Martha Beck on The Path to Your True Self

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. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Martha Beck, a bestselling author, life coach, and speaker who specializes in helping individuals and groups achieve greater levels of personal and professional success. She's the author of nine nonfiction books and one novel, and has been a longtime contributor to Oh The Oprah magazine. Her most recent

book is The Way of Integrity. Him Martha, Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, it's such a pleasure to have you on. We're going to be talking about your book, The Way of Integrity, finding the Path to your True Self. But before we do that, let's start like we always do, with the Parable. In the Parable, there's a grandparent talking with 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 and thinks about it for a second, looks up with their grandparents as well. Which one wins, and the grandparents 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

such an interesting point. I know the parable well, but did not expect to have it thrown at me. And what comes back to my mind is one time when I was trying to publicize I think my very first book. This was before podcast, but I was in some guy's garage because he did a blog thing that was video and everybody was very excited about it. And he turned on the cameras and we started talking about his life or something, and then he said, but let's get down

to it. We're here to sell books. And I was like, no, I am not here to sell books, and he was like what, And I said, if I were here to sell books, yeah, things would not go well. I am here to be present for whatever needs me right now, because throughout my life I had really sold myself. I'd fed the wrong wolf. I went after achievement and egoic sort of rewards and ended in disaster every single time.

So I'd become hypersensitive to feeding that wrong wolf. And I just said, you know, the reason I'm here is to help maybe one person who's out there on the other side of this broadcast. I'm never here just to sell books. So that just popped up. But when you asked me the question, yeah, well, it speaks to the reasons why we do things, which is so much of what I think this book is about is what is

going on underneath things. And one of the things that I'm struck by when you were talking, it made me think about something that I've often thought of, which is like, why do I do what I do? And what's interesting is there's a big part of why I do what I do which is very much grounded in love and

service and all of that. And I've been cultured in such a way, to use a term that we'll talk about a lot in the book, I am in a culture that constantly sort of I feel distracted and drawn towards downloads and money and like, you know, and so there's this constant for me having to sort of reorient back to my deeper meaning. And you talk in the book about discerning what you really want or what you

think you want, and what you actually yearn for. Could you speak a little bit about that, because I think that can be such a confusing thing for many of us. Is because we feel like we want lots of different things that may very often seem to be in conflict with each other. Yeah, you know, I've coached hundreds of people one on one foul if you count groups. And I found this little trick. If you ask people what they want, they will make you a list, you know,

make a list of things you want. They will make you a list that's very much dominated by what they've learned from their culture. So it will be that particular cultures type of success, power, welt status, those things, of course are huge and our particular culture, and they're always striving for these things, and there may be not getting them. Maybe they're getting them at the cost of their own happiness,

but things aren't going well. Then I ask them when you wake up at night and it's dark, and you're alone, and you've got hours to do nothing but think, what is it you yearn for? And it always brings up a very different list when I put it that way. What comes up for you when I ask you what you yearn for? Well, I think what's interesting is the first thing that came to mind is sometimes in the dark of the night is where fear can get its greatest grips into us. And so there's a certain type

of being awake in the middle of the night. It leads to deeper reflection on my deepest desires, and there's another type of being awake in the middle of the night, which is fueled by fear. So setting aside the fueled by fear, you know, I think what I yearn for is to do work that matters that I love doing. And what's the outcome of that. Well, I guess the outcome is that I am, I guess, for lack of

a better word, excited by what I'm doing. Beautiful. There's an excitement and innate joy in doing what you're doing. That's one of the things people yearn for. Others are peace, freedom, joy, belonging. That's kind of it. Like I've I've asked people all over the world from wildly different cultures what they want, and it's always very different. But what people yearn for are those few things they want to matter. They want purpose, joy, belonging, freedom, peace,

That's pretty much it. And what we realize when we go into that is that we're selling out the things we yearn for to get the things we want. And the reason is exactly what you just said, because we're driven by fear. And I'm actually writing another book right now.

You mentioned this right before we went live. You said, um, you're probably having new ideas and thoughts, and it's all about fear and about how there is in the human brain particular cycle of thoughts that creates continuous fear, continuous

growing fear. My friend Jill Bolt Taylor, who's a neuro anatomist, says that the left hand side just feels a fear impulse and then another part that tries to control everything, and those two can get locked up in this little duet where they're screaming at each other that things are

very bad, and they get more and more frightened. On the right hemisphere, the corresponding parts create no fear, but curiosity and fascination and instead of control, a sense of giving up control to creativity and selflessness and connection with the universe. So it's literally inside the hemispheres of the brain are the two wolves, and fear literally feeds the

dark wolf for the bad wolf. The thing is that our culture so supports the fearful side of the brain, and like we've created outside ourselves exactly what that part of the brain is doing internally. So it's again it reinforces itself and it doesn't shift unless we deliberately shift it. You don't just fall into less fear, you fall into

more fear. To get less fear, you have to do things that sort of push you towards the other side of your brain, like imagining the feeling of doing something that matters to you that will cause the circuit in the left side of the brain and pull it over all your attention over to the right side, where you can feed the wolf. That is all about joy and belonging and frolicking and having good puppies and all of that.

