If you're anxious, you fritter away the energy that you can have being alert, prepared, engaging with your life, and creatively trying to figure out what to do.
Wow, welcome to the one you feed throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Fear is instinctual. It's like a cobra in a box of kittens. It grabs our attention and it won't let go. But anxiety, that's something else. It's the ghost of fear haunting us long after the danger is passed, or before it even occurs. In today's conversation with Martha Beck. We explore why anxiety can't simply be silenced. It has to be replaced, replaced with creativity, curiosity, and a deep kindness towards ourselves. And when we do that, something important begins
to happen. Life starts to feel like something we can actually live rather than just survive. I'll take any opportunity to talk with Martha. I think she's one of the most gifted and thoughtful teachers we have Today. I'm Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Martha, Welcome to the show.
Oh, Eric, is so good to be back. I love this podcast.
Oh thank you talking with you. It's a pleasure to have you on and it's nice to see you again. We're going to be discussing, at least part of the time your latest book, which is called Beyond Anxiety, Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding your Life's Purpose. And I'm sure will veer kind of all over the place, but yes, that may anchor us correct. But before we get into that, we'll
start the way we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking to their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us. That are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which
one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
It's everything. I grew up in the rigid religious system in Mormonism and was told to follow the rules and only feed any impulse that had been given to me by the religion. And when that happens to you, a lot of people who leave Mormonism don't go to any other religion because you break free from it so hard that you reject all belief systems. When I was around
seventeen eighteen, I went off to Harvard. I started getting different types of thinking, and then it just sort of blew up in my head and I decided that the only thing I could do to build my life was to find what felt like the truth and what felt like joy, and that I would go toward that no matter what, and if something felt like fear or less joy and less freedom, I would not go there. As life went on, I made my choices based on that,
and that's sort of shaped everything. And I'm so grateful for that metaphor that so many people out there are hearing it now.
Yeah, I think that's a great way to segue into your book, because what you're basically saying there is you tended to follow. If I use the subtitle of your book, the things that made you curious, the things that made you creative, the things that made you calmer, and use those as a guidance versus following the things that made you fearful or anxious sort of.
I mean, it's interesting because I've had a whole career helping people build their lives based on feeding the good wolf and following your better angels or whatever it is. But I also had very high anxiety, and a lot of people that I've worked with and people that i've known as friends, very creative people, had tremendous amounts of anxiety.
And I didn't see that always as part of the bad wolf, because it's so innocent to be afraid in a world where things go wrong and where we all know we're the one animal that knows for sure we're going to die. So I thought anxiety was just part of the human condition, and so I didn't steer away
from it the way I have learned to. It wasn't until I started living by this code of absolute integrity, and I wrote a book called The Way of Integrity, because I came to find that if I only did things that felt aligned with all the parts of my being body, heart, mind, soul, if I just always walked the line of truth there, then I wouldn't feel any
psychological pain, which has been true for me. But people came up to me after I wrote that book and said, I'm living in total integrity, but I'm afraid all the time. And I thought, okay, so that's just the human condition. And then I thought, no, no, that's not the way it works. And so I went and I researched anxiety, and I dug into it and into the brain science
and into the social science of it. And what I found is that we live in a society that really encourages high anxiety, and the way we learn and the way we organize our lives is very conducive to high anxiety. But it actually isn't normal. What's normal is something that's not around most of us anymore. That is sorry, I'm going on and on, But if you and I had been born three hundred years ago, we would have woken up surrounded by nature, by animals, hearing the trees, water,
other people's voices. We would have spent the day in our group of people we mostly knew, doing things with our hands as well as our minds that were deeply meaningful to us. And that type of scenario is what we evolved to live in, and that's what puts the nervous system in a state of regulation. And nowadays we live in a profoundly abnormal situation for the animals of our bodies, and we're anxious because we're in cages all the time, and some of those cages are physical and
some of them are psychological. And in this book, in the research for it, I tried to find my way out of that, and so two thirds of the book are about what happens after you get away from that, and it's actually really fun. That's where the cure riosty, creativity and finding your life's purpose coming there. There is my dissertation. Everybody can go to bed now.
Well, I think that, yes, I think we are probably living in a deeply anxiety producing culture. We are living in ways that don't allow us to soothe ourselves. And we could go back, though, to say the Buddha and he's writing about something similar a little bit right, He's going back and he's saying like, Hey, these things that you manufacture in your mind cause you to suffer more than is necessary. And so I think that it's just
gotten worse. Right, I think that the world that we may have lived in when we were closer to nature, had more maybe natural balms in it than today's world does. Yeah, it keeps getting amplified. There's something that you talk about in the book that I'd love to really start with, which is that you talk about fear, which is a
natural response. You make examples in the book I Love Your Kittens and Cobra's example, like, if you open up a box and there are eight kittens in one cobra, what are you going to pay attention to the cobra? I just think that's so it made me laugh when I heard that. But if there was a cobra in this room, I would naturally be fearful, and that is natural. Yeah, But you describe anxiety more as like being haunted, right, I love that phrase. Tell me what you mean by that.
