February 26, 2020 • 39 mins
Martha Beck is the woman Oprah turns to for coaching, so when she talks, everyone listens. Our conversation focuses on a big idea that has reshaped how she thinks and lives: the integrity cleanse. Find out what that is, and how it can put you in touch with an inner compass you never knew you had.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
What I believe now is that all suffering comes from
losing our integrity. And I know that I don't mean
that moralistically. If everything's working right together, then we don't suffer.
And when there's a piece out of joint, things go wrong,
and they go wrong in a way that's designed to
bring them to our attention. And the most attention getting
things in the world is suffering. Welcome to the Road
(00:32):
to Somewhere where we talk about all things exploration, adventure,
major life changes. Transformation is about not necessarily knowing where
we're going, but having faith that the journey will be worthwhile.
I'm Lisas and I am Chill Herzig, and literally since
day one when we started thinking about this podcast, we
(00:54):
were both in places where we were I think we
were stuck. We're two stuck too, stuck checks and we
wanted desperately to talk to the person who is on
the pot on one person, always one person, the guru
of change, the the the uber life coach, I think,
(01:18):
the first life coach, Martha Beck, the magnificent and and
illustrious and amazing Martha Back, Martha, thank you for finally
coming to see us. We need you. I am so
overwhelmed by praise that I am unable to undergoing a
life transformation right here, and I cannot cope. It's just
(01:39):
a hot flash. I have nothing. I've never known you'd
have nothing to say. Yeah, wait till I ask you
a million and one questions. We've got so many questions.
Believe believe me? Well, all right, So our podcast is
about transformation, as you've probably gathered from the open. And
what struck me as I just saw you was the
(02:01):
transformation of your beautiful hair. And you know, i've known
you my hair. You're a brunette, and this was not
was okay? So has this changed your well? Because people
look at blondes differently. I don't know if you're aware
of that, but blondes are always like it gives you
(02:21):
a good three points on the looks scale. You know,
they'll it's so not truly So look, no, it's really true.
If I were blonde, I'd be so hot. It's kidding,
but I love you as a brunette. It's really pretty.
How are you feeling about blonde? Like? I was my
mother's half Swedish, so we all all my siblings and
I had the really white blonde hair and then it
(02:42):
started darkening and it just looked like mousey, and so
I've I liked it as a child better, so then
I lightened it, and then I went to a hair dresser.
But the interesting thing is, on the topic of change,
I used this thing in my coaching a cycle of change,
and there are signals when you've truly changed your identity,
and one of those is that you change your hair
(03:04):
pretty dramatically. And actually socio goes for men too, I
take it. Yeah, sociologist say that that hairstyle is actually
one of the most profound markers of identity. So like
in all slave society, slaves were only allowed to have
one hairstyle, so it's it's really powerful. But this one
happened to me by chance. I literally just wanted to
(03:26):
get my haircut and my wonderful hairstyle said your mind
dark in it. I was like, go for it. She
put the thing on, and she pulled off the like
the veil she put on my head, and she said,
don't freak out, but what you're just what you just
said made me think that you are actually, whether you
knew it or not, you were ready for something because
(03:49):
if otherwise, when she said you mind a darkn you
would have said, what are you kidding? Every time I
see a client come in with a new hairstyle, I'm like,
it's I mean, it's profoundly significant it and this would
happened to me more or less by accident. But because
I think that way about change, I paid attention. Well,
for one thing, I said yes, And for another thing,
(04:10):
I looked at myself in the mirror and went, huh,
who am I going to be now? Because I know
you only change your hair dramatically like that when your
whole identity is changing. And have you felt a shift energetically,
Oh yeah, I have, But this was just like a
couple of months ago, So it's different besides your hair color.
(04:32):
I've been writing this book about living in complete integrity,
and because I'm writing it, I've been trying to be
incredibly aware of my own integrity and only making choices
that feel really deeply right for me. And ah, it's
it's changed a lot of small things, it's but it's
(04:52):
it's shaking at the foundation of my identity, like everything
I've ever not been honest about is falling away. But
and I asked you, I think of you as somebody
you've you've been a life coach and a trainer of
life coaches, of a wayfinder. You absolutely are almost twenty
years of being commons for for the Oprah magazine. How
(05:13):
how have you not been living in integrity? It seems like,
how is that possible? Well, what I came to find
out a few years ago, I actually just like went
off to the woods for about six years. There's a
phase in a lot of people's lives when they're contemplative,
where you just go into the wild. And I started
(05:34):
by going into the wild of Africa. And then I
came home one day and thought, I can't live in
a city. So I moved to the edge of the
National Forest in California for six years. And while I
was there, I didn't really interact with many people. And
I started to realize that any interaction with other people
was causing me to lose track of my essence. And
(05:55):
so I had to like be just completely quiet. And
I'm kind of still in this way, be completely quiet
and only listening to that inner voice without anyone else
interacting with me at all. Because every little departure from
my true nature from social pressure culture, it was it
(06:16):
was in a blind spot. I couldn't see where I
wasn't being true to myself, but I became obsessed with
absolutelute integrity. It's not something I would ask anyone else
to do, but it's very, very interesting. It's funny that
you mentioned that, because there are two other people in
my life who have been as profound an influence as
(06:39):
you have, and they're both One is a was a
parole officer who turned into a therapist, and the other
is a psychologist, PhD. And they both have gone on
this path as well, and part of it, at least
the way that one of them explains it, is that
repeated behavior, so like not even just lying directly, but
(07:00):
not not adhering to the truth meticulously. When you do
that repetitively, it goes to a part of your brain
which shifts from being both hemispheres to only left hemisphere,
to the back of your last hemisphere, and then it
becomes crystallized, so that the behavior actually becomes who you are,
like it's it's biological, it's and so that when you
(07:23):
are confronted by big things in life, you can't depend
on yourself because you're inherently unreliable. So they both made
a practice of this intense integrity so that they can
dress themselves, which I think is fascinating that you're doing
that too. Yeah, maybe there's a trend to war it
because there's so much conflicting cultural pressure, and I pair
(07:46):
culture and nature as opposites. There's so much cultural pressure
that we don't all know what we want to be.
We don't know. We lose ourselves in the clash of
cultural pressures. And for me, the only answer to that
was to find out what was absolutely true at the
absolutely core of myself. So maybe maybe it's a trend
we're starting here culturally that we always lying to write
(08:08):
Instagram is one big lie. Yeah, right, by reason to
play honest on my instagration. I'm completely in integrity except
honest ground. All right, So give me some instructions. What
is the instruction manual for integrity, for living in integrity? Well,
(08:32):
the first thing is to know that you do it gently,
be gentle. The first thing you learn out with wild animals.
I used to when I lived in the for Us.
I would go out and meditate for hours covered in
bird seed, so that as I sat there, chipmunks and
birds would forget that I was alive and just land
on me and eat the seeds and stuff. And I
(08:53):
found that there's a level of quiet and a level
of gentleness in nature that you just don't get in
human culture, because we're also busy performing for each other.
And you know, we tell children to look adults in
the eyes, and for primates, that's a hostile behavior. It's
terrifying for some children to look into another person's eyes.
(09:16):
So the first thing is be very, very very gentle,
because nothing else is honest. Your true nature is gentle.
