Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
My guest today is Dr. Martha Beck.
Dr. Martha Beck did her undergraduate master's NPHD training at Harvard University.
She is also considered one of the foremost experts in the personal development field having authored many best-selling books including her upcoming book Beyond Anxiety, Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose.
I must say that today's discussion is a truly special one.
I've long benefited from Martha's teachings and I assure you that during today's episode you will benefit from Martha's teachings.
She describes and we explore practices in real time that will allow you to truly understand what is most important to you and what you ought to spend your time pursuing.
You will hear a rich discussion about how to frame the thoughts and the emotions around any topic, including pain points in life, as well as your goals and the things that you are in pursuit of.
You will also learn how to figure out exactly what is most essential to you and indeed how to explore what Dr.
Martha Beck calls your essential self, those deep rooted desires that are unique to you and your history and what will make your life most fulfilling.
By the end of today's episode you will be armed with new intellectual and practical knowledge and you will be able to adopt the best possible stance for you as you navigate forward in your life.
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.
In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.
Our first sponsor is BetterHelp.
BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online.
I've been doing weekly therapy for well over 30 years.
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It was a condition of being allowed to stay in high school, but pretty soon I realized that doing regular therapy is extremely important to our overall health.
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And now for my discussion with Dr.
Martha Beck. Dr. Martha Beck, welcome.
Oh, it's so good to be here, Andrew.
Thank you. I'm so excited.
I mean, I don't know how to convey to the people listening and watching just how excited I am.
I have very few heroes in life, but you are one of them.
I know it's true. It does not compute.
It's true. I won't name all of them, but you, the great Oliver Sacks, are among the people that have really influenced me so much in terms of the things I do, the ways I try and think, the ways I try to not think at times.
And your life story is an amazing one.
We have a lot to cover today, so I'm not going to spend any more time talking about why I feel that way, because it's going to just become apparent in our discussion.
But I do want to say that you have really been ahead of your time.
I mean, your triple degree from Harvard, you have these academic credentials.
You were one of the first people to be public facing about the mind body connection in a way that is operationalized, what we sometimes call an in around this podcast protocols.
And you've offered some practices that have absolutely transformed my life in other people's lives.
And I gained them through reading your books.
That's not a standard book advertisement, but all of your books have been transformative for me.
One of the exercises that has had a profound effect on my life is the perfect day exercise.
Oh, yeah. And when I first read about it, I thought, you know, what could this possibly be?
And as I recall, it involved taking a little bit of time, maybe 10 minutes, maybe 30 minutes, and just sitting or lying down, closing one's eyes, and just imagining with no limitations, one's perfect day.
And what's so wild about this exercise is that several not all, but several of the things that I imagined in that exercise have amazingly.
Come to be reality. It works.
I don't know how or why it works, but I've I used to have people send me a postcard.
This is how long I've been doing this stuff now.
It's emails and texts that I'd say, OK, we just did your ideal day.
You've got it all written down.
Now send me a notification when that day happens.
And I get a lot of notifications.
OK, well, I'm giving you a notification right now because at the end of that exercise and I ended up doing it several times.
I do it all the time. OK, that's good to know.
I want to know about the frequency there was, you know, I'd love to sit down and talk to Martha Beck.
What I wouldn't do. So I'm in a pinch me moment right now.
It's so great. It's wild.
It's like reality weaving back on itself.
It's like, you know, you're not going to be able to do it.
You're not going to be able to do it.
I'm not going to be able to do it.
I'm not going to be able to do it.
I'm not going to be able to do it.
I'm not going to be able to do it.
I'm not going to be able to do it.
I'm not going to be able to do it.
I'm not going to be able to do it.
I'm not going to be able to do it.
I'm not going to be able to do it.
I'm not going to be able to do it.
Just for sake of those listening, what is this exercise?
How would you suggest somebody try it?
So the first thing is that you don't make up something.
People would always tell me they'd make up a day where they woke up in a white room with white sheets and windows with white curtains.
Then they would put on white clothes and drift around.
And I realized finally that these people were just tired.
And they were, they were, they were, they could not project anything but a sort of blankness that I finally realized meant that they just pushed themselves too hard.
So I stopped doing this with people until they were well rested.
Then you don't make it up.
You see it happen. That's the key thing.
You allow it into your mind.
Not as though you're reaching with your imagination.
Just as though it emerges.
So I talk people through it.
You, first thing is you wake up in the morning.
You're perfectly refreshed by a beautiful sleep.
In your imagination, don't open your eyes but listen.
What are you here? So you don't make it up.
You listen for it. What, what are you here?
For me, the first thing I hear is like just feeling how comfortable my body is on the bed.
Yeah, it's something that I don't do enough.
What about the sound of someone or someone's breathing?
Yeah, someone next to me breathing and they're still asleep.
Ah, lovely. Is there a dog breathing on the foot of the bed?
Well, it was like my bulldog, Costello.
It's snoring. I'm going to get another dog soon.
So I would like a dog that breathes with less snoring than Costello.
Although I must say I miss his bulldogs.
His like incredibly deep snores.
The early versions of this podcast, the early episodes, we kept him in the room snoring.
And by the way, the watering up on my eyes, these are truly tears of joy.
And I said at the beginning of the podcast, I said, listen, I have a bulldog.
He's getting toward the end of his life.
So we're going to keep him in the room.
And so when you hear that breathing in the background, that snoring, let's call it what it is.
He's in here like so sorry, not sorry.
So anyway, so yeah, so there's some bulldog breathing.
And you can have as many dogs in the room as you want.
Just listen. And maybe you hear birds outside.
Maybe you hear the ocean.
Maybe you hear wind. Maybe you hear people talking or the noise of traffic.
Just listen for a minute and tell you're pretty sure you've heard everything there is to hear.
Yeah, I like the sounds of kids playing.
Ah, sweet. Okay, so smell there.
What's it like? How humid is it?
What's the temperature?
You know, I'm a California heart.
I like it in the 70s and 80s.
Perfect. Not too humid.
And it's weird that it don't jump in.
But there's something about the sound of airplanes flying over.
Interesting. It always depresses me.
It must be some paired association.
From some time. I don't like that.
Okay, no playing. So birds, bird chirping, who doesn't like birds chirping.
And by the way, for the listeners, this is not one magical day that you'll never live again.
This is a typical day, but your life is now perfect.
So it's an ordinary day, but in your perfect life.
So we'll put it out three years, five years, whatever makes it possible for you to allow that your ideal life could form in that time.
You'll find as you do it many times, the time necessary for it to happen becomes much shorter.
Anyway, so you get up, look around.
You sit up in the bed, look around.
Who's next to you? What does the dog look like?
What does the room look like?
Yeah, it's my partner next to me.
My dog is... I told myself I wasn't going to get another bulldog, but I think I'm going to get another bulldog.
They're the best. They're like the essence of efficiency of metabolism, meaning they do as little as possible.
And they experience as much joy as possible.
Their hiddenness when it really comes down to it.
You need a wise hiddenist in your life.
And they are capable of protecting if they need to, but I honestly don't care about that.
All that stuff, like all that, like my bulldogs, I don't care about any of that.
Something tells me you could protect yourself pretty well.
I'm good there. So... Look around the room, what color are the walls?
What pictures are hanging there, if any?
Yeah, I'm a Wyeth fan. Which one?
And or NC. Recently, I saw a caption.
I don't know if this is true, because it was an Instagram post, that the woman in the field...
Oh, interesting, as well.
That... Yeah. Yeah. I didn't know the name of it.
Thank you. That this was a neighbor of theirs that had a degenerative neural condition.
Yeah. And rather than use a wheelchair of sorts, she insisted on crawling everywhere.
And so that image is actually of her crawling out into the field happily to enjoy the field.
I know. Because my impression of the painting before was that somehow, because she's seated out there, it looks like in my mind I projected onto it that there's some like desperation there, something to get back to the house, but that's not it at all.
It turns out this is a woman who preferred to move with her own agency.
Amazing. Even if it meant crawling to enjoy nature.
Yeah. And it's a magnificent painting.
It's a magnificent painting.
So it's on the wall there.
Yes. Maybe not the original, although that would be awesome.
Well, I'm not. It's your perfectal line.
Then I'm waking up in the in the met.
And also just notice that you're creating a theme, which is the theme is, I will go out as myself and I will reach and strive for things.
And I'm not here to be helped.
I'm here to do hard things and to do them for the joy of it.
So that's what that painting is.
Strong symbol of who you are.
So get out of the bed and your partner is still sleeping.
The dog is still sleeping.
Go look out the window. Where are you?
And you can be anywhere.
I'm a mountains guy. As much as I love California, you know, I've.