Well, fear is like being shot from a cannon. I interviewed a lot of people who'd been through life threatening situations, and they experienced fear in those situations the way animals probably do. And that was an extremely intense bolt of alertness and energy that allowed them to react to the emergency, whether it was a car accident or being mugged or whatever it was. And then the feeling went away, the hormones dropped, it was gone once they were safe, unless
they had lingering trauma. And this is where our humans can do things in our brains that are not good for us that most other animals cannot. And that is that the part of the brain that tells stories and thinks in logic and abstraction and time starts to tell a story about how there is danger out there waiting to get us. It's not in the room anymore, but it could be back any second, and what if this happened,
and what if that happened? And just today, looking at my Instagram feed, it was like a thousand terrifying stories, legitimately terrifying. Yeah, And I was saying when I got on with you, if I'd known this would be happening when I wrote the book, I may have shaped it slightly differently, but you were reminding me that it's still true. I'm in a completely comfortable room, well fed and housed and healthy. There is nothing for me to be afraid
of right now. So looking at my Instagram feed and painting a picture with my mind of a world that is very dangerous, pure anxiety, I just let myself f into the trap of doing that again. But at least now I know how to get out.
Yeah. So let's talk about separating these two things, because yes, you and I were sort of extrapolating on this before we started, which is that for certain people today, Let's say you are an immigrant in the United States. Right now, it's a time that I think it's reasonable to have feasts.
Absolutely and and well, here's the thing, that bolt of fear that fills the body with cortisol and adrenaline and everything. That's only for things that are physically here and now, and it's so that you can fight, flee, or do whatever. Then there is alertness and awareness, so I said, other animals don't have anxiety because you know, if your dog or cat is in a safe room, they relax, They
save their energy. I've watched an antelope get charged by a lion and it took off running really fast, and the lion gave up and just stood there and panted, and the antelope stopped immediately and went back to grazing. Like, you don't waste any energy on that adrenaline response unless you absolutely have to. However, if you are in the African wilderness where I saw that, you'd better be very aware.
If you're not aware and alert, then danger will come upon you and you might not have time to get away. Once I was with some friends and we were relaxing on this river bank in Africa, and I put my head down on the sand because I wanted to see if I could hear the footsteps of elephants. And I did, and I was like, you guys, there are elephants. And my friends were like, Marty, there are elephants. Get in the damn jeep. And I was like, but I couldn't
hear their footsteps. That was stupid. That was just playing stupid. I wasn't afraid when I ran over and got in the jeep. But I was alert, and I was aware, and I had a plan. That jeep was parked there for a reason. We didn't go far from it, for a reason we knew the boundaries. In the social science sociology, they say that those who are not prepared to remember the past are doomed to repeat it. I think that's George Santeana. If we don't keep our wits about us now,
danger could very well come upon us quickly. And yes, it is unfair and horrible that that risk is distributed equally. Yeah, it's a scary time, and it's a time to not get anxious, because if you're anxious, you fritter away the energy that you could have being alert, prepared, engaging with your life and creatively trying to figure out what to do.
Yes, And I think what you just said there is kind of the key to the game, because I always go back to and I reference it a lot on this show because it's one of the most foundational teachings I think that I know of, and it emanates of the serenity prayer right, the courage to change the things
you can the acceptance. But there's a part of it where Stephen Covey took it for me a step further, and he talked about the circle of influence in the circle of concern, and the thing about it that I come back to again and again with all these situations was his point was, if you spend all of your time out in your circle of concern, worried, frightened, anxious, afraid, your circle of influence shrinks. But the more time that you put in your circle of influence, the more it grows.
And I think the corollary of that is what you're talking about, which is this idea that being anxious doesn't prepare us better to deal with the world. It exhausts uses, it disheartens us, it discourages us, and so finding a way to work with it skillfully actually makes us safer.
Yes, much.
But the thing about anxiety, and you alluded to this in the beginning where you were like, oh, I think it's not this thing to move away from. Is it always convinces us that it's right? Yes, well, yes, I know anxiety is bad and I shouldn't be anxious except I really have a reason to be this time, right, Yeah, And it's not that you don't, it's just that it's a profoundly not useful response.
And it's based on such a weird factor of the human brain. And there's a neuroscientist named Ian McGilchrist who writes brilliantly about this. The left hemisphere of the brain is the one where most of the language and almost
all of the anxiety are located. My friend Jill Bolty Taylor, who was a neuroanatomist who had a stroke, a left hemisphere stroke, she said that working only with her right hemisphere when she didn't have a left hemisphere, effectively there was no anxiety whatsoever, no time, no fear, just presence. So what Ian McGilchrist and a lot of other neural logists have written about is the part of the brain, the left hemisphere, that generates most or all of our anxiety.
