October 7, 2021 • 46 mins
At every turn, American popular culture threatens to go in and strip away the joy of aging. Yes, the JOY! NYT best-selling author and Oprah’s favorite life coach Dr. Martha Beck reveals how she came to trade in giving a f*** about her wrinkles for just embracing the process. They go deep into their relationships with mortality, the freedom of being a “crazy old bat” and the golden key to tapping into the "glammer" of it all. Martha shares tips, of course, for discovering the radiance of your own maturing spirit. The rest is just bullshit.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Go ask Ali, a production of Shonda Land
Audio and partnership with I Heart Radio. I don't think
that there's some one soul mate. It's not like there's one.
Although bon Jovi is my soul mate, there's always exceptions.
Are you saying that gossiping is the same as if
I'm picking lice out of your scalp and eating it. Well,
(00:25):
you've done both. So what do you think? I want
to give her too much? I don't like her to
come in with an inflated head, So we won't mentioned
the Golden Globe. After all we've been through. We deserve
an orgasm. Cis I deserved? Welcome back to Go ask Ali.
I'm Ali Wentworth. It's season two and this time I'm
(00:47):
digging into everything I can get my hands on, peeling
back the layers and getting dirty. You know, I'm a
big clamor. I love to go out in the bay
with my clamming fork and my net, and I love
it because I go deeper and deeper into the sand
and always pull up these little nuggets. And I've decided
to use that in my life in general. So that's
(01:07):
what we're doing this season. We're digging into topics, topics
that I find interesting, that you find interesting, and find
different angles in ways to talk about them. What is
also new for season two is you. Throughout the season,
we'll be sprinkling questions from you, my listeners, and I'll
be answering them. Right here, here's Ruth, Hi Ali, I'd
(01:29):
love to get some expert advice about health families can
best balance aging parents while working to raise and care
for their own media families. My parents live in their
happy place near Lake in South Carolina. My sister and
I are invested with our lives here in the Midwest, which,
by the way, is where they raised us. A move
of them is out of the question that health issues
are becoming continual. I hate to ask this, Ali, but
(01:51):
who trump foods hold our families and there four kids
need us? Thank you, Ruth. First of all, I am
going through this right now. I don't think anybody wins.
I think it's about balance, like anything else in life,
like careers and families and kids and aging parents. I mean,
it's a tough position because you're kind of sandwiched in
between being a parent to your kids and being a
(02:14):
parent to your parents. Both my parents live far away
from me and what I have found the best thing
to do is check in with them a lot, make
sure their needs are being met. You'll find that you're
going to have to be in control of if they
need any care, if they need to be assisted living,
or if they need somebody if they're aging at home
to help care for them. You have to make sure
(02:35):
their medical needs are met. Sometimes I've had to travel
to my parents to make sure they go to the
right doctors or just to be with them for emotional support.
But the most important thing is I think you teach
your children how it is to care for aging parents.
My daughters are certainly watching me go through it, so
hopefully they'll know how to handle it when I'm aging.
(02:58):
Thank you, Ruth. I hope that how helps. I could
really do a whole podcast on the subject. Anyway, To
all the listeners out there, keep your questions coming. The
phone number and email will be at the end of
every episode and in all of the show notes. So
to kick off this fabulous season, I want to talk
about something I think about all the time, aging aging
(03:18):
in this country, which is not easy. Last season I
spoke with Dr Frank Lippman about how to take care
of our bodies as we age, and today it's about
aging gracefully on the inside. And luckily I got the
best guest on this topic, Martha Beck. Dr. Martha Beck
is a best selling author, life coach, and speaker known
(03:40):
for her unique combination of science, humor, which I of
course love, and spirituality, which of course I need more of.
Her written work includes several New York Times and international bestsellers,
as well as over a hundred and fifty magazine articles.
She holds three Harvard degrees in social science, and Oprah
Winfrey has called her one of the smartest women I know. Well,
(04:02):
that is high praise. NPR and USA Today have proclaimed
her as the best known life coach in America. Martha's
newest book, The Way of Integrity, Finding the Path your
True Self, was an instant New York Times bestseller. Jesus,
how do you follow that? All? Right? So, Martha Beck, again,
I told you before we started recording, I could really
(04:22):
talk to you about a million things, And I'm going
to send you a huge case of ice cream when
we're done, in the hopes you'll come back and talk
about other things any time. But Martha Beck, I am
fascinated by aging in America. I think we are not
kind to people over a certain age in our country
as opposed to other countries in the world. And also
(04:45):
I want to talk about how what aging is to
us personally. I think we get fascinated, particularly as women,
on the exterior of ourselves when it comes to the
aging process. I know, everybody's nip and tucking and poking
and syringing and going on fat diets and if you
eat this, you know, mushroom and all that kind of stuff.
Nothing makes me more exciting than reading a new potion
(05:06):
that's going to help me stay young. But I think
a lot of it is internal, and I think you
do too. So let's dive in with your kind of
big brushstroke about what you think about aging, and then
we're gonna sort of dig into the minutia of all that. Well.
I was reading a memoir by Tibetan monk, and he
was one of these guys that is reincarnated, so they
(05:29):
recognize him as a llama when he's too and take
him off to be trained. So by the time he
was like thirteen, he was already giving wise counsel to
American middle aged women. And this middleized American women came
and started going on about how tragic aging was and
how she was getting wrinkled and everything, and he said
he could not understand it. It was like, in my culture,
(05:50):
the wisdom of age is so covenant, and every wrinkle
is like a sign that makes people bow to you
more deeply, and people rejoice in their maturation of the
soul in an an individual body, and then they think
they just go on to a new one. So it's
in a big deal that the old one wore out.
And it was really interesting to see the complete cultural
bafflement that he was in, Like, it really isn't just
(06:10):
that other cultures pretend to feel differently about aging. We
feel worse about aging than almost any other culture that's
ever been in the world. Therefore completely missed the benefits
of aging, because you can't access the benefits of aging
if you're resisting the aging process itself. So what it
is for me is I like, look at the new
me every morning. It is like, what fresh hell is this?
(06:32):
And then I got all right, well, all right, go deeper.
What's happening? What have I got to show with this
new bag and wrinkle? And yeah, without exception, I can
sit down and think of something that I am slightly
wiser about today than I was yesterday. And what I've
lost in youth and vigor, I've gained in wisdom and experience.
(06:52):
And here's the biggest thing. I'm really not afraid of dying. Well,
that I think is key. I think a big piece
of this is our relayationship with mortality, because you know
the fact that the monks and so many other religions
believe in reincarnation, and so that you know, for somebody
who maybe doesn't think that we're reincarnated, or someone has
gone to an oppressive Christian all girls boarding school, you
(07:17):
start to go, oh, well, this is it. I'm going
to die and worms are going to eat me. So
how do I make this last as long as I can? Yeah?
And I was obsessed with that from the moment I
was about five when I saw a cat get hit
by a car and die and it was my introduction
to death. And I didn't sleep for like another ten years.
I mean, no one's ever been more horrified by death
than I was. And then I got to the place
(07:38):
where it's like, I can't stand the anticipation of death.
Why don't I just get off the bus right now.
So there was the whole suicidal era. That was an era.
Oh lord, Yes, it was like age maybe six to
about thirty two. Not that Ily was suicidal after the
age of twenty nine. But something happened to me in
a surgery when I was twenty nine. I've written about
(08:00):
it in this last book, and it's not I wasn't dead.
It wasn't a near death experience, but it's similar to
what people talk about in near death experiences where they're
unconscious but then they can sit up and look around
and they see their body. That's what happened to me.
I saw my body lying down and I was sitting up,
and then I was really confused, and I sort of
lay back down and this light appeared between the surgical
lights that was so much brighter than the surgical lights,
(08:22):
and it grew and it touched me and it seemed
to sort of fill me up, and it was the
most exquisite thing I had ever imagined, and I just
kept thinking home, Home, Home. And basically all it was
there to do is to say, your goal is not
to get to some death realm and then maybe get
to heaven and feel like this. The meaning of your
life is to feel the way you feel right now,
(08:44):
but while you're in this body. And that was the
time I started my policy of never lying, because lying
didn't feel the way I had felt in that surgery.
Anything that didn't feel that way had to go. My
family of origin, my marriage, from job, everything sort of
went in the bond fire. But as a result, I
lost all my fear of death. So now aging to
(09:04):
me is kind of exciting. It's like, not only am
I better at what I'm doing here, aside from the
fact that I'm decrepit, but oh my goodness, mate, Like,
there are so many ways to experience joy that I
haven't gotten to it yet, and I believe that they're here,
there and everywhere, And it puts me at such ease.
It's so interesting you're saying that because I knew a woman.
(09:25):
Her name was Mona, and I actually wrote about her
in one of my books. And this is a woman
in her early sixties, and when I met her, I
thought she was the most fabulous woman I had ever met.
She had such zest for life, She loved talking to people,
She was fascinated by everything. She enjoyed life, food, friendship,
(09:48):
and I remember thinking, I want to be just like Mona.
I mean, Mona is life to me, full vitality. Mona
got cancer and died sort of mid sixties, and I
remember when she was dying, I would bring things to
her and she used to say, oh God, I can't
(10:08):
eat sugar because of this fucking cancer, but I I
sure love desserts, and so my family we would bring
her cupcakes with flowers and she loved to have it
all around her. My point is, this is a woman
that I can't even describe her body or her wrinkles
because that they were so beyond and above the point
of my story. But she was such a beautiful person
(10:29):
on the inside that she was literally radiant even when
she was going in chemo, and it just she was
aged defying and that had a huge impact on me.
