← Mayim Bialik's Breakdown
Mayim Bialik's Breakdown
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)
01:50:44
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- [00:00]
Jonathan Cohen
Mind Breakdown is supported by Helix Sleep.
- [00:04]
Mayim Bialik
Spring is in 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 can prevent us from getting a good night's rest. Night sweats, back pain, feeling the person next to you when they roll over a million times.
- [00:19]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
We were so excited to hear that Helix wanted to partner with us.
- [00:22]
Mayim Bialik
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
- [00:40]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
door which is so much fun.
- [00:41]
Mayim Bialik
With free shipping in the US they have a 120 night sleep trial and limited lifetime warranty. Plus they're happy with Helix Guarantee Rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. 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 helixsleep do slbreakdown for 27% off site wide. That's helixsleep.com breakdown for 27% off site wide helixleep.com breakdown book a loved by
- [01:11]
Dr. Martha Beck
guest property with vrbo and you get a top rated vacation rental that's loved for all the right reasons. I love my VRBO for the location.
- [01:18]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Good reason. Oh and for the pool cuz pools are cool. I feel the love book of Verbo
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Jonathan Cohen
that's loved by guests.
- [01:23]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
If you know you verbose Foreign
- [01:29]
Mayim Bialik
hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.
- [01:30]
Jonathan Cohen
And I'm Jonathan Cohen.
- [01:32]
Mayim Bialik
And 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 Dr. 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.
- [02:14]
Jonathan Cohen
Martha also explains how trauma is actually hijacking your body and its ability to have intuition to really know if your sensing danger or not and how your muscles literally weaken when you lie.
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Mayim Bialik
Martha was 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 trauma and increasing your intuition.
- [02:50]
Dr. Martha Beck
And.
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Mayim Bialik
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.
- [02:58]
Jonathan Cohen
Just before we get to this episode, did you know that 43% 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 Mayim Bialik breakdown material, check us out on substack, where we release content that is not available anywhere else.
- [03:19]
Mayim Bialik
And now, in honor of mental health Month, we hope you enjoy this episode with Dr. Martha Beck. Break it down.
- [03:28]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Welcome to the Breakdown. It's really an honor to speak to you. We're so glad that you, you have the time to talk to us.
- [03:34]
Dr. Martha Beck
Ah, the honor is all mine. Huge, huge fan.
- [03:37]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
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 explain kind of the overarching, sort of purpose of all of the different kinds of work that you do.
- [04:10]
Dr. Martha Beck
It's really simple. I. 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 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. 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 the time.
- [05:48]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
It sounds deceptively and seductively simple, but I'm sure you encounter, as you have encountered for your whole career, especially as sort of a public facing person, people for whom it. It doesn't seem like they sort of know how to get there.
- [06:08]
Dr. Martha Beck
No, nobody does.
- [06:11]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
I'd like you 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.
- [06:25]
Dr. Martha Beck
Yeah, so the 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.
- [07:23]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
I was born 65 years old. I don't know what you're talking about.
- [07:28]
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. If you're a girl baby, they like it when you're demure and soft. And when you're a boy baby, they. They like it when you're brave and, you know, and durable or whatever. And when we encounter that mismatch between our true nature, what we were, our genotype tells us to be, and our socialization, we sell out ourselves hard and we do it 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 one of the Mormoniest Mormon places, in a very Mormony family, super duper Mormon. And some 25 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, 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.
- [09:37]
Jonathan Cohen
This episode is sponsored by Wandering Jews, an open door media brand.
- [09:42]
Mayim Bialik
If you've ever found yourself feeling like you have more questions than answers, you're in good company. The Jewish people have been like that for thousands of years. Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam is a podcast where two of today's most dynamic Jewish voices, Michal Bittone and Noam Weissman, dig into the biggest questions about life through a Jewish lens. It's the kind of conversation where you'll laugh, learn something new, and probably shout in disagreement at least once. Michal and Noam tackle the tough topics like antisemitism in America, what happens after we die, and the future of religion with guests like Bret Stephens, Michael Rapoport and Sarah Hurwitz. And this past month, in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month, they've been celebrating some of the Jewish lives and institutions that have shaped American life, from food to music and comedy. Thoughtful, joyful, and always honest. That's Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam, a production of Unpacked. Find it on your favorite podcast app or on YouTube and make sure to hit subscribe. Check out Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam podcast and subscribe at Unpacked. Bio nmx
- [10:44]
Jonathan Cohen
Mind Bialix Breakdown is supported by bioptimizers.
- [10:47]
Mayim Bialik
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- [12:12]
Jonathan Cohen
Make 2026 the year you finally start sleeping again.
