Dr. Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach): This Weird Trick Reduces Anxiety & Fixed My Childhood Trauma!

[Music] when we lie our bodies get very weak for example stick your arm out and say I love fresh air I love fresh air now I want you to do that while lying and the LIE I'd like you to say is I love to vomit say it I love to vomit that's so weird you now say I love fresh air I love fresh air you now say I love to vomit I love to vomit why is that it's because the way the brain is structured and there are many tricks do you want to do some

more sure Martha Beck PhD is a Harvard trained sociologist and world renowned life coach whose notable clients include Oprah Winfrey her neurological based techniques have helped individuals cope and adapt to an anxiety addicted world so our brains were biologically pre-programmed to be anxious taught by innocently believing Lies by socialization or trauma socialization says you're not good enough you should try harder that was a bad choice all kinds of things and Trauma tells you oh my God everything's dangerous all the time and then it creats horror stories that haven't happened yet to make you safe but

the thing about anxiety is that you get stuck in the anxiety spiral it just keeps getting worse for example I have memories and a lot of physical scarring from sexual abuse which started at 5 years old and then by the time I was 30 I had depression and anxiety been bedridden with autoimmune diseases thinking I could just kill myself but I can tell you with 100% certainty it is possible to trick our brains and shut down anxiety so if I'm feeling anxious what would you recommend that I do here's one of my favorites this has

always blown my mind a little bit 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show so could I ask you for a favor before we start if you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the Subscribe button and my commitment to you is if you do that then I'll do everything in my power me and my team to make sure that this show is better for you every single

week we'll listen to your feedback we'll find the guest that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do thank you so much Dr Martha within all your work what is it that you're aiming to do and I guess most importantly equally importantly who are you aiming to do it for I could give you the normal answer which goes down easily with most people or I could give you the truth which sounds really weird I'll take the truth I was hoping you would say that so um in all my work

and this means from the time I was little um I remember being dreadfully anxious about not having done enough toward it on the night before my birthday one one year I was lying there thinking I am supposed there's something I'm supposed to help with on the earth and I have not done enough and I've got to get moving here and the next day I turned four so ever since I was little my whole intent has been based on this feeling that I was meant to help with a shift that would happen in the world during

my lifetime and I did not know what it was so I would ask myself what what is it I would spend hours thinking what is it and the only thing I got as an answer was this poet this bit of poetry from TS Elliot and it goes I said to my soul be still and wait without love for for it would be love of the wrong thing and wait without hope for it would be hope of the wrong thing there is yet Faith but the love and the hope and the faith are all in the

waiting wait without thought for you are not ready for thought so the darkness shall be the light and the Stillness the dancing all right as I got older and studied more I began to think what I'm meant to help with is a shift in the way human beings perceive and think and that is why I couldn't know what it was because to explain to someone a fundamental shift in the way they think would have to be processed through the way they're thinking now and so it would be fundamentally misunderstood so now I'm old and I

don't care what people think of me so I just say this right out loud I used to it was a deep Secret in my heart for decades and now I just say I think there is going to be a shift in the way in human consciousness and I think it is going to change the way humans relate to the planet relate to each other relate to themselves and I could be wrong but I don't care I'm going to keep trying for it till the day I die and what is that shift in human consciousness that

you're predicting wait without without thought but actually no I I actually have a theory now um my undergraduate degree was in East Asian studies I lived in Asia and studied Chinese and Japanese and they have a concept in Asia that is not well known in modern Western culture and that is the concept of Awakening and it's Awakening out of the dream of thought which is I mean the whole thing is now like half of our listeners are at this point probably thinking Steven has brought a lunatic to the program I will not listen to this

episode but I'm promising you it gets really cool if you focus on it because when you awaken and it's a it's a shift in the way a fundamental perception it's also very strong in India Tibet and the other Buddhist countries it's a shift where you you leave the aspects of your thinking that cause you internal suffering you see to suffer after you awaken I think that's actually an epigenetic shift that is inherent in the brain of every individual and that many individuals throughout history have gone through it the great teachers uh I think Nelson Mandela

went through it in prisent Robin Island so all over the world in different cultures in different parts of the world throughout history individuals have described this experience with very very consistent terminology you awaken you realize that the life you've been living is real but only in the way a dream is real and that the reality of the awakened state is much more real and in that state there's no fear there's no suffering there is infinite compassion there is the desire to serve there is love for all beings not just every human but every being there

is and there is a kind of fundamental peace and Bliss the Bliss of being they call it in Sanskrit sa tananda the Bliss of being becomes your everyday State I think if a critical number of people experience that at the same time we could just fix the problems humans have been causing for the last few thousand years how could you persuade anybody that that state of being is even possible well I have a few tricks there's no persuading um I could show you a few things if you want that I tend to do when I'm

coaching people so well let's get on to that then um who are you in terms of your qualifications I am a person who has experienced intense psychological and physical suffering for decades um absolute wreck of a human being physically I was by the time I was 30 I had been bedridden for 10 years with autoimmune diseases um had depression and anxiety in massive amounts from the time I was very small and then I actually had an experience during a surgery which was like a near-death experience um where I felt like I saw this light and

I felt connected to it um more than connected to it I felt radically shifted and I came out of that surgery and changed I stopped telling a single lie with any aspect of my speech Behavior I would not lie after that so in the next year that was a very exciting year um I walked away from my family religion which was very very important in my my home community so that meant I lost my family of origin my community of origin every friend I'd had before the age of 17 when I left for college um

I realized I was gay so I left that was the end of my marriage um I had to leave my home I had to leave my I left Academia basically threw everything into the bonfire and I would not recommend this to anyone listening out there don't do I did this so you would not have to I can tell you there are easier ways but through it all through everything I have studied with my mind and through everything I've experienced with my body and my heart I'm not say I awakened but I feel I know what

Awakening is and for that reason I feel very safe in the world and very joyful all I can say is this is in you um I'm I may be able to help you find it mhm but I I don't need to create it who have you worked with on a one-on-one basis what are the different types of individuals that have asked for your help and support everybody I mean I've worked with homeless heroin addicts on the streets of Phoenix because I truly believe that the experience I had in surgery with this light this absolute homecoming

and peace I actually gravitated to addicts even though I've never been addicted to substance because when they say they can't live without that first heroin hit that's how I felt after coming out of that experience that that light I was like I cannot live without that and so I would tell the heroin addicts I believe you're meant to have that feeling you long for so much but I also think you you get to keep your teeth you know like there's another way so I've worked with people like that I've had had billionaires clients I have

counseled people in prison because I'm a sociologist and if I say something works for Humanity it has to work across cultures and in all situations poverty wealth captivity Freedom um any situation it has to work before I'll say I'll put my stamp on it and say yeah I think that works and who when you talk about you know helping billionaires what do they come to you seeking or do they just Express symptoms or something you know what almost everyone has the same major problem and it's not what you would think they want to know their

purpose they want to know why the hell they're even here humans are the only animals so far as we know that live on a day-to-day basis with the consciousness of our mortality we are going to die so why are we even here what am I doing here and it's it's the same whether you're talking to someone on the street or someone with a billion dollars that desperation to know why we're here and I think it comes out of a culture that has fundamentally pulled us away from from our inherent knowledge of what we're meant to

be and put us in a place where we are obsessed with productivity and consumption and production of material wealth and has actually cut us off off from our own sense of meaning and that that's actually in the brain that you get stuck in a part of the left hemisphere that is obsessed with grabbing things and owning things and controlling things and it's always afraid it's always grasping and it refuses to believe that anything but itself exists but on the other side of the brain there is the self that connects with meaning purpose relationship connection and

living in a state of nature as everyone did until a few hundred years ago almost everyone we would wake up a human would wake up hearing wind and bird song and other people's voices they would rise and go to bed according to the sunlight and the temperature they had intimate relationships with animals and with plants and with the Earth itself all of our biology evolved to be in that situation we in one Anthropologist called it the weird societies Western educated industrialized Rich Democratic we have a fundamentally different way of living we get up surrounded by

artificial light we push ourselves all day to do things that we would never have done 300 years ago spreadsheets um sitting next to people we barely know who are assigned to be there because we have similar tasks which is a system based on Factory labor which is horrible for people not to solve real problems that matter to you but to catch on to something that an adult already knows who's going to punish you or shame you depending on whether you get the right answer or the wrong it's a bizarre very left hemosphere dominated Society so

Ian mcgilchrist my favorite philosopher a neurologist or psychiatrist says the whole culture functions like someone with a severe right hemisphere of stroke we live in a bizarre crazy culture and we do not know why we're here because we don't have access to our sense of meaning I just wanted to ask you you know of all the things you could have written about at this exact moment in time you chose to write a book about anxiety it's called Beyond anxiety curiosity creativity and finding your life's purpose why did you choose that subject and specifically this word

anxiety above everything else you could have written about so after I wrote The Way of Integrity where I say look if you Integrity to me means that you are whole and in that's the what the word means it means intact it doesn't mean like morally it just means structurally if all your meaning making systems are in order or are it's telling the same story body heart Spirit mind if those are all in agreement there is a kind of grounding in reality and in that reality what happens when you get into that reality is you begin

to awaken you begin to experience spontaneously the things that Eastern sages have described about the sensation of suffering so I was you know i' been studying toward this for years and I thought this is the last self-help book I'm ever going to write because I really believe this is it so people read the book and then they would come to me and they'd say I have put my whole life in Integrity but I'm so scared all the time I am so afraid so I started looking into it and realized that anxiety is skyrocketing all over

the world it is by far the most common mental health challenge that people face something like uh 284 million people last I checked were clinically diagnosable with with anxiety disorder during the pandemic year 2020 anxiety went up all over the world by a full 25% and here's the thing about anxiety it's like one of those Tire rippers that you drive across and you can't drive back because the way the brain is structured when you get into anxiety it just keeps going up and up and getting worse and worse and worse and then when you get