I've realized that I just went out to go bolder Colorado for the first time for a week just by myself.
And I fell in love with it.
Yeah. So I'm in the mountains.
Colorado feels right to me.
And there's water. Like a river.
They river. They've got great rivers there.
Yeah, they go. Or the little streams.
I like the little streams that they have there.
Because the rivers are so loud.
Yeah. The rivers are really loud when they get going.
Yeah. And. So are you looking at a small town, a city or just do you just live out in the mountains by yourself?
Definitely small town.
I can't be too isolated.
If I'm going to be in a city, I'm going to be in Manhattan.
It's like it's all or none.
Yeah. So if I'm going to be in nature, I want to be in nature.
So a small town. Beautiful.
So just look around. Smell the pine.
Aspen air. And then you go into your perfect bathroom.
It's all it's beautiful.
You can go through a lot of description if you wanted to.
But I'm going to rush through that to get to the interesting parts.
So you take a look at yourself in the mirror.
Your body is absolutely perfect.
Of course, in your case, that's not an aspirational thing.
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There actually seems to be a radiance coming from the eyes gathered around the eyes.
That's what I'm thinking as you talk.
Yeah. And I think it's the Buddhist that talked about, you know, it's someone who's at the level of their, their eyes are at the level of their skin.
So like right there, as opposed to sunken back into their eyes.
Yes. You know, and then of course some people are like really forward leaning.
That's so interesting.
But this one, and I also have been working on the intersection between the visual system and the autonomic system, you know, so you know, stress or calm.
Right. And I think what that's referring to, and I'm speculating here, is where we are alert but calm.
Yes. So we're present alert but calm.
And of course that controls pupil size and all of this stuff, I do believe has been understood in other traditions and ancient traditions.
Yeah. Through a kind of unconscious genius where they're recognizing all the symbols integrated of, you know, clarity of the eyes and level of the skin and, you know, and of course we can measure the stuff in the lab but that's just isolating variables.
So for me, it's looking in the mirror and I'm like, okay, my eyes are clear.
This is so interesting because my friend Liz Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love, Fame, that she wrote something before she was famous where she dressed as a man for a week and walked around and she's tall and broad-joldered and has, you know, great chin.
So she could get it, she could look male.
And she got herself all dressed up male and they faked a beard and everything.
And then she had her friends come and the male friend said to her, no, Liz, pull your eye, pull yourself back six inches away from your own eyes.
And she did it and then he said, now you're looking like a man.
Interesting. And she walked around that way and she said it was the loneliest, saddest week she's ever experienced.
And she was like, yeah, people gave her more respect in certain ways but she said when they told me to back away from my own eyes, it was like my soul went dim.
Wow. And that's really, really interesting that you would say that exact distance.
It's like a retraction of our humaneness.
That's fascinating. I mean, I don't ever recall as a kid, you know, my dad or my mom or anyone telling me like where to place my vision.
No, no, no, it's not. And I'm probably guilty of being more expressive, emotional, effusive than certainly the traditional male stereotype.
Right. Right. Like if I love something, people are going to hear about it.
And I'm not shy about the fact that thinking about Costello or my graduate advisor or people I love like, oh, well up.
And I'm okay with that. Yeah.
But I think, well, to flip that one around, do you think that that's a real thing that?
I have no idea. Do cultural conditioning that men and women tend to kind of be either more, I don't know, there's no language for this.
I have an NF2, you and Liz Gilbert.
Okay. But I think it's very interesting that you said that that you're forward and your eyes and the idea that the eyes are the parts of our brains that are showing.
It's fascinating that she had that experience too.
So I would love to, I'll be asking people from now on, if you're designated male identified male, do you feel you have to pull your sort of vitality back from the world.
And I suspect it's true.
I suspect it's true just from interacting with people.
And ask women if they, I think it's more vulnerable to have be right on the surface of your life.
And in the surface of your eyes, but it's also much more, there's a sensuessness to the world when you're fully present.
I know I had to shut down like when I was in the Ivy League, it was, I had to pull myself back and sink down.
And that's a typically male environment.
I think it's about materialism and conquest and oppositional thinking as much as gender.
It's very tactical. Yes.
It's like taking what's out there and holding it in, actually can do it.
I know how to do it. You just did it.
Yeah, I know how to do this.
It's like visible. Yeah, I probably just learned how to do it.
Right. Because I'm comfortable in a lot of different environments.
Right. There are certainly environments I don't want to find myself in again or in the future for the first time.
But yeah, I'm very, very aware of what that, that, that distinct change in internal state that accompanies that.
That's so, that was so interesting that you just did that.
Wow. Okay. The problem I'm having now is that I have, and I quote, an interest based for like 20 years, and it was exactly what was in the ideal day, but I had not named it.
I didn't know that you could live in Phoenix and be a calmness for New York magazines.
So notice what you're doing.
You put on your very comfy t-shirt.
Very cool black jeans. Your one wants your belt.
You're Adidas, and you go do something really fun with people you really love in a place you really enjoy.
Well, the work part of my life, quote unquote, work is like reading and teaching and talking about stuff on the internet, which is podcasting.
But what I got a flash of is I, I'd want to work on my fish tanks with my kids.
Oh, yeah, I feel like now I skipped a thing.
Yeah, you're supposed to go down to breakfast and see if you've got a family.
I do. I, um, yeah, I've always wanted kids, um, and trying to time that correctly.
What a lot. And with the right person.
So, yeah, I like tending to my fish tanks.
I have kept fish tanks since I was a kid.
I haven't had one for a few years now.
But, um, I like, I'm always setting them up for other people.
It's interesting. I always go play in real life.
I go, well, see, you do. I'm like, I'm going to put a fish tank there.
I don't know. My interest-based decision system just went, oh, really?
You do it for other people.
Oh, yeah, I'll show up. I'll be like, will you let me in?
And then I'll set it up. And I love setting up fish tanks.
It's like the, who knows?
So your kids are helping you.
Yeah, pretty much. How many kids are there?
Realistically. No. In your imagination, you know, 20 if you want.
Two. Two. I, for some reason, I got obsessed with numbers for a while.
But I was thinking like, five or something.
No, two. You never know.
It could happen. Yeah. The important thing about this exercise is you don't get logical about it.
You don't think what's manageable and what's probable.
And you just see who's there.
Yeah, two feels good. All right.
Yeah, two feels good. And yeah, there's so much life in a fish tank.
There's the plants, there's the food, there's how the fish are interacting with one another, who's chasing, who's nibbling, who's hiding, who's dominant, who's like being kind of unruly.
And like, you know, you know, I mean, I must have seen the Finding Nemo movie, especially the second one.
Like, like 12 times. Fabulous.
Like 12 times. It's crazy.
It's not crazy. This is wonderful.
So good. Like, I just loved the personalities.
I mean, any movie where Willem DeFoe, the voice of a fish, you're like, okay.
I am. So, all right. So we tend to the fish tanks, which is great.
It was just great pleasure.
And then for me, it's, it would become here and sit down with you.
And hang out with these guys and my team.
And share what I, like, know to be really cool, like truly useful practices.
Fabulous. So you're very, very close to your idea they right now.
But, and as you said, I don't know the mechanisms that get put in play.
Certainly directed attention.
You're now like a guided missile that knows where its target is or at least what the target looks like.
And we all make countless decisions every day.
And you can think of it as a lot of little whys branching out.
And if you've got this in your mind really clearly, you're going to take the option that leads to it.
That's what I tell people.
It's logical directed attention.
Except that in many cases, I have to say a miracle occurs.
You know, my favorite cartoon is this physics equation with these two physicists.
And there are all these symbols on both sides of the board in the middle in brackets.
It says a miracle occurs.
My dad's a theoretical physicist.
Oh, really? But he will delight in that.
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There was something that popped to mind.
I mean, there are all these little things that also go into my perfect day that we don't have to go into every detail about working out.
But I just want to maybe mention a point of contrast that served as one of the reasons why I did this practice in the first place was that in real life, I was waking up and sometimes still do wake up with this underlying tension, like something's not right.
I don't feel good. I wasn't anxious.
I wasn't like, but like something's not right.
I went through years of kind of like gnawing and scratching at different things that I quickly discovered going out for a couple of drinks with people made me feel worse.
I don't judge people who drink whatsoever.
I don't like this. It doesn't, but this unease, it's like a restlessness that lived inside of me for so long and still can surface as a signal that this is not the right life.
At that point, at a laboratory, grants, publishing papers, all these things that I loved doing and that I loved the trajectory that I took to arrive there and the people that were in my life.
But I just knew I could just say something's not right.
And I felt terribly guilty.
The reason I'm telling this is I felt terribly guilty.
