Speaker 1: When our nature goes one direction and our culture goes another,
Speaker 1: almost all of us will just sell out our nature
Speaker 1: hard and go after the culture. So now we're not
Speaker 1: one thing integrity, we're two things duplicity. There's what's two
Speaker 1: for us at a very deep level, and then there's
Speaker 1: what we're trying to adapt to. Welcome to the one
Speaker 1: you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance
Speaker 1: of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out,
Speaker 1: or you are what you think, ring true. And yet
Speaker 1: for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
Speaker 1: We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
Speaker 1: see what we don't have instead of what we do.
Speaker 1: We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
Speaker 1: But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
Speaker 1: takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
Speaker 1: worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
Speaker 1: themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
Speaker 1: good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this
Speaker 1: episode is Martha Beck, a bestselling author, life coach, and
Speaker 1: speaker who specializes in helping individuals and groups achieve greater
Speaker 1: levels of personal and professional success. She's the author of
Speaker 1: nine nonfiction books and one novel, and has been a
Speaker 1: longtime contributor to Oh The Oprah magazine. Her most recent
Speaker 1: book is The Way of Integrity. Him Martha, Welcome to
Speaker 1: the show. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's such a pleasure to have you on. We're going
Speaker 1: to be talking about your book, The Way of Integrity,
Speaker 1: finding the Path to your True Self. But before we
Speaker 1: do that, let's start like we always do, with the Parable.
Speaker 1: In the Parable, there's a grandparent talking with their grandchild
Speaker 1: and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside
Speaker 1: of us that are always at battle. One is a
Speaker 1: good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love,
Speaker 1: and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things
Speaker 1: like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops
Speaker 1: and thinks about it for a second, looks up with
Speaker 1: their grandparents as well. Which one wins, and the grandparents says,
Speaker 1: the one you feed. So I'd like to start off
Speaker 1: by asking you what that parable means to you in
Speaker 1: your life and in the work that you do. It's
Speaker 1: such an interesting point. I know the parable well, but
Speaker 1: did not expect to have it thrown at me. And
Speaker 1: what comes back to my mind is one time when
Speaker 1: I was trying to publicize I think my very first book.
Speaker 1: This was before podcast, but I was in some guy's
Speaker 1: garage because he did a blog thing that was video
Speaker 1: and everybody was very excited about it. And he turned
Speaker 1: on the cameras and we started talking about his life
Speaker 1: or something, and then he said, but let's get down
Speaker 1: to it. We're here to sell books. And I was like, no,
Speaker 1: I am not here to sell books, and he was
Speaker 1: like what, And I said, if I were here to
Speaker 1: sell books, yeah, things would not go well. I am
Speaker 1: here to be present for whatever needs me right now,
Speaker 1: because throughout my life I had really sold myself. I'd
Speaker 1: fed the wrong wolf. I went after achievement and egoic
Speaker 1: sort of rewards and ended in disaster every single time.
Speaker 1: So I'd become hypersensitive to feeding that wrong wolf. And
Speaker 1: I just said, you know, the reason I'm here is
Speaker 1: to help maybe one person who's out there on the
Speaker 1: other side of this broadcast. I'm never here just to
Speaker 1: sell books. So that just popped up. But when you
Speaker 1: asked me the question, yeah, well, it speaks to the
Speaker 1: reasons why we do things, which is so much of
Speaker 1: what I think this book is about is what is
Speaker 1: going on underneath things. And one of the things that
Speaker 1: I'm struck by when you were talking, it made me
Speaker 1: think about something that I've often thought of, which is like,
Speaker 1: why do I do what I do? And what's interesting
Speaker 1: is there's a big part of why I do what
Speaker 1: I do which is very much grounded in love and
Speaker 1: service and all of that. And I've been cultured in
Speaker 1: such a way, to use a term that we'll talk
Speaker 1: about a lot in the book, I am in a
Speaker 1: culture that constantly sort of I feel distracted and drawn
Speaker 1: towards downloads and money and like, you know, and so
Speaker 1: there's this constant for me having to sort of reorient
Speaker 1: back to my deeper meaning. And you talk in the
Speaker 1: book about discerning what you really want or what you
Speaker 1: think you want, and what you actually yearn for. Could
Speaker 1: you speak a little bit about that, because I think
Speaker 1: that can be such a confusing thing for many of us.
Speaker 1: Is because we feel like we want lots of different
Speaker 1: things that may very often seem to be in conflict
Speaker 1: with each other. Yeah, you know, I've coached hundreds of
Speaker 1: people one on one foul if you count groups. And
Speaker 1: I found this little trick. If you ask people what
Speaker 1: they want, they will make you a list, you know,
Speaker 1: make a list of things you want. They will make
Speaker 1: you a list that's very much dominated by what they've
Speaker 1: learned from their culture. So it will be that particular
Speaker 1: cultures type of success, power, welt status, those things, of
Speaker 1: course are huge and our particular culture, and they're always
Speaker 1: striving for these things, and there may be not getting them.
Speaker 1: Maybe they're getting them at the cost of their own happiness,
Speaker 1: but things aren't going well. Then I ask them when
Speaker 1: you wake up at night and it's dark, and you're alone,
Speaker 1: and you've got hours to do nothing but think, what
Speaker 1: is it you yearn for? And it always brings up
Speaker 1: a very different list when I put it that way.
Speaker 1: What comes up for you when I ask you what
Speaker 1: you yearn for? Well, I think what's interesting is the
Speaker 1: first thing that came to mind is sometimes in the
Speaker 1: dark of the night is where fear can get its
Speaker 1: greatest grips into us. And so there's a certain type
Speaker 1: of being awake in the middle of the night. It
Speaker 1: leads to deeper reflection on my deepest desires, and there's
Speaker 1: another type of being awake in the middle of the night,
Speaker 1: which is fueled by fear. So setting aside the fueled
Speaker 1: by fear, you know, I think what I yearn for
Speaker 1: is to do work that matters that I love doing.
Speaker 1: And what's the outcome of that. Well, I guess the
Speaker 1: outcome is that I am, I guess, for lack of
Speaker 1: a better word, excited by what I'm doing. Beautiful. There's
Speaker 1: an excitement and innate joy in doing what you're doing.
Speaker 1: That's one of the things people yearn for. Others are peace, freedom, joy, belonging.
Speaker 1: That's kind of it. Like I've I've asked people all
Speaker 1: over the world from wildly different cultures what they want,
Speaker 1: and it's always very different. But what people yearn for
Speaker 1: are those few things they want to matter. They want purpose, joy, belonging, freedom, peace,
Speaker 1: That's pretty much it. And what we realize when we
Speaker 1: go into that is that we're selling out the things
Speaker 1: we yearn for to get the things we want. And
Speaker 1: the reason is exactly what you just said, because we're
Speaker 1: driven by fear. And I'm actually writing another book right now.
Speaker 1: You mentioned this right before we went live. You said, um,
Speaker 1: you're probably having new ideas and thoughts, and it's all
Speaker 1: about fear and about how there is in the human
Speaker 1: brain particular cycle of thoughts that creates continuous fear, continuous
Speaker 1: growing fear. My friend Jill Bolt Taylor, who's a neuro anatomist,
Speaker 1: says that the left hand side just feels a fear
Speaker 1: impulse and then another part that tries to control everything,
Speaker 1: and those two can get locked up in this little
Speaker 1: duet where they're screaming at each other that things are
Speaker 1: very bad, and they get more and more frightened. On
Speaker 1: the right hemisphere, the corresponding parts create no fear, but
Speaker 1: curiosity and fascination and instead of control, a sense of
Speaker 1: giving up control to creativity and selflessness and connection with
Speaker 1: the universe. So it's literally inside the hemispheres of the
Speaker 1: brain are the two wolves, and fear literally feeds the
Speaker 1: dark wolf for the bad wolf. The thing is that
Speaker 1: our culture so supports the fearful side of the brain,
Speaker 1: and like we've created outside ourselves exactly what that part
Speaker 1: of the brain is doing internally. So it's again it
Speaker 1: reinforces itself and it doesn't shift unless we deliberately shift it.
