Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Mon, 05 Aug 2024
In this episode, my guest is Dr. Martha Beck, Ph.D., a Harvard-trained sociologist, bestselling author, and one of the world’s foremost experts on personal exploration and development. Dr. Beck shares specific frameworks and practices to tap into your unique and deepest desires, core truths, and best life direction—all elements that comprise your authentic self. She also explains how to align your work and relationships of all kinds with your true self and how to embrace the discomfort and process of leaving unhealthy relationships. We discuss how to deal with negative thoughts and emotions, grapple with societal norms, and improve body awareness to gauge your inner truth. We also discuss codependency and self-abandonment - and how to exit and recover from these experiences. By the end of the episode, you will have learned numerous practical tools to access your best self and live a richly fulfilling life. Access the full show notes for this episode at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/huberman Helix Sleep: https://helixsleep.com/huberman LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/huberman Waking Up: https://wakingup.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Dr. Martha Beck 00:01:34 Sponsors: BetterHelp, Helix Sleep & LMNT 00:05:34 Tool: Perfect Day Exercise 00:15:31 “Clear Eyed”, Male vs. Female 00:23:31 Family & Work; Directed Attention & Miracles 00:30:21 Sponsor: AG1 00:32:10 Unease, Restlessness & Guilt; Life Worth, Fear 00:37:22 Accessing the Subconscious; Compassionate Witness Self 00:46:16 Finding Self, Suffering, Anxiety; Tool: “KIST”, Self-Parenting 00:54:01 Self, Radiance, Death; Awakening 00:59:14 Suffering & Compassionate Attention 01:02:10 Challenging Internal Thoughts, Understanding Truth, Body & Mind; 01:08:44 Sponsor: Waking Up 01:10:20 Western Society & Pressure 01:18:30 Tool: Sensing Truth in Body; Meditation, “Stopping the World” 01:25:02 Energy, Magnetoreception, Pet’s Death 01:33:49 Lying to Ourselves, Addiction 01:38:18 Tool: “Integrity Cleanse”, Lies; The Light 01:47:32 Relationship with Loss; Love, Self-Abandonment & Codependency 01:55:10 Romantic Relationships; Jobs & Family 02:02:06 Hurting Others, Relationship Imbalance 02:06:55 Tool: True Empathy 02:11:26 “Happiness is an Inside Job”, Codependency 02:18:58 Live Your Joy, Western Society 02:24:41 Relationships, Love & Integrity, “Feeling Good By Looking Weird” 02:30:42 “I Like It!”, Punk Rock Music, Love 02:34:24 Honesty & Essential Self; Helping People & Healers 02:42:12 Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow & Reviews, YouTube Feedback, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Martha Beck. Dr. Martha Beck did her undergraduate master's and PhD training at Harvard University.
She is also considered one of the foremost experts in the personal development field, having authored many bestselling books, including her upcoming book, Beyond Anxiety. curiosity, creativity and finding your life's purpose. I must say that today's discussion is a truly special one.
I've long benefited from Martha's teachings, and I assure you that during today's episode, you will benefit from Martha's teachings. She describes and we explore practices in real time that will allow you to truly understand what is most important to you and what you ought to spend your time pursuing.
You will hear a rich discussion about how to frame the thoughts and the emotions around any topic, including pain points in life, as well as your goals and the things that you are in pursuit of. You will also learn how to figure out exactly what is most essential to you and indeed how to explore what Dr. Martha Beck calls your essential self.
Those deep rooted desires that are unique to you and your history and what will make your life most fulfilling. By the end of today's episode, you will be armed with new intellectual and practical knowledge, and you will be able to adopt the best possible stance for you as you navigate forward in your life.
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is BetterHelp.
BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. I've been doing weekly therapy for well over 30 years. Initially, I didn't have a choice. It was a condition of being allowed to stay in high school, but pretty soon I realized that doing regular therapy is extremely important to our overall health.
There are essentially three things that go into great therapy. First of all, you need to have great rapport with a therapist. So you need to be comfortable with that person. You need to be able to trust them and talk to them about all the issues that are relevant to you. Second, and this is what people normally think of when they think of a great therapist,
that therapist needs to provide you support in the form of emotional support or directed guidance. And third, excellent therapy has to provide very useful insights, insights that you can apply to be better, not just in your emotional life, in your relationship life, but also your relationship to yourself.
BetterHelp makes it extremely easy to find an excellent therapist for you, one with whom you resonate with, have excellent rapport with, and that can give you those three essential benefits of therapy. If you'd like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com slash Huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com slash Huberman.
Today's episode is also brought to us by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. I've spoken many times before on this and other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance.
Now, the mattress we sleep on makes an enormous difference in terms of the quality of sleep that we get each night. We need a mattress that is matched to our unique sleep needs, one that is neither too soft nor too hard for you, one that breathes well and that won't be too warm or too cold for you.
If you go to the Helix website, you can take a brief two-minute quiz, and it asks you questions such as, do you sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach? Do you tend to run hot or cold during the night? Things of that sort. Maybe you know the answers to those questions, maybe you don't. Either way, Helix will match you to the ideal mattress for you.
For me, that turned out to be the Dusk mattress, D-U-S-K. I've been sleeping on a Dusk mattress for, gosh, no, more than four years, and the sleep that I've been getting is absolutely phenomenal. If you'd like to try Helix, you can go to helixsleep.com slash Huberman, take that brief two-minute sleep quiz, and Helix will match you to a mattress that is customized to your unique sleep needs.
Right now, Helix is giving up to 25% off mattresses and two free pillows. Again, that's helixsleep.com slash Huberman to get 25% off and two free pillows. Today's episode is also brought to us by Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium in the correct ratios, but no sugar.
Now, proper hydration is critical for the optimal functioning of all the cells in your body. And that's especially true for the neurons, the nerve cells. In fact, we know that even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish both cognitive and physical performance.
So to make sure that I'm getting proper hydration and electrolytes, I personally dissolve one packet of element in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I first wake up in the morning and I drink that or sip that across the first half hour of the day or so.
And then I also make it a point to drink another packet of element dissolved in an equal amount of water, so 16 to 32 ounces, at some other point during the day, and maybe even a third if I'm exercising and or sweating a lot. I should mention that Element tastes absolutely delicious. My favorite flavor is watermelon, although I also confess I like the raspberry flavor, the citrus flavor.
Basically, I like all the flavors. If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free Element sample pack with the purchase of any Element drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free sample pack. And now for my discussion with Dr. Martha Beck. Dr. Martha Beck, welcome.
Oh, it's so good to be here, Andrew. Thank you.
I'm so excited. I mean, I don't know how to convey to the people listening and watching just how excited I am. I have very few heroes in life, but you are one of them. It's true. That does not compute. It's true. I won't name all of them, but you, the great Oliver Sacks, are among the people that have really influenced me so much in terms of the things I do.
the ways I try and think, the ways I try to not think at times. And your life story is an amazing one. So we have a lot to cover today. So I'm not going to spend any more time talking about why I feel that way, because it's going to just become apparent in our discussion. But I do want to say that you have really been ahead of your time.
I mean, you're triple degreed from Harvard, you have these academic credentials, and yet you were one of the first people to be public facing about the mind-body connection in a way that is operationalized, what we sometimes call in and around this podcast protocols. And you've offered some practices that have absolutely transformed my life and other people's lives.
And I gained them through reading your books and That's not a standard book advertisement, but all of your books have been transformative for me. One of the exercises that has had a profound effect on my life is the perfect day exercise.
Oh, yeah.
And when I first read about it, I thought, what could this possibly be? And as I recall, it involved taking a little bit of time, maybe 10 minutes, maybe 30 minutes, and just sitting or lying down, closing one's eyes, and just imagining with no limitations one's perfect day.
And what's so wild about this exercise is that several, not all, but several of the things that I imagined in that exercise have amazingly come to be reality.
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.
Okay, well, I'm giving you a notification right now because at the end of that exercise, and I ended up doing it several times. I do too. I do it all the time. Okay, that's good to know. I want to know about the frequency there. Was, you know, I'd love to sit down and talk to Martha Beck, what I wouldn't do. So I'm in a pinch me moment right now.
This is so good.
It's wild. It's like reality weaving back on itself.
And I've listened to your podcast and I thought, that guy's really cool. And here I am.
Thank you. I'm moved by that. Let's just talk about this exercise for a second. Clearly, we could come up with scientific explanations for why it would work. The brain is a predictive machine. Once it understands that something might be possible, maybe it looks for avenues for that unconsciously. We could come up with a whole narrative around that.
But just for sake of those listening, what is this exercise? How would you suggest somebody try it?
So the first thing is that you don't make up something. 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.
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.
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?
For me, the first thing I hear is like, Just feeling how comfortable my body is on the bed. Something that I don't do enough.
What about the sound of someone or someone's breathing?
Yeah, someone next to me breathing and they're still asleep.
Ah, lovely. Is there a dog breathing on the foot of the bed?
Well, if it was like my bulldog Costello that's snoring. I'm going to get another dog soon. So I would like a dog that breathes with less snoring than Costello. Although I must say I miss his – Bulldogs. His like incredibly deep snores. The early versions of this podcast, the early episodes, we kept him in the room snoring. And by the way, the watering up of my eyes, these are truly tears of joy.
And I said at the beginning of the podcast,
podcast I said listen I have a bulldog he's getting toward the end of his life so we're gonna keep him in the room and so when you hear that breathing in the background that snoring let's call it what it is he's in here like so sorry not sorry so anyway so yeah so there's some bulldog breathing you can have as many dogs in the room as you want just listen and maybe you hear birds outside maybe you hear the ocean maybe you hear wind maybe you hear people talking or the noise of traffic just just listen for a minute
Until you're pretty sure you've heard everything there is to hear.
Yeah, I like the sound of kids playing.