- [12:16]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Okay, 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, when you talk about 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 true self?
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Dr. Martha Beck
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 10 or 15 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. And irreplaceable, and we go into psychological suffering.
- [15:14]
Jonathan Cohen
I. I 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, M. Teases me that, like, I know when my feet are hot,
- [15:34]
Dr. Martha Beck
and
- [15:34]
Jonathan Cohen
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.
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Dr. Martha Beck
Yeah.
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Jonathan Cohen
And not sit down. 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.
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Dr. Martha Beck
You are an unusual individual, sir.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
Oh, yes, he is. That's just the tip of the iceberg.
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Dr. Martha Beck
But I, I mean, you're both, like, way ahead of the curve on this because I think you both live very ex, I'm guessing, with Jonathan. But what I know of you, my name is you live very examined lives and you're actually using what in a lot of cultures, not just therapy, 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?
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Jonathan Cohen
It took some getting used to.
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Dr. Martha Beck
What did they do?
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Jonathan Cohen
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 now.
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Dr. Martha Beck
I love that so much.
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Jonathan Cohen
And 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.
- [18:18]
Dr. Martha Beck
I think the 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 gonna get up and I'm gonna 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 straitjacket. Because people in the straitjacket explode at each other because they're so repressed, there's so much pain. And if they're gonna tolerate that pain, then, by God, so is everyone else. Boy, did I get a lot of that as a Mormon woman.
- [19:43]
Jonathan Cohen
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 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 to me.
- [20:25]
Dr. Martha Beck
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 you're just coming at it from this, oh, there will be times when we conform with each other and there will 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 use culture as our servant instead of taking it as our master. And that will always have culture. But when culture is serving us, it's wonderful.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
I guess maybe you could. Can you speak A little bit to how this 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.
- [22:24]
Jonathan Cohen
Can be off putting to some.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
The couple instances I'm thinking of are women who. Very, very bright, beloved women. I'm not going to 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 want to 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 yourself, 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?
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Dr. Martha Beck
Yeah, it's. It. It feels, from the culture's perspective, like a very dangerous bet it. 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 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. 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'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, there's 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 where I'm wrong. That's the first thing I tell you. 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. 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 30 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.
- [25:58]
Jonathan Cohen
I 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 in dialogue with them.
- [26:29]
Dr. Martha Beck
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 100% 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.
- [27:35]
Podcast Host/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 sin 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 psyches, and 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 to talk a little bit about lying.
- [28:59]
Dr. Martha Beck
Okay? So first 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. 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, we're. 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 10, at least 10 lies within the first three minutes of meeting each other.
- [30:21]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Okay, give us examples. What are some of the examples? That of the lies people tell within three minutes of meeting each other.
- [30:27]
Dr. Martha Beck
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.
- [30:46]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
I like that.
- [30:47]
Dr. Martha Beck
Yes, it's. But that's a pattern that is ingrained into females. For males, 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.
- [31:24]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
I'm thinking of3's company.3's company was always right. A lie, a misunderstanding, also a sexual innuendo, but yes.
- [31:31]
Dr. Martha Beck
Yeah, 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 2, 3, 4 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 II was wearing his and he was in a, an explosion and his arms, legs and head burned off. But the part covered by the underwear was untouched. I remember sitting there was 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 20th 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 10 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 20 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. You are the greatest threat to its well being. So it'll attack you. So I was, when I was 29, I decided I would not tell a lie for a year. A whole year.
- [34:04]
Jonathan Cohen
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- [34:53]
Dr. Martha Beck
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Mayim Bialik
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Jonathan Cohen
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Jonathan Cohen
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- [35:33]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Buried at this time.
- [35:35]
Dr. Martha Beck
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, 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 had this sort of a near death experience during the 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 is true, the truth will set you free. Even though as you Foster, David Foster Wallace said, it has its way with you.
- [37:03]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
First, what was that year like of not lying? Did things come quickly, slowly?
- [37:13]
Dr. Martha Beck
So 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.
- [38:01]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Can you share a little bit? This near death experience as you described it? 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. 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 it, you know, not. 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 experience?
- [38:47]
Dr. Martha Beck
Yeah, I. 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 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 him 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.
- [41:04]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Was it the planet that was promised to your righteous Mormon husband?
- [41:08]
Dr. Martha Beck
That was it. 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.
- [42:13]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
It is.
- [42:14]
Dr. Martha Beck
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. 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 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 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? Was that. 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 33 years of practice? I said, no. And 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 30 years later, and it is still all I care about.
- [44:52]
Jonathan Cohen
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.
- [45:14]
Dr. Martha Beck
Yeah, but 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 a 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.
