Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Martha Beck. Dr. Martha Beck did her undergraduate master's NPHD training at Harvard University.

She has also considered one of the foremost experts in the personal development field, having authored many best-selling books, including her upcoming book Beyond Anxiety, Curiosity, Creativity and Finding Your Life's Purpose. I must say that today's discussion is a truly special one. I've long benefited from Martha's teachings and I assure you that during today's episode you will benefit from Martha's teachings.

She describes and we explore practices in real time that will allow you to truly understand what is most important to you and what you ought to spend your time pursuing. You will hear a rich discussion about how to frame the thoughts and the emotions around any topic, including pain points in life, as well as your goals and the things that you are in pursuit of.

You will also learn how to figure out exactly what is most essential to you and indeed how to explore what Dr. Martha Beck calls your essential self, those deep rooted desires that are unique to you and your history and what will make your life most fulfilling. By the end of today's episode you will be armed with new intellectual and practical knowledge and you will be able to adopt the best possible stance for you as you navigate forward in your life.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Better Help. Better Help offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online.

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And now for my discussion with Dr. Martha Beck. Dr. Martha Beck, welcome. It's so good to be here, Andrew. Thank you. I'm so excited. I mean, I don't know how to convey to the people listening and watching just how excited I am. I have very few heroes in life, but you are one of them.

It's true. It does not compute. It's true. I won't name all of them, but you know, you, the great Oliver Sacks, are among the people that have really influenced me so much in terms of the things I do, the ways I try and think, the ways I try to not think at times. And your life story is an amazing one. So we have a lot to cover today. So I'm not going to spend any more time talking about why I feel that way, because it's going to just become apparent in our discussion.

But I do want to say that you have really been ahead of your time. I mean, you're triple degree from Harvard. You have these academic credentials. And yet you were one of the first people to be public facing about the mind body connection in a way that is operationalized what we sometimes call an in around this podcast protocols.

And you've offered some practices that have absolutely transformed my life and other people's lives. And I gain them through reading your books. And that's not a standard book advertisement. All of your books have been transformative for me. One of the exercises that has had a profound effect on my life is the perfect day exercise. Oh, yeah.

And when I first read about it, I thought, you know, what could this possibly be? You know, it, and as I recall, it involved taking a little bit of time, maybe 10 minutes, maybe 30 minutes. And just sitting or lying down, closing one's eyes, and just imagining with no limitations, one's perfect day. And what's so wild about this exercise is that several not all, but several of the things that I imagined in that exercise have amazingly come to be reality.

And I don't know how or why it works, but I've used to have people send me a postcard. This is how long I've been doing this stuff. Now it's emails and texts that I say, OK, we just did your ideal day. You've got it all written down. Now send me a notification when that day happens. And I get a lot of notifications.

I'm giving you a notification right now because at the end of that exercise and I ended up doing it several times. I do it all the time. OK, that's good to know. I want to know about the frequency there. Was, you know, I'd love to sit down and talk to Martha Beck. What I wouldn't do. So I'm in a pinch me moment right now. This is so great. It's wild. It's like reality weaving back on itself. Yeah, I've listened to your podcast and I thought that guy is really cool. And here I am.

I don't think I'm moved by that. So let's just talk about this exercise for a second. Clearly we could come up with scientific explanations for why it would work. You know, the brain is a predictive machine. You know, once it understands that something might be possible. Maybe it looks for avenues for that. Exactly. We could come up with a whole narrative around that. But just for sake of those listening, what is this exercise? How would you suggest somebody try it?

So the first thing is that you don't make up something. I used to it. People would always tell me they'd make up a day where they woke up in a white room with white sheets and windows with white curtains. And then they would put on white clothes and drift around. And I realized finally that these people were just tired. And they were, they were, they were, they could not project anything that a sort of blankness that I finally realized meant that they just pushed themselves too hard.

So I stopped doing this with people until they were well rested. Then you don't make it up. You see it happen. That's the key thing. So you can just allow it into your mind, not as though you're reaching with your imagination, just as though it emerges. So I talk people through it. You, the first thing is you wake up in the morning. You're perfectly refreshed by a beautiful sleep.

In your imagination, don't open your eyes, but listen. What are you here? So you don't make it up. You listen for it. What are you here? For me, the first thing I hear is like just feeling how comfortable my body is on the bed. Yeah, it's something that I don't do enough. What about the sound of someone or someone's breathing? Yeah, someone next to me breathing and they're still asleep. Ah, lovely. Is there a dog breathing on the foot of the bed?

It was like my bulldog Costello that's snoring. I'm going to get another dog soon. So I would like a dog that breathes with less snoring than Costello. Although I must say I miss his bulldogs. His like incredibly deep snores. The early versions of this podcast, the early episodes, we kept him in the room snoring. by the way, the watering up on my eyes, these are truly tears of joy.

And I said at the beginning of the podcast, I said, listen, I have a bulldog, he's getting toward the end of his life. So we're gonna keep him in the room. And so when you hear that breathing in the background, that snoring, let's call it what it is. He's in here, like, so sorry, not sorry. So anyway, so yeah, so there's some bulldog breathing. You can have as many dogs in the room as you want. Just listen.

And maybe hear birds outside, maybe hear the ocean, maybe hear wind, maybe hear people talking or the noise of traffic. Just listen for a minute and tell you're pretty sure you've heard everything there is to hear. Yeah, I like the sounds of kids playing. Ah, sweet. Okay, so smell there. What's it like? How humid is it? What's the temperature? You know, I'm a California heart. I like it in the 70s and 80s. Perfect. Not too humid.

And it's weird that it jumps in, but there's something about the sound of airplanes flying over. Interesting. It always depresses me. It must be some paired association. From the time I don't like that. Okay, no planes. So birds, bird chirping, who doesn't like birds chirping. And by the way, for our listeners, this is not one magical day that you'll never live again. This is a typical day, but your life is now perfect. So it's an ordinary day, but in your perfect life.

So we'll put it out three years, five years, whatever makes it possible for you to allow that your ideal life could form in that time. You'll find as you do it many times, the time necessary for it to happen becomes much shorter. Anyway, so you get up, look around, you sit up in the bed, look around, who's next to you? What does the dog look like? What does the room look like? Yeah, it's my partner next to me.

My dog is, I told myself I wasn't gonna get another bulldog, but I think I'm gonna get another bulldog. They're the best. They're like the essence of efficiency of metabolism, meaning they do as little as possible, and they experience as much joy as possible. Their hedonist, when it really comes out. You need a wise hedonist in your life. Right, and they are capable of protecting if they need to, but I honestly don't care about that.

You know, all that stuff, like all that, like my bulldogs, I don't care about any of that. Something tells me you could protect yourself pretty well. Yeah, I'm good, I'm good there. So... Well, look around the room, what color are the walls? What pictures are hanging there, if any? Yeah, I'm a Wyeth fan, I'm a Wyeth fan. Which one, Andrew or Nancy?

Well, recently I saw a caption, I don't know if this is true, because it was an Instagram post, that the woman in the field, image, or seeing this world. That, yeah. I didn't know the name of it, thank you. That this was a neighbor of theirs that had a degenerative neural condition. And rather than use a wheelchair of sorts, she insisted on crawling everywhere. And so that image is actually of her crawling out into the field happily to enjoy the field. I know.

Because my impression of the painting before was that somehow, because she's seated up there, it looks like in my mind, I projected onto it that there's some desperation there, something to get back to the house, but that's not it at all. Turns out this is a woman who preferred to move with her own agency, even if it meant crawling to enjoy nature. And... It's a magnificent painting. It's a magnificent painting. So it's on the wall there.

Yes. Maybe not the original, although that would be awesome. Well, I know, it's your perfect look. Then I'm waking up in the Met. And also just notice that you're creating a theme, which is the theme is, I will go out as myself, and I will reach and strive for things. And I'm not here to be helped. I'm here to do hard things, and to do them for the joy of it. So that's what that painting is. Strong symbol of who you are. So get out of the bed, and your partner's still sleeping.

The dog's still sleeping. Go look out the window. Where are you? And you can be anywhere. I'm a mountains guy. As much as I love California, I've realized that I just went out to Boulder, Colorado for the first time for a week, just by myself, and I fell in love with it. Yeah. So I'm in the mountains. Colorado feels right to me. And there's water. Like a river. They've got great rivers there. Yeah, they go. Or the little streams. I like the little streams that they have there.

Because the rivers are so loud. Yeah. The rivers are really loud when they get going. Yeah. And. Yeah. So are you looking at a small town, a city, or do you just live out in the mountains by yourself? Definitely small town. I can't be too isolated. If I'm going to be in a city, I'm going to be in Manhattan. It's like it's all or none. Yeah. So if I'm going to be in nature, I want to be in nature. So a small town. Beautiful. So I just look around, smell the pine, aspen, air.

And then you go into your perfect bathroom. And it's all, it's beautiful. You can go through a lot of description if you wanted to. But I'm going to rush through that to get to the interesting parts. So you take a look at yourself in the mirror. Your body is absolutely perfect. Of course, in your case, that's not an aspirational thing. You're already there. But make it even better. Yeah. For me, that means being clear-eyed.

You know, I'm people who listen to this podcast to know that I came up through neuroscience studying a number of things, but the visual system. And you know, these two bits in the front of our skull are pieces of our brain. Yeah. The only pieces of our brain outside of our skull, and they, yes, they may be the windows to the soul if people want to refer to them that way. But to me, just feeling like my eyes are clear. Yeah. And there's a certain tone or something that I'm like, OK, like.

Well, there is a real clarity. I've seen it. I don't know if you've worked with people who are dying or who are really ill. Sometimes you'll see a shift in there, and the transparency of their eyes. There actually seems to be a radiance coming from the eyes who are gathered around the eyes. That's what I'm thinking, as you talk. Yeah. And I think it's the Buddhist that talked about, you know, it's someone who's at the level of their eyes, at the level of their skin.

Sort of like right there, as opposed to sunken back into their eyes. Yes. You know, and then, of course, some people are like really forward-wredening. That's so interesting. But this, and I also have been to work on the intersection between the visual system and the autonomic system, you know, so stress or calm. And I think what that's referring to, and I'm speculating here, is where we are alert but calm. Yes. So we're present alert but calm. And of course, that controls pupil size.

And all of this stuff, I do believe, has been understood in other traditions and ancient traditions through a kind of unconscious genius where they're recognizing all the symbols integrated of, you know, clarity of the eyes and level of the skin. And, you know, and of course, we can measure the stuff in the lab, but that's just isolating variables. So for me, it's, you know, looking in the mirror and like, okay, my eyes are clear.

This is so interesting because my friend Liz Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love, Fame, that she wrote something before she was famous where she dressed as a man for a week and walked around and she's tall and broad-joldered and has, you know, great chin. So she could get, she could look male. And she got herself all dressed up male and they faked a beard and everything. And then she had her friends come and the, a male friend said to her, no Liz, pull yourself back six inches away from your own eyes.

And she did it and then he said, now you're looking like a man. Interesting. And she walked around that way and she said it was the loneliest, saddest week she's ever experienced. Like, yeah, people gave her more respect in certain ways but she said when they told me to back away from my own eyes, it was like my soul went dim. Wow. And that's really, really interesting that you would say that exact distance. Yeah, it's like a retraction of our humaneness. That's fascinating.

I mean, I don't ever recall as a kid, you know, my dad or my mom or anyone telling me like where to place my vision. No, no, no, it's not. I'm probably guilty of being more expressive, emotional, effusive than certainly the traditional male stereotype. Right, right. Like if I love something, people are gonna hear about it. And I'm not shy about the fact that thinking about Costello or my graduate advisor or people I love, like, oh, well up and I'm okay with that.

Yeah. I think, well, to flip that one around, do you think that that's a real thing that? I have no idea. Do cultural conditioning that men and women tend to kind of be either more, I don't know, there's no language for this. I have an NF2, you and Liz Gilbert. Okay. All right. But I think it's very interesting that you said that, that you're forward and your eyes. And the idea that the eyes are the parts of our brains that are showing, it's fascinating that she had that experience too.

So I would love to, I'll be asking people from now on, if you're designated male, identified male, do you feel you have to pull your sort of vitality back from the world? And I suspect it's true. I suspect it's true just from interacting with people.

And ask women if they, I think it's more vulnerable to have be right on the surface of your life and in the surface of your eyes, but it's also much more, there's a sensuessness to the world when you're fully present that I know I had to shut down like when I was in the Ivy League, it was, I had to pull myself back and sink down and that's a typically male environment. I think it's about materialism and conquest and oppositional thinking as much as gender. It's very tactical.

Yes. I've taken what's out there and holding it in, I actually can do it. I know how to do it. You just did it. I know how to do this. It's like visible. Yeah, I probably just learned how to do it. Wow. Some comfortable in a lot of different environments. Right. There are certainly environments I don't want to find myself in, again, or in the future for the first time, but yeah, I'm very, very aware of what that, that distinct change in internal state that accompanies that.

That's so, that was so interesting that you just did that. Wow. Okay. The problem I'm having now is that I have, and I quote, an interest-based attention system. I love that. ADHD, which means I pay attention to things that interest me, which means that I literally follow squirrels away from business meetings. But I have paper and pen here. Okay. So because the art of podcasting, in my opinion, is that we can spend a couple different plates and return to them because it's like conversation.

