Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Martha Beck. Martha Beck is a monthly columnist at O, The Oprah Magazine. She is the New York Times bestselling author of The Joy Diet, Finding Your Own North Star, and Finding Your Way in a Wild New World. Martha has coached hundreds of individuals over the past 15 years, and NPR has called her “the best-known life coach in America.” She has taught career development at the American Graduate School of International Management, performed research at Harvard Business School, and consulted to numerous Fortune 500 corporations.
With Sounds True, Martha Beck has created the audio program Follow Your North Star, and will be presenting at The Self-Acceptance Summit, a free 10-day online series featuring Elizabeth Gilbert, Parker Palmer, Annie Lamott, Tara Brach, and many other teachers and writers on the topic of how to be kind to ourselves—a 10-day summit that begins on September 11.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Martha and I spoke about her experience of going through what she calls “the center of Hell” when learning about her son Adam’s Down syndrome diagnosis, and the template of change that she discovered [as well as] the journey of faith that it requires. We also talked about having the courage to leave a situation that no longer works for you and Martha’s pith advice for someone who just doesn’t feel ready to make that change. We also talked about her experience as a coach with people facing the challenge of self-acceptance, particularly in relationship to body hatred. Finally, we talked about Martha Beck’s love of Africa and her deep commitment to both awakening consciousness and healing the natural world, and how she remains engaged in this task in a joyful and positive way. Here’s my conversation with Martha Beck:
Martha, you’re known as one of the “coaches of coaches,” one of the best-known life coaches in America. To start our conversation, I’d love to know what you think makes someone an excellent coach.
Martha Beck: One word: Listening. There’s literally an exercise I do where I just have people say what they’re worried about, and like a cartoon psychologist, say, “[Yes], and what more would you to say about that?” To keep that going for 15 minutes, they’ll fix everything themselves. I do not know why people keep paying me.
TS: OK. Fair enough. I believe that listening is incredibly powerful, but I also think there’s probably more to it than that.
MB: There is. The way I teach people to interact with people—because I train coaches a lot—is that each of us is always forming conclusions about every other person. It’s impossible. We have subjective views about everything. The way I was trained as a PhD in sociology was to defer my own opinion to the other person’s perspective. What I teach people to do—it’s really simple; you can do it with your friends and neighbors—you have a conversation and then you say very frankly, “This is what I think is going on with you.” I could say to you—we barely connected today—but I could say, “Yes. You’re making a recording for your podcast. I’m guessing you want it to go well.”
Then the most important part is this: you ask to be disconfirmed. The phrase we use is, “Tell me where I’m wrong.” Not “tell me if I’m wrong,” because for certain, you will be wrong to some degree. Even speaking something in language makes it not what it is. When you ask to be disconfirmed, you open yourself to feedback from your real experience, and specifically from that other person. So they will give you as closely as they can their subjective point of view, and tell you exactly where you’re in error about your perceptions. That enables them to get more clear on their own psychology, and it develops trust that they’re in a place that is receptive and attentive to them.
In a weird way, it reminds me of meditation—where my mind shows up as the client, and then there’s the witnessing part that shows up just to say, “Uh-huh. I see what’s happening, and you might be wrong.” That combination is magic, I promise you. If you use that combination over and over, pretty soon you’ll get to the point where you’re not wrong, and you’re giving them a perspective that’s very, very helpful. You’re mirroring what they’re going through, which is what all of us need to get tidied up. We just need to look in a mirror.
TS: You’re really happy to talk about coaching in this conversation today with me. Tell me where I might be wrong, Martha. Did I do it? Did I disconfirm?
MB: You’re super right! Yes. What people usually say is, “You’re not wrong,” or, sometimes, they’ll say, “You’re completely wrong.” Either way, you should be delighted, because they’re getting clarity and they’re giving you clarity.
I would say yes, you’re right, except that I have always really had trouble with the word “coaching,” or the phrase “life coaching.” It makes me squirm and wince. I’ve been trying for 20 years to come up with a term that sounds less like it’s on the side of a cereal box. Really, I’m happier to talk about spiritual growth and development because that’s what—at least in the system I use—life coaching is just a cover word for that.
TS: That’s really interesting. I want to talk a lot about spiritual growth and development, and also your book, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World and this wild new world we’re in—but I have one more question about coaching.
MB: Sure.
TS: This is a little provocative, but I know you can handle it, which is I’ve noticed that when people tell me they’re a life coach, some part of me squirms and my eyes roll a little bit.
MB: Yes!
TS: Some of it is because I’ve interviewed a lot of people for jobs, and they’ll say, “Well, I wasn’t really sure what I was doing with my life. I was at a crossroads, and I became a life coach. Now, it’s two or three years later, and I’m here looking for a job.” I think to myself, “Why did you start coaching other people on their life path when you hadn’t really found your own? You thought your own was coaching, but it wasn’t.” Anyway, I notice I don’t have that much respect in some ways for the profession, the name of which you don’t like. I wonder if you could help me with this.
MB: Right. Yes. It’s funny, because when I wanted to be a psychologist, I kind of noticed the same thing—that it’s the cobbler’s children who go without shoes. A lot of times, it’s those of us who are broken who go into healing. In some sense, that’s like, “Oh my God, I’m trusting the airplane of my life to a pilot who is feverish and disoriented. Why would I do that?” Yes. This is why, when we do training, we call it “life training.” We say, “Until you can fix your life . . . Your first job in training is to fix your own life. Until you’ve fixed yours, you cannot fix another person’s life.”