- [47:00]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Can 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 want to 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 because 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 10 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 fine. 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 with what, you know, release can look like. And also, I kind of want to then get into your book about the role of creativity.
- [48:37]
Dr. Martha Beck
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 10 years. I couldn't use my right leg, my knee in particular, for a long time. I developed granuloma annulari, 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, 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 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 600 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 exclamation 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 17. I go off to Harvard. You. 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 my body.
- [52:22]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
When I think about, you know, kind of all this autoimmune disease, like, 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?
- [52:57]
Dr. Martha Beck
Well, things are getting more extreme. I mean, we can see this a lot with young people on. On social media, in particular girls. The. The schoolyard taunting that used to, like, break our hearts and make our lives miserable has become so. 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 it's. Our culture is very intense and very chaotic at the 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 that'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.
- [55:33]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
That's what we 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. Like what?
- [56:13]
Dr. Martha Beck
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, 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 lives. 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 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.
- [58:27]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
This is Jill Bolte Taylor. This is whole brain living.
- [58:30]
Dr. Martha Beck
This is.
- [58:30]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
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, feels things and then needs to explain it.
- [58:40]
Dr. Martha Beck
And 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, 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 described 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. 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.
- [61:16]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
So a lot of people might be thinking like, I can't draw, I'm not musical. I can't hold a tune. And 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 Bolte T Sailor 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.
- [62:40]
Dr. Martha Beck
Yeah, this is just. And if you're anxious and someone says, be creative, you're gonna get incredibly anxious. Cause you're not good at being creative.
- [62:47]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
I can tell you right now, the first Time I was told to make a vision board. And I'm 48 years old and I've like 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 90s, the aughts and the 2010s 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 person. Because I am.
- [63:41]
Dr. Martha Beck
Everyone is. Anxiety cuts off creativity.
- [63:44]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
There are tons except Jonathan who's like, I'm going to stand in the back of the room and take my shoes off during a board meeting and then I'm going to make a vision board
- [63:52]
Dr. Martha Beck
instead of going to 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 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 from 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, 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 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 right square?
- [67:13]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
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
- [67:30]
Dr. Martha Beck
is a huge 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 1 to 10. 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 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? 00,000. And it's about brain function. It's about the fact that those two air, those two phenomena, the spinning anxiety and the intense creativity, they can't seem to operate at the same time.
- [69:14]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
So you're expand. And I, I really appreciate this. You're expanding out and, 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, 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? Um, you know, one of the, one of the exercises is to find 10 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. And 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 creativity.
- [70:31]
Dr. Martha Beck
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.
- [70:42]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
And very legitimately, everybody's triggered all the time.
- [70:45]
Dr. Martha Beck
Everybody's 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 and 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. So if you. 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, 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 just the delightfulness that is this child. And immediately I was glimmered into a state of happiness. So what were yours?
- [72:28]
Jonathan Cohen
I mean, I have a big ball of joy right next to me. I don't know if you can see this tail.
- [72:34]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Jonathan just got his first dog as an adult, and so it's been like one giant glimmer fest over there.
- [72:40]
Dr. Martha Beck
Oh, my God. What's his name?
- [72:43]
Jonathan Cohen
Her name is Archie. He's a golden retriever. He's seven months out, 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 up the awards.
- [72:59]
Dr. Martha Beck
Golden retrievers are just an entire glimmer nation. They cannot help themselves. That's awesome. I love that.
- [73:07]
Jonathan Cohen
He's been amazing.
- [73:08]
Dr. Martha Beck
Okay, so what about you, Mayim?
- [73:10]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
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 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.
- [73:58]
Dr. Martha Beck
Can I take a guess and you tell me where I'm wrong?
- [74:00]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Oh, sure.
- [74:01]
Dr. Martha Beck
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.
- [74:32]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
The I'm uncomfortable. I just want everyone to know I wanted to not lie. I'm uncomfortable hearing things about welcome to the party.
- [74:41]
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 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 I'm wrong.
- [75:15]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
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. I have a very strong ability to kind of cut all of that off. I build a very strong wall. And I am, I'm seen as playful, but I'm actually, I'm not the most playful parent. You know, I mean, my kids are 16 and 19, 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.
- [76:03]
Dr. Martha Beck
Yeah, you 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 all experienced.
- [77:36]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
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 interesting.
- [78:12]
Dr. Martha Beck
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.
- [79:19]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
I 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, who 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?
- [79:55]
Jonathan Cohen
So there's 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 Covid results. There's, there's. So there's a couple of points here. One is when I hear about, you know, us talking about glimmers and talking about joy. There 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? 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 being adults?