It has a characteristic called hemispatial neglect, which is so weird and I don't really know the reason for it. But people who have lost the right side of the brain so they're only working with their left side of the brain, the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and vice versa. So someone only having a left hemisphere not only only works with their right and left leg, they actually don't believe their left arm and leg belong to them, or that they
even exist. They don't shave the left sides of their faces, they don't look at people who are on their left. It's this weird thing the left hemisphere has of believing that it is the only thing in existence and that it is absolutely right and its stories are the only truth. So if you go online, you can see a lot of left hemispheres screaming at each other. I know the truth and your perspective does not matter, is not real.
And that was a really amazing thing for me to study because it describes so much of what I see going on as people anxiously shout at each other. But it's a very bizarre kind of mental illness really, and and McGilchrist says, we act like people who have had a right hemisphere stroke, so it's very weird.
We did a fascinating episode. It's been several years ago, but we had Jill Bolty Taylor on. We also had a friend of mine. He was originally like a coaching client and it just over the years of gon and know him who did indeed have a right brain injury really and still has a right brain injury, and his recovery has been all about how does he bring that right brain online?
Wow?
You know, so he's kind of the opposite of Jill, right, he was Jill's opposite. And I love the way when you talk about this you do the standard disclaimer that I think is worth doing real quick, which is so that all the neuroscientists can settle down, which is that, look, of course, we are all using all parts of our brain. Brains connect, there's networks. It's not as simple as saying this part of the brain does that. And you know, the split brain experiments and all these different things show
us there are very different ways. And I think that some people, I think, get all into like it's all should be all the right brain and it should be the whole brain. The problem is that we are oriented in one direction ninety eight percent of our time. It's sort of like when we talk about being present and people like, what are you just supposed to be present
all the time? And I'm like, no, try it, Like, let's try and get the ratio to like ten percent, Like you know, like if I could get to ten percent present, I would take it, you know, like I just need to move in that direction. And I think it's the same thing, like we want to move in
the direction of wholeness. And I wanted to talk about this because you recently talked about this very eloquently, and it's going to take me a second, but well, actually I'm gonna let you do it, because you were talking about the idea of breakdown and to break through, and then you went to talk about the double slit experiment. So kind of walk me through this, because I think this is really important.
I have no memory of what you're talking about or what I was smoking, but I'm going to follow that lead, and you just tell me where I'm.
Off from, all right, I'll fill in the gaps, all right.
So I think that if you go long enough in a state of anxiety, which is a sort of false fear, you do things. You create things in your psychological life and also around you in relationships and the things you build in the world whatever. You make things that are inherently flawed because they are based on a limited version
of reality. So people who go out and sort of build themselves a giant pyramid of power without any meaning in it, they're creating something out of anxiety that is destined to collapse, and so they will have breakdowns at some point. And I had that when I was at Harvard and I had a child with Down syndrome, and it broke down my whole concept of intellectual meritocracy and everything. Anyway, you're gonna you're gonna break down if you feed that
wolf forever. So what happens then, though, is what the left hemisphere sees as fragmentation and letting go is actually gives space and permission for the meaning systems and the perceptions that we see more with our right hemispheres to come back into consciousness very fully, and if we can contextualize both together, we'll be living in a really interesting paradox.
So when Jill had her stroke, her left brain went on and off for a while, and she was in the shower for part of that thinking that it would help this horrible headache she had. And she told me that when her left brain was active, she saw her hand against the tiles, and when her left brain went off duty, so to speak, what she saw was not hand in tiles, but two intermingling fields of energy. And both perceptions are accurate. So the double slit experiment pertains
to this in that way. Back in nineteen twenty three, so it's been more than one hundred years ago, someone designed this experiment where if they shot little photons through a screen that had two slits in it, it would behave like water. If you threw two buckets of water through two slits, they would make a certain pattern where the water would disperse differently but then come back together after it went through the slits. Then when they tried
to observe this process, what happened was completely different. The photons went through the two slits and created two perfectly vertical straight lines, as if you'd shot a number of bullets through a screen. So one interpretation of this, and has been the paradox of matter for as long as I've been alive, is somehow, when consciousness is not observing or we're not measuring, what is happening to particles. They're just waves of energy what Jill saw with only the
right side of her brain. When we're observing them and controlling them, the probabilities of that energy cloud collapse into a point and it looks like solid matter, and it behaves like solid matter, and we are living in both realities all the time. And I think when you get back to a balanced brain what you're talking about even ten percent, if you get back into nature and you integrate, your right brain starts to wake up the way it
does my mind does. When I go into nature, you begin to see a vast array of possibilities in reality instead of the narrow, tight, circumscribed, nasty little lives.
That our culture prescribes for us.
