten and then i'll say all right try this write your name on a piece of paper you sign your signature and then write it backwards just write your signature backwards you don't have to show anyone you don't have just do it for the hell of it and they sit there and it gets very quiet and then i say now during the time you were focused on that what was your anxiety zero zero zero zero zero and it's about brain function it's about the fact that those two phenomena the spinning anxiety and the intense creativity they can't seem to operate at the same time

[Interviewer]

so you're expand and i really appreciate this you're expanding out and the book also the book is beyond anxiety curiosity creativity and finding your life's purpose and it's full of kind of simple exercises and little kind of worksheet kind of things so it's really it's a fun kind of book to work through and it it is it's full of a lot of simple creative activities that are not as hard as creating a vision board which i get it it takes supplies and you need a glue stick and i use rubber cement but it's very stinky that's not what you're talking about you're expanding out the concept of creativity can can you just talk a little bit about glimmers you know one of the one of the exercises is to find ten glimmers that are near me right here right now can you talk about glimmers because i kind of it's funny i i have a lot of glimmers i didn't know that's what they're called when i was a kid my my dad used to take me for walks we lived near some alleys and to me that was an adventure cuz you'd find all sorts of things you'd sometimes find pennies or dimes or you'd find a marble or you'd find someone's hot wheels car that like you know fell out of their car and into an alley like to me that was an exploration and that kind of continued my whole life talk a little bit about glimmers as an extension of

[Dr. Martha Beck]

creativity okay so it's almost like it's all in everything is paired everything is dual in our at least in our perceptual universe and we talk a lot these days about triggers and then very

[Interviewer]

legitimately everybody's triggered all the time everybody's

[Dr. Martha Beck]

triggered i get triggered you get triggered we all get triggered and if you've got buried trauma triggered becomes not just a sort of thing you use in conversation but a catastrophe where you can't control what's happening to you triggers are very real they're anything in the brain that kicks up an association with something traumatic on the other side we don't talk about them having an opposite but there's a polyvagal expert named deb dana who does talk about that she talks about finding things that trigger associations with moments of joy deep appreciation gratitude and the other things that make us healthy and happy and joyful and so she says a glimmer is the opposite of a trigger and the thing is if you're in anxiety you can't see that it's a glimmer but right now whoever's listening to this if you look around your space and i want you two to do this right away find something and see if it okay i just found something that glimmers me it associates with a lot of positive things here it is it's a tiny tiny cough lozenge which i use to keep my mouth from going dry during interviews but i have a four year old running around the house if you're an older woman it helps to be a lesbian if you want to have a four year old and she calls these spicy balls and so just seeing it there i thought of spicy balls and i thought of lila and i thought of the just the delightfulness that is this child and immediately i was glimmered into a state of happiness so what were

[Mayim Bialik]

yours i mean i have a big ball of joy right next to me i don't know if you can see

[Interviewer]

this tail jonathan just got his first dog as an adult and so it's been like one giant glimmer fest over

[Dr. Martha Beck]

there oh my god what's his name

[Mayim Bialik]

her name his name is archie he's a golden retriever he's seven months and every day there's a very intense contest for who wins the best boy award but he's had a record like no one else going to win just racking

[Dr. Martha Beck]

up the awards golden retrievers are just an entire glimmer nation they cannot help themselves that's awesome i love that he's been amazing okay so what about you

[Interviewer]

mike so this is one of these like kids wands that has like sort of looks like pixie dust inside and it's got all these like little confetti things and a lot of my glimmers which i didn't know that's what they're called they are i don't know if they're preverbal but it's literally a feeling i don't know why when i see things like this there's also certain stuff sounds that i hear kind of that crinkly jingly sound that some children's toys make i have no kind of cognitive association with it but the sight of it the shapes like something about it reminds me of something and so i actually have a lot of glimmers that are like that i don't know why this is just one of them can

[Dr. Martha Beck]

i take a guess and you tell me where i'm wrong oh sure you have this incredibly strong social and verbal mind and mathematical and everything like very very strong intellect very very strong ability to read people and do things that delight them but a lot of those things especially when they get commoditized as they were in your case become work and become associated with anxiety and you're so smart and this started so early that i think probably the the i'm