I owned it home. I was in my mid-30s and it wasn't an expensive home.
It's certainly not by today's standards, but I was able to buy a home on my own.
I was, I'm a dog. I had people in my life, but it was like this.
It was almost like a gear that was grinding.
And that was the stimulus for exploring this perfect day.
My life looks completely different now.
And as far from, quote unquote, perfect.
Meaning there's still work to do in a lot of domains a lot.
But, but I feel like the trajectory is right.
Yeah. And I really believe the source of all my work.
I was getting my doctorate at Harvard.
I'd gotten my bachelor's there.
I'd been there since I was 17.
And halfway through my doctorate, I, during that time, I'd gotten married, had a child.
My second child was prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome.
And that was six months into the pregnancy almost.
And I had like two weeks to make a decision.
And I'm politically very pro choice.
And I wouldn't, again, never judge anyone who made the other decision, but I couldn't do it.
I was already sort of bonded to him.
And I kept asking the question of myself, what makes a human life worth living?
Because the doctors at the Harvard Medical Clinic and all my advisors told me, you have got to at the very least institutionalized this child, the second he's born institutional.
Yeah, for sure. They said, you're throwing your career away.
The head of the obstetrics committee, there were five obstetricians.
And the chief dude came in.
And there I was sitting on a bed in my little hospital napkin.
And he said, this is like a cancerous tumor.
You've got to let us take it out.
It will ruin your life. And I just looked at him and I had the weirdest experience.
And I looked at this very intimidating guy.
And I'm there sort of young and naked and pregnant.
And suddenly it was like I could see two faces on him.
And one was this very stern knowledgeable doctor.
And the other one was a terrified child.
And it was so striking that I like started looking at him strangely.
I'm sure he thought it was completely nuts.
But I looked at him and I thought you're afraid.
You're afraid of this baby.
And I realized that's what I realized that a lot of people don't go to Harvard because they know they're smart.
They go there because they're afraid they're stupid.
And probably true for a lot of higher education.
And I thought he's afraid of the, in quote, stupid little boy inside me because he's afraid of the stupid little boy inside him.
He's terrified of being the person he's worked so hard not to be.
He's afraid of being like my son.
And he thinks that should be thrown away.
And that was the point which I said, I will not make my decisions based on social pressure.
I have to do something from a very, very deep place within.
And so I kept that, I mean, he's home right now.
You know, we're having a great time.
Adam, my son, Adam. I only know his name through your books, of course.
But I feel like I know him a little bit because I love the story about him peeing on the doctor.
The very first thing I ever did in this life was the doctor pulled him out of my body.
And I saw this arc of urine go straight into the doctor's face.
And I was like, so proud of my child.
I thought, if only I thought to do that.
I want to just, for lack of a better way to put it, double click on two things.
First of all, I wonder if we're going to speculate no need to.
But if the perfect day exercise is really about accessing the subconscious.
That's why I told that long story that when I had to make that decision, it was the first time I had dropped everything conscious and logical from my mind and come from a place that was, I believe it's part of our neurological apparatus.
The cognitive structures are so, you know, cognitive function is just a tiny fraction of what our whole nervous systems are able to detect and tell us.
And for the first time I was making a decision from every cell in my body, instead of just my, you know, neocortex.
And I realized my life is not meant to go like his life and the person in the next bed, their life is meant to be like mine.
But we all have this. Programmed into us somehow.
And when we start to leave it in my last book, I called it leaving our integrity because to be an integrity just means to be one thing.
It doesn't have any moral implications in the original like Latin.
It just means integer one thing.
So if we were born knowing who we are.
But at some point, at some point, usually not long after birth, we get socialized away from what, from expressing exactly what our own truth is telling us.
We get socialized to behave in ways that please other people, very simple.
And as you're describing it, I had a great life.
I had a lab, I had a dog, I had a house.
Those are all socially recognized items that say your life is working.
But they have nothing to do with your personal destiny.
Right. And in my case, again, I loved, and I still love doing science.
I mean, my lab is certainly strong.
I got it made sure people got placed in jobs and faculty positions, etc.
Still involved in some clinical trials.
But you know, one thing that painted me about the work of just come clean about this.
I think my throat lock up a bit is I've been an animal lover since I was a kid.
I do eat meat, I eat it from sustainable sources.
But you know, not all, but a lot of the work that I did in my laboratory was on animals.
And at some point, it was approximately halfway through my first position.
I realized I was like, I, I don't like this.
And we could talk all day about animal research and on animal research.
I decided to work on humans instead.
Because they can consent and they house themselves.
But you know, there were so there were some pain points.
But I think my unconscious was pulling at me.
Yeah. Like this isn't good.
This isn't good. And for me.
And I do think that the conscious mind and the logical mind as you're referring to it is it's very tactical.
And it part of the problem is it works so well, works in quotes to move us forward on metrics related to that.
Exactly. But I mean, there are very few people that I know who are truly aligned with their, I guess what you've called essential self.
One who I'm fortunate to be good friends with.
You just so happens to be famous for lack of a better word.
Resonates with a lot of what we're discussing is the great Rick Rubin, the music producer is produced all these different types of music.
And one thing that's really interesting about Rick.
I've spent a lot of time with Rick and communicate all the time.
And one thing that is very interesting about him is he's he has incredible powers of observation.
He can really feel the energy of a musical artist or any is produced other things too.
He does great documentary.
He's got his own great podcast.
But he doesn't get absorbed by it.
And I wanted to talk to you about this because I, you know, I think for people that are very feeling very sentient or really in touch with that.
The ability to like feel music to feel other people's emotions to really that's a beautiful life to taste food.
But there's a threshold beyond which we kind of lose ourselves in the experience of others and what's going on.
Rick can go right up to that line and really see it and enjoy it.
But it doesn't absorb him in a way that he has a place that he returns to that's in him.
And the reason I discovered this is I said, wait, you don't drink alcohol.
He said, no, I said no drugs.
He said, no, doesn't judge it, but he doesn't do it.
I said, did you ever said no?
And I said, who comes up through music?
And never takes a sip of alcohol.
Goes to college and never took a sip of alcohol and tried any drug.
And again, you know, I don't judge.
I've talked about psychedelics on this podcast.
I've talked about my own relationship to those.
What I think are very interesting clinical trials and that sort.
I think there's tremendous potential there.
I agree. But what is it to be able to experience life in the richest way, but make sure that we don't get lost in feeling or in thought.
It's like this ability to move back and forth seems to be the most the best definition of like a great life.
Yeah. In my opinion, because we need to do things.
I would say you don't even have to go back and forth.
You can do it all at once.
You can feel you can think and you can stay in the driver's seat and not be overwhelmed either intellectually or emotionally.
But I think it has a lot to do with you were talking about Asian Eastern like meditation practices.
There's a little exercise I like to do with people where if they're struggling with a bad habit, I say.
Imagine the part of you that is always doing the bad thing like smoking 20 packs a day or whatever.
Imagine them as a wild thing in your left hand.
And then imagine the part of you that hates him and says stop smoking in your right hand.
And look at them and begin to see that they're both well meaning they're both exhausted.
And you can wish them both well.
So one the wild child part is not thinking is just feeling the controlling part is not feeling is just thinking.
And if I can get people and I have them put their hands out because I know it's going to activate both sides of their brains.
And then I have them wish these people well, maybe well, maybe happy.
When they can feel compassion for both sides of themselves, then I ask them, so who are you?
And who they've become is a compassionate witness, which is not thinking and it's not feeling in the way we feel it's not emotional.
Emovar the word emotion means movement disturbance.
This part of the of ones being is not ever disturbed or moved.
It's totally still and totally peaceful and completely compassionate.
And the ultimate parent.
Yes, it is. And Dick Schwartz who who came up with the model of internal family systems theory.
I don't know if you've had him on the show.
Have not but I'm learning more about internal family systems models.
I learned about this first in the context of visiting a trauma healing center.
That's great. And then people are now applying this to addiction as well.
I'll get his name from you later.
Richard Schwartz anyway, I was talking to him and he said, there is this part.
We all have different parts.
There's a part of you that feels like a little kid and wants to curl up in bed.
There's a part of you that wants to go rule the world.
Whatever your parts are.
So he talks to people about these different parts and then sometimes they say, Oh, there's just I've just come up against.
There's someone here who's very still.
He's very huge who's very kind.
And he calls itself with the capital S.
And he says after thousands of patients, they'll say he'll say what part of you is that.
And they say, Oh, this isn't a part like the others.
This is who I am. This is who I am.
And he believes is just one unified self.
And for me, if I don't find and lock into that self, I am immediately swept away by my most.
It has so much fun in this world.
