← Meaningful Conversations with Maria Shriver
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Maria.
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I'm Maria Shriver, and this is Meaningful Conversations. On every episode, we'll take a journey into the lives of inspiring, thoughtful, thought provoking people. People who are smart, spirited, and spiritual. People who have done extraordinary things to make a positive impact on our world. These are people I respect and admire, people who inspire me. I want them to share their stories, their experiences, their wisdom, and their feelings with you. I hope we can come together in community to reflect on the issues and topics that we're all thinking about, but no one seems to be talking about. I hope that you're inspired to have more meaningful conversations with the people in your life. Martha Beck is one of my dearest friends and one of my favorite people on the planet. She's also one of the first people I turn to when I need a boost of inspiration or just someone to talk to about the issues in life that we all face. Like me, I know that so many people, millions of you, actually respect and and cherish Martha's voice. That's why I wanted to share her with you here on Meaningful Conversations. She is a real wisdom gatherer and a pathfinder, and I hope you enjoy our conversation. I probably had more meaningful conversations with Martha than practically anybody else on the planet. That's the truth. Deep, meaningful conversations that have been really helpful in my own life to moving me forward. Which is why I wanted to take a moment to talk to her on this podcast. Martha. On her Instagram themartha Beck, she refers to herself as an author, a teacher, a pajama enthusiast, and a person who's on a perpetual integrity cleanse. I would amend that by saying she's a best selling author and an inspiring teacher, a life strategist, a motivator, an inspirer, a survivor, a mother, and a meaningful friend. So I don't know about the pajama
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part, but yeah, you left out the pajamas.
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So welcome, welcome, Martha. You are out. You have just moved across the country. Martha used to live in California, where I would get to see her. And she packed up her family and moved to the east coast to Pennsylvan, Pennsylvania, to live her one big, free, meaningful life. So let's begin, Martha, by having you describe what a meaningful life looks like from your vantage point. And I'm curious as to how you've embarked on that.
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Sure. Well, really, the reason I became a writer had everything to do with my own definition of what it's like, what it means to have a meaningful life. I was getting my doctorate at Harvard after being there as an undergraduate and my second child was prenatally diagnosed with down syndrome. And I had about two weeks to legally end the pregnancy if I wanted to. But I knew this wasn't an unwanted pregnancy. So I was really deciding what kind of a baby I was willing to have. And I have no judgments about people who make a different decision. But I walked around Harvard and I looked at all these professors and highly, highly successful people, and none of them looked particularly happy. And the doctors at Harvard had told me that allowing a child to be born with cognitive deficits and so on was like having a malignant tumor and refusing to have it removed.
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But I kept thinking, now, how long ago was that? Pause a second.
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Because this was 30 years ago.
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30 years ago. And we should talk about that. Your son is named Adam.
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Yeah.
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And so you were debating whether to bring Adam into the world.
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Exactly. So I was. They kept telling me what kind of a life was worth having. And it was a life where you could be a big intellectual success. It was a life where you could earn a lot of money, be famous, be handsome, whatever. And yet I looked at all the people who had those things, and they didn't seem particularly happy. And I kept thinking, I really don't care if I have all those things if I'm never happy, but if I can experience joy, then isn't joy its own excuse for being? Isn't that enough of a reason to be alive? And everything I read or heard about people with down syndrome was that they could experience tremendous amounts of joy. So I chose to keep Adam. But more importantly, I radically shifted the definition of success for myself. And I've sort of been on that path ever since. If something feels like joy, I go toward it. If it doesn't feel like joy, I don't go toward it. And this seems really simple to me. And yet people keep paying me to tell them to do this.
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Now, what I think is so, you know, important about that story is that you were told a certain thing about the child that you were carrying. You looked around. You actually confronted all the beliefs and assumptions that you had about what success looked like. You were standing on the campus of one of the biggest, most prestigious universities in the world, and you made a conscious decision to shift your life into a life of joy and meaning and raise your son with that philosophy. Really.
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Right.
