Speaker 1: I was born a total people pleaser in a culture
Speaker 1: that was completely against my true nature, and I tried
Speaker 1: really hard to embody it, and it made me so
Speaker 1: miserable and suicidal that when I left, I left with
Speaker 1: the force of somebody who has just jumped onto a trampline.
Speaker 2: Wow, welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great
Speaker 2: thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have,
Speaker 2: quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what
Speaker 2: you think ring true, and yet for many of us,
Speaker 2: our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 2: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 2: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 2: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 2: just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent
Speaker 2: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 2: podcast Asked is about how other people keep themselves moving
Speaker 2: in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 2: Thanks for joining us. This episode is a special collaboration episode,
Speaker 2: so we have Eric and Jenny talking to doctor Martha
Speaker 2: Beck and Rowan Mangan. Doctor Martha Beck is a New
Speaker 2: York Times bestselling author, life coach, and speaker. She holds
Speaker 2: three Harvard degrees in social science, and Oprah Winfrey has
Speaker 2: called her one of the smartest women I know. Martha
Speaker 2: is a passionate and engaging teacher known for her unique
Speaker 2: combination of science, humor, and spirituality. Her newest book, The
Speaker 2: Way of Integrity, Finding the Path to Your True Self,
Speaker 2: was an instant New York Times bestseller. Rowan is a writer, podcaster,
Speaker 2: and mom to a vivacious toddler. She runs the Wild
Speaker 2: Adventures newsletters and community on substack Roe, as she has
Speaker 2: called is currently pursuing publication for her first novel.
Speaker 3: Hi Martha, Hi row Welcome to the show.
Speaker 4: Thank you, thanks for having us.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're really excited to have you on. This is
Speaker 3: kind of a special episode where we're going to just
Speaker 3: the four of us. Genny's here with me, by the way,
Speaker 3: Hi Genny, Hello everybody. We're just going to have a
Speaker 3: conversation among the four of us, and we thought that
Speaker 3: that would be more fun than one person interviewing another
Speaker 3: person and we would just kind of talk. So we're
Speaker 3: going to do that in a second. But we'd like
Speaker 3: to start like we always do on our show, which
Speaker 3: is with the Wolf Parable, and I'd like to ask
Speaker 3: Roe you to respond to it this time, because Martha
Speaker 3: has had a chance before. So in the Parable, there's
Speaker 3: a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say,
Speaker 3: in life, there's two wolves inside of us that are
Speaker 3: always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents
Speaker 3: things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other's
Speaker 3: a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred
Speaker 3: and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about
Speaker 3: it for second and they look at it their grandparents.
Speaker 3: They say, well, which one wins? And the grandparents says,
Speaker 3: the one you feed. So I'd like to start off
Speaker 3: by asking you what does that parable mean to you
Speaker 3: and your life and in the work that you do.
Speaker 4: It's such a great question.
Speaker 5: And I think about this a lot because I have
Speaker 5: loved that parable for so long, and I feel as
Speaker 5: though when you're feeding the right wolf, there is an
Speaker 5: ease and a flow and a pull towards So for me,
Speaker 5: I'm very motivated by stories and storytelling and the power
Speaker 5: of that in our lives, in our spiritual lives, in
Speaker 5: our imaginative and creative lives. And I think we all
Speaker 5: know the feeling of being magnetically pulled towards something, and
Speaker 5: I also think we can all relate to the feeling
Speaker 5: of taking a path that feels avoidant of truth in
Speaker 5: whatever form it takes, and so that could be however,
Speaker 5: we're trying to avoid what needs to be done, whether
Speaker 5: it's substances or wasting time or zoning out or whatever
Speaker 5: it is. And so for me, it's about recognizing those
Speaker 5: two different states and the way that they feel for
Speaker 5: me in my body, and just trying to always be
Speaker 5: edging back towards feeding the right wolf, because you know,
Speaker 5: the right wolf is hungry all the time.
Speaker 6: I'm interested to know how you feel through that. I mean,
Speaker 6: I spent the better part of my life thus far,
Speaker 6: actually especially my adult life up until about, I don't know,
Speaker 6: ten years ago, kind of orienting towards going with what
Speaker 6: felt easy and good and kind of whatever I was
Speaker 6: drawn to. And I did that without the fine attunement
Speaker 6: towards if potentially that might be an avoidant path to
Speaker 6: something I really need to pay attention to, and it
Speaker 6: got me into a place of addiction and burnout and
Speaker 6: just not it's great turns out by avoiding all the
Speaker 6: hard stuff, you actually don't end up in a great place.
Speaker 6: So how do you kind of discern within yourself if
Speaker 6: you are like moving towards something that feels really supportive
Speaker 6: and good for you versus something that maybe just feels
Speaker 6: good in the moment.
Speaker 5: Right, And it's so true because they can feel similar,
Speaker 5: can't they. And I think there's something about you know
Speaker 5: that phrase, the path of least resistance, Like there's like
Speaker 5: a place where it's just easier to turn on the
Speaker 5: television than to do the work on your creative project.
Speaker 5: And that's a path of least resistance. And it can
Speaker 5: feel like sort of sliding downhill very easily. But for me,
Speaker 5: it never has that gravitational pull. It never feels like
Speaker 5: a magnet. It just it feels like a downhill slope
Speaker 5: on a little toboggan.
Speaker 1: I love that because they're both forces that move you forward.
Speaker 1: But there's a very subtle difference between the feeling of
Speaker 1: being pulled down by gravity and the feeling of being
Speaker 1: pulled into a magnet which can actually pull you up right.
Speaker 1: And so it may actually be hard to do something,
Speaker 1: but there's a pull up into the energy of it,
Speaker 1: and that is missing when you're.
Speaker 5: Just flopping, just sliding along, slip, sliding away.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think this is such an interesting question because Martha,
Speaker 3: I know, you do a lot of talking about intuition, right,
Speaker 3: and you know, trusting that inner knowing, and yet it
Speaker 3: is difficult because sometimes our deepest, most habitual conditioned patterns
Speaker 3: have that same almost instant sense of knowing. Maybe knowing
Speaker 3: is the wrong word, but they just arise immediately without
Speaker 3: any real thought. And so I'm kind of curious, you know, Roe,
Speaker 3: You've talked a little bit about it, Martha, how do
Speaker 3: you think about discerning those two energies?
Speaker 1: They don't feel the same at all to me anymore.
Speaker 1: And part of it is that during the pandemic lockdown,
Speaker 1: we were all like in our little house, and we
Speaker 1: talked a lot about what to do next and how
Speaker 1: to move forward, and rose and dudibly intuitive and also
Speaker 1: very bright. So we would go to the intellectual route
Speaker 1: and then we'd go the intuitive route. And the socialization
Speaker 1: of immediate reaction was sort of shut down by the pandemic,
Speaker 1: and that really brought me to an abrupt halt. And
Speaker 1: I learned that when there's an immediacy of socialized reaction,
Speaker 1: it is not all the same feeling of I'm going
Speaker 1: deep into my intuition into my body, and body, heart
Speaker 1: and mind and soul are lining up and there's a
Speaker 1: sense of solidity, and that does not happen when I'm
Speaker 1: following socialization, even though the socialization may be really deep
Speaker 1: and intense.
Speaker 4: I don't know, how do you guys feel about it?
Speaker 3: I think you used a word there that I think
Speaker 3: is really important is those things aren't hard for you
Speaker 3: to tell apart at all now, right, And so for me,
Speaker 3: in learning to work through my perhaps traumas, my addictions,
Speaker 3: and the work that I've done along the way has
Speaker 3: made that difference very clear to me. Also, it's just
Speaker 3: that I didn't have that discernment once upon a time.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I feel like I now am better at discerning
Speaker 6: habitual respons or socialized conditioning versus deep intuition, deep knowing,
Speaker 6: deep wisdom. I'm better at it. I mean, I'm certainly
Speaker 6: no Martha Back at it, but I'm definitely better than
Speaker 6: I used to be. I think a lot of that
Speaker 6: for me has come. I don't want to say all,
Speaker 6: but I do actually want to say all that. All
Speaker 6: of it has come through cultivating more of that embodied
Speaker 6: presence being in my body and having the center of
Speaker 6: my being. I'm really aware of it down in my
Speaker 6: belly somewhere. We're actually an interview poet Maggie Smith soon
Speaker 6: and so reading her upcoming memoir. She's so good, she says,
Speaker 6: it's so many good things.
