Dr. Martha Beck
Appearances
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Beautiful. So just look around, smell the pine, aspen air, and then you go into your perfect bathroom, and it's beautiful. You could go through a lot of description if you wanted to, but I'm going to rush through that to get to the interesting parts. So you take a look at yourself in the mirror. Your body is beautiful. absolutely perfect. Of course, in your case, that's not an aspirational thing.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
You're already there. But make it even better.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
There's a real clarity. I've seen it. I don't know if you've worked with people who are dying or who are really ill. Sometimes you'll see a shift in the transparency of their eyes. There actually seems to be a radiance coming from the eyes or gathered around the eyes. That's what I'm sort of thinking as you talk.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
This is so interesting because my friend Liz Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame, she wrote something before she was famous where she dressed as a man for a week and walked around. And she's tall and broad-shouldered and has, you know, great chin. So she could look male. And she got herself all dressed up male and they faked a beard and everything.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And then she had her friends come and a male friend said to her, no, Liz – Pull yourself back six inches away from your own eyes. And she did it. And he said, now you're looking like a man.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And that's really, really interesting that you would say that exact distance.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I have an N of two, you and Liz Gilbert. Okay, all right. But I think it's very interesting that you said that, that you're forward and your eyes, and the idea that the eyes are the parts of our brains that are showing. It's fascinating that she had that experience, too.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So I would love to—I'll be asking people from now on, if you're designated male, identified male, do you feel you have to pull your— sort of vitality back from the world. And I suspect it's true. I suspect it's true just from interacting with people.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
ask women if they... I think it's more vulnerable to be right on the surface of your life and in the surface of your eyes, but it's also much more... There's a sensuousness to the world when you're fully present that I know I had to shut down like when I was in the Ivy League. I had to pull myself back and sink down, and that's a typically male environment. I think it's about materialism and
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
conquest and oppositional thinking as much as gender.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yes.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
You just did it. Yeah. I know how to do this. It's like visible.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
That was so interesting that you just did that. Wow. Okay. The problem I'm having now is that I have, and I quote, an interest-based attention system. I love that. ADHD, which means I pay attention to things that interest me, which means that I literally follow squirrels away from business meetings.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Okay.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And now you go to your closet and you're going to get dressed. Open your closet, which is the closet of clothing you have in your ideal life, and just look at the different outfits you have. The different, like how many kinds of shoes are there?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Oh, sweet. So whose photographs are there? Do you see any photographs you don't recognize at this moment?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Mm-hmm.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Okay, so then you go through the whole day, and I can spend at least an hour going through this with someone. And the important thing is that you do something I call the three Ns. You notice what comes into the field of your imagination, but you don't try too hard to see it specifically. And then as you go through, you sort of narrow down what it might be.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And if the name of that thing comes up, you can then name it. But, for example, in one of my ideal days, I was writing short – pieces of writing that I was interacting with people very regularly about it. And I couldn't even imagine what kind of job that was. And then an editor in Manhattan knocked over a manuscript I'd written. And she was the editor of a women's magazine.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And she called me and asked me to be a columnist. I was like, I was always a magazine columnist for like 20 years. And it was exactly what was in The Ideal Day, but I had not named it. I didn't know that you could live in Phoenix and be a columnist for New York magazines. So notice what you're doing.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
You put on your very comfy T-shirt, very cool black jeans, your one watch, your belt, your Adidas shirt. And you go do something really fun with people you really love in a place you really enjoy.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Oh, yeah. See, now I skipped a thing. You're supposed to go down to breakfast and see if you've got a family.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Wonderful.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
My interest-based attention system just went, oh, really? You do it for other people? Oh yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So your kids are helping you. How many kids are there?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
No. In your imagination. You can have 20 if you want.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
You never know. It could happen. The important thing about this exercise is you don't get logical about it. You don't think what's manageable and what's probable. And you just see who's there.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
All right.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It's not crazy. This is wonderful.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Fabulous. So you're very, very close to your ideal day right now. And as you said, I don't know the mechanisms that get put in play. Certainly directed attention. You're now like a guided missile that knows where its target is, or at least what the target looks like. And we all make countless decisions every day. And you can think of it as a lot of little whys branching out.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And if you've got this in your mind really clearly, you're going to take the option that leads to it. That's what I tell people. It's logical, directed attention, except that in many cases, I have to say, a miracle occurs. My favorite cartoon is this physics equation with these two physicists, and there are all these symbols on both sides of the board.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
In the middle in brackets, it says, a miracle occurs. I love it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah. And I really believe the source of all my work, you know, I was getting my doctorate at Harvard. I'd gotten my bachelor's there. I'd been there since I was 17. And halfway through my doctorate, during that time, I'd gotten married, had a child. My second child was prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome. And I was six months into the pregnancy almost. And I had like two weeks left.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
to make a decision, and I'm politically very pro-choice, and I would, again, never judge anyone who made the other decision, but I couldn't do it. I was already sort of bonded to him. And I kept asking the question of myself, what makes a human life worth living?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Because the doctors at the Harvard Medical Clinic and all my advisors told me, you have got to, at the very least, institutionalize this child the second he's born. Institutionalize? Oh, yeah, for sure. They said, you're throwing your career away. The head of the obstetrics committee, there were five obstetricians, and the chief dude—
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
came in, and there I was sitting on a bed in my little hospital napkin, and he said, this is like a cancerous tumor. You've got to let us take it out. It will ruin your life. And I just looked at him, and I had the weirdest experience ever. I looked at this very intimidating guy, and I'm there sort of young and naked and pregnant, and... suddenly it was like I could see two faces on him.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And one was this very stern, knowledgeable doctor, and the other one was a terrified child, terrified. And it was so striking that I started looking at him strangely. I'm sure he thought I was completely nuts. But I looked at him and I thought, you're afraid. You're afraid of this baby.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I realized – that's when I realized that a lot of people don't go to Harvard because they know they're smart. They go there because they're afraid they're stupid.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I thought he's afraid of the – in quotes, stupid little boy inside me because he's afraid of the stupid little boy inside him. He's terrified of being the person he's worked so hard not to be. He's afraid of being like my son. And he thinks that should be thrown away. And that was the point at which I said, I will not make my decisions based on social pressure.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I have to do something from a very, very deep place within. And so I kept that. I mean, he's home right now. You know, we're having a great time.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Adam, my son Adam.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yes, the very first thing he ever did in his life was the doctor pulled him out of my body and I saw this arc of urine go straight into the doctor's face. And I was like so proud of my child at that moment. I thought if only I'd thought to do that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
That's why I told that long story that when I had to make that decision, it was the first time I had dropped everything conscious and logical from my mind and come from a place that was, I believe it's part of our neurological apparatus, but the cognitive structures are so, cognitive function is just a tiny fraction of what our whole nervous systems are able to detect and tell us.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And for the first time, I was making a decision from every cell in my body instead of just my, you know, neocortex. And I realized my life is not meant to go like his life. And the person in the next bed, their life isn't meant to be like mine. But we all have this... programmed into us somehow.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And when we start to leave it, in my last book, I called it leaving our integrity, because to be an integrity just means to be one thing. It doesn't have any moral implications in the original, like Latin, it just means integer, one thing. So if we were born knowing who we are,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But at some point, usually not long after birth, we get socialized away from expressing exactly what our own truth is telling us. We get socialized to behave in ways that please other people. Very simple. And as you're describing it, I had a great life. I had a lab, I had a dog, I had a house. Those are all socially recognized items that say your life is working.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
but they have nothing to do with your personal destiny.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I would say you don't even have to go back and forth. You can do it all at once. You can feel, you can think, and you can stay in the driver's seat and not be overwhelmed, either intellectually or emotionally. But I think it has a lot to do with, you were talking about Asian, Eastern, like meditation practices.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
There's a little exercise I like to do with people where if they're struggling with a bad habit, I say, imagine the part of you that is always doing the bad thing, like smoking 20 packs a day or whatever. Imagine them as a wild thing in your left hand. And then imagine the part of you that hates them and says, stop smoking in your right hand and look at them and say,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
begin to see that they're both well-meaning, they're both exhausted, and you can wish them both well. So the wild child part is not thinking, it's just feeling. The controlling part is not feeling, it's just thinking. And if I can get people, and I have them put their hands out because I know it's going to activate both sides of their brains, and then I have them wish these people well.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
May you be well, may you be happy. When they can feel compassion from both sides of themselves, then I ask them, so who are you? And who they've become is a compassionate witness. which is not thinking and it's not feeling in the way we, it's not emotional. The word emotion means movement, disturbance. This part of one's being is not ever disturbed or moved.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It's totally still and totally peaceful and completely compassionate.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yes, it is. And Dick Schwartz, who came up with the model of internal family systems theory, I don't know if you've had him on the show.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, Richard Schwartz. Anyway, I was talking to him and he said, there is this part, we all have different parts. There's a part of you that feels like a little kid and wants to curl up in bed. There's a part of you that wants to go rule the world, whatever your parts are. So he talks to people about these different parts.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And then sometimes they say, oh, I've just come up against, there's someone here who's very still, who's very huge, who's very kind. And he calls it self with a capital S. And he says after thousands of patients, he'll say, what part of you is that? And they say, oh, this isn't a part like the others. This is who I am. This is who I am. And he believes that it's just one unified self.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And for me, if I don't. find and lock into that self, I am immediately swept away by my emotions in my brain, just like in a gale force winds. So I have to be very, not grounded, but centered and identified with this self before I can even leave the house.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It's like junk food. It tastes delicious, but then you feel like that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I do. And it's called suffering. It's very reliable. That made me laugh. Forgive me. My best friend, suffering. I have a deeply love-hate relationship with suffering. If I'm, for example, I can barely look at Instagram because I will watch Instagram. A monkey nursing a kitten. And then I will be down that rabbit hole so far.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And eight hours later, I'm bleh. But I will start to suffer. I will start to physically feel cramped. My eyes will start to hurt and water. And I will start to feel what you were saying, the grinding of the gear that is wrong. The machine isn't, it's not in structural integrity. It's like when your car starts making a funny sound and you're like, I should not ignore that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And it always feels like discomfort. Tension, anxiety, anger, any of those things. And then the practice of my life is to notice those sensations at a finer and more granular level so that the moment I'm off true, I can stop and say, okay, whew, out of integrity, okay. Now I'm into anxiety because a divided person is always anxious. So to get away from that, from anxiety and back to true,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I use the body, sit back, straighten my spine, take a deep breath, do all the things that I'm sure you do when you meditate. And then I sink into that part of myself that I was just trying to pull up for people with the two hands exercise.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I believe, you could probably tell me the truth of this, I believe that I've wired a pretty strong superhighway in my brain that goes, oops, suffering, find self with a capital S. And I've done it so many thousands of times that I think I have like a highly myelinated circuit that just goes there, shoop. And then no matter what's happening, I can usually just find it, feel it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And it's an exquisite sensation. It's like coming home completely over and over again. And now when I do an ideal day, everything else is incidental. The key is I'm in that self.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yes.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Oh, yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
You pay attention to it. And here is the key thing. This is in my new book. I kept this a secret because it sounded so silly. And I thought this would never go in the Ivy League. But there's something I call KIST, K-I-S-T, and it stands for kind internal self-talk. So what do you call yourself when you think to yourself? Andrew, Andy, what do you call yourself?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So you'd be sitting there and you don't feel good. You don't feel right. The first thing you do is allow yourself to register every sensation without pushing back, without restricting it. People talk to me about bringing down their anxiety. And I say, how do you feel if I told you I was going to bring you down? That's not a nice thing to say.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
If I told you I'm here to understand you and care about you, better. So just allow yourself to feel all the suffering and then start saying kind things to the one who is suffering, even if it's just tiny suffering. Just go, how are you? How are you doing? Not great? Ah, okay, so there's some anxiety. Oh, your sinuses are blocked too. Let's see, what could we do for you?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Let's get you a hot drink and like a call with a good friend or a book or something. And you just actively work as your own caregiver from the moment you are conscious in the morning. And what that does is it makes you so compassionate to other people because you're not fighting the suffering in yourself. Right.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Right. I'm like, I've got some inner adults here who aren't very happy too, you know?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
That obstetrician at Harvard, I would bet my last dime that he was still working on the same circuits he used when he was five. And they were pretty scary, you know? So, yeah, we all have... multiple causes of suffering, but we also have, I wouldn't actually call it interparenting because that basically implies that only parents give that to children. And I think it's just humaning.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
If you are truly humane, if you are truly in a state of self with a capital S, there is nothing in you that wants to cause suffering for any other being. And there's nothing in you that doesn't want to help. ease the suffering of the entire world.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So again, now I'm into a kind of Asian modality of there's this Bodhisattva prayer that goes, for as long as space endures and as long as sentient beings exist, may I also abide that I might heal with my heart the miseries of the world. And that part of us is in everyone. And if we become those people, It won't just be parents being kind to children.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It will be humans being kind to each other, the earth, and all other beings. And we may actually make it into another century.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I believe it's actually the only part of us that's real. I talked a minute ago about people who are dying. They drop the pretense. They don't need the pretense of belonging to the material world or the material body anymore. And that radiance begins to gather. in their eyes. And it's not new. It's what they came in with.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
If you've looked into the eyes of a young child, a little baby, you see the same thing. And it's only when people die that they put down everything else. Unless, as Eckhart Tolle says, you die before you die and learn that there is no death. Because that self does not feel physical. It feels metaphysical.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I think you've said— The other parts are impermanent. They will vanish. Everything, as Shakespeare says, everything will just disappear and leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on. There is an experience that is common to individuals all over the world in different cultures at different times where they start to say they feel as if they've awakened from a dream.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Oh, it's so good to be here, Andrew. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Plato did it with his cave analogy. He said, Imagine that we all live chained in a cave and there's a fire behind us and we see shadows on the wall and that's what we call reality.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And then someone gets out of the cave and goes outside and sees this three-dimensional world where everything's bright and mobile and goes back and says, the shadows on the wall are real, they're real shadows, but they're not the ultimate reality. You should come outside and see it. And Plato said, everybody would say he was crazy. And that's what academia says now. You're crazy.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
If you've ever had an experience where you felt like there was something realer than your physical self, you're crazy. Like, read Plato.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, and not without supervision. But if you can get somebody really good at it, I'm not saying do it either, but I'm not saying don't do it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, it's not step number one. Step number one is suffering.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
We all have that. You may have never felt good in your life, listener, but you have suffered. That's for sure. That's the first noble truth of Buddhism. There is suffering in this life. Pay attention to your suffering without fighting it. Allow it to be there. I did this meditation. If something's physically painful or emotionally painful, I used to say, let go, let go to myself. Didn't work.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So one day I said, all right, you can stay. Let it stay. And so I do a let stay meditation. If there's pain, let it stay. If there's sorrow, let it stay. And as soon as I let it stay, it begins to change. So first step is suffering. Second step is compassionate attention to one's suffering with no resistance.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And the third step is to follow the compassion that is naturally being directed toward that suffering until you find yourself centered in it. And that is a huge relief. And I've done this in massive physical pain. I've done it when I just lost people I love. It's a very powerful, maybe not a panacea, but not that far from it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
If you can get there, you're still suffering, but there's a piece that holds the suffering so lovingly. that it no longer concerns you. So on one level, that you're suffering, and on a different level, which feels more real to me, there's only peace and compassion and wonder and joy. And somebody asked me once, if there's a metaphysical reality, why is there suffering?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I just heard coming out of my mouth, because the self loves experience and is not afraid to suffer. It's not afraid. So then staying in that is highly motivated by the suffering you feel when you leave. So to me, that's first step, suffer. Second step, pay attention to suffering. Third step, follow compassion to its origin. Fourth step, never stop doing that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Every minute. Yeah. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Well, I would – can I reverse it and talk about what's true first? So I remember sitting when I was 17 in the Lamont Library at Harvard contemplating ending my life and like – Actually ending your life. Oh, yes. Yes. And looking at the – equally miserable scratchings that other teenagers had put in the wood there. And I thought, okay, they say the truth will set you free.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
All right, I'll give it a try. And I just started trying to find out what was true. And I read through all the works of the greatest philosophers until I got to Immanuel Kant, who says, everything is screened through our perceptions, so we can't know that anything is true for certain. And I felt such relief. Okay, I can't intellectually know what's true.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Then if it's not true, if I can't intellectually know something's true because everything's subjective, what's useful? What feels like truth to the body? And I was interested that, for example, polygraph machines work because the body hates to lie, right?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
it starts to send up a whole bunch of, you know, activation of stress systems and puts you in fight or flight and everything when you tell a lie or when you keep a secret. So I just started thinking, all right, what makes my body contract and and weaken, and what makes my body feel peaceful, centered, and grounded. And you do so much work with the body.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I love that you're a brain-body scientist, because the body is incredibly wise. So I just started letting myself test things, like I was raised Mormon. And very, very Mormon. So, okay, Mormonism. Oh, boy, that doesn't make me feel good at all.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And, okay, so God is not a white man who lives near the planet Kolob. Okay, that is not true. Okay, that feels better. Okay. So I started following what made my body relax because my whole body, as I said a few minutes ago, is far more sophisticated, has spent far more time being tinkered with by evolution than my human ability to think in language.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It has a response to truth or falsehood that's more subtle and sophisticated than my intellectual knowledge. That's how I made the decision to keep my son. That's how I've made almost all my decisions. Does it make my body relax? And then does the mind come to the party and make the math work? Okay.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Mormonism says that all the American Indians were descended from a group of Israelites who came across in 600 BC in a boat to the Americas. Okay. Does the math work? What does the genetic evidence say? No, they came over the Aleutian Straits and down into the Americas.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
When I was living in Utah, they excommunicated a DNA expert from the Mormon church for finding the data that said that Mormonism's claims were wrong. So something that makes my body relax where it's also logically coherent. That's the first thing. And then what you find is if you really pursue that, what is true? What is true? What is true?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Everything that makes you suffer turns out to have flaws in the logic, including I will die. Right. Because I can't know, I have no idea. So to say that I will go out like a candle when my body dies is just as fundamentalist as saying I'm gonna go sit on a cloud and play a harp. I don't know.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Nisargadatta Maharaj, one of my favorite yogis says, the only true assertion that the mind can make is I do not know. But you can feel what feels right to you. So that's what ends up being real. What's left over when you eliminate all the things that feel deeply untrue to your body and don't make logical sense? And some of those are things that our culture is very, very fond of.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Like everything has to be measured or it's not real. Is that true?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Really?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Those friends are probably dead by now. They're not doing well. That's true. And I grew up
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Oh, yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Well, we have this culture of push, push, push, produce, produce, produce. One of my favorite heroes, along with Oliver Sacks, is Ian McGilchrist at Oxford. I love that man. He may wake up someday just to find me crouched on his bed watching him sleep. He's like, he's not just a neurologist. Ian, don't be scared. Not in a creepy way. Not in a creepy way, sir.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But he talks about how our particular culture for the last few hundred years has veered towards stuff that is preferentially favored by the left hemisphere of the brain. And it has to do with grasping things and producing physical things and getting things to happen, controlling them, where the right side of the brain, and of course, it's all I'm oversimplifying massively.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But functions like meaning, synthesis, combinations of different bits of knowledge, we're moving away from those. And one of my good friends is Jill Bolte-Taylor who had, she was a Harvard neuroanatomist and she had a massive left hemisphere stroke. And so she suddenly, she watched her left hemisphere go off. She had a brain bleed and it would pulse.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So her left hemisphere would be there, and she'd see everything as solid and measurable and verbal, and then it would go off. And she was in a world where she was like a fluid the size of the universe. And she would watch. She was in the shower, and she watched her hand on the tiles dissolve into fields of energy. And you were talking about energy earlier.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