Otherwise, we might as well be on a highly produced, traditional media show, and that's not what this is. Sure. So we're back. So I look in the mirror and I see, I'm like, you are clear. I'm clear and present. I'm clear. And of course, for those listening, you should all be doing this exercise for you. Right. Yes. Okay. Okay. And now you go to your closet, and you're going to get dressed. Open your closet, which is the closet of clothing you have in your ideal life.

And just look at the different outfits you have. The different, like, how many kinds of shoes are there? It's just pretty funny because I definitely have my ideal wardrobe, which is very sparse. I've always owned 20 or so of these button-down black shirts. Like, for work purposes, I like t-shirts that are super soft. And because I have a short torso and long arms, like, they have to, like, fit right. And so I find the ones that fit right. It's a nightmare trying to get them.

But once I get them, I adore them because I always own two belts or so, one watch, black jeans. The shorts I like, I get teased for wearing mailman shorts, but they're actually the cost-cone purchase, or like, Kmart purchase, like, mail person shorts. They fit best for me. And I've always worn Adidas. So I'm happy there. Oh, yeah. I own a pair of leather shoes. I have a suit. I actually own a tuxedo. Oh, my. I own those things. And I like my closet. I've always liked it.

If it's very safe in there, I like it. And then I've always kept a couple photographs of people that I love in my closet. Oh, sweet. So whose photographs are there? Do you see any photographs you don't recognize at this moment? It's my sister. It's my grandfather. And then, I think that's it. Yeah, it's my brother. Apologies to my parents. Apologies to my parents. Apologies to my parents. Apologies to my parents. And anyone else, forgive me. OK. Yeah. OK, so then you go through the whole day.

And I can spend at least an hour going through this with someone. And the important thing is that you do something I call the three ends. You notice what comes into the field of your imagination, but you don't try too hard to see it specifically. And then as you go through, you narrow down what it might be. And if the name of that thing comes up, you can then name it.

But for example, in one of my ideal days, I was writing short pieces of writing and I was interacting with people very regularly about it. And I couldn't even imagine what kind of job that was. And then an editor in Manhattan knocked over a manuscript I'd written. She was the editor of a Women's Magazine. And she called me and asked me to be a columnist. And I was like, oh, this was a magazine columnist for like 20 years. And it was exactly what was in the ideal day. But I had not named it.

I didn't know that you could live in Phoenix and be a columnist for New York magazines. So notice what you're doing. You put on your very comfy t-shirt, very cool black jeans. Your one wants your belt, your adidas. And you go do something really fun with people you really love in a place you really enjoy. Well, the work part of my life, quote unquote, work, is like reading and teaching and talking about stuff on the internet, which is podcasting.

But what I got a flash of is I'd want to work on my fish tanks with my kids. Oh, yeah. I see now I skipped a thing. Yeah, you're supposed to go down to breakfast and see if you've got a family. I do. I, um, yeah, I've always wanted kids and trying to time that correctly. What a hell. And with the right person. So yeah, I like tending to my fish tanks. I have kept fish tanks since I was a kid. I haven't had one for a few years now. But I like, I'm always setting them up for other people.

It's kind of interesting. I always go play in real life. I go, well, see, be home. I'm going to put a fish tank there. I don't know what to do. My interest based decision system just went, oh, really? You do it for other people. Oh, yeah, I'll show up. I'm like, will you let me in? Then I'll set it up and I love setting up fish tanks. It's like those who knows. So your kids are helping you. Yeah. How many kids are there realistically? No. In your imagination, you're going to 20 if you want to.

For some reason, I got obsessed with numbers for a while. But I was thinking like five or something. No, two. You never know. It could happen. The important thing about this exercise is you don't get logical about it. You don't think what's manageable and what's probable. And you just see who's there. Two feels good. All right. Fair enough. Two feels good. And yeah, there's so much life in a fish tank. There's the plants. There's the food. There's how the fish are interacting with one another.

Who's chasing? Who's nibbling? Who's hiding? Who's dominant? Who's being kind of unruly? And I must have seen the Finding Nemo movie, especially the second one. Like 12 times. Fabulous. Like 12 times. It's crazy. As an adult. It's not crazy. This is wonderful. So good. I just loved the personalities. I mean, any movie where Willem DeFoe, the voice of a fish, you're like, OK. Like I am. So. All right. So we tend to the fish tanks, which is great. It was just great pleasure.

And then for me, it's become here and sit down with you. And hang out with these guys and my team and share what I know to be really cool, truly useful, practices. Fabulous. So you're very, very close to your idea. They right now. And as you said, I don't know the mechanisms that get put in play. Certainly directed attention. You're now like a guided missile that knows where its target is or at least what the target looks like. And we all make countless decisions every day.

And you can think of it as a lot of little whys branching out. And if you've got this in your mind really clearly, you're going to take the option that leads to it. That's what I tell people. It's logical, directed attention. Except that in many cases, I have to say a miracle occurs. My favorite cartoon is this physics equation with these two physicists. And there are all these symbols on both sides of the board in the middle in brackets. It says a miracle occurs.

My dad's a theoretical physicist. So he will. But he will delight in that. As many of you know, I've been taking A.G.1 for more than 10 years now. So I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast. To be clear, I don't take A.G.1 because they're a sponsor. Rather, they are a sponsor because I take A.G.1. In fact, I take A.G.1 once and often twice every single day. And I've done that since starting way back in 2012.

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I mean, there are all these little things that also go into my perfect day that we don't have to go into every detail about like working out and the whole thing. But I just want to maybe mention a point of contrast that served as one of the reasons why I did this practice in the first place was that in real life, I was waking up and sometimes still do wake up with this underlying tension, like something's not right. I don't feel good. I wasn't anxious.

I wasn't like, but like something's not right. And I went through years of kind of like gnawing and scratching at different things that, you know, I quickly discovered, you know, like going out for a couple of drinks with people made me feel worse. I don't judge people who drink whatsoever. I'm like, I don't like this.

Like it doesn't, like it's just, but this unease, it's like a restlessness that lived inside of me for so long and still can surface as a signal that like this is not the right life. And at that point, at a laboratory, grants, were publishing papers, like all these things that I loved doing and that I loved the trajectory that I took to arrive there and the people that were in my life. But like, I just knew I could just say, like something's not right. And I felt terribly guilty.

The reason I'm telling this is I felt terribly guilty. Like I owned it home. I was in my mid 30s and it wasn't an expensive home. Certainly not by today's standards, but I was able to buy a home on my own. I was, I'm a dog. I had, you know, people in my life, but it was like this, it was almost like a gear that was grinding. And that was the stimulus for exploring this perfect day. My life looks completely different now.

And as far from, quote unquote, perfect, meaning, there's still work to do in a lot of domains a lot. But I feel like the trajectory is right. Yeah. And I really believe the source of all my work, you know, I was getting my doctor at Harvard. I'd gotten my bachelor's there. I'd been there since I was 17. And halfway through my doctorate, I, during that time, I'd gotten married, had a child. My second child was prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome.

And that was six months into the pregnancy, almost. And I had like two weeks to make a decision. And I'm politically very pro-choice. And I wouldn't, again, never judge anyone who made the other decision, but I couldn't do it. I was already sort of bonded to him. And I kept asking the question of myself, what makes a human life worth living?

Because the doctors at the Harvard Medical Clinic and all my advisors told me, you have got to, at the very least, institutionalize this child, the second he's born. Institutionalize. Oh, yeah, for sure. They said, you're throwing your career away. The head of the obstetrics committee, there were five obstetricians. And the chief dude came in. And there I was sitting on a bed in my little hospital napkin. And he said, this is like a cancerous tumor. You've got to let us take it out.

It will ruin your life. And I just looked at him. And I had the weirdest experience, I had to. I looked at this very intimidating guy. And I'm there, sort of, young and naked and pregnant. And suddenly, it was like I could see two faces on him. And one was this very stern knowledgeable doctor. And the other one was a terrified child. Terrified. And it was so striking that I started looking at him strangely. I'm sure he thought it was completely nuts.

But I looked at him and I thought, you're afraid. You're afraid of this baby. And I realized, that's what I realized, that a lot of people don't go to Harvard because they know they're smart. They go there because they're afraid they're stupid. And he was. Probably true for a lot of higher education, instead of just being stupid. And I thought he's afraid of the, in quote, stupid little boy inside me, because he's afraid of the stupid little boy inside him. He's terrified of being the person.

He's worked so hard not to be. He's afraid of being like my son. And he thinks that should be thrown away. And that was the point, which I said, I will not make my decisions based on social pressure. I have to do something from a very, very deep place within. And so I kept that, I mean, he's home right now. You know, we're having a great time. Adam. Right. My son, Adam. I only know his name through your books, of course.

But I feel like I know him a little bit, because I love the story about him peeing on the doctor. Yes, the very first thing I ever did in this life was the doctor pulled him out of my body and I saw this arc of urine go straight into the doctor's face. And I was like, so proud of my child that moment. I thought, if only I'd thought to do that. I want to just, if we're like a better way to put it, double click on two things.

First of all, I wonder if we're going to speculate, no need to, but if the perfect day exercise is really about accessing the subconscious. That's what I told that long story.

But when I had to make that decision, it was the first time I had dropped everything conscious and logical from my mind and come from a place that was, I believe it's part of our neurological apparatus, but the cognitive structures are so, you know, cognitive function is just a tiny fraction of what our whole nervous systems are able to detect and tell us. And for the first time, I was making a decision from every cell in my body instead of just my, you know, neocortex.

And I realized my life is not meant to go like his life. And the person in the next bed, their life isn't meant to be like mine. But we all have this programmed into us somehow. And when we start to leave it, in my last book, I called it leaving our integrity, because to be an integrity just means to be one thing. It doesn't have any moral implications in the original, like Latin, it just means integer, one thing.

So if we were born knowing who we are, but at some point, usually not long after birth, we get socialized away from expressing exactly what our own truth is telling us. We get socialized to behave in ways that please other people, very simple. And as you're describing it, I had a great life. I had a lab, I had a dog, I had a house. Those are all socially recognized items that say your life is working. But they have nothing to do with your personal destiny.

Right. In my case, again, I loved, and I still love doing science. I mean, my lab is certainly strong. I got it made sure people got placed in jobs in faculty positions, et cetera. Still involved in some clinical trials. But one thing that painted me about the work, I'll just come clean about this. Thanks for my throat. Lock up a bit is, I've been an animal lover since I was a kid.

I do eat meat from sustainable sources, but not all, but a lot of the work that I did in my laboratory was on animals. And at some point, it was approximately halfway through my first position. I realized I was like, I don't like this. And we could talk all day about animal research and animal research. I decided to work on humans instead, because they can consent, and they house themselves. But so there were some pain points. But I think my unconscious was pulling at me.

Like this isn't good, this isn't good. And for me, and I do think that the conscious mind and the logical mind as you're referring to it, is very tactical. And part of the problem is it works so well, works in quotes, to move us forward on metrics related to that. Exactly. But I mean, there are very few people that I know who are truly aligned with their, I guess what you've called, essential self.

One, who I'm fortunate to be good friends with, he just so happens to be famous for lack of a better word, who resonates with a lot of what we're discussing is the great Rick Rubin. The music producer has produced all these different types of music. And one thing that's really interesting about Rick, I've spent a lot of time with Rick, and communicate all the time. And one thing that is very interesting about him is he has incredible powers of observation.

He can really feel the energy of a musical artist, or any of his produced other things too. He does great documentary. He's got his own great podcast. But he doesn't get absorbed by it. And I wanted to talk to you about this, because I, you know, I think for people that are very feeling, very sentient, or really in touch with that, the ability to like feel music, to feel other people's emotions, to really, that's a beautiful life, to taste food.

But there's a threshold beyond which we kind of lose ourselves in the experience of others and what's going on. Yes. Rick can go right up to that line, and really see it and enjoy it, but it doesn't absorb him. In a way that he has a place that he returns to that's in him. And the reason I discovered this is I said, wait, you don't drink alcohol. He said, no, I said no drugs. He said, no. Doesn't judge it, but he doesn't do it. I said, did you ever?

He said, no. And I said, who comes up through music? Yeah. And never takes a sip of alcohol. Goes to college and never took a sip of alcohol, tried any drug. And again, I don't judge. I've talked about psychedelics on this podcast. I've talked about my own relationship to those, what I think are very interesting. Clinical trials and things like that sort. I think there's tremendous potential there. I agree.

But what is it to be able to experience life in the richest way, but make sure that we don't get lost in feeling or in thought? It's like the ability to move back and forth seems to be the best definition of a great life, in my opinion. Because we need to do things each day. I would say you don't even have to go back and forth. You can do it all at once. You can feel, you can think, and you can stay in the driver's seat and not be overwhelmed, either intellectually or emotionally.

But I think it has a lot to do with you talking about Asian Eastern meditation practices. There's a little exercise I like to do with people where if they're struggling with a bad habit, I say, imagine the part of you that is always doing the bad thing, smoking 20 packs a day or whatever. Imagine them as a wild thing in your left hand. And then imagine the part of you that hates them and says, stop smoking in your right hand and look at them and begin to see that they're both well-meaning.