On the other hand, when you do fix your life, you just become clear that the answers are always within the person. That’s why I use the image of “your own North Star.” You will never know the trajectory of another person’s life mission. That is not your privilege. It is theirs. Once you’ve found your way to clarity in your own mind, you can be a very, very useful sounding board again to help them read the compasses within themselves.
There’s this tendency for people to try to get expertise in something that sounds trendy or appeals to them simply because they need coaching. We always emphasize self-coaching, self-coaching, self-coaching. I don’t have a lot of respect for that either.
When you get a wounded healer who says—I mean, I can look people in the eye and say, “I have trashed my life up one side and down the other several different times, and I found my way back so that now I am 85 percent serene—if you judge serenity by moments of intense bliss that I’ve had in meditation, in a near-death experience, in a bunch of things. I’m about 80 percent of those on a bad day, and on a good day, I’m pretty close to 95. And I know how you can get yourself there. I can’t get you there, but I know from doing it myself that there’s something in you that is going that way, and I can help you find it.”
TS: Now, tell me a little bit from your own life path difficulties, if you will—and getting yourself out of those difficulties—maybe you could give a couple of examples that you think really illustrate this template, if you will, of change and transformation.
MB: Yes. Everything that happens to me seems to follow the model of Dante’s Inferno, where I’m just stumbling around, not knowing what to do—the way Dante is at the beginning. Then I enter Hell, and I go through the door that says, “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” There’s always the soul of a poet—usually, the books that I love and the authors who wrote them—who are sort of with me in spirit, and we start going down through Hell. There is no way back up. It gets worse and worse and worse until you realize—you get to the lowest possible point, in the center of the Earth. In Dante, it’s where Satan is frozen in a lake of ice, and his guide says to him, “Keep going.” He says, “There is nowhere to go.” The guide says, “Keep going.”
He climbs on Satan’s body and keeps going down. As he passes the center of the Earth, then by going the same direction, he’s headed up. The whole Inferno is about him going down, and the last few stanzas are about coming up. It ends, “And so we emerged, and once again beheld the stars.”
That’s happened to me several times in different forms. One of the worst was when I was at Harvard getting my doctorate, after getting my bachelor’s and MA there, and my second child was prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome at about six months into the pregnancy. I had already intensely bonded with him, though I’m politically pro-choice. It wasn’t a choice for me of having a baby or not. It was, “What kind of life do you think deserves to exist and why?”
When you’re a mother, contemplating this with a child, even—to me, at that point, he already was my child. That’s a really, really intense choice to have to make. Because I’d been at Harvard for so long—since I was 17—I thought in terms of intellectualism being the way to happiness, the way to success, the way to be admired. My entire ego was structured around intellect, and here was this child on the way whose intellect would be very, very different. He would never go to Harvard or maybe even school. [He] was horrifying to my doctors, to my advisors, to my classmates, even to my ex-husband, I think. He was really horrified.
I began—at the moment I got the diagnosis from the clinic, the nurse called me and said, “I have some not-so-good news for you.” At that moment, in my head, a voice said, “Don’t be afraid.” Then she told me, “You’re carrying a fetus with Down syndrome,” and the voice said, “Martha, are you happy?” I said, “What?” The nurse said, “I’m talking about trisomy of the 21st chromosome.” I said, “No, no. Not you. I was listening for the other voice.” I said, “I’ve heard that people with Down syndrome can be happy.” The voice said, “That is right.” The nurse said, “I don’t think so.”
That—those two voice in my head—when I heard that, that became the entire basis for the actions I took following that. I kept the baby, had him. He has Down syndrome. He’s almost 30 now. I did not know that I was entering a path of faith and miracles, and I call it magic. I don’t believe in magic, but it looks magical to someone in our culture—a lot of magic. But I went through the center of Hell to get there. I really did.
Then another time—after he was born, I thought, “Oh, spirituality is right. Well, I was born and raised Mormon. So, maybe all the Mormons were right. Oh, good heavens. I’m going to roll back all my rationality and try to be religious.” Then I found that religion was actually taking me away from that voice. Me—that religion—I’m not condemning anyone else. I ended up leaving that religion, and thereby losing the relationship with all my relatives and all my friends up to the age when I was about 17 and left the college. I lost everyone except for my nuclear family—my children and my husband and myself. That was not easy either, I can promise you.
TS: [Yes]
MB: Yes. Then I wrote memoirs about it, and then people got mad at me. That was another one that I haven’t yet written down—but you see where I’m going.
TS: Now, Martha, I’m curious. This voice that you heard in your head. What do you attribute that voice to? A part of yourself? An angel whispering to you? How do you think of it?
MB: I think it was myself, and I think it was everything that exists, because I don’t feel any difference between myself and all that exists—my real self. It was also you. It was also CJ, who’s in the studio recording this. It was everything. Absolutely everything whispered that to me. It needed to be everything, because the illusion that I was separate was very strong in that moment.
Yes. I would call it God. I would call it the Universe. I would call it All-That-Is. I would call it Casper the Friendly Ghost, if you want me to. I don’t know! I most often call it “Whatever.”