In my Zen training, we talk about this in the sense of the relative, in the absolute. The relative is A good example would be think of like my hand, my hand. I could just describe it as my hand, and it is one hundred percent in my hand, and it does things that hands do, and luckily it works well, and it's all that. That's the absolute view. It's the hand, it's a whole thing. There's another view that is one hundred percent true at the same time, which is that
these are all separate fingers. Yes, and these fingers are not the same as each other. This finger is different from that finger. That's different from that finger. And so I think what the physics pointed to, what the spiritual tritions have pointed to, is that there are indeed, these two views of the world. One is that everything is one unitary, whole thing, and the other is that there's all this division, in separation and fear. And at least what Zen teaches is that the fully realized view is
that you can see both at the same time. Now, most of us are not fully realized. But what I think we can do, and I'm going to tie this back to breakthrough and break down in a second, is I do think that even if we're not fully realized enough to see that all at the same time, we can learn to switch back and forth. Yeah, we can go and we're looking at it only this way. There's another way. Let me look over that way, right, and
we can do that. And I think that as we look at the world today, or honestly our lives at any point, we can see all the things that are kind of wrong, the breakdowns that are going to happen, all of that, and we can see that there's a breakthrough that's possible, and that neither of those things is right or wrong to the other. It's the holding both or at least, as I said, being able to switch back and forth, at least try to switch back and forth.
I think you can get to the point where you hold both things at once. I mean, I think that's where we are, where we're in flow, that famous psychological condition. It's a state of bliss. It's very difficult to sustain, but it's also fun. Can I use that word?
Sure?
I started having the experience in meditation. I don't even know if I should be talking about this, but when I was meditating a lot in the forest, it was quite common, like every day everything would pixelate and turn into these showers of light, and animals would come up to me, and it was very it was very woo woo, and which is why I don't talk about it much. But hour after hour after hour, I would sit in
it and try. I knew that the brain is plastic and can be rewired, and I knew that my culture had wired my brain to believe in a very boring existence. Life is a bitch and then you die, Like why not get off now? But I knew that my brain was going outside my culture and even outside its ordinary view of material reality.
And I remember going to a a meeting with my book agent and an editor during that time, when I was in this Manhattan office looking down at the City and they were talking about I.
Said, I just don't want to kill more trees. Man, I don't think like it. If I'm going to write a book, it has to be worth the trees. And then I actually said something. I don't know what was being said, but I blurted without knowing I was going to say it, Oh, oh, you guys still think that's real. And I pointed out at New York City and what I meant was just the buildings. Of course it's real, but there was a blaze of energy, of the life, energy of consciousness of millions of humans, and I was
like drunk on it. It was so huge. I kind of like living that way. And that's why I had to go back and write Beyond Anxiety, because after all that meditation, when I'd got to that place, there was no anxiety anymore. I don't know what you plan to talk about in this podcast, but I'm enjoying.
We're good, although of just now, I just turned my book into the publisher about a month ago, and now I'm like, is.
It worth the trees?
You've set a new bar that I have to clear here.
Oh, I'm sure he's going to be worth the trees. No, question. Yeah, but I think things are breaking down in large ways. You know, you look at climates, ecosystems, and then you look at the human systems all over the world, and you look at our local political systems and even things like supply chains and stuff, and the fear is that they will break down. And I think that that's a very legitimate fear. In fact, I think it's a near certainty at this point. I think we are out in
the wilderness where we need to be alert. And I was trying to write about this eric and I was reading all these books on economics and they weren't tracking because there was no economic policy that matches what we're seeing today. And I was like, I don't want to read this. And then something inside me said, read about fungus,
and I was like oh. And I started reading about the my ceial networks that exist under every forest ecosystem, that are made of fungi and roots and mosses and algae, and they are constantly conveying chemistry to each other, coordination, communication, water, and the whole forest knows itself through this my celial network. And I believe that there is something similar coming up.
It's like a city has been shattered, and through the stones of the fallen buildings, a forest is rising that is made of a new way of living and allows us to be a new kind of human. And I think that's pretty cool.
Yes, I think there is both those things. Like you said, there is breakdown and it's the sort of old back the cliche of the Chinese symbol of crisis and opportunity. Right before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What's one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it's there, You've tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in
the way. You're not alone in this, and I've identified six major saboteurs of self control, things like autopilot behavior, self doubt, emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here's the good news. You can outsmart them. And I've put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now at oneufeed dot net slash ebook and take the
first step towards getting back on track. So let's redirect here a little bit too specific ways of working with anxiety people who have anxiety, because it's a topic that always does well yes on the podcast. Right, So let's start with this phrase here, which you say, anxiety can't just be ended, it must be replaced. Yeah, what does that mean?