And when I think about aging, particularly for women our age,
I think about how, like I said at the beginning,
so there's so much focus on the exterior, but I
(10:51):
am a different person than I was in my twenties. Yes,
I wish I had my ass and my skin from
my twenties, but I wouldn't give up everything I know now,
you know, I wouldn't give up the things that make
me aspire to be Mona. So I wish that everybody
had a Moona in their life. And I think you're Amona,
(11:11):
and I think that you're helping a lot of people
with that because when you see it, when it's personified,
you know that light in a person, you go, oh,
I get it, I get it. Which is not to
take away from anything you need to do on the
exterior to make yourself feel good, but I do think
that our own inner life is a huge part of it. Absolutely,
(11:33):
let's go through some of the mental habits, influences, attitudes
that we can take. Because just you telling the story
about how you blew up, it sounds like your marriage.
You re evaluated your life. Everything I want to hear
about that. Tell me about that, because I actually have
a couple of people in my life that I think
are really toxic that make me feel bad. I think
(11:55):
we could probably do a little spring cleaning in terms
of that. So tell me your experience with all this. Okay,
So I had this transcendent experience and it was what
you say, It was this radiance, and I knew that
it was also part of me. There's like I have
many Scottish ancestors, and there's the word glamour comes from
a Scottish word that did not mean beauty. It meant
(12:16):
the ability to project beauty, whether you're beautiful or not.
Its spelled g l A M M e R. This
light was full of glamour, and I came out and
I was like, okay, I'm just going to feel the
way that made me feel. And what I learned really
quickly was I couldn't lie with my words or my
behavior without that glamor going down. And I wasn't doing
(12:37):
it to try to project radiance. I was doing it
to feel happy, which I had never done before, and
so it was very, very motivating. So I would talk
to my parents and I would start to feel really dreadful,
and I would have to say, okay, I'm going to
talk to them less, and finally stopped talking to them
at all, which was convenient because I started remembering being
sexually abused as a child, and my no lie as
(13:00):
she meant that I went to a therapist, which I
was not supposed to do in my family. So I
lost my whole family of origin, which was this monstrous
Mormon family. I mean big I was gonna say, if
you're from a Mormon family, that sounds like a lot
of people. One of eight children, baby, Um. Yeah, it
was a lot of people to be angry at me
at the same time. And also at the time, I
(13:20):
was living in Utah, so that was like, okay, now
I'm leaving home. Then I realized I was gay. Oops,
so they went my marriage, but I couldn't lie about it,
and so I a lot of relationships went away. Something
back later, lots and lots of I mean, it was
just layers of the onion to get through my own falsehoods.
But I did notice that as I got to a
more raw places, a more tender, honest place, people started
(13:43):
telling me that I came across as more shiny, which
was bewildering to me. But I've seen it now in
so many women and men, and it's real. I just
write a book on near death experiences, but not from
the perspective of the dead person, from the others, and
one of of things that happens is people see the
dying person started to physically shine. And this is hundreds
(14:05):
and hundreds and hundreds of cases of people who are
in their right minds. If you can shine as you're
going to death, you can shine as you go in
through middle age, right, Like, why not start now? That's interesting.
My uh stepfather died during COVID and he was ninety nine.
But he loved life. I mean, he loved life and
(14:26):
he was shining at the last few days of his death.
I mean, he held my mother in his arms and
was incredibly sweet and and loved a good joke and
you know, told my mom she still had a great rack.
I mean, all the things, you know. And that's something
again that I look at and went, wow, that is
that's a life there that he was able to have
(14:50):
joy to the very end. And I think, and I
think you've written about this, that our culture teaches us
to age miserably. Aging is a horrible thing in our culture.
It's something to be embarrassed about. It's something to be
shunned about. It's a certain point you had written about
the difference between elders and olders. Can you talk about that.
(15:10):
Elders are the people who are socialized in those cultures
that love the elderly, They're the ones that, for example,
non written languages depended completely on the older people to
remember everything about everything from plant medicine to how to
heal a broken heart. So the older you were, the
more people came to you, the more people respected you.
And we've lost that completely in our culture and instead
(15:33):
everything has become about material wealth, material substance and the
material beauty of the body. And it's a cultural lie
that feels like a lie. When you start to tell
your own truth, you can start to bump into aspects
of the culture around aging, like I should be ashamed
of this, I should feel bad, and you can start
to feel that it has the texture of a lie.
If you start telling the absolute truth, it becomes really apparent,
(15:57):
and then the whole culture it turns out to be
wrong about it, and you can be the only one
in step. And when you get that internally, then the
glamour starts and then people start telling you you look good.
I don't know why, they just do it. There's a
lot more to come after this short break, welcome back.
(16:27):
It's interesting when you think of everything that's in books
and film and operas. You know, the idea has always
been that you would go to the wise man or
the wise woman. You know, who came in many forms,
amongk a priest, a guru. You went to them to
have life affirmation and wisdom. You didn't go to a
(16:47):
you know, a twenty one year old influencer on Instagram
to get your advice. Now it's Google. Yeah, now it's Google.
It used to be almost all cultures that those were
the people that would share this credible wisdom with you,
but not anymore. When you ask about older and elder,
so you can actually feel the difference between being older
(17:08):
and being elder in any given moment and the way
you can do it. I just had foot surgery and
I couldn't walk for two months, and I was an
absolute drain on everyone's resources and I was really like
a lot of pain. And the thing that interested me
was I watched my body get more decrepit and weak
and like the leg atrophying, and I would feel so old.
And then I would listen to the stories that were
(17:29):
going into my head. Okay, my life will never recover.
Oh my god, it's an old lady leg all these things,
and then I would say, no, that's old energy. It's old,
and that it's defunct and it's old, and that it's
related to aging. And I would say, oh my god,
I get to do absolutely nothing, and this bolt of
joy would run through me and I would command someone
to bring me something. I mean, I would go from
(17:51):
being older and decrepit to being like in absolute joy
and delight. You can go back and forth by shifting.
It's that you're shifting between the left and right hemispheres
of your brain. If you want to know technically what's happening.
It's an electrical phenomenon. It's not like spooky. But once
you learn the feeling of it, you can shift from older,
(18:12):
which lives in the left hemisphere of the brain too, elder,
which is in the right hemisphere, which actually doesn't even
track time. And you can physically see it in yourself
or in someone else when you make that shift. All right,
I'm going to give you an example right now. I
have a eighty six year old mother who, as I said,
my stepfather died and she's alone. And I've noticed that
(18:34):
when she sort of falls victim to that aging, oh
my gosh. You know, she takes to her bed, she's
feels all kinds of pain and ailments. But if you
can distract her, you know, if you can give her
a placebo or you can say, like, oh my gosh,
the blueberries are out, let's go picking, and you get
her out of that mindset. You know, she's up and
(18:55):
getting dressed and picking blueberries. I mean, if I use
my mother as aience experiment, I can see how the
mental state changes her physical well being in some ways.
It's if you fall prey to the old decrepit scenario.
It is easy to take to your bed and you know,
have warm milk and you know watch MSNBC for the
(19:16):
rest of your days. Absolutely, I'm putting you on that
quote online. I use my mother as a science experiment.
Dash Ali Wentworth. Why not? I mean, there's a look
I and I adore my mother and I've learned from
her at every step of my life. Marriage, whatever it
is that she went through, I mean she did it
a lot before I did. And now I'm watching her
(19:37):
as a woman in her eighties and I'm thinking what
do I want to keep and what do I not
want to keep? As I watch her go through this
process and some of the things are incredibly painful. She's
lost all her best girlfriends, which you know is a
who She says, who do I call? And I said,
call me or or my sisters. But there's other things
(19:59):
that I mind sort of reinvigorate my idea about aging.
When she lives up to her potential, meaning where she
puts that aging, you know, we have to be miserable, decrepred,
can't do anything out to past your idea away. She
is the most intelligent, impressive woman in the world. I mean,
and she was in her earlier life and she still is.
(20:22):
And so when she gets up and starts, you know,
writing her next book, or she can do a vegetable
garden like nobody else in the world, I go, yes,
that is my takeaway from my mother. Well, you're you're
bringing up in my mind an archetype that is really
useful to me, and that is the archetype of the
crazy old bat. Okay, yes, So unfortunately for me, I
(20:43):
never had looks to lose. That's a really hard one
for people who are glamorous and beautiful like you. Oh
you're very sweet. I have been worn makeup in two
years go aheads. But as you get older. I don't
know if you've heard this may be a cliche rule,
I've heard it from you, but please say it because
it does make me feel good. When you're twenty year
(21:05):
obsessed with it. What everyone else is thinking about you.
When you're forty, you stop caring so much what everyone
else is thinking about you, and when you're sixty you
realize no one was ever thinking about you. So then
you can act like a crazy old beat and you
can get a lot of mileage and joy out of
just not caring what people think once you realize they're
(21:27):
not looking at you. And I remember when I was writing.
One day, I was writing a memoir and I wrote
something about my son who has Down syndrome, and in
the book I I wrote, my reality is that I
live with a zen master, and then I went back
to fix it so people wouldn't be offended, and I wrote,
if you disagree with me, and I was going to say,
you know, I I totally take your point, and instead
(21:48):
I found myself typing I respectfully do not care. And
that was such a landing place for me. And people
come to me now and they will say negative things,
and I think, I, respectfully do not give a crap
what you think because I'm a crazy old bat now
and you can't stop me. That's great. And do you
really believe that you don't get hurt if you're a
(22:11):
crazy old bat not if you take the attitude of
a crazy old bat. It's not that you have the
costume of a crazy old bat. I think you aren't
genuinely a crazy old bath. Crazy old bats do not
give a flying what. I don't know what fuck say it.
Fuck give a flying fuck what anybody thinks. And it's
the genuineness. It's like method acting. You can't just pretend
(22:34):
to be a crazy old bat. You have to buy it.