Speaker 4: I know.
Speaker 6: Yeah. So there's something she said I read actually this
Speaker 6: morning that I was like, what a hilarious and like
Speaker 6: brilliant analogy. She talks about the body. She says, for years,
Speaker 6: I joked that my body was basically a plant stand
Speaker 6: for my head. You know. I knew that, like I
Speaker 6: live from the neck up essentially, you know, I knew
Speaker 6: my body was important. It kind of just got me
Speaker 6: from point A to point B. I watered it every
Speaker 6: now and then that was about it. And I thought,
Speaker 6: I was like that, So I guess so relate to that,
Speaker 6: you know. And when I'm not embodied, that's how it feels.
Speaker 6: It feels like the plant is up here and it's
Speaker 6: the whole show, you know, and the stand is just
Speaker 6: I have to have a stand. And then I realized,
Speaker 6: so we have a plant stand over here by the
Speaker 6: window in the room where it's actually like a three
Speaker 6: tiered one, so we have like a high, like a top,
Speaker 6: and a middle and a bottom place you can put
Speaker 6: the stand. And I was like, okay, So when I'm embodied,
Speaker 6: it's as if I moved the plant down to the
Speaker 6: bottom stand. It's like my brain is down in my belly,
Speaker 6: you know. And I just think in a Buddhist tradition
Speaker 6: they refer to this place as like your horror haah,
Speaker 6: it's like three fingers kind of down from your belly
Speaker 6: button and in yeah, when I'm really kind of able
Speaker 6: to contact that place somehow mysteriously. I can't give you
Speaker 6: the physiological reason in here, but I'm connected to the
Speaker 6: knowing that is in my body, and it feels like
Speaker 6: that deep wisdom, you know.
Speaker 1: And it's not hard to feel that right Like we've
Speaker 1: all had this experience, have we not or haven't.
Speaker 5: Well, Martha has to teach it, though she teaches it
Speaker 5: in her trainings. It's always one of the first things
Speaker 5: she teaches, because I think we do know what we
Speaker 5: come in knowing it, and we're trained to unlearn.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 5: We talk a lot un bewildered about the fact that
Speaker 5: we're always right in the feeling, but we often get
Speaker 5: it wrong in how we interpret it and act on
Speaker 5: the feeling, because then it's like it has to come
Speaker 5: back up through the brain and the social filters, and
Speaker 5: then we can get it so wrong.
Speaker 1: What I always tell people is that the cognitive brain
Speaker 1: can process about forty bits of information per second, but
Speaker 1: the entire nervous system, including more nerves going from the
Speaker 1: heart to the brain than from the brain to the heart,
Speaker 1: and a massive amount of information going from the gut
Speaker 1: to the brain, that can process eleven million bits of
Speaker 1: information per second.
Speaker 4: And it's it's so much smarter.
Speaker 1: And you know what people always say, corporate groups and stuff.
Speaker 1: I say something like, so let's all just like see
Speaker 1: if you can turn your attention to your belly, and
Speaker 1: they're like, this is too woo woo, this is just
Speaker 1: that is just far out. I'm a scientist and I'm parsist.
Speaker 6: I'm like, your body is empirical.
Speaker 4: It's that you have. Sorry, I got exercise.
Speaker 6: It's true though, you know, I was thinking the other
Speaker 6: day too that like as a species, and potentially we've
Speaker 6: always in those as a species, I don't really know,
Speaker 6: but our balance is off, like we're so oriented towards
Speaker 6: our brain and our intellectual orientation to the world and
Speaker 6: interpretation and filter that we've forgotten this other huge component
Speaker 6: of like how to move through the world. I was thinking, like,
Speaker 6: you know, evolution is not an intellectual unfolding of life.
Speaker 6: You know, life got smarter and better adapted by just
Speaker 6: through doing and then optimizing, doing and responding, doing and responding,
Speaker 6: not like thinking about it and analyzing and then trying
Speaker 6: to find the right way. We're products of that. That
Speaker 6: experience is often, I think, the richest way to relate
Speaker 6: to things, you.
Speaker 5: Know totally, and it's so fascinating as we learn that
Speaker 5: that is even in a theoretical plane that you know,
Speaker 5: this stuff about their learning about the brain in the gut,
Speaker 5: and you know all these these crazy stories from people
Speaker 5: who've had organs transplanted, and so much of the person
Speaker 5: comes through a hut or another organ, and it's like,
Speaker 5: it's not in here, it's not inside our skulls that
Speaker 5: all of this is happening. And if we tune out
Speaker 5: all these other parts of our brain, it's such a
Speaker 5: partial glimpse of who we are and how we can
Speaker 5: relate to each other.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's the whole nervous system.
Speaker 1: I just want to put it emphasize that people have
Speaker 1: had like hot lung transplants literally start to have the
Speaker 1: memories of the person who donated the hot and lungs.
Speaker 1: I thought, I just read one book about this weird
Speaker 1: experience this woman had turned out she was going to
Speaker 1: a support group because everybody she knew at a heart
Speaker 1: lung transplant started remembering the donor's life.
Speaker 6: I think I read something to that effect almost recently
Speaker 6: and told you about it. That is mind blowing.
Speaker 5: There was a really brilliant episode of this American Life
Speaker 5: years ago, and I feel like it started a whole
Speaker 5: snowball effect because it was all these different stories about
Speaker 5: this happening.
Speaker 4: Yeah, cool, it.
Speaker 6: Is so cool.
Speaker 3: Well, I think the idea is we do tend to,
Speaker 3: or I should say I tend to and have gotten
Speaker 3: better at it, sort of view the world as if
Speaker 3: I'm up in my head, and I just imagine that
Speaker 3: has to have been sort of what happens when you're
Speaker 3: taught that everything important happens here, right, but it also
Speaker 3: happens to be where the eyes are, and we're very
Speaker 3: you know, eyes and ears. But the idea that the
Speaker 3: brain is disconnected or different than the rest of the
Speaker 3: body makes no sense. And I mean, even if you
Speaker 3: want to be as empirical and scientific about it as
Speaker 3: you want, like literally, they are connected, like there's a
Speaker 3: lot of and so so Yeah, I think it is
Speaker 3: learning to know in multiple ways. Yeah, yes, I think
Speaker 3: the thing that we're aiming at.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and the body is full of surprises, right and
Speaker 6: wild and sort of untamed and like I remember the
Speaker 6: first time I sort of dropped into my body, I
Speaker 6: was like, whoa, this is This feels out of control.
Speaker 6: This feels like things are happening that I'm not making happen,
Speaker 6: sensations are happening. I wonder how much of us being
Speaker 6: cut off from our bodies is connected to sort of
Speaker 6: a puritanical like the body is dirty, you know, and
Speaker 6: there's like a way to rise above it and beyond it.
Speaker 1: I mean it's really interesting because Roe always notices that
Speaker 1: American culture is much more puritanical than Australian culture, and
Speaker 1: they're both from British colonial things, so there's this strong similarity.
Speaker 4: But I really want to ask you.
Speaker 1: Like the Puritans really were like super repressed about their bodies,
Speaker 1: super super repressed, whereas not everyone who went to Australia
Speaker 1: maybe was quite Is it the same now?
Speaker 6: I don't know.