She said by the time her left hemisphere had shut down completely, a phone call made. She couldn't talk by the time the phone call went through. She got to a hospital, took her eight years to come back to full functioning. But she said, during that time, I did not know people's names, I didn't know the word person, but boy, could I feel people's energy.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And as she healed, she didn't bother to get rid of her ability to feel people's energy. So she's a great fan of using the whole brain. Whole Brain Living is her latest book, and it's great.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But Ian McGilchrist talks about how when we don't use the whole brain, his book The Master and His Emissary says the part of the brain that knows meaning should be the master, and the data collector is just the emissary. But the data collector has taken over in Western medicine. society, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic, if you want to get technical.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And so what you were doing to yourself was completely irrational, completely. You should get the Darwin Award for taking yourself out of the gene pool.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Oh, there is.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I think it's cool that you did that. I think it's really useful. I mean, there are many situations where your ability to do that could be really useful. Like a pair of scissors could be really useful. But when you're like trying to re-diaper the baby, you put the scissors down. It's a tool that you can use and it's fascinating.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I did martial arts for eight years and I loved pushing myself to the point where I was bruised and bleeding and my doctor thought I was a victim of domestic abuse. I think it's useful and even fun, but you have to know when your heart's in it and when your heart is not in it, when your self is delighting in the adventure and when self says, no, Andrew, peace, be still, you know?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It works. I don't know how or why it works, but I used to have people send me a postcard. This is how long I've been doing this stuff. Now it's emails and texts that I say, okay, we just did your ideal day. You've got it all written down. Now send me a notification when that day happens. And I get a lot of notifications.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
The Buddha used to say, he said this often, that wherever you find the ocean, whatever it looks like, you can know it because the ocean always tastes of salt. And wherever you find awakening or enlightenment, no matter what it looks like, you will know it because it always tastes of freedom. So it's not that you stop suffering, it's that you are free.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
You are free to interact with your own suffering in a new way, and that is peace. So you look, and it literally physically affects the body as not free, free. And if anybody out there listening, go to a really rough time in your life and imagine it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I mean, go to that time in your life when you were pushing yourself, and you can actually remember the tightness in your throat, in your back, in your... It's contracted. And then remember the best moment of your life and what was happening then. And all your muscles will loosen, relax, and open. And that is my gauge of truth. Does it set me free? The truth sets you free.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So whatever sets you free is the truth. Then reality is going to start changing for you with or without psychedelics. And I remember sitting, and I had this overwhelming obsession with meditation when I turned 50.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I just bought this place in the woods in central California, and I'd go out and sprinkle myself with birdseed and meditate in the forest all day while the chipmunks came and the birds would land on me. Nice. Oh, it was amazing. And about six months into really meditating for hours every day,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I kind of had an experience like Jill Bolte-Taylor in the shower where I was in the forest with the chipmunks and birds, and then it was just light. And it was like, it was so startling. It was like I'd fallen off a cliff. Like I couldn't see the ground. I couldn't. And then everything was back. And then it started happening a lot.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I read in shamanic traditions, they call this experience stopping the world. And it can happen through the guidance of a shaman or a plant or whatever. It was happening to me through meditation. And in that space of light, which I stopped fearing after a while, It looked as if this thing we're doing now is a video game.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
If you and I were sitting and playing a video game, you would choose a character. I would choose a character. You'd stab me with a sword. I'd hit you with a mace. And we would say, you are hurting me. You are killing me. But really, we'd be talking about characters in a video game. And then somebody would come say, let's go get lunch.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And we would put it down and go stop stabbing each other and be friends. It feels to me as if this is more like a game than reality, the whole physical everything. And I call this you, me, and you call that me, and I call it you. And when the game stops, however that happens... There's a level of reality as different from this one as a video game is from three-dimensional life.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
There's a world outside the cave. And I don't know what it is. And I may be wrong. I don't care.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
As close as we can. For us. We can't ever know completely what's true. For us. The whole – the Baconian method is accept nothing until it's proven true. Well, we can't prove anything true. We could all be dreaming this. So I decided that I would accept everything until I'm convinced that it's false. So I don't really believe anything. But I'm willing to – Like a scientist.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, I don't believe anything because I can't – nothing can be absolutely proven. But I do know what's most useful to me, what makes me healthy. I've had a really, really sick, weak body most of my life. And it became a big part of my navigational system. I now think I have – the MCAS, Mass Cell Activation Syndrome. You put out a podcast on that. My daughter's been diagnosed with it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
This is so good.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I probably have it. And it's just this weird random thing where you get symptoms in different parts of your body. It's an overactive immune system. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Does it really?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I've listened to your podcast and I thought, that guy's really cool. And here I am.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, and my mother had it, and I just wish she had lived to see the diagnosis even exist. But my daughter called me from England the other day, and we were talking about the fact that she has that diagnosis. And she said, I am allergic to my own goddamn emotions. And I was like, yeah, we both are. And my whole journey has been –
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
really, really accelerated by the fact that if I go off true for myself emotionally, psychologically, metaphysically, whatever, I immediately get physical symptoms of some kind. But when I am true to myself, they all subside and I get this unbelievable health. So I've been told that I had five different progressive incurable diseases. I don't have any symptoms.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But if I allow myself to be untrue to myself, if I allow myself to get out of integrity, I suffer intensely and immediately and in a very real way. So I don't know what's true, but I know what keeps me healthy. And I know what feels like freedom. And if I hit a thought like there is nothing to us but physical matter and it feels like tension, like when I put down my dog,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I felt something go through me as she died. It was like, I don't know whether that I was feeling something that was real, but that's as close to the truth as I can get. And if I see right now what's happening to me, I'm getting into this self thing. And as I'm talking about this dog, I feel that dog. And I can feel, I'm going to sound crazy.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah. Our phones are electronic circuits that communicate at a distance. We are electronic circuits. Why shouldn't we communicate at a distance? That's right.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And my dog was a physical entity, but my dog was also an energetic entity. And that entity was something I could feel. And this is, I don't know how many, a couple of years later, I start talking about that dog. I feel it again. And it is a... Okay.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So when I was pregnant with my son Adam, one of the big reasons I chose to keep the baby is that from the moment he was conceived, I started having experiences that completely blew apart my understanding of reality. My husband at the time was traveling in Asia a lot. And when I would think about him, It would happen a lot at night. For me, I'd be lying in bed, and I would think about him.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And it would be daytime in Asia, and I would suddenly be in a three-dimensional movie where I'd be walking down a street in Japan or flying over a thunderstorm in an airplane. And I'd see these very specific things, very specific.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And then he would call me like the next day and say, oh, I was walking down this street in Japan and I saw this very specific banner and I flew over a thunderstorm and the lightning was amazing. And I started to realize. I was picking up information that he was seeing and it was testable, it kept happening. So what is that?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It would have been so non-scientific of me to say that is completely insignificant, don't pay any attention. It just was too weird. And so that's when I decided I'll believe anything until I'm convinced it's false. And that throws your whole mind open to understanding the universe as being far more mysterious than our culture likes to say it is.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And yes, there's a danger of getting woo-woo and crazy, but as I said, the math has to work too. And you're just telling us how the neurophysics of energy are being tested and shown to be operative. It's not woo-woo. It's just at the outside edge of what our culture is willing to accept.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So the first thing is that you don't make up something. People would always tell me they'd make up a day where they woke up in a white room with white sheets and windows with white curtains. And then they would put on white clothes and drift around. And I realized finally that these people were just tired. And they were tired.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
That is not an accident.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Right.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
They could not project anything but a sort of blankness that I finally realized meant that they just pushed themselves too hard. So I stopped doing this with people until they were well-rested. Then you don't make it up. You see it happen. That's the key thing. You allow it into your mind, not as though you're reaching with your imagination, just as though it emerges. So I talk people through it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
No, I think it's amazing. I think addicts are people who are hypersensitive to the suffering that they are told to accept. And so they're trying to medicate the suffering that comes from being out of integrity. And the society says, you know, like I talked to people, I interviewed people for this book who would go to their – this one woman went with her husband to the psychiatrist and
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
They said, you know, she's not happy doing the traditional wife role. And they sat there and talked about what medication would enable her to fulfill this social role that she just didn't like. It never occurred to anybody to say, you know, maybe don't do it if you don't like it that much.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And people are medicating themselves into a conformity with social systems that are not in line with their true nature. And addicts hurt people. And they sometimes they find a substance or they find an activity that gives them relief. And so they use it because they're in a lot of pain.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah. And it always does. And it's horrible. But one addiction specialist I know says it's like they're standing on a nail and trying to take enough drugs to stop the pain. But that is not what you need to do when you're standing on a nail. You need to take the nail out.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And the nail is the part of your life that you're living that's out of integrity with your true nature because other people want you to live that way. And they will force themselves. They want to stay in the position of pain or fear, push past it, be stronger.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But how laudable is it that you took what the culture told you was good and by God, you learned to do it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah. Yeah. I guess I'm going to start with the Wu story. I was very sick. And at one point, they rushed me into surgery, didn't know what was wrong with me. I had some internal bleeding going on. That's a long story. I wrote about it in another book. Point is, during the surgery, I regained consciousness and sat up and looked at them operating on me.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
which was surprising because I was lying down there and so I was like very disconcerted. And I lay back down and I looked up between the surgical lights and between them appeared this ball of light that was much, much, much brighter than the surgical lights, which are very bright. And it was so beautiful. You just, you can't describe it. It's outside the cave.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
The first thing is you wake up in the morning. You're perfectly refreshed by a beautiful sleep. In your imagination, don't open your eyes, but listen. What do you hear? So you don't make it up. You listen for it. What do you hear?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I was just completely obsessed by it. And then it started to grow. And when it touched me and it filled things, it didn't bounce off things, it filled them. When it touched me, this incredible joy and love and warmth
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
flooded my body and I started to cry and my body was crying and the surgeons noticed these tears coming out of my eyes and they freaked out because they thought that I was feeling the surgery and crying was the only thing I could do about it. So they were panicking and the anesthesiologist, they told him, you know, bump up the medication. Later, because I grilled him later, what did you give me?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
What are the side effects? What happens? Can I have some more? He said afterward that, When he went to increase the medication, he said a voice said to him, don't. She's crying because she's happy. And he said, I just did what it said. And he was white and shaking. And he said, did I do the right thing? So I kind of told him a little of the story. Anyway, this light was there. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I was just like, home, home, home. And it said, yeah, okay, so this is what you really are, and you're about to have a pretty tough time for a while. But just remember, I'm always here, even though you can't see me. And so I came out of that surgery, and I thought, I will not allow anything to my life that doesn't feel like that light.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Oh, that's what it—it wasn't like it used language, but it said— This is not the way you feel after you die. This is the way you're supposed to learn to feel all the time. So in your body, out of your body, it doesn't matter. This is how you're meant to feel.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And believe me, when I worked with heroin addicts, they would describe their first high, and it was as close to that as anything I'd heard people describe. And I would say, I believe you're meant to feel that way. And also keep your teeth, you know? But... So I didn't tell a lie for a year. I came out of it and I thought, well, lying is definitely not going to feel like that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
That light does not lie. So no lies ever.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Can't say that. Say 12. Do you like my outfit? No, I do not. I mean, I found ways to...
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
No. In fact, it felt untrue to say certain things to certain people. It felt invasive or offensive, and that didn't feel true. Sometimes silence was the greatest truth I could tell, but I didn't even know that that was the case until I started my experiment. So I did not lie for that year, and I've done it many, many times since.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But I would not recommend jumping into it 100% from a life that hasn't already been pretty examined.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, the research shows that most people lie at least three times within 10 minutes of meeting another person, they lie to them. And men are socially conditioned to tell lies that make them seem a little bit cooler than they maybe think they are for real. And women, people identified as women, are socialized to tell lies that make other people feel good about themselves.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So it takes you in different directions. But I just wasn't going to tell any lie at all. And let me just say that that year, I It's not like I could say I lost these things, but the fact is I dropped them. I walked away from them. My religion, with the religion went the family of origin. Every friend I had growing up, because to leave Mormonism is worse than murder in that community. I was...
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
cast into outer darkness. My marriage realized I was gay. Oops. I hadn't figured that out at 29.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
No, I was so... bent on being a good person according to my socialization, the same way you were bent on being a brave, strong male according to the skateboarding culture. I would never have let that anywhere near my consciousness. And it had to be a series of experiences and my ex-husband was gay as well. So I'd known that about him for a while.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
What about the sound of someone or someone's breathing?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I knew he was his best self when he was his gay self. So that kind of helped, but the marriage ended because of that. Let's see what else happened. Oh, yeah, I quit academia. So my industry, the thing I'd gone to all those years of school for, my job, means of support. I left my, I was living in Utah at the time and I sort of fled for the border. So I lost my home.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
How were you feeling during this time? Better and better and better.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It kind of was, but not as horrible as staying in all those things.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Oh, it's very, yeah, for parts of the psyche that are, you know, very attached to socialization and attached to people that are familiar to you, it's heartbreaking, really heartbreaking. But that light gave me a full-on experience of the self. And I just, I... What it told me was it's always there.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
My son, who has Down syndrome, one day told me after his friend's mother died, we were coming home from the funeral, and he said, I didn't cry. And I said, it's okay if you cried. Strong men cry, and this is a sad time. And he said, yeah, it's not as hard after the light comes and opens your heart. And he can barely talk. And so it was very garbled.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Ah, lovely. Is there a dog breathing on the foot of the bed?
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I was like, what, a light came and opened your heart? He said, mm-hmm. I said, well, when did this happen? He said, May 10th. I was like, this year? No, I was 13. And I was like, you're holding out on me. So this light had appeared in his room when he was having a really hard time. Kids with Down syndrome don't have easy lives. And It touched his heart.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And he said, since then, nothing was as hard. And I said, you know, I saw it too. And it said to me that it's always with us, even though we can't see it. And he said, oh, I can see it. And I was like, you can? And he was like, yeah. Like, he was sort of disappointed in me. And I said, well, where is it? Is it like up there, down here in your head, in your heart?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And he just looked at me and he said, mom, it's everywhere. He just sees the whole world illuminated. And I think that's what I saw in the forest when suddenly the world would just turn to light. It was that light. So that was the field.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And as I lost each friendship, as I lost each job, as I faced the fear and the heartbreak and everything, those parts of me were dissolving and I was becoming more identified with life. that light. And that was the thing. It was completely selfish. I was not going back to the way I felt before I felt that light. Never going back there.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But be gentle with yourself. Don't quit your job. I mean, I was very violent. I was quite a lot like you. The way I got to Harvard was I had a part of myself called Fang that did not care what hurt me. I'd go running in the snow. I remember once I bought running shoes that were too small and all my toenails came off during that run. And I just kept running.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I'd stop and take off another toenail and keep running. I was able to be very brutal to myself. Just living in Boston is brutal to me. Well, you know, on the plus side, my feet were completely numb because of the cold. Right.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah. And I think that's why I did this massive integrity cleanse when I was at a place where I was far, far away from my true self. And because of that, it was a kind of violent breaking of connections. So now if I'm coaching somebody, I'm like – Be very gentle. I call it one degree turns.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
If you're flying a plane and you turn one degree north every half hour, you won't even notice it's turning, but you'll end up someplace very different. So just gently move away from what causes you to suffer. Get yourself the hot cup of tea in the morning to soothe your throat. Listen to your own sorrow. cancel a meeting because you just don't feel like doing it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
These are the things that bring you back to your truth. And it's always loving. And it's not loving necessarily to just say, I'm going to say the truth about everything and I don't care who hates me for it. That was just my way.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah. Was it Keats who said that of all the ways there are to lose a person, death is the kindest. Like that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
There can't be incompatible truths. I think what happens is that you, and just tell me where I'm wrong, okay? I could be completely full of crap. It sounds to me like you're one of the people who have a huge heart, who sometimes confuse love with self-abandonment, who love so deeply that you want the joy of the beloved more than you want your own joy.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And that is not love. That is a hostage situation. There's something I call spider love. If you say to a spider, how do you feel about flies? It would say, oh, I love them. And it expresses that love by immobilizing them, wrapping them up and injecting them with poison and then sucking out their life force whenever it needs them. And it loves those flies. Yum.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
but love always sets the beloved free, okay? So there's a consumptive love. And when you are a fly and you meet a spider and you give your whole self to this person who goes, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, I really want that, you find yourself starved of your own validation, your kindness to your true self, and you've given it all to the other person. And that's when it will not work.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And you may be missing the people who aren't looking for flies or who want to just, I'm not going to extend this metaphor any further, who just want to be with you as a whole human, who want to know what your limitations are as well as their own, who will say to you, I have a new friend who had pneumonia and I wanted to talk to her on the phone.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I told my assistant, I don't care if I have pneumonia. And she wrote me a text and she said, do not impinge on your own health because you want me to feel loved. I don't like it. I want you to be healthy. And I was like, well. So I would examine that. The moment where you become so entranced with another that you stop caring about yourself and try to feed your whole life to them.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Because that's not love. It's something our culture defines as love. A lot of parents love their children that way. But you have to be able to know exactly what you want to communicate to the other person and to have them say, I completely respect that. Or you don't have a love situation. You have codependency. Mm-hmm.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I'll relate it to this relationship thing because it applies across everything, but it's hardest in relationships. And that is start to notice the first moment when – And part of you, a deep part of you, knew you were losing your threat. You were losing your integrity.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So if you think about a relationship you had that ended poorly, where you loved the other person by giving your whole self to them, which you've been taught is called love, even though I don't think it is called love. And then... Look back on the first moment that she wanted something and you abandoned yourself to give it to her. And it's usually very early in the relationship. Like day one.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Exactly. And you just crushed right over that boundary, that very sensitive inner vigilance that's saying, this is how we stay whole, Andrew. This is how we stay in integrity. So most people with a job, with a relationship, with any choice they make, they can trace it back. When I pick up the pieces for them years later, they're like, oh, I knew that the first week.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I stayed in there for 20 years. So it's about, as I said earlier, being really granular in your experience of your own suffering and knowing that you are not here to suffer. There's this big thing that men in our society are taught that if, you know, their love songs, like, I would— I can't remember his name. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Until you're pretty sure you've heard everything there is to hear.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And, you know, I would crawl down the avenue black and blue to show my love, to make you feel my love. And it's like, okay, that's not showing me love. You don't have to hurt yourself to show me love. But maybe that's why you have to pull back six inches from your own eyes to brutalize yourself for other people that martyr love. archetype. No, it doesn't work.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Ah, sweet. Okay, so smell the air. What's it like? How humid is it? What's the temperature?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And repeat.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, I think because they identify me as a coach. They go to a therapist with relationship things, but people come to me with, my life's just not working, that feeling you were describing.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, the whole thing's not working, but in my job, I need to change my job. I need to get my purpose. I need to have my life's meaning. And it always ends up ending up to be about the relationship as well. Mm-hmm. Anything we do that's dysfunctional for any part of ourselves is dysfunctional for every part of ourselves. The way we do anything is the way we do everything.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
See that pattern?