And so you can walk around in that state.
Oh, yeah. Sure. So to be sure I understand.
So say I wake up in the morning and I'm just like not feeling right or something triggers me or I don't know.
Just like I'm off center.
Right. So you take that sensation of suffering.
Yeah. And you don't fear it.
You don't amplify it. You just kind of pay attention to it.
You pay attention to it.
And here is the here is the key thing.
This is in my new book. I kept this a secret because it sounded so silly.
And I thought this would never go in the Ivy League.
And I call it kissed KIS and it stands for kind internal self talk.
So what do you call yourself when you think to yourself and do Andy?
What do you call yourself?
You. Yeah, just. Yeah. So you'd be sitting there and you get you don't feel good.
You don't feel right. The first thing you do is allow yourself to register every sensation without pushing back without restricting it.
To me about bringing down their anxiety.
And I say, how do you feel if I told you I was going to bring you down?
It's not a nice thing to say.
If I told you I'm here to understand you and care about you better.
So just allow yourself to feel all the suffering and then start saying kind things to the one who is suffering.
Even if it's just tiny suffering.
Just go, how are you? How you doing?
Not great. Okay. So there's some anxiety.
Oh, your sinuses are blocked too.
Let's see what could we do for you?
Let's get you a hot drink and like a call with a good friend or a book or something.
And you just actively work as your own caregiver from the moment you are conscious in the morning.
And what that does is it makes you so compassionate to other people because you're not fighting the suffering in yourself.
Yeah. People in pain are usually agitated and grumpy.
And so it's the inverse of that.
Yeah. Yeah, I love this.
I mean, in some sense that the words like self parenting keep coming up in my mind because a lot of this is about learning to parent ourselves from the inside.
Yeah. And I do think that most, you know, we hear about inner child stuff.
And I think inner child work is very interesting.
I also think that as a biologist who spent the early part of my career on developmental neurobiology, like the same neural stuff is repurposed in adulthood.
That's that's something that it's kind of obvious, but we overlook.
Right. I'm like, I've got some inner adults here who aren't very happy too.
Right. Right. Right. You know, but the notion that like our attachments when we're young, somehow that like those neural circuits are set aside.
So then we can form more mature adult attachments.
You know, it's like, no, it's crazy.
We repurpose them. So we're working.
We're working in an adult landscape with child based algorithms.
And depending on how childhood went, you know, that either can be spectacular or so, so or complete disaster.
Usually it's a combination.
That everything, Shakespeare says everything will just disappear and leave not a rack behind.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on.
And there is an experience that is common to individuals all over the world in different cultures at different times where they start to say they feel that they've awakened from a dream.
Played out did it with his cave analogy.
He said, you know, imagine that we all live in a cave and there's a fire behind us and we see shadows on the wall and that's what we call reality.
And then someone gets out of the cave and goes outside and sees this three dimensional world where everything's bright and mobile and goes back and says people that this is the shadows on the wall are real.
They're real shadows, but they're not the ultimate reality.
You should come outside and see it and played us and everybody would see say he was crazy.
That's what academia says now you're crazy.
If you've ever had an experience where you felt like there was something realer than your physical self, you're crazy.
Like, replayed out. What's interesting because a few years ago, so many concepts that I was intrigued by, breathwork, for instance, psychedelics, meditation.
I mean, now people get federal grants to study this stuff.
And we do reductionist work to try and understand in fact, I had to disguise breathwork as respiration physiology.
Which we did and we did a clinical trial and you know, lo and behold, certain patterns of breathing, shift your internal state and you're sleeping your anxiety.
It's like a, it was scary territory for a while.
And now, you know, psychedelics have kind of broken through as, I mean, I just have to say this with like while touching my forehead and like that, they adjust neuromodulators just like, but differently then.
Certain drugs that adjust neuromodulators and everyone accepted.
So the idea of changing neuromodulators to change conscious experience.
And in that altered experience to be able to achieve neuroplasticity is like a, it's also a big duh.
Of course it works that way.
But six years ago, you'd get fired from the university if he said, well, maybe psilocybin could be an interesting compound for, you know, depressed people.
But and by the way, I'm not suggesting everyone run out and take a bunch of psilocybin, especially if you're depressed, but they're not without supervision.
But if you can get somebody really good at it, yeah, I'm not saying do it either, but I'm not saying, I'll do it.
Right. And there, and if you're, you know, or gun shy on these things, contact a local university, they're likely doing a clinical trial on this.
We can provide, provide some links to clinical trials.
I think the data are incredibly interesting.
In any case, the, I guess the point is that I feel like academia is kind of coming around.
Probably do to the suffering of people in it, where then they know somebody who achieved some relief through meditation or some benefits of meditation.
So now, you know, everyone I think accepts, like meditation can be very useful for lowering stress and altering conscious experience.
This is not new stuff as everyone knows what we're talking about in so much of life is like, what's real, what's true?
Yeah. Certainly out in the world, but like in us.
Yeah. Like what I'm hearing is that at some level, we need to not trust our thinking.
Yeah. But of course, there are times when we need to trust our thinking.
Yeah. And then of course, we're receiving messages about what's real, what's not real, what's true, what's not true.
Sometimes about us. I mean, there's all this childhood programming.
Right. Right. How do we start to sort through this?
I'm guessing that it has something to do with being in that compassionate witness place.
Yeah. But let's say, well, you've experienced in your life.
I know because you've written and talked about this.
And I certainly have now that by some interesting twist of fate, I'm a public facing person.
People saying things about you or about me that are not true.
Yeah. Or that are judgments that don't feel good.
Yeah. And we are not alone in this.
Or you don't have to be public facing in order to experience this.
People all the time are being told they are stupid.
Sometimes they're being told they are brilliant.
And they know they're not brilliant.
And you know that this can go in every direction.
Yeah. How are we supposed to hold the narratives, the voices that we hear in our head and outside us in a way that really allows us to be our best essential selves.
Well, I would, can I reverse it and talk about what's true first?
So I remember sitting when I was 17 in the Lamont library at Harvard contemplating ending my life and like actually ending your.
Yes. Yes. And looking at the equally miserable scratches that other teenagers had put in the wood there.
And I thought, okay, they say the truth will set you free.
I'll give it a try. And I just started trying to find out what was true.
And I read through all the works and the greatest philosophers until I got to a manual con who says everything is screened through our perception.
So we can't know that anything is true for certain.
And I felt such relief. Okay.
I can't intellectually know what's true.
Then if it's not true, if I can't intellectually know something's true because everything's subjective, what's useful?
What feels like truth to the body.
And I was interested that, for example, polygraph machines work because the body hates to lie.
It starts to send up a whole bunch of, you know, activation of stress systems and puts you in fight or flight and everything when you tell a lie or when you keep a secret.
So I just started thinking, all right, what makes my body contract and and weaken?
And what makes my body feel peaceful centered and grounded?
And you do so much work with the body.
I love that you're a brain body scientist because the body is incredibly wise.
So I just started letting myself test things like I was raised Mormon and very, very Mormon.
So, okay, Mormonism. Oh boy, that doesn't make me feel good at all.
It wasn't for you. And okay.
So God is not a white man who lives near the planet, colo.
Okay. That is not true. Okay.
That feels better. Okay.
So I started following what made my body relax because my whole body, as I said a few minutes ago, is far more sophisticated has been far more time being tinkered with by evolution than my human ability to think in language.
So it has a response to truth or falsehood that's more subtle and sophisticated than my intellectual knowledge.
That's how I made the decision to keep my son.
That's how I've made almost all my decisions.
Does it make my body relax?
And then does the mind come to the party and make the math work?
Okay. Mormonism says that all the American Indians are descended from a group of Israelites who came across in 600 BC and about to the Americas.
Okay. Does the math work?
What does the genetic evidence say?
No, they came over the illusion straights and down into the Americas.
When I was living in Utah, they excommunicated a DNA expert from the Mormon church for doing the date for finding the data that said the Mormonism that Mormonism's claims were wrong.
So something that makes my body relax where it's also logically coherent.
That's the first thing.
And then what you find is if you really pursue that what is true?
What is true? What is true?
Everything that makes you suffer turns out to have flaws in the logic, including I will die because I can't know.
I have no idea. So to say that I will go out like a candle when my body dies is just as fundamentalist as saying I'm going to go sit on a cloud and play a harp.
I don't know. The Sargadatta Maharaj, one of my favorite yogis says the only true assertion that the mind can make is I do not know.
But you can feel what feels right to you.
So that's what ends up being real.
What's left over when you eliminate all the things that feel deeply untrue to your body and don't make logical sense?
And some of those are things that our culture is very fond of.
Like everything has to be measured or it's not real.