[Interviewer]

uncomfortable i just want everyone to know i wanted to not lie i'm uncomfortable hearing things about welcome to the party

[Dr. Martha Beck]

but like you had to have been so young when you were allowed to freely exist in that right brain state where most people sort of drift in and out a lot you had a very intense life and you have a very unusual psyche and i think probably there's just a wealth of of that transcendent awestruck blissful feeling in you that you were drawing from to entertain other people but to go back to it you have to sort of go to when you were little tell me where

[Interviewer]

i'm wrong yeah that's pretty accurate i mean i also have a very and i think a lot of people do or maybe i'm wrong a lot i have a very strong ability to kind of cut all of that off you know i build a very strong wall and you know i am i'm seen as playful but i'm actually you know i'm not the most playful parent you know i mean my kids are sixteen and nineteen but i enjoyed my children but i didn't really enjoy childhood that way like i hated the park i hated seeing other people and also a lot of people yell and hit their kids and i can't deal with that but yeah i i'm not i don't really like like even the puppy energy meaning not jonathan's puppy energy but the puppy you know it's kind of like whoa it's really abundant and it's like all over and everybody talks about how cute it is but like i don't know like it doesn't really have a lot of function for me yeah you

[Dr. Martha Beck]

had to you you could not let that be part of your comfort zone you know you had if you ever loved it you had to push it aside in order to stay day absolutely centered in the social demands being made of you which were extraordinary and continue to be extraordinary and so i would suggest for you many psychedelics i don't know i mean that's one way i would not judge you if you did people are using that a lot to get back to that because the parts of us that are in that awestruck joy they're more common than we know because they're not available to the verbal or chronological mind so the left side of the brain basically says that doesn't look like anything to me it didn't really happen but when you do something really formal like i'm going to go to a peyote ceremony or whatever it is and really set it aside in ritual pre modern cultures learn to do this as a high form of psychological technology it is not recreational drug taking it is opening the portal between the fear mind and the awestruck blissful mind because when you get into the awestruck blissful mind it will enfold the other part of the mind and comfort it whereas if you're stuck in the left side it just isolates so yeah getting back to that state of the state of nature is very very sweet and very very healing to the traumas we've

[Interviewer]

all experienced it's really interesting you say that because there has been a lot of attention you know as i mentioned about women in particular of my age who are not feeling their needs are met by traditional psychoanalysis or you know their needs are not being met by you know sort of you know plug and play medical attention which is like oh you have high blood pressure here take this pill instead of what's actually going on or you know why are people fainting why are women you know kind of experiencing these high rates of you know panic attacks and you know hyperventilation and just being told oh must be your blood pressure so very very

[Dr. Martha Beck]

interesting it is interesting and i have a son with down syndrome and i was told that as he grew up i had to work extra hard with him with language because girls with down syndrome and i've been told all girls developmentally tend to use both sides of the brain more than young men young boys and so i think that women are pulled more and also we do things like have babies we nurse babies we're squirting oxytocin out of our ears it makes us want to kiss people who are dying on the street i mean it's just it's we're pulled by facets of our nature toward the the awakened state is what they would call it in in asia and our culture won't let us go there and and i had one doctor tell me it's like somebody pounds a nail into your foot and then says how much codeine are you going to need before that stops hurting here i'll give you all the morphine you want here you go oxycontin sure here you go and he said the way to heal that is to take the the nail out of the foot and then heal it and our culture is the nail right i

[Interviewer]

was gonna say when you first opened this episode with that you know the the joke that i was taught is doctor it hurts when i do this to which the doctor said then stop doing that and you know i i can't tell you how many you know friends i speak to you know are like i'm in this relationship and it's it's this and we're always fighting and he's unfaithful and this that and it's like maybe the answer is no you know that's like how many messages do you want god to give you right it's like i sent you the lifeboat i sent you the fireman i sent you the person knocking on your door what were you waiting for so there's