Ah, sweet. Okay, so smell the air. What's it like? How humid is it? What's the temperature?
You know, I'm a Californian at heart. I like it in the 70s and 80s. Perfect. Not too humid. Yeah. It's weird that a don't jumps in, but there's something about the sound of airplanes flying over.
Interesting.
It always depresses me. It must be some parrot association. Something like that. Sometime like, I don't like that.
Okay. No planes.
Bird chirping. Who doesn't like birds chirping?
And by the way, for our listeners, this is not one magical day that you'll never live again. This is a typical day, but your life is now perfect. So it's an ordinary day, but in your perfect life. So put it out three years, five years, whatever makes it possible for you to allow that – your ideal life could form in that time.
You'll find as you do it many times, the time necessary for it to happen becomes much shorter. Anyway, so you get up, look around, you sit up in the bed, look around, who's next to you? What does the dog look like? What does the room look like?
Yeah, it's my partner next to me, my... Dog is, you know, I told myself I wasn't going to get another bulldog.
Oh, you are.
But I think I'm going to get another bulldog. You are. They're the best.
Yeah.
They're like the essence of efficiency of metabolism, meaning they do as little as possible and they experience as much joy as possible. Oh, that's perfect. They're hedonists when it really comes down to it.
You need a wise hedonist in your life. Right.
And they are capable of protecting if they need to, but I honestly don't care about that. You know, all that stuff, like all that, like my bulldogs, I don't care about any of that.
Something tells me you could protect yourself pretty well.
Yeah, I'm good there.
Look around the room. What color are the walls? What pictures are hanging there, if any?
Yeah. I'm a Wyeth fan.
Andrew Wyeth fan. Me too. Which one? Andrew or NC?
Well, recently I saw a caption. I don't know if this is true because it was an Instagram post that the woman in the field image. Oh, Christina's world.
Yeah.
Yeah. I didn't know the name of it. Thank you. That this was a neighbor of theirs that had a degenerative neural condition. And rather than use a wheelchair of sorts, she insisted on crawling everywhere. And so that image is actually of her crawling out into the field happily to enjoy the field. Because my impression of the painting before was that
Somehow because she's seated up there, it looks like in my mind I projected onto it that there's some like desperation there or something to get back to the house. But that's not it at all. It turns out this is a woman who preferred to move with her own agency, even if it meant crawling to enjoy nature.
It's a magnificent painting.
It's a magnificent painting.
So it's on the wall there.
Yes. Maybe not the original, although that would be awesome.
Why not? It's your perfect life.
Then I'm waking up in the Met.
And also just notice that you're creating a theme, which is – the theme is I will go out as myself and I will reach and strive for things. And I'm not here to be helped. I'm here to do hard things and to do them for the joy of it. So that's what that painting is about. Strong symbol of who you are. So get out of the bed and your partner's still sleeping, the dog's still sleeping.
Go look out the window. Where are you? And you can be anywhere.
I'm a mountains guy. As much as I love California, you know, I've realized that I just went out to Boulder, Colorado for the first time for a week just by myself. And I fell in love with it. Yeah. So I'm in the mountains. Colorado feels right to me. And there's water.
Uh-huh. Like a river.
A river. They've got great rivers there. Yeah, they do. Or the little streams. I like the little streams that they have there because the rivers are so loud. That's true. The rivers are really loud when they get going. Yeah. And –
So are you looking at a small town, a city, or do you just live out in the mountains by yourself?
Definitely small town. I can't be too isolated. If I'm going to be in a city, I'm going to be in Manhattan. It's like it's all or none. So if I'm going to be in nature, I want to be in nature. So a small town.
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.
You're already there. But make it even better.
For me, that means being clear-eyed. People who listen to this podcast know that I came up through neuroscience studying a number of things, but the visual system. And these two little bits in the front of our skull are pieces of our brain. They're the only pieces of our brain outside of our skull. And yes, they may be the windows to the soul if people want to refer to them that way.
But to me, just feeling like my eyes are clear. And there's a certain... tone or something that I'm like, okay, like, I'm all there.
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.
Yeah, and I think it's the Buddhist that talked about, you know, it's someone who's at the level of their – their eyes are at the level of their skin. So like right there as opposed to sunken back into their eyes. Yes. You know, and then of course some people are like really forward leaning. That's so interesting.
And I also happen to work on the intersection between the visual system and the autonomic. You know, so, you know, stress or calm. And I think what that's referring to, and I'm speculating here, is where we are alert but calm. So we're present, alert, but calm.
And of course that controls pupil size and all of this stuff I do believe has been understood in other traditions and ancient traditions through a kind of unconscious genius where they're recognizing all the symbols integrated of clarity of the eyes and level of the skin. And of course we can measure the stuff in the lab, but that's just isolating variables.
So for me, it's looking in the mirror and like, okay, my eyes are clear.
This is so interesting because my friend Liz Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame, 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.
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.
Interesting.
Wow.
And that's really, really interesting that you would say that exact distance.
It's like a retraction of our humanness. That's fascinating. I mean, I don't ever recall as a kid, you know, my dad or my mom or anyone telling me like where to place my vision.
No, no, no. It's not articulated.
And I'm probably guilty of being more expressive, emotional, effusive than certainly the – a traditional male stereotype. Like if I love something, people are gonna hear about it. And I'm not shy about the fact that thinking about Costello or my graduate advisor or people I love, like I'll well up and I'm okay with that.
I think – well, to flip that one around, do you think that that's a real thing that – I have no idea. Through cultural conditioning that men and women tend to kind of be either more – I don't know. There's no language for this.
I have an 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.
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.
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
conquest and oppositional thinking as much as gender.
Very tactical.
Yes.
It's like taking what's out there and holding it in. I actually can do it. I know how to do this.
You just did it. Yeah. I know how to do this. It's like visible.
Yeah. I probably just learned how to do it, right? Because I'm comfortable in a lot of different environments. There are certainly environments I don't want to find myself in again or in the future for the first time. But yeah, I'm very... very aware what that distinct change in internal state that accompanies that.
That was so interesting that you just did that. Wow. Okay. The problem I'm having now is that I have, and I quote, an interest-based attention system. I love that. ADHD, which means I pay attention to things that interest me, which means that I literally follow squirrels away from business meetings.
But I have paper and pen here, and it's okay because the art of podcasting in my opinion, is that we can spin a couple different plates and return to them because it's like conversation. Otherwise we might as well be on a highly produced traditional media show and that's not what this is. So we're back. So I look in the mirror and I see, I'm like clear, like I'm clear and present.
Okay.
And of course, for those listening, you should all be doing this exercise for you, right? Yes. Okay. Okay.
And now you go to your closet and you're going to get dressed. Open your closet, which is the closet of clothing you have in your ideal life, and just look at the different outfits you have. The different, like how many kinds of shoes are there?
It's just pretty funny because I definitely have my ideal wardrobe, which is very sparse. I've always owned 20 or so of these button-down black shirts for work purposes. I like T-shirts that are super soft. And because I have a short torso and long arms, they have to fit right. So I find the ones that fit right. It's a nightmare trying to get them. But once I get them, I adore them because –
I always own two belts or so, one watch, black jeans. The shorts I like, I get teased for wearing mailman shorts, but they're actually the Costco purchased mail or like Kmart purchased like mail person shorts. They fit best for me. And I've always worn Adidas. So I'm happy there.
No dress shoes?
Oh, yeah. I own a pair of proper leather shoes. I have a suit. I actually own a tuxedo. Oh, my. I own those things. And I like my closet. I've always liked it. It feels very safe in there. I like it. And then I've always kept a couple photographs of people that I love in my closet.
Oh, sweet. So whose photographs are there? Do you see any photographs you don't recognize at this moment?
It's my sister.
Mm-hmm.
It's my grandfather. And then I think that's it. Apologies to my parents. Apologies to my parents and anyone else. Just forgive me. Okay. Yeah.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, the work part of my life, quote unquote work, is like reading and teaching and talking about stuff on the internet, which is podcasting. Mm-hmm. But what I got a flash of is I'd want to work on my fish tanks with my kids.
Oh, yeah. See, now I skipped a thing. You're supposed to go down to breakfast and see if you've got a family.
I do. Yeah, I've always wanted kids. I've been trying to time that correctly.
Wonderful.
And with the right person. So, yeah, I like tending to my fish tanks. I have – kept fish tanks since I was a kid. I haven't had one for a few years now, but I like, I'm always setting them up for other people. It's kind of interesting. I always go play in real life. I go see people. I'm like, I'm going to put a fish tank there.
My interest-based attention system just went, oh, really? You do it for other people? Oh yeah.
I'll show up and I'll be like, I got it. Will you let me? And then I'll set it up. And I love setting up fish tanks. It's like the, who knows?
So your kids are helping you. How many kids are there?
Realistically?
No. In your imagination. You can have 20 if you want.
Two. For some reason, I got obsessed with numbers for a while. But I was thinking like five or something. No, two.
You never know. It could happen. The important thing about this exercise is you don't get logical about it. You don't think what's manageable and what's probable. And you just see who's there.
Yeah, two feels good.
All right.
Fair enough. Two feels good. And... Yeah, there's so much life in a fish tank. There's the plants. There's the food. There's how the fish are interacting with one another, who's chasing who, who's nibbling, who's hiding, who's dominant, who's, like, being kind of unruly and, like, you know. I mean, I must have seen the Finding Nemo movie, especially the second one.
Huh.
Like. Like 12 times. Fabulous. Like 12 times. It's crazy. As an adult.
It's not crazy. This is wonderful.
So good. Like I just love the personalities. I mean, any movie where Willem Dafoe is the voice of a fish, you're like, okay. I am in. All right. So we tend to the fish tanks, which is great pleasure. And then for me, it's we come here and sit down with you and – Hang out with these guys and my team and share what I know to be really cool, useful, like truly useful practices. Yeah.