Speaker 5: I mean it's sort of I think I don't know
Speaker 5: that the body stuff. I feel like if you look
Speaker 5: through history, there were different times. There were times before
Speaker 5: the kind of Victorian era where everyone got super uptigh,
Speaker 5: where people were much more chilled about their bodies.
Speaker 6: Like I think, it sort of rises and falls.
Speaker 5: And maybe here in American dominant culture right now we're
Speaker 5: kind of coming back to a sort of more preside,
Speaker 5: kind of disconnected way. But you know what is interesting
Speaker 5: to me thinking about this is that you can actually
Speaker 5: almost close the circle and the conversation coming back to
Speaker 5: the brain because Martha's doing this amazing research at the
Speaker 5: moment which is all about how broadly the left brain
Speaker 5: and the right brain and what she's taught me. And
Speaker 5: you have to correct me if I'm getting this wrong,
Speaker 5: but like, even the impulse to disconnect from our body
Speaker 5: is intensely left brain. And one of the things that
Speaker 5: I think she's arguing in her new book is our
Speaker 5: society has pushed us into our left hemisphere, and if
Speaker 5: we could actually learn to embrace both sides that process
Speaker 5: that you're talking about, Ginny would be almost automatic.
Speaker 1: Is that a fair Yeah, I mean the left pasuring
Speaker 1: the speaking of butchering. The left side of the brain
Speaker 1: is more analytical, and analysis literally means to cut things
Speaker 1: into pieces, so it understands by chopping, dividing. It's more grasping.
Speaker 1: It's very intellectual. It's the primarily verbal hemisphere. And I
Speaker 1: think what we're seeing is not the suppression of sexuality,
Speaker 1: but the obsession of intellectualism. Yes, and that is the
Speaker 1: left hemisphere. And the weird thing about it is that
Speaker 1: if somebody has a stroke on the left hemisphere, the
Speaker 1: right hemisphere is all they've got left. They may not
Speaker 1: be able to talk, but they see everything. When someone
Speaker 1: has a right hemisphere stroke, So the left hemisphere, which
Speaker 1: is the talking, intellectual side, it insists that it's the only.
Speaker 4: Thing in existence.
Speaker 1: And in fact, the person who has that stroke, may
Speaker 1: I only put makeup on one side of their face.
Speaker 1: They pay no attention to one side of reality because
Speaker 1: the left hemisphere only wants to deal with what it knows,
Speaker 1: and it chops things up.
Speaker 5: And that's the intellect functioning in our society. It's refusing
Speaker 5: to allow for the possibility of what our bodies can know.
Speaker 5: Of spirituality and spiritual truth and spiritual knowledge and all
Speaker 5: the things that actually you know when the opposite sort
Speaker 5: of strokes happen, or however we can do the research.
Speaker 5: The right hemisphere knows this.
Speaker 1: It's inclusive, it's connected. Even the neurons in the left
Speaker 1: side of the brain are short, they chop things up, and
Speaker 1: on the right there are longer neurons, and what they
Speaker 1: do is connect, connect, connect, connect. So Jilberty Taylor a
Speaker 1: friend of mine, she's a neuroanatomist who had left hemisphere stroke.
Speaker 1: She couldn't talk for a long time, but she felt
Speaker 1: absolutely connected to everything in the universe. She was having
Speaker 1: a profoundly mystical experience. And all cultures have wise teachers
Speaker 1: in them who bring the intellect and that connection with
Speaker 1: everything together. And it's in that whole brain. Likes to
Speaker 1: say that we become everything we're meant to be. So
Speaker 1: maybe the bad wolf is not one side of the
Speaker 1: brain or the other, but the part that wants to
Speaker 1: divide versus the part that wants to connect.
Speaker 3: Right, And I think we always have to know, like
Speaker 3: what do we have to correct for or what direction
Speaker 3: do we want to go? And societally we are way,
Speaker 3: way way left brain or over intellectual right. It's not
Speaker 3: that that's a bad part of the brain.
Speaker 6: It's not.
Speaker 3: I mean, both parts are critical, they have to be there,
Speaker 3: it's just that one gets so much more play.
Speaker 6: Yet.
Speaker 3: We had an interesting conversation where we had Jill on
Speaker 3: the show and then we had a listener of the
Speaker 3: show who I've known for years who had a right
Speaker 3: brain injury. Oh yeah, and so you've got these two
Speaker 3: totally different injuries. They're sort of mirroring each other, and
Speaker 3: it was kind of a fascinating conversation to hear the
Speaker 3: two of them talk. And our listener, John, who's the
Speaker 3: one who had the opposite injury, talked about how it
Speaker 3: was particularly hard to recover from what he did because
Speaker 3: most of the research goes to dealing with the other side,
Speaker 3: because when you can't talk, you don't function in the
Speaker 3: way that we tend to think of your families like.
Speaker 3: But I want him to be able to talk again,
Speaker 3: I want to write, and so most of the research
Speaker 3: has driven that direction. And given that we're a left
Speaker 3: brain culture, it's been very difficult for him to find
Speaker 3: the support medically at all to rehabilitate the right side.
Speaker 4: Well, it's so interesting all of her.
Speaker 1: Sacks writes about how through most of the history of
Speaker 1: brain science, the right hemisphere was not only ignored, but
Speaker 1: it was actually contemptuously dismissed.
Speaker 4: Isn't that weird?
Speaker 1: And it's because the left side is the one that
Speaker 1: does contemptuous dismissal. The right side is like, hey, we're
Speaker 1: all friends here, Oliver Sacks, Ian, Micgilchrist, all these great
Speaker 1: neurologists are like, the left side of the brain has
Speaker 1: been trying to pretend that it's the only thing that exists,
Speaker 1: and it's dominating our culture to the extent that it
Speaker 1: has made neuroscientists disdain their own right hemispheres. It's bizarre.
Speaker 6: It's so bizarre and just hilarious and ironic and in
Speaker 6: so many ways. But I think the other thing that
Speaker 6: this is making me think about is, Yeah, like you said,
Speaker 6: we need to know what imbalance we're correcting for at
Speaker 6: a given point. It's that kind of self awareness. So
Speaker 6: one of the things I've noticed is when I am
Speaker 6: not able to do kind of my morning routine, which
Speaker 6: involves a bit of some meditation, all the left brain
Speaker 6: characteristics get amplified and really to the degree to which
Speaker 6: they can cause some stumbling and suffering in my own life,
Speaker 6: like it's too much left brain. But what I'm practicing,
Speaker 6: I think in my meditation in the morning is more
Speaker 6: right brain being in my body in the world. And
Speaker 6: so I'm correcting for the imbalance of the rest of
Speaker 6: my day, which is so left brain. But if I'm
Speaker 6: not careful, everything around me supports left brain activity all
Speaker 6: the time. Right.
Speaker 5: So true, And I wonder if it would be fair
Speaker 5: tot sort of even characterize if you were talking about
Speaker 5: the two wolves, is that one wolf is the force
Speaker 5: that connects and the other is the force that divides.
Speaker 5: Because when you're looking at a force that connects, it
Speaker 5: includes the part that divides. Right, And that's what Eric's saying,
Speaker 5: is that there is, of course, there is a really
Speaker 5: important use for the left hemisphere. And that's why our
Speaker 5: society is so ridiculously successful in so many ways and
Speaker 5: dealing with such a massive deficit in so many others.
Speaker 5: But if we can be in the connection, like you say, Jenny,
Speaker 5: that can include that left hemisphere and all that comes
Speaker 5: with it, all the analysis and language, and oh.
Speaker 6: That's so beautiful and brilliant.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I always think that if we feed the right wolf,
Speaker 1: if we create a shift in consciousness toward a better
Speaker 1: way of being, it won't be a revolution. It won't
Speaker 1: overthrow anything because that's been done over and over. It
Speaker 1: just replaces one violent set of people with another. But
Speaker 1: if we can change our consciousness, we can embrace dissonance
Speaker 1: and include it to death.