a lot of people who are experiencing this intense anxiety and they can't get out of it they create a culture that reflects anxiety and fosters anxiety without really meaning to but that becomes if you're if you're stuck in this very mechanistic grasping way of being um anxiety is inevitable and actually lawed so I was amazed to find that Jeff Bezos one of the richest men in the world says in his quarterly report and loves to say in many settings that he tells all of the thousands of Amazon employees who work under him he wants them

all to wake up terrified every morning and that's the word he uses terrified and to stay terrified all day because that makes them productive but most of these people are just getting by financially he wants them to be afraid all the time so that he and the stockholders can get more stuff and they already have so much stuff you know like 1% of the world's people own something like 95 no 50% of the total um wealth of the world is owned by the top 1% it's insane and so we're saying yes get up be terrified

as long as you're productive and you know what but when you get really productive and you earn a lot of stuff and that's still your only way of being you still wake up terrified every morning and you st stay anxious all day long fear see fear is like being shot from a cannon if a bear came in here we would both go whoa and we'd get very clear instructions from our biology to either fight flee freeze you know hide under the table I would feed you to the bear good luck with that good luck with

that I'm double your weight you could totally take that bear I'm not going to risk it I'd be out of here no you would you would win anyway it would eat me and then you would win yeah and then our fear if we were like other animals would subside M that's normal fear an anxiety instead of being like shot from a cannon it's like being haunted something bad happens or we hear about something bad happening and we get that jolt of fear but instead of acting and then relaxing we turn it into a verbal story

so a group of psychologists um I think in the 90s decided to try to figure out why humans of all animals are the only ones who commit suicide on a regular basis and what they found out the answer is language we humans have the capacity to use language to create an abstract vision of the future that is more horrifying than the prospect of Our Own Death we choose death over the story of fear that we carry in our minds and the spiral happens because there's a jolt of fear then a story about the fear and

then there's a story about how we have to control the world so that we won't be in danger anymore and we have to control our loved ones so they want me in danger and we have to control we just have to control but we honest to God really can't control very much so then we get worried we get even more scared and that feeds back into these primitive brain structures that say fear and then it creates a bigger story and a more control efforts and it goes up and up and up and it doesn't go

down because that part of the brain has a very peculiar I don't know how this evolved it has this tendency to to truly believe that nothing but itself exists so you're going to have to explain the brain to me in the context you're describing it for me to understand some of Point um tell me what I need to know about the brain I'm going to draw a little picture of it on my iPad here so I can stay with you all right so you've got your brain and it's it's uh symmetrical right yeah to mirror

image there something in the middle called the Corpus colosan that connects it and I'm about to vastly oversimplify and I'm not a neuroscientist so neurologists I I beg you to forgive me uh I know that the whole brain is working almost all the time and that left right uh simplifications about the hemispheres of the brain are oversimplifications nevertheless there are very dramatic differences between what happens and so I'm going to talk to those so on the left side you have this thing called the anxiety spiral where there's a little tiny part of your brain called

the amydala and it's very primitive every animal with a spine has one of these um or something very close to it and its job is to make you safe by being alarmed when you see unfamiliar things it feeds information to layers of the brain that are also ancient but not as old and these on the left hemisphere make you immediately start thinking of ways to control a situation and then when it gets to the outermost layer of the left hemisphere which handles things like time and language it starts to tell a story defending the feelings

it's having so that's what the left hemisphere does in this one little compartment on the right side you also have an amigdala you actually have two of all these structures on the right side the amydala also goes ah something unfamiliar little burst of then and the right side it creates curiosity instead of aversion have you ever rubber necked at an accident is that when you're like what look yeah everybody slows down and you're like what what happened what happened course and and I always think oh I should look away this is I'm being like vois

but I still really want to look and the reason is that we evolved a tendency to move away from frightening things to be safe but toward them in so far as we can figure out what happened and avoid that happening to us so curiosity is intense around Things We Fear that's why the the average American Child by the time they're ready for college has witnessed on TV or or online 16,000 or is it 60,000 murders we're terrified of murder so we're obsessed with it you do not have mystery stories written about robbery it's murder okay

so the right side of migul goes curious and then it starts to connect things how can I figure this out that's like that other thing so this is what must have happened it's a detective and it starts to put together its own version of what happened doesn't use language but it uses very Vivid images and sensory details and it can connect connect things in ways that are highly original and inventive so you immediately start to get creative what I found in in the wonderful books I wrote I read about anxiety they always talked about how

to get your anxiety to calm down but for me that wasn't enough as an individual or just as a theoretician because that just gets you to the you flatten your anxiety but if you go into the right hemisphere of your brain and start to get creative something really magical happens just as anxiety shuts off creativity creativity can shut down anxiety it's like these two parts of the brain toggle and if you go to any traditional culture you will find the Wise people the elders the medicine people of that culture talking about the Oneness of all

things it's not a New Concept what I realized is that if I deliberately chose to push my brain toward creativity and get the right side moving my anxiety shut down and then I started testing it on clients and on groups of people online I'd design these you know experiments because I was trained as a sociologist and consistently I found that this is the way to get rid of this horrific scourge that is ruining so many people's lives and what I always hear is people say well there are real problems we really should be afraid my

answer to that is if you were in a horrible car accident God forbid and you had many injuries would you want the surgeons working on you to be in a state of panic or calm creativity the only way we're going to fix the problem we've made with our fear-based Behavior the only way to solve problems this big is to access the incredible capacity of human creativity I believe we can do that as individuals and as a species so how would I go about switching into this right hemisphere if I'm feeling anxious what would you recommend

that I do it's so easy it's so amazingly easy now your brain naturally goes toward anxiety because of something called the negativity bias and I always think of it as 15 puppies in a Cobra if I gave you a box and it had 15 puppies and a cobra in it what would catch your attention the snake and that's because in evolutionary terms paying attention to the SN snake is a good idea yeah but um it we have such a strong negativity bias in our culture and we very little to pull us back into communion with

Oneness we don't have nature around us anymore so we have to do that we can trick our brains into doing that and if you want to play a little with this sure okay tell me what to do first I want you to think of something that makes you feel a bit anxious maybe not panicky but anxious and something you're willing to like tell us what it is okay um something that makes me feel a little bit anxious yeah this is an interesting one um sounds like a strange thing to say but um when my partner

is not happy and I know she's not happy but she's not telling me why and I'm around her and I can tell from her vibe her face she's not happy about something and I have no idea what it is okay I think there will be many people out there who know what this feels like yeah you are describing a domestic a tiny domestic nightmare that many of us feel so think about that think about what that feels like and just notice what it does to your body and to your emotions MH what's happening in your

body if you're in that situation with your partner like my breath is short uhhuh yeah right I just feel tense and I I become quite impatient because I just need the answer to like alleviate the anxiety yeah so you've gone to a fight ORF flight nous system arousal State okay uhuh something something's wrong okay I'm very focused yeah yeah I'm very focused and I'm very like I'm anxious but I'm also a little bit snappish because I'm I'm F fleeing on one side I need to get out of this situation but I'm fighting on the other

side like tell me what's wrong so you've got a full fight ORF flight thing happening so you can get into that by imagining the situation now I want you to imagine something else very vividly um and it would probably help if you close your eyes um have you ever eaten an orange yeah all right so imagine that you are holding an orange MH um it's a nice ripe heavy delicious orange at the peak of its ripeness I can tell you you've already smelled it so you can smell the Citrus you just take a bite of

it to break the seal of the of the peeling and just feel that little spray of citric acid that pops up when you bite the peel and then the bitterness of the Rind and then as you bite in the juice gets in your mouth it's sweet it's a little bit Tangy uh you can feel the filaments of the skin and the stringiness of the insides and you can pull it back you pull back the peel you can feel it on your fingernails you can smell it um put just put the broken part to your mouth

and like squeeze the orange and let some juice get into your mouth and taste it completely and then swallow it and then enjoy the sensation of tasting feeling hearing even this experience okay how's your anxiety my anxiety went away it's gone yeah because I asked you to use sensory imagination mhm and that's handled by the right hemisphere it's not in the left so instead of verbal imagination which can create horror stories you were in a sensory experience and what I don't think people realize is that we're always imagining what's going to happen to us in

the next few days weeks months years but we're imagining it based on what we think is real which is all the horror stories we're hearing about oh you know I need to mind my health I need to there will be accidents there will will be you know my loved ones will die we have all these stories that we haven't happened yet they may they're not lies but that's in the mind as we make our choices I need to get more money that whole thing when you imagine forward with your senses in a way that brings

relaxation how's your body when you're in the orange thing you said it was tense when you're in anxiety what happens to your physical body when you're completely connected to the experience of this imaginary orange relaxes your body relaxes yeah you start breathing more deeply you stop producing all the the cortisol the GL glucocorticoids the adrenaline that you had in the fight flight State and now you're starting to produce serotonin and dopamine and and the what they call the tend and befriend hormones so you're say if you say you could hold that in energy and your

partner is still tense and running around but you're staying in this relaxed State can you then instead of being afraid of her start to be curious about what's going on instead of saying tell me what's going on it's more like wow she's really T I wonder what that's about and you could even ask her honey I don't want to step on your toes here but the vibe I'm getting is that you're not okay like can I help you so it's a very very different thing to approach conflict um one of the people I wrote about

in this book is Chris Voss one of the FBI's top hostage negotiators and when he's dealing with a violent Psychopathic terrorist who has people as hostages he's ready to kill Chris Voss says this is how you deal with him gently with a soft voice curious about his experience and empathetic about it and you're just thinking what this is not in the movies but the human amydala is a frightened animal most of the time and we all know that if you run at a frightened animal and say tell me what you want it doesn't get less

frightened so what you just did was move your nervous system into a state where you can be a field of Peace for someone else who's anxious do you have to do the orange thing the whole time to get into that state no no no there are many tricks do you want to do some more sure let all right here's one of my favorites um and I got this from a brilliant artist and professor at Harvard William Ryman who I was his lucky enough to be his teaching assistant for a few years and this is one

of the things that he used to do to get the students to shut down the the left side of their brain well not shut it down but to use the right side of the brain as well because the left side of the brain can't draw very well I have to tell you this so all I want you to do is put your stylus there over toward the right uh Center of your field Y and write your first name the way you usually sign it yeah all right the way I usually sign it or write it

the way you usually sign it okay yeah okay so the way I usually sign it is a bit more licated o that's beautiful okay so now put your P your stylist just to the left of the signature and now replicate the signature but this time write it in Mirror writing back cords take as much time as you need gosh take as much time as you need so difficult just breathe wait I've got it wrong already can I rub out absolutely you have as many tries as you need suar notice how the rhythm of your hand

goes when you're signing moving right and try to see if you can find that rhythm going the opposite direction I might need pen and paper using pencil and paper because they're tactile yeah is actually you're going to have easier access to it because you're have you're going to have more access to the right side of your brain this is so difficult why is my signature so so complicated you're doing brilliantly you did it terrible yay no not terrible now but the torture is not over Stephen it's terrible it's beautiful you said you wouldn't lie I