And then you start to find places where you're uncomfortable
and you simply say, why am I doing that? And
you you find the answer, well, because I want to
be good? Okay, well why do you want to be
good so people will like me? It always ends up
(09:37):
so people like me, And then it's just and okay, well,
do you really need other people to like you so
much that you have to leave yourself? And then you
find out what's true for you. You You create a space
first of all, for inquiry and contemplation of yourself, and
and compassion and gentle us are the only way you're
(10:01):
ever going to unearth that wild animal in the center
of your soul. And then you do whatever it says.
And what if life won't let you go off into
the woods, What if life won't let you take a
time out like that? How do you get in touch
with this in the middle of the noise. Yeah, well,
first you question the thought life won't let me do this,
(10:23):
because there's a lot of stuff we believe we can't
do that is actually within our physical capacity to do.
So there are absolutely people who can't get away from culture.
But the first thing to say is is it really
true that you can't take a walk in the woods.
Is it really true that you can't set aside a
day to go do that this week? Um, if you're
(10:43):
saying it's true and it's not, you're lying to yourself.
And that has all kinds of terrible physiological effects, psychological effects,
inter personal effects. So you say, okay, if I'm say,
if you're in prison, Lisa, when you said the first
personal influenced you was your parole officer, I was like, wait,
he wasn't a parole officer. He had been a parole officer,
(11:05):
but I could have officer much better. Yes, we all
need a life coach who was also a little bit
of a pearl officer keeping us on the straight and arrow,
coached people in prison where they were had to have
the warden there with them and everything. So how do
they how do they get in touch with that monastic
(11:28):
life that you're recommending exactly? Well, you do need a
quiet space, um. Every wisdom tradition on Earth talks about
stillness and silence as being fundamental to this self discovery
of truth. So even if like I grew up in
a very small house with ten people, I have seven siblings,
(11:49):
and I did a lot of all nighters, especially as
an adolescent, because I needed stillness, and I wouldn't recommend that.
But if you are in prison and people are shouting
all day, wait until they go to bed, like, take
any space of quiet you possibly can actually worse than
being in prison, as being a mother of small children,
that is literally the hardest place then you could go
(12:11):
to find yourself. But eventually they do. They do all
fall asleep at once. Once in a blue moon, they do,
and then you if it's only ten minutes, great, that's fine.
But go to a specific space, and the every tradition
says you start with the breath. You start by slowing
and deepening your breathing, which switches off your fight flight system,
(12:34):
switches on the rest and um the tendon befriend hormones
they call it, and then start to for example, listen
for the beating of your own heart or ring a
bell or a gong, and then listen to it fade
and then listen to the silence where it used to be.
(12:57):
So you can actually do that right now. So this
is not straight up meta pation you're talking about. It's
just awareness, like really intense. That's what it's sounding like
to me. Intensive meditation. There's not a single culture on
earth that talks about the quest for truth that does
not recommend something very similar to meditation. Yeah, so I
do different forms of meditation. But this is just following
(13:19):
a sound until it disappears and then following silence. And
what it does is it focuses your attention very intensely
on a silence that is always present. Part of the
problem with silence, though, for people like me and I'm
sure one or two listeners out there, is that silence
is instantly filled by our own chattering inner voices. Like
(13:42):
it's hard to get, you know, solitude getting away from
other people is way easier than getting away from your
inner chatter box. Um Pascal said, the reason for all
men's sorrows is that we cannot sit quietly in a
room alone. And that is really true, especially if you've
if you've been separated from yourself, from your true nature
(14:03):
for a while. There's tons of chatter. So what you
do is you comment on the chatter. You just keep saying, oh,
there's a lot of chattering um there. And there are
different visualizations people use. UM. I used to work with
horses in a round pen, and if a horse is frightened,
it'll run around and around and around the pen. And
I used to just sit and watch my thoughts as
(14:24):
if my head worthy inside of a round pen, and
I would just watch myself race racing thoughts, racing thoughts,
racing thoughts. If you keep breathing slowly and you keep
commenting and naming the events that are going on inside
the head, they can go on at the same time
that a part of the brain in the back starts
(14:46):
to watch them, and you get this sense of something
called the internal witness and the witnesses quiet. I'm sure
you guys have talked about this before, right like we have.
I mean and Somebody once asked me, what's the one
thing that you you had to boil it down to
one thing that you've learned from doing this podcast, and
I had to say it, it's that's that we should
(15:07):
all be doing some form of meditation. I know it's
monotonously true, but I want to tell you there is
a point where it starts to get quiet in there,
and the field of fascination that opens then is unlike
anything you've ever experienced. It will take your breath away
(15:27):
over and over and over again forever. It is so magnificent.
It's like it's hard to focus the microscope or the telescope,
but the moment it gets into focus, it's just like this.
The silence that it opens up is it's just exquisite,
(15:49):
Like there's no way to describe it in language, and
you never want to stop going there. And if you
can just hang in long enough, develop the witness enough
that you become um not the size and shape of
your own thoughts, but a little bit bigger, watching from
the outside, and then began to switch identification from the
racing to the one watching. Then the watcher as your
(16:12):
identity sometimes looks away from the racing thoughts and at
that moment, it may see into this field of stillness
that everything in you is begging you to join. Can
you bring that watcher into every other area of your life? Yeah,
you can do it. And and the internal commentary really
(16:34):
helps me. Like if I'm stuck in line at the
d m V or whatever and I'm bored, it's so
funny because I always forget what am I supposed to
do that because I'm frustrated. Oh breathe, you know, um.
But as as soon as I remind myself and then
I start labeling what's happening breathing and breathing out boredom, frustration, anger,
(16:57):
immediately the witness starts to separate, and then I can
bring this stillness in. But I had to do it
a lot by myself. I really had to go away,
and I really haven't come back, to be honest with you,
for a long time. Are you going to come back? Yeah? No,
(17:18):
To be absolutely honest now, I haven't come back yet.
I haven't come to the place where my identity is
effortlessly aligned with stillness and there's nothing else in me.
So I can't leave the stillness yet. I have to
stay until it's me, and it's like oxygen. I couldn't
there is no possibility of continuing to live without it.
(17:41):
That's how strong it is. More with Martha Breck after
the break. Does it impact your relationships? You're like removed
(18:02):
because the way it sounds is like a little bit
like you're a monk and you're like zend out and things.
And yeah, I'm thinking, Lisa of your four children and
what they would do, So they would freak if if
they can text you and you don't answer within you
know what ten minutes? Do you think you got that
long a leash? So how does that impact this movement
(18:27):
into a place of deep inner self? How does that
impact your out exterior relationships? The first thing is that
I noticed the way I'm reacting to people, and I
notice if it's true or not. So if I'm reacting
with frustration, there's dishonesty in me, and I have to
(18:47):
pay attention to it and I and I will actually
say I'm sorry, I was, I was not completely present
with you for a moment. I'm gonna sorry. Let me
clear my mind. It actually was. It was hard on
some of my relationships. I had one woman who said
she wanted to come visit me, and then I said, Okay,
(19:08):
I'm gonna think about it. And later she said she
was devastated because when she said can I come visit you?
She said, you paused? And I was like, yeah, well pausing.