You have to be like I will wear purple and
spending all my money on hats and say we have
done for butter and like really go there, and people
cannot resist the energy of the old bat. You see
them from time to time. They all come in all
different shapes. You know, some of them are dressed like
Stevie Nicks. But they do have power to them, that
is for sure. You may have seen multiple movie or
(22:56):
TV things, and this is true that when a crazy
old bat shows up, even young man who are you
know infamously the rough and Tumble group, will calm down.
I remember reading a story and the news, like twenty
years ago, this man broke into an elder woman's window,
into her bedroom and tried to rape her, and she
was like seventy five, and she grabbed him by the
scrotum and she twisted it as hard as she could,
(23:18):
and she dragged him outside, lecturing him all the way,
and pushed him through the door and said, do not
come back. And of course he ran screaming. Now that
is something only a crazy old bat could do. Yeah, yeah,
I love that. Nobody at twenty could do that. It's
funny because I have a very close friend and she
said to me once, I said, you know what, I
can't even look at zoom anymore. I'm just looking at
(23:40):
my neck. I'm looking at this, I'm looking at that.
She goes Elle, sexy. Sexy's over, honey, we're big straw
hats and we're growing tomatoes now. And I go, yeah,
I guess you're right. I guess I'm going to wear
a big straw hat and grow tomatoes. And I'm okay
with that. Actually, it takes the pressure off. And here's
the thing. When you're really in to the crazy old
bat mentality, you're really in to the straw hat and
(24:00):
the tomatoes, the glamor begins. I know this woman who's
very she's like a spiritual teacher, and name is Byron Katie,
and she's in the mid seventies now, and I was
visiting her and her husband, and she went in the
other room and I said to him, I said, Stephen,
it's so weird. As she gets through her seventies, Katie
is becoming more and more physically beautiful. And I don't
mean compensating for aging. I mean she's physically getting more beautiful.
(24:24):
And from the other room, Katie says, I know, isn't
it weird? That's crazy, little bad energy. It's actually divine.
It's actually it's countercultural for sure. Yeah, because all crazy
is countercultural. But everything comes from the gods through a
countercultural conduit, so why not be that. I agree with that.
And I also thought about a few years ago, I
(24:46):
had a sist to no varyan cist, and they had
to take out my ovaries, and I remember being really
upset about that because I thought, it's truly hit me that,
you know, I can't now have more babies, and you know,
something's being taken away from me and maybe I will
be a sexy and you know, because again I think
(25:07):
that there's a label that happens to us when we're
no longer allowed to procreate. That we're useless, right, and
so um I had to That was like a big
hurdle to get over because I thought I'm not useless
because I had some kids, Like I'm done anyway. It's
not like whatever late forties going, Oh, I can't wait
to have another baby. I mean, you know, George was like,
(25:28):
don't get near me. It's an onion skin of cultural
attitudes towards everything from our ovaries to our you know,
our hair coator. Like every little thing we experience, culture
goes in and goes after it, and it is not
kind to middle aged older women in the modern world.
And there's nothing there that is kind. So you have
to burst through culture and that becomes a gift because
(25:50):
the culture will keep you hog tied and miserable with
all its various lies. And it's when you burst through
that into the glamour, into the radiance, whatever that happens
to be. It's really all over the world people have
talked about light and radiance emitting from people as beautiful
or emitting from nature itself, and that lies beyond culture.
And every single thing you you do, from dental work,
(26:13):
getting a surgery, everything can take you down the death
road of culture, and when it makes you suffer, you
just say that is a lie. It's like the Buddha
looking at every demon and saying you are illusion, you
are a lie, and then you burst through to the
truth of that and it feels like light and it
looks like light. I also think there needs to be
a shift in our sort of culture and film and everything,
(26:37):
because this is an age old argument. But you can
have Michael Douglas as as the husband and Gwyneth Paltrow
as a wife, but if it's the other way around,
it's gross. But in Europe, I've known many men that
had affairs with women twenty five years older them, and
it was it was sexy, and it was you know,
they learned about women and it was kind of this
(26:58):
romantic thing which we don't have. Yeah, and I think
there should be a shift a little bit. Sometimes the
crazy old, you know hat lady could also be kind
of a sexy older woman that can actually teach you
a thing or two. Absolutely, because it's it's vitality we're
talking about. Exactly. In our culture, we say that vitality
has an inverse relationship with age. It goes down as
(27:19):
we age. That is simply a lie. It can increase
as we age. I knew a man who died if
locked in syndrome where he went into Parkinson's and then froze,
and it took him like two years to die. And
you would think that that would be the ultimate destructive situation.
And this man was very bulliant while he was younger,
(27:40):
and he went into this gradual paralysis by increasing his joy.
I don't know how he did it, but by the
end he was just absolutely luminous. And I remember going
in and grabbing him and just kneeling down by his
wheelchair and just hanging onto him and feeling his vitality
just energized me. And I took a lot away from
(28:01):
that experience. I'm like, that's the power of the human
nervous system when it's really flipped on. Like a magnetometer
can measure the electromagnetic energy coming from us ten feet
away and then it's two weeks, but it goes on forever.
If we amp that up. It's a genuine physical force.
And I felt it coming from him, and it was
I was like, that's what I want to do. That's amazing.
And tell me about you wrote about how we're all seven.
(28:24):
Do you remember that. Yeah. I was lying there in
shivasana on my bathroom floor, probably just sleeping it off,
but I was thinking, Okay, it's really weird that this
body had three children. I was like in my forties.
And then I was like, is that true? Is it true? No,
because once every seven years, every atom in our body
gets flipped out for another atom, and it's a completely
(28:47):
new thing, like this body. None of the body that
I have now was present when my children were born,
not a single atom. And that led me to, well,
then what am I? And what you come to is
I am a whisp of consciousness around which matters seems
to accrue for like a few years, and then it stops.
And so it shifted my identity again from the body
(29:09):
into the light, into the glamour. And if you live
in the glamour, you don't fear death because the glamber
doesn't die, or if it does, it's just so happy
about it, it it doesn't even care. And you're kind of
watching your body going, well, that's what it did. But
even the body is rejuvenated. It's electrical, it's joyful, it's uplifting,
it's rejuvenating, and people feel it as younger the older
(29:30):
you get. We're gonna take a short break and we'll
be right back, and we're back. If I were speaking
to somebody else about aging, they would say, well, here
(29:51):
my ideas are hits for how to help the aging process.
You know, use a vitamin C serum and laid. I
do that, I do that, you know, I mean, look,
there is there is the reality of physical health, of course,
but tell me, Dr Martha Beck, what are the things
that you can help us all age joyfully in a
(30:15):
way that only you could tell us? Meaning? Is it yoga?
Is it? What are the things that you have found
with all your incredible experiences in your knowledge that help
you envelope the glamour? Okay, so Ernest Haming White said
he was born with a built in bullshit detector. We
all are, and the problem is that we turn it
(30:35):
off really early in our lives. So people tell us,
you know, you need to go to school, and we're like, okay,
when the truth is bullshit. And then they say, you know,
you look better in blue, or you should always wear
heels or something, and we say, okay, when the truth
is bullshit, recognize your bullshit detector. And then every time
you have a negative thought about the aging process. Feel
(30:55):
with your bullshit detector. Which part of that is bullshit?
Because any part of it that says you're getting worse
is a lie. That's my experience after thirty years of
coaching people. So it's get your bullshit detector and get
it honed, and listen to it, and then apply it
to anything that tells you you should feel bad about agent. Okay,
(31:16):
get rid of the bullshit. Now you got rid of
bullshit in a macro way because you left your origin family,
you came out, you left your husband. Give me a
few other biggies that you've done that have helped you.
So here's the thing. Every culture around the world says
that the truth will set you free. And that's what
(31:37):
I mean by the bullshit detector, and I mean when
you get it really hung I'll never forget the day
I picked up a cup of coffee, which I had
every day for since I left Mormonism, and I took
a sip of it and my body said, no, absolutely not,
and I tried to keep drinking it. No, that is
not for you. Bullshit. It's gonna make me feel better, bullshit.
I can't drink coffee anymore. Okay. So then I go
(31:59):
and I was vegan and my doctor said this is
killing you. You need meat, and my body did not
say bullshit. So I started eating high fat food and
my body said, yes, the low fat thing was bullshit
for you. Like that feeling of this is right for me.
It glows in the body. It feels like the light
shining through the body, and it's delicious. It's a sense
(32:21):
of vibrant deliciousness. And if you get really particular, like
I started to go to bed early just because it
felt like bullshit to stay up later, you know, I
get so much sleep now because the bullshit detector works
on everything. And that's why I wrote the last book,
because it's the most elegant solution to every single problem,
and it's applied to behaviors as well. Take two medicine,
(32:43):
See which one feels like bullshit, Like, ask your doctor
and then trust your your insides, and it will take
you to the healthiest root, or at least to the
right most joyful route for you through life. And if
you don't have the most joyful route through life, who
cares how you look or what other people think? You know,
So what's the different between listening to your gut and
(33:03):
tracking bullshit. To me, there's absolutely no difference because I've
been doing my integrity cleanses for so long that I
get really, really immaculate, and I'm constantly saying, is this
right for me? Is this true for me? Is this right?
It's every single part of my day. I can't tell
you how intensely I focus on this, and the result
has been what looks like good luck, what looks like
(33:23):
good business, what looks like good health, what looks It's
just I can't tell you enough how true your instincts are,
but you have been socialized to ignore them. Yeah, be
a wild animal, never do anything that a wild animal
self wouldn't do, and you'll always choose the right way
to go with your body, and you'll always feel the
(33:44):
vitality of being that never ages ever see. I think
that women, particularly have been told what to do and
what to think their whole lives. So, like you said,
peeling the onion, it's very hard for us to even
get to that core to understand what's bullshit or not.