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Because for a while you did things that hurt you and then you realized, no, the things that hurt me, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do the things I like. When you bring another human being into it, when it's a romantic partnership, I think you still have the pattern of, I will do things that hurt me. I will abandon my sense of safety. I will go over my own experienced internal boundary.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And you just haven't, you've done it in other areas of your life, but this is, yeah, this is a big one for you where you just haven't applied the same wisdom you've learned in other areas. And I would guess that it's because you don't feel that that's loving to the other person. If you decide you're not going to kill animals at your job, the people at your lab aren't going to be heartbroken.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But if you decide you don't want to live a certain kind of life with another person, that person's heart could get broken. Or at least they could feel that way. They could genuinely feel pain. So I think maybe that's why it's a cutout thing, because changing your job doesn't hurt someone, but changing your relationship pattern somebody could get hurt.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And if you don't change your pattern, someone will also get hurt.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So there are different ways of reframing it. And one example, since you know a lot about addiction, if somebody is addicted to you pleasing them, you're pleasing them and going out of your integrity to please them, to give them whatever they want that pleases them. Your addiction as a codependent is giving them that emotional energy, whatever gets them high.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And their absorption of that energy and the imbalance that results, it's as if they are getting high on you. And An alcoholic, if you take away the bottle of booze, will tell you, you are hurting me. This is the worst thing you could ever do to me. You have no idea how much I'm suffering. And the thing you have to do in an intervention is, no, it's the alcohol that's doing the hurting.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
You know, it's the overgiving. It's allowing someone to consume your energy and to get high on it. That is an addiction. I will not let you do it. I will separate from you person to person if you continue in your addictive pattern. Doesn't mean that we won't be together in the great self and that we're all one self and we can all love each other forever.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But it is not kind to feed someone's addiction to eating your energy. Does that make sense?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It's not. You have to do some tough love.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah. This is not helping you. And they say, but I want more of you. And you say, no. no, you really don't. You want something false I was creating for you, and it's actually not me. You know, my friends who, why would you leave the church? Now you're lost to us. And I was like, no, I was always a gay non-Mormon.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
You know, I was just feeding you the story that I was a straight Mormon girl, you know, and I can't feed you that anymore. It's making you sick. It's making me sick. It's not true. And some of them I never saw it again. And some of them came around years later and said, oh, I figured it out. And some probably still are really happy and think I'm going to hell.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And by the way, for our listeners, this is not one magical day that you'll never live again. This is a typical day, but your life is now perfect. So it's an ordinary day, but in your perfect life. So put it out three years, five years, whatever makes it possible for you to allow that – your ideal life could form in that time.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It's an innocent mistake.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Does that resonate? Oh, totally. Yeah. Here's the thing. You don't expect your dog to pretend it's not a dog. You don't expect your dog... to stop loving walks and chasing a ball and just being a dog. And when it's tired, it'll go to sleep. But often when we fall in love, we try to make ourselves not who we are and try to become the person that will make the other maximally thrilled with us.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I know exactly what you're talking about. I have thrown, like I love to give money to people. Yeah, I do too. Because it makes them happy. And then it never works. Well, it works out only in cases where it feels true in my heart. If I overgive because someone's there saying, I need, and it doesn't feel good in the giving, I am not being a dog. A dog would say, no, this is where my limits are.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I'm going to go lie down on the floor and sleep. but I will get an extra job to give money to people that I don't want to give money to after the first little while. So we bend ourselves out of our true being. And I think the reason we love dogs so much is that they love, but they love truly. They love honestly. They don't pretend to be something they're not.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
You'll find as you do it many times, the time necessary for it to happen becomes much shorter. Anyway, so you get up, look around, you sit up in the bed, look around, who's next to you? What does the dog look like? What does the room look like?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And they don't have the empathy that says, if your leg is broken, I will break my own leg and lie down next to you so that I feel exactly the same pain you're feeling. It is not empathy to feel everything the other person is feeling. Take the broken leg example.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
If you got hit by a car, you're lying there screaming in anguish, and I felt your feelings so strongly that I couldn't cope, and I fell down in a faint. I had a client once who has passed away now, so I'll tell this anecdote. Her husband was like you. He would give himself away. And she gladly consumed all his life energy. And one day he had a heart attack, a near fatal heart attack.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And she called me and said, I couldn't get him to take care of my needs while he was having this heart attack. He just had it. And I was like, yeah, he couldn't help that. And she said, well, I told him. He said, I can't be there for you right now. I'm having a heart attack. And she said, you're not the one whose husband may be dying from a heart attack.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
She was so into consuming his energy that she actually said that with a straight face. She was expecting him to give empathy. That's not empathy. That's selling yourself out. Empathy acknowledges self-other awareness. There are four components to real empathy. Self-other awareness, I am not you.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
As Byron Katie, one of my favorite spiritual teachers says, my favorite thing about separate bodies is that when you hurt, I don't. It's not my turn.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah. Another one is emotion regulation. So you see something that's horrific and you can like, this is where you can use your skills dealing with your emotions. You bring it down. Okay. I'm a surgeon. I'm dealing with a horrible ER accident. I can't feel that. I have to get to work. So that's emotion regulation. You can do that. Self-awareness, emotion regulation. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Two other components, but those are the two that I think we really need to focus on. If you hurt, I don't. It's not my turn. And when you're hurting and I start to hurt too much because you're hurting, I can bring myself back into my own body, relax, and be contented in my own skin so that I can be present for you. So here's the thing I love.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It's a short quote from a poem by Hafiz, who was a 13th century Persian poet. It's so simple. Remember it, though. Troubled? Then stay with me, for I am not.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, that's being yourself in a relationship. Then stay with me for I am not. But I'm really, really unhappy. I see that. And I'm not unhappy. But I really, really want to be together. I really see that that's how you feel. And I don't want it.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
You make it your job to make them happy. And it is never your job to make another person happy. You cannot do it. Happiness is an inside job. You cannot make another person happy. You can't be – You can't go far enough into someone else's sadness to make them happy. You can't go far enough into their sickness to make them well.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
You have to get out of your own sadness and your own sickness and then stay in your integrity with love for them and model what it is to be in your own skin, which is the only one you're ever going to have. My oldest child as a teenager, I was so over-involved and everything. And they gave me a song called Let Me Fall by a man who had fallen from a tree and he broke his spine. He was a paraplegic.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And he just says, the one I will become will catch me. Don't catch me anymore. Don't catch me anymore. And it was so hard as a parent to let my child suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. And what they were telling me, they, them pronouns, was that this is my life and my suffering is my birthright. And I am here to figure it out as I go.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And you are not loving me when you shove yourself into my affairs to try to take away my suffering. Let me fall.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
You need a wise hedonist in your life. Right.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But only in the eyes of the other person. If you come back into your own integrity, okay, did I promise to always give more than I can? Well, I did by my actions. I established a precedent. Isn't that a promise? They say it's a promise. No, or if I did make a promise, I was in error. I apologize, I made a mistake. I promised something I couldn't really give.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Have you heard the term extinction burst?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Something tells me you could protect yourself pretty well.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
No, it's when pigeons are, well.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
The galactic pigeons.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It's about any animal.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I love all the animals. Anyway, if you give pigeons, they peck a lever and they get a pellet at unpredictable intervals, which is highly motivating. It's the most highly motivating thing they can do. And then if the pellets stop coming, the pigeons go bananas.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Peck, peck, peck, peck, peck, peck. They pick it a lot more. They pick it angrily. They insist that the researchers promise them those pellets. And then they just give up and go away because the pellets stop coming. When you have been giving too much and you realize that and you say to stay in my integrity, I have to pull back and care for myself and that's where I stop.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
The other person will put on an extinction burst for sure. And your job is to stay inside your integrity until they stop pecking. And they'll be much more healthy. I had a golden retriever once who would just come and bark to be petted. Big, huge dog. But he was young. And it was so annoying.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Look around the room. What color are the walls? What pictures are hanging there, if any?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And we had to get a dog behaviorist to come in because he was just barking at everybody constantly to be petted. And she said, when he does that, get up, walk across the room, go into another room and shut the door in his face. And we were like, oh! That would be cruel. She's like, it's not cruel. He'll understand it. And I'll never forget watching him bark at someone.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And they got up, walked out, shut the door in his face. He stood by the door and went, rah. And he went, eh. He went over and laid down. He was like, all right, well, that didn't work. And, you know, that's ultimately what happens when you stay inside your integrity and don't let people play with you that way. Don't let them tug you around.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, I know. And I call it what I what I in the book that I just wrote called Beyond Anxiety. I talk about when people like you live that way from their joy, they begin to create economic ecosystems. You create so much value that in multiple ways, people start to. you can get streams of income.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Andrew Wyeth fan. Me too. Which one? Andrew or NC?
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Did you break the heart of the other lab?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
We live in this weird economy where you're supposed to get a job and it's all based on factory work. You're supposed to go to a place and do something you don't really like to get your little allowance and then you go home. And that has only existed for the last couple of hundred years since the industrial revolution. Before that, people existed for hundreds of thousands of years doing what?
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Hunting, fishing, gardening, weaving, singing songs, telling stories, doing the things that we do as hobbies.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But we have this weird mindset that says, no, if I do things that bring me joy like a hobby does, the things that people have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years, if I just put my joy out there and see what I can do with the wild new creations of our particular time, if I don't do the job, I'm being weird somehow and it won't work.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But what I'm seeing is the economic structures of this society are all being fractured. They're falling apart around us. And it's people who are afraid. I used to watch this video of a tsunami that hit Sendai, Japan in 2011, I think it was. And this wave comes in and it eats a city in six minutes, this one wave, and you watch the whole city be ripped to shreds in six minutes.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And people are running into the buildings, and then the buildings start to collapse, and you know there are people in there. And I watched this, and I thought, there is so much change in our culture. It's like that wave has hit us. And then accidentally, I hit something in YouTube or whatever, and it switched to Mike Parsons surfing one of the biggest waves ever filmed.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It was a rogue wave, and it went up like 70 feet. And the camera pulls back, and here's this basically naked man on a board saying, with a wave that is like the wrath of God. And he's this tiny little figure. The wave is seven stories tall. And he comes riding down the face of that and it breaks over him and you think, oh, he's dead. And then he shoots out of the spray, just like shouting.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I thought, those are the choices we have right now. We can run into the institutions that we think will keep us safe and change will crush us and drown us and kill us. Or we can deal with the fact that there's a huge wave of change in our society right now and everything's changing at an accelerating rate.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And we can risk running out naked and just with our joy and just balance on our joy and let the wave take us for a ride. You're surfing. That's – you are an example to the world of someone who is balanced in his joy except in relationships, but you'll get over that.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
There's a woman hanging on to the end of your surfboard.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Do an ideal day with that relationship and it could be the weirdest thing you've ever heard of. It will work. I promise you, I have a very weird relationship life.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I can't believe I'm going to say this on this podcast. So I have two partners.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
One was the very first relationship I ever had with a woman. That was 20-some years ago. And then I was living on my ranch and meditating all day. And my partner, Karen, came to me. And this Australian poet, Rowan, was staying on our ranch with some other people. And Karen sat me down. She said, Marty. I have to tell you, I'm having very strong, I don't know, maybe maternal feelings toward Rowan.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I was like, no, they're not maternal. I'm not getting a maternal energy. And I got hit by this blast of joy, joy, joy. It was like that white light thing. It was like, and I said, you're in love with her. This is amazing. Tell her to come in. I'll go to the guest room. You guys can have that. I was just like, happy, happy, happy.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I looked for jealousy and I looked for, I was like, this isn't supposed to work this way. So Rowan came up and we all sat around talking and we sat around talking a lot more. And we all sat on the same couch talking, going, this isn't weird, is it? And after a couple of weeks, we realized everybody was in love with everybody and we couldn't live without each other.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And we have a three-year-old named Lila, who's delightful. Awesome. And it is, we call it, Feeling good by looking weird. And you can cut it out of the podcast if it's too.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It's a magnificent painting.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But I would love you to really sit down, get incredibly authentic with yourself and say, honestly, if I had the perfect romantic life, what would it look like? And be what you will call very selfish, what I will call very much in your integrity. Don't tell yourself any lies about what you really want. Right.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So it's on the wall there.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, it's very strange, but both Karen and I felt like there was a tremendous absence in a couple of years before Roe came into our life. It's like we're a three-legged stool. Two-legged stools do not make sense to us. They fall down. Whatever comes into your vision of joy... Whatever makes you feel free, write it down and read it often.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And when you get into a relationship, read it even more often.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And let the other person read it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Why not? It's your perfect life.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It's like a prenup. Here's what I'm after. Don't let me do the things in column B. It won't end well. Okay.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I hope so. And if not, I read a book by Samantha Irby, a wonderful comedian. And she says, here's what you say when people tell you that you're horrible and you're doing something awful. You say, I like it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And also just notice that you're creating a theme, which is – the theme is I will go out as myself and I will reach and strive for things. And I'm not here to be helped. I'm here to do hard things and to do them for the joy of it. So that's what that painting is about. Strong symbol of who you are. So get out of the bed and your partner's still sleeping, the dog's still sleeping.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, I really like it. I like it a lot.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Who can't? Like if it's all love, nobody can really, you can outlove almost anything. You're furious at me? I like it. I just outloved you. And I think that's why Jesus said, you know, charity never faileth. It's not that you're going to win everything if you are a loving person. It's that no matter what happens, it's like that self. You're suffering, you're pain, you're codependency, whatever.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It loves it all. Bring it. It loves it all. And that means that no matter what you come at me with, I can hold that in a field of love. And my experience is love.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I don't know if it's from Jesus, but I think it's in Paul. It says, charity never faileth. You know, love never fails. And it's because I can say, I hate myself. Yes, but I love the part of me that hates myself. Just outloved you.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
That's what I was about to use that same word. I think in order to be to become stable, I always say that the raw material for any good experience is its opposite. So I was messed, I was effed up beyond belief. There's snafu, these are both military terms, snafu means situation normal, all fucked up. FUBAR means fucked up beyond all recognition. I was FUBAR. Now I occasionally get snafu.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But I was so FUBAR that the suffering was so intense that when I learned to come home, the contrast was very sharp. And I never, ever want to... I never want to leave the consciousness that that light is always with us and we can feel it if we're honest. And that's all we have to do. Be honest. And there it is. Boom. It's got us.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Go look out the window. Where are you? And you can be anywhere.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
The first time I remember worrying about this, I was four. And I'm 10 years older than you are. But I knew at four that I was here to try to help with something. And as I grew up, it just wouldn't go away, this feeling that I was supposed to help with something. And in my teens, it became, I need to help change the way people think? I don't know.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And then I started noticing other people who seemed to be like me. And I'd be like... think they're on the same team I'm on. And I was like, what team? What am I talking about? And it all came to a head when I was in South Africa in the wilderness. And I had a dream that my ancestors were coming to visit me. And I thought it was funny.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So I told it to some friends from the Shangan tribe who reacted like this. And then they ran. And I was like, what did I And later that night, we're all sitting around the fire. There are lions roaring. They bring this little woman from Mozambique, and she's a sangoma. She's a shaman. And she did her divinatory system, which is she threw the bones for me.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Because if you had a dream I had, you have to see a sangoma right away, or bad things will happen. So she said stuff about me that was true, but she could have Googled it, you know. And It was weird. When she looked at me, I felt like these ice needles going through me. It was not cute, but it was very intense.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And what she said was, there are people being born to be healers all over the world, just like there are in the traditional tribes. You need to go find them and tell them what they're here to do. They're here to heal the world, and they need the wisdom that the traditional people had, and they need their technology. And it was so interesting because she was like confused.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
She acted very frightened and confused by what she was saying to me. She had to get a group of people behind her who would chant, we agree, we agree, because she was freaked out. But I think that in every traditional experience, group of 100 to 150 people. There were a few healers that were recognized by the elders as people who were highly sensitive. They were interested in nature and science.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
They were interested in animals. They were interested in the mystery. They were interested in the arts. They were performers, but they were also very introverted and thinky-thinky. It's an archetype of healing, of medicine person, the coaches I coach, I call it wayfinders, which is a term from an anthropologist. If you're born in that archetype, if you have that phenotype,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I believe it's a phenotype, and I believe it crops up in every 100 to 150 people several times. And our culture has no word for it and no path for it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But if we are going to save the world, we will draw on whatever was born into us that makes us want to heal things, and we will use the technologies we've developed, and we will use our joy and our refusal to participate in the nonsense of our culture And we will hold firm and we will try to change the way humanity lives on this planet.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Uh-huh. Like a river.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I don't know which way it's going to go, but I'm in the game. And I kind of think you are too.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Same to you. You're just looking in the mirror. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So are you looking at a small town, a city, or do you just live out in the mountains by yourself?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
When we lie, our bodies get very weak. For example, stick your arm out. Say, I love fresh air.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
It's like one of those tire rippers that you drive across and you can't drive back because the way the brain is structured, when you get into anxiety, it just keeps going up and up and getting worse and worse and worse.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And then when you get a lot of people who are experiencing this intense anxiety and they can't get out of it, they create a culture that reflects anxiety and fosters anxiety without really meaning to. But that becomes, if you're stuck in this very mechanistic, grasping way of being, anxiety is inevitable and actually lauded.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
So I was amazed to find that Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, says in his quarterly reports and loves to say in many settings that he tells all of the thousands of Amazon employees who work under him, he wants them all to wake up terrified every morning. And that's the word he uses, terrified. And to stay terrified all day because that makes them productive.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
But most of these people are just getting by financially. He wants them to be afraid all the time so that he and the stockholders can get more stuff. And they already have so much stuff. You know, like 1% of the world's people own something like 95, no, 50% of the total wealth of the world is owned by the top 1%. It's insane.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And so we're saying, yes, get up, be terrified as long as you're productive. And you know what? When you get really productive and you earn a lot of stuff and that's still your only way of being, you still wake up terrified every morning and you stay anxious all day long. Fear, see, fear is like being shot from a cannon.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
If a bear came in here, we would both go, whoa, and we'd get very clear instructions from our biology teacher. To either fight, flee, freeze, you know, hide under the table. I would feed you to the bear probably.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
You could totally take that bear.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
No, you would win. Anyway, it would eat me and then you would win. Yeah. And then our fear, if we were like other animals, would subside. Yeah. That's normal fear. Anxiety, instead of being like shot from a cannon, it's like being haunted. Something bad happens, or we hear about something bad happening, and we get that jolt of fear.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
But instead of acting and then relaxing, we turn it into a verbal story. So a group of psychologists, I think in the 90s, decided to try to figure out why humans, of all animals, are the only ones who commit suicide on a regular basis. And what they found out, the answer is language.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
We humans have the capacity to use language to create an abstract vision of the future that is more horrifying than the prospect of our own death. We choose death over the story of fear that we carry in our minds. And the spiral happens because there's a jolt of fear, then a story about the fear.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And then there's a story about how we have to control the world so that we won't be in danger anymore. And we have to control our loved ones so they won't be in danger. And we have to control. We just have to control. But we, honest to God, really can't control very much. So then we get worried. We get even more scared. And that feeds back into these primitive brain structures that say fear.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And then it creates a bigger story and a more control efforts, and it goes up and up and up. And it doesn't go down because that part of the brain has a very peculiar, I don't know how this evolved. It has this tendency to truly believe that nothing but itself exists.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yeah, a little bit.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
All right, so you've got your brain, and it's symmetrical, right? Yeah. To mirror image, there's something in the middle called the corpus callosum that connects it. And I'm about to vastly oversimplify, and I'm not a neuroscientist, so neurologists, I beg you to forgive me.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I know that the whole brain is working almost all the time, and that left-right simplifications about the hemispheres of the brain are oversimplifications. Nevertheless, there are very dramatic differences between what happens, and so I'm going to talk to those.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
So on the left side, you have this thing called the anxiety spiral, where there's a little tiny part of your brain called the amygdala, and it's very primitive. Every animal with a spine has one of these or something very close to it. And its job is to make you safe by being alarmed when you see unfamiliar things. It feeds information to layers of the brain that are also ancient but not as old.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And these on the left hemisphere make you immediately start thinking of ways to control a situation. And then when it gets to the outermost layer of the left hemisphere, which handles things like time and language, it starts to tell a story defending the feelings it's having. So that's what the left hemisphere does in this one little compartment. On the right side, you also have an amygdala.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
You actually have two of all these structures. On the right side, the amygdala also goes, ah, something unfamiliar, a little burst of, ah. Then, in the right side, it creates curiosity instead of aversion. Have you ever rubbernecked at an accident?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And I always think, oh, I should look away. I'm being voyeuristic, but I still really want to look. And the reason is that we evolved a tendency to move away from frightening things to stay safe, but toward them... insofar as we can figure out what happened and avoid that happening to us. So curiosity is intense around things we fear.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
That's why the average American child, by the time they're ready for college, has witnessed on TV or online 16,000 or is it 60,000 murders We're terrified of murder, so we're obsessed with it. You do not have mystery stories written about robbery. It's murder. Okay, so the right side amygdala goes curious, and then it starts to connect things. How can I figure this out?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
That's like that other thing, so this is what must have happened. It's a detective, and it starts to put together its own version of what happened. It doesn't use language. But it uses very vivid images and sensory details. And it can connect things in ways that are highly original and inventive. So you immediately start to get creative.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I could give you the normal answer, which goes down easily with most people. Or I could give you the truth, which sounds really weird.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
What I found in the wonderful books I read about anxiety, they always talked about how to get your anxiety to calm down. But for me, that wasn't enough as an individual or just as a theoretician because that just gets you to the – you flatten your anxiety. But if you go into the right hemisphere of your brain and start to get creative, something really magical happens.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Just as anxiety shuts off creativity, creativity can shut down anxiety. It's like these two parts of the brain toggle.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And if you go to any traditional culture, you will find the wise people, the elders, the medicine people of that culture talking about the oneness of all things. It's not a new concept. What I realized is that if I deliberately chose to push my brain toward creativity and get the right side moving, my anxiety shut down. And then I started testing it on clients and on groups of people online.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I'd design these experiments because I was trained as a sociologist. And consistently I found that this is the way – to get rid of this horrific scourge that is ruining so many people's lives. And what I always hear is people say, well, there are real problems. We really should be afraid.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
My answer to that is if you were in a horrible car accident, God forbid, and you had many injuries, would you want the surgeons working on you to be in a state of panic or calm creativity? The only way we're going to fix the problems we've made with our fear-based behavior, the only way to solve problems this big is to access the incredible capacity of human creativity.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Now say, I love fresh air.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I was hoping you would say that. So in all my work, and this means from the time I was little, I remember being dreadfully anxious about not having done enough toward it. On the night before my birthday one year, I was lying there thinking, there's something I'm supposed to help with on the earth, and I have not done enough, and I've got to get moving here. And the next day I turned four.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I believe we can do that as individuals and as a species.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
It's so easy. It's so amazingly easy. Now, your brain naturally goes toward anxiety because of something called the negativity bias. And I always think of it as 15 puppies and a cobra. If I gave you a box and it had 15 puppies and a cobra in it, what would catch your attention? The snake. And that's because in evolutionary terms, paying attention to the snake is a good idea.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
But we have such a strong negativity bias in our culture, and we have very little to pull us back into communion with oneness. We don't have nature around us anymore. So we have to do that. We can trick our brains into doing that. And if you want to play a little with this. Sure. Okay.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
First, I want you to think of something that makes you feel a bit anxious. Maybe not panicky, but anxious. Something you're willing to, like, tell us what it is.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Okay, I think there will be many people out there who know what this feels like. You are describing a tiny domestic nightmare that many of us feel. So think about that. Think about what that feels like and just notice what it does to your body and to your emotions.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
What's happening in your body if you're in that situation with your partner?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
So you've gone to a fight-or-flight nervous system, arousal state. Okay, uh-uh, something's wrong.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yeah, I'm very focused and I'm very, like, I'm anxious, but I'm also a little bit snappish because I'm fleeing on one side. I need to get out of this situation immediately. But I'm fighting on the other side. Tell me what's wrong. So you've got a full fight or flight thing happening. So you can get into that by imagining the situation. Now I want you to imagine something else very vividly.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And it would probably help if you close your eyes. Have you ever eaten an orange?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
All right. So imagine that you are holding an orange. It's a nice, ripe, heavy, delicious orange at the peak of its ripeness. I can tell you've already smelled it. So you can smell the citrus. You just take a bite of it to break the seal of the peeling and just feel that little spray of citric acid that It pops up when you bite the peel and then the bitterness of the rind.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And then as you bite and the juice gets in your mouth, it's sweet, it's a little bit tangy. You can feel the filaments of the skin and the stringiness of the insides. And you can pull it back. You pull back the peel. You can feel it on your fingernails. You can smell it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
How's your anxiety?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
It's gone.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Because I asked you to use sensory imagination. And that's handled by the right hemisphere. It's not in the left. So instead of verbal imagination, which can create horror stories, you were in a sensory experience. And what I don't think people realize is that we're always imagining what's going to happen to us in the next few days, weeks, months, years.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
So ever since I was little, my whole intent has been based on this feeling that I was meant to help with a shift that would happen in the world during my lifetime. And I did not know what it was. So I would ask myself, what is it? I would spend hours thinking, what is it? And the only thing I got as an answer was this poet, this bit of poetry from T.S. Eliot.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
But we're imagining it based on what we think is real, which is all the horror stories we're hearing about. Oh, you know, I need to mind my health. There will be accidents. My loved ones will die. We have all these stories that haven't happened yet. They may. They're not lies. But that's in the mind as we make our choices. I need to get more money, that whole thing.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Now say, I love to vomit.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
When you imagine forward with your senses in a way that brings relaxation, how's your body when you're in the orange thing? You said it was tense when you were in anxiety. What happens to your physical body when you're completely connected to the experience of this imaginary orange thing?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yeah. You start breathing more deeply. You stop producing all the cortisol, the glucocorticoids, the adrenaline that you had in the fight-flight state. And now you're starting to produce serotonin and dopamine and what they call the tendon befriend hormones. So say you could hold that energy and your partner is still tense and running around, but you're staying in this...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
relaxed state, can you then, instead of being afraid of her, start to be curious about what's going on? Instead of saying, tell me what's going on. It's more like, wow, she's really dense. I wonder what that's about. And you could even ask her, honey, I don't want to step on your toes here, but the vibe I'm getting is that you're not okay. Like, can I help you?