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And you've always told me that to follow your truth, you know, when something is true because you feel a sense of relaxation about it, a sense of joy in it. And what is a lie that you tell yourself or others tell you brings you anxiety?
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Yeah, it's such an interesting thing and there's a lot of good research to bear this out. Our minds are the, in all the animal kingdom and we are the best liars. But that doesn't mean we lie as easily as you might think. When we lie or when we choose something that doesn't feel like what we want, our entire physiological makeup is affected. Our immune systems get less efficient, our muscles tense, we develop memory deficits, our pulse goes up, our blood pressure goes up. So anything we do that is false to our true selves has an animal response in the body. And you literally feel yourself tensing as you choose to go towards something that's wrong for you and relaxing, even if it seems odd. Like I just had a friend diagnosed with a terrible illness. But when she heard the right diagnosis, her whole body relaxed because she finally it was true. She knew it was true. And so even when it doesn't seem to be good news, if you head the way of truth, it always goes into relaxation, peace, and then into joy and other blissful emotions eventually.
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You said there that people pay you all the time to teach them how to find their own one wild meaningful life, their own truth, their own sense of joy. Why do you think it is that so many well meaning people, so many people who want to live lives of meaning and joy have trouble doing so and it seems to be at record highs right now.
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Yeah, yeah, we were talking about this yesterday. That with the state of the world, with the state of governments all over the globe and with the amount of information about it that is flooding into us. I mean, it used to be if something went wrong somewhere, you probably wouldn't hear about it, but now we hear about all the disasters. And so we live in a high state of anxiety and fear. And that is actually the opposite of the set of instructions necessary to find joy. So fear will tell you to tense up, shut down, try to control everything. Good luck with that. You can't control much of anything. Where if you pay less attention to fear and pay more attention to what is pulling you forward in a positive way, if you pay more attention to joy than to fear, you're going to choose a better path. But the way the culture goes is fear.
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And so it's harder than ever for us to kind of step away from the fear, find places and moments in our life that bring us back to our true center that are our compass on how to move our lives forward. Correct.
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Yeah. And I remember a long time ago I was talking to you about this, probably the first time we ever talked about it and you wanted to sort of anchor into something and I said, all right, well, here's something I think I know about you. Have you always, always in every circumstance in your life, done your very, very best and you just said yes? There was just this absolute solid yes. And I could feel the peace in your voice. Your vocal tone dropped. You knew that was true. And that's the kind of anchor that feeling is. Ah, this is the feeling of my integrity. This is the feeling of truth. And if you can start from that and use that as kind of a touchstone, go back to that moment and say, what feels like this in my life and what doesn't feel like this? You can start living your life like a game of you're getting warmer, you're getting colder, and it's actually very. You can find an object that's hidden very cleverly if you just know when you're getting warmer and you're getting colder, and it will lead you all the way through your life.
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How do you know? And how have you determined that you're living your meaningful life?
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You know what, it's a moment to moment thing. Literally. I can be happily ensconced in writing a book and think, this feels so good. It's so engaging. I'm so fascinated. My body's relaxed. It's not easy, but it's joyful. And two hours later it could feel awful because the time has come to turn my attention to something else or to take a rest or to get a hug from someone I love. So we're being guided continuously and there's no rigid, eternal thing we're supposed to do. It's a condition of continuous responsiveness. So I love this phrase from a yogi I once heard. I exist in continuous creative response to whatever is present. And if you can do that and always move toward joy, you flow into everything that's meant to happen for you.
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One of the things that Martha does, one of the questions, and since I love to ask questions because I'm curious about people lives and how they move themselves forward, and this is something I've learned from you that has helped me tremendously in my conversations with people. Whenever someone's telling you something and they maybe aren't clear themselves, what they're trying to think, you say, tell me more. What is the kind of science behind asking a person to tell you more?