Is that true? So it sounds like challenging or sitting with doctrine and labels and stories that we've heard and that maybe we've internalized and just...
We've internalized them.
Yeah. And systematically exploring how those make us feel in our body.
Yeah. I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge one of our sponsors waking up waking up as a meditation app that offers hundreds of guided meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga, knee juror sessions and more.
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One of the worst mistakes I ever made.
Same. I mean, I and my lab studies stress and I talk about stress relief and physiological size are a great way to, you know, reduce real time stress.
And I stand by that. So I'm not talking about that.
I stand by meditation and saunas and all the things that make us feel vacation, the things that relax us.
So I'm not saying the ability to modulate stress is is incredibly powerful and useful.
I believe that. Yeah. For sure.
But when I was a kid, I wasn't the kid that was going to hold the firecracker to the last second.
I wasn't the kid that would do the really daring thing.
I had friends like that.
And I felt kind of sheepish about that.
And those friends are probably dead by now.
They're not doing well.
They're not doing that.
That's true. And I grew up in the then very parentless community of escape orders that we were, a lot of us were really wild.
We were very free, which I loved the freedom part.
But there was a lot of mayhem and craziness, especially back then.
And it's a beautiful culture.
I'm still friends with a lot of those folks.
But those cultures split off basically into thirds over time, about a third dead or in jail, about a third doing incredibly well, personally and professionally incredibly well.
And then a third, like doing well, but they're not.
And she would be there and she'd see everything is solid and measurable and verbal.
And then it would go off.
And she was in a world where she was like a fluid, the size of the universe.
And she would watch. She was in the shower and she watched her hand on the tiles, dissolve into fields of energy.
And she was talking about energy earlier.
She said, by the time her left hemisphere had shut down completely, she managed to get a phone call made she couldn't talk by the time the phone call went through.
She got to a hospital took her eight years to come back to full functioning.
And during that time, I did not know people's names.
I didn't know the word person, but boy, could I feel people's energy.
And as she healed, she didn't bother to get rid of her ability to feel people's energy.
So she's a great fan of using the whole brain, whole brain living is her latest book.
And it's great. But Ian McGillchrist talks about how when we don't use the whole brain, his book, the master and his emissary says the part of the brain that knows meaning should be the master and the data collector is just the emissary.
But the data collector has taken over in Western society.
Western educated industrialized rich democratic, if you want to get technical.
And so what you were doing to yourself was completely irrational, completely, you should get the Darwin award for taking yourself out of the gene pool.
It was like this stupidest thing.
I remember thinking like, what am I doing?
And of course, we used it to get virtual reality for our lab.
We did a bunch of things that I put were useful that we transmuted into studies on stress.
And so there was always a purpose and a story that could justify being there.
And one that was really rooted in goodness and adventure.
I love adventure and I'm super curious.
I think it's cool that you did that.
I think it's really useful.
I mean, there are many situations where your ability to do that could be really useful.
Like a pair of scissors could be really useful.
But when you're like trying to re-diper the baby, put the scissors down.
It's a tool that you can use.
And it's fascinating. I did martial arts for eight years.
And I loved pushing myself to the point where I was bruised and bleeding.
And my doctor thought I was a victim of domestic abuse.
I think it's useful and even fun.
But you have to know when your heart's in it.
And when your heart is not in it.
When your self is delighting in the adventure.
And when self says, no, I'm true.
Peace be still. You know enough.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a perfect segue.
But before I move on, I want to make sure that I'd linked back what you said because I think it's exceptionally valuable about what's real, what's true.
So to really evaluate what's true, you need to sit or maybe one can learn to do this while in motion and sense within one's body, what feels liberating, opening versus what feels contracting.
Yeah. The booty level of reality as different from this one as a video game is from three dimensional life.
And there's a world outside the cave.
And I don't know what it is.
And I may be wrong. I don't care.
I love it. I'm going to mention Rick Rubin again a few years back.
I called him up and I said, like, Rick, you're not going to believe this.
And I relate to him a story about someone that I knew really well.
And this like very like just kind of wild set of discoveries that someone else had unearthed about their life being completely different than it had been presented and their business was a fail.
They're like the whole thing just collapsed and and Rick just wrote back.
He said, back to nature, the only truth.
Like that's very Rick. Like he's he's that's how he taught exactly.
He said, he said, well, I actually sorry it was preceded by he said, I said, did you read this?
Do you see this? I can't believe this and I can know this person really well.
And like I can't like for very long time.
And he just said, it's all lies.
Back to nature, the only truth.
And I just like and that just like tattooed in my brains because so much of what we see and like in the shock and like I can't believe it.
And I think he was referring to something similar.
He also has said you're going to get a kick out of this.
I think so Rick loves professional wrestling.
He watches 10 hours a week of professional wrestling.
Why? Well, first of all, he believes that it's the only thing that humans have created that's real.
Why? Because everyone agrees that it's not real.
It's fake. And that he likes that no one gets hurt.
Actually, I mean, people actually can get hurt, but that no one's trying to actually hurt the other person.
They're collaborating in this kind of Shakespearean dance that they do.
And you have the different characters.
And so I went to see professional wrestling with Rick thinking like, what am I doing here?
Like it was like loud in the flames and all this is like not a scene.
I would normally take myself to on a Friday.
And it was so much fun. And mostly because of how delighted Rick was.
And his son as well. So we can distinguish or like really identify what's true through this practice.
As opposed to we can't ever know completely what's true.
The whole the Baconian method is except nothing until it's proven true.
Well, we can't prove anything true.
We could all be dreaming this.
So I decided that I would what except everything in time convinced that it's false.
So I don't really believe anything, but I'm willing to like a scientist.
Yeah, I don't believe anything because I can't nothing can be absolutely proven.
But I do know what's most useful to me what makes me healthy.
I've had a really, really sick week body most of my life.
And it became a big part of my navigational system.
I now think I have the MCAS.
Mass cell activation syndrome.
You put out a podcast on that.
My daughter's been diagnosed with it.
I probably have it. And it's just this weird random thing where you get symptoms in different parts of your body.
It's overactive immune system.
Yeah. And it'll protect you from cancer.
Does it really? Well, it turns out that people that run kind of more towards autoimmune conditions.
Like people who have skin conditions that are autoimmune based have fewer skin cancers.
Because the immune system is combating all these invaders.
So there's a yeah, if there's a if there's an upside.
And this is the basis of a lot of the logic related immunotherapies for cancers is trying to have the immune system fight off these mutations that are always occurring in the background.
Wow. So I'm not trying to take away from the suffering it's created.
But that's an upside. And my mother had it.
And I just wish she had lived to see the diagnosis even exists.
But my daughter called me from England the other day.
And we were talking about the fact that she has that diagnosis.
And she said, I am allergic to my own goddamn emotions.
And I was like, yeah, we both are.
And my whole journey has been really, really accelerated by the fact that if I go off true for myself emotionally psychological, metaphysically, whatever, I immediately get physical symptoms of some kind.
But when I am true to myself, they all subside and I get this unbelievable health.
So I've been told that I had five different progressive incurable diseases.
I don't have any symptoms.
But if I allow myself to be untrue to myself, if I allow allow myself to get out of integrity, I suffer intensely and immediately in a very real way.
So I don't know what's true.
But I know what keeps me healthy.
And I know what feels like freedom.
And if I hit a thought like there is nothing to us, but physical matter, and it feels like tension, like when I put down my dog.
And I felt something go through me as she died.
And I was like, I don't know whether that I was feeling something that was real.
But that's as close to the truth as I can get.
And if I see right now what's happening to me, I'm getting into this self thing.
And as I'm talking about this dog, I feel that dog.
And I can feel, I mean, the sound crazy.
Not if you're talking about dogs and feeling.
I know right. You might make me cry because I'm thinking about.
No, because I think I can sense it.
Yeah. I think I can sense it.
And forgive me if I'm like, you know, like now sounding like totally crazy.
If anyone's listening, like this, I will say, and I have a, I'm just going to be blunt.
I got a lot of training in neuroscience.
I got decades of training in it.
And I'll tell you the notion of energy is not mysterious at all.
Neurons are electricity and chemical exchange.
And that happens locally and it happens at a distance.
Yeah. Our phones are electronic circuits that communicated a distance.
We are electronic circuits.
Why shouldn't we communicate at a distance?
That's right. And the really forward thinking neuroscientists are starting to put multiple people into scanners and putting people in scanners in different locations.
And I know it sounds like people are like, oh no, like what are you talking about?
This is like spoon bending stuff.
No. The idea that thought and emotion at one location can impact thought and location.
Another one is that magnetoreception has been published in the journal science.