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
So it's a very, very different thing to approach conflict. One of the people I wrote about in this book is Chris Voss, one of the FBI's top hostage negotiators. And when he's dealing with a violent, psychopathic terrorist who has people as hostages he's ready to kill, Chris Voss says, this is how you deal with him. Gently, with a soft voice, curious about his experience and empathetic about it.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And you're just thinking. What? This is not in the movies. But the human amygdala is a frightened animal most of the time. And we all know that if you run at a frightened animal and say, tell me what you want, it doesn't get less frightened. So what you just did was move your nervous system into a state where you can be a field of peace for someone else who's anxious.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
No, no, no. There are many tricks. Do you want to do some more? Sure, let's do that. All right, here's one of my favorites. And I got this from a brilliant artist and professor at Harvard, William Ryman, who I was lucky enough to be his teaching assistant for a few years. And this is one of the things that he used to do to get the students to shut down the left side of their brain.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Well, not shut it down, but to use the right side of the brain as well, because the left side of the brain can't draw very well, I have to tell you this. So all I want you to do is put your stylus there over toward the right. center of your field and write your first name the way you usually sign it.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
The way you usually sign it.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Ooh, that's beautiful. Okay, so now put your stylus just to the left of the signature and now replicate the signature, but this time write it in mirror writing backwards. Take as much time as you need. Gosh.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Just breathe.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Can I rub out? Absolutely. You have as many tries as you need. Notice how the rhythm of your hand goes when you're moving right and try to see if you can find that rhythm going the opposite direction.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Using pencil and paper because they're tactile is actually, you're going to have easier access to it because you're going to have more access to the right side of your brain.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
You're doing brilliantly. Mm-hmm. You did it!
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And it goes, I said to my soul, be still and wait without love, for it 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. All right.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yay! No, not terrible. Now, the torture is not over, Stephen.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
You said you wouldn't lie. I just meant your first name anyway.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Now, while you were doing that, you might have felt intense frustration and a sense of, huh. But when you're anxious about it, you actually can't do it. You have to become engrossed with it in order to do it. Because your brain is creating new neuron synapses that have never existed before. You've never done this before.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
It's because of the way the brain is structured. And there are many tricks. Do you want to do some more? Sure, let's do that.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
So you are fundamentally changing your brain, teaching it a skill it has never had. And this is what children are going through when they learn to write for the first time. But what you just did was connect two parts of the brain that are in the right side. So this is why we used to make these poor students do this.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Because once they could, we had another book we worked with called Drawing is Forgetting the Name of What You See. As long as you call it a cup, you can't draw it. You draw your image of a cup. But when you forget to call it anything, it just becomes a shape. Like your signature had to just become a shape. And shapes... are on the right hemisphere.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
So what you just did was, it's like power lifting. You forced your brain to create synapses that were brand new that were taking you into a state of learning, deep learning. Similar to what happens to children if you let them run around in nature. So there was a study done at NASA in the 60s to identify creative geniuses.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And they found that 2% of the adults they sought out, like college graduates, were creative geniuses. After a while, a few years, they decided to try giving it to 4- and 5-year-olds. 98% of them were creative geniuses. And I think that probably the other 2% were just having a bad day.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
What happens between the moment you're four years old, a full-on creative genius learning new things the way you just did day in, day out, and adulthood where your genius has mainly gone dark? It's because you stop trying things that are brand new like that.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
You're put in the factory line in school and taught to learn in a completely different way that's based on shame and fear and artificial skills that don't mean much to you. And rotten romances. Yeah. Everything's right or wrong. Everything's very judgmental in nature. Nothing's judgmental. One of the things I've done with groups of clients is take them into a forest.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And with the help of another coach who's a great woodsman, we give them the tools to make fire with sticks and rocks. But they have to work as a team. And then we say, make fire, but you can't talk about it because language is in the left hemisphere. And sometimes they're out there for four hours. And the whole time it's like, ah, what are we doing? They try all these different things.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And then I've never had a group that didn't do it. They figure it out and you end up with a little flame in your hands and you feed it a few bits of dried moss or whatever and you blow into it and it starts to smoke and then smoke heavily and then suddenly it just bursts into flame. And there's this feeling, there's this Promethean feeling, oh my God, we can do anything.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And the fact that that's how we're built to learn and there's joy in it, there's a kind of, it's an achievement. But nature's not saying wrong, right. You get an F, you get an A, you get higher levels. No, you get fire or you don't get fire. No judgment.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Well, to me, there's a three-step process, and there are three sections in the book. The first one, I use it with the acronym CAT, Calm, Art, and Transcendence. This is how it works. The first third of the book is just how to calm your brain. It's been taught to be anxious. It is biologically pre-programmed to be anxious.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
So to calm it down, most people will say, they'll come in and tell me, I want to fight my anxiety. I want to end it. I want to bring it down. I want it gone. Because they think it's a broken machine. But it's not a broken machine. It's a frightened animal. And if you came in and I said to you, okay, I want to end you. I want to bring you down. I'm going to fight you until you're gone.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Would you be less afraid or more afraid? So they're attacking you. the part of themself that's anxious, and it makes it more anxious. And that's what we're taught to do. End it. Force it to calm down with chemicals.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
As I got older and studied more, I began to think what I'm meant to help with is a shift in the way human beings perceive and think. And that is why I couldn't know what it was because To explain to someone a fundamental shift in the way they think would have to be processed through the way they're thinking now. And so it would be fundamentally misunderstood.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
One of the most ghastly things that ever happened in psychiatry was that they used to literally take people who had inexorable anxiety and literally put a screwdriver through the eye socket and up into the brain and just mix it around. That's how mechanistic we are about our own minds. We can fix it with a screwdriver. That's a very left hemisphere way to think.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And it's literally attacking ourselves. But we're all born with the intrinsic knowledge of how to calm a frightened animal. So if you found a terrified puppy on your stoop one morning and you decided to try to help it, you would instinctively know how to do that. What would you do?
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yeah. And if it didn't, you'd give it space. You'd give it time. You'd sit there with it. Yeah. And just the way your energy just changed now, you'd get down, you'd begin to smile in a very sweet way. And I could feel the tolerance and the gentleness and the space that you would give this creature. Yeah. We've got to learn to be gentle to ourselves. We are taught to be violent to ourselves.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Biohack that. Make yourself eat this and do that. And instead, if we could just go to the anxious part, like say you're with your partner and she's acting weird and you're feeling anxious. Generally, what we do is we try to control the situation. What can I do? Can I make her happy? I'll bring her flowers. I'll do whatever, right? Have an argument.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Instead of trying to control her, the best approach is go inside, find the part of yourself that's afraid. So if you're in that situation and she's nervous and you just start to observe your own anxiety, like, okay, what does that feel like? Who is that in there? Who's the anxious part of me? And just notice. I mean, try it right now if you don't mind. She's upset. She's tense.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
She's not telling you the problem. Notice the anxiety. Where is it in your body exactly?
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Okay, in your chest. So allow that and say to it, I'm going to give you space. I'm here. I'm going to be here with you. I know she's scaring you, but I've got you. It's okay. She's not going to hurt us. I can go in the other room with you if you need and sit with it and say, let me know, what are you feeling? Tell me everything.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
You get to feel exactly the way you feel, and I'm here to listen to anything you want to tell me, and I will not hurt you, and I will not try to stifle you or make you go away. So how does that change anything?
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
That can be really helpful. There's a psychologist named James Pennebaker who found that if he just had students, he just did this experiment once as a graduate student. He had students write for 15 minutes about something that was upsetting to them. And many of them came out of the experiment in tears. It really upset them for an hour or two.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
He had other students just write what they did last summer or whatever. So there was this brief period where the ones who had stirred up some turmoil felt unsettled. But in the weeks and even the years subsequent to that experiment, they had fewer doctor's visits. They had less anxiety. They had better relationships. They had better everything.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
So he, for his whole career, just did these writing exercises where he would have people just express themselves, not to show anyone, not even to reread, just to express. The parts of us that are frightened need to be heard more. The parts of society that are hurting need to be heard.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I'm astonished by the Truth and Reconciliation Councils held in South Africa after Nelson Mandela became president. These people who had been through absolute atrocities and they were just heard. They were allowed to tell their stories to the people who had hurt them and other people who were on their side. And the telling of it avoided, you know, what everyone thought would be a bloodbath.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
So now I'm old and I don't care what people think of me. So I just say this right out loud. It was a deep secret in my heart for decades. And now I just say, I think there is going to be a shift in the way in human consciousness. And I think it is going to change the way humans relate to the planet, relate to each other, relate to themselves. And I could be wrong, but I don't care.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And it, of course, didn't fix all the problems, but it unburdened, to a large extent, people who had been through things that I can't even imagine. So, yes, write it. Write it down. So she's in the other room. She's acting weird. Something might come up about, like, how old is that anxious part? Maybe it's young. Maybe it's not.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
That's what it's like if you get stuck in what's called the anxiety spiral in the brain, the anxiety cycle, some people call it. So what you have to do in that situation is, to extend the metaphor, get out of the car, disarm the mechanism, get that mechanism out of the way, you know, the tire ripping thing, and then you can back out.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
But the stopping and getting out, that's the calming step of anxiety. And that's what you're doing here. As weird as it sounds, when you write your name backwards and you come into a state of physiological calm, you are getting rid of the tire rippers. You're building pathways that go into the calmer parts of the brain.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
So the same thing when you were imagining eating an orange, you're calming yourself and it allows you to reverse. It allows you to leave finally. But our culture tends to not allow you to leave. It's always telling you horror stories. So then once you get really calm and you've taken care of that part of yourself, I said the acronym is CAT, cat.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Once you get to calm, then very paradoxically, it blew me away when I realized this, then you need art. And I don't mean drawing. I mean making things, making things in three dimensions, making events happen, making a podcast. Like what was the fire in you that made you make things? And how did it feel when you were in the making?
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yeah. And do you know that if people have been through a trauma and they're allowed to draw about it, even if they can't draw, you know, professionally, They have an 80% lower chance of developing PTSD. There's something about creating stuff, and it could be a company or it could be a spray paint on a cardboard. My partner started making bead bracelets a while ago. She's very busy.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
She doesn't have time for this, but it makes her so happy. content. And we were talking about how if you go into a tomb in Egypt from 5,000 years ago, what are you going to find? Among other things, beaded bracelets. If you go to the Amazon rainforest and contact an uncontacted tribe, what might you find? Beaded bracelets.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
People are making beaded bracelets all the time, and they serve no function. They are precious, pointless things, she said, that we make. And all cultures make, we make music. I mean, I think about the cultures in Jamaica, one of the worst slavery colonies in the history of the world. It was just, it made what was happening on the mainland look gentle by comparison.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And out of that, you get these incredible art forms, reggae, dance. I mean, like in the middle of... being crushed, having literally everything taken from them. People were still making art. This is a part of the human spirit that is just, it's indomitable and our culture pushes it to the fringes. Okay, Stephen, you can do that on a weekend. That's nice. But did you really make any money?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I'm going to keep trying for it till the day I die.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
You know?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
It's because of the way the structures on the left side, they're obsessed with grasping material objects, acquiring, controlling other people, always thinking about fear. And there does seem to be this toggle effect that anxiety and creativity just can't work at the same time.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
So the moment you begin to create, like when you said, I could write this, that's expressive writing, that's artistic writing. And all of a sudden, the toggle switches off in anxiety and on in creativity. So I believe that there's another spiral on the right side of the brain, but instead of spiraling tightly into fear, it spirals outward. And ultimately, you get to the final thing.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Wait, without thought, but actually, no, I actually have a theory now. My undergraduate degree was in East Asian Studies. I lived in Asia and studied Chinese and Japanese. And they have a concept in Asia that is not well known in modern Western culture. And that is the concept of awakening. And it's awakening out of the dream of thought.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
There's calming, there's artistry, and then there's transcendence or awakening. When you're there, sometimes we call it flow. Chicks at Me High, the psychologist who named it Flow, really looked into this. And it's a state of creating and performing at a level so difficult we almost can't do it. Exactly the way you were writing your name. It's like, ah, flow.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And you can have what's called the rage to master where you're just like, I can't. But when you get it, and I'm sure you've had this with many things you've created in your life, it's like flying. It's heaven. And there's a time in the process of creating where the sense of self falls away and the is creation itself sort of moving with you and through you. And it's blissful.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And I believe that is the state in which we are meant to spend almost all our time. And I think that would transform our consciousness.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yeah. Well, it's conditioned by the way the brain works. It works very differently in pubescent girls than it does in, say, adult men. Young adult men, their brains work very differently from elders. That's why in traditional societies, the young man would be – herded together. And sometimes, for example, in some cultures, their faces would be obscured. They would leave their name behind.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
They would leave all the possessions they had or burn them. And they would be taken into the wilderness by the elders. And the elders would proceed to scare the living daylights out of them, making strange noises in the brush, putting them through a kind of trial And the result of this is it kind of disintegrates the ego.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And you still see it in like if you see movies about the army and how the tough but hard of gold sergeant breaks down the young soldier's egos so that they finally say, okay, I am not the center of the universe. I need my brothers to exist. And I am. I bow down in the face of nature, which is greater than I am. And then the elders say, all right, now you're ready to be a man.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Go back to the village and tell people your new name, which you get to choose. Young girls at puberty go through the opposite experience in many cultures. They are isolated in places away from all humans. Because the primary psychological task, according to some theories, of males is that they're born sort of differentiated and very individual.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And they need to learn to integrate with other people to be whole. Females tend to be born, or people identified as female, are born very integrated. And the task of female maturation is to individuate. So young girls who haven't, they're just at the stage where they need to find out who they are as an individual.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And instead, they're very integrated with networks of people who are psychologically attacking each other in ways that are extremely harmful to their psyche at that stage. In a traditional culture, they might be put in, say, a hut that was dark and given food every day, but you're in there by yourself until you learn, I'm okay. I can actually go inside myself and find the truth of who I am.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Which is, I mean, the whole thing is now like half of our listeners are at this point probably thinking, Stephen has brought a lunatic to the program. I will not listen to this episode. But I'm promising you, it gets really cool if you focus on it. Because when you awaken, and it's a shift in the way, a fundamental perception.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
On the other hand, the boys are out there going, ah, I can give up thinking I am...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
all that and i can kneel in reverence at the oneness of it all and then they come back together and they've got a lot in common at that point because the men now realize they need people and the women now realize that they're in independence exactly and so each can understand the other better i mean the wisdom of these cultural traditions is incredible and we just don't have it
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
we don't have it the the internet in particular spins out the the individuation of young men makes them feel like you know they do have bands of brothers but it's like we're under attack man and i really i'm gonna try to i have to achieve i'm gonna try it this way and i'm gonna try it that way and there's a lot of battle games and stuff but none of the humility that comes from the elders
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And these young girls are just caught in whirlwinds of social toxicity when they might be taught to meditate. And we can still do all those things. We can still access those things
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Because... It is easier in the mind to take arms against a sea of troubles. It's Hamlet's speech. Why should I stay alive in a world where everyone dies and we're all assaulted by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? He's just watched his father die, and he's like, why would I keep going? I could just kill myself. Because men are taught combat as a way of control.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
If you're afraid, every movie will tell you, get a gun. Like The Matrix, where the guy learns he can control everything with his mind. Everything he's controlling with his mind. So what does he do? He says, we're going to need a lot of guns. You can control the universe with your mind. You don't need guns, right? But there's just this obsession with weaponry. And that's kind of in the DNA.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
But when you get people in a spiral of fear, it becomes... intense and military. All the genocides committed throughout history have relied on like really toxic leaders accessing vulnerable young men and militarizing them against other people, which is really easy. And if they're on their own isolated and there are no elders taking them in groups doing things, they turn that on themselves.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I would say look to our ancestors, you know. Let's take young men. The coach, Michael Trotta, that I used to go with to make fire in the woods, he originally worked with and probably still does work with groups of young men. And he used to wear a—he was a disciple of— I think it was the Odawa tribe of indigenous Americans. And he always wore this shirt that said, listen to grandfather.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
It's also very strong in India, Tibet, and the other Buddhist countries. It's a shift where you leave the aspects of your thinking that cause you internal suffering. You cease to suffer after you awaken. I think that's actually an epigenetic shift that is inherent in the brain of every individual and that many individuals throughout history have gone through it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And he would take these confused, hurting young men out. And he would put them through the trials that they would have had in a traditional society. And they would have to learn to make fire together. And they would have to learn to feed each other what they could find and use their skills in hunting, building, all of that for the community. And I just watched him heal boy after boy after boy.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Like the lives we're giving people now, the lives most of us are living, are so alienating. It's such an abnormal – this here is not normal anymore. Right? This is not a forest or a beach or a desert. This is all man-made. It's full of right angles, which don't even very rarely exist in nature, only in crystals.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yeah, I'm pointing at the studio, which is lovely, by the way. Absolutely state-of-the-art. But If you talk about human evolution and the incredible sophisticated nervous systems we have, they evolved intimately for a totally different environment. And this is scary.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
You would create stuff. You can't help yourself. And that's why you are obviously like physically healthy. You seem incredibly balanced and wise. Like you've been making stuff. So you're very much like you're... Sorry to use California language, but your energy is very calm, but also very exuberant.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Oh, yes, I was.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
So I was born not just into a Mormon family, but a Mormon community where everyone shared the same beliefs. You didn't call people Mr. and Mrs. It was brother and sister, brother Smith, sister Smith. And I was told from very young, I mean, you're indoctrinated.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
At 18 months, you start religious training and they tell you things like, you know, if men live well and they're part of the Mormon church, then when they die, they get their own planet and all the women they want. And it's like, all right, like you're three years old. What do you know, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
So our brains are biologically pre-programmed to be anxious, taught by innocently believing lies, by socialization or trauma. Socialization says you're not good enough, you should try harder, that was a bad choice, all kinds of things. And trauma tells you, oh my God, everything's dangerous all the time. And then it creates horror stories that haven't happened yet to make you safe.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And Jesus is going to come over the mountains, and all the graves are going to fly open, and all the bodies, the literal bodies of all the dead people are going to rise up out and go join Jesus. which is why we don't cremate bodies. We bury them because they're going to come back to life.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And I would have nightmares of Jesus coming over the mountains, the graves flying open, all the people around me are rising up. And I would run. As a little kid, this happened over and over again, this dream where I was trying to jump high enough to go with the people who were being saved, and I couldn't do it. I just kept coming back down. So I lived in
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
absolute terror all the time and i also didn't know what was real because none of it nothing felt real so that was it's very disconcerting but because i'd never had any other experience i just thought well this is life so that was rough and at 28 years old you realized that you'd been sexually assaulted as a child Yeah, I think I had hints of it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Actually, friends told me that I had told them about it in high school, and I don't remember telling them. So I had pretty much repressed it. My father was a very, very renowned scholarly defender of Mormonism. His job was to take the claims of the doctrine and validate them you know, academically.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
The great teachers, I think Nelson Mandela went through it in prison at Robben Island. So all over the world, in different cultures, in different parts of the world, throughout history, individuals have described this experience with very, very consistent terminology. You awaken, you realize that the life you've been living is real, but only in the way a dream is real.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
But in order to do that, I talked to many people who—he had five people working with him to help him translate various documents of different languages. And they said he would just make things up and put them as footnotes in different languages so no one was likely to check them. And it was called Lying for the Lord. Which is so weird.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I mean, it means you have a God who's fundamentally interested in helping people be like God by lying. So yeah, I was twisted in knots when I was little. And then I think it twisted my father into knots as well. And I do have memories and a lot of physical scarring from sexual abuse that sort of blew up into my consciousness right after I had the light experience that came to me in surgery.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And it actually told me during the surgery, you're about to go through something very, very difficult. But I've always been with you and I'll always be with you. Never forget that. And that's why I decided not to lie anymore. And that's why when I started having these memories, it didn't matter because...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Because connection with that light and never forgetting it was the realest, maybe the only absolutely true thing that had ever happened to me. And I was not leaving again.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yes. Yeah.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Well, it sort of exploded into my mind. They're called intrusive flashbacks. I'd had a lot of symptoms of PTSD my whole life without knowing it. But my oldest child got to be the age I was when the abuse started occurring, five years old. And she looked just like me at that age. And it... Every time I looked at her, I would just have these incredibly violent... It's not like a memory.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