TS: I think some of the reason I’m asking is because I think sometimes people have trouble trusting the voices that they hear, distinguishing, “Is this a voice that I should follow, or is this just another inner blah-blah? I don’t know if I should trust this.”
MB: Right. Yes. The way I try to answer that—or the way I come to answer it in myself—as I said, after I heard that voice, I sort of went nuts the other direction. I found every—I read the great works of every major religion. I kept all the laws. I tried all their mystical practices. I was just seeing what would work and what didn’t. Mormonism—there are a few things that worked for me, and most of it didn’t, just really didn’t. Everybody was telling me, “Oh, you’ll hear a voice inside that will tell you to be faithful to this or that.” And yes, there are all those voices. But what can confuse the mind does not confuse the body.
I was also very, very chronically ill. I was in so much pain for about 12 years that I was basically bed-ridden during my entire twenties. I began to notice that when I believed a lie—that is, when I believed a voice that wasn’t telling a truth that resonated with my deepest sense of integrity—I would get sicker dramatically.
I was given this gift of a body that’s very, very sensitive. The body hates to lie. We know that scientifically. All your stress indicators skyrocket when you lie, even when you don’t know you’re lying. When I held onto a cultural thing like, “You should stay in your parents’ religion so that you can keep your parents,” something in me got sick. Mentally, it felt desirable, but physically, I literally got weaker and sicker and in more pain until it was really excruciating.
That’s when I finally started saying no. By that time, I had three diagnosed progressive, incurable illnesses that now—
TS: Oh my
MB: Yes, and they now have virtually no symptoms. They’re not supposed to get better. They just went away. If I lie, they come back. That is: if I believe a voice within me that is not resonant with my deepest integrity, I get sick. I have a real gift that way. But I promise: you do too. Your body will shy away. You know, we were talking about how when someone says, “I want a job. I’m a life coach because my life was falling apart. Now, I’ll come help you,” the body shrinks from the lie.
TS: OK. Help me understand that—your understanding of that from a biological mechanism, if you will. How do you get that—that if you believe a voice that’s untrue, you, Martha Beck, your body will get sick? What’s happening inside your body that it’s responding that way?
MB: Yes. It definitely is because I keep detailed notes, and I do love a bit of science. I’m obsessed with science. The two types of book I read most frequently are spiritual books and science. I just love it. I was trained in it.
Self-observation, the N of one, was the way I saw that pattern in myself. Then I started doing research. It turns out that the brain is very stressed when it has to invent something that is not what it is perceiving at a deep level. Most animals cannot lie. Chimpanzees can lie, but it’s extremely stressful on them. They can only lie down one level. They can hide something from you, but then they can’t tell you, “I didn’t hide it.” That’s the best their brains can do.
Our brains can sustain fictions and secrets, but it creates tremendous pressure for the creative aspect of the brain that is now trying to make up a world that is not what the senses are perceiving. It’s busy making up this world. If you lie in bed at night and you’re terrified that your stocks are falling in the marketplace or whatever, the reality your body is perceiving is simply, “Warm bed, dark place, here we are.” The part of the brain that’s making up, “Oh my God. I’m falling apart. My money is going away,” has to sustain the idea that money is keeping you alive, which it isn’t. You can’t eat it. You can’t really use it. It’s just a fictitious symbol of energy that we trade around. It has to maintain the fiction that things are disappearing when in fact, you’re just sitting on a bed. It has to maintain a whole future in which you don’t have enough money, which doesn’t exist. It’s laborious.
Remember, your brain takes up 20 percent of your calories. This is a lot of work. The easiest thing by far for the brain to do is to simply relax into what is present, and that’s what animals are always doing. For us, the fictions are so rapid, and the more we hold them, the more the muscles tense and it triggers a fight-or-flight reaction. Your adrenal glands are pumping like crazy. You’re squirting cortisol and glucocorticoids into your bloodstream, and your whole body is getting ready to run from a cave bear. That’s a lot of work, and it’s tiring. Over time, it creates stress-related illness. Even in the near-term—the immediate term—it creates physical weakness and a drop in attention, enjoyment. Everything in this physical-emotional self starts to corrode as we try to hold the lies.
TS: OK. You mentioned in describing this passage in your life—the birth of your son with Down syndrome—that is also in some ways started a deep journey of faith for you.
MB: Yes.
TS: I want to understand more what faith means to you. What does that mean—to be faithful?
MB: There was a time when I was so transfixed, because if you start—as you well know—if you start meditating a lot and if you start giving your mind over to the present, you go into what some traditions call “the Time of the Miracles,” which is a phase on the spiritual journey. It’s not the most important phase, but it’s very arresting. It gets your attention because little miracles start happening and then some that maybe don’t feel small, like having precognitive experiences, or in my case, I had remote viewing, which is knowing what someone is doing when they’re far away from you.
I was really curious about this world. I used to walk around thinking, “What am I meant to see here? What am I meant to see? What’s going to happen? What am I waiting for? What’s the enlightenment? Where is this taking me?” All I would hear in response, coughed up from my subconscious by whatever, was a stanza from TS Eliot, from a poem called “East Coker,” that goes, “I said to my soul, ‘Be still,’ and wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing, and wait without hope, for it would be hope of the wrong thing. There is yet faith, but the love and the hope and the faith are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought, so the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness, the dancing.”