That was the big smashing gong moment for me doing the research, because I was trying to learn a little about the neurobiology of anxiety and how it works. So I was looking at the left hemisphere and how the very ancient structures sound the alert, and then the storytelling structures that are more recently evolved tell a story about it that goes feeds back into the more primitive structures. Okay,
so there's this anxiety spiral. But it started ringing a bell in my mind because a few years earlier I had done a course on creativity, and I had studied the neurobiology of creativity, and I realized that the sort of spiral I was seeing on the left hemisphere when we're anxious is what's happening in the right hemisphere when we're creative. And I knew from a huge amount of research that when we get anxious, it flatlines our creativity, and I thought, where's the research that says when we're
creative it flatlines anxiety and there was none. But I started to think these two things may toggle that when our anxieties up, our creativity is down, and vice versa. This was during the pandemic, and I did experiments on myself to see if I could change my anxiety levels by turning on my creativity the right side of my brain deliberately, and oh my goodness, it worked like the
best drug you can imagine. I would get up in the morning and just do things that I knew would activate the right hemisphere of my brain, and I went into absolute and total delight. It was like being a little kid again. I can't even describe the joy I felt,
the liberation. So I got something going on here. So I started working with people on zoom calls, you know, one hundred people, three hundred, sometimes a thousand, and I would have them put in a number to represent their anxiety score, which was usually high because we were in lockdown, and then I'd have them do like mental exercise is that forced them to open up the right hemisphere of the brain into that creative mode. And then I'd say, now put in your anxiety scores again and it would
be zero zero zero, zero zero. So I realized that it's not enough to calm down your anxiety and make it go away. If you don't turn on the creativity systems, the anxiety will creep back in, and culture will force it at you. And you know the cobra kitten paradox
or tendency that'll send you into anxiety. But if you are in a creative space, if you're going through this sort of spiral that starts with curiosity and turns into connection and then into courage, compassion, a sense of meaning, all these different things open up when you're creative, and there is simply no space to be anxious. And I have to tell you that since that time, my life has been almost deliriously happy. It actually works.
Yeah. When I read that line, anxiety can't just be ended, it must be replaced. The first thing that came to mind was addiction. You know my history as a recovery parent addict, and that's a deep belief I have about addiction. You can't just yank whatever ex substance is out of somebody's life and expect it to work. It's fulfilling a purpose in thereact. Now it's not doing his job very well anymore. Right, you know, it's actually wrecking the entire system.
But you can't just yank it out. It has to be replaced. And when we look at behavior change, it's the exact same thing. If you're trying to get somebody to change a habit, there's a habit loop, and what you want to do is change the behavior in the middle.
You can't just get rid of it. And so I thought a lot about that, and I certainly know that, you know, in my own life, the ability to be curious about something changes something from as aj Jacobs said to me once, which he got from Quincy Jones, you reframe it from a problem to a puzzle. Yeah right, you stop saying I have problems, I have puzzles, And
immediately there's your shift. There's another thing that you do, though, before we get to creativity, and I think this is an important one, which is that you talk about the creature. So talk to me about what you mean by creature and why that's even like sort of a preliminary step even to the creativity side.
Yeah, because if I go to somebody who's super anxious and I say creativity will fix that, you know, sing a song. No, it's not going to work. That's bullshit. Excuse my language. Yeah, but here's the thing. In our very left hemisphere dominated society, we see our brains as machines, and so an anxious brain is a broken machine. And you take chemistry, and you take analysis, which is like analysis literally means to chop something up to see how it works, and you, by god, fix that machine. But
the anxious human brain is not a machine. It's a frightened animal. And if you approach an animal and say I'm going to chop you up or numb you with chemicals or bring you down, I want to end you. This is the way people talk about their anxiety, and they don't know their threat and a frightened animal. And so here's the interesting thing as well, psychiatrists and I love that they've studied this and that there are meds that can be helpful, and a big fan of all
of that, but it's such elitist. Knowledge is so rare. But every single one of us, from little babies to old people and everyone in between, male, female, every gender knows inherently how to approach a frightened animal. We don't have to learn that in graduate school. The calming of anxiety is such an important survival skill that we are born with it all through our DNA. So I've asked so many people this and they always give the same response.
So if you were to open the door and find a puppy, a bedraggled, tiny, freezing, shaking, grubby little puppy on your doorstep, and you made up your mind that you were going to help this animal, how would you approach it physically? How would you actually approach the animal.
Very slowly, very calmly, little bit by little bit and yeah, quietly.
Yeah, making reassuring sounds and all of that that calms the amigdala. And I was so struck by this when I read a book by an FBI hostage negotiator named Chris Voss, brilliant, brilliant hostage negotiator who went out and dealt with you know, sociopathic terrorists, murderers, And how did he do it exactly the way you just described, soft, low voice, reflecting their experience, so they know that they've been seen, You know that. He calls it the late night.
DJ voice, Like yeah, okay, here's what I think you're saying. And the call it is like, yeah, I hear you. He even says, study Oprah because she can do that. So the first thing you.