I just SP your I just meant your first name anyway okay is good now while you were doing that you might have felt intense frustration and a sense of but when when you're anxious about it you actually can't do it you have to become engrossed with it in order to do it because your brain is creating new neurons synapses that have never existed before you've never done this before so you are fundamentally changing your brain teaching in a skill it has never had and this is what children are going through when they learn to write

for the first time but what you just did was connect to parts of the brain that are in the right side so this is why we used to make these poor students do this because once they could we had another book we worked with called Drawing is forgetting the name of what you see as long as you call it a cup you can't draw it you draw your image of a cup but when you forget to call it anything it just becomes a shape like your signature had to just become a shape and shapes are

on the right hemisphere so what you just did was a it's it's like powerlifting you forced your brain to create synapses that were brand new that were taking you into a state of learning deep learning similar to what happens to Children if you let them run around in nature so there was a study done at Nasa in the 60s to identify creative Geniuses and they found that two% of the adults they sought out like college graduates were creative geniuses after a while a few years they decided to try giving it to four and fiveyear olds

98% of them were creative Geniuses and I think that probably the other 2% were just having a bad day what happens between the moment you're four years old a full-on creative genius learning new things the way you just did day and day out and adulthood where your genius has mainly gone dark it's because you stop trying things that are brand new like that you're put in the factory line in school and taught to learn in a completely different way that's based on shame and fear and artificial skills that don't mean much to you and right

and wrong answers yeah everything's right or wrong everything's very judgmental in nature nothing's judgmental um uh one of the things I've done with groups of clients is take them into a forest and uh with the help of my uh another coach who's a great Woodsman we have them we give them the tools to make fire with sticks and rocks but they have to work as a team and then we say make fire but you can't talk about it because language is in the left hemisphere and sometimes they're out there for four hours and the whole

time it's like ah what are we doing they try all these different things and then I've never had a group that didn't do it they figure it out and you end up with a little um flame in your hands and you feed it a few bits of dried Moss or whatever and you blow into it and it starts to smoke and then smoke heavily and then suddenly it just bursts into flame and there's this feeling there's this Promethean feeling oh my God we can do anything and the fact that that's how we're built to learn

and there's joy in it there's a kind of it's an achievement but Nature's not saying wrong right you get a you get an F you get an A you get higher levels no you get fire or you don't get fire no judgment so what does this mean for me on a like day-to-day basis if I understand the power of this does this mean that I I should draw my name a lot or is there something that I that we can all be doing to alleviate our anxiety and to get us into the right hemisphere of

our brain well there's to me there's a three-step process and there are three sections in the book the first one I I use it with the acronym cat calm art and Transcendence this is how it works the first third of the book is just how to calm your brain it's been taught to be anxious um it is biologically pre-programmed to be anxious so to calm it down most people will say they'll come in and tell me I want to fight my anxiety I want to get it I want to end it I want to bring

it down I want it gone because they think it's a broken machine but it's not a broken machine it's a frightened animal and if if you came in and I said to you okay I want to end you I want to bring you down I'm going to fight you till you're gone would you be less afraid or more afraid so they're attacking the part of themsel that's anxious and it makes it more anxious so and that's what we're taught to do end it force it to calm down with chemicals one of the most ghastly things

that ever happened in the in Psychiatry was that they used to literally take people who had you know inexurable uh anxiety and literally put a screwdriver through the eye socket and up into the brain and just mix it around that's how mechanistic we are about our own Minds we can fix it with a screwdriver that's a very left hemisphere way to think and it's literally attacking ourselves but we're all we're all born with the intrinsic knowledge of how to calm a frightened animal so if you found a terrified puppy on your stoop one morning and

you decided to try to help it you would instinctively know that how to do that what what would you do um I would approach it slowly or not approach it at all and I would get down yes and I'd be very gentle and say hello not ask it to come to me yeah and if it didn't you'd give it space you'd give it time you'd sit there with it yeah and just the way your energy just changed now you get down you begin to smile in a very sweet way and I could feel the tolerance

and the gentleness and the space that you would give this creature we've got to learn to be gentle to ourselves we are taught to be violent to ourselves biohack that make you know make yourself eat this and do that and and instead if we could just go to the anxious part like say you're with your partner and she's acting weird and you're feeling anxious generally what we do is we try to control the situation what can I do can I make her happy I'll bring her flowers I'll do whatever right have an argument instead of

trying to control her the best approach is go inside find the part of yourself that's afraid so if you're in that situation and she's nervous and you just start to observe your own anxiety like okay what does that feel like who is that in there who's who's the anxious part of me and just notice I mean try it right now if you don't mind she's upset she's t she's not telling you the problem notice the anxiety where is it in your body exactly it's like here in my chest okay in your chest so allow that

and say to it I'm going to give you space I'm here I'm going to be here with you uh I know she's scaring you but I've got you it's okay she's not going to hurt us I can go in the other room with you if you need and sit with it and say let me know what what are you feeling tell me everything you get to feel exactly the way you feel and I'm here to listen to anything you want to tell me and I will not hurt you and I will not try to stifle

you or make you go away so how does that change anything yeah for some reason it just um the volume went down so describe it it's just like the volume is went down it made me wonder if just because just by you saying that made me wonder if if in those moments I should be writing it out that can be really helpful there's a psychologist named James Panabaker who found that if he just had students he just did this experiment once as a graduate student he had students write for 15 minutes about something that was

upsetting to them and many of them came out of the experiment in tears it really upset them for an hour or two he had other students just write what they did last summer or whatever so there was this brief period where the ones who had stirred up some turmoil felt unsettled but they in the in the weeks and even the years subsequent to that experiment they had fewer doctor's visits they had less anxiety they had better relationships they had better everything so he for his whole career just did these writing exercises where we he would

have people just Express themselves not to show anyone not even to reread just to express MH the parts of us that are frightened needs need to be heard the parts of society that are hurting need to be heard I'm astonished by the um Truth and Reconciliation councils held in South Africa after Nelson Mandela became president these people who had been through absolute atrocities and they were just heard they were allowed to tell their stories to the people who had hurt them and other people who were on their side and the telling of it avoided you

know what everyone thought would be a blood bath and it it of course didn't fix all the problems but it unburdened to a large extent people who had been through things that I can't even imagine so yes write it write it down so she's in the other room she's acting weird something might come up about like how old is that anxious part maybe it's young maybe it's not you said something at the start you said that um anxiety is like driving over a metal spike in those police like chases that's what I was thinking about

like the police chases where they throw out the metal spikes and the car over why why did you use that analogy what are you what are you saying there about the nature of anxiety that's what it's like if you get stuck in what it's called the anxiety spiral uh in the brain the anxiety cycle some people call it um so what you have to do in that situation is to extend the metaphor get out of the car disarm the mechanism get that mechanism out of the way you know the the tire ripping thing and then

you can back out but the stopping and getting out that's the calming step of anxiety and that's what you're doing here as weird as it sounds when you write your name back backwards and you come into a state of physiological calm you are getting rid of the tire rippers You're Building Pathways that go into the calmer parts of the brain so um the same thing when you were imagining eating an orange you're calming yourself and it it allows you to reverse it allows you to leave finally but our culture tends to not allow you to

leave it's always telling you horror stories so then once you get really calm and you've taken care of that part of yourself I said the acronym is C cat once you get to calm then very paradoxically it blew me away when I realized this then you need art and I don't mean drawing I mean making things making things in three dimensions making events happen making a podcast like what was the fire in you that made you make things and how did it feel when you were in the making in the making it usually feels great

yeah like in the process of making actually me and my partner went and did um last weekend we went and made some art and I was like stressed and stuff and so when we went and did this art I'd like never painted in my life yeah so we went to this like random Loft and there was this guy there and uh he had these massive two pieces of cardboard and like loads of spray cans and paint and stuff and we just painted for maybe 3 hours or something yeah and I was totally lost in it