I heard this over and over. It’s one of those beautiful, koan-like stanzas that sort of works its way through your consciousness. I realized that for me, faith was waiting, knowing that love and hope were available, but that the way I presently think is not capable of understanding reality as the spirit experiences it and as it truly is—that if I were to be told what I was waiting for, the way I think would fundamentally misinterpret that experience and so it would come into my present way of being. So, “The love and the hope and the faith are all in the waiting.” The way you wait without wanting to kill yourself is you become extremely present and you drop your stories—and there the unfolding is, right in the heart of this moment.
TS: Very beautiful. Now, I also want to ask you a question about what you learned from coming forward, leaving the Mormon church—all of your friends, as you mentioned—and then also being highly criticized for that.
MB: Oh, yes.
TS: I want to talk about it in the context of someone who might be listening and thinks, “You know, there’s some change I need to make in my life, and I might be criticized for it. Maybe I need to change my job, or maybe I need to have a different kind of conversation with these friends of mine,” something like that. But, they can’t quite bring themselves to do it. I wonder if you could talk to that person and share a bit what you learned from what you went through.
MB: Sure. It’s funny. Each crisis you go through, each time you dare to take the leap of faith, you learn the skill of taking leaps of faith. There’s the immediate result, and then there’s the learning—or what they call a meta-learning, a learning over experiences that shows you the consistency, the consistent elements.
What I learned was that our culture sees life as a linear progression. You go from thing to thing, and you never go backwards, and you’re supposed to be getting better all the time. Your life is supposed to be working better, and it’s not getting better, it’s getting worse. We see ourselves regressing along that line.
I have a friend right now who’s in the final stages of terminal cancer, and it kills her every time she tries to do something like playing the guitar because she’s a musician, and now it’s too painful, and she sees herself falling back along that line of development. It’s agony because of the cultural context where that’s not OK.
Now, in traditional cultures, you have a cyclical or circular view of reality, which is that there is a winter for every summer, there is a fallow period for every harvest. Everything goes to sleep and wakes up again repeatedly.
What I think that is going to happen to you, if you take a leap of faith, you’re not going to go summer to summer. You’re not going to go, “Oh, I was fading, and now suddenly, everything’s great again,” which is what people hope will happen, to give them a validation by our cultural standards. What will happen is, oh, you will go into winter. You will fade and you will die, and it will be just as bad as you expect. Then, as Albert Camus said, “In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.” It’s by going down into winter—or, to mix metaphors, into the center of Hell—that you realize if you trust the cycle, it comes back up into a spring and a new summer.
For me, I combine the linear and the cyclical so that it forms a spiral moving through space. Yes, you move forward every time—but each time, you go through the seasons of dying, being dead, preparing to be reborn, and then flourishing again. And you can just expect that throughout your life. Anytime something major happens to you—even something that looks positive, like moving house or moving to a different job. Even prisoners being released from prison have to grieve and die to their prisoner identity before they can come into abundance again. That’s just, it’s just nature, and you can relax into it. Yep, it’s going to be bad—I’m validating your fear—and it’s going to be fine.
TS: What about someone who says, “I’m not going to do it, because I don’t want to hurt that much?”
MB: Well, what I always say is, “Stay in your present life as long as you possibly can. Stay in that soul-murdering job as long as you can. Stay in that awful marriage as long as you can—just so you’ll know that you left no stone unturned, and you won’t feel remorseful.” The moment I say that, most people say, “I’m done.”
TS: Yes.
MB: Once you give yourself permission to stay, you’re ready to go.
TS: OK. Now, I want to pick up on something you said kind of casually: You started having spontaneous remote viewing experiences. What happened? What did you start seeing? Give me an example. How do you understand that?
MB: It started when I was pregnant with my son. Before he was diagnosed with Down syndrome, my husband at the time was traveling back and forth between Asia and the US doing international consulting while he finished his doctorate at Harvard. I noticed that when he was gone, I would wake up at night. It wasn’t usually a dream, but I’d wake up at night when it was daytime for him, and I would see something very, very specific like a very crisp movie playing inside my mind. The first one I think was in Japan, and it was a festival. There were these beautiful banners hung from all the narrow streets of Tokyo. They were rippling in the breeze, and it was really different from any way I’d ever seen Tokyo.
I woke up, and John called me, and he said, “You should be here. Tokyo is—during this Matsuri, this festival—it’s so different. There are these beautiful banners hanging from everything.” Then I started quizzing him. “Was there a scaffold with workmen on it?” He said, “Yes.” “Did you see a sign that said, ‘Ajinomoto?’” (this salt substitute). He was like, “Yes. Yes. I saw all of that.”
We started comparing notes. It just turned out that when were thinking about each other, I would see what he was seeing. It was really robust and testable, as we say in the social sciences. We did a lot of testing. It got much less after Adam was born, but I can still do it a little bit and Adam does it very easily.
TS: Can you remove view whenever you want to? Or it’s just sometimes, yes, sometimes, no? How does that work for you?
MB: All these talents—there’s a really good scientist named Dean Radin who does these laboratory tests on so-called psi phenomena. Everybody apparently has them to some degree, but it’s like musical or athletic talent. Some people are better at it than others. Some people want to do it more than others. At first, it’s kind of haphazard and clumsy, but if you practice it, you get better at it. If you don’t practice, it kind of fades. You get rusty. If I practice, I can get pretty good at it—not as good as my son, but pretty good at it.