[Mayim Bialik]

this video that i made of mime that i'm going to try to play for you it's hard not to look at an adult and say that used to be a baby and you know we're now all wearing suits and walking around but like and the montage for people who are only listening is a series of mime in different play like states some crabby some happy just waking up doing taekwondo practicing her taekwondo moves in in the middle of a pharmacy a cvs when we were waiting for

[Interviewer]

covid results there's there's so there's a

[Mayim Bialik]

couple points here one is when i hear about you know us talking about glimmers and talking about joy there is seems to be a very childlike essence to that where that we revert back to and a bit of an intelligence that we all had then before we understood exactly what we needed to do to make everyone happy or we were getting those messages but we hadn't fully succumbed to it and realized that we could navigate life by doing x y and z as a trade off to our internal states or we were much more guided by our internal states so is it that we are returning to that through these glimmers does it only exist in our childlike states does it and then i you know want to cover a little bit about like you know are we all just these children not really functioning with the demands of

[Dr. Martha Beck]

being adults i think that we are all people not functioning well with the demands of a society that is asking us to behave in ways we did not evolve to behave so two hundred years ago we would all wake up with the sun the sounds we would hear would be birds wind water each other's voices we would go through the day doing things like growing food hunting fishing making baskets making clothes things that people now do on vacation and we would never be like woken up with bright lights early in the morning and put in a box full of light and then told to stare at another box while it gives us terrible news and makes us do hard things with the left sides of our brains and we are not in a normal lifestyle so it's not about childhood per se it's about the fact that our entire brain was designed to work the way a child's brain does in our culture so in the sixties nasa commissioned a study to pick out creative geniuses so they could hire them for nasa and some people put together this survey and they found that two percent of adults tested that they tested came came out as creative geniuses so they were using this test for years then somebody thought to give it to four and five year olds how many of them do you think came out as creative geniuses a lot more ninety eight percent wow ninety eight percent and the people who did the study said it's not that they lost their genius is that they were put in boxes in rows and told to do problems that made no sense to them which is what our school system was doing at the time in order to make them into obedient factory workers which is what the culture needed to be productive materially so i believe that that creative genius is waiting inside you and it has nothing to do with the monetization of something you draw or dance or act or anything so ironic that mayim managed to bring such huge voltage of that same energy to produce for other people at the cost i would guess from working with other performers at the cost of being able to freely like find joy on your own but i don't think it's a childhood thing i think it's a cultural thing and i think that when you take your shoes off and walk to the back of the room you are a very countercultural being in the process of reclaiming creativity and joy and i would i would encourage you to take off all your clothes now sorry

[Mayim Bialik]

well there's something about that what are the rituals by which we return to that early knowledge you know mime and i were just talking and i like to think about you know themes in in all these podcasts that we do and one of them is about an idea that we have senses and guidance beyond our understanding of our five senses like five senses seems ridiculous yep we sacrifice aspects of ourselves in order to fit in in order to fulfill our role in society or what the social expectation is and then we get pulled further and further away from our internal knowing about are my feet hot or what do i like do i want to pursue one thing or another and then we say i'm lost i don't know what my life's purpose is i am at a job i dislike because that's what i thought was going to get me from point a to point b and what's crazy is that there are a lot of ways more so than ever before to make money quote unquote outside the system and that may seem like a very elite or privileged thing but you hear people who have built many tribes online or who found a way to turn their art but if you start by pursuing your art to say how do i monetize it won't work but if you start by slowly getting in touch with what you like to do the most and robert green who we had on talked about this that when you're young there are core things that you inherently are driven to that spark your joy that you can lose yourself for in for hours

[Interviewer]

at a time or that you're intuitively good at right like when parents say about kids like oh they were they showed this kind of ability or oh they were always such good communicators or

[Mayim Bialik]

whatever it is so i'm kind of going back to this idea if we start by saying actually we are more animalistic than we think and we do have an inherent instinct that we have separated ourselves from whether it's for cultural reasons whether it's that we're eating a lot of junk and we've our microbiome is off and therefore we don't have a gut instinct and we're constantly inflamed so we're dealing with that type of thing or we're lying to ourselves or whatever it is that has separated ourselves from this intuition but can we talk about intuition as in a compass to guide our lives and you know do we have it inherently all of us and how do we get back to