I mean that's the way people describe it they describe it as being lost in it right yeah and do you know that if people have been through a trauma and they're allowed to draw about it even if they can't draw you know professionally they have an 80% lower chance of developing PTSD there's something about creating stuff and it could be a company or it could be a spray paint on a cardboard um my partner um started making bead bracelets a while ago she's very busy she doesn't have time for this but it makes her so

content and we were talking about how if you go into a tomb in Egypt from 5,000 years ago what are you going to find among other things beaded bracelets if you go to the Amazon rainforest and contact an uncontacted tribe what might you find beaded bracelets people are making beaded bracelets all the time and they serve no function they are precious pointless things she said that we make and all cultures make we make music I mean I think about the cultures in Jamaica one of the worst slavery colonies in the history of the world it

it was just it made what was happening on the mainland look gentle by comparison and out of that you get these incredible art forms reggae Dance I mean like in the middle of being crushed having literally everything taken from them people were still making art this is a part of the human spirit that is just it's indomitable and our culture pushes it to the fringes okay Stephen you can do that on a weekend that's nice but did you really make any money you know get a real job yeah how does this link again back to

the brain so if I'm creating I'm making some art I was doing that spray paint thing with the paint in the I'll show a picture of it after I actually think cool I want to see but how is that helping me to calm my anxiety it's because of the way the structures on the left side um they're obsessed with grasping um material objects acquiring controlling other people always thinking about fear and there does seem to be this toggle effect that anxiety and creativity just can't work at the same time so the moment you begin to

create like when you said I could write this that's expressive writing that's artistic writing and all of a sudden the toggle switches off in anxiety and on in creativity so I believe that there's another Spiral on the right side of the brain but instead of spiraling tightly into fear it spirs it it spirals outward and ultimately you get to the final thing there's calming there's Artistry and then there's Transcendence or Awakening when you're there sometimes we call it Flo chicks at Nei the psychologist who named it Flo um really looked into this and it's a

state of creating and performing at a level so difficult we almost can't do it the exactly the way you were writing your name it's like and you can have what's called The Rage to master where you're just like I'm can't but when you get it and I'm sure you've had this with many things you've created in your life it's like flying it's heaven and there's a time in the process of creation creating where the sense of self Falls away and the sense of control isn't necessary and what you feel is creation itself sort of moving

with you and through you and it's Blissful and I believe that is the state in which we are meant to spend almost all our time and I think that would transform our Consciousness this is a related but slightly unrelated um topic but there's a lot of people and certain demographic suffering in different ways at the moment yes there's like a conversation I hear a lot about men suffering with meaning and purpose and those things and I hear this other conversation about young women suffering and depression anxiety being on the rise there when you think about

those two group groups so like men and young women what is it that you think is the cause causal factor of their suffering because their suffering is similar and different yeah well it's it's conditioned by the way the brain works it works very differently in pubescent girls than it does in say adult men young adult men their brains work very differently from Elders that's why in traditional societies the young men would be herded together and sometimes for example in some cultures their faces would be scared they would leave their name behind they would leave all

the possessions they had or burn them and they would be taken into the Wilderness by the elders and the elders would proceed to scare The Living Daylights out of them making strange noises in the brush um putting them through a kind of trial and the result of this is it kind of disintegrates the ego and you still see it in like if you see movies about the the Army and how the the tough but Heart of Gold Sergeant breaks down the young soldiers egos so that they finally say okay I am not the center of

the universe I need my brothers to exist and I I bow down in the face of nature which is greater than I am and then the elders say all right now you're ready to be a man go back to the village and tell people your new name which you get to choose young girls at puberty go through the opposite experience in many cultures they are isol ated in places away from All Humans because the primary psychological task According to some theories of males is that they're born sort of differentiated and very individual and they need

to learn to integrate with other people to be whole females tend to be born or people identified as female are born very integrated and the task of female maturation is to individuate so young girls who haven't they're just at the stage where they need to find out who they are as an individual and instead they're very integrated with networks of people who are psychologically attacking each other in ways that are extremely harmful to their psyche at that stage in a traditional culture they might be put in say a hut that was dark and given food

every day but you're in there by yourself to until you learn I'm okay I can actually go inside myself and find the truth of who I am on the other hand the boys are out there going ah I can give up thinking I'm all that and I can kneel in reverence at the Oneness of it all and then they come back together and they've got a lot in common at that point because the men now realize they need people and the women I realize that they're having Independence exactly and so each can understand the other

better I mean the wisdom of these cultural Traditions is incredible and we just don't have it we don't have it the the internet in particular spins out the the individuation of young men makes them feel like you know they do have bands and brothers but it's like we're under attack man and I really I'm gonna try to I have to achieve I'm going to try it this way and I'm G to try it that way and there's a lot of battle games and stuff but none of the humility that comes from the elders MH and

these young girls are just caught in horal Winds of social toxicity when they might be taught to meditate and we can still do all those things we can still access those things you talked about suicidal ideation earlier on being unique to humans when we think about suicidal ideation it's part particularly prominent in young men I think in the UK the stat is still the case that the single biggest killer of young men is themselves under the age of 45 wow so why why is that you know we talked about meaning and purpose and stuff earlier

why are young men killing themselves at alarming race because it is easier in the mind to take arms against a sea of troubles like it's Hamlet speech you know why should I stay alive in a world where everyone dies and we're all assaulted by the slings and arrows of Outrageous Fortune he's just watched his father die and he's like why would I keep going I could just kill myself because men are taught combat as a way of control if you're afraid every movie will tell you get a gun like the Matrix where the guy learns

he can control everything with his mind everything he's controlling with his mind so what does he do he says we're going to need a lot of guns you can control the universe with your mind you don't need guns right but there's just this obsession with weaponry and that's kind of in the DNA but when you get people in a spiral of fear it becomes intense and Military all the genocides committed throughout history have relied on like really toxic leaders accessing vulnerable young men and militarizing them against other people which is really easy and if they're

on their own isolated and there are no Elders taking them in groups doing things they turn that on themselves so what is the what is the solution then for young men uh I would say look to our ancestors you know let's take young men um the the coach Michael trada that I used to go with to make fire in the woods he originally worked with and probably still does work with groups of young men and he used to wear us uh he was he was a disciple of um I think it was the Odawa tribe

of indigenous Americans and he always wore this shirt that said listen to grandfather and he would take these confused hurting young men out and he would put them through the trials that they would have had in a traditional society and they would have to learn to make fire together and they would have to learn to feed each other what they could find and um use their skills in hunting building all of that for the community and I just watched him heal boy after boy after boy and it that's not that hard to do why is

it he healing for them doing that using their skills hunting surviving because it's what we evolved to do like the lives we're giving people now the lives most of us are living are so alienating it's such an abnormal this here is not normal right this is not a forest or a beach or a desert this is all man-made it's full of right angles which don't even very rarely exist in nature only in crystals for people that AR watching video she's pointing at the studio yeah I'm pointing at the studio which is Lovely by the way

absolutely state-of-the-art but if you talk about human evolution and the incredible sophisticated nervous systems we have they evolved intimately for a totally different environment and this is is scary so what do we do about it because you know the more I listen to you I think maybe I should run away like maybe I should I have the funds to run away I could I could go forever and I do wonder I go probably be happier maybe maybe I'd start creating though and then this is what I said I did a solo episode on my podcast

recently I said if I ran away then I'd start creating and then you know I might start a podcast on the beach in barley and then you would you would create stuff you can't help yourself and that's why you are obviously like physically healthy you seem incredibly balanced and wise like you've been making stuff so you're very much like your sorry to use California language but your energy is very calm but also very exuberant your story is um is heartbreaking in many ways but it's it's so evidently shaped the person that sits in front of

me today because you're at a very young age which you've not we've not really spoken about much you were part of the Mormon religion oh yes I was take me into that before 10 years old how that experience before the age of 10 has shaped the person you are so I was born not just into a Mormon um family but a Mormon Community where everyone shared the same beliefs you didn't call people um Mr and M it was brother and sister brother Smith sister Smith um and I was told from very young I mean you're

indoctrinated at 18 months you start religious training and they tell you things like um you know if men live well and they're part of the Mormon church then when they die they get their own planet and all the women they want I like all right like you're three years old what do you know right and Jesus is going to come over the mountains and all the graves are going to fly open and all the bodies the literal bodies of all the dead people are going to rise up out and go join Jesus which is why

we don't cremate bodies we bury them because they're gonna come back to life and um I would have nightmares of Jesus coming over the mountains the graves flying open all the people around me are rising up and I would run as a little kid this happened over and over again this dream where I was trying to jump high enough to go with the people who were being saved and I couldn't do it I was I just kept coming back down so I lived in absolute Terror all the time and I also didn't know what was

real because none of it nothing felt real so that was it's very disconcerting but because I'd never had any other experience I just thought well this is life so that was rough and at 28 years old you realized that you'd been sexually assaulted as a child yeah I think I had I had hints of it actually friends told me that I had told them about it in high school and I don't remember telling them so I had pretty much repressed it my father was a very very renowned um scholarly defender of Mormonism his job was

to take the claims of the doctrine and validate them you know academically but in order to do that I talked to many people who many of he had five people working with him to help him translate various documents of different languages and they said he would just make things up and put them as footnotes in different languages so no one was likely to check them um and it was called lying for the Lord which is so weird I mean it means you have a god who's fundamentally interested in helping people be like God by lying

so yeah I was twisted in knots um when I was little and then I think it twisted my father into knots as well and I do have memories and a lot of physical scarring from sexual abuse that sort of blew up in my into my Consciousness right after I had that um the light experience that came to me in surgery and um it actually told me during the surgery you're about to go through something very very difficult but I've always been with you and I'll always be with you never forget that and that's why I

decided not to lie anymore and that's why when I started having these memories it didn't matter because because connection with that light and never forgetting it was the realest maybe the only absolutely true thing that had ever happened to me and I was not leaving again abuse at the hands of your father yes yeah and you remembered that at 28 years old yeah you recalled it at 28 years old it well it it sort of exploded into my mind at they're called intrusive flashbacks um I'd had a lot of lot of symptoms of PTSD my

whole life without knowing it but my oldest child got to be the age I was when the abuse started occurring 5 years old and she looked just like me at that age and it every time I looked at her I would just have these incredibly violent it's not like a memory it's like it's happening it's like you're completely overwhelmed by it um for a period of time and it was it was extraordinarily hard I'm not going to lie it was bad and I called my mother and and she said well yes that's what happened I

was like what you agree with me and she said why shouldn't I I know him better than you and I said okay so like what do I do and she said well obviously you have to protect the church you called your mother to tell her you've been sexually abused and you realized and she said yes she knows well she called me and said what's going on why why are you not visiting us and I said all right I had taken a vow not to lie so I told her the truth expecting her to go into

a rage or something and she said well yeah that's how it is um she said well yeah that's how it is yeah I believe you that's that sounds right that tracks what how how did it track what did she know she said I know him better than you do and I said I don't remember this was 30 years ago but I said um he's really he's not an honest man and she said no he's not honest and then she said you better come and make him a cake which is is weird frankly to say yes