Another one, which—it’s funny, for some reason, we’ve talked a little bit, but I really, really have a strong sense that you are like this too—is just being an empath. Like, if somebody is in the room, you can just tune in and feel what they’re feeling emotionally or even physically, sometimes. Tell me where I’m wrong. Are you not that way?
TS: I do have a capacity to tune in to other people deeply. My partner, a woman named Julie, is such a strong empath that—when I compare myself to her—I feel like I’m in the minor leagues. But I am following what you’re saying. I think I do have a capacity to merge when I want to.
MB: Right. I hope this isn’t too weird for our listeners.
TS: No, go there.
MB: Because I thought, “OK. What is my talent set in terms of psi phenomena?” By the way, they test really well in the laboratory. The statistics are—for example, a major league hitter only hits the baseball three times out of 10, and we put him in the hall of fame for that. Somebody who’s, say, intuiting who’s calling them on the phone will be wrong sometimes, but the number of positive hits will exceed random chance by a factor of billions to one. We can do this stuff. It’s just not a one-to-one correspondence like seeing something with your eyes.
I was going through my talent set. I’m like, “Yes, remote viewing.” Then I thought, “Well, OK. The empath part of me . . .” and I turned it on/ I moved into it and flicked it on, and what happened to me immediately was I felt the same thing in you so strongly that I really felt like, “I have to talk about it, because she’ll know this, because I can feel that she knows it.”
That’s another one. We had that experience in Africa, where a huge male lion came up and stared at my son. We were in an open vehicle. The lion was maybe six inches from his nose. Their heads, with the manes—you couldn’t put your arms around it. It was huge. They stare at you like serial killers, because they are. I got a little nervous. Later, I asked Adam, “Weren’t you scared when the lion came up and looked at you?” He said, “No, because I was feeling him, and he was feeling me back.”
I said—by the way, he’s not very verbal. We don’t talk about this stuff at all. I said, “So, what was he feeling?” Adam said, “What lions always feel.” I said, “Well, what do lions always feel?” He said, “Peaceful.” The idea that everything around us is participating in consciousness, and that being an empath means you can feel what a tree is thinking—not just what another person is thinking—that’s some pretty magic, and it’s real. It’s testable in a laboratory.
TS: Now, it’s interesting, Martha, that you brought up an African lion, because one of the things I wanted to ask you about is your fascination with Africa. I know you’ve taken many people on trips to Africa. And so what is it?
MB: Yes. We do seminars at this place in Africa called Londolozi, which is a Zulu word that means “protector of all living things.” It’s a big game preserve next to Kruger National Park. What’s interesting about it to me is that two teenage boys inherited this property—this large property—when their father died suddenly many years ago. They were advised to sell it because it was nothing but bankrupt cattle farm. It had been overgrazed. There were very few animals. Lions would come in and kill the cattle. It was just useless and completely broken as an ecosystem.
They said, “We refuse.” They went and they found a geologist who helped them clear away the brush and pack it into the Earth so the normal water table came back. Then the grassland came back, and then the grazers, and then the prey animals. Now, it’s pretty much pristine ecosystem. And it’s not conservation, it’s restoration of the planet’s natural way of being. When I went there—because my book about Adam became this big bestseller in South Africa—I felt immediately—and especially when I met these people, this small family that has now restored a territory larger than Switzerland—
TS: Wow.
MB: I was out with one of my friends from that family tracking rhinoceros, and we tracked up on a mother rhino and the calf got behind us. She got agitated. I thought—I looked at this huge horn and I felt the Earth shuddering under me, and I thought, “This is how I’m going to die. This is awesome. That is a good way to die! Tracking rhinoceros? Are you kidding?” I literally let go of the rest of my life. It seems absurd now, but I literally said, “This is it. There’s nothing else.”
Suddenly—bam—into my head came a huge piece of what I’d been asking about when my inside voice said, “I said to my soul, ‘Be still.’” The task that we’re here to do right now, I thought—or at least me and people like me who are obsessed with spirituality and nature—[was], “Oh, we’re here to fix the planet so that humans can keep living here. Oh, this is what Eckhart Tolle means by ‘a new Earth.’ We have to—it’s not just our consciousness. When we change our consciousness, we’ll be able to fix what we’ve broken.”
Scientifically, it’s an absurd hope, but I am not being scientific now. It blew open my heart like a nuclear bomb, and I saw this amazing, playful past that some of us are here to do together. And that is the ruling obsession of my life—is the healing of consciousness and then the healing of the Earth for humans and other animals.
TS: I want to talk more about this. Many of the themes in your book, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World, are about this combined task, if you will, [of] healing human consciousness and the consciousness of the planet.
MB: Yes.
TS: What I noticed was that there was a kind of lightness, optimism, joyfulness in you about this task—that often I feel challenged to get on that wavelength. I often feel a sense of despair. I feel grief—more like that—a sorrow, a weightiness about what’s happening in the world. I wanted to understand from you, Martha, how I could catch fire a bit with your sense of magical possibility about a new Earth instead of my gloominess.