There have many times in my life where I go,
(34:04):
I don't know what I think about the death penalty.
I've never Actually I was told what to think about it,
but I don't. What do I think about this? What
do I think about that? I mean even the idea
of you coming out. It's like I've had so many
female friends that were gay, but just we're like, well,
I better get married, right, Well I did that. I
didn't know I was gay. And may I say that
(34:24):
if you want to age joyfully and happily as a woman,
I really would consider becoming a lesbian. For all your
listeners out there, Oh that's that's gonna piss my husband off. Martha,
he can be a lesbian. He's awesome. No. It really
the whole thing with with feminine inferiority um starts in
the cradle. And I mean in my family, the way
(34:46):
I always heard it when someone had a baby was
they got a boy, or it's a girl, but she's
really cute. That breaks my heart. I put in my
in my memoir about it. The only thing Mormons want
from women is that they breed in captivity. And so
I really got the full treatment, and it made me
the deeper, the suffering, the harder the pushback. Elizabeth Katie
(35:08):
Stanton said women have been systematically disappointed in the law
of the polity and economy, and she said, my life's
mission is to deepen this disappointment in the hearts of
women until they will suffer it no longer. And that's
what happened to me. I just was such an outlier
culturally that culture nearly killed me and I had to
push back, and in the process, I think feel more
(35:31):
free than most of the people I run into. So
be a wild animal, I'm hearing, be a wild animal.
Be feral in your life. Be wild. Yeah. I actually
moved to the woods for six years. On my fiftieth birthday,
I moved to this little house on the edge of
a huge national park, and all I did was just
get up in my pajamas, put on galoshes, and go
walking through the woods every day because I was a
(35:51):
crazy old bat right and it was amazing. And I
would track the bears and I would track the mountain lions,
and I didn't care if they killed me. And I
started to feel like they do about their bodies. I think,
just rejoicing in the experience of being in this particular
type of machine and seeing how much fun it can have,
like sexually, with food, with light, with words, with everything,
(36:15):
how much joy can this machine have now? And what
I found is that as it loses its ability to
have some joys, other joys expand exponentially. If what I'm
hearing is correct, Martha, because I am tapping into this
big time is I think for all women, we can say,
whether you live in a high rise building or in
an adobe hut, if you find those moments that you're
(36:38):
talking about, where you can do yoga, meditate, take a
walk in the woods, if you could just sort of
be alone in yourself, those are the ways you can
start to discover what you believe is bullshit, it is not.
You need that quietness that is going to help you
listen to your gut. One thing I wanted to ask
you before we go, and I know that everyone's going
(36:58):
to go out and buy Integrity, because this is just
but a sampling, a taste of what you will learn
from that book. And I touched upon it before when
I talked about my mother. You know, a lot of
people are dealing with aging parents now, and dealing with
aging parents when they have children of their own, and
so I'm sort of in this weird middle zone of
(37:19):
being a kind of a mother to my parents and
a mother to my kids, and I look at my
both my mother and my father, who had divorced but
aging in place, and I'm thinking, how do I learn
from what I'm seeing? How do I be a good
child for my aging parents? And also how do I
send those messages to my kids about aging parents. What
(37:43):
are your thoughts on that? I love what you said
about quiet and what I learned in the quiet for
the six years I lived in the woods was to
keep my attention and my energy focused on my inside
because I have what my family jokingly calls god to tentacles.
If anybody or anything is suffering, it is up to
me to fix. So I had to pull those tentacles
(38:05):
back in. I was getting exhausted, and what I found
is that the moment my attention turned to someone else
to help them, my own vitality diminished significantly. And it
was bullshit. So I started to realize that even in
the room with someone who is suffering, of my attention
is on saying what am I feeling? How is this?
So you know if I'm panicking that they're not okay?
(38:27):
Is that true? No, Get back into your own body,
find a place of your own joy and balance and
then if they're freaking out, you can hold a place
of balance. Your child that freaks out, your parents freaks out,
It doesn't matter. You have to keep the energy inside yourself,
which is what women are trained not to do, and
by the way, biologically we kind of geared not to
(38:49):
do it. I actually visualized pulling in the tentacles of
my attention so that they go to my own heart,
my own body, my own brain, and I'm constantly taking
care of myself out with bubble bass, but with Okay,
they're suffering, they think it's my job to fix it. Okay,
that's bullshit. Where do I want to go? Instead, go
into the piece of glamour, going to the piece of
(39:10):
radiance and hold it. I had a friend who was
dying and she hated having me in the room with
her because I was excited for her and she did
not like that. But she would make me come in
and sit with her behind her where I couldn't see her,
because she said she could feel the the joy, the
energy of it. She didn't want to see my face
because she wanted everyone to be sad. But the feeling
(39:33):
of being contented in myself and the trust that death
is no big deal. She could feel it in her
body and eased her pain and it eased her passing.
So that sounds very self congratulatory, but it's real this energy.
Keep it for yourself, and that doesn't make you not
empathetic to the people that are aging or dying, or
it makes you more empathetic. There are four different parts
(39:56):
of the brain that are related to empathy, and one
of them is sharing feelings. But if you broke your
leg and my response was to break my leg and
sit with you in Christ so that I could really
experience your pain, you would get no help with your leg.
So part of the brain, when it feels empathy emotionally,
also is able to make a self other differentiation. And
a third part does emotion regulation, and you have to
(40:18):
pull down your sharing of the other's suffering in order
to get really into a full experience of empathy, which
is a blast of compassion without concern, like I am
right here with you in your depression, in your aging,
in your dementia, I am okay. One of my favorite writers,
the Persian poet have Fizz, says, troubled, then stay with me,
(40:42):
for I am not. And if you can do that,
then everything around you starts to calm down, and the
radiance and everyone starts to shine, and it's communicable, and
you need that desperately if you're in the Sandwich generation
between kids and aging parents. That's great advice. Thank you,
Martha Beck. If I were a lesbian, I would be
(41:05):
courting you right now. But I am here with my
children and my husband and aging parents, so I'm not
going anywhere. But thank you for this, truly. Thank you. Okay, So, Martha,
before you go, we're trying something new this season, and
you're kind of the guinea pig. But I'm going to
have our guests asked me a question at the end
of each episode. I thought so long and hard, and
(41:27):
this is my question. Oh my gosh, Okay, you have
been in so many arenas, you have achieved so much,
You've been in the public eye in so many different ways.
What is the most horrible, humiliating thing that ever happened
to you in a public forum? Oh gosh, where do
I start? Um, let's see humiliating. If there's there's this,
(41:49):
there's that story. Well. One of the things, which I
think is an interesting story because it shows who I
am authentically is when I was first married, nobody cared
about me, you know, I didn't. There was no publicity
about me as a person. It was always a review
about something I was in or And when I married
George Um, somebody wrote a piece in the New York
(42:12):
Post that said Ali went within George Stephanopolis are getting divorced.
And I was taken aback by that. Like, first of all,
I knew that wasn't true, but it hurt my feelings.
I felt overwhelmed by it. And another reporter got my
cell phone number and he called me up and he said,
what do you think about this article about you and
your husband getting divorced? And I said, you show me
two people that have sex twice a day that are
(42:33):
getting divorced. Now that was my way of handling it,
you know which, much like I've seen you do you
handle it with humor. George was enraged. He should have
been so proud. What a stud. They still call him
George twice today Stephanopolis. But he was not used to
Um sort of talking about his personal life in any way.
(42:56):
He was a no comment, no comment. You don't even
talk to these people about this stuff. And so I
was humiliated by my response and I thought I was
in trouble, and and yet it was very often it
would just immediately came out of my mouth. I didn't
think about it. So there have been times where I
thought I was sort of being my courageous self and
(43:19):
I got in trouble for it, and that was that
was a humiliating moment for myself. Well, do not accept
that because you did the right thing. You told the truth,
and the truth makes you and George look amazing. So
just yeah, well, you're right, that's that's the wild animal
in me. So um, I'm keeping that wild and I'm
letting her out of the cage. Martha. Yeah, keep your
(43:42):
energy inside. He can deal with his exactly. Thank you.
Excellent question. That sounds great. That's a wonderful story. Thank
you so much for that. Thank you, Martha went Ri.
You are a goddess. I just love you and thank
you so much. I love you too, and thank you.
I you love Martha Beck. I got to tell you
she is so full of them and bigger again. You
(44:05):
should read her book, Integrity, because it goes through so
many different channels and variations of what we talked about
and so many things we didn't talk about. So I
have to admit I do have moments of terror about aging,
and I think, yes, some of it is mortality. I mean,
I'm afraid to die, to not exist, But also I
(44:25):
feel like it's how America does treat, particularly women who
are going through an aging process. But talking to Dr
Martha Beck made me feel so much better because I
truly believe it is the quote unquote light within us.
And I think, look, we live in a very unpredictable
world right now. What is predictable is we're going to
(44:47):
get old and we're gonna die. So why not make
this life the best we can? And so I think
we all need to go out and take those moments
for ourselves and listening to our glamor g l A
M M e er and find ways to shine bright
to the very last moment. Yeah, thank you for listening
(45:12):
to go ask Gali. Be sure to subscribe, rate and
review the podcast, and follow me on social media on
Twitter at Ali E. Wentworth and on Instagram at the
Real Ali Wentworth. Now, if you'd like to ask me
a question or suggest a guest or a topic to
dig into, I would love to hear from you. And
there's a bunch of ways to do it. You can
call or text me at three to three three six
(45:33):
four six three five six, or you can email a
voice memo right from your phone to Go Ask Gali
podcast at gmail dot com. If you leave me a message,
you may hear it on Go Ask Alli. Go Ask
Gali is a production of Shonda Land Audio and partnership
with I heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio,
(45:54):
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Go ask Ali, a production of Shonda Land
Audio and partnership with I Heart Radio. I don't think
that there's some one soul mate. It's not like there's one.