Yeah. So we're not outside the bounds of reality.
We are like actually finally as a field starting to acknowledge that this stuff exists and trying to poke and prod around in there.
But people have known about this.
So for you, the sensing of your dog passing or what you can feel them present.
That my dog was a physical entity, but my dog was also an energetic entity.
And that entity was something I could feel.
And this is, I don't know how many a couple of years later, I start talking about that dog.
I feel it again. And it is a.
Okay, so when I was pregnant with my son, Adam, but one of the big reasons I chose to keep the baby is that from the moment he was conceived, I started having experiences that completely blew apart my understanding of reality.
My husband at the time was traveling in Asia a lot.
And when I would think about him, it would happen a lot at night for me.
I'd be like lying in bed and I would think about him.
And it would be daytime in Asia.
And I would suddenly be like in a three dimensional movie where I'd be walking down a street in Japan or flying over a thunderstorm in an airplane.
And I'd see these very specific things, very specific.
And then he would call me like the next day and say, I was walking down this street in Japan.
And I saw this very specific banner and I flew over a thunderstorm and the lightning was amazing.
And I started to realize I was picking up information that he was seeing.
And it was testable. It kept happening.
So what is that? It would have been so non-scientific of me to say that is completely insignificant.
Don't pay any attention.
It just was too weird. And so that's when I decided I'll believe anything until I convinced his false.
And that throws your whole mind open to understanding the universe as being far more mysterious than we that our culture likes to say it is.
And yes, there's a danger of getting woo-woo and crazy.
But as I said, the map has to work too.
And you're just telling us how the neuro physics of energy are being tested and shown to be operative.
It is, it's not woo-woo.
It's just at the outside edge of what our culture is willing to accept.
And the instruments we have to measure things are just not there yet.
But the same was said about most everything that has been clearly discovered and is rock solid over the last 50 plus years, at least in neuroscience.
I can't help but just briefly share when I put Costello down because I did that myself, which sucked.
Yeah, but I didn't want to.
I mean, so the vets, they came to the house, but it was at home and I was right there.
I didn't do the injection.
Okay, good. No, no, no. Originally, I thought I would because unfortunately because of my previous job, I had to do that a number of times.
That's cool. Yeah. That is not an accident.
No, so, but what was interesting is, you know, like he let out a big like, sigh right there at the end.
But the wildest part of it was, and I swear it sounds like I'm making this up.
But I, at the moment he went, I felt my heart heat up.
I thought I was going to be crushed like a broken heart.
And I swear it felt as if he was giving me all this energy back.
Wow. And it's because I had been spending so much time here was up in the middle of the night a lot.
He must have had some dementia or that kind of thing.
And I mean, I had that dog on everything.
I was injecting my testosterone for the last part.
Man, I'm a lot healthier folks.
Don't let your dog breed, you know, indiscriminately, but like I've got my theories about, you know, all the stuff at hormones and animals that a lot of the vets are aligned with me on this one.
Talk to your vet. Talk to a progressive vet.
You know, I had him on a bunch of different drugs.
I had him, you know, he was, he was really unhappy.
So letting it, it was the right thing to do.
And I'll stop talking about it because I'll get to worked up.
But, forgive me. But the, but that feeling, it was like, whoa.
And I can still feel it. It's like he gave something back that now, I think enough times pass, I go get another dog.
It was, it was almost like a here, here's all this resource and, and like gratitude.
And so these things sound kind of woo, right?
Could you do an experiment where you put me in the lab while I go through that.
Sure. Would you see huge physiological changes?
Sure. I don't see the point of that kind of experiment because I think enough people have experienced these kinds of things that it's not necessary.
In any case, I want to talk about integrity and your book way of integrity.
You ran a very interesting experiment.
Yeah. That frankly, it's going to sound a little scary to some people and maybe, and maybe reflective to other people, which is, I think it was one year of no lying.
Yes. But like no lying of any kind, not even to yourself.
No. And especially not to myself.
Right. And previously on the podcast, we had my colleague, Dr.
Anilemke, who runs our dual diagnosis addiction clinic.
She's done a tremendous service to the world talking about all the various kinds of addiction, addiction as a disease, yes, but also something that people can overcome.
And one of the things that I love so much about Anna's message, she wrote the book Dopamine Nation.
Oh, I love that. Yeah, wonderful book.
Is she talks about how recovered addicts are actually her heroes because they've learned to navigate this internal process that most people, perhaps who aren't addicts or don't think they are, are constantly being yanked around by these dopamine systems.
But they've learned to conquer their own dopamine system.
Right. So they represent the heroes of her world.
I love that model because we tend to look at addicts and think about it's like like there's all this judgment on it.
But I think they're, I think it's amazing.
I think addicts are people who are hypersensitive to the suffering that they are told to accept.
And so they're trying to medicate the suffering that comes from being out of integrity.
And the society says, you know, like I talked to people, I interviewed people for this book who would go to there.
This one woman went with her husband to the psychiatrist and they said, you know, she's not happy doing the traditional wife role.
And they sat there and talked about what medication would enable her to fulfill this social role that she just didn't like.
And it never occurred to anybody to say, you know, maybe don't do it.
If you don't like it that much.
And people are medicating themselves into a conformity with social systems that are not in line with their true nature.
And addicts hurt. And they sometimes they find a substance where they find an activity that gives them relief.
And so they use it because they're in a lot of pain.
And one until it becomes the source of pain.
Yeah. And it always does.
And it's horrible. But one addiction specialist, I know says, it's like they're standing on a nail and trying to take enough drugs to stop the pain.
But that is not what you need to do when you're standing on a nail.
You need to take the nail out.
And the nail is the part of your life that you're living that's out of integrity with your true nature because other people want you to live that way.
And they will force themselves.
They want to stay in the position of pain or fear.
Push past it. Be stronger.
Yeah. I've spent a lot of my life there.
I'll confess. And it's super unpleasant.
And it's always led to like shitty things.
But how, how lottable is it that you took what the culture told you was good and by God you learned to do it.
And we tell ourselves stories like, well, if we achieve certain things, then we'll be in a better position to do more for other people.
Like there's the martyrdom version of it too.
The reason I brought up Anna was she was the first to alert me to these studies that have been done about how myelination and growth of the prefrontal cortex is actually accelerated when people tell the truth, especially around truths that are somewhat uncomfortable.
And it's a beautiful literature that's small, but starting to really emerge.
Yeah. And and the big part of the recovery from addiction is people first like acknowledging the truth to themselves.
Yeah. And then to other people.
And you know, again, it's all of that's kind of shrouded by how we think about addicts.
Like, you know, sadly in any major city and even small towns now, you can see that the bent over, you know, the fentanyl addicts and like we we judge were like, oh, you know, or where we say it's so sad or.
But that's just, you know, an example of how far gone people can get in that particular addiction.
Anna offers an interesting idea, which is that the more we tell these little micro truths, the more connected to reality we are.
Yes. Yes. And in the way of integrity, you talk about this experiment that you did.
Like, first integrity cleanse.
So, what an integrity cleanse.
So maybe you could explain what it is.
And it sounds incredibly scary.
It's not just the telling the truth part.
It's the realizing the truth part.
Yeah. Yeah. I guess I'm going to start with the woo story.
I was very sick. And at one point they rushed me into surgery.
Didn't know what was wrong with me.
I had some internal bleeding going on.
That's a long story. Wrote about it in a true.
Sometimes silence was the greatest truth I could tell.
But I didn't even know that that was the case until I started my experiment.
So I did not lie for that year.
And I've done it many, many times since.
But I would not recommend jumping into it 100% from a life that hasn't already been pretty examined.
What Anna has said. And I think in the backdrop of what you're saying is that everybody does these little micro adjustments.
So, and you've said constantly.
And you've said that this is largely to smooth social interactions.
That most of lying is to smooth social interactions.
Yeah. The reason it shows that most people lie at least three times within 10 minutes of meeting another person.
They lie to them. And men are socially conditioned to tell lies that make them seem a little bit cooler than they maybe think they are for real.
And women, people identified as women are socialized to tell lies that make other people feel good about themselves.
So it takes you in different directions.
But I just wasn't going to tell any lie at all.
And let me just say that that year I.
It's not like I could say I lost these things.
But the fact is I dropped them.
I walked away from them.
My religion. My with the religion went the family of origin.
And I had growing up because to leave Mormonism is worse than murder in that community.
I was cast into outer darkness.
My marriage realized I was gay.
Oops. I hadn't figured that out.
That came to you as a realization in that year.
Yeah. Okay. It must have been in your unconscious someplace prior.
Yeah. There had never been a kind of like knock knock.
Hey. I was so bent on being a good person according to my socialization.