They're both exhausted. And you can wish them both well. So the wild child part is not thinking. It's just feeling. The controlling part is not feeling. It's just thinking. And if I can get people, and I have them put their hands out because I know it's going to activate both sides of their brains. And then I have them wish these people well, maybe well, maybe happy. When they can feel compassion for both sides of themselves, then I ask them, so who are you?

And who they've become is a compassionate witness, which is not thinking. And it's not feeling in the way we... It's not emotional. Emovar, the word emotion means movement disturbance. This part of one's being is not ever disturbed or moved. It's totally still and totally peaceful and completely compassionate. It's like the ultimate parent. Yes, it is. And Dick Schwartz, who came up with the model of internal family systems theory, I don't know if you've had him on the show.

Have not, but I'm learning more about internal family systems models. I learned about this first in the context of visiting a trauma healing center. That's great for you. And then people are now applying this to addiction as well. Yeah. I'll get his name from you later. Richard Schwartz. Anyway, I was talking to him and he said, there is this part. We all have different parts. There's a part of you that feels like a little kid and wants to curl up in bed.

There's a part of you that wants to go rule the world. Whatever your parts are. So he talks to people about these different parts and then sometimes they say, oh, I've just come up against. There's someone here who's very still, who's very huge, who's very kind. And he calls itself with a capital S. And he says after thousands of patients, they'll say what part of you is that. And they say, oh, this isn't a part like the others. This is who I am. This is who I am.

And he believes it's just one unified self. And for me, if I don't find and lock into that self, I am immediately swept away by my emotions and my brain, just like in a gale force winds. So I have to be very not grounded, but centered. And identified with this self before I can even leave the house. How do you go about doing that?

And one of the reasons I'm asking this is because I think everyone, including myself, would do well to be able to access this compassionate witness self, but also because so many people are on social media nowadays, where you can almost feel yourself getting pulled down these trajectories, like the gravitational pull of a battle or a video or even something that's delightful, but then you find like two hours went by and you were over consumed and under-created in some sense.

Like junk food, it tastes delicious, but then you feel like that. It goes nowhere. Yeah, this sort of goes nowhere. So do you have a practice that you use to make sure that you're in that place? I do. And it's called suffering. It's very reliable. It made me laugh. My best friend, suffering. I have a deeply love-hate relationship with suffering. If I'm, for example, I can barely look at Instagram because I will watch a monkey nursing a kitten and then I will be down that rabbit hole so far.

You're only both. And eight hours later, I'm the... But I will start to suffer. I will start to physically feel cramped. My eyes will start to hurt and water and I will start to feel what you were saying, the grinding of a gear that is wrong. The machine isn't... It's not in structural integrity. It's like when your car starts making a funny sound and you're like, I should not ignore that. And it always feels like discomfort, tension, anxiety, anger, any of those things.

And then the practice of my life is to notice those sensations at a finer and more granular level so that the moment I'm off-true, I can stop and say, okay, woo, out of integrity, okay. Now I'm into anxiety because a divided person is always anxious. So to get away from that from anxiety and back to true, I use the body, sit back, straighten my spine, take a deep breath, do all the things that I'm sure you do when you meditate.

And then I sink into that part of myself that I was just trying to pull up for people with two hands exercise. And I believe you could probably tell me the truth of this. I believe that I've wired a pretty strong super-highway in my brain that goes, oops, suffering, find self with the capital S. And I've done it so many thousands of times that I think I have like a highly-mile-in-aided circuit that just goes there, sure. And then no matter what's happening, I can usually just find it, feel it.

And it's an exquisite sensation. It's like coming home completely over and over again. It's, and now when I do an ideal day, everything else is incidental. The key is I'm in that self. So the state is what's key? Yes, and it is so, it has so much fun in this world. And so you can walk around in that state. Oh yeah, sure. You can, so to be sure I understand, so say I wake up in the morning and I'm just like not feeling right or something triggers me or, I don't know, just like I'm off center.

Right. You take that sensation of suffering. Yeah. And you don't fear it, you don't amplify it, you just kind of pay attention to it. You pay attention to it. And here is the key thing. This is in my new book. I kept this a secret because it sounded so silly and I thought this would never go in the Ivy League. But there's something I call KIST KIST and it stands for kind internal self talk. So what do you call yourself when you think to yourself? Andrew, Andy, what do you call yourself?

You. Yeah, just yep. So you'd be sitting there and you don't feel good, you don't feel right. The first thing you do is allow yourself to register every sensation without pushing back, without restricting it. People talk to me about bringing down their anxiety. And I say, how do you feel if I told you I was gonna bring you down? That's done a nice thing to say. If I told you, I'm here to understand you and care about you, better.

So just allow yourself to feel all the suffering and then start saying kind things to the one who is suffering. Even if it's just tiny suffering, just go, how are you? How you doing? Not great. Okay, so there's some anxiety. Oh, your sinuses are blocked too. Let's see what could we do for you? Let's get you a hot drink and like a call with a good friend or a book or something. And you just actively work as your own caregiver from the moment you are conscious in the morning.

And what that does is it makes you so compassionate to other people, because you're not fighting the suffering in yourself. Yeah, people in pain are usually agitated and grumpy. And so it's the inverse of that. Yeah. Yeah, I love this. I mean, in some sense, the words, like self parenting, keep coming up in my mind. Because a lot of this is about learning to parent ourselves from the inside.

Yeah. And I do think that most, you know, we hear about inner child stuff and I think inner child work is very interesting. I also think that as a biologist who spent the early part of my career on developmental neurobiology, like the same neural stuff is repurposed in adulthood. Like that's something that it's kind of obvious, but we overlook. Right. I'm like, I've got some inner adults here who aren't very happy too, you know? Right, right, right.

You know, but the notion that like our attachments when we're young, somehow that like those neural circuits are set aside so then we can form more mature adult attachments. You know, it's like, no, it's crazy. We repurpose them. So we're working in an adult landscape with child-based algorithms. And depending on how childhood went, you know, that either can be spectacular or so-so or a complete disaster. Usually it's a combination.

That obstetrician at Harvard, I would bet my last dime that he was still working on the same circuits he used when he was five and they were pretty scary, you know? Like so, yeah, we all have multiple causes of suffering but we also have, I wouldn't actually call it interparenting because that basically implies that only parents give that to children. And I think it's just humaning.

If you are truly humane, if you are truly in a state of self with a capital S, there is nothing in you that wants to cause suffering for any other being. Right. And there is nothing in you that doesn't want to help ease the suffering of the entire world. So again, now I'm into a kind of Asian modality of there's this bodhisattva prayer that goes for us. As long as space endures and as long as sentient beings exist, may I also abide that I might heal with my heart the miseries of the world.

And that part of us is in everyone. And if we become those people, it won't just be parents being kind to children. It will be humans being kind to each other, the earth and all other beings. And we may actually make it into another century. Yeah, no, it's looking a little sketchy right now. I mean things are tense. It sounds like it starts with self love compassion. Like only from that place of compassionate witness, self with a capital S, excuse me, can we be at our best for others?

I believe it's actually the only part of us that's real. I talked a minute ago about people who are dying. They drop the pretence. They don't need the pretence of belonging to the material world or the material body anymore. And that radiance begins to gather in their eyes. And it's not new. It's what they came in with. If you've looked into the eyes of a young child, a little baby, you see the same thing. And it's only when people die that they put down everything else.

And less, as Eckhart told us as you die before you die, and learn that there is no death. Because that self does not feel physical. It feels metaphysical. But let's, if you would, let's drill into this a little bit more. Because this is a high level, but at the same time, basic and yet abstract concept. And it's not often on this podcast that we talk about abstract concepts. We probably don't do it enough.

We get, I like to talk about protocols, you hear sunlight, unclear days, and I love that stuff too. But as probably people realize by now, I think a great life is bridging as many things, at least for me, as possible, and seeing the overlap in the Venn diagrams. So it's the only part of us that's real. Meaning the other parts are just conditioned. I think you've said. The other parts are impermanent. They will vanish.

Everything, as Shakespeare says, everything will just disappear and leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on. There is an experience that is common to individuals all over the world in different cultures at different times, where they start to say they feel that they've awakened from a dream. Plato did it with his cave analogy. He said, imagine that we all live in a cave, and there's a fire behind us, and we see shadows on the wall, and that's what we call reality.

And then someone gets out of the cave and goes outside and sees this three-dimensional world where everything's bright and mobile, and goes back and says, people, the shadows on the wall are real, they're real shadows, but they're not the ultimate reality. You should come outside and see it and Plato said, everybody would say he was crazy. And that's what academia says now.

You're crazy if you've ever had an experience where you felt like there was something realer than your physical self, you're crazy. Re-implato. What's interesting because a few years ago, so many concepts that I was intrigued by, breathwork, for instance, psychedelics, meditation. I mean, now people get federal grants to study this stuff. And we do reductionist work to try and understand it. In fact, I had to disguise breathwork as a respiration physiology.

Which we did, and we did a clinical trial, and lo and behold, certain patterns of breathing, shift your internal state, and you're sleeping your anxiety. It's like a, it's like a giant, but it was scary territory for a while. And now psychedelics have kind of broken through as, I mean, I just have to say this with, like while touching my forehead and like, that they adjust neuromodulators, just like, but differently then, certain drugs that adjust neuromodulators and everyone accepted.

So the idea of changing neuromodulators to change conscious experience, and in that altered experience, to be able to achieve neuroplasticity is like a, it's also a big duh. Of course it works that way, but six years ago you'd get fired from the university if you said, well, maybe psilocybin could be an interesting compound for, you know, depressed people.

But, and by the way, I'm not suggesting everyone run out and take a bunch of psilocybin, especially if you're depressed, but they're not without supervision. But if you can get somebody really good at it, yeah. I'm not saying do it either, but I'm not saying, don't do it. Right, and there, and if you're, you know, or gun shy on these things, contact a local university, they're likely doing a clinical trial on this. We can provide some links to clinical trials.

I think the data are incredibly interesting. In any case, the, I guess the point is that I feel like academia is kind of coming around, probably due to the suffering of people in it. Yeah. Where then they know somebody who achieved some relief through meditation or some benefits of meditation. So now, you know, everyone I think accepts, like meditation can be very useful for lowering stress and altering conscious experience. This is not new stuff as everyone knows.

It's gone back thousands of years. So it sounds like getting into the capital S self, the compassionate witness is step number one. And so I just want to make sure that we make clear how one does that. Yeah, it's not step number one is suffering. Okay. We all have that. You may have never felt good in your life, listener, but you have suffered. That's for sure this first noble truth of Buddhism. There is suffering in this life. Pay attention to your suffering without fighting it.

Allow it to be there. I did this meditation of something physically painful or emotionally painful. I used to say, let go, let go to myself, didn't work. So one day I said, all right, you can stay, let it stay. And so I do a let stay meditation. If there's pain, let it stay. If there's sorrow, let it stay. And as soon as I let it stay, it begins to change. So first step is suffering, second step is compassionate attention to one suffering with no resistance.

And the third step is to follow the compassion that is naturally being directed toward that suffering until you find yourself centered in it. And that is a huge relief. And I've done this in massive physical pain. I've done it when I just lost people I love. It's a very powerful, maybe not a panacea, but not that far from it. If you can get there, you're still suffering, but there's a piece that holds the suffering so lovingly that it no longer concerns you.

So on one level, that you're suffering and on a different level, which feels more real to me, there's only peace and compassion and wonder and joy. And somebody asks me once, if there's a metaphysical reality, why is there suffering? And I just heard coming out of my mouth because the self loves experience and is not afraid to suffer. So it's not afraid. So then staying in that is highly motivated by the suffering you feel when you leave. So to me, that's first step, suffer.

Second step, pay attention to suffering. Third step, follow compassion to its origin. Fourth step, never stop doing that. And every day. Every minute. Yeah. Yeah, this is very relevant to me. I have always wondered about, like, do you push back against the feeling? Do you live with the feeling? Do you let it amplify? There's so much contradiction in inside of the typical discussion of these kinds of things.

That's one of the reasons I love your work so much is that you don't tell people what to do, but you provide paths. Absolutely. Absolutely, you do. Absolutely. I'd like to talk about two things. You know, before I came in here, I did a little meditation. I do this before every episode, but today I just, it like took only like a minute because it came to me so fast, which is the two words that pop to mind where, you know, what's real, what is true?

I mean, I think so much of what we're talking about in so much of life is like, what's real, what's true? Yeah. Certainly out in the world, but like in us. Yeah. What I'm hearing is that at some level, we need to not trust our thinking, but of course, there are times when we need to trust our thinking. Yeah. And then of course we're receiving messages about what's real, what's not real, what's true, what's not true. Sometimes about us. I mean, there's all this childhood programming.

Right, right. How do we start to sort through this? I'm guessing that it has something to do with being in that compassionate witness place. But yeah, but let's say, well, you've experienced in your life, I know because you've written and talked about this. And I certainly have now that by some interesting twist of fate, I'm a public facing person, people saying things about you or about me that are not true. Yeah. Or that are judgments that don't feel good. Yeah. And we are not alone in this.

Or you don't have to be public facing in order to experience this. People all the time are being told they are stupid. Sometimes they're being told they are brilliant and they know they're not brilliant. And you know, this can go in every direction. How are we supposed to hold the narratives, the voices that we hear in our head and outside us in a way that really allows us to be our best essential selves? Well, can I reverse it and talk about what's true first?