It's like it's happening. It's like you're completely overwhelmed by it for a period of time. And it was extraordinarily hard. I'm not going to lie. It was bad. And I called my mother, and she said, well, yes, that's what happened. I was like... What? You agree with me? And she said, why shouldn't I? I know him better than you. And I said, okay, so like, what do I do?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And she said, well, obviously you have to protect the church.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Well, she called me and said, what's going on? Why are you not visiting us? And I said, all right, I had taken a vow not to lie. So I told her the truth, expecting her to go into a rage or something. And she said, well, yeah, that's how it is.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yeah, I believe you. That's that sounds right. That tracks.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
She said, I know him better than you do. And I said, I don't remember. This was 30 years ago. But I said, he's really, he's not an honest man. And she said, no, he's not honest. And then she said, you better come and make him a cake. Which is true. It's weird, frankly, to say, yes, I believe you were raped by your father at the age of five.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And by the way, the surgery I was in when I had the light experience was surgery to correct some of the scar tissue left by the abuse. It had ripped internally, and I was bleeding internally. And they just found all this scar tissue where it probably shouldn't have been. And so for a mother to say, oh, yeah, I completely believe that's true.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And what I think you should do about it is to make your perpetrator a cake kind of sums up the way I was raised. And I just I tried. I made the cake. I went down. I served the cake. And then I just couldn't go back. I just couldn't.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And that the reality of the awakened state is much more real. And in that state, there's no fear. There's no suffering. There is infinite compassion. There is the desire to serve. There is love for all beings, not just every human, but every being there is. And there is a kind of fundamental peace and bliss, the bliss of being, they call it in Sanskrit, satchitananda.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I did. Yeah. Um, I confronted him at first and then years later, 10 years later or so when he was 90, 91, I was born when he was 52. And, um, I wanted to meet with him after I'd forgiven him to tell him that I'd forgiven him so that he would not have to carry that because he was a very, very miserable, strange, disassociated human being, like really, really weird.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
He was brilliant, but very, very broken. And I think he had to choose between his entire sense of reality and his religion, and he chose the religion himself. And he chose the job of talking other people into believing the religion. And I think it just completely broke him. And that plus he was in World War II and saw a lot of action there. I forgive him.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
By the way, anyone listening to this, you do not have to forgive your perpetrator. Find a way to be in your own truth, in your own integrity. You will heal. You will be happier. Then you will notice that there is no more anything to forgive. You're done.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
No. He's very strange about it, though. He didn't say, I never did that. He said, oh, but that was the evil one, meaning the devil. And that was my family's story was that I'd been sexually assaulted by the devil as a child. And that's why I had scars and so on. And so he said, yeah, that was the evil one. I think meaning the devil, but maybe he meant part of him that was evil.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
He never really talked to me. My whole life, we never had like conversations. He would switch languages. He would literally physically run away from me. It was very, very strange. Yeah. It wasn't a normal childhood or adulthood.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Oh, she totally retracted it, yeah. I mean, she had to live with him. And she couldn't very well, like... agree with me in his presence. So when I asked her, I met with both of them in my therapist's office, and I said, why did you tell me that you agreed with me and that it made sense to you? And she said, oh, I just assumed you were joking, which was like, nah, that, no.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
No, she never did. I never saw her again. But actually, I have to say, as a child, if I had to choose one of my parents to be around, it would have been my father because my mother was just a big ball of misery and rage. And I never once remember feeling safe around her. Why?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I had the distinct impression she hated me. Really? Yeah, because Mormons believe that children choose to be born to specific parents. And she had had five children and one stillbirth, and her body was over it, and she was done, and she was sick and depressed and miserable. And then she had three more children. I was seventh of the eight surviving children.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And the last four of us, she was really angry that we had forced ourselves upon her. She did not want us. And she was angry because we had been born.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yeah, like all the time. I had a weird privilege of watching her funeral on, what do they call it, closed circuit TV during the pandemic or just after. One of my sisters had gotten back in touch with me after 30 years of no contact. And It was the strangest thing because I was going to go do something that day, and then I thought, no, I've got to go lie down in bed, which I don't do.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And then I've got to watch TV, which I never do during the day. And then I got a text from my sister saying, our mom's funeral is on TV right now. at this link. So I sat there and I watched it and it was quite validating. One of my brothers got up and started out by saying, if you came here expecting to hear stories of motherly love, you are at the wrong funeral.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
The bliss of being becomes your everyday state. I think if a critical number of people experience that at the same time, we could just fix the problems humans have been causing for the last few thousand years.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yeah, and my siblings said things like, it's so much that she was depressed. It was kind of like depression is who she was. It was, I feel tremendous sadness for my mother, tremendous compassion and empathy to the point, I mean, heartbroken.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
about the life she lived and the lives that many other women live sort of in crazy systems feeling they have no power um it just destroyed me to to feel how much pain she was in but uh yeah she didn't like me did you ever figure out why your parents were the way that they were outside of
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Oh yeah, tons of things. Like they were, my grandmother, my mother's mother, I think was a complete psychopath. She was pro-Nazi in World War II. What? Like who does that? She was Swedish and she just thought that was the right thing to do.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Oh, he was definitely abused by his mother.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yes, yes. And that was known. My mother had told me this before. Yeah, she would do horrible things. She would wound him and put bee venom on his genitals and be very sexual toward him. I mean, it was a mess. It was horrible.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Oh, constantly.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yeah. Like it was a daily struggle not to.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I would say about... well, 16, well, it started right around 13. But by the time I was 16, it was pretty constant. 17, 18, 19, it was all I could do to not commit suicide. And then it kind of It went to a level of, like, I can hang on during my 20s. But I think I was 32 the day I realized it was the first day I remembered that I hadn't wanted to kill myself. Yeah.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Because I was in tremendous amounts of physical and psychological pain.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
They were for me, yeah. They were very much psychogenic pain. You know, the body-mind interface is not – there's not much separation. And for me, one of the things I talked about in The Way of Integrity is that when we lie, our bodies get very weak. So like I could do a simple little hokey test with you where I could – oh, you want to do it? Of course. Okay. So stick your arm out and hold it up.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Well, I have a few tricks. There's no persuading. I can show you a few things if you want that I tend to do when I'm coaching people.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Don't let me push it down, okay? Okay.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Okay, got that. Now, I want you to do that while lying. And the lie I'd like you to say is, I love to vomit.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Say it holding your arm up.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Say it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Now say, I love fresh air.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I'm trying my very hardest. Say it again.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Now say, I love to vomit.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
This is why polygraph machines work on everybody with psychopaths.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yes, because the body lives in reality. The body is honest. Only the mind and only the verbal mind can lie to us and tell us things that we can believe even though they're not true. So I love to vomit is a statement that says it's okay for me to feel horrible. But a smaller version of this is I often speak to groups and often they're in like hotel ballrooms or in auditoriums.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And I'll stop right in the middle of the speech and say, apropos of nothing, is everyone comfortable? And they'll say, yes. No, really, truly, is everyone, are you genuinely comfortable? Are you really comfortable? And they say, yes, go on with your speech.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And then I say, so how many of you, if you were sitting at home alone, if you were at home alone right now, how many of you would be in exactly the position you're in at this moment? And nobody raises a hand. And then I say, why not? And they have to sit and think for a long time before someone finally says, I'm not completely comfortable this way.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And I would say, well, that's okay because humans can tolerate a lot of suffering. And this is mild. What concerns me and should concern you is that 30 seconds ago you swore to me in broad daylight that you were absolutely comfortable while you knew you weren't.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Your body knew you weren't comfortable, and your mind was doing this little trick where it goes very quickly through this, okay, in order to listen to speeches, we sit in uncomfortable positions, and that's okay because it's worth the benefit we get out of it. So given that, I am tolerably comfortable. But all you think is, I'm comfortable. when you're not comfortable.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I am a person who has... experienced intense psychological and physical suffering for decades. Absolute wreck of a human being. Physically, by the time I was 30, I had been bedridden for 10 years with autoimmune diseases. I had depression and anxiety in massive amounts from the time I was very small.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
So people come to me and they're in jobs where they're not comfortable, in relationships where they're like sometimes in intense suffering, in religions where they're not comfortable, in all kinds of places. And they think they're comfortable, but they're getting sick.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
They're getting physically sick or they're getting addicted to a substance because they're trying to numb the discomfort they won't acknowledge. And so pretty much all I do is help people get in touch with a really, really benevolent friend called suffering.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
When you know what makes you suffer, you're getting accurate information from your entire neurological system about what's working for you and what isn't and what would be better, what would be more comfortable, just a little bit. And if you keep correcting, I call them one-degree turns, I would be a little more comfortable doing this. So I did it like run off a cliff method. Don't do my way.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Do the one-degree turns. If you're in an airplane and it turns one degree north every half hour over 10,000 miles, you won't even notice you're turning, but you'll be in a completely different place. And that's just noticing. oh, this isn't very comfortable for me. I would rather do this. You know, my girlfriend is anxious.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I could break my back trying to figure out what's going on and getting her enough presents to make her happy. Or I could go in the other room, sit down, be gentle with myself, maybe do a little writing about how I feel. That would be a little more comfortable.
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100%. As Sir Ken Robinson says, you know, we're trained to think of our bodies as mechanisms that take our heads to meetings. You know, that the meetings are all important and our heads are all important and all of the rest of our evolution is meaningless to us. That's a very left hemisphere dominated way of thinking.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And that's why Ian McGilchrist says we live like people with right hemisphere strokes. We're not even in our bodies. I think maybe you are more than most people. The way you talk about it and the way you've made decisions really, it speaks to me of a person who finds what's right for him with a lot of integrity.
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And the thing is, the costs are high and the rewards are high. If you go gradually, you're going to get a smaller amount of gain, you know, by the year. If you run off a cliff, you can have a really rough ride, but you might come out with a lot of positives. And your skill of quitting, it reminds me –
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
If people come to me, I try to give them all the value in one session, like hear this and go away. All right, take notes. If you don't really want to do something and you don't really have to do something, don't do it. Now, give me my money and go. Because that's the whole thing. If you don't want to do something and you don't have to do it, don't do it.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And then I actually had an experience during a surgery, which was like a near-death experience, where I felt like I saw this light and I felt connected to it, more than connected to it. I felt radically shifted. And I came out of that surgery and changed completely. I stopped telling a single lie with any aspect of my speech, behavior. I would not lie after that.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And that's a really quick way to find out what you do want.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
So I like, you have to get more and more attentive to what's going on inside. And I think some form of meditation, whether it's expressive writing or painting or just sitting still, is very helpful at noticing these fine details. And there's, I'm kind of joking when I say if you don't want to do it, you don't have to do it, don't do it. But ultimately, that's true.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And the way you decide there are things that you don't want to do, but you actually do have to do them. Not because people want you to, but because you have to do them. And the way I experienced that, I like to describe it with something the Buddha used to say a lot. And that was, wherever you find a body of water... You can know if it's the sea because the sea always tastes of salt.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And wherever you find enlightenment, awakening, your own truth, your path, you can always recognize it no matter what form it takes because enlightenment always tastes of freedom. He did not say happiness. He did not say benefit. He did not say, you know, mania, true love. He said freedom. And when you know, like, I did not want to meet with my parents, for example, in my therapist's office.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I was terrified of both of them and of the whole community. My therapist could have been run out of business in the town we lived in. But if I had not done it, I would not have been as free. So I had to do it. But that's a really different I have to do it than my mother really, really would be happier if I became a doctor.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yeah.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
When I asked you what your body felt when you started paying attention to it and you said it relaxed. It's a sense of – I also mentioned flow, which is the sense of being completely – almost the sense of self-disappearing and being in complete harmony with something that is moving through the world.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
My undergraduate degree is in Chinese, and so I found out about Taoism earlier in my life, and it's not really a religion the way we would think of it. It's the sense that there is an energy that flows through nature and that if you don't fight it, you will... You will live the life you were meant to live.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And the sense of letting go of everything else except letting that thing work with you and through you, that to me is freedom.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I had a gig in Boston, so I went back to Cambridge, which is next to it, and I went with my wife, something that couldn't have happened when I was 17. I had the sense of tapping my younger self on the shoulder and saying… I am from your future, and I can tell you with 100% certainty that it is possible for you to live in a state of almost continuous joy and that you can get there without dying.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
So in the next year, it was a very exciting year, I walked away from my family religion, which was very, very important in my home community. So that meant I lost my family of origin, my community of origin, every friend I'd had before the age of 17 when I left for college. I realized I was gay, so that was the end of my marriage. I had to leave my home. I left academia.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
You can get there. In fact, your job in this world is to find a way to live in a state of continuous joy without dying.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I would say, sit down with yourself and find a part of you that can say to your suffering, which is huge. I love you. It'll be okay. I'm right here. And that's something I call it kind internal self-talk. And the acronym is KISSED. And I didn't tell anyone about it for decades because it's so corny sounding. But that one thing in Tibetan Buddhism, they might call it the basis of loving kindness.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
For years, sometimes, the monks who are trained there and the nuns will sit in meditation for days and days and do nothing but offer kindness to themselves.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yeah, it has to start that way. So you sit with your miserable self and you say, I would sit with her and I would say, may you be well, may you be happy. May you be free from suffering. May you feel safe and protected. May you live with ease. And as I offer her those wishes, I become the part of myself that is real. Because the suffering is part of the dream world.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And the reality is infinitely loving. I mean... And intelligent beyond, so far beyond our silly monkey minds. And we can align ourselves with that. And it's like a lifeline that I could throw my younger self. Sometimes I wonder if I did.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Oh, yeah, but also the whole thing about we're all going to die and everything's awful and what point is there to it anyway? You know, suffering is certain and death is certain. Why don't we just get off the bus now? That kind of thing. That's the dream. Everybody who's had the awakening experience, Dante said it, Shakespeare said it, they're like, we are such stuff as dreams are made of.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Dante, in the last part of the Divine Comedy, which I believe is his description of his own enlightenment, said, He looks back at the earth once he's learned to love himself, and he calls it the little threshing floor that so incites our savagery. It's nothing compared. Now he's with the source of love in paradise, and he describes it as a rose unfolding and unfolding and producing light.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And in Asia, the It's a lotus, same thing, a many-petaled flower that keeps opening and opening. Very similar imagery. And that's – I kind of feel that way. When you mention the part of me that used to be so unhappy, it's like, oh, yeah. Yeah, she thought that was real. But I haven't – and it is real. The way a video game is real.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
It's something that I believe our consciousness projects this life of misery and even materiality. I happen to think that. Matter is not—consciousness is not made by matter. Matter is made by consciousness, and consciousness is primary. And nobody has the vaguest clue what consciousness actually is, but we have it, so it must exist. And that was what Descartes said.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
He actually—we say—he said, I think, therefore I am. He actually said, I don't know anything. But I doubt everything. And the fact that I doubt means that I'm thinking, so I must exist. He said, I doubt. Therefore, I think. Therefore, I am. So when you get to this place where you're willing to let your mind go wide open, not closed around, oh, there's an afterlife where we sit on clouds.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
But the thing about anxiety is if you get stuck in the anxiety spiral, it just keeps getting worse. For example, I have memories and a lot of physical scarring from sexual abuse, which started at five years old. And then by the time I was 30, I had depression and anxiety and bedridden with autoimmune diseases, thinking I could just kill myself.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And no, I have no idea what happens when we die. But my mind is open. And the minds we are taught to have by this culture are closed like fists, whether it's around a religion or religion. a sort of atheistic science, because real science has to be open to the mystery. People experience it. You can't just rule that out.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
basically threw everything into the bonfire. And I would not recommend this to anyone listening out there. Don't do it. I did this so you would not have to. I can tell you there are easier ways. But through it all, through everything I've studied with my mind and through everything I've experienced with my body and my heart, I'm not saying I awakened. But I feel I know what awakening is.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
So, yeah, I think that what we're experiencing is a real projection of consciousness, but I think consciousness is something much vaster and more infinite and enduring than matter.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yeah.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I don't remember exactly which anesthesia they used, but I asked. So I'm in surgery. They're operating on me. I look around. I sit up. And then I think, why am I sitting up? I'm having surgery. I look down. There's my body. They're operating on it. I was like, this is weird. So I lay back down. And there were bright surgical lights. And the light that appeared between them was just small at first.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
like a golf ball. And it was, they tell us we only see a trillionth of the available light spectrum. We only see a trillionth of the colors that we could, that exist. And I think I could see trillions more colors than I'd ever seen before. And it was
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
absolutely mesmerizing you could not you would never want to look away from it and then it got bigger in my case and it touched my body and the this feeling of absolute exquisite joy just coursed through me and um And it was the realest thing I'd ever seen, so much realer than the body that was being operated on. And it was laughing with joy. And I was laughing with joy.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And I started to cry because it was pure relief, pure happiness. And the surgeons noticed tears coming out of my eyes. And they thought I could feel the surgery and that the anesthesia wasn't strong enough. So they were like, oh, my God, oh, my God, she's feeling this. And the anesthesiologist was freaked out. And then I really didn't notice the rest because I was busy with other things.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
But the moment I woke up, I was like, bring me the anesthesiologist, please. Actually, I couldn't stop crying for hours because I loved everyone so much. And I was just like, everybody that was there, there was a janitor. I was like, I love you so much. So they brought me the anesthesiologist, and he seemed terrified, which I didn't understand. Now I do.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
He was afraid that he'd done something wrong. So I said, what did you give me? What are the side effects? What happens to people under this surgery? What goes on? And he said, just tell me what happened. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, I was going to give you more medication. And then a voice said, don't do that. She's crying because she's happy.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And he said, I just listened to it and I don't know why. And he was like, did I do the right thing? And so I told him a little bit. It was still, I never thought I'd tell anyone this story. I have ended up telling it over and over. And the memory of it never fades at all. It's not like a typical memory.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And he said, do you know how many times this has happened to me in 33 years of giving people anesthesia? I said, how many? And he said, once. And then he gave me a kiss on the forehead and went away. So I don't think it was a drug effect.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yeah, in any way. Like, not with my actions, not with even my facial expressions. And the reason was... I had heard the truth will set you free. I had studied so many wisdom traditions, looking everywhere for a reason not to commit suicide. I mean, I had really looked. I knew a lot of religious texts, philosophical texts. I had done my homework.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And over and over and over and over it said, the truth will set you free. I was like, in Mormonism, they said the truth is what we've written down here. And it was bogus and phony. And I was like, no. But the light was there. far more true than anything else I'd ever experienced. It was far more real.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
So I was like, okay, if truth takes me there, and it told me, not verbally, but it said, look, you've been thinking that you could kill yourself and feel better. And I am telling you that you are meant to learn to feel this way, the way you feel with me now. when you're alive, always. So go and do that. And what I really did was I made, it wasn't even a choice. It was an absolute obsession.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I would not live in such a way that I was not conscious of the presence of that light. And that meant every time I lied, you felt how weak you got when you just said something that wasn't true. I felt it withdraw. Or myself, you can't withdraw from it. It's everywhere, I believe. But I felt myself less conscious of it. And I was like, okay, that's not going to work.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And for that reason, I feel very safe in the world and very joyful. All I can say is this is in you. I may be able to help you find it, but I don't need to create it.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
So I decided what I'm going to do is I'm just going to say what's real, do what's real. If a thought comes in that feels like it's pulling me away from that light, I will question that thought. It can't be real. It doesn't set me free. Bring me into that. I'm going to just investigate everything until I find what feels truest to me.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Knowing, by the way, that, as one of my favorite Indian sages says, the only true statement the mind can make is, I do not know. Because we could be dreaming all this. We could be fed misinformation. We could be deep faked. I don't know anything. I mean, with this little monkey brain.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
But in Asia, they have this concept of don't know mind, where the mind is wide open and not clenched around anything. And then you can experience a sort of, it's the humility of surrendering your primacy, the primacy of human intelligence, to something so much bigger. And still being human and having that be a good thing, but just not mistaking it for godhood.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
You ask yourself, is it kind? Is it true? Is it necessary? So you don't say every little thing that crosses your mind, and you don't do it in ways that are unkind. But yes, you may feel that, you know, I felt I had to formally leave Mormonism, which to my entire community of childhood and young adulthood was the sin worse than murder. I was going to outer darkness.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I used to walk down the street once I'd done this and people would physically turn their backs. Friends, right? But I had to. So that was a place where, yes, there was a huge consequence. And there will be. I sort of position it as your true nature versus culture. And by culture, I mean anything from a couple's culture to a family culture, to a religious, to an ethnic, national, whatever.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
If you serve your true nature, there will come a time when you become countercultural. You do something that is not what your parents approved of, or it's not what your religion taught.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yeah, the absence of all suffering, psychological suffering.