Do with your own anxiety is to realize that it is that frightened animal. Whether it's a tiny little puppy or a big scared horse, it's frightened and the only way it's going to calm down is if you approach it with compassion and with gentleness and with kindness. In fact, I came to see the Dalai Lama has said my religion is kindness, and I thought, oh, what a nice thing to say. Oh, I think that is a statement
of incredible power. Kindness to the self is the balm that starts to soothe those jagged edges that we have inside us that we need medication or drugs or whatever we're trying. We're trying to soothe the pain, and the best soother for that pain is gentle, loving, compassionate energy giving that to yourself.
I think it took me years to come to similar conclusions CBT and even a lot of the Buddhist inquiry methods. All these ways of working with our thoughts have been an enormous gift that we have, and my experience is when the emotional level rises above a certain point, none
of that works at all. It doesn't work. And so the first step is and the analogy I use you're using frightened animal, but I think of like a child, Like once a three year old has gone into full tilt, you can't reason with a three year old at that point. You can't be like, now, look, it's good to share our toys to you know, you've got to get the kid to calm down then you have a chance of
working with the stories. And I think it's the same with us, Like if we can't calm down, no amount of trying to come up with the right thoughts or the rational thoughts or the helpful thoughts. And like you said, kindness is kind of the way to do that, because when we're not kind to our we just keep turning the emotional temperature up. I mean that's what that's what harsh self criticism does, is it just keeps turning the emotional temperature up. You're going in the wrong direction. And
so you get to it with the creativity. Creativity is a great way of redirecting the brain towards a learning different capability, but it can't do it when it's boiling.
Yes, the soothing of the parts of ourselves that are in legitimate pain is so important. And I've done the same thing you did where I sat in meditation and I thought, okay, well, I can go past my fear and my sorrow and everything into no thingness right, And I did. I had a lot of mystical experiences, but I also realized, and partly being a mom does this for you? Teaches you this. It's something that Jack Cornfield,
the great meditation teacher, talks about. He talked about teaching someone who broke down and started solving midway through this long meditation session, and the other students were really angry that he was disturbing things and everything, and he had been unable to sit still and hold at bay the memory of bearing his seven year old daughter who had died. The grief had hit him so hard, and so the other students didn't know this, and they were like, shut
him up. And the meditation teacher came and took him to a different place and just sat there with his arm around the guy's shoulders and let him cry. And then that man became a meditation teacher, and he said, now I'm the one who takes people out of the group and holds them while they cry, and that is I think the most sacred work that any human being can do. And it is absolutely necessary to come out of our fear.
So what are some techniques for soothing the creature?
So it's very physical, okay, I mean it's so interesting reading Chris Voss's work because you realize that even when somebody's got a gun to some no one else's head, there's an unregulated three year old inside them, and they will respond to certain physical triggers, like being spoken too softly, being held. So if you put a blanket around yourself, if you're alone, if you have someone that you love around you, you can ask for a hug that will help.
But you put a blanket around yourself and then you start to do something that I call kind internal self talk. So it's kist or kissed, which is a silly name, but I don't mind it anymore. I used to be embarrassed by it. But all you need to do is just make those kind sounds that you would offer to a three year old, or to a puppy or a man who was grieving an inconceivable loss. You just say things like I've got you, You're right here. You can
feel exactly the way you're feeling. That's a really important thing. If you're anxious, don't say calm down, everything's fine. You stop and say are you afraid? I get it, I've been there, I'm here, I love you. Go ahead and feel it. There are no limits here. You're not wrong, you're not broken, you're not bad. I'm here for you, I love you. Just poor kindness out of the part
of yourself that can access compassion. There's the line from this argonaut to Maharaj that I love that says, the mind is interested in what happens, while awareness is interested in the mind itself. The child is after the toy, but the mother watches the child, not the toy. So when you're in grief, you're holding an object the way a child would hold something painful, and it's agonizing, and
you can get lost in that. But if you can access awareness simply by saying to yourself, I'm here for you, I've got you, we're all right in this moment, we're just here together, you become the awareness that is the mother force watching the mind in its agony, and you can start to locate yourself in the compassion instead of in the anguish, and that is a massive crossroads in your whole life.
I know that a lot of people report that they find this very difficult after a lifetime with a really strong inner critic. Is just continuing to try and do your best. The path forward here.