Speaker 1: You don't just fall into less fear, you fall into
Speaker 1: more fear. To get less fear, you have to do
Speaker 1: things that sort of push you towards the other side
Speaker 1: of your brain, like imagining the feeling of doing something
Speaker 1: that matters to you that will cause the circuit in
Speaker 1: the left side of the brain and pull it over
Speaker 1: all your attention over to the right side, where you
Speaker 1: can feed the wolf. That is all about joy and
Speaker 1: belonging and frolicking and having good puppies and all of that.
Speaker 1: So what are some other things that we can do
Speaker 1: that move us from that fear based circuit over to
Speaker 1: the curiosity based circuit. For lack of a better word
Speaker 1: for it, Yeah, I'm so glad you asked. None of
Speaker 1: this is in the book I just wrote a little
Speaker 1: of it is, But it's in the book I'm writing now.
Speaker 1: The right side of the brain has very few verbal components.
Speaker 1: The places where it uses language are in poetry and jokes.
Speaker 1: So actually seeking humor is one of the things you
Speaker 1: can do to feed the wolf on the right side
Speaker 1: and to shift the energy. There's a great book called
Speaker 1: Deep Survival by Lawrence Gonzalez where he talks about how
Speaker 1: people who survive unsurvivable situations are really funny about it.
Speaker 1: Like they find a way to be to laugh at
Speaker 1: the darkest moments of their lives. So that's one way.
Speaker 1: Just drenching yourself in immediate sensory experience, like imagining three
Speaker 1: things you love to taste and three things you love
Speaker 1: to hear, and like any of the senses and going
Speaker 1: into that deeply will shift you. I've done that with
Speaker 1: huge groups and you can actually feel the shift in
Speaker 1: the room when people go into their senses instead of
Speaker 1: their thoughts. So yeah, so you turn down thought and
Speaker 1: you turn up presence and experience, and that allows you
Speaker 1: to stop feeding the bad wolf and going over taking
Speaker 1: something over to the good wolf. Yeah. I think that
Speaker 1: humor piece is such an important one. I've often said,
Speaker 1: I think levity is a spiritual virtue. You know, it
Speaker 1: should be listed as one. And it is true that people,
Speaker 1: oftentimes we have gone through the worst things, have the
Speaker 1: best sense of humor about them. I mean, I know,
Speaker 1: in a a you know, there's a lot of laughter
Speaker 1: about things that are really pretty pretty dark things, you know,
Speaker 1: but having gone through them, we're able to laugh about them.
Speaker 1: And you know, laughter is such a powerful tool. But
Speaker 1: I never really thought of it is moving that sort
Speaker 1: of left to right brain. Oh, it's so powerful. And again,
Speaker 1: the reason you don't value it like as this massive prize,
Speaker 1: which it really is, is that the culture downgrades it.
Speaker 1: Our particular culture, and that would be modern sociologists called
Speaker 1: the weird culture is western ucated, industrialized, rich, and democratized.
Speaker 1: Our culture is so materialistic and so based on the
Speaker 1: idea of scarcity and survival that it really really focuses
Speaker 1: all its energy on exactly what you said, frightens you
Speaker 1: in the night. You've gotta have enough money, You've got
Speaker 1: to survive. You know what about other people? Are you
Speaker 1: serving them? Well? Do they like you enough? There's this
Speaker 1: continuous frenzy of fear and the need to control situations
Speaker 1: so that we don't have to be afraid, and it
Speaker 1: never works. We just get more and more frightened. And
Speaker 1: then if you just sit around laughing with your friends,
Speaker 1: the culture goes, well, you're wasting time. Now. I don't
Speaker 1: think so. I think that's the most value added thing
Speaker 1: you could possibly do. And I know what you mean
Speaker 1: about the laughter in those rooms. It is some of
Speaker 1: the most holy expression of spirit I've ever heard. Reinhold
Speaker 1: and Ibar said, laughter is the beginning of prayer. And
Speaker 1: I think maybe that's true that the first person who
Speaker 1: was really in deep crap and suddenly burst out laughing
Speaker 1: was telling the most powerful kind of prayer. Yeah, yep.
Speaker 1: I have a couple of people I know that I've
Speaker 1: done some work within our listeners of the show, who
Speaker 1: also really love your work. And I solicited a couple
Speaker 1: of questions. So I don't normally do this, but I
Speaker 1: happen to know that they love you, and I thought,
Speaker 1: why not ask them? And so one of the questions was,
Speaker 1: and they are great questions otherwise I wouldn't ask them,
Speaker 1: which is, how do you continue to grow yourself? I
Speaker 1: know that changes over time. What's that look like for
Speaker 1: you now? What is continuing to move forward and grow
Speaker 1: in your life look like now? Well, fortunately I was
Speaker 1: blessed with an extremely anxious brain and a very flimsy body.
Speaker 1: So there, It's like I do all these self help things,
Speaker 1: and they actually do. I I said to my daughter
Speaker 1: one day, I've stopped reading self help books and she
Speaker 1: was like, well, Mom, maybe you self helped, and I
Speaker 1: think I have. But I have to self help every
Speaker 1: single day, and you know, and that's why I'm interested
Speaker 1: in it's the fact that the brain, pushed by culture,
Speaker 1: goes back into fear over and over and over again.
Speaker 1: Because I've had that experience, I don't fall into joy naturally.
Speaker 1: I wake up in the morning and I deliberately put
Speaker 1: myself in a place of joy by looking at the
Speaker 1: parts of me that are frightened, that are depressed, that
Speaker 1: are discouraged, and then finding a way to connect with
Speaker 1: compassion and speak from a different self to those parts
Speaker 1: of me that are afraid. I don't want to freeze
Speaker 1: out the bad wolf. I want to scratch it under
Speaker 1: the chin and and maybe give it some quay ludes. No, no,
Speaker 1: no drugs. Sorry, that's probably triggering for your audience. I
Speaker 1: love that word, by the way, the lud, I know,
Speaker 1: the double vowels. They're fabulous. Anyway, Just calm down the
Speaker 1: wolf and then he actually comes over and works for
Speaker 1: the good side as well. I don't believe that any
Speaker 1: part of us is evil, but for me, there's always
Speaker 1: a project. So I'm pushing my mind as hard as
Speaker 1: I can on this new idea of fear and the
Speaker 1: brain science around it. And then there's always my natural
Speaker 1: tendency towards slipping into negative mood states. And finally there's
Speaker 1: the fact that I'm going to die, which you know,
Speaker 1: they say, I know everybody dies, but I assume that
Speaker 1: in my case there will be an exception. We all
Speaker 1: feel that way, but sort of looming, you know, death
Speaker 1: sort of looms over those of us who think about it,
Speaker 1: and it means you've got to keep your powder dry,
Speaker 1: you've got to tidy up, you've got to keep self
Speaker 1: helping every day. Yeah. And so when you embark on
Speaker 1: a new project writing wise, is it because you found
Speaker 1: something that really interests you. Is it because it's what
Speaker 1: you most need to learn in that moment or are
Speaker 1: those the same thing? That's such an interesting question. Another
Speaker 1: writer was asking me the other day what's your muse?
Speaker 1: And I was thinking, what is it? Because I've written
Speaker 1: wildly different things over the years, Like I wrote a
Speaker 1: feminist book to begin with, and people said you're a feminist,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, no, I'm done with that. I'm writing
Speaker 1: about my son with down syndrome, and they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: you're all about intellectual disability. And now I'm done with that.
Speaker 1: I'm going to write about I don't know food. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I thought, what is it that helps me choose topics.
Speaker 1: And it's really like there's kind of this very very
Speaker 1: thin but very bright little line, like a fish line
Speaker 1: that goes through my entire life, and I'm sort of
Speaker 1: pulling myself along it, and it goes straight through the
Speaker 1: center of my heart. And I would have to say
Speaker 1: that that is a kind of spiritual identity, a spiritual destination,
Speaker 1: a spiritual state of being. If I don't keep it
Speaker 1: at the center of my life all the time, I
Speaker 1: just absolutely flame out. And when I do stay on it,
Speaker 1: it just pulls me into things I did not expect.
Speaker 1: But if it says go, I go. And if it
Speaker 1: says don't go, I don't go. And that's just it. Yep.
Speaker 1: My through line for guests on this show is do
Speaker 1: I want to read their work? And if I don't,
Speaker 1: they're not a guest, you know. It's just that's it,
Speaker 1: because I try and engage deeply with each piece of work,
Speaker 1: and I'm just like, do I want to? And if
Speaker 1: I don't, then I'm just not going to That served
Speaker 1: me fairly well, I think, yeah, I think it has.