Speaker 5: Ah, include patriarchy today, include capitalism today, you know.
Speaker 4: Conclude it all, bring it all in. Yes, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: I think.
Speaker 6: I'm sorry to keep talking about my practice in the morning,
Speaker 6: but I'd begun doing this thing where when I catch
Speaker 6: myself thinking, instead of going like nope, don't think, like
Speaker 6: put it out, is to say yes and like yes
Speaker 6: to the thinking and what else is here? Right? So
Speaker 6: I'm not putting it out of my mind that I'm
Speaker 6: more just sort of enveloping it into whatever else is
Speaker 6: going on. You're including it, Yeah, I'm including it. I
Speaker 6: love this framework and broadening it.
Speaker 4: Like this.
Speaker 1: Life is a game of improv. You always say yes,
Speaker 1: and somebody comes into the scene and says, there's the
Speaker 1: rhinoceros on fire in the living room. You can't say
Speaker 1: no because that stops the scene. But you always have
Speaker 1: to say yes. And my mother in law is in
Speaker 1: the other room having a baby or whatever, because that
Speaker 1: builds it. And I want to ask Eric something because
Speaker 1: I was just reading a book about boys and men
Speaker 1: and how the script for boys and men has been
Speaker 1: thrown away, and how actually there's an article by Richard
Speaker 1: Reeves in Maria Shriver's Sunday Paper and he said that
Speaker 1: men don't have a script anymore. They have to improvise.
Speaker 1: And what you were just saying was improvisation. At the
Speaker 1: beginning of the day, setting her mind to improvise is
Speaker 1: something that balances her and feeds the right wolf. And
Speaker 1: we talk a lot about getting bewildered or be wildered,
Speaker 1: about putting yourself in a place where you have that
Speaker 1: improvisational mindset because you've let go of your culture and
Speaker 1: you're willing to find what your true nature wants to do.
Speaker 1: So how does that work for you these days? Eric,
Speaker 1: cause you seem to be an improvisational dude.
Speaker 3: I am, actually yes. I mean my favorite way of
Speaker 3: playing music is improvising. It's the whole thing about music
Speaker 3: for me is that improvisation, making up something new or
Speaker 3: playing with somebody, And so I think in general, I
Speaker 3: am very comfortable with that and more comfortable with uncertainty
Speaker 3: and risk in general than a lot of people are.
Speaker 3: And I don't even think that's a male female thing.
Speaker 3: I think that's just a thing that I'm much more
Speaker 3: that way. I do think that it's interesting to think
Speaker 3: about the scripts that men and women have been given,
Speaker 3: and I feel like for both genders the scripts have
Speaker 3: undergone a lot of recent revision and a lot of change,
Speaker 3: and so I could certainly say, yes, the script for
Speaker 3: being a man is very different than it was when
Speaker 3: I was ten, But so is a whole lot of
Speaker 3: other stuff, like, you know, I mean, I think that's
Speaker 3: part of what's happening. You know, we talk about in
Speaker 3: society this point in life where you have to sort
Speaker 3: of find and make your own meaning because it doesn't
Speaker 3: exist in the ways that it used to, in the
Speaker 3: places that it used to, And so I think that's
Speaker 3: kind of across the board for everyone. But I was
Speaker 3: thinking about my father, and my father passed recently. I
Speaker 3: was at his funeral last week, but I was thinking,
Speaker 3: with my dad, it's easy for me to see that
Speaker 3: I feel like, right in the middle of his life,
Speaker 3: script got changed, Like here's how you are as a man.
Speaker 3: Here's how you parent your children, here's the way you
Speaker 3: are towards them. And so he did that and then
Speaker 3: right somewhere around forty five fifty somewhere in there, And
Speaker 3: I think this happens to all of this to some degree,
Speaker 3: but maybe I just see it more sharply in his case.
Speaker 3: That whole script changed and the way he was was
Speaker 3: suddenly wrong. And my father was a person who very
Speaker 3: much wanted to do the right thing. He was very
Speaker 3: focused in that direction, to the point that you might
Speaker 3: say it's a shortcoming, you know, looking towards someone else
Speaker 3: to tell you what the right thing is. But I
Speaker 3: think he had that, And so I think when everything
Speaker 3: shifted about what a man should be, I think it
Speaker 3: caught a lot of men, you know, sort of off
Speaker 3: guard like that, who had been thinking, like, I'm doing
Speaker 3: the right thing. I've done everything I've been told to do,
Speaker 3: and now you're telling me that I've done it all wrong.
Speaker 3: And that's a difficult thing for anyone to go through it, right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, particularly like you were saying with Jordan, your son,
Speaker 6: it was like and they're doing it at an age
Speaker 6: often when psychological flexibility is not the strength anymore.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I was sort of saying that I think
Speaker 3: this happens to everybody as we get older. The older
Speaker 3: we get, the more the rules are changing from when
Speaker 3: we were younger. And unfortunately we are at an age
Speaker 3: where if we're not careful, our psychological flexibility, our cognitive ability,
Speaker 3: our ability to adapt is going down. And so I
Speaker 3: see how people get stuck.
Speaker 1: Although we now know that the brain continues to develop
Speaker 1: and maintain its plasticity throughout life. And the famous Nuns
Speaker 1: study done in Canada. They followed these nuns because they
Speaker 1: were living in almost the same exact routine, so it
Speaker 1: was a great chance to look at a group of
Speaker 1: people who are basically having the same life. And then
Speaker 1: they donated their bodies to science, and they found that
Speaker 1: they were looking like at Alzheimer's. And they found that
Speaker 1: some of the nuns who had not developed Alzheimer's, who
Speaker 1: were sharp and clever to the end of their days,
Speaker 1: when they looked at their brains, they actually had Alzheimer's,
Speaker 1: but they were learning. They were the people who twenty
Speaker 1: years earlier had answered questions with the most complex sentences
Speaker 1: and said they like to solve puzzles. So they were
Speaker 1: constantly challenging their own brains. And I think maybe we
Speaker 1: can see this as an opportunity, the world shifting constantly
Speaker 1: around us and having to improvise everything as a gift
Speaker 1: to take us back to the part to the wolf
Speaker 1: that connects, because that's the puzzle cracker, right, So maybe
Speaker 1: constant change and improvisation is a joyful thing that can
Speaker 1: help our brain's young.
Speaker 5: And it's almost like a way that we can evolve
Speaker 5: in our own lifetimes to refuse that. And I can
Speaker 5: see from where your father in his generation and the
Speaker 5: way that changed him in his life, we have an
Speaker 5: opportunity that he and his generation didn't have to kind
Speaker 5: of grasp now the inevitability of the constant change and
Speaker 5: that social role pology, all the stuff that you know
Speaker 5: and say, okay, I'm not going to surrender my willingness
Speaker 5: to adapt and learn and embrace.
Speaker 3: I think you go back several hundred years, things changed
Speaker 3: very slow. You could feel fairly confident that the life
Speaker 3: that you were living was going to look very much
Speaker 3: like the life your parents had lived. You know, go
Speaker 3: back three hundred, four hundred, five hundred years, not a
Speaker 3: whole lot changed. So now it's like ten minutes later,
Speaker 3: You've got to be on your toes, you know. And
Speaker 3: so I agree, and I look at ways in which
Speaker 3: I often refer to it as like a see older people.
Speaker 3: Ossifying is a term that I use, and so I
Speaker 3: watched that very much in myself because I'm like, that's
Speaker 3: what to watch for, Like I can see it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: So how do I stay nimble, improvisational? How do I
Speaker 3: allow my brain to change even as I feel some
Speaker 3: of what happens in age sort of feel it kind
Speaker 3: of creeping in. It's there, but I think there's ways
Speaker 3: to work with it skillfully and it feels important.