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.
And if you've got this in your mind really clearly, you're going to take the option that leads to it. That's what I tell people. It's logical, directed attention, except that in many cases, I have to say, a miracle occurs. My favorite cartoon is this physics equation with these two physicists, and there are all these symbols on both sides of the board.
In the middle in brackets, it says, a miracle occurs. I love it.
My dad's a theoretical physicist, but he will delight in that. As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 for more than 10 years now, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast. To be clear, I don't take AG1 because they're a sponsor. Rather, they are a sponsor because I take AG1.
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They'll give you five free travel packs with your order, plus a year's supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman. There was something that popped to mind. I mean, there are all these little... things that also go into my perfect day that we don't have to go into every detail about like working out and the whole thing.
But I just want to maybe mention a point of contrast that served as one of the reasons why I did this practice in the first place was that in real life, I was waking up and sometimes still do wake up with this like underlying like tension, like something's not right. I don't feel good. I wasn't anxious. I wasn't like, but like something's not right.
And I went through years of kind of like gnawing and scratching at different things that, you know, I quickly discovered, you know, like going out for a couple of drinks with people made me feel worse. I don't judge people who drink whatsoever, I'm like, I don't like this.
Like it doesn't, like I was just, but this unease, it's like a restlessness that lived inside of me for so long and still can surface as a signal that like, this is not the right life. And at that point, I had a laboratory, grants, we're publishing papers, like all these things that I loved doing, And that I loved the trajectory that I took to arrive there and the people that were in my life.
But like, I just knew I could just say like, something's not right. And I felt terribly guilty. The reason I'm telling this is I felt terribly guilty. Like I owned a home, right? I was in my mid thirties and it wasn't an expensive home, certainly not by today's standards, but I was able to buy a home on my own. I was... dog.
I had, you know, people in my life, but it was like this, it was almost like a gear that was grinding. And that was the stimulus for exploring this perfect day. My life looks completely different now. And it's far from quote unquote perfect, meaning there's still work to do in a lot of domains, a lot. But I feel like the trajectory is right.
Yeah. And I really believe the source of all my work, you know, I was getting my 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.
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?
Because the doctors at the Harvard Medical Clinic and all my advisors told me, you have got to, at the very least, institutionalize this child the second he's born. Institutionalize? Oh, yeah, for sure. They said, you're throwing your career away. The head of the obstetrics committee, there were five obstetricians, and the chief dude—
came in, and there I was sitting on a bed in my little hospital napkin, and he said, this is like a cancerous tumor. You've got to let us take it out. It will ruin your life. And I just looked at him, and I had the weirdest experience 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.
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.
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.
And he was – Probably true for a lot of higher education institutions. Yeah.
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.
I have to do something from a very, very deep place within. And so I kept that. I mean, he's home right now. You know, we're having a great time.
Adam, right?
Adam, my son Adam.
I only know his name through your books, of course, but I feel like I know him a little bit because I love the story about him peeing on the doctor.
Yes, the very first thing 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.
I want to just... or lack of a better way to put it, double click on two things. First of all, I wonder if we're going to speculate, no need to, but if the perfect day exercise is really about accessing the subconscious.
That's 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.
And for the first time, I was making a decision from every cell in my body instead of just my, you know, neocortex. And I realized my life is not meant to go like his life. And the person in the next bed, their life isn't meant to be like mine. But we all have this... programmed into us somehow.
And when we start to leave it, in my last book, I called it leaving our integrity, because to be an integrity just means to be one thing. It doesn't have any moral implications in the original, like Latin, it just means integer, one thing. So if we were born knowing who we are,
But at some point, usually not long after birth, we get socialized away from expressing exactly what our own truth is telling us. We get socialized to behave in ways that please other people. Very simple. And as you're describing it, I had a great life. I had a lab, I had a dog, I had a house. Those are all socially recognized items that say your life is working.
but they have nothing to do with your personal destiny.
Right. In my case, again, I loved, and I still love doing science. I mean, my lab is certainly shrunk. I made sure people got placed in jobs and faculty positions, et cetera. I'm still involved in some clinical trials. But one thing that pained me about the work, I'll just come clean about this, this makes my throat lock up a bit is I've been an animal lover since I was a kid. I do eat meat.
I eat it from sustainable sources, but you know, not all, but a lot of the work that I did in my laboratory was on animals. And at some point it was approximately halfway through my first position. I realized I was like, I, I, I don't like this.
Yeah.
And we could talk all day about animal research, non-animal research. I decided to work on humans instead because they can consent and they house themselves. But, you know, so there were some pain points, but I think my unconscious was pulling at me. Yeah. Like, this isn't good. This isn't good. And for me. Yeah. And I do think that
the conscious mind and the logical mind, as you're referring to it, it's very tactical. And part of the problem is it works so well, works in quotes, to move us forward on metrics related to that. But I mean, there are very few people that I know who are truly aligned with their, I guess what you've called essential self.
One who I'm fortunate to be good friends with, he just so happens to be famous for lack of a better word, who resonates with a lot of what we're discussing is the, great Rick Rubin, the music producer who's produced all these different types of music. And one thing that's really interesting about Rick, I've spent a lot of time with Rick and we communicate all the time.
And one thing that is very interesting about him is he has incredible powers of observation. He can really feel the energy of a musical artist or, and he's produced other things too. He does great documentary. He's got his own great podcast. But he doesn't get absorbed by it.
And I wanted to talk to you about this because I, you know, I think for people that are very feeling, very sentient or really in touch with that, the ability to like feel music, to feel other people's emotions, to really – that's a beautiful life, to taste food. But there's a – threshold beyond which we kind of lose ourselves in the experience of others and what's going on.
Rick can go right up to that line and really see it and enjoy it, but it doesn't absorb him in a way that he has a place that he returns to that's in him. And the reason I discovered this is I said, wait, you don't drink alcohol. He said, no. I said, no drugs. He said, no. Doesn't judge it, but he doesn't do it. I said, did you ever? He said, no.
And I said, who comes up through music and never takes a sip of alcohol?
Wow.
Goes to college and never took a sip of alcohol, tried any drug. And again, I don't judge. I've talked about psychedelics on this podcast. I've talked about my own relationship to those, what I think are very interesting clinical trials and things of that sort. I think there's tremendous potential there.
I agree.
But what is it to be able to experience life in the richest way, but make sure that we don't get lost in feeling or in thought. It's like this ability to move back and forth seems to be the most, the best definition of like a great life, in my opinion, because we need to do things each day.
I would say you don't even have to go back and forth. You can do it all at once. You can feel, you can think, and you can stay in the driver's seat and not be overwhelmed, either intellectually or emotionally. But I think it has a lot to do with, you were talking about Asian, Eastern, like meditation practices.
There's a little exercise I like to do with people where if they're struggling with a bad habit, I say, imagine the part of you that is always doing the bad thing, 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,
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.
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.
It's totally still and totally peaceful and completely compassionate.
It's like the ultimate parent.
Yes, it is. And Dick Schwartz, who came up with the model of internal family systems theory, I don't know if you've had him on the show.
Have not, but I'm learning more about internal family systems models. I learned about this first in the context of visiting a trauma healing center. Yeah, that's great for trauma. And then people are now applying this to addiction as well.
Yeah.
I'll get his name from you later.
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.
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.
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.
How do you go about doing that? And one of the reasons I'm asking this is because I think everyone, including myself, would do well to be able to access this compassionate witness self. But also because...
So many people are on social media nowadays where you can almost feel yourself getting pulled down these trajectories, like the gravitational pull of a battle or a video or even something that's delightful. But then you find like two hours went by and you were overconsumed and undercreated in some sense.
It's like junk food. It tastes delicious, but then you feel like that.
It goes nowhere.
Yeah.
You know, this sort of goes nowhere. So do you have a practice that you use to make sure that you're in that place?
I do. And it's called suffering. It's very reliable. 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.
You and me both.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
So the state is what's key.
Yes.
And it is so – it has so much fun in this world. And so you can walk around in that state.
Oh, yeah.
Sure. You can – so – To be sure I understand. So say I wake up in the morning and I'm just like not feeling right or something triggers me or, I don't know, just like I'm off center.
Right.
You take that sensation of suffering. Yeah.
Yeah.
And you don't fear it. You don't amplify it. You just kind of pay attention to it.
You pay attention to it. And here is the key thing. This is in my new book. I kept this a secret because it sounded so silly. And I thought this would never go in the Ivy League. But there's something I call KIST, 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?
You. Okay.
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.
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?
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.
Yeah, people in pain are usually agitated and grumpy. So it's the inverse of that.
Yeah.
Yeah, I love this. I mean, in some sense, the words like self-parenting keep coming up in my mind because a lot of this is about learning to parent ourselves from the inside. Yeah. And I do think that most... We hear about inner child stuff and I think inner child work is very interesting.
I also think that as a biologist who spent the early part of my career on developmental neurobiology, like the same neural stuff is repurposed in adulthood. Like that's something that it's kind of obvious, but we overlook.
Right. I'm like, I've got some inner adults here who aren't very happy too, you know?
Right, right, right. You know, but the notion that like our attachments when we're young, somehow that like those neural circuits are set aside. So then we can form more mature adult attachments. You know, it's like, no, it's crazy. We repurpose them. So we're working in an adult landscape with child-based algorithms.
And depending on how childhood went, you know, that either can be spectacular or so-so or a complete disaster. Usually it's a combination.
That obstetrician at Harvard, I would bet my last dime that he was still working on the same circuits he used when he was five. And they were pretty scary, you know? So, yeah, we all have... multiple causes of suffering, but we also have, I wouldn't actually call it interparenting because that basically implies that only parents give that to children. And I think it's just humaning.