So I remember sitting when I was 17 in the Lamont library at Harvard, contemplating ending my life. And like, actually ending your life. Yes. Yes. And looking at the equally miserable scratches that other teenagers had put in the wood there and I thought, OK, they say the truth will set you free. All right. I'll give it a try. And I just started trying to find out what was true.

And I read through all the works of the greatest philosophers until I got to a manual con who says everything is screened through our perceptions. So we can't know that anything is true for certain. And I felt such relief. OK, I can't intellectually know what's true. Then if it's not true, if I can't intellectually know something's true because everything's subjective, what's useful? What feels like truth to the body?

And I was interested that, for example, polygraph machines work because the body hates to lie. It starts to send up a whole bunch of activation of stress systems and puts you in fight or flight and everything. When you tell a lie or when you keep a secret. So I just started thinking, all right, what makes my body contract and weaken? And what makes my body feel peaceful, centered, and grounded? And you do so much work with the body.

I love that you're a brain body scientist because the body is incredibly wise. So I just started letting myself test things like I was raised Mormon and very, very Mormon. So OK, Mormonism. Oh boy, that makes me feel good at all. It wasn't for you. Oh. And OK, so God is not a white man who lives near the planet colobe. OK, that is not true. OK, that feels better. OK, so I started following what made my body relax.

Because my whole body, as I said a few minutes ago, is far more sophisticated has spent far more time being tinkered with by evolution than my human ability to think in language. So it has a response to truth or falsehood that's more subtle and sophisticated than my intellectual knowledge. That's how I made the decision to keep my son. That's how I've made almost all my decisions. Does it make my body relax? And then does the mind come to the party and make the math work?

OK, Mormonism says that all the American Indians are descended from a group of Israelites who came across in 600 BC and about to the Americas. OK, does the math work? What does the genetic evidence say? No, they came over the illusion straights and down into the Americas. When I was living in Utah, they excommunicated a DNA expert from the Mormon Church for doing the date and for finding the data that said, the Mormonism's claims were wrong.

So something that makes my body relax where it's also logically coherent. That's the first thing. And then what you find is if you really pursue that, what is true, what is true, what is true, everything that makes you suffer turns out to have flaws in the logic, including I will die, because I can't know. I have no idea. So to say that I will go out like a candle when my body dies is just as fundamentalist as saying, I'm going to go sit on a cloud and play a harp.

I don't know. Miss Argadatta Maharaj, one of my favorite yogis, says the only true assertion that the mind can make is I do not know. But you can feel what feels right to you. So that's what ends up being real. What's left over when you eliminate all the things that feel deeply untrue to your body and don't make logical sense. And some of those are things that our culture is very fond of. Like everything has to be measured or it's not real. Is that true? So it sounds like challenging.

We're sitting with doctrine and labels and stories that we've heard and that maybe we've internalized. And just. We've internalized them. Yeah. And systematically exploring how those make us feel in our body. Yeah. I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge one of our sponsors waking up. Waking up is a meditation app that offers hundreds of guided meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga knee gerosessions, and more.

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I recall the inverse of the perfect day exercise was another one that I did, which was like, just call it what it was, it was like the sucky day, like the shitty day, right? Or just where you'd imagine something really terrible, and then how it would cause the body to contract. Oh yeah. And to recognize the other side of the coin, you're right? And just learning that relationship between the body and thought.

Yeah. I mean, I can say from my own experience that one of the biggest mistakes I ever made was teaching myself to be more resilient to certain forms of stress. Really? One of the worst mistakes I ever made. Say more. I mean, and my lab studies stress, and I talk about stress relief and physiological size are a great way to reduce real time stress. And I stand by that. So I'm not talking about that.

I stand by meditation and sauna's, and all the things that make us feel vacation, the things that relax us. So I'm not saying the ability to modulate stress is incredibly powerful and useful. I believe that for sure. But when I was a kid, I wasn't the kid that was gonna hold the firecracker to the last second. Right. I wasn't the kid that would do the really daring thing. I had friends like that. And I felt kind of sheepish about that. Those friends are probably dead by now.

They're not doing well. That's true. And I grew up in the then very parentless community of skateboarders that a lot of us were really wild. We were very free, which I loved, the freedom part. But there was a lot of mayhem and craziness, especially back then. Yeah. And it's a beautiful culture. I'm still friends with a lot of those folks.

But those cultures split off basically into thirds over time, about a third dead or in jail, about a third doing incredibly well, personally and professionally, incredibly well. And then a third doing well, but they're not still as ambitious about that. They're more focused on their personal lives. And I hope that's what they want to be doing. So that's kind of how it broke down.

But I remember as a young kid, and then in that culture, like learning to push myself, past the feeling of like this is dangerous. To the point where, as I got older and my body eventually got stronger because back then I was always getting hurt, which is why I left that sport wasn't very good. I, for the record, wasn't very good. Good enough, but not not where I wanted to be. That over time, I remember when I started doing science, I realized, this is crazy.

skateboarding, you fall, you hurt yourself so badly, you can't do it anymore. That doesn't happen with studying. So I'll just study until I collapse. I'll just work until I'm sick. I'll just, that person down the hall puts in 80 hours, well then I'll do 100. And I'm not a competitive person by nature. And, or even worse, in my mid 40s, getting into stupid stuff, KJegsick, great white shark diving to the point where I had an air failure. And this is all this whole thing.

And then coming back from them to the lights, like what am I doing? And what had happened is I learned to override the signals of the body. Right. And it was like, when is enough enough? It's like when the reaper comes. Yeah. And so I think that if we don't listen to the signals that our body says, and we learn to override them repeatedly and systematically, we can place ourselves into real psychological, emotional, and physical danger. Yeah. And I just, like, I don't know why.

I just felt like this was a need to do this in order to grow up. And now I try and do the exact opposite. It's like, and then I feel bad. I feel kind of lazy. I'm like, I'm not like running at 5 a.m. I'm like sleeping at 5 a.m. I'm doing yoga, I'm doing yoga, I'm doing yoga, at 7 a.m. because I didn't feel I slept enough. And then I have friends in the public facing, you know, health, the health space that are like, they push so hard. I'm lazy. And then so it can go too far.

Well, we have this culture of push, push, push, produce, produce, produce. One of my favorite heroes, along with Oliver Sax, is Ian McGill-Christ at Oxford. I love that, man. I may Sunday, he may wake up. Something they just just find me crouched on his bed, watching him sleep. He's like, he's not just a neural. He don't be so don't be stupid. Not in a creepy way, not in a creepy way, sir.

But he talks about how our particular culture for the last few hundred years has veered towards stuff that is preferentially favored by the left hemisphere of the brain. And it has to do with grasping things and producing physical things and getting things to happen, controlling them, where the right side of the brain, and of course, it's all, I'm oversimplifying massively. But functions like meaning, synthesis, combinations of different bits of knowledge were moving away from those.

And one of my good friends is Jill Bulti-Taylor, who had, she was a Harvard Neuroanautomist, and she had a massive left hemisphere stroke. And so she suddenly, she watched her left hemisphere go off. She had a brain bleed, and it would pulse. So her left hemisphere would be there. And she'd say, everything is solid and measurable and verbal. And then it would go off. And she was in a world where she was like a fluid, the size of the universe.

And she would watch, she was in the shower, and she watched her hand on the tiles dissolve into fields of energy. And you were talking about energy earlier. She said, by the time her left hemisphere had shut down completely, she managed to get a phone call made. She couldn't talk by the time the phone call went through. She got to a hospital, took her eight years to come back to full functioning. But she said, during that time, I did not know people's names.

I didn't know the word person, but boy, could I feel people's energy? And as she healed, she didn't bother to get rid of her ability to feel people's energy. So she's a great fan of using the whole brain, whole brain living, is her latest book, and it's great. But Ian McGillchrist talks about how when we don't use the whole brain, his book, The Master and his Emissary says, the part of the brain that knows meaning should be the master and the data collector is just the Emissary.

But the data collector has taken over in Western society, Western educated industrialized rich democratic, if you want to get technical. And so what you were doing to yourself was completely irrational, completely. You should get the Darwin Award for taking yourself out of the gene pool. It was like this stupidest thing. I remember thinking, what am I doing? And of course, we used it to get virtual reality for our lab.

We did a bunch of things that were useful, that we transmuted into studies on stress. So there was always a purpose and a story that could justify being there. Oh, there is. And one that was really rooted in goodness and adventure. I love adventure, and I'm super curious. I think it's cool that you did that. I think it's really useful. I mean, there are many situations where your ability to do that could be really useful. Like a pair of scissors could be really useful.

But when you're like trying to re-diper the baby, you put the scissors down. It's a tool that you can use. And it's fascinating. I did martial arts for eight years. And I loved pushing myself to the point where I was bruised and bleeding. And my doctor thought I was a victim of domestic abuse. I think it's useful and even fun. But you have to know when your heart's in it.

And when your heart is not in it, when yourself is delighting in the adventure, and when self says, no, Andrew, peace, be still. Enough. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a perfect segue. But before I move on, I want to make sure that I linked back what you said, because I think it's exceptionally valuable about what's real, what's true.

So to really evaluate what's true, you need to sit or maybe one can learn to do this while in motion and sense within one's body what feels liberating, the opening versus what feels contracting. Is that right? The booty used to say, he said this often, that wherever you find the ocean, whatever it looks like, you can know it because the ocean always tastes of salt.

And wherever you find awakening or enlightenment, no matter what it looks like, you will know it because it always tastes of freedom. So it's not that you stop suffering is that you are free. You are free to interact with your own suffering in a new way. And that is peace. So you look and it literally physically affects the body as not free, free.

And if anybody out there listening, go to a really rough time in your life and imagine it, I mean, go to that time in your life when you were pushing yourself. And you can actually remember the tightness in your throat in your back and your, it's contracted. And then remember the best moment of your life and what was happening then. And all your muscles will loosen, relax and open. And that is my gauge of truth. Does it set me free? The truth sets you free.

So whatever sets you free is the truth. Then reality is going to start changing for you with or without psychedelics. And I remember sitting in the, I had this overwhelming obsession with meditation when I turned 50 and I just bought this place in the woods in Central California and I'd go out and sprinkle myself with bird seed and meditate in the forest all day while the chipmunks came and the birds would land on me. Nice. Oh, that was amazing.

And about six months into really meditating for hours every day, I kinda had an experience like Jill, multi-tailor in the shower where I was in the forest with the chipmunks and birds and then it was just light. And it was like, it was so startling. It was like and falling off a cliff. Like I couldn't see the ground. I couldn't, and then everything was back. And then it started happening a lot. And I read in Shamanic traditions, they call this experience stopping the world.

And it can happen through the guidance of a shaman or a plant or whatever. It was happening to me through meditation. And in that space of light, which I stopped fearing after a while, it looked as if this thing we're doing now is a video game. If you and I were sitting and playing a video game, you would choose a character. I would choose a character. You'd stab me with a sword. I'd hit you with a mace. And we would say, you are hurting me. You are killing me.

But really we'd be talking about characters in a video game. And then somebody would come say, let's go get lunch and we would put it down and go stop stabbing each other and be friends. It feels to me as if this is more like a game than reality. The whole physical everything. And I call this you me and you call that me and I call it you. And when the game stops, however that happens, there's a level of reality as different from this one as a video game is from three-dimensional life.

There's a world outside the cave. And I don't know what it is. And I may be wrong, I don't care. I love it. I'm an invention Rick Rubin again, a few years back. I called him up and I just said, like Rick, you're not gonna believe this. And I relayed him a story about someone that I knew really well and this like very, like just kind of wild set of discoveries that someone else had unearthed about their life being completely different than it had been presented. And their business was a big fail.

So like the whole thing just collapsed and Rick just wrote back, he said, back to nature, the only truth. Like that's very Rick, like he's, you know, that's how he talks. He's not a real act. Exactly, he said, he said, well, actually, sorry, it was preceded by, he said, I said, did you read this? Do you see this? I can't believe this and I like, you know, this person really well and like I can't, like for a very long time and he just said, it's all lies, back to nature, the only truth.

And I just like, and that just like tattooed in my brains because so much of what we see and like the shock and like I can't believe it. And I think he was referring to something similar. He also has said, and you're gonna get a kick out of this. I think so Rick loves professional wrestling. He watches 10 hours a week of professional wrestling. Why? Well, first of all, he believes that it's the only thing that humans have created that's real. Why? Because everyone agrees that it's not real.

It's fake. It's fake. And that he likes that no one gets hurt. I mean, people actually can get hurt, but that no one's trying to actually hurt the other person. They're collaborating in this kind of Shakespearean dance that they do. And you have the different characters. And so I went to see professional wrestling with Rick thinking like, what am I doing here? Like it was like loud in the flames and all this. Like not a scene I would normally take myself to on a Friday. And it was so much fun.

And mostly because of how delighted Rick was. It's seeing it in his son as well. So we can distinguish or like really identify what's true through this practice. As close as we can. We can't ever know completely what's true. The whole the Baconian method is except nothing until it's proven true. Well, we can't prove anything true. We could all be dreaming this. So I decided that I would accept everything in time convinced that it's false. So I don't really believe anything. But I'm willing to.