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Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yeah, it's caused by innocently believing lies you were taught by one of two forces, right? socialization or trauma. Trauma tells you, oh my God, everything's dangerous all the time, and it gets lodged in the brain. And socialization says things like, you're not good enough, you should try harder, that was a bad choice, you've got to please your mother, all kinds of things. We all have them.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And if you want to please your mother and you have that, it's great. If your true nature and your culture go together, there's no conflict. Like, I loved school. My true nature fit that culture. But then my oldest child, who's brilliant, it did not fit that child's culture. And yet I forced my kid to go through school. And we've talked about it a lot since. I wish I hadn't done that. I was young.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I mean, I've worked with homeless heroin addicts on the streets of Phoenix because I truly believe that the experience I had in surgery with this light, this absolute homecoming and peace, I actually gravitated to addicts, even though I've never been addicted to substance, because when they say they can't live without that first heroin hit, that's how I felt after coming out of that experience, that light.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I had my kids young. And I forced my child to conform with a culture that went against her true nature. And it caused a lot of suffering.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I was really, really kind of, I was deeply sad after the last American election. Deeply sad, but never afraid anymore. Not anxious. And even, you know, the grieving process. When you lose someone, you're going to grieve deeply. And that's a sequence of, you know, denial, anger, bargaining, sadness. There's kind of a They put them in a list.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross put them in a list of things you experience when you lose someone or you're going to die. It's actually more like being in a cement mixer. It just all happens at once. But I actually wouldn't count that as suffering. It is a process. A Peruvian shaman once told me, compassion is the evolution of consciousness in the healing of trauma.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And the healing of trauma is the grieving process. So if you're grieving, I would sit with you and I would bring you, you know, warm drinks and put a blanket around you and I would cry with you and feel with you and love you. But that's not the same to me as psychological suffering, which is that anguished feeling of I just don't want to be here. This is bad.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
No. He was gay and trying so hard not to be gay. And he was Mormon, so it was very convenient for me because I was in love with him, very much in love. And I think he really, really loved me, too. I know he did. We got married when I was 20. We were delivered by the same obstetrician, like we had a very similar life path.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And then we both went to Harvard, which was very unusual for people from our hometown. So we had so much in common and we were best friends and loved each other deeply. And he was trying desperately not to be gay. I wasn't conscious of being gay because I wasn't conscious of anything much. I was so disassociated because of sexual abuse that I just didn't know where I stood.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
He just made me feel safe. And I loved that. But then when we started questioning Mormonism and the sexual abuse came up and everything, I was just – and even before that, it was really obvious that I said – when I was pregnant with my son, I started having psychic experiences. I'm sorry. They just happened. I had to allow them. I was –
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
getting my doctorate at Harvard, and now I was having psychic flashes. What do you do with that? You either throw it away, which means throwing away the evidence, the data, or you blow your mind open. And one of the things that happened was I started to be able to see what was happening with people I loved when I wasn't there, just in flashes, but very verifiable. I could call them and do it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And when that would happen, my husband was traveling a lot and I just knew he was gay, and I knew that's what was right for him and that his joy was part of homosexuality. And he was still quite religious and wanted to be a good boy the way he'd been taught to be. And so I think he went through a lot of anguish. I know he did. We talked about it. And it wasn't until we both left the church that –
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I was like, I cannot live without that. And so I would tell the heroin addicts, I believe you're meant to have that feeling you long for so much. But I also think you get to keep your teeth, you know, like there's another way. So I've worked with people like that. I've had billionaires as clients. I have counseled people in prison because I'm a sociologist.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I said, you know, I'm gay. You're gay. Why don't we just be gay? And so he started dating men, and I fell in love with a woman, and I'm still with her. And eight years ago, as I said, you go into countercultural things when you follow your truth.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Another woman who was visiting us at the place where we were living, the three of us started hanging out, and we could not stop hanging out with each other. And it's very weird for three people to all fall in love with each other. But that's what happened eight years ago. And it was so – it's a good thing we were living out in the forest because the cultural pressures against that are huge.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
But we were living in a national forest. There were no people around. And it was just like, well, okay then. This feels awesome. And eight, nine years later, it still feels awesome.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Do you know how embarrassing it is for me to sit and tell people, not only am I gay, but I have two partners.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yeah.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yeah, because you're a public figure.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
When this happened, when I realized, when the three of us realized we were actually, for several weeks we were like, this is normal, right? It's very normal for three people to sit very close together on the same couch and talk for hours. And then finally I was like, oh, my God, I'm in love with both of you. And they were like, yeah, we're all in love with both of each other.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And I said, it's fine for you two. I'm on an integrity cleanse and I have to tell the truth all the time to a lot of people. But it was like being hit by a train, the joy that came with that. I remember Karen, my original partner, who'd been with me for like 22 years at the time, she came to me and she sat me down. She said, I've been spending a lot of time with Rowan.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yeah, this writer from Australia who had come to do some work in the US. And she was staying with us for a while. But not with us, with some other people on a neighboring property. And Karen said, yeah, we've been hanging out. And I just, I'm having very, very strong feelings. It's like It's kind of like a fire hose of love. And I don't know if it's like maybe spiritual.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And I remember just smiling at her the way you do with your friends when they are in love and going, you're in love with her. And I looked inside myself for... Any fear, any anger, any jealousy, nothing. It was like an explosion of pure joy, just joy beyond joy beyond joy. And I was like, this is amazing. Does she feel the same way about you? Bring her. Tell her to come here.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Let's all get to know each other. This is awesome. And I'll move into the guest room, and you guys can have the master bedroom, and there will be more love in this house. And that's just how it felt. And that's how it's felt to me ever since. And that's my alternative to feeling suicidal. Ro calls it feeling good by looking weird.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And if I say something works for humanity, it has to work across cultures and in all situations, poverty, wealth, poverty.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
It's like now I just think about how do couples do it and it's like a two-legged stool. How would that even work? Like you need the balance of three. Like if somebody gets in an argument, who's the referee? Like how do you even do that with two people? So it very quickly, it felt so natural. You have to communicate a lot. And there is, one of the things is none of us is capable of lying.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
We just, we're out of practice. I don't think either of them ever had a tendency to lie to themselves or anyone else. So you're always telling each other the truth and there's not, there's a weird kind of harmony among people who are forming community with total authenticity and openness.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I think one thing I wrote in one of my books a long time ago was that I realized this when I was pregnant with my son and I realized he would have Down syndrome and be intellectually delayed. And I thought, what is the meaning of his life? What is the purpose of his life? And then somehow I realized... because of my love for him, that the meaning of life is not what happens to people.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
The meaning of life, your purpose in life, is what happens between people. So it's in the meeting. You have a home in South Africa, so you know about Ubuntu, yeah?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Well, the concept of Ubuntu I think is dominant throughout a lot of Africa. And there's no English translation. And it is completely the opposite of our cultural individualism. And the meaning of Ubuntu is basically I am me because we are us. I am fundamentally different because I know you and you matter to me.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And I used to be confused in South Africa because I knew there were a lot of AIDS orphans and I never saw them on the streets or anything. And then I realized that Ubuntu is a real practical thing there and that the children who are left are absorbed into community by people who may have nothing except Ubuntu. And Ubuntu, there's a Chinese proverb that says, if you want to go fast, go alone.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
If you want to go far, go together. So we've been going really fast in this culture, fast toward our own destruction.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Because I am because we are is the closest thing you can say to it. But conceptually, it means the space between us. So that's another thing you can do, an exercise you can do to get into your right hemisphere. So we're looking at each other. But if you look, without moving your eyes, look at the distance between us. Look at the openness between us.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Do you feel how it changes your gaze?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
How it changes your heartbeat? This is how people like Carl Jung, the psychologist, had a dear friend who was a Pueblo Indian, and he said, what do you really think of us Anglos? And he said, we think you're insane. And he said, why? And this guy's name was Chief Mountain Lake. He said, you're always staring at things, and yet you never see each other. You never see what's between you.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
You know what? Almost everyone has the same major problem, and it's not what you would think. They want to know their purpose. They want to know why the hell they're even here. Humans are the only animals, so far as we know, that live on a day-to-day basis with the consciousness of our mortality. We are going to die, so why are we even here? What am I doing here?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And our eyes are soft and yours are hard. And when you and I just did that, my whole body went into a state of, it's like the light, you know? It's like that light is more, I'm more conscious of it when I'm looking at the space between us. And I feel you. I don't just see you.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yeah, so did mine.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
So I'm trying right now to start building communities of Ubuntu. I started one online just to foster people's creativity and help them move into this state of being. And it's called Wilder because when we were wilder, that's how we looked at each other. That's how your dog and your cat look at you.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
That's why we love being with them because they look at us and they look at the space between us and their eyes are soft. And if there's a fly that goes by, they'll get sharp. And that's the hunting instinct. But then when they're looking at something they love, they're looking at the whole space and feeling each other.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I'd say, first of all, Sit down and offer love to the part of you that's in so much stress because you can't find your purpose. That's a horrible feeling. You know your purpose, but you can't find it because it's being drowned out by what you've been taught. And that hurts. And I'm really sorry because I know that pain.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Go and sit down or find a friend, find someone trustworthy, find community and tell them what Mary Oliver says. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. And she talks about the wild geese announcing your place in the family of things. When you can communicate your despair and feel heard and feel connected and
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And what happens between people will fill in the gaps in your knowledge and you'll realize, ah, my purpose is where my deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet. And I can feel that when I love. And love is not like goopy-gipky.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yeah, that's from Fred Boichner, who was a theologian, German theologian. He said, your mission in life is where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet. So what you just described, a young person reaching out to you and saying, what is my purpose? And you... are asking yourself, what do I say?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
So you're looking at the relationship between this young person and you, and you are in Ubuntu. You're looking at the space between you and your deep gladness is to heal the scars and wounds in this person you've never met, but who is deeply hungry for something the culture is not giving him or her or them. That's your deep gladness and their deep hunger.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And you've been serving that really well, like so much better than most people I've met in my life.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Yeah, that's kind of interesting. People could take that a number of different ways. This is deep gladness. It's something you feel in your viscera. It's something, it's like the most, here's another way to get into it. Imagine a time when you were with a creature you loved, and it's probably easier if it was an animal than if it was a person. If it was a person, it has to be a baby.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
So somebody who couldn't talk. My son can't really talk, so I get this with him a lot. And remember a time when you relaxed completely into the presence of this other being and the cat was purring on your chest or the dog had his head on your lap and there was no pressure to do anything. You're being human now.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And it's the same whether you're talking to someone on the street or someone with a billion dollars. That desperation to know why we're here. And I think it comes out of a culture that has fundamentally pulled us away from our inherent knowledge of what we're meant to be and put us in a place where we are obsessed with productivity and consumption and production of material wealth.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
with this other being in a space that you have created, that we've all created with our consciousness for the joy of its beauty and its darkness and its light. And there's just...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Psalm 46 Eckhart Tolle says it says the name of God like six different ways be still and know that I am God be is a name for God stillness is a name for God know is a name for God I am is a name for God and God is a name for God and when you When you feel all of that as what you fundamentally are, and it's connecting with another person, the gladness doesn't even touch it. No word can touch it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
But it's two aspects of a consciousness that thought they were separate joining hands and meeting each other again. And the reunion is overwhelmingly Beautiful. Relief. Joy. Gladness. Light. All of it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
It's messed it up and it's made it possible. You know, like it's messed it up horribly by feeding on our culture's obsession with those left hemisphere, what bleeds leads, right? We have that negativity bias. And what people want to do is monetize their position on the internet. And the best way to monetize your position is to get the lion's share of attention.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And whatever gets the lion's share of attention is a cobra versus a puppy. So there's... There's a psychological and monetary pressure always pushing the Internet to frighten us more or to make us more angry at each other, to divide and polarize us. It's like this left hemisphere weapon that has just gone berserk.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And so like in America, there are these pockets of such extremely polarized political power. belief systems that all have their own information sets. And I don't know what the hell's true, but they all believe absolutely the way the left hemisphere believes. There's no open mind. On the other hand...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
You know, when the brain wakes up, when it has the awakening experience, the fruit ripens and ripens and then it falls. Okay, so that, I think, may be this epigenetic switch going on in the brain and it flashes to the whole brain and changes everything. And I like to think of fractals, the different units of nature that tend to reproduce at larger sizes.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Like a twig is like a branch is like the trunk of a tree. So our brains may be like us. Our neocortex is very thin. It's just this thin surface of cells around the surface of the brain. Very, very interactive. And we are kind of like that. We're running around the surface of a sphere being very, very interactive and teaching each other ideas.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And if just one person awakens, you know, Buddha was awake. Jesus was awake. And Buddha never tried to save anybody but himself. But other minds caught that configuration. They switched on. And because we have the internet,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
What used to take a whole national government to do to communicate with everyone in the world could happen from, like, a poor kid in Malawi who suddenly awakened and was able to put that into a message. Or, you know, Malala Yousaf. Like, everyone knows what this 15-year-old girl went through.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Even though the information would have been suppressed by the Taliban if they could have done it, but they can't do it anymore. So one awakened person now has the potential to touch the lives of literally everyone virtually for free.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
But I can tell you with 100% certainty, it is possible to trick our brains and shut down anxiety.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I do. And I know that I am shaping an algorithm that is totally unrealistic because my world online is primarily otters. I loves me an otter. But, like, it's all the examples of love and joy that occur between people. And then I look at the headlines, and I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, when I first went to Africa, I'd heard, it's the dark continent. Everything is bad.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And has actually cut us off from our own sense of meaning. And that's actually in the brain that you get stuck in a part of the left hemisphere that is obsessed with grabbing things and owning things and controlling things. And it's always afraid. It's always grasping. And it refuses to believe that anything but itself exists.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Ebola, war, the Congo, all these terrible things, the heart of darkness. And then I went there and realized that for every horrible thing that legitimately does happen in that place, there are maybe a thousand acts of completely selfless love. I would walk around. Every time I go there, I look at the people who have been colonized, the original people, and I think, I'm white.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
If I were you, I'd be really mad at me. Like, white? And yet I was there. My wife had a little girl a few years ago. She's a bit younger than I am. And she got sick in the airport in Johannesburg, really sick. And she was barfing everywhere. And we were just pushing the stroller from one tourist store. We'd get a bunch of t-shirts, and she'd throw up on that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And we'd put her in another one and throw the first one away. And people came running to us from the different stores. And they were from, you know, there are 11 different national languages there. There were people from different tribal legacies. And instead of running away from a vomiting child, They ran toward us with everything they could find to help.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Someone lit a fire and sterilized a spoon. Someone ran down the airport to the only pharmacy to get the right medication and ran back with it. People were holding the vomit-stained clothes. I mean, these are people we had never met. And this was the place I'd been afraid of because I had let myself believe the stories that polarized me and said, oh, that's a dark, scary place.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Every place is dark and scary. And everywhere there are human beings, there is the capacity for Ubuntu. And what there is to love, the part of us that loves is infinitely more powerful than the part of us that doesn't.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I would say it's, I wish I could, I don't know how to get it, how to say this clearly enough. And I've said it here. But what is the most important thing that anyone listening to this, you specifically right now, wherever you are, and I just mentioned Mary Oliver's The Wild Geese, one of the things she says, no matter who you are, no matter how lonely, whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
The world offers itself to your imagination. You are part of the family of things. So whoever hears this, you specifically, in your essence, you are safe. No matter what it looks like, you are fundamentally going to be okay. I promise.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
But on the other side of the brain, there is the self that connects with meaning, purpose, relationship, connection. And living in a state of nature, as everyone did until a few hundred years ago, almost everyone, we would wake up, a human would wake up hearing wind and birdsong and other people's voices They would rise and go to bed according to the sunlight and the temperature.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
In a good story, bad things happen to good people. In a great story, bad things happen to heroes. Because there's always conflict and there's always suffering. And that can be just like, oh, that was awful, right? But the great stories, the ones we keep telling, are the ones where the person who would be a victim becomes a creator who says, I'm not going to stay in fear.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I'm going to make something from this. And they stand up and they go out on an adventure. And what looks like it could have been a tragedy becomes an adventure. That's what Shakespeare did at the end of his life. I was taught at Harvard that he wrote the four great tragedies where everything ends in horror and annihilation. That was his high point.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And then he started writing these romances, which are so stupid because they have like magic and forgiveness and happy endings. And I was actually told he did that because he was senile. He was 50, you know? The tragedies are amazing stories. And the romances, those are the great ones as far as I'm concerned. Because that's where the tragedy becomes an adventure that ends well.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Heroes. Because it's what the good people do with that. Do they suffer it or do they make it the material of invention? Do they let it be a weight of lead or do they perform an alchemy that turns it into gold? And all the great stories that last forever are the ones about alchemy where suffering turns to something wonderful.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Now, I want you to do that while lying. And the lie I'd like you to say is, I love to vomit. Say it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I do believe it is. Not always. Like if you're a little kid or if you're a young person out there, if you're a working mom or someone in poverty or someone who's just had a terminal diagnosis, of course you're going to feel, you're not just going to want to jump up and do something heroic. Be kind. Be kind. Be kind. Be kind. Be gentle to yourself.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And if you're gentle for just a while, you're going to start to say, instead of, what am I going to do about this? You're going to say, what can I make from this? And that shifts you into the mode of the creative. And as you start to make something of your situation, you become part of the creation. And that's when you wake up from your nightmare. And to me, that's the best ending of any story.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
I hope so. The honor is all mine. Thank you so much.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
They had intimate relationships with animals and with plants and with the earth itself. All of our biology evolved to be in that situation. One anthropologist called it the weird societies, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic. We have a fundamentally different way of living. We get up surrounded by artificial light.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
We push ourselves all day to do things that we would never have done 300 years ago, spreadsheets. Sitting next to people we barely know who are assigned to be there because we have similar tasks, which is a system based on factory labor. which is horrible for people, not to solve real problems that matter to you, but
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
to catch on to something that an adult already knows who's going to punish you or shame you, depending on whether you get the right answer or the wrong answer. It's a bizarre, very left hemisphere dominated society. So Ian McGilchrist, my favorite philosopher and neurologist or psychiatrist, says the whole culture functions like someone with a severe right hemisphere stroke.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Here's one of my favourites.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
We live in a bizarre, crazy culture. And we do not know why we're here because we don't have access to our sense of meaning.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
So after I wrote The Way of Integrity, where I say, look, integrity to me means that you are whole and that's what the word means. It means intact. It doesn't mean like morally. It just means structurally. If all your meaning-making systems are in order, are telling the same story, body, heart, spirit, mind, if those are all in agreement, there is a kind of grounding in reality.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
And in that reality, what happens when you get into that reality is you begin to awaken. You begin to experience spontaneously the things that Eastern sages have described about the cessation of suffering. So I was, you know, I'd been studying toward this for years, and I thought, this is the last self-help book I'm ever going to write because… I really believe this is it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
So people read the book and then they would come to me and they'd say, I have put my whole life in integrity, but I'm so scared all the time. I am so afraid. So I started looking into it. And realize that anxiety is skyrocketing all over the world. It is by far the most common mental health challenge that people face.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): I Nearly Died, So I Stopped Lying! Why You're Anxious & How To Fix It! Fix Your Childhood Trauma!