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Well, it's actually the basis of all science. If you don't have a really clear picture of something, you try to get more information and so many of us barely listen to what other people are saying, and we don't want to sit there and just let them talk to us. We're in a state of either talking or waiting to talk. And instead it's. It's amazing. One methodology that I've used is you get two people who are strangers to each other, put them in a room together, and you have one of them be the talker, and the other person just says, what more would you like to say about that? And the person brings up. They're supposed to. You're supposed to bring up a problem, a serious problem in your life, and the other person never responds. And this goes on for 15 minutes with anything other than what more would you like to say about that? And within 15 minutes, the person who's talking has figured out the problem because they had a compassionate witness who actually cared enough to listen. It's profoundly powerful. And if you just go through the world saying that to people, especially when they seem odd or strange or they're upsetting you, if you can have the discipline to say, tell me, tell me more, you will find yourself coming into accord with people, and they will start to solve the very issues that you think are problematic without you having to do anything.
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And what's great about that is that it brings connection to you, the listener, and to the person trying to work out their life. And really, connection is at the foundation. When I talk about a meaningful life, it's once steeped connection. Whether you find connection in nature, whether you find connection with other human beings, whether it's with animals, it makes you feel connected to be in a meaningful conversation.
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You are so good at that too. I've watched you with all kinds of people, this genuine curiosity, genuinely open heart. And it's so interesting because as I watch you, you know, it's like, why doesn't she get in there and start arguing? And as you listen, I actually start to have more compassion for the person that's talking to you as well.
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Oh, that's funny, because people are always right, saying, why don't you say something about this? Or jump into that fray? And I think that's a challenge, right to us all who are, you know, out speaking or using our platforms. You feel like this need now kind of to comment on everything, to jump into everything, to be, I guess, most the most forceful person make the wittiest comment. How do you refrain?
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It's not easy. It's amazing how hard the ego wants to assert itself. And I honestly, this is a practice, as you said. In the introduction, I'm on this thing I call an integrity cleanse, which is being absolutely as truthful as I can, not only in words, but in actions and in everything I do. And one of the things I've realized is that I lose the truth of the present moment when I start to get excited about imposing my position or expressing things, especially opinions. So as part of this cleanse I'm on, I've had to sit with that. And I'm telling you, at first it feels like you're going to crawl out of your skin. And it's very helpful to have a practice of meditation, which is something I do. And when somebody starts to talk in a way that upsets me, I have to go back to the breathing and the mantras. In meditation, I just say breathing and breathing out. It's an actual. I have to speak, force myself to say those words in my head. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out and listen. And if I can keep my breathing low, this is part of controlling the animal reactions. It relaxes the body and it opens the heart and the mind. And then you can start to forge connection. But it's hard.
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It really is. And one of the quotes you have on your Instagram, I love the quotes that you share, which leads into that. You said most of our stress comes not from situations, but from our thoughts about situations. What our minds create, only our minds can erase. Now, the mind is such a complicated entity, right? And for so many people, their minds drive them to exhaustion, drive them to depression. The thoughts they have are anything but kind. And what is your best advice, Martha, or what have you learned over the years? Works. And for someone who wants to live a meaningful life, wants to move forward, wants to do good, but their mind is hitting them with, who do you think you are? You're not smart enough, you're not good enough, you're not rich enough, you're. Who do you think you are? It keeps coming back to that, right? Over and over again.
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Yeah. Well, this is again, back to integrity. I have a belief, and it's based on many years of experience and experimentation, that even the thoughts we think have effects, whether we're lying or telling the truth to ourselves. So all that physiological and emotional response to a lie that I was telling you about, the tension, the immune system failure, all of that, it happens when we even think something that is not deeply, deeply true to the whole organism. Body, spirit, heart, mind. So most of us are focused mainly on mind, because that's how our culture tells us to focus. And as you said the mind does nothing but tell terrifying stories, terrible stories about the past, terrible stories about the future. And it's very uninterested in this moment here now. So the way you can come down out of the mind is to get present in the body. My son Adam, who's not very verbal, is such a great role model for this. He's very present with what is. He's very attentive to things like beauty in the room or any type of loving or interesting thing that's happening in the room. He focuses on that almost automatically. I kind of see it as his gift. And then once you're really present, you notice the thoughts in your head, and you almost have to slow it down. Like you have a remote control. It can go to way slowed down thinking, and you'll see a thought go through your head. I don't have enough money. If that's true, it will be a calm, peaceful motivation to action. If it's a lie, it will make your heart speed up. It will make your palms sweat. It will make you feel anxious. It will just send you into that whole spin. But the reason isn't the information in the thought. It's that the thought is not true. And that is the hardest thing for us to learn, because we're taught that our thoughts are true, but they usually have very little a reflection of what's actually happening in our lives. And so we live in this skein of lies that drives us into panic. And the whole time, we're basically just sitting there eating a sandwich and everything's fine, you know, so it's hard. It's hard in our culture again. But knowing that the mind can lie and that we don't need to listen to its lies, that's the first thing
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you mentioned, your son Adam's gift to the world.