So what are some other things that we can do that move us from that fear based circuit over to the curiosity based circuit. For lack of a better word for it, Yeah, I'm so glad you asked. None of this is in the book I just wrote a little of it is, But it's in the book I'm writing now. The right side of the brain has very few verbal components. The places where it uses language are in poetry and jokes. So actually seeking humor is one of the things you can do to feed the wolf on the right side

and to shift the energy. There's a great book called Deep Survival by Lawrence Gonzalez where he talks about how people who survive unsurvivable situations are really funny about it. Like they find a way to be to laugh at the darkest moments of their lives. So that's one way. Just drenching yourself in immediate sensory experience, like imagining three things you love to taste and three things you love to hear, and like any of the senses and going

into that deeply will shift you. I've done that with huge groups and you can actually feel the shift in the room when people go into their senses instead of their thoughts. So yeah, so you turn down thought and you turn up presence and experience, and that allows you to stop feeding the bad wolf and going over taking something over to the good wolf. Yeah. I think that humor piece is such an important one. I've often said, I think levity is a spiritual virtue. You know, it

should be listed as one. And it is true that people, oftentimes we have gone through the worst things, have the best sense of humor about them. I mean, I know, in a a you know, there's a lot of laughter about things that are really pretty pretty dark things, you know, but having gone through them, we're able to laugh about them. And you know, laughter is such a powerful tool. But I never really thought of it is moving that sort

of left to right brain. Oh, it's so powerful. And again, the reason you don't value it like as this massive prize, which it really is, is that the culture downgrades it. Our particular culture, and that would be modern sociologists called the weird culture is western ucated, industrialized, rich, and democratized. Our culture is so materialistic and so based on the idea of scarcity and survival that it really really focuses all its energy on exactly what you said, frightens you

in the night. You've gotta have enough money, You've got to survive. You know what about other people? Are you serving them? Well? Do they like you enough? There's this continuous frenzy of fear and the need to control situations so that we don't have to be afraid, and it never works. We just get more and more frightened. And then if you just sit around laughing with your friends, the culture goes, well, you're wasting time. Now. I don't think so. I think that's the most value added thing

you could possibly do. And I know what you mean about the laughter in those rooms. It is some of the most holy expression of spirit I've ever heard. Reinhold and Ibar said, laughter is the beginning of prayer. And I think maybe that's true that the first person who was really in deep crap and suddenly burst out laughing was telling the most powerful kind of prayer. Yeah, yep. I have a couple of people I know that I've done some work within our listeners of the show, who

also really love your work. And I solicited a couple of questions. So I don't normally do this, but I happen to know that they love you, and I thought, why not ask them? And so one of the questions was, and they are great questions otherwise I wouldn't ask them, which is, how do you continue to grow yourself? I know that changes over time. What's that look like for you now? What is continuing to move forward and grow

in your life look like now? Well, fortunately I was blessed with an extremely anxious brain and a very flimsy body. So there, It's like I do all these self help things, and they actually do. I I said to my daughter one day, I've stopped reading self help books and she was like, well, Mom, maybe you self helped, and I

think I have. But I have to self help every single day, and you know, and that's why I'm interested in it's the fact that the brain, pushed by culture, goes back into fear over and over and over again. Because I've had that experience, I don't fall into joy naturally.

I wake up in the morning and I deliberately put myself in a place of joy by looking at the parts of me that are frightened, that are depressed, that are discouraged, and then finding a way to connect with compassion and speak from a different self to those parts of me that are afraid. I don't want to freeze out the bad wolf. I want to scratch it under the chin and and maybe give it some quay ludes. No, no,

no drugs. Sorry, that's probably triggering for your audience. I love that word, by the way, the lud, I know, the double vowels. They're fabulous. Anyway, Just calm down the wolf and then he actually comes over and works for the good side as well. I don't believe that any part of us is evil, but for me, there's always a project. So I'm pushing my mind as hard as I can on this new idea of fear and the brain science around it. And then there's always my natural

tendency towards slipping into negative mood states. And finally there's the fact that I'm going to die, which you know, they say, I know everybody dies, but I assume that in my case there will be an exception. We all feel that way, but sort of looming, you know, death sort of looms over those of us who think about it, and it means you've got to keep your powder dry, you've got to tidy up, you've got to keep self

helping every day. Yeah. And so when you embark on a new project writing wise, is it because you found something that really interests you. Is it because it's what you most need to learn in that moment or are those the same thing? That's such an interesting question. Another writer was asking me the other day what's your muse? And I was thinking, what is it? Because I've written wildly different things over the years, Like I wrote a feminist book to begin with, and people said you're a feminist,

and I'm like, no, I'm done with that. I'm writing about my son with down syndrome, and they're like, oh, you're all about intellectual disability. And now I'm done with that. I'm going to write about I don't know food. Anyway, I thought, what is it that helps me choose topics. And it's really like there's kind of this very very thin but very bright little line, like a fish line that goes through my entire life, and I'm sort of pulling myself along it, and it goes straight through the

center of my heart. And I would have to say that that is a kind of spiritual identity, a spiritual destination, a spiritual state of being. If I don't keep it at the center of my life all the time, I just absolutely flame out. And when I do stay on it, it just pulls me into things I did not expect. But if it says go, I go. And if it says don't go, I don't go. And that's just it. Yep. My through line for guests on this show is do I want to read their work? And if I don't,

they're not a guest, you know. It's just that's it, because I try and engage deeply with each piece of work, and I'm just like, do I want to? And if I don't, then I'm just not going to That served me fairly well, I think, yeah, I think it has. It's so funny people keep paying me to say this. I mean, I went through my own life adventures and I, you know, broke away from my own home culture and everything.

And I was teaching business school in my early thirties and I was teaching career development, and I would say to my students things like you should probably get a job doing something you enjoy. And then they would line up outside my office at office hours and they'd be like, wait, wait, wait, go back. What was that thing about enjoying my job. I've never heard that. And I like, yeah, if you love something that makes you happy, maybe do a little more.