I believe you were raped by your father at the age of five and by the way the surgery I was in when I had the light experience was surgery to correct some of the scar tissue left by the abuse I was it had ripped internally and I was bleeding internally and they just found all this scar tissue and um where it probably shouldn't have been and so for a mother to sayoh yeah I completely believe that's true and what I think you should do about it is to make your perpetrator a cake kind of sums

up the way I was raised and I just I tried I made the cake I went down I served the cake and then I just couldn't go back I just couldn't did you confront him I did yeah um I confronted him at first and then you years later 10 years later or so when he was 90 91 I was born when he was 52 and [Music] um uh I wanted to meet with him after I'd forgiven him to tell him that I'd forgiven him so that he would not have to carry that because he was

a very very miserable strange disassociated human being like really really weird um people he was brilliant but very very very broken and um I think he had to choose between his entire sense of reality and his religion and he chose the religion and he chose the job of talking other people into believing the religion and I think it just completely broke him and that plus um he was in World War II and saw a lot of action there and he was I forgive him you know by the way anyone listening to this you do know

not have to forgive your perpetrator find a way to be in your own truth in your own Integrity you will heal you will be happier then you will notice that there is no more anything to forgive you're done did he acknowledge that he had done it no um it's very strange about it though he didn't say I never did that he said oh but that was the evil one meaning the devil and that was my family was that I'd been sexually assaulted by the devil as a child and that that's why I had scars and

so on and so he said yeah that was the evil one I think meaning the devil but maybe he meant part of him that was evil he never really talked to me my whole life we never had like conversations he would switch languages he would literally physically run away from me it was very very strange yeah wasn't a normal childhood or adulthood and after that phone call with your mother where you confronted her about it and she said that sounds about right um I read that she then denied after oh she totally retracted it yeah

I mean she had to live with him and she couldn't very well like agree with me in his presence so um when I asked her I I met with both of them in my therapist's office and I saidh did you tell me that you've agreed with me and that it made sense to You' and she said oh I just assumed you were joking which was like nah that no so did she ever admit that she had said that no she never did I never saw her again and but actually I have to say if I

had to as a child if I had to choose one of my parents to be around it would have been my father because my mother was just a big ball of misery and rage and I never once remember feeling safe around her why she I I had the distinct impression she hated me really yeah because Mormons believe that children choose to be born to specific parents and so and she had had five children and one still birth and her body was over it and she was done and she was sick and depressed and miserable and

then she had three more children I was seventh of the eight surviving children and the last four of us she was really angry that we had forced ourselves upon her she did not want us and she was angry because we had been born and she was depressed right I I read was reading through your story about how she spent a lot of time in bed upset crying yeah like all the time I had a weird privilege of watching her funeral funeral on um what do they call it closed circuit TV during the pandemic or just

after um one of my sisters had gotten back in touch with me over after 30 years of no contact and it was the strangest thing because I was going to go do something that day and then I thought no I've got to go lie down in bed which I don't do and then I've got to watch TV which I never do during the day and then I got a text from my sister saying our mom's funeral is on TV right now at this link so I sat there and I watched it and it was quite

validating one of my brothers got up and started out by saying if you came here expecting to hear stories of motherly love you are at the wrong funeral really yeah and and my siblings said things like it's so much that she was depressed it was kind of like depression is who she was was it was I feel tremendous sadness for my mother tremendous compassion and empathy to the point I mean heartbroken about the life she lived and the life that many other women live sort of in Crazy systems feeling they have no power um it

just destroyed me to to feel how much pain she was in but uh yeah she didn't like me did you ever figure out why your parents were they way that they were outside of the influence of the religion was there anything that happened to them oh yeah tons of things like they were um my grandmother my mother's mother I think was a complete psychopath she was pr- naazy in World War II she I what like who does that she was Swedish and she just thought that was the right thing to do um was there a

suspicion that your dad was abused oh he was definitely abused by his mother he was sexually abused by his yes yes and that was known my mother had told me this before um yeah she would do horrible things she would put she would wound him and put be Venom on his genitals and um be very sexual toward him I mean it was a mess it was horrible the the things that happened to at that age they left their fingerprints on you as you went through your teen years oh yeah I I was listening to an

interview you did where you were describing being I think 17 18 years old and you were thinking about ending your own life oh constantly constantly yeah like it was a daily struggle not to through through what period of your life I would say about 16 well it started right around 13 but by the time I was 16 it was pretty constant 17 189 it was all I could do to not commit suicide and then um it kind of went on it went to a level of like I can hang on during my 20s but I

think I was 32 the day I realized it was the first day I remembered that I hadn't wanted to kill myself yeah why why do you think that was so present in your life those thoughts because I was in tremendous amounts of physical and psychological pain and are the two linked they were for me yeah they were very much um psychogenic pain you know the body mind interface is not there's not much separation and for me one of the things I talked about in the way of Integrity is that when we lie our bodies get

very weak so um like I could do a simple little hokey test with you where I could oh you want to do it okay so stick your arm out yeah and hold it up don't let me push it down okay don't let me push down yeah okay got that now I want you to do that while lying and the LIE I'd like you to say is I love to vomit okay I love to vomit say it holding your arm up yeah say it I love to vomit why that's so weird now say I love fresh

air um I love fresh I love fresh air yeah I'm trying my very heart say it again I love fresh air now say I love to vomit I love to vomit why is that that's so strange this is why polygraph machines work on everybody with Psychopaths just for people that couldn't see that because they were listening when I don't know if I've just been like messed with in some way but when I said I love to vomit I she could push my hand down but when I said I love fresh air she couldn't push my

hand down and she was trying both times she was pushing hard both times and I would think that I'd be able to resist both forces but when I said I love to vomit it was like the only way I can describe it was I wasn't actually connected to my strength and my hand exactly I wasn't it was like I was inside my head so I couldn't also at the same time think about you you're about to push me right it was like there was two different systems yes because the body lives in reality the body

is honest only the mind and only the verbal mind can lie to us and tell us things um that we we can believe even though they're not true so I love to vomit as a statement that says it's okay to for me to be feel horrible but a smaller version of this is I often speak to groups and often they're in like hotel ballrooms or in auditoriums and I'll stop right in the middle of the speech and say apropo of nothing is everyone comfortable and they'll say yes and no really truly is everyone are you

genuinely comfortable are you really comfortable and they say yes go on with your speech and then I say so how many of you if you were sitting at home alone if you were at home alone right now how many of you would be in exactly the position you're in at this moment and nobody raises a hand and then I say why not and they have to sit and think for a long time before someone finally says I'm not completely comfortable this way and I would say well that's okay because humans can tolerate a lot of

suffering and this is mild what concerns me and should concern you is that 30 seconds ago you swore to me in broad daylight that you were absolutely comfortable well you're you knew you weren't your body knew you weren't comfortable and your mind was doing this little this little trick where it goes very quickly through this okay in order to listen to speeches we sit in uncomfortable positions and that's okay because it's worth the benefit we get out of it so given that I am tolerably comfortable but all you think is I'm comfortable when you're not

comfortable so people come to me and they're in jobs where they're not comfortable in relationships where they're like sometimes in intense suffering in religions where they're not comfortable in all kinds of places and they're they think they're comfortable but they're getting sick they're getting getting physically sick or they're getting addicted to a substance because they're trying to numb the discomfort they won't acknowledge and so pretty much all I do is help people get in touch with a really really benevolent friend called suffering when you know what makes you suffer you're getting accurate information from your

entire neurological system about what's working for you and what isn't and what would be better what would be more comfortable just a little bit and if you keep correcting I call them one degree turns I would be a little more comfortable doing this so I did the like run off a cliff method don't do my way do the one degree turns if you're in an airplane and it turns one degree North every half hour over 10,000 miles you won't even notice your turning but you'll be in a completely different Place mhm and that's just noticing

oh I'm this isn't very comfortable for me I would rather do this you know my girlfriend is anxious I could break my back trying to figure out what's going on and getting her enough presents to make her happy or I could go in the other room sit down be gentle with myself maybe do a little writing about how I feel that would be a little more comfortable it almost feels like we've been trained not to listen to how we feel 100% 100% as Sir Ken Robinson says you know we're trained to think of our bodies

as mechanisms that take our heads to meetings you know that the meetings are all important and our heads are all important and all the rest of our evolution is meaningless to us that's a very left hemisphere dominated way of thinking and that's why Ian migil Chris says live like people with right hemisphere Strokes we're not even in our bodies I think maybe you are more than most people the way you talk about it and the way you've made decisions really it it speaks to me of a person who finds what's right for him very with

a lot of Integrity yeah well I think um I think yeah one of the things I the reason I say that is because I've been saying on stage and wanted to see if you thought it was true this idea CU people ask me all the time they ask me about meaning and purpose and what decision they should make and should they quit their job or quit their relationship and my response for the last I'd say 12 months has just been to try and impress upon them that they were born with this thing inside them which

is how you feel yeah and you you've learned not to listen to it because your mother's opinion of which university you go to has like superseded it and Instagram has but I know it's there because I know like evolutionarily you wouldn't be here if your body didn't have signals to tell you to run to tell you to be scared to tell to move away from this person so I know it's there but you just probably tuned it out yeah and um I say that to people and I've almost never asked them if that resonated with

them but I just just been saying it for a while so I don't even know if it's like true but it's just how I experience life CU my decision like the reason why I'm like here now is because of just I quit a lot of stuff yes so like and I quit people go you're so young it's like actually it's not that I made great decisions it's just I think the skill of quitting was one that just came naturally to me so like I don't like being at school stopped going I don't like University I

left after the first lecture I started a business did it for two years quit that business out the blue started another business did that one for six seven years quit that one out of the blue I love it and um it's it was all like the I didn't need to have a place to go to I didn't need to have like a better option it was just this doesn't feel good I love that but that's kind of running off the cliff like thing is the the costs are high and the rewards are high yeah uh

if you go gradually you're going to get a small smaller amount of gain you know by the year if you run off a cliff you can have a really rough ride but you might come out with a lot of positives and your skill of quitting it reminds me if people come to me I try to give them every all the value in one session like hear this and go away all right take notes if you don't really want to do something and you don't really have to do something don't do it now give me my

money and go because that's the whole thing if you don't want to do something and you don't have to do it don't do it and that's a really quick way to find out what you do want what if you don't want to do it but there's something telling you that you have to so it could be like a horrible work meeting or that that then you've been invited to with that person which you don't particularly like anyway that baby shower you don't want to go to so I like you have to get more and more

attentive to what's going on inside and I I think some form of meditation whether it's expressive writing or painting or just sitting still is very helpful at noticing these fine details and and there's I'm kind of joking when I say if you don't want to do it you don't have to do it don't do it but ultimately that's true and the way you decide there are things that you don't want to do but you actually do have to do them not because people want you to but because you have to do them and the way