Something like 284 million people, last I checked, were clinically diagnosable with anxiety disorder. During the pandemic year, 2020, anxiety went up all over the world by a full 25%. And here's the thing about anxiety.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And I remember being in my apartment in Cambridge, curled over my big pregnant belly, which terrified me because I didn't know what was going to happen to my life and to him. And I was under such a weight of grief that I did something. And your new book is like perfect because I just allowed what was happening to happen. I said, let the world be what it is. Let this child be what it is.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And I sort of collapsed forward. And I swear to God, I felt arms go around me in that moment. And it was as if something picked me up and I was curled on the floor, but I felt as if I'd been picked up like a baby and held. And I don't know what that was, but it was unlike anything I'd ever experienced.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And I don't know how long it lasted because it felt outside of time and it was just overwhelming. And after it ended, My entire life was about, I have to get back there. And that is, to this very day, what I'm doing here.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Oh, everywhere I went, I was tapping my younger self on the shoulder. Because I was there from the time I was 17 until I was like 28. And I would just tap my younger self on the shoulder and say, hey... I'm from your future. And I know with 100% accuracy, you're going to get through this and you're going to be happy.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And I just kept telling my younger selves that all morning, going around with my wonderful partner. It was time travel. It was magic. I had three social science degrees from Harvard, and they taught me well. It was a brutal education, but one thing was very true, and that is I'm a social scientist by training. You can't really know what another person's life is like for them.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
So the only true story you can tell is your own. Never presume to tell another person's story. If I'm going to speak the truth, I speak it from my own experience because I will not impose that on you. But you're invited to come share if you feel the same thing.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
But that's why I had to tell my own story because standing on some pedestal and saying, I know these things because I'm a social scientist, bullshit. I know I found the way out of suffering because I was suffering horribly. Here's the path I followed. If it feels good to you, come with me. I love you. Good luck.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Mel and I, we're here. We got you. There is a community of love. It's invisible, but if you feel it with your senses and your heart, something will start to shift because we've got you and it's going to be okay.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Oh, yeah. Well, the story I just told you, I felt completely and totally stuck. I mean, my advisors at Harvard, even the doctors told me I was throwing my life away by keeping my son. And I'm very pro-choice, by the way, but he was diagnosed like a week before my sixth month. I had already really bonded to him. So I felt stuck then. And here's the thing.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
The release came from a surrender to what was, but then being caught by some force that is not something we really talk about in our culture. And over and over in my life when I've gotten stuck, when I was, you know, the daughter of one of Mormonism's most famous defendants, and then I'm dealing with memories of sexual abuse, and the whole religion is, you know, vested in keeping me quiet.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
I felt very stuck then. And when my whole family and all the friends I'd had as a child sort of wrote me off, and I've never spoken to them again, I felt very stuck. But I've come to have a really delightful relationship with the feeling of being stuck. And now I even know the brain science behind it. When you have a really big need or desire and you're really feeling stuck, I call it an impasse.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
This is when your brain, the feeling of just bumping up against it, that is the brain saying, I'm about to give you a big leap forward. I'm about to tell you things that will blow your mind. So be stuck. Get right down in the mud with it. Say, I hate this. I'm miserable. And then say, screw it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
and go for a walk or go for a ride in the car, or if you can't get out of your house, watch the birds outside your window. There is a part of your brain that will actually take the impasse, the stuckness. And you will come eventually to an idea you have never imagined before. And I compare it to the caterpillar cannot imagine being a butterfly, but that is its destiny.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Stuckness always means you're about to be transformed. So embrace it with both arms. Enjoy it. Lean in. You're going to love it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
So two things. You have two best friends that go with you everywhere. One is your body. The other is suffering. And these are your allies. And our culture really discounts both of them. We need to get a little wilder, as I say in my little online community called Wilder. And the way you get wilder is you sink into the body and you feel for suffering
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
So if you wouldn't mind, I don't do hypothetical work, so I want to just work it on you. So what I do with myself and what I would do with you if I were coaching you, I would say in this moment, is there anything in you that is not peaceful?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Okay. Where in your body do you experience most of the not peace?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Yeah. Okay. And when you start to describe it, you actually will be using the language of the body. Okay. This tells everyone in the world, no matter what language they speak, we've all felt that. Yes. The armoring of the heart, the flinching away. When you focus on that, what emotion comes up? And there are four categories. Mad, sad, glad, and scared. Scared. Okay. So breathe into that.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
So now you have your friend suffering, saying, I'm afraid. And you have your friend body saying, it doesn't need words. It's... Okay. This is helping you find your way through life. So the first thing you do is, in your phrase, let it, let it be. Okay. Let the emotion be bigger.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Let it be huge. Let it fill your internal space. Let it leak over into the world. Let that plate armor in your chest really, really get as big as it wants to be. It's like a nuclear cloud now.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Now it's like... Yeah, okay, let it, let it, let it. You should write another book called Let It. What happens when you relax into it is you're no longer resisting the lesson that is coming from your... You know, fear is another word for anxiety. So it's coming from your anxiety. It's coming from life circumstances. So now...
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
If that were a being you loved and you asked it, first of all, say, be yourself. I have no resistance to you. Come in. Sit down with me. The suffering? Yes. Be huge. Be yourself.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Yeah. And then this will take too much time for the broadcast, but you say to yourself, tell me everything. Write it all down.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Well, look at the amount of energy you had compacted into your chest. When you let it go, there's a kind of release. Yes.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Yes, it is. And And if we were working this in person, I would have you write down or tell me. Every thought that is causing suffering. Because here's the thing. There are two sources of suffering. One is clean and one is dirty. The clean suffering is like if I punched you in the head, it would hurt. That's just clean suffering. But dirty suffering comes from our thoughts about events.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
So then you would think, she hates me. Why does she do that? Did I deserve it? She shouldn't have done that. So there would be this storm of thoughts. And we all have different storms. But most of our pain, most of our suffering doesn't come from events. It comes from our thoughts about events. So as your pain tells its story, you are unblending from it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And you said it's not the same situation at all. You're able to see that. That means you have a little perspective. But don't shut it down. Don't say, oh, you don't need to worry. This is different. No. Suffering is your ally. It will tell you everything you need if you let it speak. And I'm going to ask you because you're good at this stuff.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Tell me one of the scariest thoughts that comes up when you let your fear speak.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Okay. I'm going to boil that down to you're about to do something stupid and all the alarm is attached to it, right? Yes. Here's the deal. Here's how suffering is your friend. It always tells you the opposite of what you actually need to know. So it's very specific. It's not just, oh, let it go. It'll be fine. That thought, the more suffering it causes, the more it's getting your attention, the
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
I would say, you know, you've spent all this time getting yourself out of debt and now you're about to do something really brilliant. Feel that? Yes. Yeah. The opposite of the most painful thought in your head, the opposite of that thought is your next step toward awakening.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
So you have to really listen to the suffering till the point where you're sick of it. Because before that, you're going to cling to this thought. It's part of your ego trying to defend itself. But as we know, trying to cling to things to defend yourself is the way into misery. So I'll never find love again. It will sound radical, but the opposite would be, I will always find love again.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Now, if you sit with that and start to look for ways it could be true, oh, I will always find love. I love that tree outside the window. I love my cat. I love my mother. I love, oh, there's just love everywhere. When you say, I'll always find love, I'll find it everywhere, everything starts to love you back. Try this. Try this. Go into a coffee shop or someplace you like to go to have lunch.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Go in thinking your most painful thought, I'll never find love again. I'll The next day, go in again. But this time, you have to repeat the opposite. I'll always find love everywhere. I'll always find love everywhere. And watch how people react to you. They will open doors for you. They will give you free stuff. They will smile. I'm telling you... People talk about me being woo-woo.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Yeah. Selective attention. You've probably seen that experiment where they have six people bouncing a basketball and you tell someone watching the film, count the times they bounce the ball. In the middle of the film, a person in a gorilla suit comes in and does a little dance and then leaves. And people watching that film are
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
don't see the gorilla because they're busy watching the times the ball bounces. And the gorilla is not subtle. It is right in the middle of the frame. It's big. We don't see what we don't pay attention to. So if you are constantly saying, I'm not going to find love, I'm not going to find love, the only things you'll see will be things that make you jealous and hurt and sad.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And if you walk around thinking, I'm going to see love everywhere always, It happens. The other thing is mirror neurons. Other people's brains, if you took a sip of water, my brain would actually have the same activity in it as if I had taken a sip of water. Our brains are constantly moving to reflect one another. So when you walk around going, there's love everywhere, a person meets your eyes and
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
and suddenly sees love everywhere, you're giving them a different brain by going around thinking, I'll always find love.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
They're very related. Yeah, because the biggest reason people consult me is a sense of not having a purpose. And they'll put that above things like heartbreak or disease. Like not having a purpose is really a big problem. And it's really related to being stuck because our knowledge of the direction we want to take is informed by a sense of purpose.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And when we don't have a sense of purpose, we have no way of knowing where to go. And that gets us stuck. I do seminars in Africa. And one of the things we do is we take people rhinoceros tracking because that's an obvious thing to do, right? If you don't have a sense of purpose. The rhinoceros is your purpose. You learn to see every sign it leaves on the earth and everything.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And then we take them back to the camp and we say, now you're going to track your purpose the way we track the rhino. And the way you track the track of your purpose is joy in the body. Oh, a sense of joy, lifting or lightness, relaxation in the body is a track. It never says, here's what you're going to be in 20 years or even 20 minutes. It says, here's your next step forward.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
So with this financial situation, you're about to make a brilliant decision. If you say that, what happens in your body? I feel that freedom and peace and ease that you talk about. So the Buddha used to say, and he said it a lot, wherever you find water, you can know if it's the ocean because no matter what it looks like, the ocean always tastes of salt.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And when you find enlightenment, you will always recognize it no matter what it looks like because enlightenment always tastes of freedom. Ooh, not giddy joy, not bliss, freedom. It can be scary as hell to serve your purpose, but it's free. You are free. So when you say you felt lighter and freer, that's a track.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
So now, okay, you know that that's what you're gonna follow instead of the thing that says, oh my God, I'm gonna make a terrible decision.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Yeah, and you're tracking what brings you more freedom in the body, more joy in the body. So if you're making the decision, okay, I'm going to put this money in this account or in that account. literally sit there and say, okay, if I make decision A, what happens in my body? Shut down. If I make decision B, what happens in my body? A little bit lighter.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
So I always say to people, think of the worst experience you had and then feel that, how that was in your body and give that a score, negative 10 on the happy meter because Then remember the most peaceful and free you've ever felt, that's a positive 10. And everything in between, zero is neutral.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
So you may make a decision with this financial thing where it's just a, that's plus one, that's minus three. Okay, it might be subtle, but as you learn to feel what sets you free, what removes suffering and replaces it with, okay. That's how you know the next step. And as the steps start to add up, you go, oh my God, that's my purpose.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Yeah, it's as individual as our fingerprints. And how do you define purpose? That which brings you the greatest satisfaction and joy as a being on this earth, and it allows you to contribute the most satisfaction and joy to the rest of the world. That's your purpose. It's where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet. A theologian said that once. I think it was Fred Boikner.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Well, you do. You realize what feels like the way forward and what is not the way forward. And it's really simple. If it sets you free even a little bit, go there. That's your purpose. If it traps you, if it makes you feel encased, no matter how slightly, that is what my friend Boyd who tracks with me calls the track of not there. So we go through life banging into suffering and oh my God.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And that is just the track of not there. After you learn to track joy, you won't even pay much attention to all of that noise. You'll be so focused following your joy, and then you'll look up and go, oh my God, that's where I'm headed? Like, think of your story of being in the audience at the O convention.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
No, actually it's not. It's not in the day. It's always in this moment and it's always inside the self. There is no such thing as a circumstance that will set you free. All your feeling of captivity is always coming from the mind, from the fear-based mind.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
when you set yourself free in your mind, like, I was bedridden for 12 years with a whole bunch of autoimmune diseases, a lot of which they told me were incurable and progressive. I don't have any symptoms. But that didn't start after, like, for 12 years, I was in constant chronic pain and severe disability, okay? Like, I raised my kids on a king-size bed. And I felt very, very stuck.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And then I realized that the feeling of being stuck was torture and that I could shift the feeling. So it always starts. What am I thinking? I'm thinking I'm stuck. I'm stuck. There's nowhere to go. That causes suffering. What's the opposite? I'm free. I'm free. I could go in any direction.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And then find a way in which that may be true, even if you just find one little mote of it in what looks like a sea of pain. Once I got on a plane and I was at the airport and this guy started talking to me. He was a professional hockey player. He said, here's the thing. The net is small and the goalie is big in hockey, but you can't ever look at the goalie.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
You look at the five little spaces where the putt can go because where your eyes go, the putt goes. So get on the plane and the guy beside me says, I'm a whitewater rafter. And let me tell you, there are times when it just looks like all rocks and just a little tiny bit of water, but you never look at the rocks because where your eyes go, the boat goes. I was like, okay, something's happening.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
I get off the plane. I go take a horse riding lesson. And my teacher says, always look where you want the horse to go, where your eyes go, the horse goes. And I was just like, I get it. I get it. Where my attention goes, my life goes. Hmm. If you feel stuck, I'm there for you. Tell me everything. And when you're done telling me everything, I'll say, where are you free?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And when I started finding the places I was free, one by one, these incurable symptoms disappeared. I'm 61. Last month, I went on a walk in England and I walked 75 miles in six days after being told I'd never walk again. It's because I know how this thing works and we can use it to lock us down or we can use it to set us free no matter what.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
I started looking at the things that hurt most because it was like having knives stuck in me, these thoughts that I thought... And everybody has these, I'm not good enough. This person doesn't love me. Life is a bitch and then you die. Whatever it was. I'd be like, life is a bitch and then you die. All right. I'll never get out of this bed. Okay.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
That hurts. I'll always get out of this bed.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
That can't be true. I'm lying. Wait, wait. I can read a book and be a million miles away. I can watch a show and space travel. I can talk to a friend and feel everything they're feeling and be at the dance where they're dancing. And I am free because the human imagination can do anything. That's where my attention went and that's where my life went. Because everything else just hurt too much.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Wow. I just, I am so honored to be here. And it's like, we're just looking in the mirror here because we've both had parasocial relationships with each other. I feel like you're talking to me all the time and it's just such an honor to be here.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And the thing to notice is just, does it feel a little bit better? Does it feel a little bit freer? What's happening when people feel stuck is, and I don't want to get all brain science-y, but honest to God, there's a little spiral that happens in a part of our brain that it's such a strange thing.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
That part of the brain believes that it's stuck and also believes that nothing that contradicts it is true at all. So you get into this tiny, I call it an anxiety spiral. And it believes that only it is real.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And people who have like strokes and they can only use that part of their brain, they believe that half the world doesn't exist because they're only perceiving it with the anxious mind and nothing else exists. But if you can go from I'm always going to be stuck in this bed to I'm always going to be free in this bed.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
then part of your brain lets go of the anxiety and it turns to the part of the brain that is creative. And that is the part that a lot of people don't understand, that the opposite of your worst thought is not this serene bliss or calm. It is that you suddenly walk into the zone of the human imagination at its most creative and it can solve anything.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Here's the first thing you need to know. Anxiety always lies, but only always. Wait, what does that mean, but only always? I just like to say it. It's like, you know, a thing that makes you feel entrapped is always bad for you, but only always. And it's just a joke. It's a way of, because people think, ah, yeah, that's sort of, no, I really mean it. All your anxiety is lying. Oh, no, it isn't.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
I put that at the end of the book. If I'd put it at the beginning, people would have said, F you, and just thrown it at the wall, right? Yes. Because it feels so convincing that your most frightening, self-hating thoughts are the truth. And it's lying. So that's the first thing. Just hear me now, understand me later.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
So you nailed it in your book, Let Them. Because Let Them, a phrase where you're in this tense state, you're trying to control. So the anxiety spiral goes fear, control, back to fear again. And it just spins and it gets bigger and bigger. And the attempt to control gets bigger. And Let Them is a way out of the spiral. And it's genius. It's genius. So you know that it's genius.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
You have it tattooed on your bodies, you know. So let them kind of relaxes the spiral. And then when you say, let me, let me do something, given that this person or this world event is happening the way it's happening. Let me assume my response ability, my ability to respond, given that my mind is free. So let me do what? Now you are using the part of your brain that creates.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And there's tons of evidence showing that anxiety shuts down creativity. What there's not a lot of studies about is creativity also shuts down anxiety. So if you can go into that creative space, you will go for three or four hours and then realize, I haven't been anxious for three or four hours. So when you sit down to write, And you shared with me that you have dyslexia, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
So the written word has not always been your friend, but you create these amazing books. Think about being inside that creative process. I don't know how you do it. For me, it's always somebody sitting across from me who's in prison. What do you mean? Well, I once met a warden from a woman's prison. And this is when I was doing my Oprah magazine column.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And she told me that when they tossed the cells, the most common thing they found were copies of my column from Oprah magazine. And I remember going back to my hotel room and crying because... I felt such tremendous empathy with someone sitting, talk about stuck, no options.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
I think the part of me that was so trapped and found its way to freedom has always been trying to find the trapped part of other people and say, we're going to get you out of here.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
off the charts is, I'm not good enough. I'm not valuable. I'm not worthy. And it can be imposter syndrome. It can be jealousy. It can be whatever. But the root of it is, I'm not good. Not even enough. I'm not good. The biggest lie ever told. Go to a nursery in a hospital and pick up a baby and tell me which one of them isn't good.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
If we knew ourselves to be that precious, we would automatically live our purpose. If we could experience ourselves as being these innocent creatures that are bumbling through life, and I just, I feel like the powers that be, the divine force of the universe is just going, oh, sweetie, oh, honey, how could you think that? Don't you know?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
I mean, I remember looking at some horses once and going, oh, they're so beautiful. And this woman who was with me knew horses and she said, well, that one's swaybacked and that one's... And I'm like, shut up. They're all perfect. They're all beautiful. And when you step out of suffering enough times, you sit down and say, I'm not good enough. It immediately flips to, oh my God, I'm so good. Oh,
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
I haven't had to earn it. It's not something I did. My favorite spiritual teacher, Byron Katie, says, if you understood how important you are, you would shatter into a billion pieces and just be light. And she had that experience. And I believe she went beyond suffering. And
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
I've come out of suffering over and over again, like someone surfacing out of deep water, you know, and taking a breath of the truth. There is no word to describe how utterly precious you are. You have no, like, hear me now, understand me later. I had a near-death experience once.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
I mean, I've written about it. I've talked about it. I wasn't dead. I was in surgery for actually scars that were inflicted by sexual abuse when I was a child. I was getting flashbacks, and the scar tissue had started bleeding internally. That happens? It did with me.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
It's actually not that uncommon for post-traumatic stress syndrome to re-inflict wounds that were inflicted on you at the time of the trauma. Wow. to get your attention because suffering is always trying to say, here, here, look here. So I was in the surgery and I opened my eyes and I sat up and I looked around and then I thought, wait a second, I'm lying down. My eyes are taped shut.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
What's happening? And I looked at the surgeons and I was sitting up and my body was lying down and they were working and And I was like, I became very confused and I lay back down into my body and I looked up at the surgical lights, which were very, very bright. And then in between all of them, and you got to understand this was a time of maximum suffering for me. I was in physical agony.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
three little kids under five, all kinds of nonsense. They say we only see a trillionth of the available light spectrum. And it was the whole thing. It was the most beautiful thing. Even for years, if I even read about somebody seeing this light, I would just bawl like a baby. It is so beautiful. And it started to grow and just infuse things. And then it touched me And I was utterly home.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
I was utterly loved. I was utterly, I belonged. I had nothing to prove. I was absolutely included in this love. And it was laughing with me. And it was like, you said you wouldn't forget, but you totally forgot this, didn't you? And I was like, yes, I really thought life is a bitch and then you die and that's all there is. And we were laughing together and
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And it was so happy that I started crying. And one of the surgeons saw the tears and thought that I could feel the surgery, but I was numb. And so he said, she's in pain, she's in pain. And the anesthesiologist went to increase the medication. Uh-huh. And later when I said, I want to talk to the anesthesiologist because I thought that might be a drug effect. It was not a drug effect.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And I wanted to quiz him. And he said, what happened in there? And I sort of told him and he said, I went to increase the medication and a voice said to me, don't do that. She's crying because she's happy. And he was just pale because he thought he'd done the wrong thing. And he said, did I do something horrible? I was like, no, no.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
He said, you know how many times that's happened to me in 33 years of practice? I said, no. And he said, once. And then he kissed me on the forehead and went away. But when the light touched me and sort of suffused me, it just said, you're about to go through some really hard stuff. And I was. Complete loss of all my family members, my job, my industry, my home, all my friends. Totally gone.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Yeah, I left everything. And it said, you're about to go through something really hard. Just remember, I'm always, always with you. And I came out of that surgery and it was kind of like the experience in Cambridge where I just said, okay, that light is with us. I am going to live as if I can see it all the time.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And then I had a son with Down syndrome who told me at a friend's funeral that he can see it all the time. He said, life isn't so sad after the light comes and opens your heart. And I was like, who told you that? And he told me that when he was 13, a light had appeared in his bedroom and filled him with peace and told him, I'm your teacher, you can do this.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And I said, you know, I can see the light. I said, the light told me it's always with us, even though we can't see it. And Adam said, oh, I can see it. And I was like, what, now you can? He was like, yeah, can't you? I was like, no, where is it? Is it up there in here? And he said, mom, it's everywhere. It's everywhere.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