Speaker 5: You know, our friend Elizabeth Gilbert, I don't know if
Speaker 5: she's ever been on your show, but there was this
Speaker 5: wonderful talk that she gave long time ago, at least
Speaker 5: ten years ago. And it's funny you were talking to
Speaker 5: Eric about, you know, men's experience with this, and she
Speaker 5: was speaking at a women's conference and so it was
Speaker 5: actually about women's experience and she was making the exact
Speaker 5: point that you were making Eric about, you know, for
Speaker 5: the first time ever, we can't look to our mother's
Speaker 5: lives and our grandmother's lives and our great grandmother's lives
Speaker 5: to get the script of what we should do. And
Speaker 5: she said, it's like, and this totally applies across all genders.
Speaker 5: We're all just wandering around in our own little trying
Speaker 5: to make decisions about what to do without any blueprint.
Speaker 5: And she said, this is why this is the age
Speaker 5: of memoir. She said, because reading someone's memoir is like
Speaker 5: getting to climb up and look over at her little maze,
Speaker 5: and how's she making these decisions? How's she dealing with
Speaker 5: these impossible, unscripted journeys that we're all making. And I
Speaker 5: just always think of that because it is so true,
Speaker 5: and it is in every aspect of our lives. It's
Speaker 5: even more true now than when she said it, and
Speaker 5: it will be even more true ten years from now.
Speaker 1: At that time, we didn't even have as much internet onboarding.
Speaker 4: I was there. I was actually in the room when
Speaker 4: she gave that Oh.
Speaker 5: My god, yeah, and I watched it on the internet.
Speaker 1: And at that time, you know, Eat Pray Love was
Speaker 1: brand new, and it was just you know, smoking off
Speaker 1: the shelves. People were not spending as much time on
Speaker 1: their phones. So she gave this very candid, funny, brilliant
Speaker 1: look into her own life. But now you can find incredible, candid,
Speaker 1: funny and brilliant people putting up tiktoks. You know, some
Speaker 1: twelve year old in Iowa, like can make my day
Speaker 1: and show me how to live. It's like, how do
Speaker 1: we There are so many scripts.
Speaker 5: They're not scripts, they're not scripts.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I think maybe the biggest change is that it's not prescriptive.
Speaker 6: It's reflective.
Speaker 5: It's like, here's my reality, and we're all in the
Speaker 5: place on the map where it says, here be dragons
Speaker 5: right where they got to the end of the known
Speaker 5: world yep, And it's here be dragons, and we're all
Speaker 5: dealing with different dragons, dealing with them in different ways.
Speaker 5: But I love that we're all just saying, well, here's
Speaker 5: my corner.
Speaker 4: Make of it what you will.
Speaker 3: Number of years ago, as the research around psychedelics and
Speaker 3: depression became very very relevant, I thought, Okay, that's something
Speaker 3: I want to investigate, and so I chose to. But
Speaker 3: I had a very disconcerting and yet at the same time,
Speaker 3: which way you want to view it? Experience? And in
Speaker 3: that moment what kept happening was in my body and
Speaker 3: my brain, I wanted someone to tell me that things
Speaker 3: were okay and that I was doing it okay. Ah,
Speaker 3: And everywhere I turned, it just turned to smoke. Oh wow,
Speaker 3: like everybody. I looked at every figure, every person, everybody
Speaker 3: I respect. It was like God like, Yes, they sort
Speaker 3: of see it, but not really, and they're gonna be gone.
Speaker 3: And it's either completely liberating or terrifying, depending on the
Speaker 3: way you want to interpret it. But it is to
Speaker 3: that point of other people can give us some vision
Speaker 3: into the way they're making decisions, what they're thinking about.
Speaker 3: But we've got to figure this out ourselves because we
Speaker 3: are unique creatures. Our values are ours, our experiences are ours.
Speaker 3: I mean, there's so many things, and so that's why
Speaker 3: I think anything that gets overly prescriptive, yeah, becomes limiting
Speaker 3: at a certain point, like right away.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 5: It always interests me because on bewildered when we're talking about,
Speaker 5: you know, liberating yourself from the rules of the culture,
Speaker 5: which are unlikely to coincide with your true nature, which
Speaker 5: for all of us will be completely different.
Speaker 4: I often think, but.
Speaker 5: What about the people who happen to have a nature
Speaker 5: that completely goes along with like, my true nature really
Speaker 5: just wants to have two point five children and nine
Speaker 5: to five under fluorescent lights, Like that's actually my I reckon,
Speaker 5: there's probably about three of them, right right.
Speaker 4: Eight million people? Three are going this works well?
Speaker 6: Right? Well, you know what it makes me think of is,
Speaker 6: right now, I'll connect back to something I heard Martha
Speaker 6: you describe, which is like that time at the end
Speaker 6: of the day when we all like cuddle up on
Speaker 6: the couch and watch the flickering light tell us stories.
Speaker 6: You know, the series we're watching right now. It's me
Speaker 6: for the first time, you for the second is Madmen.
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, did you all watch that?
Speaker 4: Not the whole thing?
Speaker 1: Okay, I found myself feeling suffocated.
Speaker 6: I understand myself. What I'm going to say is like
Speaker 6: we're immersed in that time period right now, and I
Speaker 6: mean it's just wrought with like jaw dropping unfairness and
Speaker 6: roles that are just so harmful and painful and limiting.
Speaker 6: But that was our parents' generation. I mean, that was
Speaker 6: my parents' generation, and then the ones before that. I
Speaker 6: mean it highlights for me kind of the way that
Speaker 6: that's always been is like this is how we do it,
Speaker 6: and that's her power parents did it. But again, back
Speaker 6: to Maggie, Smith's memoir, which you're just talking about. This
Speaker 6: is the Asi of memoirs, you know. She starts with
Speaker 6: this Emily Dickinson quote that says, I am out with
Speaker 6: lanterns looking.
Speaker 4: For myself animals.
Speaker 6: I just love that beautiful idea. I'm out with lanterns
Speaker 6: looking for myself.
Speaker 1: When Eric was talking about finding a skillful way to
Speaker 1: deal with the age of nothing but improvisation, you know,
Speaker 1: as we've been talking about all of this, I was
Speaker 1: thinking about the Asian philosophical tradition I was lucky enough
Speaker 1: to be exposed to when I was quite young. And
Speaker 1: in Asia there's this idea that the state of highest
Speaker 1: intelligence is called don't know mind, and it's also called
Speaker 1: beginner's mind. And Suzuki wrote, she said, in the beginner's mind,
Speaker 1: there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind, there are
Speaker 1: a few. I have a son with down syndrome. He's
Speaker 1: your son too, but I actually squirted him out.
Speaker 3: Sorry, and he said, I assume it was a little
Speaker 3: more difficult.
Speaker 7: Like the kangaroo in Australia.
Speaker 1: Anyway, there are two things that he will say so grandly,
Speaker 1: like I don't know, and you'll say something I don't know.
Speaker 4: And the other thing he will say sometimes is I
Speaker 4: haven't got a clue.
Speaker 1: And the zest with which he said that, you know,
Speaker 1: people told me I should put him in an institution
Speaker 1: because that is so shameful to have a child who
Speaker 1: doesn't know things and can't follow the thread and is
Speaker 1: an intellectual and the complete peace with which he wages
Speaker 1: his life is so of a piece with his not
Speaker 1: knowing and he has had so many I mean, every
Speaker 1: now and then he'll just rear up on his hind
Speaker 1: legs and say something absolutely magical and so deeply insightful
Speaker 1: and wise that I feel like we're living with a
Speaker 1: zen master. And it's all about not being ashamed to say,
Speaker 1: to the left hemisphere down, Wolfe, down and have a steak.
Speaker 4: Let's include you a little in the bigger piece. Don't
Speaker 4: know is a great phrase.