Speaker 1: It's so funny people keep paying me to say this.
Speaker 1: I mean, I went through my own life adventures and I,
Speaker 1: you know, broke away from my own home culture and everything.
Speaker 1: And I was teaching business school in my early thirties
Speaker 1: and I was teaching career development, and I would say
Speaker 1: to my students things like you should probably get a
Speaker 1: job doing something you enjoy. And then they would line
Speaker 1: up outside my office at office hours and they'd be like, wait, wait, wait,
Speaker 1: go back. What was that thing about enjoying my job.
Speaker 1: I've never heard that. And I like, yeah, if you
Speaker 1: love something that makes you happy, maybe do a little more.
Speaker 1: And if you hate something that makes you miserable, maybe
Speaker 1: not so much. And they were like, here is some money.
Speaker 1: Just say that again. And thirty years later, people keep
Speaker 1: paying me to say that. And it seems pretty obvious,
Speaker 1: like worms could learn it, but people are too sophisticated,
Speaker 1: and we end up missing that really simple thing. Does
Speaker 1: it interest uses make us happy? Well? That leads right
Speaker 1: kind of into the heart of the book, the Way
Speaker 1: of Integrity, which is this idea that we often do
Speaker 1: what our culture has told us we should do, not
Speaker 1: what we want to do. And oftentimes, I think what's
Speaker 1: really difficult about this is we often don't even realize
Speaker 1: it until later. It's one thing to change when you're
Speaker 1: twenty one, it's another thing to change when you're forty one. Um,
Speaker 1: And it's it's not to say that we can't make changes.
Speaker 1: I mean, I left a pretty good career about has
Speaker 1: it been three or four years ago to do this,
Speaker 1: So it's you certainly can. But I think, you know,
Speaker 1: if we knew that stuff earlier. That's why I sort
Speaker 1: of just keep, you know, with my son. I'm like,
Speaker 1: it's just worth thinking about really what you want to
Speaker 1: do because you're going to be doing it for a
Speaker 1: long time, you know, God will and you're gonna be
Speaker 1: doing it for a long time, you know, right absolutely,
Speaker 1: there you we're doing something for a long time. You've
Speaker 1: got a lot of work years. Yeah, So thank god
Speaker 1: you're creating that little micro culture for him where your
Speaker 1: personal desires are the most important thing and most people
Speaker 1: are not. You know, And every by culture it means
Speaker 1: any social pressure you encounter. So your family, your ethnicity,
Speaker 1: your community, your nationality, all of these have different levels
Speaker 1: of cultural pressure. And we're all born completely aware of
Speaker 1: our personal preferences. So we're in integrity. Integrity it just
Speaker 1: means intact we're just one thing. But before we even
Speaker 1: learn to talk, we start to encounter cultural pressures. Maybe
Speaker 1: our parents wish that we cried last, or that we
Speaker 1: smiled more, or if we're a boy, that we act
Speaker 1: tougher and if we're a girl that we act nicer
Speaker 1: or whatever, and we start responding to that before we
Speaker 1: can even talk. And it's because we're so dependent on
Speaker 1: other human beings, and that's ut positive. That's a good quality,
Speaker 1: and that makes us compassion and it helps us cooperate.
Speaker 1: But when our nature goes one direction and our culture
Speaker 1: goes another, almost all of us will just sell out
Speaker 1: our nature hard and go after the culture. So now
Speaker 1: we're not one thing. Integrity were two things duplicity. There's
Speaker 1: what's too for us at a very deep level, and
Speaker 1: then there's what we're trying to adapt to. And I
Speaker 1: used to ask audiences. I'd stop right in the middle
Speaker 1: of a speech and say is everyone comfortable? And they
Speaker 1: would say yeah, And I'd say no, no, no, tell me,
Speaker 1: are you really comfortable? And they would repeatedly say they were.
Speaker 1: And then I'd say, how many of you, if you
Speaker 1: were home alone right now, would be sitting in the
Speaker 1: exact position you're in at this moment. And no one
Speaker 1: would raise a hand, and I would say why not,
Speaker 1: and they would sit there like really brilliant people, CEO
Speaker 1: s whatever. And then finally, after like a minute, somebody
Speaker 1: would say it's not very comfortable, and I would say, yes, indeed.
Speaker 1: And the problem is not that you're mildly uncomfortable. And
Speaker 1: the problem is that thirty seconds ago you looked at
Speaker 1: me and swore you were comfortable while knowing you were uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: Your body knows you're uncomfortable, and your mind was telling
Speaker 1: you you're totally comfortable. That split between what we perceive
Speaker 1: to be our experience and what we know at a
Speaker 1: deeper level to be our experience. That split is I
Speaker 1: believe what causes all psychological suffering. Yeah, you say, are
Speaker 1: psychological suffering comes from thoughts that we genuinely believe while
Speaker 1: simultaneously knowing they aren't true. Yep, that's a very on
Speaker 1: its surface confusing statement. No kidding, right, Because if I
Speaker 1: genuinely believe it but simultaneously know it not to be true,
Speaker 1: how don't even start to unwind this? Right? Because if
Speaker 1: I don't fully know, I do coaching work like you do,
Speaker 1: and I a lot of times I'll ask clients. I
Speaker 1: love your reframing of not what do you want? What
Speaker 1: do you yearn for? But when you people to think
Speaker 1: more deeply about what they want, they're often deeply confused. Yeah.
Speaker 1: My follow on to that question, and I'll just make
Speaker 1: this even harder for you, is that culturing process starts
Speaker 1: so young that it's almost impossible to say that I
Speaker 1: am cultured. Like, what I'm interested in has been a
Speaker 1: sum of all the things that have happened to me.
Speaker 1: So which of those things do I sort of want
Speaker 1: to hang onto and go, Oh, that's really me? And
Speaker 1: which of those things do I want to go, Oh
Speaker 1: that's culture, that's trauma. It's all woven together. You are
Speaker 1: the sum of what's happened to you plus what came
Speaker 1: in originally. So it's the old nature nurture debate, right,
Speaker 1: So the sum of everything that happened to you is nurture.
Speaker 1: But you also have a true nature, and you know
Speaker 1: your nature at the level you knew it as a newborn,
Speaker 1: which is wordless, sensory based on your feelings of your emotions.
Speaker 1: So there are all these sophisticated sort of compasses inside
Speaker 1: are psyches and our bodies that are helping us know
Speaker 1: what's good for us at any given time. And when
Speaker 1: the culture around us pushes us in a direction that's
Speaker 1: away from our nature, it's like the compasses stopped working.
Speaker 1: But the one ally we have that is with us
Speaker 1: from the moment of birth and we'll be with us
Speaker 1: to death is suffering, you know. And I used to
Speaker 1: spend a lot of time thinking, well, if there is
Speaker 1: a spiritual force that loves us, why do we suffer?
Speaker 1: And it's because without suffering, we would not have any
Speaker 1: way to readjust those compasses. Suffering is the one thing
Speaker 1: that really gets our attention. In Catch twenty two, which
Speaker 1: I read in second grade, I remember being quite confused
Speaker 1: by it. But I remember from being seven years old,
Speaker 1: some guys saying, well, why is suffering? Okay, how can
Speaker 1: you believe in God if they're suffering? And he said, well,
Speaker 1: suffering alerts us to pain. And another character says, well,
Speaker 1: why couldn't there just be a system of flashing lights
Speaker 1: or something, And I remember thinking, well, my family has
Speaker 1: a car with all these warning lights and they're always on.
Speaker 1: We were not good at property maintenance my family, and
Speaker 1: nobody pays any attention to them to make us pay attention.
Speaker 1: Something has to break. We have to be inconvenienced. It
Speaker 1: has to be incredibly interruptive of our normal lives, and
Speaker 1: it has to be distressing. And I was like, well
Speaker 1: now we're back with suffering again. So it really is
Speaker 1: this profound ally and really truly, no matter how cultured
Speaker 1: you are, no matter how socialized you are. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1: I've worked with people who were born into spotlights and
Speaker 1: never got out of them with so much attention on
Speaker 1: them their whole lives, and they still had suffering telling
Speaker 1: them this is not me, this is not me, And
Speaker 1: you need to get by yourself and relax and get really,
Speaker 1: really in touch with where things aren't comfortable. It's just
Speaker 1: that simple question where am I uncomfortable? And your true self,
Speaker 1: your true nature, will always tell you, and then you
Speaker 1: you go from there. You start with the discomfort, and
Speaker 1: then you start to say, okay, why am I sustaining
Speaker 1: these conditions that are making me uncomfortable? And then you
Speaker 1: start unwinding the cultural messages that have you all tied up.