[Dr. Martha Beck]

it oh thank you for that question my very first self help book was called finding your own north star and your own north star is your particular path of the ability to feel the maximum amount of joy and do the maximum amount of good during your lifetime so that i called your north star and i said you you're born with compasses your body is one compass it will get tense and nervous like if you just say something that isn't true like so say something you're afraid of like the world's going to hell in a handbasket or something oh jonathan's got

[Interviewer]

a lot of fears jonathan tell her

[Mayim Bialik]

when i mean i used to live in a place that got very very smoky over the summer and i was afraid of i had anxiousness about forest fires and about you know the smoke filling up the valley that i lived in and not being able to go outside for a week or two at

[Dr. Martha Beck]

a time jonathan i just love you to just like get into allow yourself to feel the way you feel when that fear of smoke or whatever fear of fire when that is maxing out and you're like did i do the right thing oh my god everything's burning like go there and notice how your body feels without trying without judging it

[Mayim Bialik]

just notice i totally know it's i feel tense my focus is constricted i go on repeat checking like i need validation i'm i'm validation seeking and i can tell myself there's nothing i can read online that's going to change how i think about this in any given moment the only way is to detach and yet i can get caught in a cycle or a loop of looking for that external validation or piece of information that's going to help me shift

[Dr. Martha Beck]

this mood and i think that's another part of accelerated anxiety is that people have so many places to look and they can just keep so now i know it might be kind of an effort and i'm just pulling this on you out of nowhere but like take a couple of deep breaths which will tell your amygdala you're not being chased by a panther so just like nothing being chased by a predator ever did this so that will like loosen you up and then put all your attention on archie like just just everything about him his weird little they all have weird little habits golden retrievers his oh

[Interviewer]

he's strange he doesn't lift a leg to pee he pees like he's got to get real low to the ground

[Dr. Martha Beck]

it's pretty funny a diaper peer just think about how silly he can be and how much he loves you and the sort of felt quality of his presence and notice what that does to

[Mayim Bialik]

your body yeah totally relaxed curious playful

[Dr. Martha Beck]

yeah so it's really as simple as shifting the focus of our attention which is what meditation and a lot of the eastern traditions are all about is sit until you learn to observe that i call the body compass when it relaxes it's saying that way it's due north for you when it tenses up it's not just saying that's bad for you follow me closely here it's saying that's not true for me because if there were a fire and you did have to run for it you wouldn't feel that gnawing anxiety you would be like shit fire i'm out and you would go and then you'd get away and you'd relax unless you have anxiety which would get it spinning again so your body compass will tell you what to do and it can use fear as one of its tools but it never gets stuck in anxiety so that's one thing and then i talked about the emotional compass and the emotions you experience when you're believing that which is true for you at the deepest level it's when you divide yourself that you start to suffer and then i remember this is like twenty five years ago i'm like i have to put in intuition okay i'm going to have to really soft pedal this because i'm going to be mocked and thrown out of i was i'll take away my harvard degrees they'll kick me into the street and i was like once i had an intuition to go into a store where they were putting out pork cutlets and it turned out to be true but the fact is which i now just blithely talk about because i i'm old and i don't care is that from the time i became pregnant with my son who has down syndrome i started having psychic experiences like really intense ones undeniable testable ones like what what happened to me most often is something called remote viewing i had no words for it but my husband at the time was he was going back and forth between the us and singapore where he was consulting with a company and so he traveled a lot and i'd be lying asleep at night and i'd wake up and suddenly i'd be like on a street in japan with all these weird it was like stepping into a movie set and there would be i could smell people with cooking japanese food and there would be people on a bamboo structure and really elaborate stuff and then i'd be back and then you know four hours later he would call me having stopped over in japan and say oh it was great i went for a walk i went through this one street and they were having a festival and they were cooking and happened over and over and over again that what he would see if he had a really strong reaction to it i would suddenly see maybe you're just codependent clearly yeah no kidding but you know that may be the upside to codependency get rid of the part where you give people all your money and let them like abuse your body and keep the part where you always know exactly what they're feeling i mean we have our cell phones are these computers are wireless communication devices that run on electricity we are systems of electricity made of meat why should we not be capable of wireless transmission of information we're electric i don't know why it works but i just know it happened so many times that i sort of gave up denying it because that would not have been scientific to say this is this is random it wasn't random so