I experienced that um I like to describe it with something the Buddha used to say a lot and that was whereever you find a body of water you can know if it's the sea because the sea always tastes of salt and wherever you find Enlightenment Awakening your own truth your path you you can always recognize it no matter what form it takes because Enlightenment always tastes of Freedom he did not say happiness he did not say benefit he did not say you know Mania true love he said freedom and when you know like I did

not want to meet with my parents for example in my therapist's office I was terrified of both of them um and of the whole community my therapist could have been run out of business in the town we lived in um but if I had not done it I would not have been as free so I had to do it but that's a really different I have to do it than my mother really really would be happier if I became a doctor Freedom yeah what is freedom in that definition of the word when I asked you

what your body felt when you started paying attention to it and you said it relaxed it's a sense of I also mentioned flow um which is the sense of being completely almost the sense of self- Disappearing and being in complete harmony with something that is moving through the world um my undergraduate degree is in Chinese and so I know I found out about dosm earlier in my life and it's not really a religion the way we would think of it it's the sense that there is an energy that flows through nature and that if you

don't fight it you will you will live the life you were meant to live and the sense of letting go of everything else except letting that thing work with you and through you that to me is freedom when it comes to food I trust my gut and I trust Zoe a business I'm an investor in and today's sponsor of this podcast all the nutritionists I've spoken to have highlighted just how misleading information is out there when it comes to food take healthy Halos the claims you see on packaging that say things like low sugar and

nothing artificial are often a sign of foods to avoid have you ever noticed a health claim on fresh fruit you probably get my point understandably there's loads of distrust out there who should you turn to for accurate information I use Zoe which is backed by one of the world's largest microbiome databases and most scientifically Advanced atome gut health tests Zoe gives you proven science whenever you need it as a Zoe member you'll get an atome test kit and personalized nutrition program to help you make smarter food choices that support your gut to sign up visit

zoe.com and use my code Steven 10 for 10% off your membership that's zoe.com code step10 trust your gut trust Zoe from the person you were at what 32 years old just before 32 years years old you saying well through throughout your teenagers teenage years to the person you are now how radical is the difference so if I met that 19 year olds teenager and she sat down here I just went back for the first time in years I I had a gig in Boston so I went back to Cambridge which is next to it and

I went with my wife um something that couldn't have happened when I was 17 I had the sense of tapping my younger self on the shoulder and saying I am I am from your future and I can tell you with 100% certainty that it is possible for you to live in a state of almost continuous joy and that you can get there without dying you can get there in fact your job in this world is to find a way to live in a state of continuous Joy without dying and if she turned to you and

said Dr Martha back what is step one what would you say to her I would say sit down with yourself and find a part of you that can say to your suffering which is huge I love you it'll be okay I'm right here and that's something I call it kind internal selft talk and the acronym is kissed and I didn't tell anyone about it for DEC it's because it's so corny sounding but that one thing in Tibetan Buddhism they might call it the basis of loving kindness for years sometimes the monks who are trained there

and the nuns will sit in meditation for days and days and do nothing but offer kindness to themselves themselves yeah it has to start that way so you sit with your miserable self and you say I would sit with her and I would say maybe well may you be happy may you be free from suffering may you feel safe and protected may you live with ease and as I offer her those wishes I become the part of myself that is real because the suffering is the part of the dream world and the reality is infinitely

loving I mean and intelligent Beyond so far beyond our silly monkey minds and we can align ourselves with that and it's like a a Lifeline that I could throw my younger self sometimes I wonder if I did the suffering is part of the dream world oh yeah when you said that are you referring to the the anxiety spiral and those kinds of things oh yeah but also the whole thing about we're all going to die and everything's awful and um what point is there to it anyway we you know you suffering is certain and Death

is certain why don't we just get off the bus now that kind of thing that's that's the dream you know that that everybody who's had the Awakening experience Dante said it Shakespeare said it they're like we are such stuff as dreams are made of Dante in the last part of the Divine Comedy which I believe is his description of his own Enlightenment he looks back at the earth once he's learned to love himself and he calls it the little threshing floor that so incites our savagery it's nothing compared now he's with the source of love

in paradise and he describes it as a rose unfolding and unfolding and producing light and in Asia the it's a Lotus same thing a many petal flower that keeps opening and opening very similar imagery and that's I I kind of feel that way when you mentioned the part of me that used to be so unhappy it's like oh yeah yeah she thought that was real but I haven't and it is real the way a video game is real it's something that we I believe that con our Consciousness projects this life of misery and and even

materiality I happen to think that Ma matter is not Consciousness is not made by matter matter is made by Consciousness and Consciousness is primary and nobody has the vaguest clue what Consciousness actually is but we have it so it must exist and that was that was what deart said he actually we say he said Cojo goome I think therefore I am he actually said I don't know anything but I doubt everything and the fact that I doubt means that I'm thinking so I must exist he said Doo cojito AOS I doubt therefore I think therefore

I am so when you get to this place where you're willing to let your mind go wide open not closed around oh there's an afterlife where we sit on clouds and no I have no idea what happens when we die but my mind is open and the mind we were the minds we are taught to have by this culture are closed like Fists whether it's around a religion or a sort of atheistic science because real science has to be open to the mystery people experience it you can't just rule that out so yeah I think

that what we're experiencing is a real projection of Consciousness but I think Consciousness is something much vaster and more infinite and enduring than matter one of the things you talked about was when you saw the light um during that surgery like when people hear you say you saw a light during surgery people think well you're on morphine or something yeah were you on morphine uh I don't remember exactly which anesthesia they is but I asked so I'm in surgery um they're operating on me I look around I sit up and then I think why am

I sitting up I'm having surgery I look down there's my body they're operating on it and I was like this is weird so I lay back down and there were bright surgical lights and the light that appeared between them was just small at first like a golf ball and it was they they tell us we only see a trillionth of the available light spectrum H we only see the a trillionth of the colors that we could that exist and I think I could see trillions more colors than I'd ever seen before and it was absolutely

mesmerizing you could not you would never want to look away from it and then it got bigger in my case and it touched my body and the this feeling of absolute Exquisite Joy just coursed through me and um and it was the realest thing I'd ever seen so much realer than the body that was being operated on and and um it was laughing with joy and I was laughing with joy and I started to cry because I was it was pure relief pure happiness and the surgeons noticed tears coming out of my eyes and they

thought I could feel the surgery and that the anesthesia wasn't strong enough so they were like oh my God oh my God she's feeling this and the anesthesiologist was freaked out um and then I really didn't notice the rest cuz I was busy with other things but the moment I woke up I was like bring me the anesthesiologist please actually I couldn't stop crying for hours because I loved everyone so much and I was just like everybody that was there there was a janitor I was like I love you so much um so they brought

me the anesthesiologist and he was he seemed terrified which I didn't understand now I do he was afraid that he'd done something wrong because so I said what did you give me what are the side effects what happens to people under this surgery what goes on and he said he said just tell me what happened and I said what do you mean and he said well I was going to give you more medication and then a voice said don't do that she's crying because she's happy and he said I just listen to it and I

don't know why and he was like did I do the right thing and so I told him a little bit it was still I never thought I'd tell anyone this story I've ended up telling it over and over um and the memory of it never Fades at all it's not like a typical memory and and he said do you know how many times this has happened to me in 33 years of giving people anesthesia I said how many and he said once and then he gave me a kiss on the forehead and went away so

I don't think it was a drug effect why truth emerged from that because you say from what I've understood that you you vowed not to lie yeah in any way like not with my actions not with even my facial expressions and the reason was I had heard the truth will set you free i' had studied so many wisdom Traditions looking everywhere for a reason not to commit suicide I mean I had really looked I knew a lot of religious texts philosophical texts I had done my homework and over and over and over and over it

said the truth will set you free I was like in Mormonism they said the truth is what we've written down here and it was bogus and phony and I was like no um but the light was far more true than anything else I'd ever experienced it was far more real so I was like okay if truth takes me there and it told me not verbally but it said look you've been thinking that you could kill yourself and feel better and I am telling you that you are meant to learn to feel this way the way

you feel with me now when you're alive always so go and do that and what I really did was I made it wasn't even a choice it was a it was a absolute Obsession I would not live in such a way that I was not conscious of the presence of that light and that meant every time I lied you felt help week you got when you just said something that wasn't true I felt it withdraw or myself it you can't withdraw from it it's everywhere I believe but I felt myself less conscious of it I

was like okay that's not going to work so I decided what I'm going to do is I'm just going to say what's real do what's real if a thought comes in that feels like it's pulling me away from that light I will question that thought it can't be real it doesn't Set Me Free it doesn't bring me into that I'm going to I'm going to just in investigate everything until I find what feels truest to me knowing by the way that as one of my favorite Indian sages says the only true statement the mind can

make is I do not know because we could be dreaming all this we could be fed misinformation we could be deep faked I don't know any I mean with this little monkey brain I don't know but in Asia they have this concept of don't know mind where the mind is wide open and not clenched around anything and then you can experience a sort of it's the humility of surrendering your Primacy the Primacy of human intelligence to something so much bigger and still being human and having that be a good thing but just not mistaking it