Speaker 1: We come into this world with a certain nature. If
Speaker 1: you follow certain spiritual traditions far enough, they get to
Speaker 1: the point where they talk about essentially this oneness, this impersonal,
Speaker 1: undifferentiated oneness. Right. I think what you're saying, though, is
Speaker 1: a little bit different. You're saying that we come in
Speaker 1: here with what personality researchers might say are some dials
Speaker 1: on our personality. We're born that way out, So my
Speaker 1: nature is not the same as your nature in your
Speaker 1: belief here, right. Actually, no, I believe that there is
Speaker 1: this incredible universal intelligence and it is integrated with, uninterrupted
Speaker 1: by our personal sense of self, so that if we
Speaker 1: go deep enough in meditation or whatever, we realize that
Speaker 1: we've been melded with it all along. It's like the
Speaker 1: old metaphor of waves in the ocean. I'm a wave,
Speaker 1: you are a wave. The ocean is going to take
Speaker 1: us back very soon. So there's no difference to me
Speaker 1: between that oneness that we feel in those deeply spiritual
Speaker 1: moments and the truest of our true selves. But the
Speaker 1: vast intelligence knows what it wants to do with the
Speaker 1: individual wave, and so that it guides us and pulls
Speaker 1: us along and allows us to have individual experiences for
Speaker 1: the variety of it, for the joy and compassion and
Speaker 1: wisdom of it. But it's always part of the whole
Speaker 1: and when you feel that, it's so rely xing because
Speaker 1: you realize that the whole thing is benevolent and it
Speaker 1: not only loves you, but it is you at some
Speaker 1: essential level. And it's having an adventure looking out through
Speaker 1: Eric's eyes, through Martha's eyes, and and it's gaining this
Speaker 1: huge experience of what it means to be alive in
Speaker 1: these forms. Right, you use a phrase for that, You
Speaker 1: say that from this perspective, we're all intermingled drops in
Speaker 1: what Dante calls Lo gran mar del Sri or the
Speaker 1: great City of being. Yeah, the great sea of being. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was thinking about this. Um. There's a line from
Speaker 1: Alexander Pope that really struck me and goes all forms
Speaker 1: that perish other forms supply by turns, we catch the
Speaker 1: vital breath and die like bubbles on the sea of matterborn.
Speaker 1: We rise, we break, and to that sea return. And
Speaker 1: that could sound really ghoulish and like we're soap bubbles
Speaker 1: and we we pop and we don't exist anymore, or
Speaker 1: it can bring you into a sense of awe, like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, I'm having this incredible experience. I wrote
Speaker 1: this whole book sort of guided by Dante's metaphors, and
Speaker 1: I had the weirdest experience of the wave that was
Speaker 1: me connecting with the wave that was Dante, because I
Speaker 1: read like dozens of translations of the Divine Comedy, and
Speaker 1: I was always parsing them from meaning and everything. Don't worry,
Speaker 1: it's not a book about Dante. It's it's fun. You'll
Speaker 1: love it. But as I got into it, I thought,
Speaker 1: this man is a psychological and spiritual genius. And I
Speaker 1: started dreaming about Dante, and it was very much as
Speaker 1: though the life that was Dante encountered my life in
Speaker 1: a way that was deeply joyful and intimate. This was
Speaker 1: right during the pandemic, like we just shut down. Everything
Speaker 1: was scary as hell, and I was encountering on a
Speaker 1: daily basis another wave in the sea, another bubble in
Speaker 1: the sea that was so full of life still after
Speaker 1: seven hundred years, and I kind of lost the sense
Speaker 1: of time, which Dante himself does at the end of
Speaker 1: the Divine Comedy. And I think if we go deeply
Speaker 1: enough into our wholeness, if we align our social selves
Speaker 1: with our essential selves, we start to experience ourselves as
Speaker 1: brief but eternal, and eternal means outside of time, not
Speaker 1: a long time, but no time. And outside of time,
Speaker 1: we can meet everyone that's ever been. We can enjoy
Speaker 1: everything that's ever happened, and and that sense of awe
Speaker 1: it's impossible to convey in words, is that right side
Speaker 1: of the brain experience, But once you've had it. I
Speaker 1: used to work with heroin addicts on the streets and Phoenix,
Speaker 1: and that's what they all weren't looking for. I think,
Speaker 1: I mean, tell me where I'm wrong. No, you're not wrong.
Speaker 1: It is interesting to me as I think about sometimes,
Speaker 1: you know, my spiritual uh search. You know, I have
Speaker 1: to get it sometimes and go okay? In what ways?
Speaker 1: Is that similar to my addiction? In positive ways and
Speaker 1: in negative ways? There's both, right, because I do think
Speaker 1: in my addiction all along was a deep yearning for
Speaker 1: connection and wholeness in oneness, and there was the occasional
Speaker 1: moment where drugs they did that you know, yeah, I
Speaker 1: intuited this deeper reality and then I would touch it
Speaker 1: and I would be like that. Now. Of course, what
Speaker 1: I then did to keep getting that burned my life
Speaker 1: down right. And so I think it was young who
Speaker 1: said to Bill Wilson in a a that you know,
Speaker 1: really made the point of the word spirits for alcohol
Speaker 1: and the word spirit that's that's what alcoholics are looking
Speaker 1: for to a large extent. Yeah, And I used to
Speaker 1: tell the heroin addicts. I would go to this methodone
Speaker 1: clinic where people would come in because they couldn't get
Speaker 1: enough heroin, so and they had to sit through my
Speaker 1: thing to methodont so some of them would like fall
Speaker 1: asleep on the floor in front of and it was great.
Speaker 1: But I used to tell them, and I was not
Speaker 1: popular among the other counselors there because I'd say, never
Speaker 1: ever give up the search for that feeling, that feeling
Speaker 1: you had the first time it took you and you
Speaker 1: knew you were home. That is how you're meant to feel.
Speaker 1: And the reason I said that was that, like Bill
Speaker 1: w I had an experience. I was in surgery at
Speaker 1: the time where I encountered this light. I was lying
Speaker 1: on the surgical table and I sat up and looked
Speaker 1: around and thought, well, that's odd. Why why am I
Speaker 1: sitting up when I am strapped down? And then I
Speaker 1: lay back down into my body and saw this light
Speaker 1: and it was tiny at first, it was like the
Speaker 1: size of a golf ball. And then it began to expand,
Speaker 1: and when it touched me, I felt this incredible warmth
Speaker 1: and release and joy and homecoming and love beyond love,
Speaker 1: and I just started to laugh and laugh and laugh
Speaker 1: and cry. I mean, my body was crying. And the
Speaker 1: surgeons got very worried because there were tears coming out
Speaker 1: of my eyes and they thought that I was feeling pain.
Speaker 1: So the anesthesiologist almost increased the anesthesia, but then later
Speaker 1: he told me, as he was going to do that,
Speaker 1: a voice said to him, don't do that. She's crying
Speaker 1: because she's happy. I had asked to see him because
Speaker 1: I wanted to know if I'd had a drug induced hallucination,
Speaker 1: and instead I got this really interesting story, and he
Speaker 1: was like, what happened in there? So I told him
Speaker 1: this light came and it filled my entire being with joy.
Speaker 1: And then it said, I don't think you have to
Speaker 1: die to feel this way. You're You're meant to feel
Speaker 1: this way while you're alive. Now go out and do
Speaker 1: whatever it takes. And I think that's what heroin addicts
Speaker 1: are trying to find. I think that's what all addicts
Speaker 1: are trying to find. It's home. It's home base for
Speaker 1: us and the search to get back to it and
Speaker 1: to feel that way all the time has been my
Speaker 1: singular goal ever since. That's it, That's all I'm into. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think what's interesting though, is that desire to feel
Speaker 1: a certain way all the time is sometimes what does
Speaker 1: lead us away from what you've talked about, that wholeness. Right.