I do a lot of pausing lately because I have
to check to see what's real, what's true for me.
But what happened with my children and my dearest friends
(19:28):
and my loved ones was that I got a lot quieter,
and I started listening to them more, and not just
listening with my ears, but listening with my literally physically
with my heart, like I listened with my chest. Now.
I know that sounds weird, but like if my chest
isn't open, I can't actually feel what's happening for them.
(19:49):
And I just as I slowed down the pace of
my conversation, they slowed down to match it. Because here's
the thing. We train our children how to treat us.
You've trained your children to get instant responses. I don't
feed my dogs from the table because I know that
that way lies madness. But I train, I trained a
(20:10):
lot of people to get instantaneous responses from me, and
you have to untrained them. You have to take responsibility
for having trained them to do that, and then you
have to take responsibility for training them to do something
that's that matches your integrity more. But if you're doing
it from a space of just looking for your own authenticity,
there's no attack in that. There's no attack. It's always
(20:32):
paying attention to the other person's point of view as well.
It's it's just gentle. I it's so kind, this stillness,
there's so much softness in it. So I've become slower
and softer in my connections with other people. And I
realized that I was overriding so much that they were
(20:54):
trying to express to me that I never saw because
of the noise inside my head. So it's me My
relationships are fewer and deeper. What about interactions with people
that maybe aren't safe to be gentle and vulnerable and
open with them because you're a public person, you're out
in the world, they're and not everyone is coming from
(21:17):
a place of gentleness and kindness, and and maybe it's not.
There's a you need a protective element when you're outward
facing in the world. What do you do that because
being totally honest isn't always I mean that's hard when
you're around people who don't want the best for you,
no kidding. Yeah, I wrote a book about Mormonism a
(21:41):
few years ago that got me death threats and continuous,
not not like short lived animosity, but sustained hostility. And
that was from telling too much truth. And so you
do need to create safety. And I think, I guess
that's why I moved to the woods for one reason.
(22:02):
You know, I get away from from people. One thing
is you limit your public exposure to things that feel
innately good to you. When you are in the face
of animosity. Silence is a really good response sometimes, and
so is absolute um alignment with one zone, with that stillness.
(22:25):
So you can right now, I stopped talking as quickly
because I was listening for the answer. As you asked
me that question. I remembered going on a radio show
where someone had was waiting to call in with questions.
They had a file on me, and they were calling
in specifically to denigrate me, to say I was a liar,
to say I was mentally ill, and that this book
(22:46):
that I'd written was so evil. And I listened and
I listened, and when this woman finished her attack, which
went on for like five minutes. I said, it doesn't
sound like my book is the right one for you
right now. It would probably be better if you went
and read this other book that my brother in law
wrote about how bad I am. I think I feel
(23:10):
how much calmer if you read that one instead. Do
you want me to get a pencil, I'll give you
the title. So that having a hostile reaction to someone
because they've attacked you is one of the ways you
make yourself vulnerable to culture. A wild animal will just disappear.
And so when somebody comes at you with animosity, you
(23:33):
can tell the truth in a way that makes that
it's like there's just air for them to respond to.
There's nothing for them to push against, and that actually
is a safer place than conflict by far, and if
you mean to. There's a great story that I heard
in South Africa about Nelson Mandela in prison. He used
(23:54):
to really love it when new wardens came in because
he would start working on them with this kind of
energy that he exuded that they called the Mandela magic.
It was really just love, but he would make friends
of them within a couple of weeks, and then one
day they got this warden and who was extreme. I
(24:15):
think he was a psychopath, right. So he brought all
these people together at Robin Island and he said to them,
you've been turning this prison into a library, into a
school for philosophers. This is a prison, and we're gonna
treat you like prisoners. Nelson Mandela was at the back
of the room and as this guy talked, suddenly Nelson
Mandela just started to yell at him. And I don't
(24:38):
know exactly what he yelled, but he was very, very aggressive,
and the the warden shut down. Now, this is what
highly narcissistic people do if they're confronted. So a non
narcissist will fight back, but narcissists have the interesting psychological
dynamic where if you get louder than they are, they
suddenly become submissive. And this is what happened to the warden.
(25:00):
And then one of Nelson Mandela's friends said him, I've
never seen you lose it like that, and he said, oh, no,
I didn't lose it. That was what he needed. So
you can feel nature tells us when to run, when
to freeze, and when to fight. And if you're tuned
into your truth, it is your nature and it will
(25:21):
always tell you the right thing to do. Can I
ask though in that moment of fighting, it's Mandela's part
of Mandela's magic and greatness that he did not feel compromised,
that he didn't feel his heart beating out of his chest,
that sense of I've lost control, I'm crazed, whereas I
think a lot of us. I mean, it's it's it's
so intensely permission giving what you just said, that you
(25:43):
know with this, with this story, that sometimes you do
need to raise your voice. Sometimes you do need to
sort of shout down. It's not like we all just
walk the middle way in monk like silence and take
it and take it and take it. But at the
same time that it often does feel good, and you
often come away from it with a sense of guilt
(26:03):
like why did I Why did I do that? And
look how I you know, frantic? That made me feel.
That's exactly why I needed to get my integrity straight.
I needed to know that every time I reacted to
someone like with with loudness or with aggression or whatever,
that I was doing it from a place of my
true nature and that I wasn't out of control. I
(26:25):
wasn't a human ego responding to another human ego, but
that I was responding to that stillness from which comes
you know, the big Bang. It's it can be incredibly violent,
but it does it at the right time. You tap
into an intelligence, the intelligence of nature that knows how
to use your mind and body to fight for justice
(26:47):
without disrupting anything. It's just it's it's very very fine
distinctions that you end up making to live completely honestly.
And for me, I mean, I really hope that people
can just go there. But for me, it's taken my
entire life of of really studying it. But I feel
(27:09):
like I'm getting closing and you're teaching people this path
is that what the Wayfinder path is slightly different. That
was when I was in Africa once I had a
dream that I was being visited by my ancestors, and um,
I was freaking out because that meant a whole lot
of piste off Mormons to me. And then I was no,
(27:31):
I mean africas the African ancestors. And then I got
scared because I thought they were going to make me
kill a goat. I know, and I didn't want that either.
But then in the dream, the air sort of thickened
and I felt this love and this like a blanket
settled over me, and I thought, oh my gosh, the
ancestors are here. And they said, and I quote Martha,
(27:52):
relax and then they went away. So I told some
African friends about this, and they freaked out and ran away.
They're from the Shanghun tribe in South Africa, and I
didn't know that if you have a dream that you're
being visited by your ancestors in that tribe, you have
to see a shaman right away. So they ran off
to get a shaman, and she came and told me, Um,
(28:14):
you need to find out about the wisdom traditions of
the First people's and you need to communicate that to
the white people of your country and everybody in the country.
She specifically said the white people. So I spent the
next five years researching all these different ancient traditions and
wayfinding is what they call it in Polynesia. These incredible
(28:37):
people who can find their way to the Hawaiian Islands
from Australia by looking at the way the waves break
against the holes of their canoes. They're like astonishing human beings.