The ideal day. Yeah. Can you walk us through it? Sure. It's really simple. And now you're grounded in your body. This is the track. We have to follow the track. This is how you track forward. So we're recording this in 2024, end of 2024. How far would you like to go in the future? We're going to do time travel. So you don't do hypotheticals. I want to know what you're going to do.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
OK, 10 years. So it's 2034. OK, think about you don't have to say it. Think about the age you'll be. And the age your husband, your children will be, sort of move your mind forward like a calendar. Now, here are the instructions. Your life is absolutely what it was meant to be. Every expression of your greatest joy and your greatest fulfillment.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
You're going to wake up on a day that is an ordinary day in a perfect life, in an ideal life. So what I'm going to do is I'll prompt you with a few things and I want you to let your senses answer these questions, not your mind. So your mind can't time travel. It will tell you it can, but it can't. Only the body can time travel. And this is how it goes.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
You wake up on this morning and you don't even open your eyes. You listen. What do you hear on this day, an ordinary day in your perfect life in 2034? What do you hear?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
So smell the air. Don't open your eyes. What do you smell? Salt. Coffee. I'm seeing a theme here. All right. Open your eyes. Look at the sheets. What color are they? White. Look at the floor. What does it look like? Wood, carpet?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Cool. Look over across from you in the bed. Who's there, if anyone? Chris. Loaded question. Okay, great. Look at the room. What do you see, the whole room?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Ah, this theme is strong. It's very strong. All right. Are there windows in the room? There's one. Okay. Get up and go to the window and look out. Okay. What do you see? Your life is perfect. What do you see?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Okay. It could also be like the Alps and the Sahara. Like you can see anything. There are no rules here. Okay. It's just imagination. Yeah. But you see the ocean. Is it like a tropical ocean or is it northern? No, it's sort of northern. Okay. Rocky or just sandy? It's just the ocean. Cool. All right. So you go into your bathroom. It's the perfect bathroom.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Look at the design of everything in the bathroom. And then look at yourself in the mirror. And you are your healthiest, most radiant, physically fit self. Take that in. you are looking fabulous. Yes. And so you do your morning stuff, take a shower or whatever. Then you go to your closet and open the door. This is very important.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
The clothes in your closet reflect everything you do in your perfect life because you have to wear different things. So I always ask people, look at the shoes. What kinds of shoes do you have? Oh, they're all like flip-flops and Birkenstocks. No, like strappy sandals with stiletto heels. Nope. Hiking boots. Not at this house. Oh, you have more than one house. See how that came in? Yes. Fabulous.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
So this is your beach house. Yes. Clearly. And you do not do formal wear. No. At the beach house. So what you're going to do now, Chris is still in the bed. Maybe you go into the kitchen and... And you walk through this house. As you walk through the house, see if there are pictures of events that have happened.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Like right now, I can see a picture behind you of a wonderful family trip to the ocean. Look for the pictures that have been taken in the years between 2024 and 2034. Two weddings. Awesome. Yeah. Cool. Wow. Grandbabies? Mm-hmm. Oh, good. Is it their laughter you can hear? Yeah. Oh, I thought so. I love it. I love that. Can you feel that you are creating this future as we go through this? Mm-hmm.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
You are out of anxiety and into imagination, and the tears in your eyes tell me it's real. Yeah. You're finding your purpose right now. Right. And the things that bring tears to your eyes are the real purpose. Forget career, forget money, forget all that bullshit. When you're dying, it's the pictures of your grandkids you're going to look at. It's the hugs they give you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
It's stuff that society says isn't valuable because there's no money attached to it. That's bullshit. when I walk people through this, we go through the whole day, who's in the kitchen and walk all the way. I won't do it now cause it would take the whole session, but you go through the whole morning and see, I'll ask you, what do you do in the mornings?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Yeah. Because you've done so much in the world that says, you know, be a lawyer, be that... All that stuff that was harsh and cruel and sort of tried to knock the sentimentality out of you. it was pushing you away from your purpose and into fear, into anxiety, because when we leave the track of our joy, a natural response is to be terrified.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And then we get stuck in that spiral and we can't come back. But when you begin to create, which you just did with your senses and your imagination, not verbal mind, don't be counting things and measuring how it's going to happen. No, that's all left hemisphere thinking. Senses and joy. That's how you track your future.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
asked. And again, I don't want to get all sciencey here, but the left hemisphere of the brain, which is glorified by our society, that left hemisphere is what talks and counts and measures time and thinks of problems and tries to like get what it wants. And it's very fear-based. So it gets stuck in anxiety. When you go to the senses and
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
If I asked you, you know, imagine the taste of lemon, immediately the right hemisphere would start to light up. The senses and our sense of being in place activate the right hemisphere, and so does imagination. And creativity, like, sums it all up. So any artist is just in the present moment, very much in contact with what we're making and not stuck in fear at all.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
The interesting thing is that after you come out of a session of that, because your right hemisphere doesn't track time and you go back into the verbal left hemisphere, it will say, well, that was nothing. That didn't even happen. There was no time. I don't know what you were doing. So when you say, you know, I say, oh, yeah, bliss and white light and everything.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And you're like, how does that add up? It's the right hemisphere that gives us our sense of meaning, our sense of connection, our sense of joy. And the mind that goes, no, that actually is a completely different part of the brain. Yeah. But as I said, anxiety shuts down creativity, but creativity shuts down anxiety. So while you were doing The Ideal Day, how anxious were you? Zero.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Yeah. And that's how animals live. You know, they don't have... I remember watching this movie about bears. It was called Bears. Right. There's this grizzly ma who comes out of hibernation. She's got two cubs and she's in the sun and they're nursing. And she's like, you know how, I don't know if you nursed, breastfed your kids. You got oxytocin like squirting out of your ears.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
It's the cuddle hormone. And the narrator says, the mother bear is happy, but she's worried about her milk supply. And I'm watching and I'm like, no, she's not. She is most definitively not worrying about anything. Look at her face. It's just language. Some scientists, some psychologists set out to discover why we have all species on Earth.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
There's a certain proportion of us that take our own lives on purpose. No other animal does that that we know of. And the answer to why we do that is language. because of the way we think in language and time, we can construct a future that is so painful to live with that it outweighs our fear of death. A structure made of nothing but words and thoughts can torture us until we want to die.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And I lived that way for about 32 years. And then I decided I was going to live in that, the awareness of that light.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Pretty much. I came out of it and that was when I took my first, what I call an integrity cleanse. I decided not to tell a single lie for a year. Not a lie of any kind. What was that like? you know, don't believe in my religion. There that goes. Okay. Those friends don't like me now. They think I'm the devil. Okay. Bye.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
That goes in because I wouldn't say to them, you know, I really, you know, I see where you, I would just go, no, what you're saying makes no sense to me at all. And so I came out of that with a motto, which is burn every bridge, but love. Like if there's a bridge that's connecting you to suffering and tragedy and pain and lack of authenticity, it will kill you. Burn it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
I'm much more gentle with clients. I just say, maybe try a day where you don't lie at all and just notice the places where you have been lying and don't lie to yourself.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Over and over, you notice that you are lying to fit in, that it's all about what I call the social self, that you know not to lie about things like, did I leave the stove on? But when you're with someone who says, oh, I just love you, and you feel that they don't, Just notice, oh, I would have gone along with that and kind of believed it before. Oh, okay.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And I would, during that year, I was so clumsy. So people would say, oh, I really miss you. And I would say something like, I miss the concept of you as a friend. And people were so put off and so offended. But I was in agony. And I had to get out. And every truth I told, it's true. The truth will set you free.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
But it's the truth about little things like, am I lying to make the other person feel good? You can say what you're going to say, but know that you're telling a lie. And don't tell it to yourself. And that will set you free. Hmm.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Everybody gets lost. And the thing is that we live in a cloudy world. It's very hard to see the North Star if it's cloudy all the time. And the thoughts we are told to think are like clouds. So if you think the thought, I'm not good enough, that's a huge cloud bank. As long as you believe that, you won't be able to see the stars. So where does that leave you?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Well, it leaves you with several inbuilt compasses that are always turning toward true north, no matter how cloudy it gets. The most reliable one is your body. It will give you suffering as a gift to stop you from going any direction but north.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And it will say pain, pain, pain, pain. You hear it out. And then you get to the core of it and you say, the opposite of that is north. The opposite of that is my truth, is my destiny, is my purpose. And I know it will be hard to imagine that. It's very hard, but just sitting with it. The reason I wrote about anxiety is that I'd written a book about integrity.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And people came to me and they said, well, I'm in total integrity now. I don't lie at all, but I'm afraid all the time. And I was like, well, you can't tell the truth and be afraid all the time. But I only know that because I've spent like hours and hours and hours meditating and looking at every thought that scares me and saying, okay, is that true right now?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
The other day, things were going on in the world that I didn't like. And I was meditating and I was saying to whatever, that's what I call God, whatever. I was like, how can I be at peace even in the middle of this? And a voice inside me said, you mean your bedroom? Yeah.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
come into the present moment, come into what's actually happened, come into the things you thought would annihilate you and notice that they all helped you be free. And so then I wrote a book about anxiety because I realized that physically in the brain, people are getting stuck there. And so you have to use creativity to pull yourself out and then you can see the truth because it feels wonderful.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
So the body will go not north. And you go, what's a slightly improved thought? I'm okay right now. Okay, more north. I've been okay a long time. More north. I'll always be okay even when I die. Ooh, do north.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
It feels scary. It feels very frightening. And you tell yourself a lot of stories about if I lose this, if I let go of this, I will suffer. It will be horrible. And if you look back at... Like, now I'm old enough that I can look back on the history of things that I thought would destroy me. And I always thought, if I lose this, horrible things will happen.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And it turned into, if I don't lose this, horrible things will happen. Oh, crap. If I'd stayed in the things that I walked away from, oh, my God, that was horrible. And it also could be... If I go, wonderful things will happen to me. If I let go of this, amazing, wonderful things could happen to me. Don't look at the goalie. Look at the spaces.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And feel in your body that your body is saying, yeah, that feels truer. That feels more. Check your breath. Like if you're used to watching your breath in meditation, you'll notice that when you say a true thought, your body goes, and your chest literally expands.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
That thought may go against everything everybody in your life has always told you. Where it all comes down is believe that thought against everything else. It is so hard to do. It's so hard. And that's why my most recent craze is community. And you talk in your work a lot about the sense of community and separation from community. We are social primates. We need each other.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
A horse in catastrophe will look for a safe place. A social predator like us will look for a safe person, a safe other. And when I did that, when I left everything, I was very much, I have to do this alone. And I thought that was really true because our society is individualistic. I have to do this alone. And it was almost like a challenge. I'm going to do this alone. And it was horrible.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And it took me years because I had so little trust in other people. Because they did... diss me. They did tell me I was the antichrist. They did. My family tried to have me put in prison. Like the people I loved most were doing these things and it was horrific. And I didn't trust community for some years after that.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And then over time, I realized that I was lying to myself, thinking I'm not securely connected to anyone. and then sitting with, I am securely connected to everyone. Part of me rose up then that knows that and is looking at you in the audience and there are 3,000 people and maybe everybody else is asleep, but I am connected to you because we're all connected to each other. And that
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
It's not what our society tells us, which is why my online community is called Wilder. It's a wilder way to be, to know that you are securely connected to everyone. And if they don't love you, just look at them and say, oh, sweetheart, and let them. And then you say, let me know that I am connected to you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And when you come back, and a few people came back to me after 30 years or so, I am loving you the whole way back.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And then your heart never breaks in a way that feels toxic. It breaks open.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Congratulations. This is very exciting. Oh, my God. This is the best thing that could happen to you. Why? Because it means that, you know, I always wonder, caterpillars, they come out and they're like, I'm going to get bigger. I will be a bigger caterpillar. Munch, munch, munch. And then I wonder, what are they thinking the day they go...
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Wait, I will make a tiny sleeping bag out of my own saliva and I will go in there and completely dissolve because that's what they do in there. They dissolve. They melt into a liquid, some species. If you cut open the cocoon, it's liquid inside.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And when it's totally disaggregated, when it's complete bug soup, it triggers this response and the DNA starts reconstructing the butterfly out of those same cells. But the caterpillar's gone and the butterfly's not there yet. When you think, what is this life? This is not me. It's you knowing it's time to transform. And I would say, if you came to me, let's make your cocoon.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
We're going to create a safe space with safe people. Join something. Join a book club. Join a church. Join an online community. Join something. Because you're going to need a cocooning space and you need people around you you can trust. And those people are there. Find them. Your heart will lead you to them. You'll recognize them. Mine were mostly authors of books who'd been dead for centuries.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
you know, but as a coach or as coaches, we get to say, we'll help you build the cocoon. And then we're going to watch you melt, you know, which is, it's about grieving the loss of the life you thought you'd have, grieving the people you love who aren't coming with you, grieving the loss of your identity, grieving the loss of your physical identity, whatever.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And then when you're completely relaxed, when you've said, let them to absolutely everything, something will go, I'll change my hair. It's always one of the first things people do is they change their hair. Really? Yeah. It's because haircuts are one of the primary signs of identity. This is social science.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
So when people change their hairstyle, it's a real, it's a signal to the rest of society in the world, this is who I am now. And then they start rearranging their furniture. Then they start, they sell their car and get another one.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
So I'm going to think my life will feel better if I push the couch against that wall. And look where you are right now.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Millions of people listening to you. Guess what? It's true. You had a lot of energy. You moved the couch. You shifted the inside as you shifted the outside. And this is what is happening right now, which is pretty freaking awesome, Mel.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
I think it's shifting from what do I do now to what do I make now? What can I do now? What can I make now? The moment you ask what can I make, you awaken your creativity and your anxiety. As you think it through, just notice the anxiety will go to zero. And you will start making communities. You will start making art. You will start making pies. You will start making friends.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
You will start making things because we are endlessly generative beings. And when we think in anxiety, we generate anxiety. When we think about danger and isolation, we generate them. When we think about invention and imagination and sensory delights and cuddles and puppies and like, I mean, it sounds so cheesy, but let's make a world that is joyful and abundant and beautiful.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And we can do it just by saying instead of, oh, God, what do I do now? What can I make now? And the moment you really literally like put something in your hands and start making something, your whole brain will be different. And then your whole life will be different.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Decades. Yes. Decades. Yeah. So the first thing, it's not enough to say, go get oil paints. You'll feel good. No, there are three steps. And I remember them with the acronym CAT, K-A-T. So A is art making things and T is transformation and transcendence, but K is kindness and everything depends on kindness. I There's something I call KIST, K-I-S-T, kind internal self-talk.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
When you're afraid, just say these things. You don't have to believe them. Say it to yourself all day long. I'm here. It's okay. You're all right. I've got you. You're going to get through this. I've got you. I'm here. It's okay. Maybe let's get a blanket. Would you like some tea? Tell me everything. I'm listening. Oh, that sounds like it hurts. You're loved. I'm here. You're okay.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
That's how I've gotten out of the deepest, most horrific fear. And let me tell you, it was bad. And that was the only thing that brought me back from the darkness. And so when I'm working with people, I used to be all like, let's build your ideal life. And now I'm like, good. We know your ideal life now. Tell me about your fear. Tell me everything.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
You're going to be okay.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
I would say not a single painful experience you're having will ever be wasted. Hear me now, understand me later. Nothing is ever wasted. You've never made a wrong choice. You're only here to experience life as this sort of hapless little creature. Nothing you do is wrong because your soul is here to experience life and your soul is not afraid to suffer. But its destiny will always be joy.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And there will only be more joy because of everything you've suffered. It's all precious. It's all good. You've never put a foot wrong.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
I was listening to the sound of the planets. These NASA spacecraft go by and they get radio waves and can transform them into sounds. NASA space sounds. Go Google it. It's great. And my son Adam walked by and he did a double take and he can barely talk. But he came into the room and he said, what are those sounds? I have those sounds in my body. And we were like, you do? He was like, yeah.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
We said, well, that's the planets. And he was like, oh, the message. And he said, like, and we were like, what? He said, message, like the call. We said, oh, message. He said, yeah. And I said, so the planets are sending us a message? And he said, yes, always. And I said, what's the message? And he said, that we're safe. We're safe. I know it doesn't feel that way.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Oh, my heart is just like exploding right now. I just, you know, I remember going out in front of crowds and I had terrible performance anxiety, but I would always stop and think somebody out there feels the way I did once.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
You're safe. Even if it looks really dark and dangerous, there is a deep, deep way in which you are always safe, always loved, always held, always cherished.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
I love you, Mel. I love you, person.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Jenea, here we go. Oh my gosh. We still need a segue, right? Here we go. Magic, magic, magic. I'll stop. I'll stop. I'll segue. I promise.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Oh, my God. Nom, nom, nom, nom. Get in here.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And I would just think whoever it is, and I'd just say, please speak to them. And I don't know what the hell I said either. It's like throwing a message out in a bottle and just wondering, did anyone pick it up? And then to have you say, I found the message you left in the bottle and I picked it up. And then you come back to me and it's an answer to my prayers and
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
to feel heard and seen the way we all want to feel heard and seen. And it's talk about full circle moments. This whole day has been just this deep magic. And I really, I love you for bringing that to life and putting it out into the world.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Oh, hello. It's so nice to meet you. Yeah, I was privileged enough to have some fairly difficult things in my life. And one of the hardest, probably the hardest, was growing up in the heart of very Mormon, Mormonism, luminaries of the Mormon faith. He defended the faith. It's called being an apologist. So he was very important to Mormonism. And I think it made him crazy.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And part of his crazy was that he sexually abused me. And then I grew up and... After I was having children and trying to not tell any lies, the moment I decided one year not to tell any lies, the memory of the abuse just erupted. If you've had that happen to you, call someone. You need community.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
But yeah, I had... I mean, it literally... I had so much scar tissue in my body. My body wasn't working very well because of all the scar tissue in sensitive areas. So I had surgery for that as well, and that blew it wide open. And I started having what they call intrusive flashbacks. But at the same time, I was looking at is this religion? I love my father. He's passed on, but I love him.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And I really think it made him crazy to try to wrap his mind around telling people that something was true when it wasn't. It just, there were things that were not true that he found a way to say, oh, they're true. So I never hated him, but I realized that without speaking the truth and living in harmony with my truth, I couldn't survive psychologically. I was very close to taking my own life.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Couldn't do that to my kids. So I decided to get therapy, do other things. And at that point, my family was like, no, this did not happen. They tried to shut it down. I started getting scary messages from unknown people saying, you've been spreading rumors about your father. You need to... You know, I'm going to drag you behind my truck and tell you, tell the truth, that kind of stuff.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
It was like just from strangers. And then 10 years later, I waited 10 years. And then I wrote a book about it called Leaving the Saints, How I Left the Mormons and Found My Faith, because it was about how I had been set free by the experience of dealing with that. And lo and behold, I decided I believed that there was a divine consciousness that loves us all and is always taking care of us.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
So when that book came out, yeah, my family tried to take legal action to have me put in prison. I lost every friendship I'd had growing up because everyone was Mormon in that community. And going against the church and leaving the church is considered the only sin worse than murder.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
I knew I had to write it. Yes. But I was terrified. And pretty much all the things that I thought would happen, happened. You know, my publishers called me after the galleys came out and said, why didn't you tell us about this? And I was like, I tried. They were like, we're getting death threats. I was like, yeah, I know.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Don't rock the boat in any very strongly committed ideological community, right? Yeah, so it was just loss after loss after loss after loss. There was immense fear. There was fear for my children, whose lives were threatened anonymously by people sending me letters and stuff. I had to leave my home. At the same time, I realized I didn't really like academia, so I left my job. I realized I was gay.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
Oh, so there went my marriage. Just everything, everything left. And everything arrived, everything painful. It was so hard to lose. I had to let them go. And in the spaciousness that opened up, the thing I call God moved in.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
And there's just joy, joy, joy, joy in letting go.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
I want that for all of us. I do too. I want that so much. I want that for every single person. I want that so much for you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want
You know, we're in Boston. I haven't been back to Boston for like 30 years. Really? Yeah. And I was living in Cambridge, which is right here, when my son was prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome. So I was six months pregnant. I knew he had Down syndrome. And I had never really experienced peace. And I was very, very upset. Yeah. And I couldn't sleep. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't sleep.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Control Your Mind & Redirect Your Energy to Self Transformation
And when we've known forever that anxiety shuts down creativity. So I started thinking, what if it works the other way too? What if creativity shuts down anxiety? Oh, that's interesting. So if you, like, if I take a client and I do something very simple, like plan a meal for tomorrow.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Control Your Mind & Redirect Your Energy to Self Transformation
So... Say you're having a dinner party. Start planning right now.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Control Your Mind & Redirect Your Energy to Self Transformation
And the anxiety is quiet. And it does shut down. Did that work just now?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Control Your Mind & Redirect Your Energy to Self Transformation
It works like that.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Control Your Mind & Redirect Your Energy to Self Transformation
Absolutely. So it's anything creative that you should start doing. Yeah, and people say, oh. I'm not creative, I can't do art. That's still in the anxiety part. Just make something you love. Try using your hands, your senses, cook, garden.