And if you hate something that makes you miserable, maybe not so much. And they were like, here is some money. Just say that again. And thirty years later, people keep paying me to say that. And it seems pretty obvious, like worms could learn it, but people are too sophisticated, and we end up missing that really simple thing. Does

it interest uses make us happy? Well? That leads right kind of into the heart of the book, the Way of Integrity, which is this idea that we often do what our culture has told us we should do, not what we want to do. And oftentimes, I think what's really difficult about this is we often don't even realize it until later. It's one thing to change when you're twenty one, it's another thing to change when you're forty one. Um, And it's it's not to say that we can't make changes.

I mean, I left a pretty good career about has it been three or four years ago to do this, So it's you certainly can. But I think, you know, if we knew that stuff earlier. That's why I sort of just keep, you know, with my son. I'm like, it's just worth thinking about really what you want to do because you're going to be doing it for a long time, you know, God will and you're gonna be doing it for a long time, you know, right absolutely, there you we're doing something for a long time. You've

got a lot of work years. Yeah, So thank god you're creating that little micro culture for him where your personal desires are the most important thing and most people are not. You know, And every by culture it means any social pressure you encounter. So your family, your ethnicity, your community, your nationality, all of these have different levels of cultural pressure. And we're all born completely aware of our personal preferences. So we're in integrity. Integrity it just

means intact we're just one thing. But before we even learn to talk, we start to encounter cultural pressures. Maybe our parents wish that we cried last, or that we smiled more, or if we're a boy, that we act tougher and if we're a girl that we act nicer or whatever, and we start responding to that before we can even talk. And it's because we're so dependent on other human beings, and that's ut positive. That's a good quality, and that makes us compassion and it helps us cooperate.

But when our nature goes one direction and our culture goes another, almost all of us will just sell out our nature hard and go after the culture. So now we're not one thing. Integrity were two things duplicity. There's what's too for us at a very deep level, and then there's what we're trying to adapt to. And I used to ask audiences. I'd stop right in the middle of a speech and say is everyone comfortable? And they would say yeah, And I'd say no, no, no, tell me,

are you really comfortable? And they would repeatedly say they were. And then I'd say, how many of you, if you were home alone right now, would be sitting in the exact position you're in at this moment. And no one would raise a hand, and I would say why not, and they would sit there like really brilliant people, CEO s whatever. And then finally, after like a minute, somebody would say it's not very comfortable, and I would say, yes, indeed.

And the problem is not that you're mildly uncomfortable. And the problem is that thirty seconds ago you looked at me and swore you were comfortable while knowing you were uncomfortable. Your body knows you're uncomfortable, and your mind was telling you you're totally comfortable. That split between what we perceive to be our experience and what we know at a deeper level to be our experience. That split is I

believe what causes all psychological suffering. Yeah, you say, are psychological suffering comes from thoughts that we genuinely believe while simultaneously knowing they aren't true. Yep, that's a very on its surface confusing statement. No kidding, right, Because if I genuinely believe it but simultaneously know it not to be true, how don't even start to unwind this? Right? Because if I don't fully know, I do coaching work like you do, and I a lot of times I'll ask clients. I

love your reframing of not what do you want? What do you yearn for? But when you people to think more deeply about what they want, they're often deeply confused. Yeah. My follow on to that question, and I'll just make this even harder for you, is that culturing process starts so young that it's almost impossible to say that I am cultured. Like, what I'm interested in has been a sum of all the things that have happened to me. So which of those things do I sort of want

to hang onto and go, Oh, that's really me? And which of those things do I want to go, Oh that's culture, that's trauma. It's all woven together. You are the sum of what's happened to you plus what came in originally. So it's the old nature nurture debate, right, So the sum of everything that happened to you is nurture. But you also have a true nature, and you know your nature at the level you knew it as a newborn, which is wordless, sensory based on your feelings of your emotions.

So there are all these sophisticated sort of compasses inside are psyches and our bodies that are helping us know what's good for us at any given time. And when the culture around us pushes us in a direction that's away from our nature, it's like the compasses stopped working. But the one ally we have that is with us from the moment of birth and we'll be with us

to death is suffering, you know. And I used to spend a lot of time thinking, well, if there is a spiritual force that loves us, why do we suffer? And it's because without suffering, we would not have any way to readjust those compasses. Suffering is the one thing that really gets our attention. In Catch twenty two, which I read in second grade, I remember being quite confused by it. But I remember from being seven years old, some guys saying, well, why is suffering? Okay, how can

you believe in God if they're suffering? And he said, well, suffering alerts us to pain. And another character says, well, why couldn't there just be a system of flashing lights or something, And I remember thinking, well, my family has a car with all these warning lights and they're always on. We were not good at property maintenance my family, and nobody pays any attention to them to make us pay attention.

Something has to break. We have to be inconvenienced. It has to be incredibly interruptive of our normal lives, and it has to be distressing. And I was like, well now we're back with suffering again. So it really is this profound ally and really truly, no matter how cultured you are, no matter how socialized you are. Oh my gosh.