And I started looking at things that they did, um
to become so magical. And I used the word wayfinder
(28:59):
because it it's kind of a self explanatory, but I
use it with tremendous respect and humility because real wayfinders,
those Polynesian wayfinders, that's some serious magic. Yeah. So it's
kind of about how to find your way through life,
and integrity is more about just go sit in a
in a just go sit quietly, you'll get there. But
(29:23):
it's it's kind of all connected, I think. And for
a while you were talking about finding your north star.
That was your the metaphor that you were using, and
then it was wayfinders, and now it's getting in touch
with your deepest integrity. I think they're all the same thing. Really,
it's all the same. Yeah, They're just different techniques. And
(29:43):
some of them were so similar that my my daughter
kept asking me, why are you writing the same book
over and over? Just become your editor, I've heard, Well,
she is in she lives in complete integrity. One time, um,
she was making some cookies and my then husband came
up and UH pulled the blender out of her hand
and he said, here, let me show you how I
(30:05):
do that. And she pulled the lender back and she said,
I don't give a damn how you do that. John
and I looked at each other across the room and
gave each other this big thumbs up because we were
thrilled that she had that much sense of herself. And
she always has. So Yeah, she says things to me
right out flat that nobody else will, and she has
(30:26):
a magnificent editor and got me into this new thing
I'm writing about. After the break, I want to get
deeper into this conversation about integrity. So you have this
(30:49):
grounding in an intense awareness of your body and nature,
and nature you you you always go back to the
wild animals, into the woods, and and so going to
the pureness of the natural seems like a very purposeful
place for you. But then on the other side, you
have this and I think it's an unusual ability, but
(31:14):
this spiritual connection that that very few people have. I mean,
in in um expecting Adam, you had really intense spiritual
experiences like talking to angels in your life. How do
you integrate the intensely spiritual with the with the grounded
nous of the natural. I think every tree exists in
(31:37):
awareness of spirituality every animal. I think we are the
most cut off from spirituality of anything in nature. And
the interesting thing about integrity is I just did it
as a functional mechanical thing to put my body and
mind in order. And what I wasn't focused at all
on spirituality or para normal things or anything like that.
(32:02):
But the closer I get to being genuinely honest, the
more magical my life becomes. It's almost like the whole
new edge thing of you can manifest anything you want.
The part of that that that is left out is
the more you're in tune with yourself, and the more
you're living in tune with yourself, the more the magic works.
So I just wanted to be honest, not thinking about
(32:25):
magic at all, and the magical aspects of my life
or the spiritual aspects of my life went absolutely ballistic
at that point, which is part of the reason it's
so much fun, like going out and sitting in the forest.
If you start to if you begin to see that
everything loves you, and you see it with your whole body,
with every cell of yourself, it's very fascinating. You don't
(32:50):
really want to leave for a while. You've been through
some serious physical suffering in your life, and you've talked
about it as message to you that something needed to change. Yeah,
well you talked about that a little bit. Yeah, we
have an ally to tell us when we're lying, and
it's called suffering. And for me that took the form
(33:11):
of several different autoimmune diseases and absolutely incapacitating pain that
lasted for more than a decade. So I've I became
very good friends with pain, and I do mean that
I am friends with pain because I know that it
was always coming from a place in my life where
(33:31):
I wasn't living in accordance with my true nature. As
soon as I found a place I was out of
alignment and shifted things so that it was in alignment,
the pain would start to decrease. And now I have
no symptoms unless I get into a pattern that where
I'm not living my truth. So you, I mean, it's
like you have an alarm bell that goes off in
(33:54):
your body every time you are doing something that isn't
true for you. Yeah, at first I started to get
that handy and everybody has one. Typically people start to
get mood problems first, anger, sadness, fear. If you don't
pay attention. At that point it will become tension in
(34:17):
the body, and then you might start it might start
interfering with relationship, and then if you still are paying
no attention, it will start to be some sort of
physical cramping, and then it will get to genuine disease eventually.
I'm interested in the role of imagination in this whole
process because it feels to me like you are you know,
(34:42):
you have an unusually kind of plastic mind, and spirituality
is another whole plane. Can imagination help us navigate these moments?
I think it's so interesting. It feels to me like
we're given imagination as the ALTI a tool for a
creature living in three dimensions to create anything. So this
(35:08):
podcast exists because you imagined it. The rooms were sitting
in exists because people imagine rooms. You know, guerillas put
put leaves over their heads when it rains, but they
don't build rooms because they don't have the imagination. Unfortunately,
almost all of our capacity to imagine is misused, and
I genuinely think that the almost all sufferings, another way
(35:32):
to say it comes from the misuse of our imagination. So,
say someone you love dies far away. This may sound
really like this. This may get me a few enemies,
But if you don't know they're dead, you're fine. If
you hear that they're dead, and then you imagine how
awful the world is without them, suddenly you're in suffering.
(35:56):
And almost all of our imagination is fear driven. What
will happen if this goes wrong and this goes wrong
and this goes wrong? And how do I make that
person like me? And how do I avoid this problem?
And so we're always imagining, but we mainly imagine terrible things.
If you focus on how that makes your body feel,
you will find that it's a lie. Your imagination was
not designed to imagine horrors. It was meant to imagine
(36:19):
beyond anything you've ever experienced that is good, like it's
It's meant to push the creative capacity through this three
dimensional physical brain to the point where we can create
things that have never existed. Um, there's this weird disease
called sudden artistic output syndrome, and I want to catch
(36:44):
it good. Oh I don't think you do, because it
generally happens after someone has a horrible stroke or in
one case, the guy was taking a lightning another guy
had half his brain scooped out by an airplane propeller,
but they lived. But somehow part of the brain that
was taken out, um seemed to be inhibiting this artistic innate,
(37:05):
artistic ability ability. So the guy that was hit by lightning,
he was a surgeon, but he started hearing music in
his head, and he started compulsively teaching himself to play
the piano and ultimately composed symphonies and things. Um. The
guy who was there was who was hit by the propeller,
(37:26):
became a phenomenal sculptor. Um. Other people who have strokes
could become painters. And they can't. They go from no
artistry whatsoever, too, cannot stop ten hours a day just
just gushing creativity. Their imaginations go bananas. And here's what
that tells me. The brain is not the seat of creation.
(37:49):
It's a filter. It's an inhibitory device, because when part
of it is missing, the power of creativity flows through
the part that's left explosively. The human capacity to connect
with creation itself is in there, and a lot of
our brains are built to try to make that not,
(38:12):
you know, to damp it down, Like the capacity for
us to imagine great things is absolutely unlimited, but we
have to approach it slowly because honestly, I think if
we if we really connected with the full power of
our imagination, it would it would blow our minds. It
would like not because over dead, that's how intense imagination is. Well,
(38:37):
I feel like our minds have been blown just by
talking to you today, and definitely feel like my imagination
has been piqued. Anyway, Thank you Martha so so much
for being here. Thanks for having me okay listener out there.
Get more on Wayfinder Life Coach training at Martha Beck
(38:57):
dot com. The Road Somewhere is recorded in New York City.
Make sure to share, subscribe, rate, and review us. We
would love to hear from you. Where are you on
your journey? Connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter
at pod to Somewhere and email us at road to
Somewhere at iHeartMedia dot com. Special thanks to Alicia Haywood,
(39:20):
are incredible producer. Thanks everyone for joining us on the
Road to Somewhere. We're available on the I Heart Radio app,
on Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.