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Yeah.
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What do you feel that your gift to the world is? Why do you think you're here?
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Hmm. Wow. I didn't know you were gonna hit me with that one.
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I didn't either. I was just listening to you observe your son's gift. I have been in the room with you, and I have a feeling about your gift. So I was just curious whether you. We often know other people's gifts better than we know our own.
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Yeah, I really. I don't know what mine is, except to try to be in a space of joy and integrity so that what comes out from me helps other people into their truth, which I do believe sets us free. I don't know.
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Well, that is a huge gift to be able to help others move into their truth, see the gifts that they have and move their lives forward, move their lives out of pain, out of anxiety, out of turmoil. And you and I have spoken a lot about, you know that people call you a life coach. You've called yourself a life coach, but that. That term doesn't really resonate with you. You don't like, love that descriptor?
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No. Yeah, it makes me think of like late night infomercials. But the interesting thing is that there are so many words in my mind and I've never come up with a set of words, a phrase or a word that describes what I do. I mean, when I train people to do this, I wayfinding. Because there are people in Polynesia called the Wayfinders who know the sea so well that they can find an island thousands of miles away while in a canoe, just by looking at the way the waves are moving thousands of miles away. And their attention to what's happening around them and to what they're feeling inside their bodies is so acute that they know how to guide themselves in these incredible circumstances. So that's what I try. Like I am trying to find my way, and we're all trying to find our way. And there are methods that you can learn to help find that way. And they can be literal, they can be physical, but they also can be about the actions we take and how to direct them. We're out there in this sea of information, of change, of pressures, of influences. How do we know where the safe destination is? Sometimes it seems like that's impossible. But human capacity is so great that we can absolutely track the tiniest speck of purpose in this sea of chaos. And that's what I've spent my whole life trying to learn to do and teach other people to do.
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So you have right here on your. Another quote from you is, everything we need finds us when we stop grasping for everything we don't need. And I think most of us, and I would put myself in that are constantly, you know, grasping. Should I go over here? Should I do this? Should I comment about that? Should I write this book? Should I? And you say that there are actual steps and ways to find your way to what your purpose is, to what means something to you. Give us the first or whatever you think are the two most important steps to someone who is listening to this, driving along, sitting, feeling like they can't find their purpose, they can't find their way, they can't hear their own voice, they can't find it.
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Well, Our whole culture I keep talking about it is about adding those things as though we're sort of born ignorant. And then we have to learn that. I spent some of my early life in Asia. I was Chinese major in college. And they have a very different way of looking at it. It's sort of reversed. So in my favorite Chinese philosophy book, it says, in the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In the pursuit of enlightenment, every day something is dropped. So the idea is that we come in whole with our purpose shining like a lighthouse inside us. And then we gradually learn illusions that we're supposed to be afraid, that we're not good enough, that, you know, we need to somehow be different from what we really are. And that just obscures. It's like putting mud on the. On the windows of the lighthouse. And all you have to do to find your purpose. You don't have to do anything you're not already doing. You have to stop doing some of the things you're doing and just let go. So stop paying attention to your thoughts. Sounds easy, isn't so easy, but it's not having to add anything. I was chronically ill for about 12 years. I was almost always bedridden and in chronic pain. And all I could do was let go of things. Stuff. And it turned out that by letting go of everything I thought I was supposed to do, everything I thought I was supposed to be, I came to a part of myself that was. It felt completely peaceful. And then it began doing things, writing books, teaching people. And it was there all along. But it took me 12 years of letting go to find it. And I hope most people don't need to be that sick.