[Interviewer]

this is when you were pregnant with your son is when this started yep

[Dr. Martha Beck]

and after he was born it went down but i remembered it he is still super spooky in a very cool way and i really think that because he was in there i was like like a radio tower or something he just knows stuff but i was like i spent years like tiptoeing around okay i'm having these experiences and i i was doing a lot of sociological research at the time and i would turn i would interview people and then turn off my recorder and then i'd lean in and they'd say okay let me tell you what really happened and they had also had some kind of mysterious experience which another culture most pre modern cultures would not have considered even remotely

[Interviewer]

unusual correct they're often the shamans and the seers of cultures for thousands of years yes in our culture it does not fit into kind of the formula for productivity and for rationality and for

[Dr. Martha Beck]

rationality another and i know this is a generalization but another quality of the left side of the brain is that it likes material objects it can control and everything that happens like when monks go into deep meditation in one study they found that two areas of the brain went off and one was the sense the part that establishes a sense of separate self different from the rest of the universe and the other one was a sense of control we value our sense of self and our sense of control above all other things but it's when they drop away which can feel terrifying but suddenly we find ourselves connected with that awe that bliss and then we know what's happening to our loved ones sometimes or we know to do something before it gets too late or we have masses of information available to us that we are not allowed to even think about using unless we want to be labeled idiots are there

[Interviewer]

ways that people can learn to tune into that and if so what are they and then the second question is are there ways for people to learn to tune into even what's happening in their body the questions you asked jonathan i think a lot of people wouldn't know how to even like orient or when you ask people how they are in their chairs like a lot of us don't even kind of know how to get into our bodies can you explain about stepping into intuition and stepping into somatic awareness it's so funny that

[Dr. Martha Beck]

we claim to be a materialist rationalist society but the material body you have means nothing so and and its feelings mean nothing carl jung the great psychologist once had a friend who was a pueblo chief named mountain lake and they got to be good friends so ewing asked mountain lake what do you think about anglos and he said honestly we think you're all insane what do you want you all want something you're always staring your eyes are so starry and then he said you say you think with your heads and jung was like yeah what do you think with and he said this like it's bringing in information from all around you the body is just processing tremendous amounts of data that we don't allow often into our verbal cognitive awareness and they're very linked mayim when you start to get into your body you also start to feel things that are like what how do i know that and i usually see i knew jonathan would be something of a prodigy here because of the thing about taking off his shoes this is a man unusually aware of his body which no offense but is pathetic that we live in a society of people who don't know their feet are hot it's crazy but with most people i would start really really gently and i'd say start just with your toes wiggle them feel the sensation what are they doing now wiggle them don't be afraid to feel it see if you can feel the inside of your foot like if you wiggle it around enough is there sensation and i would sometimes i'll spend a whole hour just gradually bringing them into connection with their body starting with the feet because that's the least frightening part to the so called rational mind and as you start to get up to the pelvis the belly the lungs the heart oh my gosh that that is terrifying for a lot of people because so much is stored in there and that is when the the body starts to acknowledge trauma done to it but it also like say you were attacked as a child god forbid and you repressed it as you got back in touch with your body you would start to let the memories in of the whole experience and at that same time you would allow in a perception of when someone means you harm what i've dealt with in so many clients is someone hurt them and they said that was no big deal it was a family member it was someone i love it doesn't matter and they repressed it and then they over and over and over again recreate that situation without knowing why so they go with abusers over and over and over again until they remember the original abuse and with the abuse memory and the embodiment of it and the healing of it through gentle compassionate witnessing and holding there's a lot about that in my book when you start to heal the wounds of trauma it gives you the ability to pick up on someone's like predatory energy from across the room and go oh no oh no and you stop doubting your instincts and that does seem to you know bleed over into the almost supernatural for a lot of us