If you are truly humane, if you are truly in a state of self with a capital S, there is nothing in you that wants to cause suffering for any other being. And there's nothing in you that doesn't want to help. ease the suffering of the entire world.
So again, now I'm into a kind of Asian modality of there's this Bodhisattva prayer that goes, for as long as space endures and as long as sentient beings exist, may I also abide that I might heal with my heart the miseries of the world. And that part of us is in everyone. And if we become those people, It won't just be parents being kind to children.
It will be humans being kind to each other, the earth, and all other beings. And we may actually make it into another century.
Yeah, no, it's looking a little sketchy right now. I mean, things are tense. It sounds like it starts with... self-love, compassion, like only from that place of compassionate witness, self with a capital S, excuse me, can we be at our best for others?
I believe it's actually the only part of us that's real. I talked a minute ago about people who are dying. They drop the 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.
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.
Let's, if you would, let's drill into this a little bit more because this is a high level, but at the same time, basic and yet abstract concept. And it's not often on this podcast that we talk about abstract concepts. We probably don't do it enough. We get like, I like to talk about protocols. You get your sunlight on clear days, you know, and I love that stuff too.
But as probably people realize by now, I... I think a great life is bridging as many things, at least for me, as possible, and seeing the overlap in the Venn diagrams. It's the only part of us that's real, meaning the other parts are just conditioned.
I think you've said— The other parts are impermanent. They will vanish. Everything, as Shakespeare says, everything will just disappear and leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on. There is an experience that is common to individuals all over the world in different cultures at different times where they start to say they feel as if they've awakened from a dream.
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.
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.
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.
Well, it's interesting because a few years ago, so many concepts that I was intrigued by, breath work, for instance, psychedelics, meditation. I mean, now people get federal grants to study this stuff.
Yeah.
And we do reductionist work to try and understand. In fact, I had to disguise breath work as respiration physiology, which we did. And we did a clinical trial. And, you know, lo and behold, certain patterns of breathing shift your internal state and your sleep and your anxiety. It's like a giant, but it was, it was scary territory for a while. And, um,
And now, you know, psychedelics have kind of broken through as I mean, I mean, I just have to say this with like while touching my forehead and like that. They adjust neuromodulators just like, but differently than certain drugs that adjust neuromodulators and everyone accepted.
So the idea of changing neuromodulators to change conscious experience and in that altered experience to be able to achieve neuroplasticity is like, it's also a big duh. Of course it works that way. But six years ago, you'd get fired from the university if you said, well, maybe psilocybin could be an interesting compound for... you know, depressed people.
And by the way, I'm not suggesting everyone run out and take a bunch of psilocybin, especially if you're depressed.
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.
Right. And if you're, you know, more gun-shy on these things, contact a local university. They're likely doing a clinical trial on this. We can provide some links to clinical trials. I think the data are incredibly interesting. In any case,
And I guess the point is that I feel like academia is kind of coming around, probably due to the suffering of people in it, where then they know somebody who achieved some relief through meditation or some benefits of meditation. So now everyone, I think, accepts like meditation can be very useful for lowering stress and altering conscious experience. This is not new stuff, as everyone knows.
It's gone back thousands of years. So it sounds like Getting into the capital S self, the compassionate witness, is step number one. And so I just want to make sure that we make clear how one does that.
Yeah, it's not step number one. Step number one is suffering.
Okay.
We all have that. You may have never felt good in your life, listener, but you have suffered. That's for sure. 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.
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.
And the third step is to follow the compassion that is naturally being directed toward that suffering until you find yourself centered in it. And that is a huge relief. And I've done this in massive physical pain. I've done it when I just lost people I love. It's a very powerful, maybe not a panacea, but not that far from it.
If you can get there, you're still suffering, but there's a piece that holds the suffering so lovingly. that it no longer concerns you. So on one level, that you're suffering, and on a different level, which feels more real to me, there's only peace and compassion and wonder and joy. And somebody asked me once, if there's a metaphysical reality, why is there suffering?
And I just heard coming out of my mouth, because the self loves experience and is not afraid to suffer. It's not afraid. So then staying in that is highly motivated by the suffering you feel when you leave. So to me, that's first step, suffer. Second step, pay attention to suffering. Third step, follow compassion to its origin. Fourth step, never stop doing that.
And every day.
Every minute. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, this is very relevant to me. I have always wondered about like, do you push back against the feeling? Do you live with the feeling? Do you let it amplify? There's so much contradiction inside of the typical discussion of these kinds of things. That's one of the reasons I love your work so much is that you don't tell people what to do, but you provide paths. I hope so. Absolutely, you do.
Absolutely. I'd like to talk about two things. You know, before I came in here, I did a little meditation. I do this before every episode, but today I just, it like took only like a minute because it came to me so fast, which is the two words that popped to mind were, you know, what's real, what is true.
I mean, I think so much of what we're talking about in so much of life is like, what's real, what's true. Certainly out in the world, but like in us.
Yeah.
What I'm hearing is that at some level, we need to not trust our thinking. But of course, there are times when we need to trust our thinking. And then, of course, we're receiving messages about what's real, what's not real, what's true, what's not true, sometimes about us. I mean, there's all this childhood programming. How do we start to sort through this?
I'm guessing that it has something to do with being in that compassionate witness place. But let's say what you've experienced in your life, I know because you've written and talked about this, and I certainly have now that by some interesting twist of fate. I'm a public facing person. People saying things about you or about me that are not true. Or that are judgments that don't feel good. Yeah.
And we are not alone in this. You don't have to be public facing in order to experience this. People all the time are being told they are stupid. Sometimes they're being told they are brilliant and they know they're not brilliant. This can go in every direction. How are we supposed to hold –
the narratives, the voices that we hear in our head and outside us in a way that really allows us to be our best essential selves.
Well, 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
It wasn't for you. No.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Like everything has to be measured or it's not real. Is that true?
All right, so it sounds like challenging or sitting with doctrine and labels and stories that we've heard and that maybe we've internalized. Oh, we've internalized them, yeah. Yeah, and systematically exploring how those make us feel in our body.
Yeah.
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Again, that's wakingup.com slash Huberman to access a free 30-day trial. I recall the inverse of the perfect day exercise was another one that I did, which was like, just call it what it was. It was like the sucky day, like the shitty day, right? Or just where you'd imagine something really terrible. and then how it would cause the body to contract.
Oh, yeah.
And to recognize, you know, the other side of the coin, right? And just learning that relationship between the body and thought.
Yeah.
I mean, I can say from my own experience that one of the biggest mistakes I ever made was teaching myself to be more resilient to certain forms of stress.
Really?
One of the worst mistakes I ever made. Say more. I mean, I, and my lab studies stress and I talk about stress relief and physiological size are a great way to, you know, reduce real-time stress. And I stand by that. So I'm not talking about that. I stand by meditation and saunas and all the things that make us feel, vacation, the things that relax us.
So I'm not saying the ability to modulate stress is bad. incredibly powerful and useful. I believe that for sure. But when I was a kid, I wasn't the kid that was going to hold the firecracker to the last second. I wasn't the kid that would do the really daring thing. I had friends like that. And I felt kind of sheepish about that.
Those friends are probably dead by now. They're not doing well. That's true. And I grew up
in the then very parentless community of skateboarders that a lot of us were really wild we were very free which I love the freedom part but there was a lot of mayhem and craziness especially back then yeah and it's a beautiful culture I'm still friends with a lot of those folks but
Those cultures split off basically into thirds over time, about a third debtor in jail, about a third doing incredibly well personally and professionally, incredibly well, and then a third doing well, but they're not still as ambitious about that. They're more focused on their personal lives, and I hope that's what they want to be doing. Yeah. Um, that's kind of how it broke down.
But I remember as a young kid and then in that culture, like learning to push myself past the feeling of like, this is dangerous to the point where as I got older and my body eventually got stronger because back then I was always getting hurt, which is why I left that sport. It wasn't very good. I, for the record, wasn't very good. Um, good enough, but not, not. not where I wanted to be.
That over time, I remember when I started doing science, I realized this is crazy. Skateboarding, you fall, you hurt yourself so badly, you can't do it anymore. That doesn't happen with studying. So I'll just study until I collapse. I'll just work until I'm sick. I'll just, you know, like... That person down the hall puts in 80 hours.
Well, then I'll do 100, and I'm not a competitive person by nature. Or even worse, you know, in my mid-40s, getting into, like, stupid stuff, like cage egg sick great white shark diving to the point where I had an air failure.
Oh, my God.
And this is all – You know, this whole thing. And then coming back from that, I'm like, what am I doing? And what had happened is I learned to override the signals of the body.
Right.
And it was like, when is enough enough? It's like when the reaper comes, you know? And so I think that if we don't listen to the signals that our body sends and we learn to override them, repeatedly and systematically, we can place ourselves into real psychological, emotional, and physical danger. And I just like, I don't know why, I just felt like this was a need to do this in order to grow up.
And now I try and do the exact opposite. It's like, and then I feel bad. I feel kind of lazy. I'm like, I'm not like running at 5 a.m. I'm like sleeping at
5 a.m.
I'm doing yoga nidra. I'm doing yoga nidra at 7 a.m. because I didn't feel I slept enough. And then I have friends in the public facing health space that are like, they push so hard. I'm like, I'm lazy. And then, so it can go too far.
Well, we have this culture of push, push, push, produce, produce, produce. One of my favorite heroes, along with Oliver 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.
But he talks about how our particular culture for the last few hundred years has veered towards stuff that is preferentially favored by the left hemisphere of the brain. And it has to do with grasping things and producing physical things and getting things to happen, controlling them, where the right side of the brain, and of course, it's all I'm oversimplifying massively.
But functions like meaning, synthesis, combinations of different bits of knowledge, 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.
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.
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.