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I remember saying to you once, you know, I have to hurry up. I have to, you know, get this done. I have to hurry. I'm in a hurry. And you said to me, well, where are you going? And I was driving, I remember it very well. And I said to you, what do you mean, where am I going? You're like, well, where are you going in such a hurry? And I stopped. I thought to myself, wow, where am I going? I don't know. I didn't know the answer to what I was in such a hurry to get done or to go to. I didn't have this kind of destination in my mind, and yet I had this frantic energy to get there, right? And so the idea. And we've talked a lot about Rumi, the idea that everything your job is to break down. What's keeping you from loving yourself, loving others, and that the concept that everything all of us need is already within us is such a hard thing for hard driving people who are say, you know, I'm trying to reach the top. I'm trying to get this award, I'm trying to get this bestselling book. It runs contrary to that concept.
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Yeah, I remember after you spent many weeks, I believe, on the bestseller list with your last book, you said, yeah, I made it to number one on the New York Times bestseller list. And it made me really happy for about 10 minutes. And on the other hand, I've seen you do things in the quiet of your own, like your own room alone that have taken you to a place that is so much deeper and more stable and you've found home. You know, I think we're all really trying to get home and we think that we'll get it when we've achieved enough or when people admire us enough or we have enough money or whatever. We think we'll feel peaceful and happy and good because of circumstances, but actually it's the other way around. If we can find our way to peace and happiness, our circumstances automatically change to be more felicitous. But it doesn't really matter because the place we've been headed is within all along. And I always think after 20 years of coaching people, what I've noticed, I came to believe in miracles because I think everything you have ever, like, prayed for or asked the universe for, even if you don't believe any of that, it's all been sent to you, but it's all sent to your real home address. And our real home address, all of us, is peace. Even when I've asked people in prison, like murderers, give me a statement that is absolutely true for you, the one that resonates most deeply with every single person is I am meant to be in peace. And when you get to peace, even for a few minutes, things immediately start to go well. It's such a fascinating thing.
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How do you define peace?
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The first place I started was my body. It's so much more, you know, I didn't do well with vague abstract ideas like peace. People would tell me, be in peace. And I'd say, what the hell does that mean?
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Right?
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Being in pain obviously wasn't in peace. So for me to get my body into peace meant relaxing all my muscles. Well, you can't do that without accessing emotions. And if you relax into your emotions and let yourself feel them, they start to flow through you. And underneath the emotion, there is something that is not emotion. It's no Real feeling state. It's almost invisible to the mind. It's a state of absolute stillness. And in that stillness, which bores the mind and frustrates most of us if we stay with starts to unfold, and it becomes incredibly rich and varied and in harmony. It's just this astonishingly beautiful place that we, like, zip past every day without even noticing it.
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It's interesting because I hear people often talk about, I just want peace. I want peace. And I say to them, what is peace look like to you feel like? And they're like, I'm not sure. I think we get in the habit. And I put myself in this category as well, where we talk about, I just want to be happy. I just want to be at peace. I just want to be in love. And yet when we go below the word, most of us can't figure out, like, well, what does that actually feel like? Happy? Am I supposed to be happy all the time? Am I supposed to. Is love this high all the time? Is peace, obviously, is the absence of war on a political level, but what is peace like inside of ourselves? We're no longer at war with our mind, with our body.
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Yeah, there's a lot of spiritual work. And I ended up turning to the world, all the spiritual traditions of the world for descriptions of this thing. When I just allowed all my physical tension and then my emotional tension to be what it was, stopped resisting it, and it all started flowing. I started having these experiences that are. There is a place within us that is not emotional, and you can actually be in peace and grieving at the very same moment. You can be in peace and joyful at the same moment. You can be in peace and angry at the same time. It's a place that's very, very difficult to describe in English. We don't even really have language for it. But in Asia, they have lots of language for it because they have a tradition of sitting still. Pascal said all our miseries come from the fact that we can't sit quietly in a room alone. When we do that, the first thing is this blizzard of emotions and terrifying thoughts. And only if we let ourselves stay until those pass do we arrive at the place where we've already been our whole lives. We didn't know it.