Although bon Jovi is my soul mate, there's always exceptions.
Are you saying that gossiping is the same as if
I'm picking lice out of your scalp and eating it. Well,
(00:25):
you've done both. So what do you think? I want
to give her too much? I don't like her to
come in with an inflated head, So we won't mentioned
the Golden Globe. After all we've been through. We deserve
an orgasm. Cis I deserved? Welcome back to Go ask Ali.
I'm Ali Wentworth. It's season two and this time I'm
(00:47):
digging into everything I can get my hands on, peeling
back the layers and getting dirty. You know, I'm a
big clamor. I love to go out in the bay
with my clamming fork and my net, and I love
it because I go deeper and deeper into the sand
and always pull up these little nuggets. And I've decided
to use that in my life in general. So that's
(01:07):
what we're doing this season. We're digging into topics, topics
that I find interesting, that you find interesting, and find
different angles in ways to talk about them. What is
also new for season two is you. Throughout the season,
we'll be sprinkling questions from you, my listeners, and I'll
be answering them. Right here, here's Ruth, Hi Ali, I'd
(01:29):
love to get some expert advice about health families can
best balance aging parents while working to raise and care
for their own media families. My parents live in their
happy place near Lake in South Carolina. My sister and
I are invested with our lives here in the Midwest, which,
by the way, is where they raised us. A move
of them is out of the question that health issues
are becoming continual. I hate to ask this, Ali, but
(01:51):
who trump foods hold our families and there four kids
need us? Thank you, Ruth. First of all, I am
going through this right now. I don't think anybody wins.
I think it's about balance, like anything else in life,
like careers and families and kids and aging parents. I mean,
it's a tough position because you're kind of sandwiched in
between being a parent to your kids and being a
(02:14):
parent to your parents. Both my parents live far away
from me and what I have found the best thing
to do is check in with them a lot, make
sure their needs are being met. You'll find that you're
going to have to be in control of if they
need any care, if they need to be assisted living,
or if they need somebody if they're aging at home
to help care for them. You have to make sure
(02:35):
their medical needs are met. Sometimes I've had to travel
to my parents to make sure they go to the
right doctors or just to be with them for emotional support.
But the most important thing is I think you teach
your children how it is to care for aging parents.
My daughters are certainly watching me go through it, so
hopefully they'll know how to handle it when I'm aging.
(02:58):
Thank you, Ruth. I hope that how helps. I could
really do a whole podcast on the subject. Anyway, To
all the listeners out there, keep your questions coming. The
phone number and email will be at the end of
every episode and in all of the show notes. So
to kick off this fabulous season, I want to talk
about something I think about all the time, aging aging
(03:18):
in this country, which is not easy. Last season I
spoke with Dr Frank Lippman about how to take care
of our bodies as we age, and today it's about
aging gracefully on the inside. And luckily I got the
best guest on this topic, Martha Beck. Dr. Martha Beck
is a best selling author, life coach, and speaker known
(03:40):
for her unique combination of science, humor, which I of
course love, and spirituality, which of course I need more of.
Her written work includes several New York Times and international bestsellers,
as well as over a hundred and fifty magazine articles.
She holds three Harvard degrees in social science, and Oprah
Winfrey has called her one of the smartest women I know. Well,
(04:02):
that is high praise. NPR and USA Today have proclaimed
her as the best known life coach in America. Martha's
newest book, The Way of Integrity, Finding the Path your
True Self, was an instant New York Times bestseller. Jesus,
how do you follow that? All? Right? So, Martha Beck, again,
I told you before we started recording, I could really
(04:22):
talk to you about a million things, And I'm going
to send you a huge case of ice cream when
we're done, in the hopes you'll come back and talk
about other things any time. But Martha Beck, I am
fascinated by aging in America. I think we are not
kind to people over a certain age in our country
as opposed to other countries in the world. And also
(04:45):
I want to talk about how what aging is to
us personally. I think we get fascinated, particularly as women,
on the exterior of ourselves when it comes to the
aging process. I know, everybody's nip and tucking and poking
and syringing and going on fat diets and if you
eat this, you know, mushroom and all that kind of stuff.
Nothing makes me more exciting than reading a new potion
(05:06):
that's going to help me stay young. But I think
a lot of it is internal, and I think you
do too. So let's dive in with your kind of
big brushstroke about what you think about aging, and then
we're gonna sort of dig into the minutia of all that. Well.
I was reading a memoir by Tibetan monk, and he
was one of these guys that is reincarnated, so they
(05:29):
recognize him as a llama when he's too and take
him off to be trained. So by the time he
was like thirteen, he was already giving wise counsel to
American middle aged women. And this middleized American women came
and started going on about how tragic aging was and
how she was getting wrinkled and everything, and he said
he could not understand it. It was like, in my culture,
(05:50):
the wisdom of age is so covenant, and every wrinkle
is like a sign that makes people bow to you
more deeply, and people rejoice in their maturation of the
soul in an an individual body, and then they think
they just go on to a new one. So it's
in a big deal that the old one wore out.
And it was really interesting to see the complete cultural
bafflement that he was in, Like, it really isn't just
(06:10):
that other cultures pretend to feel differently about aging. We
feel worse about aging than almost any other culture that's
ever been in the world. Therefore completely missed the benefits
of aging, because you can't access the benefits of aging
if you're resisting the aging process itself. So what it
is for me is I like, look at the new
me every morning. It is like, what fresh hell is this?
(06:32):
And then I got all right, well, all right, go deeper.
What's happening? What have I got to show with this
new bag and wrinkle? And yeah, without exception, I can
sit down and think of something that I am slightly
wiser about today than I was yesterday. And what I've
lost in youth and vigor, I've gained in wisdom and experience.
(06:52):
And here's the biggest thing. I'm really not afraid of dying. Well,
that I think is key. I think a big piece
of this is our relayationship with mortality, because you know
the fact that the monks and so many other religions
believe in reincarnation, and so that you know, for somebody
who maybe doesn't think that we're reincarnated, or someone has
gone to an oppressive Christian all girls boarding school, you
(07:17):
start to go, oh, well, this is it. I'm going
to die and worms are going to eat me. So
how do I make this last as long as I can? Yeah?
And I was obsessed with that from the moment I
was about five when I saw a cat get hit
by a car and die and it was my introduction
to death. And I didn't sleep for like another ten years.
I mean, no one's ever been more horrified by death
than I was. And then I got to the place
(07:38):
where it's like, I can't stand the anticipation of death.
Why don't I just get off the bus right now.
So there was the whole suicidal era. That was an era.
Oh lord, Yes, it was like age maybe six to
about thirty two. Not that Ily was suicidal after the
age of twenty nine. But something happened to me in
a surgery when I was twenty nine. I've written about
(08:00):
it in this last book, and it's not I wasn't dead.
It wasn't a near death experience, but it's similar to
what people talk about in near death experiences where they're
unconscious but then they can sit up and look around
and they see their body. That's what happened to me.
I saw my body lying down and I was sitting up,
and then I was really confused, and I sort of
lay back down and this light appeared between the surgical
lights that was so much brighter than the surgical lights,
(08:22):
and it grew and it touched me and it seemed
to sort of fill me up, and it was the
most exquisite thing I had ever imagined, and I just
kept thinking home, Home, Home. And basically all it was
there to do is to say, your goal is not
to get to some death realm and then maybe get
to heaven and feel like this. The meaning of your
life is to feel the way you feel right now,
(08:44):
but while you're in this body. And that was the
time I started my policy of never lying, because lying
didn't feel the way I had felt in that surgery.
Anything that didn't feel that way had to go. My
family of origin, my marriage, from job, everything sort of
went in the bond fire. But as a result, I
lost all my fear of death. So now aging to
(09:04):
me is kind of exciting. It's like, not only am
I better at what I'm doing here, aside from the
fact that I'm decrepit, but oh my goodness, mate, Like,
there are so many ways to experience joy that I
haven't gotten to it yet, and I believe that they're here,
there and everywhere, And it puts me at such ease.
It's so interesting you're saying that because I knew a woman.
(09:25):
Her name was Mona, and I actually wrote about her
in one of my books. And this is a woman
in her early sixties, and when I met her, I
thought she was the most fabulous woman I had ever met.
She had such zest for life, She loved talking to people,
She was fascinated by everything. She enjoyed life, food, friendship,
(09:48):
and I remember thinking, I want to be just like Mona.
I mean, Mona is life to me, full vitality. Mona
got cancer and died sort of mid sixties, and I
remember when she was dying, I would bring things to
her and she used to say, oh God, I can't
(10:08):
eat sugar because of this fucking cancer, but I I
sure love desserts, and so my family we would bring
her cupcakes with flowers and she loved to have it
all around her. My point is, this is a woman
that I can't even describe her body or her wrinkles
because that they were so beyond and above the point
of my story. But she was such a beautiful person
(10:29):
on the inside that she was literally radiant even when
she was going in chemo, and it just she was
aged defying and that had a huge impact on me.