Like a scientist. Yeah, I don't believe anything because I can't. Nothing can be absolutely proven. But I do know what's most useful to me, what makes me healthy. I have had a really, really sick week body most of my life. And it became a big part of my navigational system. I now think I have the MCAS, Mass Cell Activations and you put out a podcast on that. My daughter's been diagnosed with it. I probably have it.

And it's just this weird random thing where you get symptoms in different parts of your body. It's overactive immune system. Yeah. And it'll protect you from cancer. Doesn't really. Well, it turns out that people that run more towards autoimmune conditions, like people who have skin conditions that are autoimmune based have fewer skin cancers. Because the immune system is combating all these invaders. So there's an upside.

And this is the basis of a lot of the logic related to immunotherapies for cancers is trying to have the immune system fight off these mutations that are always occurring in the background. Wow. So I'm not trying to take away from the suffering it's created. But that's an upside. And my mother had it. And I just wish she had lived to see the diagnosis even exist. But my daughter called me from England the other day. And we were talking about the fact that she has that diagnosis.

And she said, I am allergic to my own goddamn emotions. And I was like, yeah, we both are. And my whole journey has been really, really accelerated by the fact that if I go off true for myself emotionally, psychologically, metaphysically, whatever, I immediately get physical symptoms of some kind. But when I am true to myself, they all subside and I get this unbelievable health. So I've been told that I had five different progressive, incurable diseases. I don't have any symptoms.

But if I allow myself to be untrue to myself, if I allow myself to get out of integrity, I suffer intensely and immediately in a very real way. So I don't know what's true, but I know it keeps me healthy. And I know it feels like freedom. And if I hit a thought like there is nothing to us, but physical matter, and it feels like tension, when I put down my dog and I felt something go through me as she died, it was like I don't know whether that I was feeling something that was real.

But that's as close to the truth as I can get. And see, right now, what's happening to me? I'm getting into this self thing. And as I'm talking about this dog, I feel that dog. And I can feel, I mean, the sound crazy. No, you get not if you're talking about dogs and feeling. I know, right. You might make me cry because I'm thinking about, no, because I think I can sense it. I think I can sense it. And forgive me if I'm like, you know, like now sounding like totally crazy.

If anyone's listening, like this, I will say, and I have a, I'm just going to be blunt. I got a lot of training in neuroscience. I got decades of training in it. And I'll tell you, the notion of energy is not mysterious at all. I mean, neurons are electricity in chemical exchange. And that happens locally, and it happens at a distance. Yeah, our phones are electronic circuits that communicate at a distance. We are electronic circuits. Why shouldn't we communicate at a distance? That's right.

And the really forward thinking neuroscientists are starting to put multiple people into scanners and putting people in scanners in different locations. And I know it sounds like people are like, oh, no, like what are you talking about? This is like spoon bending stuff. No, the idea that thought and emotion at one location can impact thought and location. Another one is that magnetoreception has been published in the journal science. Yeah. So we're not outside the bounds of reality.

We are actually finally as a field, starting to acknowledge that this stuff exists and starting to poke and prot around in there. But people have known about this. So for you, the sensing of your dog passing or you can feel them present. That my dog was a physical entity, but my dog was also an energetic entity. And that entity was something I could feel. And this is, I don't know how many a couple of years later, I start talking about that dog. I feel it again. And it is a, I have it.

OK, so when I was pregnant with my son Adam, but one of the big reasons I chose to keep the baby is that from the moment he was conceived, I started having experiences that completely blew apart my understanding of reality. My husband at the time was traveling in Asia a lot. And when I would think about him, it would happen a lot at night for me. I'd be like lying in bed and I would think about him. And it would be daytime in Asia.

And I would suddenly be like in a three-dimensional movie where I'd be walking down a street in Japan or flying over a thunderstorm in an airplane. And I'd see these very specific things, very specific. And then he would call me like the next day and say, oh, I was walking down this street in Japan. And I saw this very specific banner. And I flew over a thunderstorm and the lightning was amazing. And I started to realize I was picking up information that he was seeing. And it was testable.

It kept happening. So what is that? It would have been so non-scientific of me to say that is completely insignificant and don't pay any attention. It just was too weird. And so that's when I decided I'll believe anything until I convinced it's false. And that throws your whole mind open to understanding the universe as being far more mysterious than we, than our culture likes to say it is. And yes, there's a danger of getting woo-woo and crazy. But as I said, the map has to work too.

And you're just telling us how the neurophysics of energy are being tested and shown to be operative. It's not woo-woo. It's just at the outside edge of what our culture is willing to accept. And the instruments we have to measure things are just not there yet. But the same was said about most everything that has been clearly discovered and is rock solid over the last 50 plus years, at least in neuroscience.

I can't help but just briefly share when I put Costello down, because I did that myself, which sucked. But I didn't want to, I mean, so the vets, they came to the house, but it was at home. And I was right there. I didn't do the injection. OK, good. No, no, no. Originally, I thought I would, because unfortunately, because of my previous job, I had to do that a number of times. That's cool. That is not an accident. No. But what was interesting is he let out a big sigh right there at the end.

But the wildest part of it was, and I swear, it sounds like I'm making this up. But at the moment he went, I felt my heart heat up. I thought I was going to be crushed like a broken heart. And I swear, it felt as if he was giving me all this energy back. And it's because I had been spending so much time he was up in the middle of the night a lot. He must have had some dementia or that kind of thing. And I mean, I had that dog on everything. I was injecting my testosterone for the last part.

Made him a lot healthier, folks. Don't let your dog breed. Indiscriminately, but I've got my theories about all the stuff at hormones and animals that a lot of the vets are aligned with me on this one. Talk to your vet. Talk to a progressive vet. I had him on a bunch of different drugs. I had him. He was really unhappy. So letting it, it was the right thing to do. And I'll stop talking about it because I'll get to worked up. But forgive me. But that feeling, it was like, whoa.

And I can still feel it. It's like he gave something back that now, I think enough times pass, I go get another dog. It was almost like, oh, here's all this resource and gratitude. And so these things sound kind of woo, right? Could you do an experiment where you put me in the lab while I go through that shore? Would you see huge physiological changes?

Sure. I don't see the point of that kind of experiment because I think enough people have experienced these kinds of things that it's not necessary. In any case, I want to talk about integrity and your book way of integrity. You ran a very interesting experiment that frankly, it's going to sound a little scary to some people. And maybe reflexive to other people, which is, I think it was one year of no lying. Yes. But like, no lying of any kind, not even to yourself.

No. And especially not to myself. And previously on the podcast, we had my colleague, Dr. Annelemki, who runs our dual diagnosis addiction clinic. She's done a tremendous service to the world talking about all the various kinds of addiction, addiction as a disease, yes, but also something that people can overcome. And one of the things that I love so much about Anna's message, she wrote the book, Dopamine Nation. But yeah, wonderful book.

Is she talks about how recovered addicts are actually her heroes? Because they've learned to navigate this internal process that most people, perhaps who aren't addicts, or don't think they are, are constantly being yanked around by these dopamine systems. But they've learned to conquer their own dopamine system. So they represent the heroes of her world. And I love that model, because we tend to look at addicts and think about it as like, there's all this judgment on it.

But now I think they're, I think it's amazing. I think addicts are people who are hypersensitive to the suffering that they are told to accept. And so they're trying to medicate the suffering that comes from being out of integrity. And the society says, I talk to people. I interviewed people for this book who would go to their, this one woman went with her husband to the psychiatrist. And they said, she's not happy doing the traditional wife role.

And they sat there and talked about what medication would enable her to fulfill this social role that she just didn't like. And it never occurred to anybody to say, maybe don't do it if you don't like it that much. And people are medicating themselves into a conformity with social systems that are not in line with their true nature. And addicts hurt. And they sometimes, they find a substance or they find an activity that gives them relief. And so they use it because they're in a lot of pain.

And one until it becomes the source of pain. Yeah. And it always does. And it's horrible. But one addiction specialist, Dinosus, is like they're standing on a nail and trying to take enough drugs to stop the pain. And that is not what you need to do when you're standing on a nail. You need to take the nail out. And the nail is the part of your life that you're living that's out of integrity with your true nature because other people want you to live that way. And they will force themselves.

They want to stay in the position of pain or fear, push past it, be stronger. Yeah, I've spent a lot of my life there. I'll confess. And it's super unpleasant. And it's always led to shitty things. But how lottable is it that you took what the culture told you was good and by God, you learned to do it? And we tell ourselves stories like, well, if we achieve certain things, then we'll be in a better position to do more for other people. Like there's the martyrdom version of it, too.

The reason I brought up Anna was she was the first to alert me to these studies that have been done about how myelination and growth of the prefrontal cortex is actually accelerated when people tell the truth, especially around truths that are somewhat uncomfortable. And it's a beautiful literature that's small, but starting to really emerge. Yeah. And the big part of the recovery from addiction is people first acknowledging the truth to themselves and then to other people.

And again, it's all of that's kind of shrouded by how we think about addicts. Sadly, in any major city and even small towns, now you can see the bent over, like fentanyl acts. And we judge. We're like, oh, or we say it's so sad. But that's just an example of how far gone people can get in that particular addiction. Anna offers an interesting idea, which is that the more we tell these little micro truths, the more connected to reality we are.

Yes. Yes. And in the way of integrity, you talk about this experiment that you did. My first integrity cleanse. So an integrity cleanse. So maybe you could explain what it is. And it sounds incredibly scary. It's not just the telling the truth part. It's the realizing the truth part. Yeah. Yeah. I guess I'm going to start with the woo story. I was very sick. And at one point, they rushed me into surgery. Didn't know what was wrong with me. I had some internal bleeding going on.

That's a long story. Wrote about it in another book. Point is, during the surgery, I regained consciousness and sat up and looked at them operating on me, which was surprising, because I was lying down there. And so I was very disconcerted. And I lay back down. And I looked up between the surgical lights. And between them appeared this ball of light that was much, much, much brighter than the surgical lights, which are very bright. And it was so beautiful. You can't describe it.

It's outside the cave. And I was just completely obsessed by it. And then it started to grow. And when it touched me. And it filled things. It didn't bounce off things. It filled them. When it touched me, this incredible joy and love and warmth flooded my body. And I started to cry. And my body was crying. And the surgeons noticed these tears coming out of my eyes. And they freaked out because they thought that I was feeling the surgery. And crying was the only thing I could do about it.

So they were panicking. And the anesthesiologist, they told them, bump up the medication later, because I grilled him later. What did you give me? What are the side effects? What happens? Can I have some more? He said, afterward, that when he went to increase the medication, he said, a voice said to him, don't. She's crying because she's happy. And he said, I just did what it said. And he was white and shaking. And he said, did I do the right thing? So I kind of told him a little of the story.

Anyway, this light was there. Yeah. And I was just like, home, home, home. And it said, yeah, OK, so this is what you really are. And you're about to have a pretty tough time for a while. But just remember, I'm always here, even though you can't see me. And so I came out of that surgery, and I just thought, I will not allow anything to my life that doesn't feel like that light. Oh, that's what it wasn't like it used language. But it said, this is not the way you feel after you die.

This is the way you're supposed to learn to feel all the time. So in your body, out of your body, it doesn't matter. This is how you're meant to feel. And believe me, when I worked with heroin addicts, they would describe their first tie. And it was as close to that as anything I'd heard people describe. And I would say, I believe you're meant to feel that way. And also keep your teeth. But so I didn't tell a lie for a year.

I came out of it and thought, well, lying is definitely not going to feel like that. That light does not lie. So no lies ever. Of any kind, even a little micro. Like when are you going to be home? And you know it's 12 minutes and you say 10. Can't say that. Say 12. Do you like my outfit? No, I do not. I mean, I found ways to sort of try to soften the truth. Did it mean also telling every truth that was in your head? Or you would keep certain things to yourself?

No, in fact, it felt untrue to say certain things to certain people. It felt invasive or offensive. And that didn't feel true. Sometimes silence was the greatest truth I could tell. But I didn't even know that that was the case until I started my experiment. So I did not lie for that year. And I've done it many, many times since. But I would not recommend jumping into it 100% from a life that hasn't already been pretty examined.

What Anna has said, and I think in the backdrop of what you're saying is that everybody does these little micro adjustments or, and you've said constantly, and you've said that this is largely to smooth social interactions. That most of lying is to smooth social interactions. Yeah, the reason it shows that most people lie at least three times within 10 minutes of meeting another person. They lie to them.

And men are socially conditioned to tell lies that make them seem a little bit cooler than they maybe think they are for real. And women, people identified as women, are socialized to tell lies that make other people feel good about themselves. So it takes you in different directions. But I just wasn't going to tell any lie at all. And let me just say that that year, I, it's not like, I could say I lost these things, but the fact is, I dropped them. I walked away from them, my religion.

My, with the religion went the family of origin. Every friend I had growing up because to leave Mormonism is worse than murder in that community. I was cast into outer darkness. My marriage realized I was gay. Oops. I hadn't figured that out at 20 years. That came to you as a realization in that year. Yeah. OK, it must have been in your unconscious someplace prior. Yeah. There had never been it. There had never been a kind of like knock knock.

OK. No, I was so bent on being a good person according to my socialization. The same way you were bent on being a brave, strong male according to the skateboarding culture. I would never have let that anywhere near my consciousness. And it had to be a series of experiences. And my ex-husband was gay as well. So I'd known that about him for a while. And so, and I knew he was his best self when he was his gay self. So that kind of helped. But the marriage ended because of that.