I've worked with people who were born into spotlights and never got out of them with so much attention on them their whole lives, and they still had suffering telling them this is not me, this is not me, And you need to get by yourself and relax and get really, really in touch with where things aren't comfortable. It's just that simple question where am I uncomfortable? And your true self, your true nature, will always tell you, and then you

you go from there. You start with the discomfort, and then you start to say, okay, why am I sustaining these conditions that are making me uncomfortable? And then you start unwinding the cultural messages that have you all tied up. We come into this world with a certain nature. If you follow certain spiritual traditions far enough, they get to the point where they talk about essentially this oneness, this impersonal, undifferentiated oneness. Right. I think what you're saying, though, is

a little bit different. You're saying that we come in here with what personality researchers might say are some dials on our personality. We're born that way out, So my nature is not the same as your nature in your belief here, right. Actually, no, I believe that there is this incredible universal intelligence and it is integrated with, uninterrupted by our personal sense of self, so that if we go deep enough in meditation or whatever, we realize that

we've been melded with it all along. It's like the old metaphor of waves in the ocean. I'm a wave, you are a wave. The ocean is going to take us back very soon. So there's no difference to me between that oneness that we feel in those deeply spiritual

moments and the truest of our true selves. But the vast intelligence knows what it wants to do with the individual wave, and so that it guides us and pulls us along and allows us to have individual experiences for the variety of it, for the joy and compassion and wisdom of it. But it's always part of the whole and when you feel that, it's so rely xing because you realize that the whole thing is benevolent and it not only loves you, but it is you at some

essential level. And it's having an adventure looking out through Eric's eyes, through Martha's eyes, and and it's gaining this huge experience of what it means to be alive in these forms. Right, you use a phrase for that, You say that from this perspective, we're all intermingled drops in what Dante calls Lo gran mar del Sri or the great City of being. Yeah, the great sea of being. Yeah,

I was thinking about this. Um. There's a line from Alexander Pope that really struck me and goes all forms that perish other forms supply by turns, we catch the vital breath and die like bubbles on the sea of matterborn. We rise, we break, and to that sea return. And that could sound really ghoulish and like we're soap bubbles and we we pop and we don't exist anymore, or it can bring you into a sense of awe, like,

oh my god, I'm having this incredible experience. I wrote this whole book sort of guided by Dante's metaphors, and I had the weirdest experience of the wave that was me connecting with the wave that was Dante, because I read like dozens of translations of the Divine Comedy, and I was always parsing them from meaning and everything. Don't worry, it's not a book about Dante. It's it's fun. You'll love it. But as I got into it, I thought,

this man is a psychological and spiritual genius. And I started dreaming about Dante, and it was very much as though the life that was Dante encountered my life in a way that was deeply joyful and intimate. This was

right during the pandemic, like we just shut down. Everything was scary as hell, and I was encountering on a daily basis another wave in the sea, another bubble in the sea that was so full of life still after seven hundred years, and I kind of lost the sense of time, which Dante himself does at the end of

the Divine Comedy. And I think if we go deeply enough into our wholeness, if we align our social selves with our essential selves, we start to experience ourselves as brief but eternal, and eternal means outside of time, not a long time, but no time. And outside of time, we can meet everyone that's ever been. We can enjoy everything that's ever happened, and and that sense of awe it's impossible to convey in words, is that right side

of the brain experience, But once you've had it. I used to work with heroin addicts on the streets and Phoenix, and that's what they all weren't looking for. I think, I mean, tell me where I'm wrong. No, you're not wrong. It is interesting to me as I think about sometimes, you know, my spiritual uh search. You know, I have to get it sometimes and go okay? In what ways? Is that similar to my addiction? In positive ways and

in negative ways? There's both, right, because I do think in my addiction all along was a deep yearning for connection and wholeness in oneness, and there was the occasional moment where drugs they did that you know, yeah, I intuited this deeper reality and then I would touch it and I would be like that. Now. Of course, what I then did to keep getting that burned my life

down right. And so I think it was young who said to Bill Wilson in a a that you know, really made the point of the word spirits for alcohol and the word spirit that's that's what alcoholics are looking for to a large extent. Yeah, And I used to

tell the heroin addicts. I would go to this methodone clinic where people would come in because they couldn't get enough heroin, so and they had to sit through my thing to methodont so some of them would like fall asleep on the floor in front of and it was great. But I used to tell them, and I was not popular among the other counselors there because I'd say, never ever give up the search for that feeling, that feeling you had the first time it took you and you

knew you were home. That is how you're meant to feel. And the reason I said that was that, like Bill w I had an experience. I was in surgery at the time where I encountered this light. I was lying on the surgical table and I sat up and looked around and thought, well, that's odd. Why why am I sitting up when I am strapped down? And then I lay back down into my body and saw this light and it was tiny at first, it was like the

size of a golf ball. And then it began to expand, and when it touched me, I felt this incredible warmth and release and joy and homecoming and love beyond love, and I just started to laugh and laugh and laugh and cry. I mean, my body was crying. And the surgeons got very worried because there were tears coming out of my eyes and they thought that I was feeling pain. So the anesthesiologist almost increased the anesthesia, but then later he told me, as he was going to do that,

a voice said to him, don't do that. She's crying because she's happy. I had asked to see him because I wanted to know if I'd had a drug induced hallucination, and instead I got this really interesting story, and he was like, what happened in there? So I told him this light came and it filled my entire being with joy. And then it said, I don't think you have to die to feel this way. You're You're meant to feel this way while you're alive. Now go out and do

whatever it takes. And I think that's what heroin addicts are trying to find. I think that's what all addicts are trying to find. It's home. It's home base for us and the search to get back to it and to feel that way all the time has been my singular goal ever since. That's it, That's all I'm into. Yeah. I think what's interesting though, is that desire to feel a certain way all the time is sometimes what does lead us away from what you've talked about, that wholeness. Right.