What I believe now is that all suffering comes from
losing our integrity. And I know that I don't mean
that moralistically. If everything's working right together, then we don't suffer.
And when there's a piece out of joint, things go wrong,
and they go wrong in a way that's designed to
bring them to our attention. And the most attention getting
things in the world is suffering. Welcome to the Road
(00:32):
to Somewhere where we talk about all things exploration, adventure,
major life changes. Transformation is about not necessarily knowing where
we're going, but having faith that the journey will be worthwhile.
I'm Lisas and I am Chill Herzig, and literally since
day one when we started thinking about this podcast, we
(00:54):
were both in places where we were I think we
were stuck. We're two stuck too, stuck checks and we
wanted desperately to talk to the person who is on
the pot on one person, always one person, the guru
of change, the the the uber life coach, I think,
(01:18):
the first life coach, Martha Beck, the magnificent and and
illustrious and amazing Martha Back, Martha, thank you for finally
coming to see us. We need you. I am so
overwhelmed by praise that I am unable to undergoing a
life transformation right here, and I cannot cope. It's just
(01:39):
a hot flash. I have nothing. I've never known you'd
have nothing to say. Yeah, wait till I ask you
a million and one questions. We've got so many questions.
Believe believe me? Well, all right, So our podcast is
about transformation, as you've probably gathered from the open. And
what struck me as I just saw you was the
(02:01):
transformation of your beautiful hair. And you know, i've known
you my hair. You're a brunette, and this was not
was okay? So has this changed your well? Because people
look at blondes differently. I don't know if you're aware
of that, but blondes are always like it gives you
(02:21):
a good three points on the looks scale. You know,
they'll it's so not truly So look, no, it's really true.
If I were blonde, I'd be so hot. It's kidding,
but I love you as a brunette. It's really pretty.
How are you feeling about blonde? Like? I was my
mother's half Swedish, so we all all my siblings and
I had the really white blonde hair and then it
(02:42):
started darkening and it just looked like mousey, and so
I've I liked it as a child better, so then
I lightened it, and then I went to a hair dresser.
But the interesting thing is, on the topic of change,
I used this thing in my coaching a cycle of change,
and there are signals when you've truly changed your identity,
and one of those is that you change your hair
(03:04):
pretty dramatically. And actually socio goes for men too, I
take it. Yeah, sociologist say that that hairstyle is actually
one of the most profound markers of identity. So like
in all slave society, slaves were only allowed to have
one hairstyle, so it's it's really powerful. But this one
happened to me by chance. I literally just wanted to
(03:26):
get my haircut and my wonderful hairstyle said your mind
dark in it. I was like, go for it. She
put the thing on, and she pulled off the like
the veil she put on my head, and she said,
don't freak out, but what you're just what you just
said made me think that you are actually, whether you
knew it or not, you were ready for something because
(03:49):
if otherwise, when she said you mind a darkn you
would have said, what are you kidding? Every time I
see a client come in with a new hairstyle, I'm like,
it's I mean, it's profoundly significant it and this would
happened to me more or less by accident. But because
I think that way about change, I paid attention. Well,
for one thing, I said yes, And for another thing,
(04:10):
I looked at myself in the mirror and went, huh,
who am I going to be now? Because I know
you only change your hair dramatically like that when your
whole identity is changing. And have you felt a shift energetically,
Oh yeah, I have, But this was just like a
couple of months ago, So it's different besides your hair color.
(04:32):
I've been writing this book about living in complete integrity,
and because I'm writing it, I've been trying to be
incredibly aware of my own integrity and only making choices
that feel really deeply right for me. And ah, it's
it's changed a lot of small things, it's but it's
(04:52):
it's shaking at the foundation of my identity, like everything
I've ever not been honest about is falling away. But
and I asked you, I think of you as somebody
you've you've been a life coach and a trainer of
life coaches, of a wayfinder. You absolutely are almost twenty
years of being commons for for the Oprah magazine. How
(05:13):
how have you not been living in integrity? It seems like,
how is that possible? Well, what I came to find
out a few years ago, I actually just like went
off to the woods for about six years. There's a
phase in a lot of people's lives when they're contemplative,
where you just go into the wild. And I started
(05:34):
by going into the wild of Africa. And then I
came home one day and thought, I can't live in
a city. So I moved to the edge of the
National Forest in California for six years. And while I
was there, I didn't really interact with many people. And
I started to realize that any interaction with other people
was causing me to lose track of my essence. And
(05:55):
so I had to like be just completely quiet. And
I'm kind of still in this way, be completely quiet
and only listening to that inner voice without anyone else
interacting with me at all. Because every little departure from
my true nature from social pressure culture, it was it
(06:16):
was in a blind spot. I couldn't see where I
wasn't being true to myself, but I became obsessed with
absolutelute integrity. It's not something I would ask anyone else
to do, but it's very, very interesting. It's funny that
you mentioned that, because there are two other people in
my life who have been as profound an influence as
(06:39):
you have, and they're both One is a was a
parole officer who turned into a therapist, and the other
is a psychologist, PhD. And they both have gone on
this path as well, and part of it, at least
the way that one of them explains it, is that
repeated behavior, so like not even just lying directly, but
(07:00):
not not adhering to the truth meticulously. When you do
that repetitively, it goes to a part of your brain
which shifts from being both hemispheres to only left hemisphere,
to the back of your last hemisphere, and then it
becomes crystallized, so that the behavior actually becomes who you are,
like it's it's biological, it's and so that when you
(07:23):
are confronted by big things in life, you can't depend
on yourself because you're inherently unreliable. So they both made
a practice of this intense integrity so that they can
dress themselves, which I think is fascinating that you're doing
that too. Yeah, maybe there's a trend to war it
because there's so much conflicting cultural pressure, and I pair
(07:46):
culture and nature as opposites. There's so much cultural pressure
that we don't all know what we want to be.
We don't know. We lose ourselves in the clash of
cultural pressures. And for me, the only answer to that
was to find out what was absolutely true at the
absolutely core of myself. So maybe maybe it's a trend
we're starting here culturally that we always lying to write
(08:08):
Instagram is one big lie. Yeah, right, by reason to
play honest on my instagration. I'm completely in integrity except
honest ground. All right, So give me some instructions. What
is the instruction manual for integrity, for living in integrity? Well,
(08:32):
the first thing is to know that you do it gently,
be gentle. The first thing you learn out with wild animals.
I used to when I lived in the for Us.
I would go out and meditate for hours covered in
bird seed, so that as I sat there, chipmunks and
birds would forget that I was alive and just land
on me and eat the seeds and stuff. And I
(08:53):
found that there's a level of quiet and a level
of gentleness in nature that you just don't get in
human culture, because we're also busy performing for each other.
And you know, we tell children to look adults in
the eyes, and for primates, that's a hostile behavior. It's
terrifying for some children to look into another person's eyes.
(09:16):
So the first thing is be very, very very gentle,
because nothing else is honest. Your true nature is gentle.