Speaker 3: What's fascinating, Martha, and I'm sure you've seen these as
Speaker 3: you're doing research in your book, is those split mind studies? Yes, right,
Speaker 3: And what's fascinating about the split mind studies. They basically
Speaker 3: find a way of separating the right brain from the
Speaker 3: left brain. And I'm not going to go through all
Speaker 3: of it, but in essence, if the left brain doesn't
Speaker 3: know the answer to something that only the right brain
Speaker 3: can see, it still makes up an answer. It makes
Speaker 3: it up instantly, and it believes it one hundred percent.
Speaker 3: And so that is the nature of that left brain
Speaker 3: is to know, is to have an answer certainty. You know,
Speaker 3: we saw this with Jenny's mom with Alzheimer's. Right, it
Speaker 3: would be like she would say something that was totally
Speaker 3: by objective reality standards, crazy, right, But there was no
Speaker 3: doubt in her mind.
Speaker 6: And there was not a second that it took her
Speaker 6: that you could observe for her to like conjure it up,
Speaker 6: like the story she said, or the idea or the solution.
Speaker 6: It was just like fast and it was absolutely cuckoo,
Speaker 6: and she was one hundred percent certain it was true,
Speaker 6: almost to the point that you were like, that's not right, right,
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, chek my sanity because she's really convincing. But you, Martha,
Speaker 6: I think your son and Eric, I think you guys
Speaker 6: share that gift of being comfortable and not knowing, being
Speaker 6: comfortable and uncertainty. I think that is a gift you have.
Speaker 6: It allows you to stay there a little longer than
Speaker 6: maybe the rest of us. That jump to certainty and
Speaker 6: knowing it's a real gift. Liz always laughs at Maddy
Speaker 6: because you know, show usk come to the expert who
Speaker 6: knows all these things in the Harvard PAHD and saying, mother,
Speaker 6: what's the answer to this question?
Speaker 4: I've got mother, Guys, I don't that great? I don't know.
Speaker 4: Instead of that being some sort of deficit, yeah, you're
Speaker 4: open to everything.
Speaker 1: And I think claiming that don't know, you know what
Speaker 1: I was just saying about people telling me to institutionalize
Speaker 1: my son. I also had books that said be prepared
Speaker 1: to be ashamed every time you're out with your child.
Speaker 1: And I remember reading one of those books when I
Speaker 1: was still pregnant and I threw it at the wall
Speaker 1: so hard. I was twenty five years old and quite
Speaker 1: emotional and pregnant, and I threw the book at the
Speaker 1: wall and it exploded into just this massive shower of pages,
Speaker 1: and I thought, f you, I will never be ashamed
Speaker 1: of this child. And in doing that, I claimed something
Speaker 1: for the child and everyone for the person wandering in
Speaker 1: every little.
Speaker 4: May is going I, I, oh, no, you need never
Speaker 4: be ashamed of that.
Speaker 1: And I think that's probably why I ended up doing
Speaker 1: self help and everything, which wasn't my intention, just being
Speaker 1: willing to embrace the I don't know, kid.
Speaker 6: I know a bit about your background and that you
Speaker 6: were born into like a Mormon culture that was very
Speaker 6: prescriptive and restrictive, and yeah, all those things. Did you
Speaker 6: always have a sense of your own, wild, open, free
Speaker 6: sort of self in this way that we're talking about
Speaker 6: this don't know mind or this rejecting sort of these
Speaker 6: prescriptive ideas that just didn't fit well? Did that happen
Speaker 6: to you, like over time or with a defining moment,
Speaker 6: like how did you get to where you are based
Speaker 6: on where you started?
Speaker 1: Who was an Elizabeth Katie Stanton, a great feminist, said
Speaker 1: women have been systematically disappointed in the law, the polity,
Speaker 1: and the economy. And my life's work and I thought
Speaker 1: she was going to say, is to make things better?
Speaker 1: And she said, my life's work is to deepen this
Speaker 1: disappointment in the hearts of women until they will suffer
Speaker 1: it no longer. Ah.
Speaker 4: And what happened to.
Speaker 1: Me is I was born a total people pleaser in
Speaker 1: a culture that was completely against my true nature, and
Speaker 1: I tried really hard to embody it, and it made
Speaker 1: me so miserable and suicidal that when I left, I
Speaker 1: left with the force of somebody who has just jumped
Speaker 1: onto a trampline.
Speaker 6: Whow.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I remember one defining moment when I was twenty nine.
Speaker 1: They announced that the three leading enemies of the Mormon
Speaker 1: Church in the latter days, which now were feminists, intellectuals,
Speaker 1: and homosexuals, well checked and I was like, okay, out,
Speaker 1: I thought you were.
Speaker 3: Going to say they named you by names. I was like, wow,
Speaker 3: they basically.
Speaker 4: Were reading from my resume.
Speaker 6: Wow, that couldn't be clearer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that reminds
Speaker 6: me of that is that annais nin quote of in
Speaker 6: the day came when the risk to remain tight and
Speaker 6: the bud became greater than the risk it took to blossom,
Speaker 6: which is kind of the same thing. But it's beautiful, right,
Speaker 6: It's beautiful to you just finally can't stay there anymore,
Speaker 6: and hopefully you go to a place that's less painful,
Speaker 6: less restrictive.
Speaker 1: And maybe we all get there, you know, each in.
Speaker 4: Our own way.
Speaker 1: We're all socialized by family cultures, ethnic cultures, religious cultures,
Speaker 1: national cultures, and none of them, as Rose said, is
Speaker 1: going to coincide with every detail of our true nature.
Speaker 1: So maybe there's a defining moment in Buddhism. They call
Speaker 1: it the squeeze where you're being crushed between two cultural
Speaker 1: forces you can't answer, and you pop out like a watermelon,
Speaker 1: see between the squeezy fingers.
Speaker 4: That's not what the Buddha actually said that. I think
Speaker 4: he would have like, I'm interested. Have you guys had
Speaker 4: a squeeze? I had that moment? What have you had?
Speaker 4: What blew you out of the cultural mode?
Speaker 3: I think my first version of that happened in high school,
Speaker 3: and I can remember it. I remember the exact moment
Speaker 3: very clearly. I didn't realize that there was a pressure building.
Speaker 3: I didn't realize what was happening. But I was a
Speaker 3: pretty unhappy kid, and I worked very hard to be
Speaker 3: what I thought I was supposed to be. And then
Speaker 3: I heard the sex pistols on a church trip in Florida,
Speaker 3: and I remember, I have a terrible memory, but I
Speaker 3: remember this moment very clearly, walking up the steps of
Speaker 3: this old school bus and the beginning of holidays and
Speaker 3: the sun came on, and I can sort of like
Speaker 3: my life feels defined by for that and after that, Wow,
Speaker 3: because all of a sudden, it just opened my eyes
Speaker 3: and I went, is any of this real? Is any
Speaker 3: of this true?
Speaker 4: Is anything?
Speaker 3: I suddenly felt like I could question everything that happened.
Speaker 3: Wow wow, So again, it didn't feel to me like
Speaker 3: I was getting ready to rebel. It just emerged, but
Speaker 3: it apparently had a lot of fuel behind it because
Speaker 3: it took off fast.
Speaker 6: Yeah, when you ask the question, immediately knew what it was.
Speaker 6: So I too, was like the people pleaser, and I say,
Speaker 6: was like that was so Jenny gay of you know,
Speaker 6: nineteen ninety. But I mean it's still something in me,
Speaker 6: but people pleaser and like the oldest child. So I
Speaker 6: was like, just tell me what the rules are and
Speaker 6: I'll do them. And I'll do them great, everyone will
Speaker 6: be happy and I'll live a happy life. And so
Speaker 6: I was in a very fundamentalist branch of the Protestant
Speaker 6: Church and in a school that was in the South,
Speaker 6: and the kind of the Bible Belts. It was like
Speaker 6: this like little bubble inside of a little bubble. It's
Speaker 6: just so small and tight and the rules were so narrow,
Speaker 6: and I was like, I still got it. I got it.