MB: hat I think it requires is a retraining of the brain. The brain is really geared to look for danger because if you’re in a room with 20 puppies and one cobra, and you ignore the cobra and play with the puppies, you’re in trouble. And so are the puppies, right? You want to pay attention to the snake and get it out of there. The problem is our ability to think abstractly, which makes us imagine snakes killing puppies even when it’s not happening. Our brains get trained that way because they’re looking for danger and because of our potential for abstract thought. It’s very easy to dream up danger, even when it’s not around us. We are not like lions, mostly peaceful, and it’s because of our abstract thinking capability.
We’ve trained our brains into creating a lot of very literal connections—like neuronal connections—that take us over and over again to scenes of disaster and doom. And we’re trying to prevent it, but we know we can’t, and even if we do our best, entropy gets us in the end, and we’re all going to die. That’s not a setup for a happy brain.
But there are other ways to wire yourself. Meditation is a rewiring of the brain. Byron Katie’s Thought Work, which I do constantly, is a rewiring of the brain where you turn around your most negative assumptions and see if the opposite may or may not be true. Usually, the opposite is truer.
For me—again, I’ve been given so many gifts: a body that breaks down really, really easily; and then a son whose life was a tragedy to me every time I looked at him. If he had died and I had to grieve and go on, it might have changed me a little. When you have—excuse me—when you have someone in your life who is deemed to be a tragedy in himself, how do you love a child as much as a parent loves a child if that child is living an absolute disaster? It’s not tolerable. My research told me parents of children who die grieve and then go to acceptance. But if your child is disabled, you will never reach acceptance. You will grieve forever. I was like, “Well, thank you so much for telling me that.”
But, then all these magical things started happening—things that I now believe are only magical because science does not yet understand them. But they are real, and they are testable. But they look magical to us.
From that context, the voice said, “It is possible for people with Down syndrome to be happy,” and I also realized I’d never been happy. I walked around Harvard still pregnant, knowing that people knew I’d made this choice and disapproved of me. I would look at them and think, “They don’t really look happy. They look haunted and driven and scared.”
When I’m in the mindset that I learned from my culture, I feel that way too—imminently like my life was going down. I was in the process of dying to my old self. There was that weight without love, weight without hope, and I was willing to do that. When I did, not just presence would open to me, but miracles in presence. That showed me a different world—a universe existing within the one we perceive but at a deeper level than we perceive.
I began shifting to that every time I looked at my baby. I would look at him—a little boy with Down syndrome—”Life is a disaster.” Then my whole brain would shift. “No, life is a miracle. This is a magical being. You’ve been given something magical. Play with it. Believe. Try just believing without thinking, because you’re not ready for thought.” Necessity—suffering for my son and suffering because of my body—forced me to play with a different worldview, and it turned out that that worldview fit the data more precisely than the world we share culturally. In that worldview, there is nothing but joy. There is no problem.
We are living in a three-dimensional video game. Yes, we mistake the avatar characters for our real selves, but just the way you move away from video games, shake off the impression that you were that video self, and then live normal life—which is fine, even if you died in the video game—you can pull back another level and realize, “This is just a game that consciousness is projecting, like a three-dimensional video game, and this body is not me.” That body is not you. My son’s body isn’t him. We are something more awake than that, something far more real. From within that perspective, nothing that happens in a video game even really matters that much—and you can get inside the code and change the game. If that’s not fun, I don’t know what is.
TS: OK, Martha, but I’m going to have to push a little bit more into this, because as you were talking, part of me was kind of with you on the video game, but then I also saw images of refugees suffering.
MB: Sure.
TS: I thought, “Wow, their pain feels very real to me.” How do you hold both of what—this seems quite paradoxical.
MB: Yes. It’s real in the sense that it’s a real game, and we’re here to play it. One of the things that I had to deal with in my life was that, when I was five years old, my father—who was very—he was a big religious figure in Mormonism, and he’d been forced to tell a lot of lies that I think drove him to a kind of madness. And so he began to sexually abuse me. It was very violent, and very strange, and done in the name of religion. I’ve had three surgeries to correct the scar tissue. This was not a small event.
So to look at that and say, “Oh, it’s just a video game. I’m feeling so lighthearted,” to someone who is experiencing the game as it is played, that’s not compassionate. Compassion holds that as it grieves more deeply than we even understand grief; as it feels anger, more angry than we can even comprehend.
I went into the Genocide Memorial in Rwanda once, and I had prepped myself for seeing all the horrors. I’d read books and I’d made myself look at pictures because I didn’t want to cringe away from it. I didn’t want to hide from it.
I went into this room [with] various displays, and I’m sobbing, completely despondent. Then I went into a room where there were a few-hundred skulls, most of them crushed above one ear with a machete, which is how the killing generally happened. I went in, and I began looking at the skulls. As I looked at each one, this unbelievable love would well up in me—not from me myself, but it was different for each skull. It felt like a different flavor for—and every one of them said a version of, “We held her. She was a—ultimately, she was OK.” “He got through it. He’s done with it now. Don’t worry. We’ve got him.” It was skull after skull, love after love after love. Such tenderness, such absolute compassion and respect for human suffering.
Yes, it is real. It is a human experience that the spirit is having, and it is designed to convince us so much that it takes us to the absolute center of Hell, and then we go past the absolute center of Hell.