This gets very interesting when you've done a lot of this, right, You've talked with people who look at and study and are enlightened, and you start to talk about like, well, are we talking about an experience or were talking about something else? Because experiences come and go. We are human beings. There's a tremendous amount of fluctuation in the experience that we have, right. I mean, you get hungry, you're not hungry.

You know you have a headache, you don't have a headache, and yet there is also something that seems to be deeper than that. And so, like you, my thing has been about how do I find my way back there in a way that isn't all about finding my way back there? The Chinese talk about trying not to try, right. I've had a couple of experiences they were a little they're different than what years were with with the light.

But I've had some in Zen we'd call Ken show experience right up, dramatic opening and matic enlightenment and experience. And of course I'm like, more of that, please, And He's like, the most surefire way to make sure you don't experience that again is to keep expecting to experience it again. Okay, well, now what do I do with that? Yeah, there's a there's a Zen teacher. His name is us escaping me for him and I'll come right back to me.

But Shinan he talks about how we travel the surface of the globe looking for enlightenment, looking for peace and the way to it, and this is exactly what Dante did, is to turn and start going into the center of it. And as we go closer to the center, we have sometimes these very intense mystical experiences. And the mistake we can make is to then turn and start roaming around the world of the mystical experience that we've had, and it's like a smaller sphere inside the bigger sphere, but

it doesn't take us to the core. So it can be very distracting and very misleading to think that those experiences are the thing itself. I did go that path for a little while. After I had that experience, I would do anything to get back to that. And I had a lot of mystical experiences, but they always if I tried to push into getting more of them, and they always sort of frittered out, and so I would end up going back. I would feel myself not comfortable.

And what's interesting is that the sensation I had on that table was not emotional. It affected me emotionally, but the experience itself was not one of emotion, and it wasn't one of sensation. It was one of absolute stillness, absolute peace. And what I've realized over the ensuing years is that I can sit with incredible levels of anxiety and being total peace. So it's a field that contains

the emotions. It's not the emotion itself. It's it's like a Cartola says, the opposite of death is not life. The opposite of death is birth. Life has no opposite. Life is the field through which birth and death alternate. So the field of me that is life, the field of me that his presence, the field of me that is awareness, can sit with me in my anguish and my sorrow, in my alienation and love me completely without

changing a thing. And it's that it's the switch into the part that is holding and loving the emotional part, away from the emotional part itself is identity, and into the field where the emotions are happening. That switch, I

think is the enlightenment experience. So my experience with that is there are times that I am able to make something like the switch you're describing, where I'm able to go, Okay, there's this very strong emotion, and now I become the space that that emotion is happening in and I'm able to sort of step back. And then there are other times that that emotion feels utterly over wellming and I'm just lost in it. And I'm kind of curious for you.

Is there anything that you have found that makes it more likely you're able to make that switch into the container or the witness or whatever way you want to put that, because I think that's a question a lot of people who are listening to the show or reading your work are trying to figure out. Is like, yeah, I get that intellectually, right, Boy, Sometimes that's really hard to do. Yeah, one way that I'm writing about right now, it's kind of a new front in psychology right now.

It's called part psychology. What the sort of flagship is called internal family systems. The idea, I'm sure you know about it. The idea is that we all have various aspects of self that should be treated as full individuals, and if we treat them as full individuals and we have relationships with them, they have this strange ability to cooperate with us. When I first started meditating really seriously, the anxiety nearly killed me. And it would not subside

in ninety seconds. It went on for hours and days and weeks. It was terrific, and it was me in anxiety and I had experienced that light and why couldn't I get back to it? If you start to think of yourself instead, as there was a part of me that had that experience with the light, there's another part of me that is running around and a round, and start to visualize the different parts. For me, the anxiety became a horse that just ran and ran and ran.

Horses do that when they're scared. They'll run round and round just to get the adrenaline out. And I sat there in meditation, I watched the horse go round and round and round, and one thing horses do if you don't approach them, they finally slow down. And finally I watched the anxiety slowing down. I thought, oh, it's slowing down. And then I thought, wait where am I? And I realized I was outside the pan the horse was in, and I'm like, okay, well I am not the horse,

So what am I? And I was the watcher or the compassionate witnesses it's called in some traditions. And now if I experience anxiety, anger, whatever, and I experienced them every day, I stop and I say to the part that is upset, what's going on with you? Right now? What can I do for you? And because I've practiced this for a long time, Young called itself with a capital S. And Richard Tchwitz, the guy who was who started internal family systems therapy, he calls it the same thing.

He just wrote a book called No Bad Parts, which is really great. And what they both found was that there is this sort of overarching self capital ass that is sort of the shepherd, to use a biblical metaphor,

or the parent of this flock of frightened children. And if you can say, all right, all right, I'm anxious, if you can just get to some compassion for the part of you that is in an anxiety or anger or whatever, and if you can wish it well and I use it tibetan loving kindness meditation simple maybe well. May you be happy, may be free from all internal and external suffering, May you have ease of well being. Whatever doesn't matter, as long as it's a good thought.

As you continue to offer the benighted part of yourself this comfort, you realize that the comforting part of you is still in the light, and it was always there. And that's what I keep coming to every time I pop out of a bad mood. It's like the part of me that isn't in the presence of that light was always there through my childhood, through my adolescence, through every horrible thing that never happened to me. It was always present. And that starts to feel very anchoring after

a while. Yeah, it's interesting. I interviewed Dick recently about that book he talks about you know, there's different types of parts, and you know, one thing he talks a lot about is asking a certain part if it might step aside, which I think is a really interesting thing. And then The other thing he talks about is that the most wounded parts of you, the exile aisles. He describes as you may really need someone who's trained, or

a therapist or someone else to go there. And you talk about this also in the book The Way of Integrity. You say, look, depending on what your your trauma is, you may not want to wade into this on your own. So I want to do that. I think it speaks to the fact that there are certain experiences for us that are so overwhelming, so emotionally activating, that we're not going to just sit there and switch out of him.