Speaker 6: So I ended up dating guy that fit what was
Speaker 6: the right, guy was on paper, and I was like, well,
Speaker 6: that's great. I got him, Okay, So stayed with him.
Speaker 6: Then we got married right out of college. And about
Speaker 6: a month after we got married, it was actually the
Speaker 6: Saturday night before were joining the church on Sunday morning,
Speaker 6: and I just walked into the guest room and he
Speaker 6: was like looking at pornography, which whatever. At the time,
Speaker 6: that was just an enormous whoa who are you? What
Speaker 6: are you doing? Like I did not know that existed
Speaker 6: in him.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 6: So it opened this whole thing. And then a year
Speaker 6: later filed for divorce. Just it opened up a whole
Speaker 6: Pandora's box of this other life he was living. Anyway,
Speaker 6: point is so what I filed for divorce. I remember
Speaker 6: it was on the phone with him, and I was
Speaker 6: telling him, like, that's it, you know, this is the
Speaker 6: decision I'm making. And he said that he had talked
Speaker 6: to the elders in the church, and of course we're
Speaker 6: twelve white old men. No one in the church had
Speaker 6: asked me in the last year, how are you doing,
Speaker 6: or what's your truth? What's your side of this? Right?
Speaker 3: It was all him.
Speaker 6: I needed to stay in the marriage and suffer. So
Speaker 6: he could get better. That was what I was told.
Speaker 6: And he said, well, the elders have said that if
Speaker 6: you file for divorce without getting their blessing or approval,
Speaker 6: then you'll be excommunicated. And I was like, oh my god,
Speaker 6: you know what. Excuse my language, but like fuck them,
Speaker 6: you know, like they have no place in our marriage.
Speaker 6: This is not between them. I will not be told
Speaker 6: what to do, like the gig is up. Like I thought.
Speaker 6: This was about love and inclusivity and support and I
Speaker 6: couldn't feel less of that right now, like I am out.
Speaker 6: So I left the marriage, I left the church. I
Speaker 6: moved to New Orleans, where things are very free, you know,
Speaker 6: and I was like doing all these free things in
Speaker 6: New Orleans. But it shot me off into this other
Speaker 6: phase of life that was more like, well let me
Speaker 6: find my rules quote unquote, you know, like I'm done
Speaker 6: with this. It was defining. I'm grateful for it.
Speaker 5: All I can think, as I've been listening to you
Speaker 5: speak is I think mine happened in increments, But it
Speaker 5: was always moments when I could get away from people
Speaker 5: and into nature and moving my body. And I remember
Speaker 5: this one moment I went to.
Speaker 4: Actually the repressive environment.
Speaker 5: I went to as I went to a very intensely
Speaker 5: like private school in high school. Like it was you know,
Speaker 5: ties and uniforms and all of that sort of thing,
Speaker 5: and we went on a sort of like outward bound
Speaker 5: is that thing?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Yeah, yeah?
Speaker 5: And I never fit in there.
Speaker 4: I was the scholarship kid.
Speaker 5: I you know, that was all that was quite you know,
Speaker 5: wealthy people there on the whole, and I didn't relate
Speaker 5: to that very well, and they didn't quite know what
Speaker 5: to make of me. And there was just this moment
Speaker 5: we had been hiking for about six hours and I'd
Speaker 5: sprained my ankle about halfway through and just kept going
Speaker 5: and like I'd bound my ankle and kept going US
Speaker 5: fifteen and I just remember this moment of slowly reaching
Speaker 5: into this state of almost euphoria, ecstasy, bliss. And this
Speaker 5: girl who I was at school with, who I didn't
Speaker 5: know very well, just she'd turned around or we stopped
Speaker 5: to have a drink of water or something, and she
Speaker 5: just looked at me and she just sort of oh,
Speaker 5: she goes, what's going on?
Speaker 6: You look really pretty.
Speaker 5: It was like she was like, something's happened to you,
Speaker 5: Like it was the you know, it was it was
Speaker 5: the vocabulary she had, but I think I knew exactly
Speaker 5: what she meant because I was like huge and full
Speaker 5: of light in that moment, and it was just I
Speaker 5: think the power of other people and cultures and systems
Speaker 5: that we create with that left brain are so powerful
Speaker 5: that sometimes you have to walk away from them for
Speaker 5: a really long time to be able to find yourself again.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I love that, that's what she said.
Speaker 4: Because there is this thing.
Speaker 1: Another friend of mine, Stephen Mitchell, is one of my
Speaker 1: favorite like spiritual poets and translators of our time, and
Speaker 1: he wrote a memoir that never It hasn't been published yet,
Speaker 1: but he let me read it, and he talks about
Speaker 1: how he, as a young boy, found himself really infatuated
Speaker 1: with this nun. Here's this very very Jewish boy and
Speaker 1: he meets this nun and he's obsessed with her. And
Speaker 1: he thought, I guess I have to be Catholic. I
Speaker 1: don't know what's going on. And he said, I had
Speaker 1: not yet learned to understand radiance.
Speaker 4: Oh that's cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there is a radiance that comes from someone who
Speaker 1: is truly in don't know mine, who is truly experiencing
Speaker 1: everything in the moment and reacting with that whole eleven
Speaker 1: million bits of information per second, body, mind, heart, soul,
Speaker 1: everything online, everything present in its nature, it starts to shine.
Speaker 1: And I think that's the pulling force that Roe was
Speaker 1: talking about at the very beginning of the episode. When
Speaker 1: we see radiance, it pulls us. It will pull us
Speaker 1: up mountains, with us with broken ankles, you know, we
Speaker 1: will just keep going or radiance. And ironically, religion is
Speaker 1: meant to embody that, and instead it just pins it
Speaker 1: to a board and kills it.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Oh that's such a beautiful thought.
Speaker 3: You've been talking about don't know mind beginner's mind a lot,
Speaker 3: and it reminds me of one of my very favorite
Speaker 3: quotes of all time, and it's by Zen Master Dogan,
Speaker 3: and he said, one is that enlightenment is intimacy with
Speaker 3: all things, the mystical experiences I've had. That feels very true.
Speaker 3: It is this deep intimacy with everything. But the other
Speaker 3: Zen quote, and I think it's Dogan, also is that
Speaker 3: not knowing is most intimate.
Speaker 1: Oh.
Speaker 4: I love that.
Speaker 3: And so it's that idea of you know, don't know
Speaker 3: mind or beginner's mind, but not knowing is most intimate.
Speaker 3: Because when we think we know something, we stop looking.
Speaker 5: Ah, that's right, and knowing comes from the force that divides, right,
Speaker 5: that cuts up, it's not from the force that connects.
Speaker 5: And so if we're not in knowledge, then we're still
Speaker 5: in the part of ourselves that can be intimate with everything,
Speaker 5: because it's everything.
Speaker 1: Two different ways to know, right, there's the way that
Speaker 1: Ginny's mom knew absolutely about her, like why she had
Speaker 1: left the category refrigerator.
Speaker 4: Or whatever it was. Yeah, there's that kind of.
Speaker 1: And then there's the kind of knowing that is my
Speaker 1: body does not exist, but I feel with every molecule
Speaker 1: in the universe, and there is no need to explain
Speaker 1: to me I am it.
Speaker 4: You know I am you.
Speaker 1: The wolves both claim to know, as Ian mcgilchris says,
Speaker 1: one says one knows that there's nothing to know, and
Speaker 1: the other one knows that it never knows.
Speaker 6: It's so often both and I mean I think often
Speaker 6: people myself included, get tripped up when in like Buddhist circles,
Speaker 6: they talk about like everything is interconnected, like there's no you,
Speaker 6: there's no me, there's just us. And that's true, but
Speaker 6: it's also incomplete because there is also still like a
Speaker 6: you and a me. I mean there's both. It's just
Speaker 6: that either alone, it's not the whole story, right.
Speaker 5: Right, it's when we connect. It's when we bring together
Speaker 5: that we find the truth.