Speaker 1: This gets very interesting when you've done a lot of this, right,
Speaker 1: You've talked with people who look at and study and
Speaker 1: are enlightened, and you start to talk about like, well,
Speaker 1: are we talking about an experience or were talking about
Speaker 1: something else? Because experiences come and go. We are human beings.
Speaker 1: There's a tremendous amount of fluctuation in the experience that
Speaker 1: we have, right. I mean, you get hungry, you're not hungry.
Speaker 1: You know you have a headache, you don't have a headache,
Speaker 1: and yet there is also something that seems to be
Speaker 1: deeper than that. And so, like you, my thing has
Speaker 1: been about how do I find my way back there
Speaker 1: in a way that isn't all about finding my way
Speaker 1: back there? The Chinese talk about trying not to try, right.
Speaker 1: I've had a couple of experiences they were a little
Speaker 1: they're different than what years were with with the light.
Speaker 1: But I've had some in Zen we'd call Ken show
Speaker 1: experience right up, dramatic opening and matic enlightenment and experience.
Speaker 1: And of course I'm like, more of that, please, And
Speaker 1: He's like, the most surefire way to make sure you
Speaker 1: don't experience that again is to keep expecting to experience
Speaker 1: it again. Okay, well, now what do I do with that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a Zen teacher. His name is us
Speaker 1: escaping me for him and I'll come right back to me.
Speaker 1: But Shinan he talks about how we travel the surface
Speaker 1: of the globe looking for enlightenment, looking for peace and
Speaker 1: the way to it, and this is exactly what Dante did,
Speaker 1: is to turn and start going into the center of it.
Speaker 1: And as we go closer to the center, we have
Speaker 1: sometimes these very intense mystical experiences. And the mistake we
Speaker 1: can make is to then turn and start roaming around
Speaker 1: the world of the mystical experience that we've had, and
Speaker 1: it's like a smaller sphere inside the bigger sphere, but
Speaker 1: it doesn't take us to the core. So it can
Speaker 1: be very distracting and very misleading to think that those
Speaker 1: experiences are the thing itself. I did go that path
Speaker 1: for a little while. After I had that experience, I
Speaker 1: would do anything to get back to that. And I
Speaker 1: had a lot of mystical experiences, but they always if
Speaker 1: I tried to push into getting more of them, and
Speaker 1: they always sort of frittered out, and so I would
Speaker 1: end up going back. I would feel myself not comfortable.
Speaker 1: And what's interesting is that the sensation I had on
Speaker 1: that table was not emotional. It affected me emotionally, but
Speaker 1: the experience itself was not one of emotion, and it
Speaker 1: wasn't one of sensation. It was one of absolute stillness,
Speaker 1: absolute peace. And what I've realized over the ensuing years
Speaker 1: is that I can sit with incredible levels of anxiety
Speaker 1: and being total peace. So it's a field that contains
Speaker 1: the emotions. It's not the emotion itself. It's it's like
Speaker 1: a Cartola says, the opposite of death is not life.
Speaker 1: The opposite of death is birth. Life has no opposite.
Speaker 1: Life is the field through which birth and death alternate.
Speaker 1: So the field of me that is life, the field
Speaker 1: of me that his presence, the field of me that
Speaker 1: is awareness, can sit with me in my anguish and
Speaker 1: my sorrow, in my alienation and love me completely without
Speaker 1: changing a thing. And it's that it's the switch into
Speaker 1: the part that is holding and loving the emotional part,
Speaker 1: away from the emotional part itself is identity, and into
Speaker 1: the field where the emotions are happening. That switch, I
Speaker 1: think is the enlightenment experience. So my experience with that
Speaker 1: is there are times that I am able to make
Speaker 1: something like the switch you're describing, where I'm able to go, Okay,
Speaker 1: there's this very strong emotion, and now I become the
Speaker 1: space that that emotion is happening in and I'm able
Speaker 1: to sort of step back. And then there are other
Speaker 1: times that that emotion feels utterly over wellming and I'm
Speaker 1: just lost in it. And I'm kind of curious for you.
Speaker 1: Is there anything that you have found that makes it
Speaker 1: more likely you're able to make that switch into the
Speaker 1: container or the witness or whatever way you want to
Speaker 1: put that, because I think that's a question a lot
Speaker 1: of people who are listening to the show or reading
Speaker 1: your work are trying to figure out. Is like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I get that intellectually, right, Boy, Sometimes that's really hard
Speaker 1: to do. Yeah, one way that I'm writing about right now,
Speaker 1: it's kind of a new front in psychology right now.
Speaker 1: It's called part psychology. What the sort of flagship is
Speaker 1: called internal family systems. The idea, I'm sure you know
Speaker 1: about it. The idea is that we all have various
Speaker 1: aspects of self that should be treated as full individuals,
Speaker 1: and if we treat them as full individuals and we
Speaker 1: have relationships with them, they have this strange ability to
Speaker 1: cooperate with us. When I first started meditating really seriously,
Speaker 1: the anxiety nearly killed me. And it would not subside
Speaker 1: in ninety seconds. It went on for hours and days
Speaker 1: and weeks. It was terrific, and it was me in
Speaker 1: anxiety and I had experienced that light and why couldn't
Speaker 1: I get back to it? If you start to think
Speaker 1: of yourself instead, as there was a part of me
Speaker 1: that had that experience with the light, there's another part
Speaker 1: of me that is running around and a round, and
Speaker 1: start to visualize the different parts. For me, the anxiety
Speaker 1: became a horse that just ran and ran and ran.
Speaker 1: Horses do that when they're scared. They'll run round and
Speaker 1: round just to get the adrenaline out. And I sat
Speaker 1: there in meditation, I watched the horse go round and
Speaker 1: round and round, and one thing horses do if you
Speaker 1: don't approach them, they finally slow down. And finally I
Speaker 1: watched the anxiety slowing down. I thought, oh, it's slowing down.
Speaker 1: And then I thought, wait where am I? And I
Speaker 1: realized I was outside the pan the horse was in,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, okay, well I am not the horse,
Speaker 1: So what am I? And I was the watcher or
Speaker 1: the compassionate witnesses it's called in some traditions. And now
Speaker 1: if I experience anxiety, anger, whatever, and I experienced them
Speaker 1: every day, I stop and I say to the part
Speaker 1: that is upset, what's going on with you? Right now?
Speaker 1: What can I do for you? And because I've practiced
Speaker 1: this for a long time, Young called itself with a
Speaker 1: capital S. And Richard Tchwitz, the guy who was who
Speaker 1: started internal family systems therapy, he calls it the same thing.
Speaker 1: He just wrote a book called No Bad Parts, which
Speaker 1: is really great. And what they both found was that
Speaker 1: there is this sort of overarching self capital ass that
Speaker 1: is sort of the shepherd, to use a biblical metaphor,
Speaker 1: or the parent of this flock of frightened children. And
Speaker 1: if you can say, all right, all right, I'm anxious,
Speaker 1: if you can just get to some compassion for the
Speaker 1: part of you that is in an anxiety or anger
Speaker 1: or whatever, and if you can wish it well and
Speaker 1: I use it tibetan loving kindness meditation simple maybe well.
Speaker 1: May you be happy, may be free from all internal
Speaker 1: and external suffering, May you have ease of well being.
Speaker 1: Whatever doesn't matter, as long as it's a good thought.
Speaker 1: As you continue to offer the benighted part of yourself
Speaker 1: this comfort, you realize that the comforting part of you
Speaker 1: is still in the light, and it was always there.
Speaker 1: And that's what I keep coming to every time I
Speaker 1: pop out of a bad mood. It's like the part
Speaker 1: of me that isn't in the presence of that light
Speaker 1: was always there through my childhood, through my adolescence, through
Speaker 1: every horrible thing that never happened to me. It was
Speaker 1: always present. And that starts to feel very anchoring after
Speaker 1: a while. Yeah, it's interesting. I interviewed Dick recently about
Speaker 1: that book he talks about you know, there's different types
Speaker 1: of parts, and you know, one thing he talks a
Speaker 1: lot about is asking a certain part if it might
Speaker 1: step aside, which I think is a really interesting thing.
Speaker 1: And then The other thing he talks about is that
Speaker 1: the most wounded parts of you, the exile aisles. He
Speaker 1: describes as you may really need someone who's trained, or
Speaker 1: a therapist or someone else to go there. And you
Speaker 1: talk about this also in the book The Way of Integrity.