I would piggyback on other people's experience. Thank God. When I was in my twenties, I had group therapy because I was completely numb to my own pain. But when I saw other people in pain, my heart opened and I could see that there was nothing bad about them and that they deserved and needed comfort. I felt the impulse to offer it to them. That's why I became a self help author. So what I would do is, like these phones we have that feed us all the
doom scrolling, they also feed us things like stories. I love things that just are images of compassion. Like there's a guy who goes and plays a pink guitar to different animals, and you know, the horses. He plays to them and they come and they kiss him on the face while he's playing. I saw a video of a cat giving birth behind a water heater in some city street and while she was giving birth, a pigeon built
a nest around her to keep her safe. By the time she was nursing five kittens, there was a nest and this little pigeon running back and forth like that cat would have killed him. He didn't care. He was offering kindness. And when I see the kindness of the one consciousness that I think animates it all, it breaks through some of that human calcification in me and opens my heart a little wider. It's worth looking for those things.
In the sort of calming the creature aspect you talk about using our senses. Yes, give us a practice there.
All right, let's do it in real time. And I love doing this with large groups on Zoom because I have them put things in the chat. So we're going to list a few items and I'm going to write them down so I don't forget them. And then I'm going to ask you to use the right hemisphere of your brain to activate sensations in your memory and create a story. So tell me two things you love to taste.
Oh boy, I've been eating a very particular diet lately, so pizza. Okay, I'm not sure this is going to be helpful. What else this may cause grief? Dark chocolate?
Okay, dark?
Can't have dark chocolate?
Okay. Two things you love to hear?
Oh boy, the sound of me playing my guitar.
Hmm, okay, the guitar. What's another one?
Birds?
All right? So imagine yourself in a place where you can hear a lot of birds singing. You're playing your guitar. You got this delicious pizza with some dark chocolate there that you're munching on between songs. Now tell me two things you love to touch with your.
Skin My dog and I guess my partner.
Wonderful. So let's say your partner is leaning against you lovingly while you play the guitar. Your dog is right there on your feet. Maybe you got the chocolate, you got, the pizza, you got, the guitar, you got the birds. Now tell me two things that are not food that you love to smell.
This is quite an experience I'm having here. Let's see what do I love to smell? I guess roses and coconut shampoo.
Ooh, okay, So let's say your partners just had a shampoo with the coconut shampoo, and do you smell that wonderful scent drifting off clean hair. And you've got your dog, and you've got roses all around you. There's just a rose garden around you, and the birds are singing. Your guitar is going. You got the chocolate, you got the pizza. Now, tell me two things you love to see that you haven't mentioned yet.
Two things that I love to see that I haven't mentioned yet. Well, any kind of tree. Really, trees are I'm a big fan of trees. And pictures of my son.
Okay, so there are pictures of you. Wouldn't it be better to just have your son there?
Well you didn't, or do you just like the pictures? Well, no, I'd rather have him there. But that you're just asking to do you love to see your son? I love to see my son. Okay, Yeah, there's no limits on this, all right.
No, So your son is there, he's sharing the pizza and the chocolate. He's smiling, he's singing along with the guitar. Your partner's there with the coconut hair. You got your dog, the trees, you got the roses. You've got all these things at once. Now, really picture it. The taste of the pizza. Taste it the chocolate, hear the guitar, hear the birds, Feel the weight of your dog's head on your feet, feel the weight of your partner's shoulder against yours, like, really,
really vividly create this scene. And now tell me how anxious you are when you're doing all that with your brain.
Not anxious, You can't be.
You literally can't do it because all those sensory things are handled on the right hemisphere. And that's what I meant about. We're in this abnormal environment because when we're out moving among plants, animals, and one another, people, we know all of that is activating our right hemispheres. It's not a chance in hell that we're going to go
off into just left hemisphere thinking. But put us in an office under fluorescent lights with a boss glaring at us and money to be made, and all that stuff is gone, and we're living in a prison.
And the point of the exercise, though, is that even if I can't manifest all those things around me imagining them, yes, I am able to shift the state of my brain.
Yes, And we're always imagining things, and those are always shifting the state of our brains. So most of us think, okay, this is going to go on the way it has, or this is going to get worse. We tend to remember our worst heartbreaks and injuries because we want to guard against trauma. So we're continuously projecting an image of a world that is very dangerous and very cold and very harsh. That's an imagined reality for most of us
in most moments of time. Most of us are pretty much okay most of the time, but we're not in the okay. We're in the imagined terror. When you just did that, you weren't imagining something as opposed to letting go of real life. You were simply replacing what you usually imagine with what I was telling you to imagine. Yep, They're equally valid, and I prefer the one that makes us feel better. I prefer to feed that wolf.
Yep. Well, I think about that all the time, This idea that we are a fair portion of what we would call our reality we are making up.
Oh my god, I would write, I believe almost all of it.
Yeah, yeah, I mean a lot of it. And so I always think about this idea, like, well, if I am sort of co creating so much of reality, whether that's what I'm imagining, whether that's the stories I'm telling, whether it's the meaning I'm giving things, then which version of that is most useful to me? You know which version is most useful. If back to the double slit experiment, light is both a particle and a wave, which it is.
Well, everything is all matter is both particle and wave.