I have a daughter who—they put her on an antidepressant. Turned out, she had Hashimoto’s disease, but the antidepressant turned out to be addictive, and she was one of the people for whom withdrawing that drug causes psychotic breaks. We went through two weeks of hell while she withdrew from this SSRI and had psychosis, and struggled not to harm herself, and all of that. At the end, she told me—when she came back to herself, she said, “Well, I know two things. I know this is just a game, and I know that I am here to play it. So, it’s OK to be deceived by it. That’s the whole point.”
So, yes. In a moment of suffering, I believe the universe weeps with every broken baby. I believe that, and I believe that there is a truth beyond that, but you have to go through the center of Hell to find it.
TS: Now, Martha, in talking about your intense commitment—both to consciousness and towards healing and restoring the planet to its full health—what I noticed is a kind of confidence in you—a new Earth—in this possibility. I also just want to see what you see. I want to get in there and feel that confidence that you feel in the Earth itself and its capacity to restore.
MB: Yes. Well, my first—the bedrock of all my confidence is the knowledge that I’m always wrong, and it’s OK. As long as you’re very cheerful about being wrong, you’re kind of good to go. Because if I’m right, it’s wonderful, and if I’m wrong, “OK. I’m wrong,” and I’ll deal with that when I get to it. All I know about truth is that it cannot be established absolutely [and] objectively, since all perception is subjective. So, my truth will always be subjective, as will yours. I’m always believing some false version of reality, but it seems that some versions are more false than others.
Someone who is in psychosis, for example, is really out of touch, and does things that do not work. Those of us who are in the grip of illusion—like the illusion of scarcity—we can become attached, and grabby, and counterproductive to our own designs. To the extent that we know or believe that life is providing for us, we relax in the way that Jesus told his disciples to relax.
As you get closer in your subjective vision to what some deeper part of you sees as truth, everything works better. Your relationships are less problematic. Weirdly, your professional woes seem to get a little bit better. Things seem to go better in work. Your health—my health improved dramatically.
Why not stay with the story that makes things work? That’s all science is: You put out a hypothesis. You test it against the data. Whatever fits the facts best, you use. If you’re in engineering, whatever does the job best, you use. I keep trying on different stories, and the more I adopt the stories that seem to resonate with my body and my mind, the more lighthearted I become.
I guess it feels like confidence, but really, it’s just continuous creative response to whatever is present. Among those things that are present is this bubbling, recurrent, joyful thought that we can fix things, and it just makes me happy. I don’t know yet exactly the steps to fixing things, but I know that when we find them, they won’t be what we expect. The darkness will be the light, and the stillness the dancing. Maybe it’s with these very magical ways of existing on the world that we have a chance at repairing the planet. I’m just here to find out, and in the meantime, it cheers me up.
TS: Now, Martha, you’re part of Sounds True’s upcoming Self-Acceptance Summit. It takes place September 11 through [September 20]. As a life coach, since we can’t come up with a better term for it, I’m sure you have heard over and over and over again from people some version of how they’re hard on themselves in their life. I’m sure you’ve heard it again and again and again. I wonder, if you were to boil it down for us: what do you think gets people stuck and then unstuck from that perspective?
MB: Right. Well, here I’m going to get all Buddhist on you. You knew this would come. It’s not the self-criticism that mires people in lack of self-acceptance and self-loathing. It’s the attachment to self-criticism. It’s the belief that we are the loathsome being that we take ourselves to be in certain moments, and it becomes fixed. Everybody has jabs of conscience, moments of chagrin for making a mistake, all of that. Our culture tends to leech, grab onto that. I think it has a lot to do with the monotheistic religions, and especially with Christianity and the idea of original sin.
We really think—even in therapy—we think, if we focus enough on the misery, we’ll somehow solve it. So we focus on our self-loathing and the mistakes we’ve made and bad things that have happened just ad nauseam. We write memoirs about it. We tell our therapy groups, and our book-reading circles, and our best friends over coffee. We just reiterate those stories over and over, thinking that Freud’s talking cure is going to work. If we just talk about it enough, it’ll go away.
In fact, that belief—that if we stick with it, it will go away—is an attachment, and attachment to suffering is what makes it last. If you can see that thought as arbitrary—that, “Oh, I’m a bad person. I did something wrong.” If you can say, “Oh, there goes a flicker of thought through consciousness,” just like the thought, “I’m pretty good,” or, “I’m all that,” and if you can learn to become that which accepts the self-loathing, you will do an end-around on your self-loathing.
This is why I believe—it says in the Bible that charity never fails, love never fails. Not because it means you’re going to win all the contests, but because even when you lose, you always have the option of extending compassion to the one who lost, and who thinks that they failed, and who feels horrible about themselves.
As you become the one who loves the self-loather, the self-loathing weakens and the one who loves become more dominant in your interior life. If you do that over and over again—if you go to the compassion for the one who loathes rather than to simply, “I am the one who loathes myself,”—you’ll start to break identification with it and slowly you’ll become able to extend compassion to all things. Then eventually, that’s your brain’s go-to state.
TS: I want to go into one area that I think is very common for people—an area where they lack self-compassion, which has to do with our sense of our body. “Am I beautiful or not? Am I too fat?” What you actually go so far as to call “body hatred” that many people I think feel. In your writing, you mention that this was a challenge for you, but it sounds like it’s not a challenge anymore. I’m curious if you could describe for us how you changed from someone who was invested in negative self-talk about your body to someone who’s not.