Let's see what else happened. Oh, yeah. I quit academia. So my industry, the thing I'd gone to all those years of school for my job, means of support, left my, I was living in Utah at the time, and I sort of fled for the border, so I lost my home. How were you feeling during this time? Better and better and better. I just thought, I think I needed to be like, it was horrible. You're like, no, better and better. It kind of was, but not as horrible as staying in all those things.

And the part that intrigues me at the moment is the losing of friends. Like losing of people and the structures that we relied on also for safety. Yeah. That's got to be hard. Oh, it's very, yeah, for parts of the psyche that are very attached to socialization and attached to people that are familiar to you, it's heartbreaking, really heartbreaking. But that light gave me a full-on experience of the self. And I just, what it told me was, it's always there.

My son, who I stayed on syndrome one day, told me, after his friend's mother died, we're coming home from the funeral. And he said, I didn't cry. And I said, it's OK if you cry, strong men cry. And this is a sad time. And he said, yes, not as hard after the light comes and it opens your heart. And he can barely talk. So it was very garbled. And I was like, what a light came and opened your heart. He said, mm-hmm. I said, when did this happen? He said, May 10th. I was like, this year?

No, I was 13. And I was like, you're holding out of me. So this light had appeared in his room when he was having a really hard time. Kids with Down syndrome don't have easy lives. And it touched his heart. And he said, since then, nothing was as hard. And I said, you know, I saw it too. And it said to me that it's always with us, even though we can't see it. And he said, oh, I can see it. And I was like, you can. And he was like, yeah, like he was sort of disappointed in me.

And I said, well, where is it? Is it like up there down here in your head and your heart? And he just looked at me and he said, Mom, it's everywhere. He just sees the whole world illuminated. And I think that's what I saw in the forest when suddenly the world would just turn to light. It was that light. So that was the field. And as I lost each friendship, as I lost each job, as I faced the fear and the heartbreak and everything, those parts of me were dissolving.

And I was becoming more identified with that light. And that was the thing. I was completely selfish. I was not going back to the way I felt before I felt that light. Never going back there. Did you feel as if you had to accomplish certain things, degrees, et cetera, first in order to allow yourself this? Because I hear this a lot.

And in the backdrop of this entire conversation, I have one little piece of neural real estate, which is devoted to the audience that is saying, OK, I can do this things once I have a job, once I have blank, once I have the resources. But at the same time, I do want to highlight for people that everything that we've talked about in terms of practices and things to do, like you just do them. There's no purchase. Like it's inside of us.

There's no looking to something in a package or even a program. It's all within us. So it can be done at really anywhere and with any amount of resources or lack thereof. But be gentle with yourself. Don't quit your job. I mean, I was very violent. I was quite a lot like you. The way I got harbored was I had a part of myself called Fang that did not care what hurt me. I'd go running in the snow.

I remember once I bought running shoes that were too small and all my toenails came off during that run. And I just kept running. And I'd stop and take off another toenail and keep running. I was able to be very brutal to myself. Just living in Boston as brutal to me. Well, on the plus side, my feet were completely numb because of the cold. OK, there's that. But so you have some, you have the capacity for extreme resilience. Yeah. And it perhaps took you too far.

Yeah. And I think that's why I did this massive integrity cleanse when I was at a place where I was far, far away from my true self. And because of that, it was a kind of violent breaking of connections. So now if I'm coaching somebody, I'm like, be very gentle. Take the, I call it one degree turns. If you're flying a plane and you turn one degree north every half hour, you won't even notice it's turning. But you'll end up someplace very different.

So just gently move away from what causes you to suffer, get yourself the cup of tea in the morning to soothe your throat, listen to your own sorrow, cancel a meeting because you just don't feel like doing it. These are the things that bring you back to your truth. And it's always loving. And it's not loving necessarily. You just say, I'm going to say the truth about everything and I don't care who hates me for it. That was just my way.

And inevitably, a much kinder, more generous version of ourselves emerges when we're living our truth. I mean, it's a foregone conclusion, but still we're stating. Yeah, I can personally say that most of my suffering has been the consequence of the fact that I am, I love, love. And I'm blessed with many great friends and things of that sort, business partners, et cetera. But I have a tendency to get into relationships quickly and ending them feels near impossible.

And this has caused me and also others too much suffering. And so a lot of that is, the reason I raised this is that it's about holding two truths at the same time, which are feel incompatible. On the one hand, really loving and caring about someone. And at the same time, knowing that the loving, caring thing to do is to go separate ways. And it's this relationship to loss that I sort of can't accept or haven't been able to. Like I can accept that people die.

All three of my academic advisors are wonderful people, suicide cancer, cancer. So I had to come to the conclusion pretty early on in my academic career, like, wow, like I'm the common denominator. I joke, you know, like, and it took me a long time to realize this might not be my fault. I know it's crazy, like how would that? But I think that it also woke me up to the idea, like life as we know it in this life ends. And so to try and make the most of it.

But the idea that people would move apart, even in circumstances where death doesn't separate them, to me, it's like it's so painful. Yeah, was it Keats who said that of all the ways there are to lose a person, death is the kindest. Like that. Yeah, yeah. And this has roots in all sorts of things in me, of course. But the reason I raise it is that I think that when we have two incompatible truths, that's when we feel stuck. Like we love people, we want to take care of them.

Maybe we want them to remain in our lives, but we have to let them go process, sucks. There can't be incompatible truths. I think what happens is that you, and just tell me where I'm wrong, okay, I could be completely full of crap. It sounds to me like you're one of the people who have a huge heart, who sometimes confuse love with self-abandonment, who loves so deeply that you want the joy of the beloved, more than you want your own joy. 100%. And that is not love.

That is a hostage situation, okay? Like there's something I call spider love. If you say to a spider, how do you feel about flies? It would say, oh, I love them. And it expresses that love by immobilizing them, wrapping them up and injecting them with poison and then sucking out their life force, whenever it needs them. And it loves those flies, yum. But love always sets the beloved free, okay? So there's a consumptive love.

And when you are a fly and you meet a spider and you give your whole self to this person, who goes, yum, yum, yum, yum, I really want that. You find yourself starved of your own validation, your kindness to your true self. And you've given it all to the other person and that's when it will not work.

And you may be missing the people who aren't looking for flies or who want to just, I'm not gonna extend this metaphor any further, who just want to be with you as a whole human, who want to know what your limitations are as well as their own, who will say to you, I have a new friend who I had pneumonia and I wanted to talk to her on the phone and I told my assistant, I don't care if I have pneumonia.

And she wrote me a text and she said, do not impinge on your own health because you want me to feel loved. I don't like it. I want you to be healthy. And I was like, well, oh. So I would examine the moment where you become so entranced with another that you stop caring about yourself and try to feed your whole life to them because that's not love. It's something our culture defines us love. A lot of parents love their children that way.

But you have to be able to know exactly what you want to communicate to the other person and to have them say, I completely respect that. Or you don't have a love situation, you have codependency. That's very useful. Thank you and I know it will be very useful to many people. What is the suggestion for people that are trying to figure out what they want or need or both? I'll relate it to this relationship thing because it applies across everything that it's hardest in relationships.

And that is start to notice the first moment when part of you, a deep part of you knew you were losing your threat and you were losing your integrity. So if you think about a relationship you had that ended poorly where you loved the other person by giving your whole self to them, which you've been taught is called love, even though I don't think it is called love. So and then look back on the first moment that she wanted something and you abandoned yourself to give it to her.

And it's usually very early in the relationship like day one. Yeah, it's like this isn't safe. Exactly and you just crushed right over that boundary that very sensitive, inter vigilance that's saying this is how we stay whole. And this is how we stay in integrity. So most people with a job, with a relationship with any choice they make, they can trace it back when I pick up the pieces for the mirrors later and they're like, oh, I knew that the first week. And I stayed in there for 20 years.

So it's about, as I said earlier, being really granular in your experience of your own suffering and knowing that you are not here to suffer. There's this big thing that men in our society are taught that if, you know, their love signs like, I would, the, I can't remember his name, one the Nobel Prize for Literature. I mean, you know, I would crawl down the avenue black and blue to show my love, to make you feel my love. And it's like, okay, that's not showing me love.

You don't have to hurt yourself to show me love. But maybe that's why you have to pull back six inches from your own eyes to brutalize yourself for other people that martyr archetype. It's, no, it doesn't work. Yeah, it's caused me and I think others, a lot of suffering because I think what ends up happening is that when we get separation from that person, then we do a little bit of self recovery, but then it's, it's like all fractured. And repeat. Yeah. And repeat, right? Exactly.

What you just described is extremely helpful. I'm curious in your role as a coach to many people. How often are romantic relationships, partnership type things, whatever form that takes for people? How often is that like the bulk of what people struggle with, at least in terms of what they bring to the table? Or is it more often, I don't like my job, I'm in the wrong life professionally, you know, if you had to give us like the non peer reviewed study, but like kind of crude breakdown.

Yeah, I think because they identify me as a coach, they go to a therapist with relationship things, but people come to me with my life's just not working. That feeling you're just going to be like, oh great, no, so that gives me the whole thing. But in my job, I need to change my job. I need to get my purpose. I need to have my life's meaning. And it always ends up ending up to be about the relationship as well.

You know, but anybody, anything we do that's dysfunctional for any part of ourselves is dysfunctional for every part of ourselves. The way we do anything is the way we do everything. So if you come in with a job issue, because you're, you know, you've got a horrible boss, but you never complain, you're going to end up telling me that you're in a horrible marriage with a spouse who's awful, but you never complain. That same issues come forward as a kind of gift to show us over and over.

Not that way. No, okay, see that pattern. No, see that pattern. No. What's interesting that you say that, because I feel like professionally, it's like there's like a gravitational pull. Like I wanted to get into tropical fish when I was a kid and I was like tropical fish, I would spend all day at the tropical fish store. Then it was birds. Then it was skateboarding. Then it was, you know, that I wanted to be a firefighter.

Like whatever, eventually it was neuroscience and it was podcasting, you know, it's just like, I can't miss. When I say that, I mean, I can't keep myself from doing what I really want. Yeah. I would say likewise with friendships, I'm fortunate to have a great relationship to my biological family. It was rock, really rocky for a lot of years, but it's like the work has paid off. And they've done a lot of work. In romantic partnership, it's like a carve out. It's been much more challenging.

I've had some amazing partners and partnerships. Like amazing. Still on excellent terms with many of them. And then I've had some really, really brutal, like barbed wire. Oh, not really. And, you know, I've had to take a look at my role in that too, right? Right. In this case, for me, it's like a carve out. I think of it as like this, like wedge-shaped carve out.

It just seems so much more challenging, but I think in talking with you today, it's clear that it's because of this thing of like, it's not, I'm not approaching it from the standpoint of like, I want to do this and it's good for me. Yeah. To be frank, whereas in the work domain, it's like what feels good ends up being really good for me. Because for a while, you did things that hurt you and then you realized, no, the things hurt me. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do the things I like.

When you bring another human being into it, when it's a romantic partnership, I think you still have the pattern of, I will do things that hurt me. I will abandon my sense of safety. I will go over my own experienced internal boundary. And you just haven't, you've done it in other areas of your life. But this is, yeah, this is a big one for you, where you just haven't applied the same wisdom you've learned in other areas.

And I would guess that it's because you don't feel that that's loving to the other person. If you decide you're not going to kill animals at your job, the people at your lab aren't going to be heartbroken. But if you decide you don't want to live a certain kind of life with another person, that person's heart could get broken. Or at least they could feel that way, they could genuinely feel pain.

So I think maybe that's why it's a cut out thing because this changing your job doesn't hurt someone, but changing your relationship pattern, somebody could get hurt. And if you don't change your pattern, someone will also get hurt. Right. Well, and that's often the case, right? And I think, so this notion of others getting hurt when we make the choice that's most in line with our own integrity, whether it's relationship or family or the decision to move or leave a job, how do you sit with that?

I mean, how does one sit with that? I mean, I think I have clearly internalized some script that says if someone else is really upset, even, and obviously the right thing is often not the thing that makes people feel best, et cetera, et cetera. But how do you work with that? So there are different ways of reframing it.

And one example since you know a lot about addiction, if somebody is addicted to you pleasing them, you're pleasing them and going out of your integrity to please them, to give them whatever they want that pleases them. Your addiction, as a codependent, is giving them that emotional energy whatever gets them high. And their absorption of that energy and the imbalance that results, it's as if they are getting high on you.

And an alcoholic, if you take away the bottle of booze, will tell you, you are hurting me. This is the worst thing you could ever do to me. You have no idea how much I'm suffering. And the thing you have to do in an intervention is, no, it's the alcohol that's doing the hurting. You know, it's the overgiving, it's allowing someone to consume your energy and to get high on it. That is an addiction. I will not let you do it.

I will separate from you person to person if you continue any addictive pattern. Doesn't mean that we won't be together in the great self and we're all one self and we can all love each other forever. But it is not kind to feed someone's addiction to eating your energy. Does that make sense? Yes. It's not. You have to do some tough love. Yeah, the compassionate thing is to do the right things. Yeah, this is not helping you.