And as she healed, she didn't bother to get rid of her ability to feel people's energy. So she's a great fan of using the whole brain. Whole Brain Living is her latest book, and it's great.
But Ian 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.
And so what you were doing to yourself was completely irrational, completely. You should get the Darwin Award for taking yourself out of the gene pool.
It was like the stupidest thing. I remember thinking like, what am I doing? And of course, we used it to get virtual reality for our lab. We did a bunch of things that I thought were useful that we transmuted into studies on stress. And so there was always a purpose and a story that could justify being there.
Oh, there is.
Yeah. And one that was really rooted in goodness and adventure. I love adventure and I'm super curious. Well,
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.
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?
Enough.
Yeah.
Yeah. That's a perfect segue, but before I move on, I want to make sure that I linked back what you said because I think it's exceptionally valuable about what's real, what's true. To really evaluate what's true, you need to sit. Or maybe one can learn to do this while in motion and sense within one's body what feels liberating, opening versus what feels contracting. Is that right?
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.
You are free to interact with your own suffering in a new way, and that is peace. So you look, and it literally physically affects the body as not free, free. And if anybody out there listening, go to a really rough time in your life and imagine it.
I mean, go to that time in your life when you were pushing yourself, and you can actually remember the tightness in your throat, in your back, 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.
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.
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,
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.
And I read in shamanic traditions, they call this experience stopping the world. And it can happen through the guidance of a shaman or a plant or whatever. It was happening to me through meditation. And in that space of light, which I stopped fearing after a while, It looked as if this thing we're doing now is a video game.
If you and I were sitting and playing a video game, you would choose a character. I would choose a character. You'd stab me with a sword. I'd hit you with a mace. And we would say, you are hurting me. You are killing me. But really, we'd be talking about characters in a video game. And then somebody would come say, let's go get lunch.
And we would put it down and go stop stabbing each other and be friends. It feels to me as if this is more like a game than reality, the whole physical everything. And I call this you, me, and you call that me, and I call it you. And when the game stops, however that happens... There's a level of reality as different from this one as a video game is from three-dimensional life.
There's a world outside the cave. And I don't know what it is. And I may be wrong. I don't care.
Love it. I'm going to mention Rick Rubin again. A few years back, I called him up and I said, like, Rick, you're not going to believe this.
And I relayed to him a story about someone that I knew really well and this, like, very, like, just kind of wild set of discoveries that someone else had unearthed about their life being completely different than it had been presented and their business was a big fail. Like, the whole thing just collapsed. And And Rick just wrote back. He said, back to nature, the only truth.
Like that's very Rick. Like he's, you know, that's how he talks. Exactly. He said, he said, well, I actually, sorry. It was preceded by, he said, I said, did you read this? Do you see this? I can't believe this. And I'm like, you know, this person really well. And like, I can't like for a very long time. And he just said, it's all lies. Back to nature, the only truth.
And that just got tattooed in my brain because so much of what we see and the shock and I can't believe it. And I think he was referring to something similar. He also has said, and you're going to get a kick out of this, I think, so Rick loves professional wrestling. He watches 10 hours a week of professional wrestling. Why?
Well, first of all, he believes that it's the only thing that humans have created that's real. Why? Because everyone agrees that it's not real.
It's fake.
It's fake. And that he likes that no one gets hurt. I mean, people actually can get hurt, but that no one's trying to actually hurt the other person. They're collaborating in this. kind of Shakespearean dance that they do. And you have the different characters. And so I went to see professional wrestling with Rick thinking like, what am I doing here?
Like it was like loud and the flames and all this is like not a scene I would normally take myself to on a Friday. And it was so much fun, mostly because of how delighted Rick was in seeing it and his son as well. So- We can distinguish or like really identify what's true through this practice.
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.
Yeah.
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.
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.
It'll protect you from cancer.
Does it really?
Well, it turns out that people that run kind of more towards autoimmune conditions, like people who have skin conditions that are autoimmune based, have fewer skin cancers. Yay! Because the immune system is combating all these invaders.
It combats everything.
So there's a, yeah, if there's an upside, and this is the basis of a lot of the logic related to immunotherapies for cancers is trying to have the immune system fight off these mutations that are always occurring in the background. So I'm not trying to take away from the suffering it's created, but that's an upside.
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 –
really, really accelerated by the fact that if I go off true for myself emotionally, psychologically, metaphysically, whatever, I immediately get physical symptoms of some kind. But when I am true to myself, they all subside and I get this unbelievable health. So I've been told that I had five different progressive incurable diseases. I don't have any symptoms.
But if I allow myself to be untrue to myself, if I allow myself to get out of integrity, I suffer intensely and immediately 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,
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.
No, not if you're talking about dogs and feeling.
I know, right?
You might make me cry because I'm thinking about, no, because I think I can sense it. Yeah. I think I can sense it. And forgive me if I'm like, you know, like now sounding like totally crazy. If anyone's listening, like this, I will say, and I have a... I'm just going to be blunt. I got a lot of training in neuroscience. I got decades of training in it.
And I'll tell you, the notion of energy is not mysterious at all. I mean, neurons are electricity and chemical exchange. And that happens locally and it happens at a distance.
Yeah. Our phones are electronic circuits that communicate at a distance. We are electronic circuits. Why shouldn't we communicate at a distance? That's right.
And the really forward-thinking neuroscientists are starting to put multiple people into scanners and putting people in scanners in different locations. And I know it sounds like people are going, oh, no, like, what are you talking about? This is like spoon-bending stuff. No.
The idea that thought and emotion at one location can impact thought and location at another one is that magnetoreception has been published in the journal Science. Yeah. So we're not outside the bounds of reality. We are like actually finally as a field starting to acknowledge that this stuff exists and starting to poke and prod around in there. But people have known about this.
So for you, the sensing of your dog passing or you can feel them present.
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.
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.
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.
And then he would call me like the next day and say, oh, I was walking down this street in Japan and I saw this very specific banner and I flew over a thunderstorm and the lightning was amazing. And I started to realize. I was picking up information that he was seeing and it was testable, it kept happening. So what is that?
It would have been so non-scientific of me to say that is completely insignificant, 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.
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.
And the instruments we have to measure things are just not there yet. But the same was said about most everything that has been clearly discovered and is rock solid over the last 50 plus years, at least in neuroscience. I can't help it. just briefly share when I put Costello down. Cause I did that myself, which sucked.
Yeah.
But I didn't want to, I didn't, I mean, so I, the vets, they came to the house, but it was at home and I was right there. I didn't do, I didn't do the injection. No, no, no. I originally, I, I thought I would because unfortunately, because of my previous job, I had to do that a number of times. Yeah.
That is not an accident.
No, so, but what was interesting is, you know, like he let out a big like sigh right there at the end, but the wildest part of it was, and I swear it sounds like I'm making this up, but at the moment he went, I felt my heart heat up. I thought I was gonna be crushed like a broken heart. And I swear it felt as if he was giving me all this energy back.
And it's because I had been spending so much time. He was up in the middle of the night a lot. He must've had some dementia or that kind of thing. And I mean, I had that dog on everything. I was injecting him with testosterone for the last part. Made him a lot healthier, folks. Don't let your dog breed, you know, indiscriminately. But like, I've got my theories about, you know,
All the stuff that hormones and animals that a lot of the vets are aligned with me on this one. Um, talk to your vet, talk to a progressive vet. Um, you know, I had him on a bunch of different drugs. I had him, you know, he was, he was really unhappy. So letting it, it was the right thing to do. And, uh, I'll stop talking about it cause I'll get, I'll get too worked up. But, um, yeah. Forgive me.
But that feeling, it was like, whoa. And I can still feel it. It's like he gave something back that now I think enough time has passed. I go get another dog. It was almost like, oh, here's all this resource and like gratitude. And so these things sound kind of woo, right? Could you do an experiment where you put me in the lab while I go through that? Sure. Would you see huge physiological changes?
Sure. I don't see the point of that kind of experiment. Because I think enough people have experienced these kinds of things that it's not necessary. In any case, I want to talk about integrity and your book, Way of Integrity. You ran a very interesting experiment that, frankly, is going to sound a little scary to some people. They don't have to do it. And maybe reflexive to other people.
which is, I think it was one year of no lying.
Yes.
But like no lying of any kind, not even to yourself. No, especially not to myself.
Right.
And previously on the podcast, we had my colleague, Dr. Anna Lemke, who runs our dual diagnosis addiction clinic. She's done a tremendous service to the world talking about all the various kinds of addiction, addiction as a disease, yes, but also something that people can overcome. And one of the things that I love so much about Ana's message, she wrote the book, Dopamine Nation. Oh, I love that.
Yeah, wonderful book. She talks about how recovered addicts are actually her heroes because they've learned to navigate this internal process that most people perhaps who aren't addicts or don't think they are, are constantly being yanked around by these dopamine systems, but they've learned to conquer their own dopamine systems So they represent the heroes of her world.
And I love that model because we tend to look at addicts and think about it as like, There's all this judgment on it.
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
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.
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.
Until it becomes the source of pain.
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.
And the nail is the part of your life that you're living that's out of integrity with your true nature because other people want you to live that way. And they will force themselves. They want to stay in the position of pain or fear, push past it, be stronger.
Yeah, I've spent a lot of my life there, I'll confess, and it's super unpleasant and it's always led to pain. like shitty things.
But how laudable is it that you took what the culture told you was good and by God, you learned to do it.
And we tell ourselves stories like, well, if we achieve certain things, then we'll be in a better position to do more for other people. Like there's the martyrdom version of it too.
The reason I brought up Ana was she was the first to alert me to these studies that have been done about how myelination and growth of the prefrontal cortex is actually accelerated when people tell the truth, especially around truths that are somewhat uncomfortable. And it's a beautiful literature that's small but starting to really emerge. Yeah.