MB: Yes. Again, it was suffering and things not working. I actually wrote a book about weight loss, which they printed the rough draft. I would advise against reading it. The whole thing came about because I realized that as I was accepting myself and having compassion for myself in other areas, I effortlessly lost the extra 15 pounds that I’d always wanted to lose and it stayed off without any effort whatsoever. I realized that it was partly because I wasn’t secreting as much cortisol, which tells the body to lay down fat because I was in a state of mental peace. I wanted to call the book Thinner Peace. They wouldn’t let me. Again, don’t even read it. This is enough.
What happened is I started with emotional factors and with things like having a son with an intellectual disability—things that—or being reviled by my family and friends because I left Mormonism. I worked on these areas of shame and on loving the person who hated herself for that. Gradually, the self-hatred calmed, and the love became stronger. Then I started to realize, “Oh my gosh. This is affecting my body. My disease symptoms are going away. I’m losing weight. I have more energy. I feel like I’m kind of aging in reverse.” It was a really joyful wake-up call for me, and I just kept doing the compassion. Whenever I would have self-hatred for my body, I would love the person who hated her body.
Now, as I look at aging and death—as I just said, one of my dear friends is in the final weeks of her life right now. And I watch her trying to accept her body now as it deteriorates rather rapidly, and I think, “Yes. Practice that. Keep practicing. Keep practicing, knowing that this body is this miraculous, magic wand—matter infused with consciousness for a short time—and that it’s capabilities are astonishing, and that it has served you well, and that thank God you don’t have to be on this ride your whole life—and that as you deteriorate into death, the body itself opens doors into another realm and allows her to experience more and more power there, even in your body, as you experience less and less power physically.” The body is an ongoing miracle.
I remember one time, sitting there, I was in yoga, in savasana, and I thought, “How interesting that this body had three children.” Then I thought, “No, it didn’t. My children are way older than seven.” Every atom in my body is replaced every seven years. There’s not a single atom of me right now that was present when my children were born. That being said, what is my body? It is nothing but a cloud of particles adhering around a wisp of consciousness in a consistent way that is born, grows, ages, and dies. Wow. Wow!”
Watch it. Watch the sandcastle be built and dissolve. That’s all it is. It’s never the same two days in a row. It’s just an ongoing creation of consciousness that you’re playing with, so be the consciousness, and play with it, and you can do it with love.
TS: One final question, Martha. I love numbers—
MB: Me too.
TS: When you were talking about your level of peace in your life, and you actually used a number—you said between 80 percent and 85 percent on a bad day, and up close to 100 percent on a good day. I was like, “Oh my God. Martha is talking about peace in terms of numbers. She’s my woman. I love this.” I want to know: is your vision that it’s possible we could be 100 percent peaceful 100 percent of the time? Do you think that’s a plausible human aspiration?
MB: Sure. I know Byron Katie. She’s not faking it. I don’t know Eckhart Tolle, but I don’t think he’s faking it either. I don’t think Jesus was faking it. I don’t think Ramana Maharshi was faking it, or Nisargadatta Maharaj.
I think that there’s a—in the Indian tradition, they say that as you practice, the fruit gets riper and riper. Then for some people, it gets so ripe, it actually drops from the tree. There’s a binary, radical shift that puts you in a fundamentally different perspective. I believe—this is just a wild hypothesis—I believe that may be an epigenetic switch of which we are all capable. That is: there’s a gene that we have that will take us there, but we have to change it the way genes can be switched on or off in any organism.
Let me explain, because that’s a little abstract for some people. We all have the gene for being covered with fur. That’s what we are genetically. But epigenetically, that gene has been switched to the off position. In some people, it’s switched to the on position, and you get little pockets of Mexico where people are covered with fine hair like a cat, all over their bodies. The gene for that is in all of us, but there’s this binary switch. Is it on or is it off?
I’m obsessed with the stories of people who say they’ve gone beyond suffering. Knowing Katie has been a very deep experience of being convinced that that can happen, because people can always lie about it, right, but I’ve never seen any evidence that convinces me she’s not telling the absolute truth.
Plus, there’s something in me that believes that can happen, that we can all awaken. I have a hunch that we need to do that—that that’s what Eckhart is telling us when he says, “More and more people are getting to that state,”—if we’re going to switch what’s happening to the biosphere. I not only believe it can happen, I believe it needs to happen for more people at the same time than it’s ever happened to before. I know that’s really audacious, but why not? We’re all dying. Why not have some fun with our imaginations before we go?
TS: Very well. Martha Beck is the author of numerous New York Times bestsellers, including the book Finding Your Way in a Wild New World. With Sounds True, she’s created the audio program Follow Your North Star. She’s also a featured presenter in our Self-Acceptance Summit. She offers a presentation on “Meat Self/Meta-Self: Reclaiming Your True Nature.” This is a free, 10-day online summit that begins on September 11.
Martha, I’m so grateful to have had this chance to talk to you. You said many things that really moved and inspired me. Thank you so much.
MB: It’s an honor. Thank you so much for all the wonderful work you do, Tami.
TS: Thanks everyone for listening. SoundsTrue.com: Many voices, one journey.