Speaker 1: You say, look, depending on what your your trauma is,
Speaker 1: you may not want to wade into this on your own.
Speaker 1: So I want to do that. I think it speaks
Speaker 1: to the fact that there are certain experiences for us
Speaker 1: that are so overwhelming, so emotionally activating, that we're not
Speaker 1: going to just sit there and switch out of him.
Speaker 1: And maybe a process, right it may be a process
Speaker 1: of slowly, over time, slowly bringing the volume on them
Speaker 1: down until we're able to work with them on our
Speaker 1: own more skillfully. Yeah. Another thing this is turning into
Speaker 1: the Dick Schwartz show, which I love. He's an awesome dude.
Speaker 1: But he says, you know, one thing you can ask
Speaker 1: them is you know, you can let me know a
Speaker 1: little bit about what you're going through, but don't overwhelm me.
Speaker 1: I can't handle it right now. And weirdly, the part
Speaker 1: that is traumatized will say all right, as long as
Speaker 1: you're listening, to me, I won't give you huge dose.
Speaker 1: I'll just drip it out a little bit. But that
Speaker 1: again is in the presence of a skilled therapist. So yeah,
Speaker 1: if you've been through something horrible. One of the things
Speaker 1: that happened to me that I wrote about in the
Speaker 1: Way of Integrity. After I had this light experience, I
Speaker 1: was so obsessed with getting back I would do anything.
Speaker 1: So when I was twenty nine years old, I made
Speaker 1: a vow that I wouldn't lie in any way for
Speaker 1: one calendar year. It was a New Year's resolution, and
Speaker 1: during that year, you get to your truth really quickly.
Speaker 1: And I would not recommend this as a strategy because
Speaker 1: I was not in therapy. I was not in a
Speaker 1: safe environment. And during that year I basically walked away
Speaker 1: from or lost my religion, my family of origin, my marriage,
Speaker 1: my home, my job, my industry. Everything sort of went
Speaker 1: into the bonfire because it wasn't right for my true self.
Speaker 1: But one of the biggest things was that I started
Speaker 1: encountering having really intrusive flashbacks of being sexually abused as
Speaker 1: a child um in a pretty violent way. And it
Speaker 1: it almost broke me. It really almost broke me. It
Speaker 1: happened right after I had the light experience, actually, and
Speaker 1: it was like I had been given enough comfort in
Speaker 1: that experience to just barely keep me alive during the flashbacks.
Speaker 1: So I do want to say to people who are
Speaker 1: out there who aren't in therapy but are miserable, I
Speaker 1: do believe there is a compassion to the universe and
Speaker 1: a symmetry to it where if you can just reach
Speaker 1: for the sense of feeling loved and comforted and contained,
Speaker 1: something reaches back for you and that will help you
Speaker 1: get to therapy. That's what it did for me, and
Speaker 1: then the therapy got me much much better. But even
Speaker 1: if you feel completely alone, reach for it. Wish yourself well,
Speaker 1: Pretend that you are an almighty force wishing yourself well,
Speaker 1: and you begin to detect that it actually is what
Speaker 1: part of you is. Let's move into some of that
Speaker 1: work you do around lies, because there's a fair amount
Speaker 1: in the way of integrity where you talk about you
Speaker 1: know that one of the ways we get out of
Speaker 1: integrity is we tell lies to ourselves and others. So
Speaker 1: share a little bit more about Lyne, and then I
Speaker 1: would love to go a little deeper into some of
Speaker 1: what telling the truth cost you and gained you. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: during that whole horrible year, speaking of having a terrible
Speaker 1: time while having a wonderful time, I felt like it
Speaker 1: was hell. Everything was burning down around me, but I
Speaker 1: had regained a connection to the sense of peace at
Speaker 1: my core, and that continued to grow as everything else
Speaker 1: fell apart. And I was happier and healthier in that
Speaker 1: year while everything was going wrong than I had ever
Speaker 1: been that I ever remembered being because I was lying
Speaker 1: to myself about so many things. And there's really good
Speaker 1: research on lying. A group of people was asked very simply,
Speaker 1: try not to lie so much for a few weeks.
Speaker 1: They said, all right. There was no policing. There wasn't
Speaker 1: even a measure really of whether they were lying or not.
Speaker 1: But compared to a control group when they came back
Speaker 1: a few weeks later, the ones who had decided not
Speaker 1: to lie as much had fewer doctor visits, They had
Speaker 1: fewer sore throats, they had better relationships that were happier
Speaker 1: with their jobs. Like lying messes with us, and we
Speaker 1: don't just lie with our words. And by the way,
Speaker 1: most people lie at least three times within a ten
Speaker 1: minute conversation. We don't do it because we're bad. We
Speaker 1: do it because we're trying to be good. We're trying
Speaker 1: to fit in, we're trying to please people, were trying
Speaker 1: to you know, tow the line whatever, and so we
Speaker 1: deviate from what's true for us. And if you can
Speaker 1: get into touch with what's true for you and at
Speaker 1: least don't lie to yourself, you start to heal in
Speaker 1: this very very deep way. And you can lie with
Speaker 1: your life. Going to a job you hate week after
Speaker 1: week after week on the assumption that that is all
Speaker 1: you can do for a living is a kind of
Speaker 1: lie because you're suffering from it and you know you are,
Speaker 1: and you keep making yourself do it. The same thing
Speaker 1: with just presenting yourself in a way that's not really you,
Speaker 1: in a way that's more pious or more stylish or whatever.
Speaker 1: If you start to live as yourself as well as
Speaker 1: speaking the truth, healing happens at a very deep level.
Speaker 1: I had three incurable progressive autoimmune diseases when I started
Speaker 1: that year of lying, and when I stopped lying, they
Speaker 1: all went away. So it healed everything from my body
Speaker 1: on out. It was really rough, but it's better than
Speaker 1: living in the line. And so one of the things
Speaker 1: that you stopped lying about. Was you grew up in
Speaker 1: the Mormon Church. Yes, that's a pretty rough place to
Speaker 1: try and navigate your way out of. No kidding, I
Speaker 1: didn't really navigate my way out, so I just hacked
Speaker 1: my way through with a sledge hammer. Um. Yeah. It
Speaker 1: was very confining and in a way I wrote in
Speaker 1: another book that it was like that religion locked me
Speaker 1: in a dungeon, and then through in the key. The
Speaker 1: dungeon was, here is exactly how you have to behave
Speaker 1: in every aspect of your life, and you will never
Speaker 1: vary from it. And by the way, it will make
Speaker 1: you extremely unhappy, but that doesn't matter. But the key
Speaker 1: was and you have an individual responsibility to find your
Speaker 1: way back to God. It was by following the second
Speaker 1: directive that I blasted through the first, and it was
Speaker 1: actually ironically because I had come to believe that there
Speaker 1: was some metaphysical reality in the universe. I hadn't believed
Speaker 1: that I spent from the time I was seventeen I
Speaker 1: went off to Harvard from Provo, Utah, bit of a
Speaker 1: culture shock, but just and completely into the materialist rationalist
Speaker 1: model until during my PhD at Harvard, I had a
Speaker 1: son with Down syndrome, and while I was pregnant with him,
Speaker 1: began having experiences that were frankly psychic, and that blew
Speaker 1: my mind. And it made me think, Okay, whatever the
Speaker 1: Mormon has told me about finding my way back to God,
Speaker 1: I'm doing that. That is what I'm going to do.
Speaker 1: And it ended up I'm not saying that I am
Speaker 1: one with God, but damn I feel like I can
Speaker 1: come closer now. And it led me right out of
Speaker 1: the religion that handed it to me. So there you go, paradox.
Speaker 1: One of the things I think that is very difficult
Speaker 1: about telling the truth in some of these situations is
Speaker 1: we want to be accepted, we want to be liked,
Speaker 1: we want to you know, all these things, and there's
Speaker 1: also a genuine care sometimes for the people in our lives.
Speaker 1: So I know that your family was Mormon, and so
Speaker 1: talk to me about how you navigated your way through
Speaker 1: knowing that some of what you were doing, at least
Speaker 1: they would say, was hurtful to them. We could debate
Speaker 1: whether it was or wasn't, but they would say it was.