And a big part of the recovery from addiction is people first – like acknowledging the truth to themselves and then to other people. And, you know, again, it's all of that's kind of shrouded by how we think about addicts. Like, you know, sadly in any major city and even small towns now, you can see the bent over, you know, like fentanyl addicts.
And like, we judge, we're like, oh, you know, or we say it's so sad or, but that's just, you know, you know, an example of how far gone people can get in that particular addiction. Ana offers an interesting idea, which is that the more we tell these little micro truths, the more connected to reality we are. And in the way of integrity, you talk about this experiment that you did.
My first integrity cleanse. So an integrity cleanse. So maybe you could explain what it is. And, um, It sounds incredibly scary. It's not just the telling the truth part. It's the realizing the truth part.
Yeah. Yeah. I guess I'm going to start with the 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.
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.
And I was just completely obsessed by it. And then it started to grow. And when it touched me and it filled things, it didn't bounce off things, it filled them. When it touched me, this incredible joy and love and warmth
flooded my body and I started to cry and my body was crying and the surgeons noticed these tears coming out of my eyes and they freaked out because they thought that I was feeling the surgery and crying was the only thing I could do about it. So they were panicking and the anesthesiologist, they told him, you know, bump up the medication. Later, because I grilled him later, what did you give me?
What are the side effects? What happens? Can I have some more? He said afterward that, When he went to increase the medication, he said a voice said to him, don't. She's crying because she's happy. And he said, I just did what it said. And he was white and shaking. And he said, did I do the right thing? So I kind of told him a little of the story. Anyway, this light was there. Yeah.
And I was just like, home, home, home. And it said, yeah, 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.
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.
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.
That light does not lie. So no lies ever.
Of any kind, even a little micro. Like when are you going to be home and you know it's 12 minutes and you say 10?
Can't say that. Say 12. Do you like my outfit? No, I do not. I mean, I found ways to...
I would sort of try to soften the truth. Did it mean also telling every truth that was in your head? No. Or you would keep certain things to yourself?
No. In fact, it felt untrue to say certain things to certain people. It felt invasive or offensive, and that didn't feel true. Sometimes silence was the greatest truth I could tell, but I didn't even know that that was the case until I started my experiment. So I did not lie for that year, and I've done it many, many times since.
But I would not recommend jumping into it 100% from a life that hasn't already been pretty examined.
What Ana has said, and I think in the backdrop of what you're saying, is that everybody – does these little micro adjustments or, and you've said, constantly, and you've said that this is largely to smooth social interactions, that most of lying is to smooth social interactions.
Yeah, the 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.
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...
cast into outer darkness. My marriage realized I was gay. Oops. I hadn't figured that out at 29.
That came to you as a realization in that year.
Yeah.
Okay. It must have been in your unconscious someplace prior.
Yeah.
There had never been a kind of like, knock, knock, hey.
No, I was so... bent on being a good person according to my socialization, the same way you were bent on being a brave, strong male according to the skateboarding culture. I would never have let that anywhere near my consciousness. And it had to be a series of experiences and my ex-husband was gay as well. So I'd known that about him for a while.
And 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.
How were you feeling during this time? Better and better and better.
I expected you to be like, it was horrible. You're like, no, better and better.
It kind of was, but not as horrible as staying in all those things.
And the part that intrigues me is, the moment is like the losing of friends, like losing of people and the structures that we relied on also for safety. That's gotta be hard.
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.
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.
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.
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?
And he just looked at me and he said, mom, it's everywhere. He just sees the whole world illuminated. And I think that's what I saw in the forest when suddenly the world would just turn to light. It was that light. So that was the field.
And as I lost each friendship, as I lost each job, as I faced the fear and the heartbreak and everything, those parts of me were dissolving and I was becoming more identified with 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.
Did you feel as if you had to accomplish certain things, degrees, et cetera, first in order to allow yourself this? Because I hear this a lot. And in the backdrop of this entire conversation, I have one little piece of neural real estate, which is devoted to the audience that is saying, okay, I can do these things once I have a job, once I have blank, once I have the resources.
But at the same time, I do want to highlight for people that Everything that we've talked about in terms of practices and things to do, you just do them. There's no purchase. It's inside of us. There's no looking to something in a package or in even a program. It's all within us. So it can be done at really anywhere and with any amount of resources or lack thereof.
But be gentle with yourself. Don't quit your job. I mean, I was very violent. I was quite a lot like you. The way I got 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.
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.
Okay, there's that. So you have the capacity for extreme resilience.
Yeah.
And it perhaps took you too far.
Yeah. And I think that's why I did this massive integrity cleanse when I was at a place where I was far, far away from my true self. And because of that, it was a kind of violent breaking of connections. So now if I'm coaching somebody, I'm like – Be very gentle. I call it one degree turns.
If you're flying a plane and you turn one degree north every half hour, you won't even notice it's turning, but you'll end up someplace very different. So just gently move away from what causes you to suffer. Get yourself the 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.
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.
And inevitably, a much kinder, more generous version of ourselves emerges when we're living our truth. I mean, it's a foregone conclusion, but still worth stating. Yeah, I can personally say that most of my suffering has been the consequence of the fact that I love love. And I'm blessed with many great friends and things of that sort, business partners, etc.,
But I have a tendency to get into relationships quickly and ending them feels near impossible. And this has caused me and, you know, and also others too much suffering.
Yeah.
You know, and so a lot of that is the reason I raised this is that it's about holding two truths at the same time, which feel incompatible. On the one hand, really loving and caring about someone.
Yeah.
And at the same time, knowing that the loving, caring thing to do is to go separate ways. And it's this relationship to loss that I sort of can't accept or haven't been able to. Like, I can accept that people die. All three of my academic advisors are wonderful people. Suicide, cancer, cancer. Like, so I had to come to the conclusion pretty early on in my academic career, like –
wow, like I'm the common denominator. I joke, you know, like, and it took me a long time to realize like, this might not be my fault. You know, I know it's crazy. Like how would that, you know, but I think that it also woke me up to the idea, you know, like life as we know it in this life ends. And so to try and make the most of it, but the idea that people would move apart.
Yeah.
Even in circumstances where death doesn't separate them.
Yeah.
To me, it's like, it's so painful.
Yeah. Was it Keats who said that of all the ways there are to lose a person, death is the kindest. Like that.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this has roots in all sorts of things in me, of course. But the reason I raise it is that I think that when we have two incompatible truths, that's when we feel stuck. Like we love people, we want to take care of them. Maybe we want them to remain in our lives, but we have to, like the letting go process sucks.
There can't be incompatible truths. I think what happens is that you, and just tell me where I'm wrong, okay? I could be completely full of crap. It sounds to me like you're one of the people who have a huge heart, who sometimes confuse love with self-abandonment, who love so deeply that you want the joy of the beloved more than you want your own joy.
100%.
And that is not love. That is a hostage situation. There's something I call spider love. If you say to a spider, how do you feel about flies? It would say, oh, I love them. And it expresses that love by immobilizing them, wrapping them up and injecting them with poison and then sucking out their life force whenever it needs them. And it loves those flies. Yum.
but love always sets the beloved free, okay? So there's a consumptive love. And when you are a fly and you meet a spider and you give your whole self to this person who goes, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, I really want that, you find yourself starved of your own validation, your kindness to your true self, and you've given it all to the other person. And that's when it will not work.
And you may be missing the people who aren't looking for flies or who want to just, I'm not 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.
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.
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.
That's very useful. Thank you. And I know it will be very useful to many people. What is the suggestion for people that are trying to figure out what they want or need or both?
I'll relate it to this relationship thing because it applies across everything, 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.
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.
Yeah, it's like this isn't safe.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, it's caused me and I think others a lot of suffering because I think what ends up happening is that when we get separation from that person, then we do a little bit of self-recovery, but then it's like all fractured.
And repeat.
And repeat, right, exactly. What you just described is extremely helpful. I'm curious in your role as a coach to many people. Mm-hmm. how often are romantic relationships, partnership type things, whatever form that takes for people, how often is that like the bulk of what people struggle with, at least in terms of what they bring to the table?
Or is it more often, I don't like my job, I'm in the wrong life? Professionally, you know, if you had to give us like the non-peer reviewed study, but like kind of crude breakdown,
Yeah, I think because they identify me as a coach. They go to a therapist with relationship things, but people come to me with, my life's just not working, that feeling you were describing.
Like the whole thing. Oh, great.
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.
No.
See that pattern?
No. Well, it's interesting that you say that because I feel like professionally, it's like there's like a gravitational pull. Like I wanted to get into tropical fish when I was a kid. And I was like, tropical fish, I would spend all day at the tropical fish store. Then it was birds. Then it was skateboarding. Then it was, you know, I wanted to be a firefighter, like whatever.
Eventually it was neuroscience and it was podcasting. You know, it's just like, I can't miss anything. And when I say that, I mean, I can't keep myself from doing what I really want. I would say likewise with friendships, I'm fortunate to have a great relationship to my biological family. It was really rocky for a lot of years, but it's like the work has paid off and they've done a lot of work.
In romantic partnership, it's like a carve out. It's been much more challenging. I've had some amazing partners and partnerships, like amazing. I'm still on excellent terms with many of them. And then I've had some like really, really brutal, like barbed wire, just like, and you know, I've had to take a look at my role in that too, right? So in this case, for me, it's like a carve out.
I think of it as like this, like wedge shaped carve out. It just seems so much more challenging. But I think in talking with you today, it's clear that it's because of this thing of like, it's not, I'm not approaching it from the standpoint of like, I want to do this and it's good for me.
Yeah.
to be frank. Whereas in the work domain, it's like what feels good ends up being really good for me.
Because for a while you did things that hurt you and then you realized, no, the things 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.