The same way you were bent on being a brave strong male according to the state warning culture.
I would never have let that anywhere near my consciousness.
And it had to be a series of experiences.
And my ex-husband was gay as well.
I'd known that about him for a while.
And so and I knew he was his best self when he was his gay self.
So that kind of helped. But the marriage ended because of that.
Let's see what else happened.
Oh, yeah. I quit academia.
So my industry. The thing I'd gone to all those years of school for my job.
I was in support. Left my I was living in Utah at the time.
And I sort of fled for the border.
So I lost my home. How were you feeling during this?
Better and better and better.
I just think I needed to be like it was horrible.
You're like no better and better.
It kind of was, but not as horrible as staying in all those things.
And the part that intrigues me at the moment is like the losing of friends, like losing of people and the structures that we relied on also for safety.
Yeah. That's got to be hard.
Oh, it's it's very yeah for there for parts of the psyche that are very attached to socialization and attached to people that are familiar to you.
It's heartbreaking. Really heartbreaking.
But that light gave me a full on experience of the self.
And that I just I. What it told me was it's always there.
My son who I stand syndrome one day told me after his friend's mother died, we're coming home from the funeral on.
He said I didn't cry and I said it's okay if you cry strong men cry and this is a sad time.
And he said, yes, not as hard after the light comes and opens your heart.
And he can barely talk and so it was very garbled and I was like what a light came and opened your heart.
I said, when did this happen?
He said May 10th. I was like this year.
No, I was 13. I was like, you're holding out of me.
So this light had appeared in his room when he was having a really hard time.
He said, you know, I can see it.
And I was like, you can. And he was like, yeah, like he was sort of disappointed in me.
And I said, well, where is it?
Is it like up there down here in your head and your heart?
And he just looked at me and he said, mom, it's everywhere.
He just sees the whole world illuminated.
And I think that's what I saw in the forest when suddenly the world would just turn to light.
It was that light. So that was the field.
And as I lost each friendship, as I lost each job, as I faced the fear and the heartbreak and everything, those parts of me were dissolving.
And I was becoming more identified with that light.
And that was the thing. I was, it was completely selfish.
I was not going back to the way I felt before I felt that light.
Never going back there.
Did you feel as if you had to accomplish certain things degrees, et cetera, first in order to allow yourself this?
I hear this a lot. And in the backdrop of this entire conversation, I have one little piece of neural real estate, which is like devoted to the audience that is saying, okay, can do this things once I have a job, once I have blank, once I have the resources.
But at the same time, I do want to highlight for people that everything that we've talked about in terms of practices and things to do, like you just do them.
There's no, there's no purchase.
Like it's inside of us. Like there's no looking to something in a package or in a, even a program.
It, it's all within us. Like so it can be done it really anywhere and with any amount of resources or lack thereof.
But, but be gentle with yourself.
Don't quit your job. I mean, I was very violent.
I was quite a lot like you, you know, the way I got Harvard was I had a part of myself called Fang that did not care what hurt me.
I go running in the snow.
I remember once I bought running shoes that were too small and all my toenails came off during that run and I just kept running and stop and take off another toenail and keep running.
I was able to be very brutal to myself just living in Boston as brutal to well, you know, on the plus side, my feet were completely numb because the cold.
Okay, there's. But so you have some you have the capacity for extreme resilience.
Yeah. And it, and it perhaps took took you too far.
Yeah. And I think that's why I did I did this massive integrity cleanse when I was at a place where I was far, far away from my true self.
And because of that, it was a kind of violent breaking of connections.
So now if I'm coaching somebody, I'm like, be very gentle.
Take the I call it one degree turns.
If you're flying a plane and you turn one degree north every half hour, you won't even notice it's turning, but you'll end up someplace very different.
So just gently move away from what causes you to suffer.
Get yourself the cup of tea in the morning to soothe your throat, listen to your own sorrow.
So cancel a meeting because you just don't feel like doing it.
You know, these are the things that bring you back to your truth.
And it's always loving.
And it's not loving necessarily to just say, I'm going to start to truth about everything and I don't care who hates before it.
That was just my way. It's inevitably a much kinder, more generous version of ourselves emerges when we're living our truth.
I mean, it's a foregone conclusion, but still we're stating.
Yeah, I can personally say that most of my suffering has been the consequence of the fact that I am I love love.
And I'm blessed with many great friends and things of that sort, business partners, et cetera.
But I have a tendency to get into relationships quickly and ending them feels near impossible.
And this has caused me and you know, and also others too much suffering.
Yeah. And so a lot of that is the reason I raised this is that it's about holding to truth at the same time, which feel incompatible on the one hand really loving and caring about someone.
Yeah. And at the same time knowing that the loving caring thing to do is to go separate ways.
And it's this relationship to loss that I sort of can't accept.
Yeah. And I haven't been able to like I can accept that people die.
All three of my academic advisors are wonderful people suicide cancer cancer.
Like so I had to come to the conclusion pretty early on in my academic career like wow, like I'm the common denominator.
I joke, you know, like and it took me a long time to realize like this might not be my fault.
I know it's crazy like how would that, you know, but I think that it also woke me up to the idea, you know, like life as we know it in this life ends.
And so to try and make the most of it.
But the idea that people would move apart.
Yeah. Even in circumstances where death doesn't separate them.
Yeah. To me, it's like it's so painful.
Was it Keats who said that of all the ways there are to light it to this relationship thing because it's it applies across everything that it's hardest in relationships.
And that is start to notice the first moment when part of you a deep part of you knew you were losing your threat you were losing your integrity.
And think about a relationship you had that ended poorly where you love the other person by giving your whole self to them, which you've been taught is called love, even though I don't think it is called love.
So and then look back on the first moment that she wanted something and you abandoned yourself to give it to her.
And it's usually very early in the relationship.
Like day one. And then it's like, this is in safe.
Exactly. And you you just crushed right over that boundary.
That very sensitive inner vigilance that's saying this is how we stay whole under this is how we stay an integrity.
So most people with a job with a relationship with any choice they make.
And I pick up the pieces for the mirrors later that like, oh, that I knew that the first week.
And I stayed in there for 20 years.
So it's about as I said earlier, being really granular in your experience of your own suffering and knowing that you are not here to suffer.
There's this big thing that men in our society are taught that if you know, their love signs like I would the, the, I can remember his name, you know, I would crawl down the avenue black and blue to show my love to make you feel my love.
And it's like, okay, that's not showing me love.
You don't have to hurt yourself to show me love.
But maybe that's why you have to pull back six inches from your own eyes to brutalize yourself for other people that martyr.
Archetype. It's now it doesn't work.
That's caused me and I think others a lot of suffering because I think what ends up happening is that when we get separation from that person, then we do a little bit of self recovery.
But then it's it's like all fractured and repeat and repeat right exactly what you just described as extremely helpful.
I'm curious in your role as a coach to many people.
Often are romantic relationships, partnership type things, whatever form that takes for people.
How often is that like the bulk of what people struggle with, at least in terms of what they bring to the table or is it more often I don't like my job.
I'm in the wrong life professionally.
You know, if you had to give us like the non peer reviewed study, but like kind of crude breakdown.
I think because they identify me as a coach, they go to a therapist with relationship things, but people couldn't be with my life just start working that feeling.
The whole thing. Oh, great.
Yeah, I know that I was not working, but in my job, I need to change my job.
I need to get my purpose.
I need to have my life's meaning.
And it always ends up ending up to be about the relationship as well.
You know, but anybody, anything we do that's dysfunctional for any part of ourselves is dysfunctional for every part of ourselves.
The way we do anything is the way we do everything.
So if you come in with a job issue because you're, you know, you've got a horrible boss, but you never complain, you're going to end up telling me that you're in a horrible marriage with this spouse is awful, but you never complain.
That same issues come forward as a kind of gift to show us over and over, not that way.
No, okay, see that pattern.
No, see that pattern. Well, it's interesting that you say that because I feel like professionally, it's like there's like a gravitational pull.
Like I wanted to get into tropical fish when I was a kid and I was like tropical fish, I would spend all day at the tropical fish store.
Then it was birds, then it was skateboarding, then it was, you know, that I wanted to be a firefighter, like whatever eventually it was neuroscience and it was podcasting, you know, it's just like I can't miss.
When I say that, I mean, I can't keep myself from doing what I really want.
Yeah. I would say likewise with friendships, I'm fortunate to have a great relationship to my biological family.
It was really rocky for a lot of years, but it's like the work has paid off and they've done a lot of work.
In romantic partnership, it's like a carve out.
It's been much more challenging.
I've had some amazing partners and partnerships, like amazing.
I'm still on excellent terms with many of them.