And when I think about aging, particularly for women our age,
I think about how, like I said at the beginning,
so there's so much focus on the exterior, but I
(10:51):
am a different person than I was in my twenties. Yes,
I wish I had my ass and my skin from
my twenties, but I wouldn't give up everything I know now,
you know, I wouldn't give up the things that make
me aspire to be Mona. So I wish that everybody
had a Moona in their life. And I think you're Amona,
(11:11):
and I think that you're helping a lot of people
with that because when you see it, when it's personified,
you know that light in a person, you go, oh,
I get it, I get it. Which is not to
take away from anything you need to do on the
exterior to make yourself feel good, but I do think
that our own inner life is a huge part of it. Absolutely,
(11:33):
let's go through some of the mental habits, influences, attitudes
that we can take. Because just you telling the story
about how you blew up, it sounds like your marriage.
You re evaluated your life. Everything I want to hear
about that. Tell me about that, because I actually have
a couple of people in my life that I think
are really toxic that make me feel bad. I think
(11:55):
we could probably do a little spring cleaning in terms
of that. So tell me your experience with all this. Okay,
So I had this transcendent experience and it was what
you say, It was this radiance, and I knew that
it was also part of me. There's like I have
many Scottish ancestors, and there's the word glamour comes from
a Scottish word that did not mean beauty. It meant
(12:16):
the ability to project beauty, whether you're beautiful or not.
Its spelled g l A M M e R. This
light was full of glamour, and I came out and
I was like, okay, I'm just going to feel the
way that made me feel. And what I learned really
quickly was I couldn't lie with my words or my
behavior without that glamor going down. And I wasn't doing
(12:37):
it to try to project radiance. I was doing it
to feel happy, which I had never done before, and
so it was very, very motivating. So I would talk
to my parents and I would start to feel really dreadful,
and I would have to say, okay, I'm going to
talk to them less, and finally stopped talking to them
at all, which was convenient because I started remembering being
sexually abused as a child, and my no lie as
(13:00):
she meant that I went to a therapist, which I
was not supposed to do in my family. So I
lost my whole family of origin, which was this monstrous
Mormon family. I mean big I was gonna say, if
you're from a Mormon family, that sounds like a lot
of people. One of eight children, baby, Um. Yeah, it
was a lot of people to be angry at me
at the same time. And also at the time, I
(13:20):
was living in Utah, so that was like, okay, now
I'm leaving home. Then I realized I was gay. Oops,
so they went my marriage, but I couldn't lie about it,
and so I a lot of relationships went away. Something
back later, lots and lots of I mean, it was
just layers of the onion to get through my own falsehoods.
But I did notice that as I got to a
more raw places, a more tender, honest place, people started
(13:43):
telling me that I came across as more shiny, which
was bewildering to me. But I've seen it now in
so many women and men, and it's real. I just
write a book on near death experiences, but not from
the perspective of the dead person, from the others, and
one of of things that happens is people see the
dying person started to physically shine. And this is hundreds
(14:05):
and hundreds and hundreds of cases of people who are
in their right minds. If you can shine as you're
going to death, you can shine as you go in
through middle age, right, Like, why not start now? That's interesting.
My uh stepfather died during COVID and he was ninety nine.
But he loved life. I mean, he loved life and
(14:26):
he was shining at the last few days of his death.
I mean, he held my mother in his arms and
was incredibly sweet and and loved a good joke and
you know, told my mom she still had a great rack.
I mean, all the things, you know. And that's something
again that I look at and went, wow, that is
that's a life there that he was able to have
(14:50):
joy to the very end. And I think, and I
think you've written about this, that our culture teaches us
to age miserably. Aging is a horrible thing in our culture.
It's something to be embarrassed about. It's something to be
shunned about. It's a certain point you had written about
the difference between elders and olders. Can you talk about that.
(15:10):
Elders are the people who are socialized in those cultures
that love the elderly, They're the ones that, for example,
non written languages depended completely on the older people to
remember everything about everything from plant medicine to how to
heal a broken heart. So the older you were, the
more people came to you, the more people respected you.
And we've lost that completely in our culture and instead
(15:33):
everything has become about material wealth, material substance and the
material beauty of the body. And it's a cultural lie
that feels like a lie. When you start to tell
your own truth, you can start to bump into aspects
of the culture around aging, like I should be ashamed
of this, I should feel bad, and you can start
to feel that it has the texture of a lie.
If you start telling the absolute truth, it becomes really apparent,
(15:57):
and then the whole culture it turns out to be
wrong about it, and you can be the only one
in step. And when you get that internally, then the
glamour starts and then people start telling you you look good.
I don't know why, they just do it. There's a
lot more to come after this short break, welcome back.
(16:27):
It's interesting when you think of everything that's in books
and film and operas. You know, the idea has always
been that you would go to the wise man or
the wise woman. You know, who came in many forms,
amongk a priest, a guru. You went to them to
have life affirmation and wisdom. You didn't go to a
(16:47):
you know, a twenty one year old influencer on Instagram
to get your advice. Now it's Google. Yeah, now it's Google.
It used to be almost all cultures that those were
the people that would share this credible wisdom with you,
but not anymore. When you ask about older and elder,
so you can actually feel the difference between being older
(17:08):
and being elder in any given moment and the way
you can do it. I just had foot surgery and
I couldn't walk for two months, and I was an
absolute drain on everyone's resources and I was really like
a lot of pain. And the thing that interested me
was I watched my body get more decrepit and weak
and like the leg atrophying, and I would feel so old.
And then I would listen to the stories that were
(17:29):
going into my head. Okay, my life will never recover.
Oh my god, it's an old lady leg all these things,
and then I would say, no, that's old energy. It's old,
and that it's defunct and it's old, and that it's
related to aging. And I would say, oh my god,
I get to do absolutely nothing, and this bolt of
joy would run through me and I would command someone
to bring me something. I mean, I would go from
(17:51):
being older and decrepit to being like in absolute joy
and delight. You can go back and forth by shifting.
It's that you're shifting between the left and right hemispheres
of your brain. If you want to know technically what's happening.
It's an electrical phenomenon. It's not like spooky. But once
you learn the feeling of it, you can shift from older,
(18:12):
which lives in the left hemisphere of the brain too, elder,
which is in the right hemisphere, which actually doesn't even
track time. And you can physically see it in yourself
or in someone else when you make that shift. All right,
I'm going to give you an example right now. I
have a eighty six year old mother who, as I said,
my stepfather died and she's alone. And I've noticed that
(18:34):
when she sort of falls victim to that aging, oh
my gosh. You know, she takes to her bed, she's
feels all kinds of pain and ailments. But if you
can distract her, you know, if you can give her
a placebo or you can say, like, oh my gosh,
the blueberries are out, let's go picking, and you get
her out of that mindset. You know, she's up and
(18:55):
getting dressed and picking blueberries. I mean, if I use
my mother as aience experiment, I can see how the
mental state changes her physical well being in some ways.
It's if you fall prey to the old decrepit scenario.
It is easy to take to your bed and you know,
have warm milk and you know watch MSNBC for the
(19:16):
rest of your days. Absolutely, I'm putting you on that
quote online. I use my mother as a science experiment.
Dash Ali Wentworth. Why not? I mean, there's a look
I and I adore my mother and I've learned from
her at every step of my life. Marriage, whatever it
is that she went through, I mean she did it
a lot before I did. And now I'm watching her
(19:37):
as a woman in her eighties and I'm thinking what
do I want to keep and what do I not
want to keep? As I watch her go through this
process and some of the things are incredibly painful. She's
lost all her best girlfriends, which you know is a
who She says, who do I call? And I said,
call me or or my sisters. But there's other things
(19:59):
that I mind sort of reinvigorate my idea about aging.
When she lives up to her potential, meaning where she
puts that aging, you know, we have to be miserable, decrepred,
can't do anything out to past your idea away. She
is the most intelligent, impressive woman in the world. I mean,
and she was in her earlier life and she still is.
(20:22):
And so when she gets up and starts, you know,
writing her next book, or she can do a vegetable
garden like nobody else in the world, I go, yes,
that is my takeaway from my mother. Well, you're you're
bringing up in my mind an archetype that is really
useful to me, and that is the archetype of the
crazy old bat. Okay, yes, So unfortunately for me, I
(20:43):
never had looks to lose. That's a really hard one
for people who are glamorous and beautiful like you. Oh
you're very sweet. I have been worn makeup in two
years go aheads. But as you get older. I don't
know if you've heard this may be a cliche rule,
I've heard it from you, but please say it because
it does make me feel good. When you're twenty year
(21:05):
obsessed with it. What everyone else is thinking about you.
When you're forty, you stop caring so much what everyone
else is thinking about you, and when you're sixty you
realize no one was ever thinking about you. So then
you can act like a crazy old beat and you
can get a lot of mileage and joy out of
just not caring what people think once you realize they're
(21:27):
not looking at you. And I remember when I was writing.
One day, I was writing a memoir and I wrote
something about my son who has Down syndrome, and in
the book I I wrote, my reality is that I
live with a zen master, and then I went back
to fix it so people wouldn't be offended, and I wrote,
if you disagree with me, and I was going to say,
you know, I I totally take your point, and instead
(21:48):
I found myself typing I respectfully do not care. And
that was such a landing place for me. And people
come to me now and they will say negative things,
and I think, I, respectfully do not give a crap
what you think because I'm a crazy old bat now
and you can't stop me. That's great. And do you
really believe that you don't get hurt if you're a
(22:11):
crazy old bat not if you take the attitude of
a crazy old bat. It's not that you have the
costume of a crazy old bat. I think you aren't
genuinely a crazy old bath. Crazy old bats do not
give a flying what. I don't know what fuck say it.
Fuck give a flying fuck what anybody thinks. And it's
the genuineness. It's like method acting. You can't just pretend
(22:34):
to be a crazy old bat. You have to buy it.