And then you start to find places where you're uncomfortable
and you simply say, why am I doing that? And
you you find the answer, well, because I want to
be good? Okay, well why do you want to be
good so people will like me? It always ends up
(09:37):
so people like me, And then it's just and okay, well,
do you really need other people to like you so
much that you have to leave yourself? And then you
find out what's true for you. You You create a space
first of all, for inquiry and contemplation of yourself, and
and compassion and gentle us are the only way you're
(10:01):
ever going to unearth that wild animal in the center
of your soul. And then you do whatever it says.
And what if life won't let you go off into
the woods, What if life won't let you take a
time out like that? How do you get in touch
with this in the middle of the noise. Yeah, well,
first you question the thought life won't let me do this,
(10:23):
because there's a lot of stuff we believe we can't
do that is actually within our physical capacity to do.
So there are absolutely people who can't get away from culture.
But the first thing to say is is it really
true that you can't take a walk in the woods.
Is it really true that you can't set aside a
day to go do that this week? Um, if you're
(10:43):
saying it's true and it's not, you're lying to yourself.
And that has all kinds of terrible physiological effects, psychological effects,
inter personal effects. So you say, okay, if I'm say,
if you're in prison, Lisa, when you said the first
personal influenced you was your parole officer, I was like, wait,
he wasn't a parole officer. He had been a parole officer,
(11:05):
but I could have officer much better. Yes, we all
need a life coach who was also a little bit
of a pearl officer keeping us on the straight and arrow,
coached people in prison where they were had to have
the warden there with them and everything. So how do
they how do they get in touch with that monastic
(11:28):
life that you're recommending exactly? Well, you do need a
quiet space, um. Every wisdom tradition on Earth talks about
stillness and silence as being fundamental to this self discovery
of truth. So even if like I grew up in
a very small house with ten people, I have seven siblings,
(11:49):
and I did a lot of all nighters, especially as
an adolescent, because I needed stillness, and I wouldn't recommend that.
But if you are in prison and people are shouting
all day, wait until they go to bed, like, take
any space of quiet you possibly can actually worse than
being in prison, as being a mother of small children,
that is literally the hardest place then you could go
(12:11):
to find yourself. But eventually they do. They do all
fall asleep at once. Once in a blue moon, they do,
and then you if it's only ten minutes, great, that's fine.
But go to a specific space, and the every tradition
says you start with the breath. You start by slowing
and deepening your breathing, which switches off your fight flight system,
(12:34):
switches on the rest and um the tendon befriend hormones
they call it, and then start to for example, listen
for the beating of your own heart or ring a
bell or a gong, and then listen to it fade
and then listen to the silence where it used to be.
(12:57):
So you can actually do that right now. So this
is not straight up meta pation you're talking about. It's
just awareness, like really intense. That's what it's sounding like
to me. Intensive meditation. There's not a single culture on
earth that talks about the quest for truth that does
not recommend something very similar to meditation. Yeah, so I
do different forms of meditation. But this is just following
(13:19):
a sound until it disappears and then following silence. And
what it does is it focuses your attention very intensely
on a silence that is always present. Part of the
problem with silence, though, for people like me and I'm
sure one or two listeners out there, is that silence
is instantly filled by our own chattering inner voices. Like
(13:42):
it's hard to get, you know, solitude getting away from
other people is way easier than getting away from your
inner chatter box. Um Pascal said, the reason for all
men's sorrows is that we cannot sit quietly in a
room alone. And that is really true, especially if you've
if you've been separated from yourself, from your true nature
(14:03):
for a while. There's tons of chatter. So what you
do is you comment on the chatter. You just keep saying, oh,
there's a lot of chattering um there. And there are
different visualizations people use. UM. I used to work with
horses in a round pen, and if a horse is frightened,
it'll run around and around and around the pen. And
I used to just sit and watch my thoughts as
(14:24):
if my head worthy inside of a round pen, and
I would just watch myself race racing thoughts, racing thoughts,
racing thoughts. If you keep breathing slowly and you keep
commenting and naming the events that are going on inside
the head, they can go on at the same time
that a part of the brain in the back starts
(14:46):
to watch them, and you get this sense of something
called the internal witness and the witnesses quiet. I'm sure
you guys have talked about this before, right like we have.
I mean and Somebody once asked me, what's the one
thing that you you had to boil it down to
one thing that you've learned from doing this podcast, and
I had to say it, it's that's that we should
(15:07):
all be doing some form of meditation. I know it's
monotonously true, but I want to tell you there is
a point where it starts to get quiet in there,
and the field of fascination that opens then is unlike
anything you've ever experienced. It will take your breath away
(15:27):
over and over and over again forever. It is so magnificent.
It's like it's hard to focus the microscope or the telescope,
but the moment it gets into focus, it's just like this.
The silence that it opens up is it's just exquisite,
(15:49):
Like there's no way to describe it in language, and
you never want to stop going there. And if you
can just hang in long enough, develop the witness enough
that you become um not the size and shape of
your own thoughts, but a little bit bigger, watching from
the outside, and then began to switch identification from the
racing to the one watching. Then the watcher as your
(16:12):
identity sometimes looks away from the racing thoughts and at
that moment, it may see into this field of stillness
that everything in you is begging you to join. Can
you bring that watcher into every other area of your life? Yeah,
you can do it. And and the internal commentary really
(16:34):
helps me. Like if I'm stuck in line at the
d m V or whatever and I'm bored, it's so
funny because I always forget what am I supposed to
do that because I'm frustrated. Oh breathe, you know, um.
But as as soon as I remind myself and then
I start labeling what's happening breathing and breathing out boredom, frustration, anger,
(16:57):
immediately the witness starts to separate, and then I can
bring this stillness in. But I had to do it
a lot by myself. I really had to go away,
and I really haven't come back, to be honest with you,
for a long time. Are you going to come back? Yeah? No,
(17:18):
To be absolutely honest now, I haven't come back yet.
I haven't come to the place where my identity is
effortlessly aligned with stillness and there's nothing else in me.
So I can't leave the stillness yet. I have to
stay until it's me, and it's like oxygen. I couldn't
there is no possibility of continuing to live without it.
(17:41):
That's how strong it is. More with Martha Breck after
the break. Does it impact your relationships? You're like removed
(18:02):
because the way it sounds is like a little bit
like you're a monk and you're like zend out and things.
And yeah, I'm thinking, Lisa of your four children and
what they would do, So they would freak if if
they can text you and you don't answer within you
know what ten minutes? Do you think you got that
long a leash? So how does that impact this movement
(18:27):
into a place of deep inner self? How does that
impact your out exterior relationships? The first thing is that
I noticed the way I'm reacting to people, and I
notice if it's true or not. So if I'm reacting
with frustration, there's dishonesty in me, and I have to
(18:47):
pay attention to it and I and I will actually
say I'm sorry, I was, I was not completely present
with you for a moment. I'm gonna sorry. Let me
clear my mind. It actually was. It was hard on
some of my relationships. I had one woman who said
she wanted to come visit me, and then I said, Okay,
(19:08):
I'm gonna think about it. And later she said she
was devastated because when she said can I come visit you?
She said, you paused? And I was like, yeah, well pausing.
I do a lot of pausing lately because I have
to check to see what's real, what's true for me.