And they say, but I want more of you and you say, no. No, you really don't. You want something false. I was creating for you and it's actually not me. You know, my friends who, why would you leave the church? Now you're lost to us. And I was like, no, I was always a gain on Mormon. You know, I was just feeding you the story that I was a straight Mormon girl. You know, and I can't feed you that anymore. It's making you sick. It's making me sick. It's not true. And some of them, I never saw again.

And some of them came around years later and said, oh, I figured it out. And some probably still are really happy and think I'm going to hell. Sorry. I didn't know what I said that, but I did. I don't know. I find it hilarious. I mean, sorry. Not sorry, that was just nothing to do but laugh there. Goodness. Yeah, I think this notion of things ending because we realized that we were telling lies. Yeah. And God should even hurts to say. Yeah. It's like because we weren't trying to tell lies.

No, no. We didn't know we were telling lies. Yeah, it's an innocent mistake. To me, that often grows from what I think of as empathy, probably not certainly not the best form of empathy. But I think that there's a human phenotype that I'm familiar with where we feel other people's emotions, which I think is healthy, can be healthy. And we love seeing people enjoy. And we delight in it. So it feels good to us. To feed this addiction. Oh, I know the feeling. It's not like, oh, here I am, Maridom.

I'm bleeding out, bleeding out, bleeding out. But it's not in line with this essential self. And here, I guess the little vignette that's related to this is that I do think there's one very healthy form of this, which is, I believe, at least for me, with a dog. I like other animals too, but with a dog, when we love them, we are seamlessly attached to their love of us. And so loving them and empathizing with them means like double the love. Like we love them and we can feel their love.

And it's like a perfect, it just feels like a perfect circle. And with people, that can happen too, I imagine. I felt that a few times. I certainly feel that in my friendships. I feel that with my sister. And I felt it in a few of my romantic relationships. But the empathy for the others' pleasure can go too far. And then when we quote unquote, lose ourselves, I think it's because there's a component of ourselves that's not attached to the part that still has our own needs. Does that mean?

Well, totally. Yeah. Here's the thing. You don't your dog. I expect your dog to pretend it's not a dog. You don't expect your dog to stop loving walks and chasing a ball and just being a dog. And when it's tired, it'll go to sleep. But often when we fall in love, we try to make ourselves not who we are and try to become the person that will make the other maximally thrilled with us. And I know exactly what you're talking about. I have thrown it like I love to give money to people. I do too.

I make them happy. And then it never works. Well, it works out only in cases where it feels true in my heart. If I overgift because someone's saying, I need, and it doesn't feel good in the giving, I am not being a dog. A dog would say, no, this is where my limits are. I'm going to go lie down on the floor and sleep. But I will get an extra job to give money to people that I don't want to give money to after the first little while. So we bend ourselves out of our true being.

And I think the reason we love dogs so much is that they love, but they love truly. They love honestly. They don't pretend to be something they're not. They don't have the empathy that says, if your leg is broken, I will break my own leg and lie down next to you so that I feel exactly the same pain you're feeling. It is not empathy to feel everything the other person is feeling.

If they then take the broken leg example, if you got hit by a car, you're lying they're screaming in anguish, and I felt your feeling so strongly that I couldn't cope. And I fell down in a faint. I had a client once who has passed away. Now so I'll tell this anecdote. Her husband was like you. He would give himself away. And she gladly consumed all his life energy. And one day he had a heart attack, a near fatal heart attack.

And she called me and said, I couldn't get him to take care of my needs while he was having his heart attack. He just had it. And I was like, yeah, he couldn't help that. And she said, well, I told him. He said, I can't be there for you right now. I'm having a heart attack. And she said, you're not the one whose husband may be dying from a heart attack. She was so into consuming his energy that she actually said that with a straight face. Unbelievable. She was expecting him to give empathy.

That's not empathy. That's selling yourself out. Empathy acknowledges self-other awareness. There are four components to real empathy. Self-other awareness. I am not you. As Byron Katie, one of my favorite spiritual teachers says, my favorite thing about separate bodies is that when you hurt, I don't. It's not my turn. It's so good. It's so good. Yeah. Another one is emotion regulation. So you see something that's horrific.

And you can like, this is where you can use your skills and dealing with your emotions, you bring it down. OK, I'm a surgeon. I'm dealing with a horrible ER accident. I can't feel that. I have to get to work. So that's emotion regulation. You can do that. Self-other awareness, emotion regulation, or two other components. But those are the two that I think we really need to focus on. If you hurt, I don't. It's not my turn.

And when you're hurting, and I start to hurt too much because you're hurting, I can bring myself back into my own body, relax, and be contented in my own skin so that I can be present for you. So here's the thing I love. It's a short quote from a poem by Hafez who was a 13th century Persian poet. It's so simple. Remember it, though. Troubled, then stay with me for I am not. I love that. Yeah, that's being yourself in a relationship. Then stay with me for I am not. But I'm really, really unhappy.

I see that. And I'm not unhappy. But I really, really want to be together. I really see that that's how you feel. And I don't want it. It's so interesting because I feel like in the domain of work and with my friends and largely with family, giving feels great. And then people are like, sated. And then they go on their way. But I noticed a contrast with romantic partnerships when, as I've said, I maintained good relationships with a couple of girlfriends that I had.

In some cases, I'm good friends with their husbands. Like they actually one just came and visited with their sister and her kid recently and like on just great platonic terms. But for years, I didn't worry about them, but I felt like I could still feel the energetic pull. Even though they weren't asking for anything. Right. And then when I attended their wedding, this particular person's wedding, I was like, oh, I was like, my work is done.

And I got to enjoy and still get to enjoy the friendship with the whole family. Yeah. But it really showed me how much the whole relationship, so much of the relationship had been about like, trying to make sure the other person was OK. You make it your job to make them happy. And it is never your job to make another person happy. You cannot do it. Happiness is an inside job. You cannot make another person happy. It can't be.

You can't go far enough into someone else's sadness to make them happy. You can't go far enough into their sickness to make them well. You have to get out of your own sadness and your own sickness and then stay in your integrity with love for them and model what it is to be in your own skin. There's the only one you're ever going to have. My oldest child as a teenager, I was so over-involved in everything.

And they gave me a song called Let Me Fall by a man who had fallen from a tree and been a broken spine. He was a paraplegic. And he just says, the one I will become will catch me. Don't catch me anymore. And it was so hard as a parent to let my child have suffer the slings and arrows about rageous fortune. And what they were telling me, they then pronouns, was that this is my life and my suffering is my birthright. And I am here to figure it out as I go.

And you are not loving me when you shove yourself into my affairs to try to take away my suffering. Let me fall. What a mature and generous thing for them to say. They are. It sounds like it. This is your oldest. The contrast, and I think what drives a lot of what we're really talking about here is codependency. Oh, yes. For those that don't know the thing we're having caught on. Right, exactly. Is that sometimes when we cut people off or we just say, hey, I can give but only to this point.

Or you can get this aspect of me, but not these other aspects, especially if they've been receiving them before. They get pissed. I mean, this is, I mean, and it's unclear, especially if the relationship had been different up until then, that, you know, like, that's why it sometimes feels unfair to do.

It's like, you know, it's one thing to invite someone over for a drink, then to discover that they're an alcoholic, and I continue to fill their glass, enjoy the exchange, and then one day realize they're an alcoholic. Yeah, yeah. And I guess that term isn't used anymore. I've been told by many audience members, forgive me. It's alcohol use disorder. I said that too. I'm sorry. No, quite all right. I think that field of addiction medicine is nascent enough that we're still making the transition.

And I don't say this, by the way, for political correctness. I'm not a politically correct person. It's just, I've had to learn to reframe these things for the specific purpose of trying to be more, to bring more people into the conversation. Also, I like the sound of, I don't like the idea, but the words alcohol use disorder, the disorder piece is also controversial.

But what I love is that as soon as we start to name things and rename things, we're all talking about those things, and then there's no way out of the conversation. So that's my, that's my kind of jujitsuing out of, out of the, so that means we have to talk about it. Just like autism spectrum disorder, autism, or neurotypical, atypical, guess what folks? Now we're all talking about it, and it needs to be talked about.

So in any case, at some point, there's the idea, like, I'm cutting you off, and the person says, but this is what we do. Yeah. This is the kind of promise that you made. Yeah. And so then we find ourselves in like the other scripts of like, well, now I'm like being bad. I'm doing the right thing, but I'm breaking a promise. Which we're told from like the time we're little like you don't do.

But only in the eyes of the other person, if you come back into your own integrity, okay, is did I promise to always give more than I can? Well, I did buy my actions. I established a precedent. Isn't that a promise? They say it's a promise. No. Or if I did make a promise, I was in error. I apologize, I made a mistake. I promised something I couldn't really give. Have you heard the term extinction burst? In the notion of galaxies developing or something like that? No, it's when pigeons are about.

Awesome. I am way off. They go lactic regions. I'm like trying to be Elon Musk here. And you're like, no, it's about pigeons. Cool. It's about any animal. I love pigeons. I've been have a pigeon tattoo. Oh, yeah, I do. I love all the animals. Anyway, if you give pigeons, they pick a lever and they get a pallet and you know, unpredictable intervals, which is highly motivating. It's the most highly motivating thing they can do. So and then if the pellets stop coming, the pigeons go bananas.

This is persevering. Peck, peck, peck, peck, peck, peck, peck. They pick it a lot more. They pick it angrily. They insist that the researchers promise them those pellets. And then they just give up and go away because the pellets stop coming. When you have been giving too much and you realize that and you say to stay in my integrity, I have to pull back and care for myself. And that's where I stop. And the other person will put on an extinction burst, for sure.

And your job is to stay inside your integrity until they stop pecking. And they'll be much more healthy. I had a golden retriever once who would just come in bark to be petting a big, huge dog. But he was young. And it was so annoying. And we had to get a dog behaviorist to come in because he was just barking at everybody constantly to be petted. And she said, when he does that, get up, walk across the room, go into another room and shut the door in his face.

And we were like, oh, that would be cruel. She's like, it's not cruel. He'll understand it. And I'll never forget watching him bark. It's on, and they got up, walked out, shut the door in his face. He went, he stood by the door and it ruff. And he went, he went over and laid down. And he was like, all right, well, that didn't work. And you know, that's ultimately what happens when you stay inside your integrity and don't let people play with you that way. Don't want to tug you around.

Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because with work, it's like I love learning, organizing information, having conversations like this, and sharing them with the world. It feels kind of like the relationship to a dog. It's like this reciprocity. And if people don't like it, okay. And if you like it great, and if you love it, even better. But I would be doing it anyway. That's like I'd be doing it anyway. Like there's no feeling of loss. There's no metabolizing of self and any of that. Yeah, I know.

And I call it what I, what I, in the book that I just wrote called Beyond anxiety, I talk about when people like you live that way from their joy, they begin to create economic ecosystems. You create so much value that in multiple ways, people start to, you can get streams of income. And people pay me to do this. And I still can't believe it. I come in here and I talk to my producer, he's also my business partner and my closest friend, Rob. And I'm like, I can't believe they pay us to do this.

I can't believe it. And that's also how I felt about science the first time I looked down the microscope and saw a slice of a particular brain area called the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus. And we had labeled this around. I turned a barber, chap me my graduate visor there. And I was like, this is amazing. And her response was so funny. She was also Harvard trained Radcliffe to be specific. And she said, yeah, brains are really cool. They're kind of like, well, walnuts.

And I was like, so barbra. The smartest people I ever met, she was like, and I was like, and I thought, and then I looked around her lab, I was doing rotations where you get to sample different labs and you hope they'll take you. And she had green counters in her lab instead of black counters. And she had pictures of mushrooms. And she had picture, this picture of a cat coming out of a farm silo. It's like it's hat. And I thought, I really like this lady. I want to work here.

I'm going to do my PhD here. And I had already committed to another lab. And I started sneaking into her laboratory at night to do a breakthrough heart of the other lab. She got over it. So in the professional domain, I'm a completely different animal when it comes to these things. I walked into the other woman's lab. I mean, she's done tremendously well without me. So I just said, listen, I'm going to join this other lab. But I have no trouble doing that in the work domain.

None. It's like, when I started the podcast, sure there were these voices in my head, one of my colleagues doing the thing, this and that. And I was like, yeah, I hope they're living their best life. I'm going to live mine. And I see them and some love it, some hate it, and some really I can tell. I hear the judgments. And I also hear the, I love it. That kind of thing, it's a mix because public facing anything is going to have different responses from people.

And but I'm sort of like, you do you. I'll do me. And we'll both be good. We live in this weird economy where you're supposed to get a job. And it's all based on factory work. You're supposed to go to a place and do something you don't really like to get your little allowance. And then you go home. And that has only existed for the last couple hundred years since the Industrial Revolution.

Before that, people existed for hundreds of thousands of years doing what hunting, fishing, gardening, weaving, singing songs, telling stories, doing the things that we do as hobbies.

But we have this weird mindset that says, no. If I do things that bring me joy, like a hobby does, the things that people have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years, if I just put my joy out there and see what I can do with the wild new creations of our particular time, if I don't do the job, I mean, weird somehow, and it won't work. But what I'm seeing is the economic structures of this society are all being fractured. They're falling apart around us.

And it's people who are afraid, I used to watch this video of a tsunami that hit Sendai, Japan in 2011, and I think it was. And this wave comes in and it eats a city in six minutes. This one wave. And you watch the whole city be ripped to shreds in six minutes. And people are running into the buildings. And then the buildings start to collapse. And you know there are people in there. And I watched this and I thought there's so much change in our culture. It's like that wave has hit us.