Speaker 1: How do you stay true to your path and how
Speaker 1: do you know that you're not being selfish? When part
Speaker 1: of what's holding you back is genuine care for the
Speaker 1: people around you, That's a wonderful question. It was a huge,
Speaker 1: huge struggle for me. Our family wasn't just Mormon. My
Speaker 1: father was the foremost scholarly apologist in the history of
Speaker 1: the Mormon Church. And an apologist is the guy who says,
Speaker 1: I have a scholar's credentials, and I'm telling you that
Speaker 1: what the profit of this religion stated is the actual
Speaker 1: factual truth. And Mormonism makes a lot of interesting truth
Speaker 1: claims based on the sayings of and doings of their
Speaker 1: original prophet, Joseph Smith. So my father's whole job was
Speaker 1: to support Joseph Smith, who said things like all the
Speaker 1: American Indians are descended from a group of Jews who
Speaker 1: say held over from Israel in six b C. Or
Speaker 1: an Egyptian mummy that Joseph Smith struggled across in Illinois
Speaker 1: in forty something was actually the original book that Moses wrote.
Speaker 1: Stuff like that. It was just in the light of
Speaker 1: modern science, it's ridiculous. But my father was very brilliant,
Speaker 1: and he spent literally all day every day confabulating people's
Speaker 1: minds so that they felt stupid if they didn't agree
Speaker 1: with Mormonism. And I have seven brothers and sisters, and
Speaker 1: we all grew up in his glory. And so when
Speaker 1: I started remembering him being the perpetrator of the abuse,
Speaker 1: and it was sort of tied in with religious mania.
Speaker 1: When I made that statement, when I told them what
Speaker 1: I thought it happened, it was literally the most damaging
Speaker 1: thing I could do to them emotionally. And I am
Speaker 1: a massive people pleaser. I want everybody to be happy.
Speaker 1: That's what my whole life is about. And I've always
Speaker 1: been the because people please are in the family, and
Speaker 1: I was not pleasing them. But if I hadn't had
Speaker 1: that light experience, that would have been way too much.
Speaker 1: But given the experience of that light, and given my
Speaker 1: internal experience that what my father was doing had taken
Speaker 1: him into a kind of madness and then helped him
Speaker 1: keep other people in that same madness, it was separating
Speaker 1: them from home, from that light. And so my desire
Speaker 1: for for everyone to go home, really home, and to
Speaker 1: be there, not when we die, but even when we're alive,
Speaker 1: that ultimately one. And I felt, well, at least I
Speaker 1: will slug my way out of this cage, and maybe
Speaker 1: maybe I'll make an opening that they can come through later,
Speaker 1: you know, and that's up to them. To love an
Speaker 1: alcoholic is to take away the bottle. And that's the
Speaker 1: most hurtful thing you can do to an alcoholic, right,
Speaker 1: And it really makes you scrutinize what the love is,
Speaker 1: which wolf really is the bad one? In which is
Speaker 1: the one you want to feed? And the light was
Speaker 1: the only thing I wanted to feed to anyone. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you address that selfish thing, and you say, at one point,
Speaker 1: everything that truly makes us happy is limitless and multiplicative,
Speaker 1: not scarce and divisive. As we realize this, our fear
Speaker 1: of scarcity, the basis of greed lessons. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: in Dante, like he's he's in the Purgatorio, which no
Speaker 1: one ever talks about, and an angel comes and he says,
Speaker 1: we're so happy that you got here. Now everyone's going
Speaker 1: to be happier, Like be happy. That makes us all happier.
Speaker 1: And he literally says, how could that be? Isn't happiness
Speaker 1: like a pie you divide up? And the angel says, no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: that's a material way of looking at it. The essence
Speaker 1: of what we long for is a feeling state and
Speaker 1: to bring more love. Like if you're in love with
Speaker 1: someone and the two of you are like making love,
Speaker 1: and each person knows that the other person is enjoying it,
Speaker 1: the circle of joy continues to increase. Bring a puppy
Speaker 1: into a family of five. It's not like they have
Speaker 1: to divide the love so they can give some to
Speaker 1: the puppy. The puppy lifts all of them even higher
Speaker 1: than before. That's the miracle of switching your identity from
Speaker 1: the material self to this limitless state of being. In
Speaker 1: that state of being, everything, everything magnifies joy. So you
Speaker 1: talk about how, in the beginning, let's start by stop
Speaker 1: lying to ourselves. You may not be ready to stop
Speaker 1: telling lies externally, but at least stop with yourself, and
Speaker 1: then as you grow into more internal integrity, you may
Speaker 1: have the strength to start doing it externally. And you
Speaker 1: say that now, once we've experimented with doing this telling
Speaker 1: and acting on our truth for a limited period of time,
Speaker 1: we've got one of three options right. One is we
Speaker 1: could continue forward into more integrity. The other would be
Speaker 1: to keep wandering around purgatory by staying at exactly the
Speaker 1: same level of self disclosure. You've reached or go back
Speaker 1: to whatever secrets, lies and habits you've abandoned. And you
Speaker 1: then go on to talk about You say, I've had
Speaker 1: many clients who couldn't go through this gate that they
Speaker 1: love going to therapy or counseling because they can blow
Speaker 1: off steam, they can share all this difficult stuff, but
Speaker 1: they never are willing to take it out into their lives.
Speaker 1: And thus you say, some people become therapy or seminar addicts,
Speaker 1: constantly seeking environments where they can be themselves without upsetting
Speaker 1: any apple carts. They may wander around antipurgatory this is
Speaker 1: the Dante term for years, not really in hell anymore,
Speaker 1: but definitely not in heaven. Say more about that. So
Speaker 1: if somebody finds themselves in that spot, so okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: I hear a ring of truth in that, how do
Speaker 1: I choose to keep moving forward at that point when
Speaker 1: it comes time for our all Right, I've recognized some
Speaker 1: internal truths. I've experimented telling them a little bit externally. Boy,
Speaker 1: the consequences of doing that externally look kind of grim,
Speaker 1: feeling pretty afraid. I know I need to keep going,
Speaker 1: but I'm stuck. I'm afraid. That's a great question. One
Speaker 1: of the exercises that I recommend in there comes from
Speaker 1: a psycho neuroimmunologist named Mario Martinez, and he suggests that
Speaker 1: when we look forward and we think about living in
Speaker 1: absolute integrity, like if I leave my church, if I
Speaker 1: leave my job, and you know, my parents and wife
Speaker 1: won't approve of me, and like if I if I
Speaker 1: leave the things that aren't working for me and it
Speaker 1: seems to upset people on the outside, how do I
Speaker 1: tolerate that? How do I justify it? And we tend
Speaker 1: to only think about what the culturated part of us expects,
Speaker 1: which is pressure to conform other people's anger, other people's disappointments,
Speaker 1: suffering that that you know, when we go all the
Speaker 1: way too and then I won't be providing for my
Speaker 1: family and they'll all die on the street of starvation.
Speaker 1: That's really easy, that road. I've had so many clients
Speaker 1: they just go right down that road. It is broad
Speaker 1: and it's flat, and it was like we all right along.
Speaker 1: What we don't do is what Mario Martinez says, which
Speaker 1: is to imagine what would happen if we made the
Speaker 1: changes and everything went well. So I did this when
Speaker 1: I was leaving Mormonism and sort of exiled from my
Speaker 1: family of origin. I happen to be doing Byron Katie.
Speaker 1: If you've had her on the show, I think you have.
Speaker 1: I happen to be doing her work, which involves questioning
Speaker 1: thoughts that create suffering and then turning them around to
Speaker 1: the opposite. So I would think something like, oh, I'm
Speaker 1: going to destroy my family if I do this, and
Speaker 1: then I would force myself to go through is that
Speaker 1: really true? It causes me suffering? Okay, what's the opposite.
Speaker 1: I'm going to create my family if I do this.
Speaker 1: What could that be true? And you start to think
Speaker 1: through things like that. The biggest shift for me was
Speaker 1: I wrote a book about this whole experience, and before
Speaker 1: the book came out, I got death threats. I got
Speaker 1: legal threats. People were threatening my children, my other people
Speaker 1: that had helped me. I was really, really intent, and
Speaker 1: I was on a plane and I was thinking, over
Speaker 1: and over, something terrible is going to happen because I
Speaker 1: wrote that book. Something terrible is going to happen to me.