But what happened with my children and my dearest friends
(19:28):
and my loved ones was that I got a lot quieter,
and I started listening to them more, and not just
listening with my ears, but listening with my literally physically
with my heart, like I listened with my chest. Now.
I know that sounds weird, but like if my chest
isn't open, I can't actually feel what's happening for them.
(19:49):
And I just as I slowed down the pace of
my conversation, they slowed down to match it. Because here's
the thing. We train our children how to treat us.
You've trained your children to get instant responses. I don't
feed my dogs from the table because I know that
that way lies madness. But I train, I trained a
(20:10):
lot of people to get instantaneous responses from me, and
you have to untrained them. You have to take responsibility
for having trained them to do that, and then you
have to take responsibility for training them to do something
that's that matches your integrity more. But if you're doing
it from a space of just looking for your own authenticity,
there's no attack in that. There's no attack. It's always
(20:32):
paying attention to the other person's point of view as well.
It's it's just gentle. I it's so kind, this stillness,
there's so much softness in it. So I've become slower
and softer in my connections with other people. And I
realized that I was overriding so much that they were
(20:54):
trying to express to me that I never saw because
of the noise inside my head. So it's me My
relationships are fewer and deeper. What about interactions with people
that maybe aren't safe to be gentle and vulnerable and
open with them because you're a public person, you're out
in the world, they're and not everyone is coming from
(21:17):
a place of gentleness and kindness, and and maybe it's not.
There's a you need a protective element when you're outward
facing in the world. What do you do that because
being totally honest isn't always I mean that's hard when
you're around people who don't want the best for you,
no kidding. Yeah, I wrote a book about Mormonism a
(21:41):
few years ago that got me death threats and continuous,
not not like short lived animosity, but sustained hostility. And
that was from telling too much truth. And so you
do need to create safety. And I think, I guess
that's why I moved to the woods for one reason.
(22:02):
You know, I get away from from people. One thing
is you limit your public exposure to things that feel
innately good to you. When you are in the face
of animosity. Silence is a really good response sometimes, and
so is absolute um alignment with one zone, with that stillness.
(22:25):
So you can right now, I stopped talking as quickly
because I was listening for the answer. As you asked
me that question. I remembered going on a radio show
where someone had was waiting to call in with questions.
They had a file on me, and they were calling
in specifically to denigrate me, to say I was a liar,
to say I was mentally ill, and that this book
(22:46):
that I'd written was so evil. And I listened and
I listened, and when this woman finished her attack, which
went on for like five minutes. I said, it doesn't
sound like my book is the right one for you
right now. It would probably be better if you went
and read this other book that my brother in law
wrote about how bad I am. I think I feel
(23:10):
how much calmer if you read that one instead. Do
you want me to get a pencil, I'll give you
the title. So that having a hostile reaction to someone
because they've attacked you is one of the ways you
make yourself vulnerable to culture. A wild animal will just disappear.
And so when somebody comes at you with animosity, you
(23:33):
can tell the truth in a way that makes that
it's like there's just air for them to respond to.
There's nothing for them to push against, and that actually
is a safer place than conflict by far, and if
you mean to. There's a great story that I heard
in South Africa about Nelson Mandela in prison. He used
(23:54):
to really love it when new wardens came in because
he would start working on them with this kind of
energy that he exuded that they called the Mandela magic.
It was really just love, but he would make friends
of them within a couple of weeks, and then one
day they got this warden and who was extreme. I
(24:15):
think he was a psychopath, right. So he brought all
these people together at Robin Island and he said to them,
you've been turning this prison into a library, into a
school for philosophers. This is a prison, and we're gonna
treat you like prisoners. Nelson Mandela was at the back
of the room and as this guy talked, suddenly Nelson
Mandela just started to yell at him. And I don't
(24:38):
know exactly what he yelled, but he was very, very aggressive,
and the the warden shut down. Now, this is what
highly narcissistic people do if they're confronted. So a non
narcissist will fight back, but narcissists have the interesting psychological
dynamic where if you get louder than they are, they
suddenly become submissive. And this is what happened to the warden.
(25:00):
And then one of Nelson Mandela's friends said him, I've
never seen you lose it like that, and he said, oh, no,
I didn't lose it. That was what he needed. So
you can feel nature tells us when to run, when
to freeze, and when to fight. And if you're tuned
into your truth, it is your nature and it will
(25:21):
always tell you the right thing to do. Can I
ask though in that moment of fighting, it's Mandela's part
of Mandela's magic and greatness that he did not feel compromised,
that he didn't feel his heart beating out of his chest,
that sense of I've lost control, I'm crazed, whereas I
think a lot of us. I mean, it's it's it's
so intensely permission giving what you just said, that you
(25:43):
know with this, with this story, that sometimes you do
need to raise your voice. Sometimes you do need to
sort of shout down. It's not like we all just
walk the middle way in monk like silence and take
it and take it and take it. But at the
same time that it often does feel good, and you
often come away from it with a sense of guilt
(26:03):
like why did I Why did I do that? And
look how I you know, frantic? That made me feel.
That's exactly why I needed to get my integrity straight.
I needed to know that every time I reacted to
someone like with with loudness or with aggression or whatever,
that I was doing it from a place of my
true nature and that I wasn't out of control. I
(26:25):
wasn't a human ego responding to another human ego, but
that I was responding to that stillness from which comes
you know, the big Bang. It's it can be incredibly violent,
but it does it at the right time. You tap
into an intelligence, the intelligence of nature that knows how
to use your mind and body to fight for justice
(26:47):
without disrupting anything. It's just it's it's very very fine
distinctions that you end up making to live completely honestly.
And for me, I mean, I really hope that people
can just go there. But for me, it's taken my
entire life of of really studying it. But I feel
(27:09):
like I'm getting closing and you're teaching people this path
is that what the Wayfinder path is slightly different. That
was when I was in Africa once I had a
dream that I was being visited by my ancestors, and um,
I was freaking out because that meant a whole lot
of piste off Mormons to me. And then I was no,
(27:31):
I mean africas the African ancestors. And then I got
scared because I thought they were going to make me
kill a goat. I know, and I didn't want that either.
But then in the dream, the air sort of thickened
and I felt this love and this like a blanket
settled over me, and I thought, oh my gosh, the
ancestors are here. And they said, and I quote Martha,
(27:52):
relax and then they went away. So I told some
African friends about this, and they freaked out and ran away.
They're from the Shanghun tribe in South Africa, and I
didn't know that if you have a dream that you're
being visited by your ancestors in that tribe, you have
to see a shaman right away. So they ran off
to get a shaman, and she came and told me, Um,
(28:14):
you need to find out about the wisdom traditions of
the First people's and you need to communicate that to
the white people of your country and everybody in the country.
She specifically said the white people. So I spent the
next five years researching all these different ancient traditions and
wayfinding is what they call it in Polynesia. These incredible
(28:37):
people who can find their way to the Hawaiian Islands
from Australia by looking at the way the waves break
against the holes of their canoes. They're like astonishing human beings.
And I started looking at things that they did, um
to become so magical. And I used the word wayfinder
(28:59):
because it it's kind of a self explanatory, but I
use it with tremendous respect and humility because real wayfinders,
those Polynesian wayfinders, that's some serious magic. Yeah. So it's
kind of about how to find your way through life,
and integrity is more about just go sit in a
in a just go sit quietly, you'll get there. But
(29:23):
it's it's kind of all connected, I think. And for
a while you were talking about finding your north star.