[Interviewer]

that's really interesting what about intuition is there a way to try and tune into intuition what i just said it's

[Dr. Martha Beck]

the furthest thing because we think spirit and body two different things that was established by like the roman catholic church the body is one thing the spirit is the other and don't you ever mix them up because the real fear they had is that people get in touch with their bodies and find out we're not talking about the god they experience what we're talking about is an authority structure where we're at the top if they get in touch with their bodies they're going to start to feel a metaphysical force that actually loves them we can't have that i don't think it was that you know logically parsed

[Interviewer]

out well it's not that far from brian marescu's research brian marescu who talks about what it means to ingest the body of christ to the catholic church was actually an incorporation of embodying the spirit of a higher power which previously we accessed through psychedelics and through transcendental experiences and dying before you die and the catholic church's interpretation was well how about if we eat this thing and it's like you're one with god and everybody was like okay because that sounds

[Dr. Martha Beck]

easier okie dokie and and by the way they systematically burned the herbalists who were allowing people to have psychedelic experience experiences with the plants that they had been growing for untold millennia or they

[Interviewer]

made lsd and psilocybin research illegal which is another way of burning the people who were trying to access something i

[Dr. Martha Beck]

studied that from afar i wrote a book after an encounter with a shaman in africa i wrote a book about the shamanic archetype and how we've split it apart in our culture and so people who are born to it have these talents that are oddly arrayed they'll be scientific but also poetic and also love nature but they also are good at building things and we split it all up and in other traditions and other peoples that cluster of characteristics would have been recognized as shamanic and then the person would have been trained and almost in in almost every every society they found plant helpers and i resisted it until i'd finished the book i went to a lot of ceremonies did not do anything and then the shamans and medicine people that i had been studying invited me back and they said come on you've called these ceremonies the the medicine you have to take the medicine and i was like all right not a drug taker usually and yeah it what happened is for me it bashed open it didn't bash anything it threw open the doors of my cognition to the experience of love in a way that i'd never had it before and what was interesting is it threw open the doors and they never closed it's the opposite of addictive for me and i've talked to other people as well they did two or three ceremonies and the doors open wider and then it's like okay we're done with you your brain's better now and it feels like a real teacher is there and i'm telling you the feeling is not subtle it's very strong and humans have been using these methods and animals use these methods too for hundreds of thousands of years you know and in the last hundred years we've decided it's all bad and wrong i want to talk

[Mayim Bialik]

about this idea of the body processing a tremendous amount of data there's a whole podcast on this which obviously we don't have time to get to today but if people start to understand that that we are what i don't have your exact phrasing but it was like we're electronic devices and meat devices then we can think about ourselves like cell phones where we're constantly processing inputs of data and we're also having outputs of data that sort of changes this notion of oh gut sense is like oh i'm just going to feel something but actually what we're feeling is that is the processing of a complex wave of inputs and so you know there are electronic inputs happening between us even remotely in this conversation there's electronic inputs from archie sitting next to me and and so how do you know so so a couple things one is do you believe in muscle testing as a signal mechanism for us to understand what we're

[Dr. Martha Beck]

processing i think muscle testing because it's been so well established that muscle strength weakens when we lie i i think it's a kind of rough and ready thing that i've found really effective in emergency situations like i i'm off i do these seminars in the african bush and um sometimes one of the guests will get sick or get stung by an insect or something and i carry a lot of medicine with me because we can't just get there's no pharmacy right there and so i'll have them like hold the medication in one hand and give them a variety of medications and then test their muscle strength when they're holding each one to see which one might be best for them as i said very rough and ready it's also true though when i was working with heroin addicts on the streets of phoenix they would come to the methadone clinic where i was working and it was just because they couldn't afford their heroin that day so to get the methadone they had to sit through me and i used to ask them what do you want more than anything in the world and they'd say heroin okay what do you love heroin what's your favorite sound heroin bubbling in a spoon like they were quite specific and then i'd have them put out an arm and these are big tough guys right out of prison sometimes i'd say hold up your hand now tell me that you want heroin and as they said that they lost all muscle strength and i mean all muscle strength and i had guys freaking out because they were terrified that they couldn't keep strong like it was how they defended themselves on the streets in prison and when they talked about heroin they got really really weak until a small girl could beat them in an arm wrestle i'm not even kidding so yeah i think there's something to it i wouldn't like give someone a course of therapy or drugs based on it but hey well if