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B
It's very hard to kind of get the. Through that wave and rush of emotions, right?
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Oh, yeah. Elliot called this a condition of complete simplicity, requiring no less than everything. You literally have to sit through the hurricane and then the eye. You find the eye of that hurricane, and it's absolutely still in there. And the job of integrity is to stay in the eye of the hurricane because every one of us has a mind and body, body that has the potential for storming. But we're safe in the eye of it, in the absolute dead center. And the way to get there is to find your own truth.
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B
Do you find, Martha, that so many of the people that come to you asking questions that sign up for your reboots and your seminars are women?
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Yeah, I think I started out, my doctoral research at Harvard was on role conflict for women. Because men have been crushed into this tiny box that says all you are is basically a money making machine. Women have been torn between, you're the money making machine and you have to take care of everyone in the world. So a lot of my work came out of that and it's drawn a lot of women. But I also think that men are in a terribly pressured and impoverished place, culturally speaking. And I really, I feel deeply for the guys in our society too.
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B
Yeah, you ran some seminars for men that your hope was, I think, to get them out of that box. And I think people talking about everything going on in gender today, and I just interviewed a bunch of young men in this era of MeToo and they said that they feel that they were raised in these boxes not to feel emotion, that the expectations were that they were going to be a provider, that, you know, it was very few things that they could actually be. And many husbands that I speak to say, you know, I don't really know my role anymore. I don't. Or men. I don't know where I belong in this culture, in this society today.
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A
Yep, that was one. The earliest creator of sociology, One of the great scholars of sociology in the 19th century wrote about something he called the iron cage of. Of rationalism. And he said all people are going to be fed to this machine of productivity and money making, this sort of material focus. And it will eventually lead us into an iron box and then the box will close around us and crush our humanity.
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B
Wow, that's pleasant. Nice light description.
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A
We used to spend years lying down.
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B
But I think people feel like our humanity is in play. Our humanity is at stake.
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It really is. It really is. Because we have a cultural assumption that creating wealth is what we're here for. Creating stuff. Power, wealth and status. And that a little power, wealth and status can make you much happier than being out homeless in the cold. That is true. But it is false to say that if you have one nice warm house, it will make you happy. And if you have 10 nice warm houses, you'll be 10 times as happy. So a lot of us have reached a place in a society that is comfortable enough, but we keep pursuing material and power based ideals when stopping and dropping the thoughts and feelings that have been pushed into us by the culture and finding what we really are in the center that would actually benefit us far more than continuing to pursue the material wealth, which is the iron cage.
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B
I find that people I often talk to say, look, I've read all the books, I've studied ancient philosophies, I've read spiritual leaders, I've worked on letting go, dropping attachments, all of these things. And I feel pretty good. And then all of a sudden I look at social media and I see everybody doing X, Y and Z and all of a sudden my heart rate starts to go up or I go out to a cocktail party and I hear about what everybody's doing and I start to compare myself and all of a sudden I'm like back in it. I'm back saying, I gotta get in it. What am I? Who am I? Because at the end of the day, right, all of us are here to want to live lives, as I said, of meaning. And we want to feel, right, that we matter, that we're not invisible, that someone notices us. Right? Right. So how do you balance this kind of quest for enlightenment, this, this quest to live a meaningful life, this quest, as Mary Oliver so eloquently said, live your one wild and precious life. How do we let go, get rid of stuff, have less so that we can hear ourselves, and then live in this society with all this information and comparisons coming at us?