You have to be like I will wear purple and
spending all my money on hats and say we have
done for butter and like really go there, and people
cannot resist the energy of the old bat. You see
them from time to time. They all come in all
different shapes. You know, some of them are dressed like
Stevie Nicks. But they do have power to them, that
is for sure. You may have seen multiple movie or
(22:56):
TV things, and this is true that when a crazy
old bat shows up, even young man who are you
know infamously the rough and Tumble group, will calm down.
I remember reading a story and the news, like twenty
years ago, this man broke into an elder woman's window,
into her bedroom and tried to rape her, and she
was like seventy five, and she grabbed him by the
scrotum and she twisted it as hard as she could,
(23:18):
and she dragged him outside, lecturing him all the way,
and pushed him through the door and said, do not
come back. And of course he ran screaming. Now that
is something only a crazy old bat could do. Yeah, yeah,
I love that. Nobody at twenty could do that. It's
funny because I have a very close friend and she
said to me once, I said, you know what, I
can't even look at zoom anymore. I'm just looking at
(23:40):
my neck. I'm looking at this, I'm looking at that.
She goes Elle, sexy. Sexy's over, honey, we're big straw
hats and we're growing tomatoes now. And I go, yeah,
I guess you're right. I guess I'm going to wear
a big straw hat and grow tomatoes. And I'm okay
with that. Actually, it takes the pressure off. And here's
the thing. When you're really in to the crazy old
bat mentality, you're really in to the straw hat and
(24:00):
the tomatoes, the glamor begins. I know this woman who's
very she's like a spiritual teacher, and name is Byron Katie,
and she's in the mid seventies now, and I was
visiting her and her husband, and she went in the
other room and I said to him, I said, Stephen,
it's so weird. As she gets through her seventies, Katie
is becoming more and more physically beautiful. And I don't
mean compensating for aging. I mean she's physically getting more beautiful.
(24:24):
And from the other room, Katie says, I know, isn't
it weird? That's crazy, little bad energy. It's actually divine.
It's actually it's countercultural for sure. Yeah, because all crazy
is countercultural. But everything comes from the gods through a
countercultural conduit, so why not be that. I agree with that.
And I also thought about a few years ago, I
(24:46):
had a sist to no varyan cist, and they had
to take out my ovaries, and I remember being really
upset about that because I thought, it's truly hit me that,
you know, I can't now have more babies, and you know,
something's being taken away from me and maybe I will
be a sexy and you know, because again I think
(25:07):
that there's a label that happens to us when we're
no longer allowed to procreate. That we're useless, right, and
so um I had to That was like a big
hurdle to get over because I thought I'm not useless
because I had some kids, Like I'm done anyway. It's
not like whatever late forties going, Oh, I can't wait
to have another baby. I mean, you know, George was like,
(25:28):
don't get near me. It's an onion skin of cultural
attitudes towards everything from our ovaries to our you know,
our hair coator. Like every little thing we experience, culture
goes in and goes after it, and it is not
kind to middle aged older women in the modern world.
And there's nothing there that is kind. So you have
to burst through culture and that becomes a gift because
(25:50):
the culture will keep you hog tied and miserable with
all its various lies. And it's when you burst through
that into the glamour, into the radiance, whatever that happens
to be. It's really all over the world people have
talked about light and radiance emitting from people as beautiful
or emitting from nature itself, and that lies beyond culture.
And every single thing you you do, from dental work,
(26:13):
getting a surgery, everything can take you down the death
road of culture, and when it makes you suffer, you
just say that is a lie. It's like the Buddha
looking at every demon and saying you are illusion, you
are a lie, and then you burst through to the
truth of that and it feels like light and it
looks like light. I also think there needs to be
a shift in our sort of culture and film and everything,
(26:37):
because this is an age old argument. But you can
have Michael Douglas as as the husband and Gwyneth Paltrow
as a wife, but if it's the other way around,
it's gross. But in Europe, I've known many men that
had affairs with women twenty five years older them, and
it was it was sexy, and it was you know,
they learned about women and it was kind of this
(26:58):
romantic thing which we don't have. Yeah, and I think
there should be a shift a little bit. Sometimes the
crazy old, you know hat lady could also be kind
of a sexy older woman that can actually teach you
a thing or two. Absolutely, because it's it's vitality we're
talking about. Exactly. In our culture, we say that vitality
has an inverse relationship with age. It goes down as
(27:19):
we age. That is simply a lie. It can increase
as we age. I knew a man who died if
locked in syndrome where he went into Parkinson's and then froze,
and it took him like two years to die. And
you would think that that would be the ultimate destructive situation.
And this man was very bulliant while he was younger,
(27:40):
and he went into this gradual paralysis by increasing his joy.
I don't know how he did it, but by the
end he was just absolutely luminous. And I remember going
in and grabbing him and just kneeling down by his
wheelchair and just hanging onto him and feeling his vitality
just energized me. And I took a lot away from
(28:01):
that experience. I'm like, that's the power of the human
nervous system when it's really flipped on. Like a magnetometer
can measure the electromagnetic energy coming from us ten feet
away and then it's two weeks, but it goes on forever.
If we amp that up. It's a genuine physical force.
And I felt it coming from him, and it was
I was like, that's what I want to do. That's amazing.
And tell me about you wrote about how we're all seven.
(28:24):
Do you remember that. Yeah. I was lying there in
shivasana on my bathroom floor, probably just sleeping it off,
but I was thinking, Okay, it's really weird that this
body had three children. I was like in my forties.
And then I was like, is that true? Is it true? No,
because once every seven years, every atom in our body
gets flipped out for another atom, and it's a completely
(28:47):
new thing, like this body. None of the body that
I have now was present when my children were born,
not a single atom. And that led me to, well,
then what am I? And what you come to is
I am a whisp of consciousness around which matters seems
to accrue for like a few years, and then it stops.
And so it shifted my identity again from the body
(29:09):
into the light, into the glamour. And if you live
in the glamour, you don't fear death because the glamber
doesn't die, or if it does, it's just so happy
about it, it it doesn't even care. And you're kind of
watching your body going, well, that's what it did. But
even the body is rejuvenated. It's electrical, it's joyful, it's uplifting,
it's rejuvenating, and people feel it as younger the older
(29:30):
you get. We're gonna take a short break and we'll
be right back, and we're back. If I were speaking
to somebody else about aging, they would say, well, here
(29:51):
my ideas are hits for how to help the aging process.
You know, use a vitamin C serum and laid. I
do that, I do that, you know, I mean, look,
there is there is the reality of physical health, of course,
but tell me, Dr Martha Beck, what are the things
that you can help us all age joyfully in a
(30:15):
way that only you could tell us? Meaning? Is it yoga?
Is it? What are the things that you have found
with all your incredible experiences in your knowledge that help
you envelope the glamour? Okay, so Ernest Haming White said
he was born with a built in bullshit detector. We
all are, and the problem is that we turn it
(30:35):
off really early in our lives. So people tell us,
you know, you need to go to school, and we're like, okay,
when the truth is bullshit. And then they say, you know,
you look better in blue, or you should always wear
heels or something, and we say, okay, when the truth
is bullshit, recognize your bullshit detector. And then every time
you have a negative thought about the aging process. Feel
(30:55):
with your bullshit detector. Which part of that is bullshit?
Because any part of it that says you're getting worse
is a lie. That's my experience after thirty years of
coaching people. So it's get your bullshit detector and get
it honed, and listen to it, and then apply it
to anything that tells you you should feel bad about agent. Okay,
(31:16):
get rid of the bullshit. Now you got rid of
bullshit in a macro way because you left your origin family,
you came out, you left your husband. Give me a
few other biggies that you've done that have helped you.
So here's the thing. Every culture around the world says
that the truth will set you free. And that's what
(31:37):
I mean by the bullshit detector, and I mean when
you get it really hung I'll never forget the day
I picked up a cup of coffee, which I had
every day for since I left Mormonism, and I took
a sip of it and my body said, no, absolutely not,
and I tried to keep drinking it. No, that is
not for you. Bullshit. It's gonna make me feel better, bullshit.
I can't drink coffee anymore. Okay. So then I go
(31:59):
and I was vegan and my doctor said this is
killing you. You need meat, and my body did not
say bullshit. So I started eating high fat food and
my body said, yes, the low fat thing was bullshit
for you. Like that feeling of this is right for me.
It glows in the body. It feels like the light
shining through the body, and it's delicious. It's a sense
(32:21):
of vibrant deliciousness. And if you get really particular, like
I started to go to bed early just because it
felt like bullshit to stay up later, you know, I
get so much sleep now because the bullshit detector works
on everything. And that's why I wrote the last book,
because it's the most elegant solution to every single problem,
and it's applied to behaviors as well. Take two medicine,
(32:43):
See which one feels like bullshit, Like, ask your doctor
and then trust your your insides, and it will take
you to the healthiest root, or at least to the
right most joyful route for you through life. And if
you don't have the most joyful route through life, who
cares how you look or what other people think? You know,
So what's the different between listening to your gut and
(33:03):
tracking bullshit. To me, there's absolutely no difference because I've
been doing my integrity cleanses for so long that I
get really, really immaculate, and I'm constantly saying, is this
right for me? Is this true for me? Is this right?
It's every single part of my day. I can't tell
you how intensely I focus on this, and the result
has been what looks like good luck, what looks like
(33:23):
good business, what looks like good health, what looks It's
just I can't tell you enough how true your instincts are,
but you have been socialized to ignore them. Yeah, be
a wild animal, never do anything that a wild animal
self wouldn't do, and you'll always choose the right way
to go with your body, and you'll always feel the
(33:44):
vitality of being that never ages ever see. I think
that women, particularly have been told what to do and
what to think their whole lives. So, like you said,
peeling the onion, it's very hard for us to even
get to that core to understand what's bullshit or not.
There have many times in my life where I go,
(34:04):
I don't know what I think about the death penalty.