And maybe a process, right it may be a process of slowly, over time, slowly bringing the volume on them down until we're able to work with them on our own more skillfully. Yeah. Another thing this is turning into the Dick Schwartz show, which I love. He's an awesome dude. But he says, you know, one thing you can ask them is you know, you can let me know a little bit about what you're going through, but don't overwhelm me.

I can't handle it right now. And weirdly, the part that is traumatized will say all right, as long as you're listening, to me, I won't give you huge dose. I'll just drip it out a little bit. But that again is in the presence of a skilled therapist. So yeah, if you've been through something horrible. One of the things that happened to me that I wrote about in the Way of Integrity. After I had this light experience, I was so obsessed with getting back I would do anything.

So when I was twenty nine years old, I made a vow that I wouldn't lie in any way for one calendar year. It was a New Year's resolution, and during that year, you get to your truth really quickly. And I would not recommend this as a strategy because I was not in therapy. I was not in a safe environment. And during that year I basically walked away from or lost my religion, my family of origin, my marriage,

my home, my job, my industry. Everything sort of went into the bonfire because it wasn't right for my true self. But one of the biggest things was that I started encountering having really intrusive flashbacks of being sexually abused as a child um in a pretty violent way. And it

it almost broke me. It really almost broke me. It happened right after I had the light experience, actually, and it was like I had been given enough comfort in that experience to just barely keep me alive during the flashbacks.

So I do want to say to people who are out there who aren't in therapy but are miserable, I do believe there is a compassion to the universe and a symmetry to it where if you can just reach for the sense of feeling loved and comforted and contained, something reaches back for you and that will help you get to therapy. That's what it did for me, and then the therapy got me much much better. But even

if you feel completely alone, reach for it. Wish yourself well, Pretend that you are an almighty force wishing yourself well, and you begin to detect that it actually is what part of you is. Let's move into some of that work you do around lies, because there's a fair amount in the way of integrity where you talk about you know that one of the ways we get out of

integrity is we tell lies to ourselves and others. So share a little bit more about Lyne, and then I would love to go a little deeper into some of what telling the truth cost you and gained you. Yeah, yeah, during that whole horrible year, speaking of having a terrible time while having a wonderful time, I felt like it was hell. Everything was burning down around me, but I had regained a connection to the sense of peace at my core, and that continued to grow as everything else

fell apart. And I was happier and healthier in that year while everything was going wrong than I had ever been that I ever remembered being because I was lying to myself about so many things. And there's really good research on lying. A group of people was asked very simply, try not to lie so much for a few weeks. They said, all right. There was no policing. There wasn't even a measure really of whether they were lying or not.

But compared to a control group when they came back a few weeks later, the ones who had decided not to lie as much had fewer doctor visits, They had fewer sore throats, they had better relationships that were happier with their jobs. Like lying messes with us, and we don't just lie with our words. And by the way, most people lie at least three times within a ten minute conversation. We don't do it because we're bad. We

do it because we're trying to be good. We're trying to fit in, we're trying to please people, were trying to you know, tow the line whatever, and so we deviate from what's true for us. And if you can get into touch with what's true for you and at least don't lie to yourself, you start to heal in this very very deep way. And you can lie with

your life. Going to a job you hate week after week after week on the assumption that that is all you can do for a living is a kind of lie because you're suffering from it and you know you are, and you keep making yourself do it. The same thing with just presenting yourself in a way that's not really you, in a way that's more pious or more stylish or whatever. If you start to live as yourself as well as speaking the truth, healing happens at a very deep level.

I had three incurable progressive autoimmune diseases when I started that year of lying, and when I stopped lying, they all went away. So it healed everything from my body on out. It was really rough, but it's better than living in the line. And so one of the things that you stopped lying about. Was you grew up in the Mormon Church. Yes, that's a pretty rough place to try and navigate your way out of. No kidding, I didn't really navigate my way out, so I just hacked

my way through with a sledge hammer. Um. Yeah. It was very confining and in a way I wrote in another book that it was like that religion locked me in a dungeon, and then through in the key. The dungeon was, here is exactly how you have to behave in every aspect of your life, and you will never vary from it. And by the way, it will make you extremely unhappy, but that doesn't matter. But the key was and you have an individual responsibility to find your

way back to God. It was by following the second directive that I blasted through the first, and it was actually ironically because I had come to believe that there

was some metaphysical reality in the universe. I hadn't believed that I spent from the time I was seventeen I went off to Harvard from Provo, Utah, bit of a culture shock, but just and completely into the materialist rationalist model until during my PhD at Harvard, I had a son with Down syndrome, and while I was pregnant with him, began having experiences that were frankly psychic, and that blew

my mind. And it made me think, Okay, whatever the Mormon has told me about finding my way back to God, I'm doing that. That is what I'm going to do. And it ended up I'm not saying that I am one with God, but damn I feel like I can come closer now. And it led me right out of the religion that handed it to me. So there you go, paradox.