for godhood as part of you stepping in when you step into your truth so you the the body knows from what you've said the body has a lives in a better State a less anxious State I imagine oh yeah you know what it is when people think about stepping into their truth they the reason they probably don't is because there's consequence to that or at least there's apparent yes shortterm apparent consequence I might lose my job when people think of Truth they think of like speaking your mind in in the modern world you speak your

mind you might lose everything well you you ask yourself is it kind is it true is it necessary so you don't say every little thing that crosses your mind and you don't do it in ways that are unkind but yes you may feel that you know I felt I had to formally leave Mormonism which to my entire Community o of of childhood and young adulthood was the sin worse than murder I was going to Outer Darkness it was Absolut I used to walk down the street once I'd done this and people would physically turn their

backs friends right so but I had to so that was a place where yes there was a huge consequence a and there will be I sort of position it as your true nature versus culture and by culture I mean anything from a couple's culture to a family culture to a religious to ethnic National whatever if you serve your true nature there will come a time when you become countercultural you do something that is not what your parents approved of or it's not what your religion taught um how do you know what your true nature is

is there such an exercise one can go through to figure it out yeah the absence of all suffering psychological suffering okay so okay so the absence of all psychological suffering is my true nature so is my psychological suffering caused by being not in my true nature yeah it's caused by innocently believing lies you were taught by one of two forces socialization or trauma trauma tells you oh my God everything's dangerous all the time and it's gets lodged in the brain and socialization says things like you're not good enough you should try harder that was a

bad choice you've got to please your mother all kinds of things we all have them and if if you want to please your mother and you have that it's great if you're true nature and your culture go together there's no conflict like I loved School my true nature natur fit that culture but then my oldest child who's brilliant it did not fit that child's culture and yet I forced my kid to go through school and we've talked about a lot since I wish I hadn't done that I was young I had my kids young and

I forced my child to conform with a culture that went against her true nature and it it caused a lot of suffering you suffer oh still yeah I was really really kind of as deeply sad after the last American election um deeply sad but never afraid anymore not anxious and and even you know the grieving process when you lose someone you're going to grieve deeply and that's a sequence of you know denial anger bargaining sadness there's kind of a they put him in a list uh El Abeth Kubler Ross put them in a list of

things you experience when you lose someone or you're going to die and um it's actually more like being in a cement mixer it just all happens at once but I actually wouldn't count that as suffering it is a process a Peruvian Shaman once told me compassion is the evolution of Consciousness in the healing of trauma and the healing of trauma is the grieving process so if you're grieving I would sit with you and I would bring you you know warm drinks and put a blanket around you and I would cry with you and feel with

you and love you but that's not the same to me as psychological suffering which is that anguished feeling of I just don't want to be here this is bad as part of you stepping into your truth you realized that the relationship you were in with your husband at the time mhm was not the relationship you wanted no um he was gay and trying so hard not to be gay um and when he was Mormon so it was very convenient for me because I was I I was in love with him very much in love I

and I think he really really loved me too I know he did we got married when I was 20 we were we were delivered by the same obstetrician like we had a very similar life path and then we both went to Harvard which was very unusual for people from our hometown so we had so much in common and we were best friends and um loved each other deeply and he was trying desperately not to be gay I wasn't conscious of being gay because I wasn't conscious of anything much I was so disassociated because of sexual

abuse that I just didn't know where I stood he just made me feel safe and I loved that um but then when we started questioning Mormonism and the sexual abuse came up and everything I was just and even before that it was really obvious that I said when I was pregnant with my son I started having psychic experiences I'm sorry they just happened I had to allow them I was getting my doctorate at Harvard and now I was having psychic flashes what do you do with that you either throw it away which means throwing away

the evidence the data or you blow your mind open and one of the things that happened was I started to be able to see what was happening with people I loved when I wasn't there just in flashes but very verifiable I could call them and do it and when that would happen my husband was traveling a lot and I just knew he was gay and I knew that's what was right for him and that his Joy was part of homosexuality and and he was still quite religious and wanted to be a good boy the way

he'd been taught to be and so I think he went through a lot of Anguish I know he did we talked about it and it wasn't until we both left the church that I I said you know I'm gay you're gay why don't we just be gay and um and so he started dating men and I fell in love with a woman and I'm still with her and eight years ago as I said you go into countercultural things when you follow your truth um another woman who was visiting us the place where we were living

the three of us started hanging out and we could not stop hanging out with each other and it's very weird for three people to all fall in love with each other but that's what happened eight years ago and it was so it's a good thing we were living out in the forest because the cultural pressures against that are huge but I we were living in a national forest there were no people around and it was just like well okay then this feels awesome and eight nine years later it still feels awesome there really is something

to that there really is something to this idea that when you follow your truth you'll live a countercultural life yeah do you know how embarrassing it is for me to sit and tell people yeah not only am I gay but I have two partners not I don't think it's embarrassing I've Got Friends that I've got a good friend of mine that's um uh that is in married but also in love with another couple so they're they're like a four and they like raise the kids together and stuff and yeah I mean there's nothing it's it's

this sounds so strange to say but for me to me it's actually quite inspiring because it must take a lot of something to accept that people are going to be judgmental and to do it anyway yeah I'm like oh God I wish I had the like if that's how I felt would I be the type of person that would be strong enough to follow that feeling if that's like how I felt or would I just bat the feeling away I actually think I'd bat the feeling away and I don't like that about myself because of

because of consequence and the consequence for me would be in my head it would be quite grave yeah because you're a public figure so it's going to be written about everywhere and people are going to think they're going to Tweet me all day saying Steve's dating five people or whatever oh when this happened when I realized when the three of us realized we were actually f for for several weeks we were like this is normal right it's very normal for three people to sit very close together on the same couch and talk for hours um

and then finally I was like oh oh my God I'm in love with both of you and they were like yeah we're we're all in love with both of each other and I I said it's fine for you too I'm on an Integrity cleanse and I have to tell the truth all the time to a lot of people um but the it was like being hit by a train the joy that came with that I remember Karen uh my original partner who'd been with me for like 22 years at the time um she came to

me and she sat me down and she said I've been I've been spending a lot of time with Rowan um who's this other lady yeah this this riter from Australia who had come to do some work in the US and she was staying with us for a while but not with us with some other people on a neighboring property and Karen said yeah we've been hanging out and I I just um I'm having very very strong feelings it's like it's kind of like like a fire hose of love and I don't know if it's like

maybe spiritual or and I remember just smiling at her the way you do with your friends when they were in love and going you're in love with her and I looked inside myself for any fear any anger any jealousy nothing there was it was like an explosion of pure joy just Joy Beyond Joy Beyond joy and I was like this is amazing does she feel the same way about you bring her tell her to come here let's let's all get to know each other this is awesome I'll move into the guest room and you guys

can to have the master bedroom and there will be more love in this house and that's just how it felt and that's how it's felt to me ever since and that's my alternative to feeling suicidal Ro calls it um Feeling Good by looking weird H and is that how it's been how many years now four years did you say so eight years wow is it difficult it's like now I just think about how do couples do it and it's like a two-legged stool how would that even work like you need the balance of three like

if somebody gets in an argument who's the referee and a like how do you even do that with two people so it very quickly it felt so natural you have to communicate a lot and there is one of the things is none of us is capable of lying we just we're out of practice I I don't think either of them ever had a tendency to lie to themselves or anyone else so you're always telling each other the truth and there's not there's a weird kind of Harmony among people who are forming Community with total authenticity

and and openness we talked earlier on about meaning and purpose you said the billionaires when they come to you but really anyone that comes to you is all trying to figure out their path in life their their meaning yeah their purpose it's a big big question what are the lies we're sold about finding our purpose because I have a lot of kids in my DMs that DM me and say Steve I can't find my passion or I can't find my purpose or I can't and I never really know what to say to them um I

think one thing I wrote In one of my books a long time ago was that I realized this when I was pregnant with my son and I realized he would have Down syndrome and be intellectually delayed and I thought what is the meaning of his life what is the purpose of his life and then somehow I realized um because of my love for him that the meaning of life is not what happens to people the meaning of life the per your purpose in life is what happens between people so it's in the meeting you have

a home in South Africa so you know about Ubuntu yeah bought the house this year so I mean I've been working a lot and uh it's only really at the end of the year that I get to go there so I don't I don't really know South Africa well yet well the concept of Ubuntu I think is is dominant throughout a lot of Africa um and it mean there's no English translation and it is completely the opposite of our cultural individualism and the meaning of Ubuntu is basically I am me because we are us I

am fundamentally different because I know you and you matter to me and I used to uh be confused in South Africa because I knew there were a lot of AIDS orphans and I never saw them on the streets or anything and then I realized that Ubuntu is a real practical thing there and that the children who are left are absorbed into Community by people who may have nothing except Ubuntu and Ubuntu they um there's a Chinese proverb that says if you want to go fast go alone if you want to go far go together so

we've been going really fast in this culture fast toward our own destruction I am me because because I am because we are is the closest thing you can say to it but conceptually it means the the space between us so that's another thing you can do an exercise you can do to get into your right hemisphere so so we're looking at each other but if you look instead of without moving your eyes look at the distance between us look at the openness between us you feel how it changes your gaze yeah how it changes your

heartbeat this is how people like Carl Yung the psychologist had a dear friend who was a Pueblo Indian and he said what do you really think of us anglos and he said we think you're insane and he said why and this guy's name was Chief Mountain Lake he said you're always staring at things and yet you never see each other you never see what's between you and our eyes are soft and yours are hard and when you and I just did that my whole body went into a state of it's like the light you know

it's like that light is more is I'm more conscious of it when I'm looking at the space between us and I feel you MH I don't just see you I felt like my heart rate dropped yeah so in mind that's kind of how I just felt really calm yeah and I was thinking about I was trying to look at the space in between yeah so I'm trying right now to start building communities of Ubuntu I I started one online just to Foster people's creativity and help them move into this state of being and it's called