- [81:19]
Dr. Martha Beck
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 200 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 60s, 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 2% of adults tested, that they tested came out as creative geniuses. So they were using this test for years. Then somebody thought to give it to 4 and 5 year olds. How many of them do you think came out as creative Geniuses a lot more. 98%.
- [82:44]
Jonathan Cohen
Wow.
- [82:45]
Dr. Martha Beck
98%. And the people who did the study said it's not that they lost their genius, it's 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 for 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 encourage you to take off all your clothes now. Sorry.
- [83:59]
Jonathan Cohen
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.
- [84:22]
Dr. Martha Beck
Yep.
- [84:23]
Jonathan Cohen
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 at a time or that
- [85:33]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
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 whatever it is.
- [85:43]
Jonathan Cohen
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 it?
- [86:22]
Dr. Martha Beck
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'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. Say something you're afraid of, like the world's going to hell in a handbasket or something.
- [86:56]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Oh, Jonathan's got a lot of fears. Jonathan, tell her when.
- [86:59]
Jonathan Cohen
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 a time.
- [87:17]
Dr. Martha Beck
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, just notice.
- [87:37]
Jonathan Cohen
I totally know it's. I feel tense. My focus is constricted. I go on repeat, checking. Like, I need validation. 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 this mood.
- [88:07]
Dr. Martha Beck
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.
- [88:47]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Oh, he's strange. He doesn't lift a leg to pee. He pees like he's gotta get real low to the ground.
- [88:51]
Dr. Martha Beck
It's pretty funny, a diaper pee. 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 your body.
- [89:05]
Jonathan Cohen
Yeah, totally relaxed, curious, playful.
- [89:09]
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. You 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, shaking 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 25 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.
- [90:49]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Like what.
- [90:50]
Dr. Martha Beck
What happened to me most often is something called remote viewing. I had no words for it, but my husband at the time was try. 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. 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.
- [92:33]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
So this is when you were pregnant with your son, is when this started?
- [92:36]
Dr. Martha Beck
Yep. 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 they'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 unusual. Correct.
- [93:22]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
They're often the shamans and the seers of cultures for thousands of years.
- [93:27]
Dr. Martha Beck
Yes.
- [93:28]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
In our culture, it does not fit into kind of the formula for productivity and for rationality.
- [93:34]
Dr. Martha Beck
And for 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, that suddenly we find ourselves connected with that awe, that bliss, that. 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.
- [94:33]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Are there 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 ask, 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?
- [95:03]
Dr. Martha Beck
It's so funny that 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 I 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 stary. 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. You know, 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 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.
- [98:36]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
That's really interesting. What about intuition? Is there a way to try and tune into intuition?
- [98:42]
Dr. Martha Beck
What I just said, it's 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 out.
- [99:16]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
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 easier.
- [99:46]
Dr. Martha Beck
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
- [100:00]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
millennia, or they made LSD and psilocybin research illegal, which is another way of burning the people who were trying to access something.
- [100:07]
Dr. Martha Beck
I 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. 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.
- [102:03]
Jonathan Cohen
I want to talk 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. 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 of things. One is, do you believe in muscle testing as a signal mechanism for us to understand what we're processing?
- [103:21]
Dr. Martha Beck
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,
- [105:17]
Jonathan Cohen
but, hey, well, if 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 me.
- [106:11]
Dr. Martha Beck
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 choi ergosum, 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. 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 29 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 science. 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.
- [109:22]
Jonathan Cohen
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, 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 from.
- [111:05]
Dr. Martha Beck
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.
- [112:21]
Podcast Host/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.
- [112:33]
Dr. Martha Beck
It's been an honor and a delight. You guys are amazing.
- [112:40]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
We're just baboons in socks. That's what I got.
- [112:44]
Jonathan Cohen
Sometimes I take my socks off and I'm just a baboon.
- [112:47]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
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, um, 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.
- [113:32]
Jonathan Cohen
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 gonna 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. 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 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.
- [115:16]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
I'm going to try and think about what it would be like to not lie, even in small ways or even to myself. I'm going to take that on this week and see what happens. And maybe you'll see me next week and maybe you won't.
- [115:27]
Jonathan Cohen
I'm curious. For people listening, comment on a lie that you have told.
- [115:32]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
What are you lying about?
- [115:34]
Jonathan Cohen
What are 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?
- [115:54]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Write 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.
- [116:01]
Dr. Martha Beck
We'll see you next time. It's Maya Bialix, breakdown. She's gonna break it down for you.
- [116:07]
Jonathan Cohen
She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. Fiction. And now she's gonna break down.
- [116:13]
Dr. Martha Beck
So break down.
- [116:14]
Jonathan Cohen
She's gonna break it down.