One of the things I think that is very difficult about telling the truth in some of these situations is we want to be accepted, we want to be liked, we want to you know, all these things, and there's also a genuine care sometimes for the people in our lives. So I know that your family was Mormon, and so talk to me about how you navigated your way through knowing that some of what you were doing, at least

they would say, was hurtful to them. We could debate whether it was or wasn't, but they would say it was. How do you stay true to your path and how do you know that you're not being selfish? When part of what's holding you back is genuine care for the people around you, That's a wonderful question. It was a huge, huge struggle for me. Our family wasn't just Mormon. My father was the foremost scholarly apologist in the history of

the Mormon Church. And an apologist is the guy who says, I have a scholar's credentials, and I'm telling you that what the profit of this religion stated is the actual factual truth. And Mormonism makes a lot of interesting truth claims based on the sayings of and doings of their

original prophet, Joseph Smith. So my father's whole job was to support Joseph Smith, who said things like all the American Indians are descended from a group of Jews who say held over from Israel in six b C. Or an Egyptian mummy that Joseph Smith struggled across in Illinois in forty something was actually the original book that Moses wrote. Stuff like that. It was just in the light of

modern science, it's ridiculous. But my father was very brilliant, and he spent literally all day every day confabulating people's minds so that they felt stupid if they didn't agree with Mormonism. And I have seven brothers and sisters, and we all grew up in his glory. And so when I started remembering him being the perpetrator of the abuse, and it was sort of tied in with religious mania.

When I made that statement, when I told them what I thought it happened, it was literally the most damaging thing I could do to them emotionally. And I am a massive people pleaser. I want everybody to be happy. That's what my whole life is about. And I've always been the because people please are in the family, and I was not pleasing them. But if I hadn't had that light experience, that would have been way too much.

But given the experience of that light, and given my internal experience that what my father was doing had taken him into a kind of madness and then helped him keep other people in that same madness, it was separating them from home, from that light. And so my desire for for everyone to go home, really home, and to be there, not when we die, but even when we're alive,

that ultimately one. And I felt, well, at least I will slug my way out of this cage, and maybe maybe I'll make an opening that they can come through later, you know, and that's up to them. To love an alcoholic is to take away the bottle. And that's the most hurtful thing you can do to an alcoholic, right, And it really makes you scrutinize what the love is, which wolf really is the bad one? In which is the one you want to feed? And the light was

the only thing I wanted to feed to anyone. Yeah, you address that selfish thing, and you say, at one point, everything that truly makes us happy is limitless and multiplicative, not scarce and divisive. As we realize this, our fear of scarcity, the basis of greed lessons. Yeah, this is in Dante, like he's he's in the Purgatorio, which no one ever talks about, and an angel comes and he says, we're so happy that you got here. Now everyone's going

to be happier, Like be happy. That makes us all happier. And he literally says, how could that be? Isn't happiness like a pie you divide up? And the angel says, no, no, no, no, no, that's a material way of looking at it. The essence of what we long for is a feeling state and to bring more love. Like if you're in love with someone and the two of you are like making love, and each person knows that the other person is enjoying it, the circle of joy continues to increase. Bring a puppy

into a family of five. It's not like they have to divide the love so they can give some to the puppy. The puppy lifts all of them even higher than before. That's the miracle of switching your identity from the material self to this limitless state of being. In that state of being, everything, everything magnifies joy. So you talk about how, in the beginning, let's start by stop

lying to ourselves. You may not be ready to stop telling lies externally, but at least stop with yourself, and then as you grow into more internal integrity, you may have the strength to start doing it externally. And you say that now, once we've experimented with doing this telling and acting on our truth for a limited period of time, we've got one of three options right. One is we

could continue forward into more integrity. The other would be to keep wandering around purgatory by staying at exactly the same level of self disclosure. You've reached or go back

to whatever secrets, lies and habits you've abandoned. And you then go on to talk about You say, I've had many clients who couldn't go through this gate that they love going to therapy or counseling because they can blow off steam, they can share all this difficult stuff, but they never are willing to take it out into their lives. And thus you say, some people become therapy or seminar addicts, constantly seeking environments where they can be themselves without upsetting

any apple carts. They may wander around antipurgatory this is the Dante term for years, not really in hell anymore, but definitely not in heaven. Say more about that. So if somebody finds themselves in that spot, so okay, yeah, I hear a ring of truth in that, how do I choose to keep moving forward at that point when it comes time for our all Right, I've recognized some

internal truths. I've experimented telling them a little bit externally. Boy, the consequences of doing that externally look kind of grim, feeling pretty afraid. I know I need to keep going,

but I'm stuck. I'm afraid. That's a great question. One of the exercises that I recommend in there comes from a psycho neuroimmunologist named Mario Martinez, and he suggests that when we look forward and we think about living in absolute integrity, like if I leave my church, if I leave my job, and you know, my parents and wife won't approve of me, and like if I if I leave the things that aren't working for me and it seems to upset people on the outside, how do I

tolerate that? How do I justify it? And we tend to only think about what the culturated part of us expects, which is pressure to conform other people's anger, other people's disappointments, suffering that that you know, when we go all the way too and then I won't be providing for my family and they'll all die on the street of starvation. That's really easy, that road. I've had so many clients they just go right down that road. It is broad and it's flat, and it was like we all right along.