- [34:35]
A
That's a major issue. And I have kind of a radical solution. The reason we're so obsessed with social media and positioning and everything, a lot of that is our biology. We are really just a few shades north of baboons in terms of our evolutionary development. And baboons are obsessed with hierarchy and will drive themselves to exhaustion to get higher in the troop. They've done these studies where they get groups of people to try to do a task like make a tower out of spaghetti and marshmallows. And people like CEOs and engineers and PhDs have done this thing and they're supposed to do it in a group. Far and away the highest performing groups are five year olds. And the reason five year olds do so well is that they're just engrossed in the task. They're going to just do this and they're not worried about who's in charge who's ranking who's, you know, they're not mature enough, we would say, to notice where they position themselves in the group that obsess obsession with how we're positioned vis a vis other people. It just destroys us, it destroys our creativity, it destroys our happiness, it destroys performance, everything. And the only way to get out of it, as far as I've been able to tell, is to break away from social prompts for a while. You know me, I had to run away to the woods for five years. I got a house way out in the California hills where I couldn't see anybody or hear anything when I woke up except bird song and water running. And after five years I was able to know who I was without comparing myself to other people. Wow.
- [36:14]
B
Just sit with that a second. That you, because you moved from Arizona and you moved really into nature, into the wilderness, into somewhat of isolation. Right. And to get to know who you were and who you are, and that was after you'd had children, after you'd written best selling books, after you had climbed the success ladder and you found yourself not knowing who you were.
- [36:41]
A
Yeah. And I just had a desperate desire to be not around other people for a while. Not that I don't love other people, but I could not find a self concept when I was in a room with others. Because the mind, and by the mind, I mean the physical primate brain, it is calibrated to continuously evaluate where we fit in groups. And it was only by getting away. And I still need to do that. I still sit alone in a room every day. And it's like now it's like, oh, it's fabulous. It's like taking a warm bath because the storm eventually does calm down and you will find yourself if you sit away from people in stillness for just a little while every day. And. But I honestly don't know any other way to do it, to find.
- [37:29]
B
So for people who find themselves, whether they be in their 30s, 40s, 50s or 60s, feeling somewhat adrift or wondering, wait a minute, I don't know who I am, or wait a minute, I feel differently about all these things. And what does that mean? And it kind of, it brings up a little bit of panic. Maybe I've wasted my life, maybe I didn't do what I came here to do. Oh my God, I don't know who I am and my life is half over.
- [37:58]
A
Right.
- [37:58]
B
You can't, most people can't go off into the woods for, I know, a year.
- [38:03]
A
I know it's a huge, huge blessing, but you can maybe get 15 minutes alone either before the kids get up or after they go to sleep or sometime when everybody's away, even if you have to go off and take a bathroom break for a few minutes. And as we said, Asian cultures have a lot more instructions for how to cope with this situation than ours does. And the best one I know is that you watch the mind and you talk to yourself about what's happening in the mind. And as you do it, you are not the mind. So you feel panicky, you go to a place by yourself, which will make you feel worse because now you don't have anything to keep the feelings at bay. And the thoughts. And you sit there and you freak out. And while you freak out, you say inside yourself, ah, I'm freaking out now. Now I'm freaking out. Oh, look, I'm still freaking out. Oh, now I'm getting angry and now I'm getting sad. And if you keep commenting, what happens? And they actually have done brain science to show that your consciousness is moving away from the part of the brain that can't solve the issue and into a part of the brain that is associated with the states of falling in love and also feeling a connection with some kind of mystery or the divine. As you watch, you become the one who is watching and not the one who is trapped and frantic. And the one who is watching is in peace. And it feels much more real and much more concrete and healthy than all those thoughts buzzing through our heads.
- [39:39]
B
So for those people who are working, maybe they find themselves working in a corporation, working on an assembly line, working in a supermarket, working in a media empire, and they're feeling like, this just isn't what I'm supposed to be doing here. I just know that there's something else, but I have no idea. Take small incremental steps toward what I call a life of meaning, Right? But just take small steps that begin with a step for you to do something for you. And then I always talk about if you take a step towards doing things for others that in many ways leads you to you.