[Mayim Bialik]

we're just talking philosophically you've had this experience firsthand obviously not randomized controlled trials but very specific experience that you know the extrapolation of that is that the body has an inherent wisdom not only for us to feel but actually visually evident that can align with what is a truth and that you know there's a lot of conversation right now that truth is subjective and actually individual truth is not there's a resonance to it that is authentic and it could even exist outside of ourselves you know if if energy is flowing all the time the idea that we could connect to a a vibration of truth both in and outside of ourselves is interesting to

[Dr. Martha Beck]

me yeah it is and i hit the problem of is truth objective or subjective really early because when i left utah mormonism and went to harvard it was like whoa these two things are very very different how do i reconcile them because the social part of me wanted to believe mormonism the social part of me wanted to say that all religion was nothing but baloney and i didn't know what to do so i actually had a breakdown instead and i read every significant work of philosophy that was recommended from the pre socratics all the way up to the postmodernists and when i got to immanuel kant the critique of pure reason in like you know a thousand densely worded pages he basically said look we could all be dreaming this you can't have an experience that's not filtered through your perception your perception is an active creator of reality therefore you don't know what the hell's true and even descartes who they say you know they quote him saying kogi ko er gosum like i think therefore i am do you know what he really said he said i doubt which is to say i think which is to say i must exist it was dubito cogito ergo su it wasn't based on his being it was based on his doubt so the great philosophers who pushed into it come to this really simple thing of i could be dreaming right now we could all be dreaming right now so i just grabbed that and said all truth is subjective whee i don't i can just lie and be anybody to anybody and and i don't have to feel guilty because the truth is subjective and that's when my body started to break and that's when things started going downhill and i went into depression and i went into intense anxiety and i just everything felt horrible and then finally when i had that experience at twenty nine in the surgery i got to this place that felt so much more real than the physical world so much more real and as i've gone around the world working with lots and lots of different people testing and testing and testing does this work i want life coaching to be high

[Interviewer]

science

[Dr. Martha Beck]

i have found that the one statement that puts people's bodies and brainwaves and heart waves and strength and everything into most alignment if there's one phrase it's the sentence i am meant to live in peace so if you just say that to yourself a couple of times silently if you're listening to this i am meant to live in peace and you just drop it down like a coin into a well and there is something that just goes and i can feel it when people reach it that's what i call your sense of truth is it an absolute reality no you're in a monkey suit you're just a baboon in socks right but is that the closest we can come i think it is i think it is

[Mayim Bialik]

i love that idea of us all being baboons in socks i totally feel that you're meant to be living we're all meant to be living in a state of much more calm and ease and i think by connecting to that level of intuition that we have we can be guided to be in the right place you know they manifest when people talk about manifestation they talk about synchronicity and just to give you you know a little bit of a window like i fully believe in the non parallel nature of time i've had experience experiences where i have been struck by oh my gosh i have seen this place in a recurring dream and showed up there and had an intense realization of oh okay i'm in the right place oh i thought my life was off track but how could i it be off track if i've dreamt of this place like this or ways in which suddenly i will be in a room and see someone's face and it will shift i'm like oh my god that person is so familiar to me even though i've never seen them before and those moments are very synchronized and become messages to me of oh there's something happening here that is important for whatever life's journey i'm on and when i don't have times of synchronicity or moments of that too often i'm like am i off kilter in some way or is this just a lull and sort of building those signposts to make sure that things are you know progressing as they should and i use should in air quotes because i don't think there's only one way that they can progress but i just share that with you for context because so you know where some of my questions are coming