I've never Actually I was told what to think about it,
but I don't. What do I think about this? What
do I think about that? I mean even the idea
of you coming out. It's like I've had so many
female friends that were gay, but just we're like, well,
I better get married, right, Well I did that. I
didn't know I was gay. And may I say that
(34:24):
if you want to age joyfully and happily as a woman,
I really would consider becoming a lesbian. For all your
listeners out there, Oh that's that's gonna piss my husband off. Martha,
he can be a lesbian. He's awesome. No. It really
the whole thing with with feminine inferiority um starts in
the cradle. And I mean in my family, the way
(34:46):
I always heard it when someone had a baby was
they got a boy, or it's a girl, but she's
really cute. That breaks my heart. I put in my
in my memoir about it. The only thing Mormons want
from women is that they breed in captivity. And so
I really got the full treatment, and it made me
the deeper, the suffering, the harder the pushback. Elizabeth Katie
(35:08):
Stanton said women have been systematically disappointed in the law
of the polity and economy, and she said, my life's
mission is to deepen this disappointment in the hearts of
women until they will suffer it no longer. And that's
what happened to me. I just was such an outlier
culturally that culture nearly killed me and I had to
push back, and in the process, I think feel more
(35:31):
free than most of the people I run into. So
be a wild animal, I'm hearing, be a wild animal.
Be feral in your life. Be wild. Yeah. I actually
moved to the woods for six years. On my fiftieth birthday,
I moved to this little house on the edge of
a huge national park, and all I did was just
get up in my pajamas, put on galoshes, and go
walking through the woods every day because I was a
(35:51):
crazy old bat right and it was amazing. And I
would track the bears and I would track the mountain lions,
and I didn't care if they killed me. And I
started to feel like they do about their bodies. I think,
just rejoicing in the experience of being in this particular
type of machine and seeing how much fun it can have,
like sexually, with food, with light, with words, with everything,
(36:15):
how much joy can this machine have now? And what
I found is that as it loses its ability to
have some joys, other joys expand exponentially. If what I'm
hearing is correct, Martha, because I am tapping into this
big time is I think for all women, we can say,
whether you live in a high rise building or in
an adobe hut, if you find those moments that you're
(36:38):
talking about, where you can do yoga, meditate, take a
walk in the woods, if you could just sort of
be alone in yourself, those are the ways you can
start to discover what you believe is bullshit, it is not.
You need that quietness that is going to help you
listen to your gut. One thing I wanted to ask
you before we go, and I know that everyone's going
(36:58):
to go out and buy Integrity, because this is just
but a sampling, a taste of what you will learn
from that book. And I touched upon it before when
I talked about my mother. You know, a lot of
people are dealing with aging parents now, and dealing with
aging parents when they have children of their own, and
so I'm sort of in this weird middle zone of
(37:19):
being a kind of a mother to my parents and
a mother to my kids, and I look at my
both my mother and my father, who had divorced but
aging in place, and I'm thinking, how do I learn
from what I'm seeing? How do I be a good
child for my aging parents? And also how do I
send those messages to my kids about aging parents. What
(37:43):
are your thoughts on that? I love what you said
about quiet and what I learned in the quiet for
the six years I lived in the woods was to
keep my attention and my energy focused on my inside
because I have what my family jokingly calls god to tentacles.
If anybody or anything is suffering, it is up to
me to fix. So I had to pull those tentacles
(38:05):
back in. I was getting exhausted, and what I found
is that the moment my attention turned to someone else
to help them, my own vitality diminished significantly. And it
was bullshit. So I started to realize that even in
the room with someone who is suffering, of my attention
is on saying what am I feeling? How is this?
So you know if I'm panicking that they're not okay?
(38:27):
Is that true? No, Get back into your own body,
find a place of your own joy and balance and
then if they're freaking out, you can hold a place
of balance. Your child that freaks out, your parents freaks out,
It doesn't matter. You have to keep the energy inside yourself,
which is what women are trained not to do, and
by the way, biologically we kind of geared not to
(38:49):
do it. I actually visualized pulling in the tentacles of
my attention so that they go to my own heart,
my own body, my own brain, and I'm constantly taking
care of myself out with bubble bass, but with Okay,
they're suffering, they think it's my job to fix it. Okay,
that's bullshit. Where do I want to go? Instead, go
into the piece of glamour, going to the piece of
(39:10):
radiance and hold it. I had a friend who was
dying and she hated having me in the room with
her because I was excited for her and she did
not like that. But she would make me come in
and sit with her behind her where I couldn't see her,
because she said she could feel the the joy, the
energy of it. She didn't want to see my face
because she wanted everyone to be sad. But the feeling
(39:33):
of being contented in myself and the trust that death
is no big deal. She could feel it in her
body and eased her pain and it eased her passing.
So that sounds very self congratulatory, but it's real this energy.
Keep it for yourself, and that doesn't make you not
empathetic to the people that are aging or dying, or
it makes you more empathetic. There are four different parts
(39:56):
of the brain that are related to empathy, and one
of them is sharing feelings. But if you broke your
leg and my response was to break my leg and
sit with you in Christ so that I could really
experience your pain, you would get no help with your leg.
So part of the brain, when it feels empathy emotionally,
also is able to make a self other differentiation. And
a third part does emotion regulation, and you have to
(40:18):
pull down your sharing of the other's suffering in order
to get really into a full experience of empathy, which
is a blast of compassion without concern, like I am
right here with you in your depression, in your aging,
in your dementia, I am okay. One of my favorite writers,
the Persian poet have Fizz, says, troubled, then stay with me,
(40:42):
for I am not. And if you can do that,
then everything around you starts to calm down, and the
radiance and everyone starts to shine, and it's communicable, and
you need that desperately if you're in the Sandwich generation
between kids and aging parents. That's great advice. Thank you,
Martha Beck. If I were a lesbian, I would be
(41:05):
courting you right now. But I am here with my
children and my husband and aging parents, so I'm not
going anywhere. But thank you for this, truly. Thank you. Okay, So, Martha,
before you go, we're trying something new this season, and
you're kind of the guinea pig. But I'm going to
have our guests asked me a question at the end
of each episode. I thought so long and hard, and
(41:27):
this is my question. Oh my gosh, Okay, you have
been in so many arenas, you have achieved so much,
You've been in the public eye in so many different ways.
What is the most horrible, humiliating thing that ever happened
to you in a public forum? Oh gosh, where do
I start? Um, let's see humiliating. If there's there's this,
(41:49):
there's that story. Well. One of the things, which I
think is an interesting story because it shows who I
am authentically is when I was first married, nobody cared
about me, you know, I didn't. There was no publicity
about me as a person. It was always a review
about something I was in or And when I married
George Um, somebody wrote a piece in the New York
(42:12):
Post that said Ali went within George Stephanopolis are getting divorced.
And I was taken aback by that. Like, first of all,
I knew that wasn't true, but it hurt my feelings.
I felt overwhelmed by it. And another reporter got my
cell phone number and he called me up and he said,
what do you think about this article about you and
your husband getting divorced? And I said, you show me
two people that have sex twice a day that are
(42:33):
getting divorced. Now that was my way of handling it,
you know which, much like I've seen you do you
handle it with humor. George was enraged. He should have
been so proud. What a stud. They still call him
George twice today Stephanopolis. But he was not used to
Um sort of talking about his personal life in any way.
(42:56):
He was a no comment, no comment. You don't even
talk to these people about this stuff. And so I
was humiliated by my response and I thought I was
in trouble, and and yet it was very often it
would just immediately came out of my mouth. I didn't
think about it. So there have been times where I
thought I was sort of being my courageous self and
(43:19):
I got in trouble for it, and that was that
was a humiliating moment for myself. Well, do not accept
that because you did the right thing. You told the truth,
and the truth makes you and George look amazing. So
just yeah, well, you're right, that's that's the wild animal
in me. So um, I'm keeping that wild and I'm
letting her out of the cage. Martha. Yeah, keep your
(43:42):
energy inside. He can deal with his exactly. Thank you.
Excellent question. That sounds great. That's a wonderful story. Thank
you so much for that. Thank you, Martha went Ri.
You are a goddess. I just love you and thank
you so much. I love you too, and thank you.
I you love Martha Beck. I got to tell you
she is so full of them and bigger again. You
(44:05):
should read her book, Integrity, because it goes through so
many different channels and variations of what we talked about
and so many things we didn't talk about. So I
have to admit I do have moments of terror about aging,
and I think, yes, some of it is mortality. I mean,
I'm afraid to die, to not exist, But also I
(44:25):
feel like it's how America does treat, particularly women who
are going through an aging process. But talking to Dr
Martha Beck made me feel so much better because I
truly believe it is the quote unquote light within us.
And I think, look, we live in a very unpredictable
world right now. What is predictable is we're going to
(44:47):
get old and we're gonna die. So why not make
this life the best we can? And so I think
we all need to go out and take those moments
for ourselves and listening to our glamor g l A
M M e er and find ways to shine bright
to the very last moment. Yeah, thank you for listening
(45:12):
to go ask Gali. Be sure to subscribe, rate and
review the podcast, and follow me on social media on
Twitter at Ali E. Wentworth and on Instagram at the
Real Ali Wentworth. Now, if you'd like to ask me
a question or suggest a guest or a topic to
dig into, I would love to hear from you. And
there's a bunch of ways to do it. You can
call or text me at three to three three six
(45:33):
four six three five six, or you can email a
voice memo right from your phone to Go Ask Gali
podcast at gmail dot com. If you leave me a message,
you may hear it on Go Ask Alli. Go Ask
Gali is a production of Shonda Land Audio and partnership
with I heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio,
(45:54):
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
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