Speaker 1: Because I wrote that book over and over, and I said,
Speaker 1: I did the Byron Katie work, and I turned it
Speaker 1: around and it came out I'm going to happen to
Speaker 1: something terrible because I wrote that book, and I just
Speaker 1: sat back and I went, wait, wait, what? But it
Speaker 1: felt like it was maybe true. And then I thought, oh,
Speaker 1: I could rock some people who are suffering now and
Speaker 1: get them out of suffering. I started to imagine the
Speaker 1: good that might come. I went to Utah and I
Speaker 1: was like hiding in a Starbucks because Mormons don't drink
Speaker 1: coffee and I didn't want to be and I went through, Well,
Speaker 1: they don't admit the cookie coffee. So I went over
Speaker 1: and I got a coffee, and I was like, has
Speaker 1: anyone seen me? And the barista handed me my change,
Speaker 1: and as she did, she said thank you for writing
Speaker 1: that book. And I suddenly thought, oh, okay, the still
Speaker 1: over line that guides my life pulled me into writing that,
Speaker 1: and I thought about the terrible things, but I didn't
Speaker 1: think that maybe this woman's life would be improved if
Speaker 1: I dared to do that. If you can imagine the
Speaker 1: good that will come, which is as infinite and as
Speaker 1: likely as the bad, it can start to pull you
Speaker 1: in the direction of your truth. So Mario Martinez says,
Speaker 1: rock backward into the feeling of I'm going to stay
Speaker 1: the way I am, and then imagine things going well
Speaker 1: and pull literally physically rock forward into that everybody's responding, well,
Speaker 1: all the good that can happen is happening. Then rock
Speaker 1: back into not going to stay in my little cage,
Speaker 1: then rock forward into I'm going to get out and
Speaker 1: it's going to free other people as well. And as
Speaker 1: you literally physically go back and forth between the two,
Speaker 1: the poll of what is truer for you will get
Speaker 1: stronger and stronger. And then when you actually have the
Speaker 1: opportunity to make a choice about what to do, you
Speaker 1: will have already done the word necessary to give you
Speaker 1: the courage to do what you think is the best option.
Speaker 1: Let's wrap up with talking about the power of one
Speaker 1: degree turns. Use different phrases than this, but we talked
Speaker 1: about this on the show a lot. But I love
Speaker 1: that idea is share with us what they are and
Speaker 1: why are they effective. Yeah, there's a reason that you
Speaker 1: talk about it in different terms. People who study change,
Speaker 1: they have this the trends theoretical model of change. So
Speaker 1: is that the most effective changes are the ones that
Speaker 1: are small, incremental, and and repeated frequently. So I did
Speaker 1: this thing I'm not gonna library here, and that's because
Speaker 1: I'm the kind of person who is going to die
Speaker 1: right after saying, watch this can't hurt um and then
Speaker 1: do something really stupid. For people that I'm coaching and
Speaker 1: people that read the book, what I would recommend is
Speaker 1: that you imagine yourself as an airplane. One of the
Speaker 1: things about airplanes is they have to be in structural integrity.
Speaker 1: Fly same with your life. If you're in basic integrity,
Speaker 1: you can start your life, can start to take you
Speaker 1: to the places you want to go. And what I
Speaker 1: suggest is that as you figure out what feels right
Speaker 1: for you, you turn by one degree every so often,
Speaker 1: just a little bit towards true north for you. And
Speaker 1: if you do that over a ten thousand mile trip,
Speaker 1: you know, turn one degree north every half hour. You
Speaker 1: won't even notice the plane turning, but you'll end up
Speaker 1: at a completely different location. And that is the kind
Speaker 1: of change that is most likely to work. So by
Speaker 1: all means to it, do it gently. Be kind there. Certainly,
Speaker 1: if we're talking about telling less lies, we could slowly
Speaker 1: tell a few less lies. If I'm looking at trying
Speaker 1: to build a practice of spending time in stillness, I
Speaker 1: could start with five minutes, and I could build the
Speaker 1: six minutes and eight minutes, and and again I'm a
Speaker 1: huge fan of that. My mind is going right this
Speaker 1: moment to someone I know right now who's trying to
Speaker 1: make a really big decision about a marriage, you know,
Speaker 1: and that's a more difficult thing to do a one
Speaker 1: degree turn on. Yeah, well, you take one step, one step,
Speaker 1: one tiny step. But eventually you come to the edge
Speaker 1: of a cliff, and that next tiny step is going
Speaker 1: to be a big one. And that is where you
Speaker 1: need to have paved the way by continuously returning to
Speaker 1: a sense of wholeness, a sense of integrity. And as
Speaker 1: you get there for yourself, it expands into being one
Speaker 1: with the whole universe, as we've said, and it's so
Speaker 1: what psychologists would call reinforcing. It is, it's so strengthening.
Speaker 1: It made my body healthy, it makes your soul healthy,
Speaker 1: and it becomes habitual. So I think that courageous people
Speaker 1: are people who are in the habit of taking the
Speaker 1: next step forward towards what they believe is right. And
Speaker 1: usually that's just a little step along the path, no problem.
Speaker 1: But when it comes to a cliff, if you're absolutely
Speaker 1: familiar with the process of knowing what's right for you. You
Speaker 1: You take the next step, even if you fall a
Speaker 1: thousand feet, because courage has become a habit. Yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 1: I was thinking about, you know, how did I get
Speaker 1: to where I'm at, where this show is what I
Speaker 1: do for a living, And like you said, it was
Speaker 1: I started a podcast, you know, like, okay, but no
Speaker 1: big deal. Chris and I, my producer and editor, were
Speaker 1: working yesterday. This episode will have come out, I think
Speaker 1: before your episode comes out. But we are celebrating our
Speaker 1: five hundredth episode here soon, and we were putting that together.
Speaker 1: But it was just, you know, one episode at a time.
Speaker 1: But there eventually was a point where I edged along
Speaker 1: until Yeah, there was a point where I was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: now I need to jump off the cliff. If I
Speaker 1: want to do this for my living, I've got to
Speaker 1: jump off the cliff. I don't know what would be
Speaker 1: the best analogy. I had got some ropes or I
Speaker 1: don't know what it was, but the jumping off the
Speaker 1: cliff at that point was less risky than it would
Speaker 1: have been a year before, two years before. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: a nice man said, And then came the day when
Speaker 1: the courage it took to blossom became less than the
Speaker 1: ridge it took to stay tight in a bud. Yes.
Speaker 1: And I think that's when I tell my clients to
Speaker 1: move forward, when it actually takes less courage to go
Speaker 1: toward your truth than to stay in any degree of lie.
Speaker 1: And I say, stay in the lie as long as
Speaker 1: you can, because pushing yourself forward is not what you
Speaker 1: want to do. It's a form of violence to to
Speaker 1: a very precious and very sensitive being, your core self
Speaker 1: that is out there looking for its way home. And
Speaker 1: please be a gentle guide and guardian to that sensitive self.
Speaker 1: It deserves every kindness you can give it. That is
Speaker 1: as beautiful a place to end up as I can
Speaker 1: think of you. And I are going to talk a
Speaker 1: little bit more in the post show conversation about the
Speaker 1: three things that Virgil keeps urging Dante to do while
Speaker 1: he's in the inferno. So we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: that because it's great, So listeners, if you'd like to
Speaker 1: get access to that, to other post show conversations, add
Speaker 1: free episodes and the joy of supporting the one you Feed,
Speaker 1: you can go to one you Feed dot net slash
Speaker 1: Join Martha Thank you so much for coming on. I've
Speaker 1: been looking forward to this one and it's been a
Speaker 1: real pleasure. Thank you for me too. At Thank you
Speaker 1: so much. If what you just heard was helpful to you,
Speaker 1: please consider making a monthly donation to support the One
Speaker 1: You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community. With
Speaker 1: this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits.
Speaker 1: It's our way of saying thank you for your support now.
Speaker 1: We are so grateful for the members of our community.
Speaker 1: We wouldn't be able to do what we do without
Speaker 1: their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted.
Speaker 1: To learn more, make a donation at any level and
Speaker 1: become a member of the One You Feed community. Go
Speaker 1: to when you Feed dot net slash Joe. The One
Speaker 1: You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors
Speaker 1: for supporting the show.