That was your the metaphor that you were using, and
then it was wayfinders, and now it's getting in touch
with your deepest integrity. I think they're all the same thing. Really,
it's all the same. Yeah, They're just different techniques. And
(29:43):
some of them were so similar that my my daughter
kept asking me, why are you writing the same book
over and over? Just become your editor, I've heard, Well,
she is in she lives in complete integrity. One time, um,
she was making some cookies and my then husband came
up and UH pulled the blender out of her hand
and he said, here, let me show you how I
(30:05):
do that. And she pulled the lender back and she said,
I don't give a damn how you do that. John
and I looked at each other across the room and
gave each other this big thumbs up because we were
thrilled that she had that much sense of herself. And
she always has. So Yeah, she says things to me
right out flat that nobody else will, and she has
(30:26):
a magnificent editor and got me into this new thing
I'm writing about. After the break, I want to get
deeper into this conversation about integrity. So you have this
(30:49):
grounding in an intense awareness of your body and nature,
and nature you you you always go back to the
wild animals, into the woods, and and so going to
the pureness of the natural seems like a very purposeful
place for you. But then on the other side, you
have this and I think it's an unusual ability, but
(31:14):
this spiritual connection that that very few people have. I mean,
in in um expecting Adam, you had really intense spiritual
experiences like talking to angels in your life. How do
you integrate the intensely spiritual with the with the grounded
nous of the natural. I think every tree exists in
(31:37):
awareness of spirituality every animal. I think we are the
most cut off from spirituality of anything in nature. And
the interesting thing about integrity is I just did it
as a functional mechanical thing to put my body and
mind in order. And what I wasn't focused at all
on spirituality or para normal things or anything like that.
(32:02):
But the closer I get to being genuinely honest, the
more magical my life becomes. It's almost like the whole
new edge thing of you can manifest anything you want.
The part of that that that is left out is
the more you're in tune with yourself, and the more
you're living in tune with yourself, the more the magic works.
So I just wanted to be honest, not thinking about
(32:25):
magic at all, and the magical aspects of my life
or the spiritual aspects of my life went absolutely ballistic
at that point, which is part of the reason it's
so much fun, like going out and sitting in the forest.
If you start to if you begin to see that
everything loves you, and you see it with your whole body,
with every cell of yourself, it's very fascinating. You don't
(32:50):
really want to leave for a while. You've been through
some serious physical suffering in your life, and you've talked
about it as message to you that something needed to change. Yeah,
well you talked about that a little bit. Yeah, we
have an ally to tell us when we're lying, and
it's called suffering. And for me that took the form
(33:11):
of several different autoimmune diseases and absolutely incapacitating pain that
lasted for more than a decade. So I've I became
very good friends with pain, and I do mean that
I am friends with pain because I know that it
was always coming from a place in my life where
(33:31):
I wasn't living in accordance with my true nature. As
soon as I found a place I was out of
alignment and shifted things so that it was in alignment,
the pain would start to decrease. And now I have
no symptoms unless I get into a pattern that where
I'm not living my truth. So you, I mean, it's
like you have an alarm bell that goes off in
(33:54):
your body every time you are doing something that isn't
true for you. Yeah, at first I started to get
that handy and everybody has one. Typically people start to
get mood problems first, anger, sadness, fear. If you don't
pay attention. At that point it will become tension in
(34:17):
the body, and then you might start it might start
interfering with relationship, and then if you still are paying
no attention, it will start to be some sort of
physical cramping, and then it will get to genuine disease eventually.
I'm interested in the role of imagination in this whole
process because it feels to me like you are you know,
(34:42):
you have an unusually kind of plastic mind, and spirituality
is another whole plane. Can imagination help us navigate these moments?
I think it's so interesting. It feels to me like
we're given imagination as the ALTI a tool for a
creature living in three dimensions to create anything. So this
(35:08):
podcast exists because you imagined it. The rooms were sitting
in exists because people imagine rooms. You know, guerillas put
put leaves over their heads when it rains, but they
don't build rooms because they don't have the imagination. Unfortunately,
almost all of our capacity to imagine is misused, and
I genuinely think that the almost all sufferings, another way
(35:32):
to say it comes from the misuse of our imagination. So,
say someone you love dies far away. This may sound
really like this. This may get me a few enemies,
But if you don't know they're dead, you're fine. If
you hear that they're dead, and then you imagine how
awful the world is without them, suddenly you're in suffering.
(35:56):
And almost all of our imagination is fear driven. What
will happen if this goes wrong and this goes wrong
and this goes wrong? And how do I make that
person like me? And how do I avoid this problem?
And so we're always imagining, but we mainly imagine terrible things.
If you focus on how that makes your body feel,
you will find that it's a lie. Your imagination was
not designed to imagine horrors. It was meant to imagine
(36:19):
beyond anything you've ever experienced that is good, like it's
It's meant to push the creative capacity through this three
dimensional physical brain to the point where we can create
things that have never existed. Um, there's this weird disease
called sudden artistic output syndrome, and I want to catch
(36:44):
it good. Oh I don't think you do, because it
generally happens after someone has a horrible stroke or in
one case, the guy was taking a lightning another guy
had half his brain scooped out by an airplane propeller,
but they lived. But somehow part of the brain that
was taken out, um seemed to be inhibiting this artistic innate,
(37:05):
artistic ability ability. So the guy that was hit by lightning,
he was a surgeon, but he started hearing music in
his head, and he started compulsively teaching himself to play
the piano and ultimately composed symphonies and things. Um. The
guy who was there was who was hit by the propeller,
(37:26):
became a phenomenal sculptor. Um. Other people who have strokes
could become painters. And they can't. They go from no
artistry whatsoever, too, cannot stop ten hours a day just
just gushing creativity. Their imaginations go bananas. And here's what
that tells me. The brain is not the seat of creation.
(37:49):
It's a filter. It's an inhibitory device, because when part
of it is missing, the power of creativity flows through
the part that's left explosively. The human capacity to connect
with creation itself is in there, and a lot of
our brains are built to try to make that not,
(38:12):
you know, to damp it down, Like the capacity for
us to imagine great things is absolutely unlimited, but we
have to approach it slowly because honestly, I think if
we if we really connected with the full power of
our imagination, it would it would blow our minds. It
would like not because over dead, that's how intense imagination is. Well,
(38:37):
I feel like our minds have been blown just by
talking to you today, and definitely feel like my imagination
has been piqued. Anyway, Thank you Martha so so much
for being here. Thanks for having me okay listener out there.
Get more on Wayfinder Life Coach training at Martha Beck
(38:57):
dot com. The Road Somewhere is recorded in New York City.
Make sure to share, subscribe, rate, and review us. We
would love to hear from you. Where are you on
your journey? Connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter
at pod to Somewhere and email us at road to
Somewhere at iHeartMedia dot com. Special thanks to Alicia Haywood,
(39:20):
are incredible producer. Thanks everyone for joining us on the
Road to Somewhere. We're available on the I Heart Radio app,
on Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.
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