Speaker 1: There's that incredible image of Indra's web, where the structure
Speaker 1: of the entire universe is like a three dimensional spider web,
Speaker 1: and it each juncture of silk is a diamond, and
Speaker 1: it has infinite facets, and that would be you, me,
Speaker 1: us in every facet of every diamond is reflected the
Speaker 1: entire web, every other diamond, So everything is reflecting everything else.
Speaker 1: But without a single one of those diamonds, it would
Speaker 1: be incomplete. Yes, it's mind blowing and that's good.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's good to.
Speaker 4: Yes.
Speaker 1: So I think we figured it all out.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think the answer is just don't know anything.
Speaker 6: Yeah, just takeaway. We don't know. We had no idea,
Speaker 6: that's right.
Speaker 3: It's interesting. The one thing, Well, it's so interesting because
Speaker 3: I often relate things back to being an addict and
Speaker 3: an alcoholic. I think back on that time and when
Speaker 3: I said at the very beginning like that, sometimes it's
Speaker 3: hard to know this deep inner knowing versus our habitual
Speaker 3: condition and in patterns because in a moment back then,
Speaker 3: it felt deeply true and right that like I had
Speaker 3: to do Heroin, like it seemed like one hundred right,
Speaker 3: it felt really real. But I was just thinking I
Speaker 3: had been having that thought. But then the other thing
Speaker 3: that I just thought about is a lot of the
Speaker 3: words that we use for intoxication, plastered, hammered, ripped, right,
Speaker 3: they all point to this breaking of this small thing
Speaker 3: that constricts us.
Speaker 1: But it also I thought you were going to say,
Speaker 1: they're all about building, hammered, blastered, They're about building something.
Speaker 1: And when I worked with Heroin addicts on the Streets
Speaker 1: of Phoenix and the dopamine or the dopamine clinate method
Speaker 1: on Planet, they came in and I would listen to
Speaker 1: them and they'd say, I really really want to be
Speaker 1: on Heroin And I'd say, how does it feel? And
Speaker 1: they would tell me, and I'd say, I agree with
Speaker 1: you a thousand percent. Yeah, that's exactly how you're supposed
Speaker 1: to feel. But it's supposed to last all the time,
Speaker 1: and you get to keep your teeth.
Speaker 3: You know, we're meant to have my teeth. I want
Speaker 3: to be clear as a former heroinatom.
Speaker 6: It really came out I still have my teeth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I got out quick enough.
Speaker 1: As you were talking about plastering and hammering, I was
Speaker 1: thinking about a line from the Dowta Jing which says
Speaker 1: that we hammer would to make a house, But it's
Speaker 1: a space inside that we live in. We work with being,
Speaker 1: but non being is what we use. So it's the
Speaker 1: space inside that we're creating. And even when you were
Speaker 1: getting high or whatever it's called with different drugs, you
Speaker 1: were still building constructions that were allowing you to know
Speaker 1: the space inside and to know ultimately that that wasn't
Speaker 1: working for you because there was misery, but you could
Speaker 1: build something out of your years as an alcoholic and
Speaker 1: attic that was still the space in which to become whole.
Speaker 4: Nothing is wasted nothing.
Speaker 3: I agree, one hundred percent. And that was what most
Speaker 3: of that was about. It was about me trying to
Speaker 3: figure out how to connect. I didn't know how to
Speaker 3: do it. I had not been equipped to do it.
Speaker 3: And I did this thing and I suddenly felt connected,
Speaker 3: and I was like, well, all right, that works right
Speaker 3: until it doesn't. If it kept working, I'd still be there,
Speaker 3: you know, if it kept doing what it would do.
Speaker 3: But it was a very elegant solution to a problem
Speaker 3: for a long time and just until it wasn't interesting.
Speaker 1: We're given psychedelics like the plant world gives us opioids
Speaker 1: and psychedelics and stimulants, and all of them can make
Speaker 1: us feel really good for a while, like we feel, oh,
Speaker 1: this is the easy way. I'm rolling downhill now, but
Speaker 1: the radiance is missing, and in the end we end
Speaker 1: up in a very low place, going why can't I
Speaker 1: find my way back up? But we've all talked about
Speaker 1: places where we were broken, where the casing was broken
Speaker 1: on our minds, and where we opened up and then
Speaker 1: the radiance comes in. And you know, the sex pistols
Speaker 1: take you away from the church, and the sex stuff
Speaker 1: takes your husband.
Speaker 4: But the radiance comes in.
Speaker 1: And I loved what you said about music too, Eric,
Speaker 1: because the right side of the brain has music, and
Speaker 1: the left side of the brain has language. And there
Speaker 1: are languages in the world that have music but no words,
Speaker 1: And there are no languages that have words but no music.
Speaker 1: Music can be part of what pulls us into the radiance.
Speaker 1: So it's also harmony. Every sense has its parallel that's
Speaker 1: trying to pull us body and soul toward what we
Speaker 1: need to be.
Speaker 5: Sex drugs, rock and roll is like what sort of
Speaker 5: kicked off that counterculture, and it all went eastward, It
Speaker 5: all went to spirituality. Once the sex drugs and rock
Speaker 5: and roll had worn out. George Harriston was over there
Speaker 5: playing the sitar, you know, and meditating.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, the Beatles went to you know, stay with Maharishi.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's fascinating because we were talking about mad Men earlier
Speaker 3: and we're at the part of mad Men where it's
Speaker 3: just starting, just start to see.
Speaker 6: I have not a little bit no spoilers, no spoilers.
Speaker 3: I don't think it's a spoiler that the sixties happened.
Speaker 6: Don't know, mind, I.
Speaker 4: Do not know.
Speaker 6: No, Yeah, that's all I mean is just culture feel
Speaker 6: a plot line, I know, no.
Speaker 3: Plot line. Just one of the things I love about
Speaker 3: that show is it does accurately reflect a historical period.
Speaker 3: And I agree with you Martha, at the beginning of
Speaker 3: it is oppressive. It's one of the things I.
Speaker 6: Like about it.
Speaker 3: Back to your point earlier about the role of the feminist.
Speaker 3: You mentioned's job was to make you uncomfortable. Mad Men
Speaker 3: never stops doing that. It refuses to look away. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it refuses to give the easy storyline, the easy answer,
Speaker 3: and it is uncomfortable. But that's what I find beautiful
Speaker 3: about it is that it doesn't come in and offer you,
Speaker 3: like the easy answer, like, well, it was really hard
Speaker 3: for women in the fifties except for these two women
Speaker 3: who you know, the happy life, and I mean, it's
Speaker 3: just relentless. But the sixties are coming to men, it's
Speaker 3: about to hit.
Speaker 6: Yes, okay, that is not right.
Speaker 5: You're right now now that you've explained to us that
Speaker 5: the way we felt watching it was their intentions.
Speaker 3: She said the same thing after like the first, second
Speaker 3: or third episode, She's like, does it ever get better?
Speaker 6: Ever? Men?
Speaker 3: Did they make a comeback?
Speaker 5: Iged we need spoilers on history for that's right, that's right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, Well, I think we are at a good
Speaker 3: wrapping up point. We talked about literally zero that we
Speaker 3: planned to talk about when we had a planning. Maybe
Speaker 3: a little bit, but that's fine. We didn't know all
Speaker 3: the way through.
Speaker 6: This conversation just made me feel radiant. It made me
Speaker 6: feel open and bright and expansive inside. In fact, my
Speaker 6: current working definition of spirituality is anything that causes me
Speaker 6: to both simultaneously go deeper inside myself and feel more
Speaker 6: connected with everything around me. And this conversation just made
Speaker 6: me feel that way.
Speaker 1: Indeed too, me too infinitely inward and infinitely outward at
Speaker 1: the same moment, even.
Speaker 6: Better said yes, yes, I love it. Thank you, thanks
Speaker 6: so much, Thank you, Barth.
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