And then accidentally, I hit something in YouTube or whatever. And it switched to Mike Parsons surfing one of the biggest waves ever filmed. It was a rogue wave and it went up like 70 feet. And the camera pulls back. And here's this basically naked man on a board with a wave that is like the wrath of God. And he's this tiny little figure. The wave is seven stories tall. And he comes riding down the face of that. And it breaks over him and you think, oh, he's dead.

And then he shoots out of the spray, just like shouting. And I thought those are the choices we have right now. We can run into the institutions that we think will keep us safe and change will crush us and drown us and kill us. Or we can deal with the fact that there's a huge wave of change in our society right now and everything's changing at an accelerating rate. And we can risk running out naked and just with our joy and just balance on our joy and let the wave take us for a ride.

You're surfing. You are an example to the world of someone who is balanced in his joy, except in relation to relationships, but you'll get over that anyway. It's taken some work. It's taken some work. There's a woman hanging onto the end of your surfboard. It's not going to. Unfortunately, it's a lot more complicated than that.

But I am seeing a portal toward, I guess, what you're calling true integrity, where in the back of my mind, I have this very vestigial understanding of what all of that relationship stuff actually looks like and feels like when it's right for me. I just think it's not going to look like the way I try to script it out. Do an ideal day with that relationship and it could be the weirdest thing you've ever heard of, it will work. I promise you, I have a very weird relationship life.

That's reassuring to me. Can't believe I'm going to say this on this podcast. So I have two partners. Your partner's awesome. Oh, I met one of them. Yes. One was the very first relationship I ever had with a woman that was 20 some years ago. And then I was living on my ranch and meditating all day. And my partner, Karen, came to me and this Australian poet, Rowan, was staying on our ranch with some other people.

And Karen said, maybe now she said, Marty, I have to tell you, I'm having very strong, I don't know, maybe maternal feelings toward Rowan. I was like, no, they're not maternal. I'm not getting a maternal energy. And I got hit by this blast of joy, joy, joy. It was like that white light thing. It was like, and I said, you're in love with her. This is amazing. Tell her to come in. I'll go to the guest room. You guys can have the, I was just like, happy, happy, happy.

And I looked for jealousy and I looked for, I was like, this isn't supposed to work this way. So Rowan came up and we all sat around talking. And we sat around talking a lot more. And we all sat on the same couch talking, going, this isn't weird, is it? And after a couple of weeks, we realized everybody was in love with everybody and we couldn't live without each other. And so that's how you, that was eight years ago. And we have a three year old named Lila, who's delightful. Awesome.

And it is, we call it feeling good by looking weird. And you can cut it out on a podcast of its two. No, we have no master, no overlords. Are you kidding me? I mean, what we're talking about here is love. First of all, like, and let's just be, of all the things to cut out of a podcast, we're not gonna cut love out of a podcast. Oh, I love that about this podcast, because a lot of people would. Yeah, well, not me.

And for people that like, bulk at that or creates internal friction in them, then I just invite you to, I don't know, visit your compassion at witness self-seve. It's still there, but it's still there, then, you know, hey, I actually believe that humans, partially based on developmental wiring, like experiences, but also just differences in wiring. I could just fundamentally believe in this.

You know, I mean, my, one of my closest friends, my third postdoc, my third advisor, who is my postdoc advisor at Stanford, is that now, unfortunately, he died of pancreatic cancer. He was the late Ben Barris. He was born an identical twin girl. Wow. Okay. Then went up through medical school, living as a woman, graduate school as a woman, and then transitioned to Ben. Pretty late in life. So I only met Ben.

Ben was a close friend, and then unfortunately, had probably because he had the Bracketou mutation, died of multiple cancers, but that initiated by pancreatic cancer. First transgender member of the National Academy of Sciences. Wow. I wrote his obituary for the journal Nature. We were very, very close. And just an amazing, very quirky dude, you know, and didn't have a romantic partner, at least not at the time when he passed, or in the time that I knew him, to my knowledge.

And, you know, Ben used to say, like, they're components of our wiring that are ubiquitous. The parts of control breathing, you know, the parts of control are, and then there are parts of our wiring that are just different. And to me as a scientist, it makes perfect sense. Like the notion that any of that would be controversial, is like, what?

Like it doesn't make any sense whatsoever, that one would like not believe that people have differences in wiring, because most people want to believe in differences in wiring when it's like convenient for themselves. So I really appreciate that you're sharing this, and because yeah, every which version works, and I also learned from my graduate advisor, Barbara Chapman, she used to say, tolerance has to go both ways.

So I also, like, love and applaud, like the whatever traditional nuclear family, is it still called that? Oh my gosh, yes. Yeah, so, but I would love you to really sit down and get incredibly authentic with yourself, and say honestly, if I had the perfect romantic life, what would it look like, and be what you will call very selfish, what I would call very much in your integrity, don't tell yourself any lies about what you really want.

Yeah, it's very strange, but both Karen and I felt like there was a tremendous absence before, in a couple of years before a row came into our lie, and we're just, it's like we're a three-legged stool, two-legged stool, do not make sense to us, they fall down. Whatever comes into your vision of joy, whatever makes you feel free, write it down, and read it often. And when you get into a relationship, read it even more often. Maybe you have the other person read it.

And let the other person read it. That would be, that I can do, as difficult as to have certain conversations, I could certainly write things down and just slide in envelope to tell them. It's like a three-nut, here's what I'm after. Don't let me do the things in column B, it won't end well. I love it. And I really appreciate that you shared that. And I know people listening will as well.

Wow, so, and if not, I read a book by Samantha Irby, a wonderful comedian, and she says, here's what you say, when people tell you that you're horrible and you're doing something awful, you say, I like it. No, that's it. One of the reasons I oriented very young towards and still love punk rock music, like that genre, is because to me, it could be wrong. Maybe classical music being an exception, but to me, it's the only genre of music where all the versions of self and emotions are welcome.

There's angry music. There's like political music. There's sad music. There's music about friendship and camaraderie, about loss, and you look at the community, like a really into this stuff. So look at the community like that, like good friend to him, Armstrong, has created around certain bands. He's going to be on the Mount Rushmore punk rock, for the great Joe Strummer from the clash, political music.

Yeah, yeah. Or Laura Jane Grace, like one of the first transgender, like outwardly facing transgendered people in the punk rock community, and does amazing music. Well, it was against me, and then Laura Jane Grace, I'm like, she's a hero of mine. One of my short lists of here, I love, love, love, her, what she's done at so many levels. And it's like, there's like this tapestry of all the different humans and human experiences, in a single genre.

And I don't know much about other genres of music, but I don't see that. I don't see that maybe across the totality of rock and roll or whatever, but if ever there was a sector of life that's all inclusive, it's that, but not because it's loud, it's fast and it's anti. It's so much of it is like pro-social. So I think there's a big misunderstanding around that. So that ethos is something that's always resonated, and I feel the same way about relationships. We're on social media.

One of the reasons I can go on social media and not have it, like spike my cortisol constantly, is I'm there and I'm like, okay, there's some mentally healthy people here, some mentally unhealthy people here. People are here to fight, people are here to love, people are here to find partners, people are here to flirt, people are to, and you know what? People are here to attack me. Like, cool, I'm glad I've been giving you a purpose for your morning, you know that kind of thing.

I try and just approach it all that way, where you just made all of this very clear in a much more succinct way, where you just said like, great, I like it. Yeah, I like it. It's awesome. Yeah, yours with a real genuine sense of joy. Yeah. Like no like, well, I like it. There's no friction in that statement. It's just, I like it. I really like it. I like it a lot. I love it. You like it a lot and you can say it that way.

Who can't, like if it's all love, nobody can really, you can out love almost anything. You're furious at me. I like it. I just out loved you. And I think that's why Jesus said, you know, charity never faileth. It's not that you're gonna win everything if you are a loving person, is that no matter what happens, it's like that self. You're suffering, you're paying your codependency, whatever, it loves it all. Bring it. It loves it all.

And that means that no matter what you come at me with, I can hold that in a field of love. And my experience is love. What was the quote from Jesus? It's, I don't know if it's from Jesus, but in, I think it's in Paul says, charity never faileth. You know, love never fails. And it's because I can say, I hate myself. Yes, but I love the part of me that hates myself. Oh, just out loved you.

Were you all, well, of course the answer is gonna be, yes, I was gonna ask, were you always like this, meaning that you could hold this position on the balance beam and then I feel like you've taken this balance beam and created this big mace up for others to stand on. So, cause it's a really stable place to be once you're there. But getting to this place of like, essential self and the path to integrity, it, I mean, can I just say it the way I feel it? It's fucking difficult.

Yeah, that's what I was about to use that same word. I think in order to become stable, I always say that the raw material for any good experience is its opposite. So I was, I was effed up beyond belief. There's snaffo, these are both military turns. Snaffo means situation normal, all fucked up. Fubar means fucked up beyond all recognition.

I was Fubar. Now I occasionally get snaffo, but I was so Fubar that the suffering was so intense that when I learned to come home, the contrast was very sharp and I never ever want to, I never want to leave the consciousness that that light is always with us and we can feel it if we're honest. And that's all we have to do, be honest and there it is, boom, it's goddess.

I feel like it starts with the scope of self, like we have to do this for ourselves before we can do this with and for other people. Yeah. And then at some point, the fantasy in my mind, it sounds like my mother, my mother, from the youngest age I can remember in myself was talking about trying to heal the world. And I've seen the toll it's taken on her. Like she'll call sometimes, I'll be like, how's it going? Something will have happened in the news.

Like I can just tell it really wears on her. Yeah. And it's hard for me to hear and see because I feel it too. It's like goodness. Like do you feel there's hope for our species? I mean, I'm trying to not throw the whole problems of the world at you, but like, I mean, like what, I'm almost 50, I feel like at this point, I've seen enough, like there's so much goodness in people.

Yeah. But there's also like the capacity for so much, like misunderstanding bad, you got the developmental wiring, you got the hurt people, hurt people. We're all, everyone's doing the best they can. Everyone wants safety and acceptance and they're just trying to find it this way. And like, and then they're your truly bad actors because they're either miswired or whatever. And they're like creating havoc. Like, is there any real hope for like a different version of things that's persistent?

The first time I remember worrying about this, I was four and I'm 10 years older than you are. But I knew at four that I was here to try to help with something. And as I grew up, it just wouldn't go away. This feeling that I was supposed to help with something. And in my teens, it became, I need to help change the way people think. I don't know. And then I started noticing other people who seem to be like me. And I would be like, I think they're on the same team. I'm on.

And I was like, what team? What am I talking about? And it all came to a head when I was in South Africa and the wilderness. And I had a dream that my ancestors were coming to visit me. And I thought it was funny. So I told it to some friends from the Shang'an tribe who reacted like this. And then they ran. And I was like, what am I doing wrong? And later that night, we're all sitting around the fire. There are lions running. They bring this little woman from Mozambique. And she's the Sangoma.

She's a shaman. And she did her divinatory system, which is she threw the bones for me. Because if you had dream, I had. You have to see a Sangoma right away, or bad things will happen. So she said stuff about me that was true, but she could have Googled it. And it was weird when she looked at me. I felt like these ice needles going through me. It was not cute, but it was very intense.

And what she said was, there are people being born to be healers all over the world, just like there are in the traditional tribes. You need to go find them and tell them what they're here to do. They're here to heal the world. And they need the wisdom that the traditional people had. And they need their technology. It was so interesting because she acted very frightened and confused by what she was saying to me. She had to get a group of people behind her who would chant. We agree.

We agree, because she was freaked out. But I think that in every traditional group of 100 to 150 people, there were a few healers that were recognized by the elders as people who were the highly sensitive. They were interested in nature and science. They were interested in animals. They were interested in the mystery. They were interested in the arts. They were performers, but they were also very introverted and thinky-thinky.

It's an archetype of healing, of medicine person, the coaches I coach. I call it wave finders, which is a term from an anthropologist. If you're born in that archetype, if you have that phenotype, I believe it's a phenotype. And I believe it crops up in every 100 to 150 people several times. And our culture has no word for it and no path for it. But if we are going to save the world, we will draw on whatever is born into us that makes us want to heal things.

And we will use the technologies we've developed. And we will use our joy and our refusal to participate in the nonsense of our culture. And we will hold firm. And we will try to change the way humanity lives on this planet. And I don't know which way it's going to go, but I'm in the game. And I kind of think you are too. I'm feeling I'm in too. And I'm certain that I'm in it, thanks to you.

Seriously, in large part, I've told the story earlier that the path I'm on and the fact that anyone's listening to this and watching it is the consequence of having read your books and done the exercises and we'll continue to do them. So I must say there really aren't words to express how much this means to me that you would come here, take the time to share with us your wisdom and to delve into some topics that are particular interest to me. Because I like everyone else.

I'm a work in progress who's curious about the best ways to move forward. And every time you speak, and just when you show up, someplace, it's an incredible thing. Everybody learns, everybody gets better, and everyone walks away with tools and empowerment. And I just want to say thank you so much. There's really not a whole lot else. Sam, to you, you're just looking in the mirror. Thank you. Thank you. It might be the only podcast ever in the tears. Thank you so much.

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