Wilder because when we were Wilder that's how we looked at each other that's how your dog and your cat look at you that's why we love being with them because they look at us and they look at the space between us and their eyes are soft and if there's a fly that goes by they'll get sharp and that's the hunting Instinct but then when they're looking at something they love they're looking at the whole space and feeling each other so someone sendss me a DM and says I can't find my purpose in life what do

you suggest I respond it's say first of all sit down and offer love to the part of you that's in so much stress because you can't find your purpose that's a horrible feeling MH you know your purpose but you can't find it because it's being drowned out by what you've been taught and that hurts and I'm really sorry because I know that pain go and sit down or find a friend find someone trustworthy find community and tell them what me Mary Oliver says tell me about despair yours and I will tell you mine and she

talks about the wild geese announcing your place in the family of things when you can communicate your Despair and feel heard and feel connected and what happens between people will fill in the gaps in your knowledge and you'll realize ah my purpose is where my deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet and I can feel that when I love when I and it love is not like goopy gipi it's my deep gladness yeah that's from Fredick bner who was a theologian German Theologian he said your mission is like in life is where your deep

gladness and the world's deep hunger meet so what you just described a young person reaching out to you and saying what is my purpose and you are asking yourself what do I say so you're looking at the relationship between this young person and you and you are in Ubuntu you're looking at the space between you and your deep gladness is to heal the scars and wound wounds in this person you've never met but who is deeply hungry for something the culture is not giving him or her or them that's your deep gladness and their deep

hunger and you've been serving that really well like so much better than most people I've met in my life and by Deep gladness what I how I interpreted that was the thing that makes me happy or the thing that makes me feel good yeah that's kind of an it's kind of people could take that a number of different ways this is deep gladness it's something you feel in in your viscera it's something it's like the most here's another way to get into it imagine a time when you were with a creature you loved and it's

probably easier if it was an animal than if it was a person it was a person it has to be a baby so somebody who couldn't talk my son can't really talk so I get this with him a lot and remember a time when you relaxed completely into the presence of this other being and the cat was purring on your chest or the dog had his head on your lap and there was no pressure to do anything you're being human with this other being in a space that you have created that we've all created with

our Consciousness for the joy of its beauty and its darkness and its light and there's just Psalm 46 says it says the name of God like six different ways be still and know that I am God be is a name for God Stillness is a name for God no is a name for God I am is a name for God and God is a name for God and when you when you feel all of that as what you fundamentally are and it's connecting with another person the gladness doesn't even touch it no word can touch

it but it's two aspects of a Consciousness that thought they were separate joining hands and meeting each other again and the reunion is overwhelmingly beautiful relief Joy gladness light all of it how has the internet messed this all up it's messed it up and it's made it possible you know like it's messed it up horribly by feeding on our culture's obsession with those left hemisphere what bleeds leads right we have that negativity bias and what people want to do is monetize their position on the internet and the best way to monetize your position is to

get the Lion's Share of attention and whatever gets the Lion's Share of attention is a cobra versus a puppy so there's uh there's a psychological and monetary pressure always pushing the internet to frighten us more or to make us more angry at each other to divide and polarize us it's like this left hemisphere weapon that has just gone berserk and so like in America there are these pockets of such extremely polar ized political belief systems that all have their own information sets and I don't know what the hell's true um but they all believe absolutely

the way the left hemisphere believes there's no open mind on the other hand you know when the brain wakes up when it has the Awakening experience it the fruit ripens and ripens and then it falls okay so that I think may be this epigenetic switch going on in the brain and it flashes to the whole brain and changes everything and I like to think of fractals the different units of of nature that tend to reproduce at larger sizes like a twig is like a branch is like the trunk of a tree so our brains may

be like us this our neocortex is very thin it's just this thin surface of cells around the surface of the brain very very interactive and we are kind of like that we're running around the surface of a sphere being very very interactive and teaching each other ideas and if just one person awakens you know Buddha was awake Jesus was awake and Buddha never tried to save anybody but himself you know but other Minds caught that that configuration they switched on and because because we have the internet what used to take a whole national government to

do to communicate with everyone in the world could happen from like a poor kid in Mal Malawi who suddenly awakened and was able to put that into a message um or you know Malala youf like everyone knows what this 15-year-old girl went through even though the information would have been suppressed by the talibon if they could have done it but they can't do it anymore so one awakened person now has the potential to touch the lives of literally everyone virtually for free do you interact with the internet much I do um and I know that

I am shaping an algorithm that is totally unrealistic because my My World online is primarily otter I loves me and Otter and but like it's it's all the examples of love and joy that occur between people and I and then I look at the headlines and I'm like yeah yeah yeah but here you know when I first went to Africa I'd heard it's the Dark Continent everything is bad Ebola War the Congo all these terrible things the Heart of Darkness and then I went there and realized that for every horrible thing that legitimately does happen

in that place there are maybe a thousand acts of completely Selfless Love I I would walk around I every time I go there I think I look at the people who have been colonized you know the original people and I think I'm white if I were you I'd be really mad at me like why and yet I was there we had my um wife had a little girl a few years ago she's a bit younger than I am and she got sick in the air port in Johannesburg really sick and she was barfing everywhere and

we were just pushing the stroller from one tourist store we'd get a bunch of t-shirts and she'd throw up on that and we'd put her in another one and throw the first one away and people came running to us from the different stores and they were from you know there are 11 different national languages there there were people from different tribal legacies and instead of running away from a vomiting child they ran toward us with everything they could find to help someone lit a fire and sterilized a spoon someone ran down the airport to the

only Pharmacy to get the right medication and ran back with it people were holding the vomit stained clo I mean these were people we had never met and this was the place I'd been afraid of because I had let myself believe the stories that polarized me and said oh that's a dark scary place it every place is dark and scary and everywhere there are human beings there is the capacity for Ubuntu and what there is to love the part of us that loves is infinitely more powerful than the part of us that doesn't amen what

is the um what is the most important thing in your new book beyond anxiety curiosity creativity and finding your life's purpose that we haven't talked about yet I would say it's I wish I could I don't know how to get it how to say this clearly enough and I've said it here but what is the most important thing that anyone listening to this you specifically right now wherever you are and I just mentioned Mary Oliver is the wild geese one of the things she says no matter who you are no matter how lonely no whoever

you are no matter how lonely the world offers itself to your imagination you are part of the family of things so whoever hears this you specifically in your essence you are safe no matter what it looks like you are fundamental mentally going to be okay I promise that's it Dr Martha backck we have a closing tradition on the podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving the question for okay and the question that has been left for you is o this is a tricky [Music] one and

you can interpret this however you wish okay what do you think separates a great story from just a good story easy in a good story bad things happen to good people in a great story bad things happen to Heroes cuz there's always conflict and there's always suffering and that can be just like oh that was awful but the great Stories the ones we keep telling are the ones where the person who would be a victim becomes a Creator who says I'm not going to stay in fear I'm going to make something from this and they

F they stand up and they go out on an adventure and what looks like it could have been a tragedy becomes an adventure Venture that's what Shakespeare did at the end of his life I was taught at Harvard that he wrote the four Great tragedies where everything ends in horror and ni Annihilation that was his high point and then he started writing these romances which are so stupid because they have like magic and forgiveness and happy endings and I was actually told he did that because he was scile he was 50 you know the tragedies

are amazing Stories and the romances those are the great ones as far as I'm concerned cuz that's where the tragedy becomes an adventure that ends well a good story is when bad things happen to good people but a great story is when bad things happen to Heroes Heroes because the good it's when the what the good people do with that do they suffer it or do they make it the material of invention do they let it be a weight of lead or they perform an alchemy that turns it into gold and all the great stories

that last forever are the ones about alchemy where suffering turns to something wonderful is this a choice that we have I do believe it is not always like if you're a little kid or if you're a young person out there if you're a working mom or someone in poverty or someone who's just had a terminal diagnosis of course you're going to feel you're not just going to want to jump up and do something heroic be kind be kind be kind be kind be gentle to yourself and if you're gentle for just a while you're going

to start to say instead of what am I going to do about this you're going to say what can I make from this and that shifts you into the mode of the creative and as you start to make something of your situation you become part of the creation and that's when you wake up from your nightmare and to me that's the best ending of any story you clearly have a great story oh thank you so do you because you are clearly someone that is a good person that bad things happened to um now you're a

person where bad things have happened to someone that me and many others consider to be hero because of all the wonderful things that you've done but you're it's interesting because I thought I understood the subject matter of anxiety um and I think I was of the mind that it's something you attack you throw things at you know much of society says the key to curing anxiety is just you throw pills at it or something else but you've given me a whole new perspective on what it is and also how to navigate in a world that's

increasingly more anxious and I'm sure you've done that for many other people in a way that's really really honest um really rooted in science and really accessible I hope so thank you so much that's what I that's genely the words that I that I mean I'm not lying to you thank so I highly recommend anybody who's resonated with any of this conversation please go and get this book it's fantastic it's it has these wonderful areas where um you can engage with the book and there's some like sections that you can write in um but it's

just a wonderful book and I think it's a wonderful book for anybody that's struggling and I say struggling or suffering in all your forms that's trying to understand what that means and how to channel it into your own hero's journey of sorts so Dr Martha Beck thank you so much it's been such an honor and privilege to meet and um I hope we have more conversations in the future I hope so the honor is all mine thank you so much isn't this cool every single conversation I have here on the Diary of a CEO at

the very end of it you'll know I asked the guest to leave a question in the Diary of a CEO and what we've done is we' turned every single question written in the Diary of a CEO into these conversation cards that you can play at home so you've got every guest we've ever had their question and on the back of it if you scan that QR code you get to watch the person who answered that question we're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question the brand new version 2 updated

conversation cards are out right now at Theon conversation cards.com they've sold out twice instantaneously so if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards I really really really recommend acting quickly [Music]