- [40:19]
A
Unless you're a person, and there are a lot of women in particular who have done this, who overdo and over give sometimes and identify as the person who is always giving to others. So if you give and you notice a sense of exhaustion or you notice the panic going up, this is what we were saying earlier about you notice the effect, effect of any action, and it's like you're getting warmer, you're getting colder. And for the vast majority of people doing Something for someone else is going to move you toward warmer. But if you're a person who's given too much and you give more, you might feel, oh, look. And observe. Look, I am actually exhausted now. That actually exhausted me. And then that means gently, gently take a small step toward self care. Which is also what you said. Yeah.
- [41:05]
B
No, but that's beautiful. What. As we wrap up here, Martha, where do you find hope today? What brings you joy today?
- [41:14]
A
I actually find hope in every single being I meet. Because if you sit with yourself long enough to find that light inside yourself, for some reason, it also gives you the ability to see it in others. And every single person, every single bird outside my window, every single tree has that light inside it. Yeah. My son Adam once told me I had a near death experience where I actually saw a light. And later my son told me that he'd seen a light, that it had come and touched his heart and made it easier to go through life. And I said, really? You see, you see that light all the time? And he said, yeah. I said, where is it? And he said, it's everywhere, Mom. It's everywhere. So as you open to yourself and he lives in this state of wordless presence, you become that light and then you see it everywhere and hope comes from it, just flowing like light from the sun. There's so much hope, you don't know what to do with it.
- [42:22]
B
I love that. That is such a beautiful place for us to end. Seeing the light in yourself enables you, of course, to see it in others. And it softens your mind, it softens the words you use for yourself and others. And it allows you to be surrounded and held in light.
- [42:41]
A
Well said.
- [42:42]
B
There you go. So, Martha Beck, my great friend, I hope you'll come back. Tell me more. Tell me more.
- [42:48]
A
I would love to. I love talking to you.
- [42:50]
B
And Martha. Martha is. Please follow her on themarthabeck on Instagram. She also has courses. If you find yourself wanting to become a wayfinder, if you find yourself needing a reboot, if you find yourself stuck, as we all do along this path of life, which is inevitable, people freak out that they get stuck. I myself freaked out when I felt stuck. And take a deep breath. It's common. I wish people knew how common and normal it is to feel stuck, to doubt yourself to. All of these things are very, quote, normal. But Martha does a lot of really great conversations. She's been in conversation with her great friend Elizabeth Gilbert. She's doing courses and all kinds of things. She's in the process of writing another book. She has a lot of best selling books which you can see on her website marthabeck.com and she's really out there every day trying to bring her knowledge and her voice to help others and that's what I really admire. It's true.
- [43:56]
A
You still left out the pajamas.
- [43:58]
B
Yes. And she does it all in her pajamas.
- [44:00]
A
How great is that?
- [44:01]
B
Are you in your pajamas right now?
- [44:03]
A
I am in the same pair of yoga pants I've worn every day for the last month. Ew, gorgeous. Well, I wash them.
- [44:09]
B
Oh my God.
- [44:10]
A
They totally count as pajamas for sure.
- [44:13]
B
That's why podcasts are great. You don't have to dress up right. You can sit in your yoga pants, but you're dispensing out of your mouth incredible wisdom that's been garnered over a lifetime. So the Martha Beck, thank you for joining Meaningful Conversations. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Meaningful Conversations. I've really loved being in community with you and I wanted to let you know that this is the last episode of season one, which went by so fast, but we'll be back again soon. Promise? Promise. So I hope you'll follow me on Facebook and Instagram to stay updated on details for season two. In the meantime, I want to thank you again. I appreciate all of you for tuning in to Meaningful Conversations. And once again I hope you'll stay in touch with me by signing up for the Sunday paper. We're igniting hearts and minds every single week trying to be a positive force for good in the world and move humanity forward. And I hope you'll join that community and stay reading. Listening to voices that rise above the noise. That's really been part of my goal with this podcast is to rise above the noise and give you conversations that ignited you, inspired you, I hope, also informed you and made you feel that you are part of the good in the world.
- [45:36]
A
Sa.