And you just haven't, you've done it in other areas of your life, but this is, yeah, this is a big one for you where you just haven't applied the same wisdom you've learned in other areas. And I would guess that it's because you don't feel that that's loving to the other person. If you decide you're not going to kill animals at your job, the people at your lab aren't going to be heartbroken.
But if you decide you don't want to live a certain kind of life with another person, that person's heart could get broken. Or at least they could feel that way. They could genuinely feel pain. So I think maybe that's why it's a cutout thing, because changing your job doesn't hurt someone, but changing your relationship pattern somebody could get hurt.
And if you don't change your pattern, someone will also get hurt.
Right. Well, and that's often the case, right? And I think so this notion of others getting hurt when we make the choice that's most in line with our own integrity, whether it's relationship or family or the decision to move or leave a job, how do you sit with that? I mean, how does one sit with that?
I mean, I think I have clearly internalized some script that says if someone else is really upset, even, and obviously the right thing is often not the thing that makes people feel best, et cetera, et cetera, but how do you work with that?
So there are different ways of reframing it. And one example, since you know a lot about addiction, if somebody is addicted to you pleasing them, you're pleasing them and going out of your integrity to please them, to give them whatever they want that pleases them. Your addiction as a codependent is giving them that emotional energy, whatever gets them high.
And their absorption of that energy and the imbalance that results, it's as if they are getting high on you. And An alcoholic, if you take away the bottle of booze, will tell you, you are hurting me. This is the worst thing you could ever do to me. You have no idea how much I'm suffering. And the thing you have to do in an intervention is, no, it's the alcohol that's doing the hurting.
You know, it's the overgiving. It's allowing someone to consume your energy and to get high on it. That is an addiction. I will not let you do it. I will separate from you person to person if you continue 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.
But it is not kind to feed someone's addiction to eating your energy. Does that make sense?
Yes.
It's not. You have to do some tough love.
Yeah. The compassionate thing is to do the right thing.
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.
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.
Sorry, I didn't mean to laugh at that, but I did. I don't know. I find it hilarious. I mean, sorry. Not sorry. That was just nothing to do but laugh there. Goodness. Yeah, I think this notion of things ending because we realized that we were telling lies.
Yeah.
And gosh, it even hurts to say. Yeah. You know, it's like... Because we weren't trying to tell lies.
No, no.
We didn't know we were telling lies. Yeah.
It's an innocent mistake.
To me, that often grows from what I think of as empathy. Probably not, certainly not the best form of empathy.
Yeah.
But I think that there's a human phenotype that I'm familiar with where we We feel other people's emotions, which I think is healthy.
Yeah.
Can be healthy.
Yeah.
And we love seeing people enjoy. Yeah. And we delight in it. So it feels good to us.
Yeah.
To, you know, feed this addiction. Oh, I know the feeling. It's not like, it's like, oh, here I am, Marta. I'm like, I'm bleeding out, bleeding out, bleeding out. But it's not in line with this essential self.
And here, I guess the little vignette that's related to this is that I do think there's one very healthy form of this, which is I believe, at least for me, with a dog – I like other animals too, but with a dog, when we love them – we are seamlessly attached to their love of us. And so loving them and empathizing with them means like double the love.
Like we love them and we can feel their love and it's like a perfect, it just feels like a perfect circle. And with people, that can happen too, I imagine. I've felt that a few times. I certainly feel that in my friendships. I feel that with my sister. And I've felt it in a few of my romantic relationships. But The empathy for the other's pleasure can go too far.
And then when we, quote unquote, lose ourselves, I think it's because there's a component of ourselves that's like not attached to the part that still has our own needs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So good. So good.
Yeah. Another one is emotion regulation. So you see something that's horrific and you can like, this is where you can use your skills 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.
Two other components, but those are the two that I think we really need to focus on. If you hurt, I don't. It's not my turn. And when you're hurting and I start to hurt too much because you're hurting, I can bring myself back into my own body, relax, and be contented in my own skin so that I can be present for you. So here's the thing I love.
It's a short quote from a poem by Hafiz, who was a 13th century Persian poet. It's so simple. Remember it, though. Troubled? Then stay with me, for I am not.
I love that.
Yeah, that's being yourself in a relationship. Then stay with me for I am not. But I'm really, really unhappy. I see that. And I'm not unhappy. But I really, really want to be together. I really see that that's how you feel. And I don't want it.
It's so interesting because I feel like in the domain of work and with my friends and largely with family, giving feels great and then people are sated and then they go on their way. But I noticed a contrast with romantic partnerships when, as I've said, I maintain good relationships with a couple of Girlfriends that I had, you know, in some cases, I'm good friends with their husbands.
Like they actually, one just came and visited with her sister and her kid recently. And like on just great platonic terms. But for years, I like...
worry about them but I felt like I could still feel the energetic pull even though they weren't asking for anything right and then when I attended their wedding this particular person's wedding I was like oh I was like my work is done yeah and I got to enjoy and still get to enjoy the friendship with the whole family yeah
But it really showed me how much the whole – so much of the relationship had been about like trying to make sure the other person was okay.
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.
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.
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.
And you are not loving me when you shove yourself into my affairs to try to take away my suffering. Let me fall.
What a mature and generous thing for them to say. Yeah, they are. It sounds like it. This is your oldest. The contrast, and I think what drives a lot of what we're really talking about here is codependency.
Oh, yes.
Yeah. For those that don't know, we haven't caught on. Right, exactly. Is that sometimes when we... cut people off, or we just say, hey, I can give, but only to this point, or you can get this aspect of me, but not these other aspects, especially if they've been receiving them before. They get pissed.
I mean, and it's unclear, especially if the relationship had been different up until then, that, you know, like that's why it sometimes feels unfair to do. It's like, you know, it's one thing to invite someone over for a drink, then to discover that they're an alcoholic, continue to fill their glass. enjoy the exchange and then one day realize they're an alcoholic.
And I guess that term isn't used anymore. I've been told by many audience members, forgive me, it's alcohol use disorder.
I said that too, I'm sorry.
No, quite all right. I think that field of addiction medicine is nascent enough that we're still making the transition. And I don't say this, by the way, for political correctness. I'm not a politically correct person. It's just, I've had to learn to reframe these things for the specific purpose of trying to be more, to bring more people into the conversation.
Also, I like the sound of, I don't like the idea, but the words alcohol use disorder, the disorder piece is also controversial. But what I love is that as soon as we start to name things and rename things, we're all talking about those things and then there's no way out of the conversation. So that's my kind of jujitsu-ing out of that.
So that means we have to talk about it, just like autism spectrum disorder or autism or neurotypical, atypical. Well, guess what, folks? Now we're all talking about it and it needs to be talked about. So in any case, at some point, there's the idea like I'm cutting you off. And the person says, but this is what we do. This is the kind of promise that you made.
And so then we find ourselves in like the other scripts of like, well, now I'm like, being bad. I'm doing the right thing, but I'm breaking a promise, which we're told from like the time we're little, like you don't do.
But only in the eyes of the other person. If you come back into your own integrity, okay, 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.
Have you heard the term extinction burst?
In the notion of galaxies developing or something like that?
No, it's when pigeons are, well.
Awesome, I am way off.
The galactic pigeons.
I'm like trying to be Elon Musk here and you're like, no, it's about pigeons, cool.
It's about any animal.
I love pigeons. I even have a pigeon tattoo. Yeah, I do.
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.
They perseverate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because with work, it's like I love learning, organizing information, having conversations like this and sharing them with the world. It feels kind of like the relationship to a dog. It's like this reciprocity. And if people don't like it, okay. And if you like it, great. And if you love it, even better. But I would be doing it anyway. I'd be doing it anyway.
Like there's no feeling of loss. There's no metabolizing of self, any of that.
Yeah, I know. And I call it what I what I in the book that I just wrote called Beyond Anxiety. I talk about when people like you live that way from their joy, they begin to create economic ecosystems. You create so much value that in multiple ways, people start to. you can get streams of income.
And people pay me to do this. And I still can't believe it. I come in here and I talk to my producer, who's also my business partner and my closest friend, Rob. And I'm like, I can't believe they pay us to do this. I can't believe it.
And that's also how I felt about science the first time I looked down the microscope and saw a slice of a particular brain area called the dorsolateral geniculate nucleus. And we had labeled this. And I turned to Barbara Chapman, my graduate advisor there. And I was like, wow. This is amazing. And her response was so funny. She was also Harvard trained Radcliffe to be specific.
And she said, yeah, brains are really cool. They're kind of like little walnuts. And I was like, so Barbara, the smartest people I ever met. She was just like, and I was like, and I thought, and then I looked around her lab. I was doing rotations where you get to sample different labs and you hope they'll take you. And she had green counters in her lab instead of black counters.
Oh, cool.
And she had pictures of mushrooms.
Mm-hmm.
And she had this picture of a cat coming out of a farm silo. It's like its hat. And I thought, I really like this lady. Like, I want to work here. I'm going to do my PhD here. And I had already committed to another lab. And I started sneaking into her laboratory at night to do experiments.
Did you break the heart of the other lab?
She got over it. So in the professional domain, I'm a completely different animal when it comes to these things. I walked into the other woman's lab. I mean, she's done tremendously well without me. So I just said, listen, I'm gonna join this other lab. But like I have no trouble doing that in the work domain, none.
It's like, you know, when I started the podcast, sure there were these voices in my head, one of my colleagues gonna think this and that. And, you know, I was like, nah, I hope they're living their best life. I'm gonna live mine. Like, and I see them and some love it, some hate it.
And some, you know, like really I can tell, like I hear the judgments and I also hear the, like, I love it, you know, that kind of thing. It's a mix because public facing anything is gonna evoke different responses from people. And, but I'm sort of like, you do you, I'll do me and we'll both be good.
We live in this weird economy where you're supposed to get a job and it's all based on factory work. You're supposed to go to a place and do something you don't really like to get your little allowance and then you go home. And that has only existed for the last couple of hundred years since the industrial revolution. Before that, people existed for hundreds of thousands of years doing what?