Yeah, if that's the reality, then in any given moment, which interpretation is most useful for me? And obviously I think we can and say that it's probably more useful if I'm going to be living in an imaginary world. To be living in an imaginary world that calms me and soothes me and makes me better able to function in the world I'm going to then be in.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And it gets even better than that, because what you imagine you tend to create. And you can believe in the New Age manifestation thing, or you can just believe in directed attention, You're not
going to create something you've never imagined. So by going into those parts of imagined reality that feel positive, you actually come up with the ideas that will allow you to make the best life you can have, to make amazing, fabulous things instead of just repeating what you've been taught to imagine by your culture. So yeah, it's not just a useful thing to go into it. It is fundamentally formative of the rest of your life. That's what I
mean by creativity. It's not about painting, singing, dance. Those are all wonderful, but it is the creation of your life itself that your whole brain wants you to focus on. That's what I believe. And there's no anxiety when you're doing it.
So we've talked about anxiety, we've talked about curiosity, we've talked about creativity, and then the last part of your subtitle is and finding your life's purpose. So that seems like a big last thing to tag on the end there not that you haven't been talking about life purpose for a long long time and we are at the last several minutes of this conversation. But why did life's purpose come into the end of your search for how to work with anxiety?
It's inevitable. So if you look at the two spirals that was that I talked about in the book, the anxiety spiral on the left side of the brain, it makes your life tighter and tinier, It makes you avoid more and more things. It pulls you inward and captures
you on the right side. When you go through a creativity spiral, it starts with curiosity, and then it goes to connection, and then it goes to whole new types of synergies, putting together information in new ways, and then it goes back to curiosity and into more connection, and it creates a spiral of creativity that opens you up
instead of shutting you down. So the more you know, I mean, look at what you're doing now, like this concept of feeding the right wolf and the healing you've done in your life, you couldn't help wanting to reach other people who were also potentially suffering the way you've suffered. So it was part of your creativity spiral to start to create this in order to fulfill your own longings,
your own desires, your own joy. Frederick Moigner, the theologian, said, your mission in life is where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meat. And you can't help wanting to feed the hungry when there's this fullness of joy that is generated inside you. And the more you help other people, the more it feeds the joy. So you end up in a cycle similar to the one that has people trapped in their rooms shaking, and primly only the opposite effect. It's like a mirror opposite in the brain,
and it has exactly the opposite effect. And if you keep pursuing that, if you keep creating on a day to day basis, what can I make with today? Doesn't have to be art? It could be a conversation, could be getting dressed in the morning. Whatever you create that becomes your right life. As it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, it becomes it morphs into your life's ultimate purpose and you don't have to go looking for it. It shows itself.
Say that question again, what can I make today? Or with today?
Yeah, once you've calmed yourself down, if you're anxious, you've been kind, and you've calmed yourself down, just look around and think what can I make? Instead of Oh my god, what are we going to do now? What are we going to make now? And that little shift between do and make is the difference between flight and creativity. So every moment of your day is something you can potentially make.
And meditation is so beneficial for that because it shows you you are making things in your mind without moving at all, all the time.
You literally can't not do it without extensive training. Yeah, and even then, I don't think you realize that your brain stops. You just relate to it completely differently.
Yeah, and even so, you're making a different brain. And the ancients knew that that's what they were doing, even though they didn't use that language. Now we've been able to observe it with instruments, but they were creating with incredible intensity. Just sitting there.
Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn't quite match the person you wanted to be. Maybe it was autopilot mode or self doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals. And that's exactly why I created The Six Saboteurs of Self Control. It's a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to
break through them. If you're ready to take back control and start making lasting changes, download your copy now at oneufeed dot net slash ebook. Let's make those shifts happen starting today one you feed dot net slash ebook. I love that idea too, where you say that essentially what you're doing is your You aren't going out and necessarily tracking down your life's purpose, you are living your way
into it. Yes, as I would say is that book is largely about little by little you live your way towards what that perpose.
And every moment that you free yourself from unnecessary fear and anxiety and come back into the present moment and think, huh, what can I make now? Every moment you do that, your life's purpose is emerging like a spring that's been held down by a lot of rock, and every little bit you pull away, there's more flowing outward. It starts to water a whole garden that you can't even imagine.
It's a function of nature. And in the end, as with all flow, you're just riding along going, oh my god, I can't believe this is happening through my life, through my body, because I'm not really doing it on purpose any more than I'm making rainbows up here in the sky. It's worth going for well.
I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. You and I are going to continue in the post show conversation where I want to ask you about what a sanity quilt is and who the kind Detective is?
Oh yeah, all.
Right, So listeners if you'd like access to that post show conversation, as well as ad free episodes a special episode I do for you each week where I share a teaching, a song I love, and a poem I love. You can go to one you feed dot net slash join and become part of the community. Martha. Thank you as always, it's a real pleasure to have you.
It's an honor. Thank you so much.
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