[Dr. Martha Beck]

from i love that and to me you know the the scientific bacon's losses believe nothing until it is proven true when i was having those psychic experiences and they were testing out true with my ex husband's experience i decided that i would take the opposite i would believe i would entertain anything until i was really sure it was false and i then walked into a completely different world because people say things to me everybody gets their own planet i'm like okay that does not feel like peace and so i don't believe it i don't go with it but then other things happen when you've opened the doors to everything and i'm thinking okay like i used to sit and meditate in the forest in california and all these animals would come and climb on me and everything and they seem to feel me as safe and kin and i would think well i don't really believe this but i don't not believe it so that's where i that's where i am with everything do we have visions and past lives whatever i don't know but i don't not believe it because that would be a fundamentalist position that blocks out a lot of potential data it's not a parsimonious way to think

[Interviewer]

martha beck it's been such a delight to get to speak to you and we highly recommend beyond anxiety curiosity creativity and finding your life's purpose thank you so much for spending time with us

[Dr. Martha Beck]

it's been an honor and a delight you guys are amazing

[Interviewer]

we're just baboons in socks that's what i got sometimes

[Mayim Bialik]

i take my socks off and i'm

[Interviewer]

just a baboon i really appreciate how many worlds she can straddle she really you know holds to an a deep understanding of not just science but the scientific method and the purpose of the scientific method and understanding of philosophy and psychology and all these things while also being so open you know this notion of what if it is true you know you often hear people say you know what if you lived your life as if god did exist right or what if you lived life as if there was possibility instead of assuming that there isn't or feeling that you need to go through life proving that there isn't so many more things open for you in your heart in your body in your life when you're open to possibility as opposed to closed off i really loved how she talked about that

[Mayim Bialik]

this conversation brings me back to some of the themes that we have on this podcast and one of the themes is there's something happening that you might not be aware of what does that mean we can be doing things that we seemingly aren't aware of that are separating ourselves from potential and there are other things that we can start to do like i'm going to set the intention to only say the truth or tell the truth and i'm going to slow down enough to know when my body has a contraction that indicates to me because we're constantly receiving information that we're not always processing because we're moving so quickly or we're moving into the left hemisphere that isn't incorporating that information because it just wants to have language and specific categories but by slowing down and expanding our view about what is available to us information wise whether it's an energy whether it's a feeling whether it's a somatic experience to a thought i have or to a saying i have i can be guided to a much better life with one filled with more enthusiasm one filled with more creativity one filled with a lot more optimism combating these fear loops so many of us get into this loops of anxiety or fear but there are ways to get out of it it's like it's i i hesitate to call it a hack it's actually just how the mind is wired and if we know more about how the mind is wired we can incorporate these very powerful interventions i'm

[Interviewer]

gonna try and think about what it would be like to not lie even in small ways or even to myself i'm gonna take that on this week and see what happens and maybe you'll see me next week and maybe you

[Mayim Bialik]

won't i'm curious for people listening comment on a lie that you have told

[Interviewer]

what are you lying about what are

[Mayim Bialik]

you lying about take this next hour this next day and see what lies you automatically tell and didn't even realize you were telling by monitoring your body and feeling when does it contract what do you say that makes your body contract in a way that you may not have previously been aware of write

[Interviewer]

it down in a journal she said if you write them down you'll have just like a list of lies sounds great all right from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have

[Dr. Martha Beck]

we'll see you next time it's maya bialik's breakdown she's gonna break it down

[Mayim Bialik]

for you she's got a neuroscience phd or two and now she's gonna break

[Interviewer]

down it's a breakdown she's gonna break

[Dr. Martha Beck]

it down did you know if your

[Jonathan Cohen]

windows are bare indoor temperatures can go up twenty degrees turn the temperature down with blinds dot com and get up to fifty percent off custom window treatments like solar roller shades and more during the memorial day mega sale whether you want to diy it or have a pro handle everything we've got you free samples real design experts and zero pressure just help when you need it shop up to fifty percent off site wide and huge savings on door busters right now during the memorial day mega sale at blinds dot com rules and restrictions apply