What we don't do is what Mario Martinez says, which is to imagine what would happen if we made the changes and everything went well. So I did this when I was leaving Mormonism and sort of exiled from my family of origin. I happen to be doing Byron Katie. If you've had her on the show, I think you have. I happen to be doing her work, which involves questioning thoughts that create suffering and then turning them around to

the opposite. So I would think something like, oh, I'm going to destroy my family if I do this, and then I would force myself to go through is that really true? It causes me suffering? Okay, what's the opposite. I'm going to create my family if I do this. What could that be true? And you start to think through things like that. The biggest shift for me was I wrote a book about this whole experience, and before the book came out, I got death threats. I got

legal threats. People were threatening my children, my other people that had helped me. I was really, really intent, and I was on a plane and I was thinking, over and over, something terrible is going to happen because I wrote that book. Something terrible is going to happen to me. Because I wrote that book over and over, and I said, I did the Byron Katie work, and I turned it around and it came out I'm going to happen to something terrible because I wrote that book, and I just

sat back and I went, wait, wait, what? But it felt like it was maybe true. And then I thought, oh, I could rock some people who are suffering now and get them out of suffering. I started to imagine the good that might come. I went to Utah and I was like hiding in a Starbucks because Mormons don't drink coffee and I didn't want to be and I went through, Well, they don't admit the cookie coffee. So I went over and I got a coffee, and I was like, has

anyone seen me? And the barista handed me my change, and as she did, she said thank you for writing that book. And I suddenly thought, oh, okay, the still over line that guides my life pulled me into writing that, and I thought about the terrible things, but I didn't think that maybe this woman's life would be improved if I dared to do that. If you can imagine the good that will come, which is as infinite and as likely as the bad, it can start to pull you

in the direction of your truth. So Mario Martinez says, rock backward into the feeling of I'm going to stay the way I am, and then imagine things going well and pull literally physically rock forward into that everybody's responding, well, all the good that can happen is happening. Then rock back into not going to stay in my little cage, then rock forward into I'm going to get out and

it's going to free other people as well. And as you literally physically go back and forth between the two, the poll of what is truer for you will get stronger and stronger. And then when you actually have the opportunity to make a choice about what to do, you will have already done the word necessary to give you the courage to do what you think is the best option. Let's wrap up with talking about the power of one degree turns. Use different phrases than this, but we talked

about this on the show a lot. But I love that idea is share with us what they are and why are they effective. Yeah, there's a reason that you talk about it in different terms. People who study change, they have this the trends theoretical model of change. So is that the most effective changes are the ones that

are small, incremental, and and repeated frequently. So I did this thing I'm not gonna library here, and that's because I'm the kind of person who is going to die right after saying, watch this can't hurt um and then do something really stupid. For people that I'm coaching and people that read the book, what I would recommend is that you imagine yourself as an airplane. One of the things about airplanes is they have to be in structural integrity.

Fly same with your life. If you're in basic integrity, you can start your life, can start to take you to the places you want to go. And what I suggest is that as you figure out what feels right for you, you turn by one degree every so often, just a little bit towards true north for you. And if you do that over a ten thousand mile trip, you know, turn one degree north every half hour. You won't even notice the plane turning, but you'll end up

at a completely different location. And that is the kind of change that is most likely to work. So by all means to it, do it gently. Be kind there. Certainly, if we're talking about telling less lies, we could slowly tell a few less lies. If I'm looking at trying to build a practice of spending time in stillness, I could start with five minutes, and I could build the six minutes and eight minutes, and and again I'm a

huge fan of that. My mind is going right this moment to someone I know right now who's trying to make a really big decision about a marriage, you know, and that's a more difficult thing to do a one degree turn on. Yeah, well, you take one step, one step, one tiny step. But eventually you come to the edge of a cliff, and that next tiny step is going to be a big one. And that is where you need to have paved the way by continuously returning to

a sense of wholeness, a sense of integrity. And as you get there for yourself, it expands into being one with the whole universe, as we've said, and it's so what psychologists would call reinforcing. It is, it's so strengthening. It made my body healthy, it makes your soul healthy, and it becomes habitual. So I think that courageous people are people who are in the habit of taking the

next step forward towards what they believe is right. And usually that's just a little step along the path, no problem. But when it comes to a cliff, if you're absolutely familiar with the process of knowing what's right for you. You You take the next step, even if you fall a thousand feet, because courage has become a habit. Yeah, it's interesting.

I was thinking about, you know, how did I get to where I'm at, where this show is what I do for a living, And like you said, it was I started a podcast, you know, like, okay, but no big deal. Chris and I, my producer and editor, were working yesterday. This episode will have come out, I think before your episode comes out. But we are celebrating our five hundredth episode here soon, and we were putting that together. But it was just, you know, one episode at a time.

But there eventually was a point where I edged along until Yeah, there was a point where I was like, Okay, now I need to jump off the cliff. If I want to do this for my living, I've got to jump off the cliff. I don't know what would be the best analogy. I had got some ropes or I don't know what it was, but the jumping off the cliff at that point was less risky than it would

have been a year before, two years before. Yeah, yeah, a nice man said, And then came the day when the courage it took to blossom became less than the ridge it took to stay tight in a bud. Yes. And I think that's when I tell my clients to move forward, when it actually takes less courage to go toward your truth than to stay in any degree of lie. And I say, stay in the lie as long as you can, because pushing yourself forward is not what you

want to do. It's a form of violence to to a very precious and very sensitive being, your core self that is out there looking for its way home. And please be a gentle guide and guardian to that sensitive self. It deserves every kindness you can give it. That is as beautiful a place to end up as I can think of you. And I are going to talk a little bit more in the post show conversation about the three things that Virgil keeps urging Dante to do while

he's in the inferno. So we're going to talk about that because it's great, So listeners, if you'd like to get access to that, to other post show conversations, add free episodes and the joy of supporting the one you Feed, you can go to one you Feed dot net slash Join Martha Thank you so much for coming on. I've been looking forward to this one and it's been a real pleasure. Thank you for me too. At Thank you

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