Hunting, fishing, gardening, weaving, singing songs, telling stories, doing the things that we do as hobbies.
But we have this weird mindset that says, no, if I do things that bring me joy like a hobby does, the things that people have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years, if I just put my joy out there and see what I can do with the wild new creations of our particular time, if I don't do the job, I'm being weird somehow and it won't work.
But what I'm seeing is the economic structures of this society are all being fractured. They're falling apart around us. And it's people who are afraid. I used to watch this video of a tsunami that hit Sendai, Japan in 2011, I think it was. And this wave comes in and it eats a city in six minutes, this one wave, and you watch the whole city be ripped to shreds in six minutes.
And people are running into the buildings, and then the buildings start to collapse, and you know there are people in there. And I watched this, and I thought, there 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.
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.
And I thought, those are the choices we have right now. We can run into the institutions that we think will keep us safe and change will crush us and drown us and kill us. Or we can deal with the fact that there's a huge wave of change in our society right now and everything's changing at an accelerating rate.
And we can risk running out naked and just with our joy and just balance on our joy and let the wave take us for a ride. You're surfing. 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.
She's taking some work. She's taking some work.
There's a woman hanging on to the end of your surfboard.
It's not going to – Unfortunately, it's a lot more complicated than that. But I am seeing a portal toward I guess what you're calling like true integrity where in the back of my mind, I have this like very – vestigial understanding of what all of that relationship stuff actually looks like when it and feels like when it's right for me.
I just, I think it's not going to look like the way I try to script it out.
Do an ideal day with that relationship and it could be the weirdest thing you've ever heard of. It will work. I promise you, I have a very weird relationship life.
That's reassuring to me.
I can't believe I'm going to say this on this podcast. So I have two partners.
Your partner is awesome. Oh, I just met one of them.
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.
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.
And I looked for jealousy and I looked for, I was like, this isn't supposed to work this way. So Rowan came up and we all sat around talking and we sat around talking a lot more. And we all sat on the same couch talking, going, this isn't weird, is it? And after a couple of weeks, we realized everybody was in love with everybody and we couldn't live without each other.
And so that's how you- That was eight years ago.
And we have a three-year-old named Lila, who's delightful. Awesome. And it is, we call it, Feeling good by looking weird. And you can cut it out of the podcast if it's too.
No, we have no master, no overlord. Are you kidding me? I mean, what we're talking about here is love, first of all. Like, I mean, let's just be, you know, of all the things to cut out of a podcast, we're not going to cut love out of a podcast. Oh, I love that about this podcast because a lot of people would. Yeah, well, not me.
And for people that, like, balk at that or it creates internal friction in them, then I just invite you to, I don't know, visit your compassionate witness self, see if it's still there. And if it's still there, then, you know, hey, I actually believe that humans, partially based on developmental wiring, like, experiences, but also just differences in wiring, like, just fundamentally –
I believe in this. I mean, one of my closest friends, my third postdoc, my third advisor, who was my postdoc advisor at Stanford is the now, unfortunately he died of pancreatic cancer, is the late Ben Barris. He was born an identical twin girl. Wow. Okay. Then went up through medical school, living as a woman, graduate school as a woman, and then transitioned to Ben pretty late in life.
So I only met Ben. Ben was a close friend and then unfortunately had probably because he had the BRCA2 mutation, died of multiple cancers, but that initiated by pancreatic cancer. First transgender member of the National Academy of Sciences. Wow. I wrote his obituary for the journal Nature.
We were very, very close and just an amazing, very quirky dude, you know, and didn't have a romantic partner, at least not at the time when he passed or in the time that I knew him, to my knowledge. And, you know, Ben used to say, like, there are components of our wiring that are ubiquitous.
Yeah.
The parts that control breathing, you know, the parts that control heart. And then there are parts of our— Wiring that are just different. And to me as a scientist, like it makes perfect sense. Like the notion that any of that would be controversial is like, what?
Like it doesn't make any sense whatsoever that one would like not believe that people have differences in wiring because most people want to believe in differences in wiring when it's like convenient for themselves. So I really appreciate that you're sharing this because yeah, the every which version works.
And I also learned from my graduate advisor, Barbara Chapman, she used to say, tolerance has to go both ways. So I also love and applaud the whatever traditional nuclear family, is it still called that? Oh my gosh, yes.
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.
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.
And when you get into a relationship, read it even more often.
Maybe have the other person read it.
And let the other person read it.
Totally. That would be – that I can do. As difficult as it is to have certain conversations, I could certainly write things down and just like slide an envelope.
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.
I love it. And I really appreciate that you shared that. And I know people listening will as well.
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.
Well, one of the reasons I oriented very young towards and still love punk rock music, like that genre, is because to me, I could be wrong, maybe classical music being an exception, but to me, it's the only genre of music where all the versions of self and emotions are welcome. There's angry music. There's like political music. There's sad music. There's...
you know, music about friendship and camaraderie about loss. And you look at the community, like I'm really into this stuff. So look at the community like that. My good friend, Tim Armstrong is created around certain bands. He's going to be on the Mount Rushmore punk rock or the great Joe Strummer from the clash political music.
Yeah. Yeah.
You know, or Laura Jane Grace, like one of the first transgender, like outwardly facing transgendered people in the punk rock community and does amazing music was against me. And then Laura Jane Grace, I'm like, she's a hero of mine. One of my short list of heroes. I love, love, love what she's done. at so many levels.
And it's like, there's like this tapestry of all the different humans and human experiences in a kind of single genre. And I don't know much about other genres of music, but I don't see that.
I don't see that, like maybe across the totality of rock and roll or whatever, but you know, and so like, if ever there was a sector of life that's like all inclusive, it's that, but not because it's loud, it's fast and it's anti, it's like so much of it is like pro-social. So I think there's a big misunderstanding around that. So that ethos is something that's always resonated.
And I feel the same way about like relationships or on social media. One of the reasons I can go on social media and not have it like spike my cortisol constantly Because I'm there and I'm like, okay, there's some like mentally healthy people here, some mentally unhealthy people here. People are here to fight. People are here to love. People are here to find partners. People are here to flirt.
And you know what? People are here to attack me like, cool, I'm glad I'm giving you a purpose for your morning. You know, that kind of thing. I try and just approach it all that way where you just made all of this very clear in a much more succinct way where you just said like, great, I like it.
Yeah.
It's awesome. Yeah, yours with a real genuine sense of joy.
Yeah.
Like, no, like, well, I like it. There's no friction in that statement. It's just, I like it.
Yeah, I really like it. I like it a lot.
I love that you like it a lot and that you can say it that way.
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.
It loves it all. Bring it. It loves it all. And that means that no matter what you come at me with, I can hold that in a field of love. And my experience is love.
What was the quote from Jesus?
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.
Were you all, well, of course the answer is going to be yes. I was going to ask, were you always like this? Meaning that you could hold this position on the balance beam. And then I feel like you've taken this balance beam and like created this big mesa for others to stand on. So, so, cause it's a really stable place to be once you're there, but getting to this place of like
essential self and the path to integrity. I mean, can I just say it the way I feel it? Yeah. It's fucking difficult. Yeah.
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.
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.
I feel like it starts with the scope of self. Like we have to do this for ourselves before we can do this with and for other people.
Yeah.
And then at some point, the fantasy in my mind right, like it sounds like my mother, my mother from the youngest age I can remember in myself was talking about like trying to heal the world. And I've seen the toll it's taken on her. Like she'll call sometimes and I'll be like, how's it going? And like something will have happened in the news. Like I can just tell like it really wears on her.
And it's hard for me to hear and see, cause I've, you know, like I feel it too. It's like, goodness, like, do you feel, there's hope for our species. I mean, I'm trying to not throw the whole problems of the world at you, but- No, I've been thinking about it. I mean, like what? I'm almost 50. I feel like at this point I've seen enough to be like, there's so much goodness in people.
Yeah.
But there's also like the capacity for so much like misunderstanding bad. You got the developmental wiring. You got the hurt people hurt people. We're all, everyone's doing the best they can. Everyone wants safety and acceptance and they're just trying to find it this way. And like, and then there are your truly bad actors because they're either miswired or whatever.
And they're like creating havoc. Like, is there... any real hope for like a different version of things that's persistent?
The first time I remember worrying about this, I was four. And I'm 10 years older than you are. But I knew at four that I was here to try to help with something. And as I grew up, it just wouldn't go away, this feeling that I was supposed to help with something. And in my teens, it became, I need to help change the way people think? I don't know.
And then I started noticing other people who 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
I believe it's a phenotype, and I believe it crops up in every 100 to 150 people several times. And our culture has no word for it and no path for it.
But if we are going to save the world, we will draw on whatever 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.
And I don't know which way it's going to go, but I'm in the game. And I kind of think you are too.
I have a feeling I am too. And I'm certain that... I'm in it thanks to you. Seriously, in large part. I've told the story earlier that the path I'm on and the fact that anyone's listening to this and watching it is the consequence of having read your books and done the exercises and will continue to do them. I must say there really aren't words
to express how much this means to me that you would come here, take the time to share with us your wisdom and to delve into some topics that are of particular interest to me, because I, like everyone else, I'm a work in progress who's curious about the best ways to to move forward. And yeah, every time you speak and just when you show up someplace, it's an incredible thing.
Everybody learns, everybody gets better, and everyone walks away with tools and empowerment. And I just want to say thank you so much. There's really not a whole lot else.
Same to you. You're just looking in the mirror. Thank you.
Thank you. That might be the only podcast to ever end in tears. Thank you so much. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Martha Beck. I hope you found it to be as informative and as meaningful as I did. To learn more about her work and to find links to her many excellent books, please see the links in the show note captions.
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