And then I've had some really, really brutal, like barbed wire.
I've had to take a look at my role in that too, right?
So in this case, for me, it's like a carve out, I think of it as like this, like wedge-shaped carve out.
It just seems so much more challenging, but I think in talking with you today, it's clear that it's because of this thing of like it's not, I'm not approaching it from the standpoint of like I want to do this and it's good for me.
Yeah. To be frank, whereas in the work domain, it's like what feels good ends up being really good for me.
Because for a while, you did things that hurt you and then you realized, no, the things that hurt me, I'm not going to do that.
I'm going to do the things I like.
When you bring another human being into it, when it's a romantic partnership, I think you still have the pattern of I will do things that hurt me.
I will abandon my sense of safety.
I will go over my own experienced internal boundary.
And you just haven't, you've done it in other areas of your life, but this is, yeah, this is a big one for you, where you just haven't applied the same wisdom you've learned in other areas.
And I would guess that it's because you don't feel that that's loving to the other person.
If you decide you're not going to kill animals at your job, you know, the people at your lab aren't going to be heartbroken.
But if you decide you don't want to live a certain kind of life with another person, that person's heart could get broken.
Or at least they could feel that way, they could genuinely feel pain.
So I think maybe that's why it's a cut out thing because this changing your job doesn't hurt someone, but changing your relationship pattern, somebody could get hurt.
And if you don't change your pattern, someone will also get hurt.
Right. Well, and that's often the case, right?
And I think so this notion of others getting hurt when we make the choice that's most in line with our own integrity, whether it's relationship or family or the decision to move or leave a job, how do you sit with that?
I mean, how does one sit with that?
I mean, I think I have clearly internalized some script that says if someone else is really upset, even, you know, and obviously the right thing is often not the thing that makes people feel best, etc, etc.
But how do you work with that?
So there are different ways of reframing it.
And one example since you know a lot about addiction, if somebody is addicted to you pleasing them, you're pleasing them and going out of your integrity to please them, to give them whatever they want that pleases them.
Your addiction as a codependent is giving them that emotional energy, whatever they, whatever gets them high.
And their absorption of that energy and the imbalance that results, it's as if they are getting high on you.
And an alcoholic, if you take away the bottle of booze, will tell you, you are hurting me.
This is the worst thing you could ever do to me.
You have no idea how much I'm suffering.
And the thing you have to do in an intervention is, no, it's the alcohol that's doing the hurting.
You know, it's the overgiving.
It's allowing someone to consume your energy and to get high on it.
That is an addiction. I will not let you do it.
I will separate from you person to person if you continue in your addictive pattern.
Doesn't mean that we won't be together in the great self and when there were all oneself and we can all love each other forever.
But it is not kind to feed someone's addiction to eating your energy.
Does that make sense? Yes.
You have to do some tough love.
Yeah, the compassionate thing is to do the right thing.
Yeah, this is not helping you.
And they say, but I want more of you and you say, no, you really don't.
You want something false I was creating for you.
And it's actually not me.
You know, my friends who, why would you leave the church?
Now you're lost to us. And I was like, no, I was always a gain on Mormon.
You know, I was just feeding you the story that I was a straight Mormon girl.
You know, and I can't feed you that anymore.
It's making you sick. It's making me sick.
It's not true. And some of them I never saw again and some of them came around years later and said, oh, I figured it out.
And some probably still are really happy and think I'm going to hell.
Sorry. I didn't laugh at that, but I did.
I don't know. I find it hilarious.
I mean, sorry. Not sorry.
No, that was just nothing to do with laugh there.
Goodness. Yeah, I think this notion of things ending because we realized that we were telling lies.
Yeah. And gosh, it even hurts to say.
Yeah. You know, it's like because we weren't trying to tell lies.
No, no. We didn't know we were telling lies.
Yeah. It's an innocent mistake.
To me, that often grows from what I think of as empathy, probably not, certainly not the best form of empathy.
But I think that there's a human phenotype that I'm familiar with where we we feel other people's emotions, which I think is healthy.
Yeah. Can be healthy. Yeah.
And we love seeing people enjoy.
Yeah. And we delight in it.
So it feels good to us. Yeah.
To, you know, feed this addiction.
Oh, I know. It's not like it's like, oh, here I am, Maridom.
Like I'm bleeding out, bleeding out, bleeding out.
Yeah. But it's not in line with this essential self.
And here, I guess the little vignette that's related to this is that I do think there's one very healthy form of this, which is I believe, at least for me, with a dog.
I like other animals too, but with a dog, when we love them, we are seamlessly attached to their love of us.
And so loving them and empathizing with them means like double the love.
Like we love them and we can feel their love.
And it's like a perfect, it just feels like a perfect circle.
And with people, that can happen too.
I imagine. I felt that a few times.
I certainly feel that in my friendships.
I feel that with my sister.
And I felt it in a few of my romantic relationships.
But the empathy for the others pleasure can go too far.
Yeah. And then when we quote unquote, lose ourselves, I think it's because there's a component of ourselves that's like not attached to the part that still has our own needs.
Yeah. Totally. Yeah. Here's the thing.
You don't your dog. I expect your dog to pretend it's not a dog.
You don't deserve. You don't expect your dog to stop loving walks and chasing a ball and just being a dog.
And when it's tired, it'll go to sleep.
But often when we fall in love, we try to make ourselves not who we are and try to become the person that will make the other.
Maximally thrilled with us.
And I know exactly what you're talking about.
I have thrown it like I love to give money to people.
Yeah, I do too. And then it never works.
Well, it works out only in cases where it feels true in my in my heart.
If I give, if I over give because someone said they're saying, I need and it doesn't feel good in the giving, I am not being a dog.
A dog would say, no, this is where my limits are.
I'm going to go lie down on the floor and sleep.
But I will get an extra job to give money to people that I don't want to give money to after the first little while.
So we bend ourselves out of our true being.
And I think the reason we love dogs so much is that they love, but they love truly.
They love honestly. They don't pretend to be something they're not.
And they don't have the empathy that says, if your leg is broken, I will break my own leg and lie down next to you so that I feel exactly the same pain you're feeling.
It is not empathy to feel everything the other person is feeling.
If they then take the broken leg example, if you got hit by a car, you're lying there screaming in anguish.
And I felt you're feeling so strongly that I couldn't cope and I lay, you know, fell down in a faint.
I had a client once who has passed away.
Now so I'll tell this anecdote.
In her husband was like you, he would give himself away.
And she gladly consumed all his life energy.
And one day he had a heart attack.
And near fatal heart attack.
And she called me and said, I couldn't get him to take care of my needs while he was having this heart attack.
He just had it. And I was like, yeah, he couldn't help that.
And she said, well, I told him he said, I can't be there for you right now.
I'm having a heart attack.
And she said, you're not the one whose husband may be dying from a heart attack.
She was so into consuming his energy, but she actually said that with a straight face.
She was expecting him to give empathy.
That's not empathy. That's selling yourself out.
Empathy acknowledges self-other awareness.
There are four components to real empathy.
Self-other awareness.
I am not you as Byron Katie, one of my favorite spiritual teachers says, my favorite thing about separate bodies is that when you hurt, I don't.
It's not my turn. So good.
So good. Yeah. Another one is emotion regulation.
See something else horrific.
This is where you can use your skills dealing with your emotions.
You bring it down. I'm a surgeon.
I'm dealing with a horrible ER accident.
I can't feel that. I have to get to work.
That's emotion regulation.
You can do that. Self-other awareness.
Emotion regulation. Two other components.
Those are the two that I think we really need to focus on.
If you hurt, I don't. It's not my turn.
And when you're hurting, and I start to hurt too much because you're hurting, I can bring myself back into my own body, relax, and be contented in my own skin so that I can be present for you.
So here's the thing I love.
It's a short quote from a poem by Hafez, who was a 13th century Persian poet.
It's so simple. Remember it though.
Troubled. Then stay with me for I am not.
I love that. Yeah. That's being yourself in a relationship.
Then stay with me for I am not.
But I'm really, really unhappy.
I see that. And I'm not unhappy.
But I really, really want to be together.
I really see that that's how you feel.
And I don't want it. It's so interesting because I feel like in the domain of work and with my friends and largely with family, you know, like giving feels great.
And then people are like, sated.
Yeah. And then they go on their way.
But I noticed a contrast with romantic partnerships when, as I've said, I maintain good relationships with a couple of girlfriends that I had.
In some cases, I'm good friends with their husbands.
They actually just came and visited with their sister and her kid recently and like on just great platonic terms.
But for years, I didn't worry about them, but I felt like I could still feel the energetic pull.
Even though they weren't asking for anything.
Right. And then when I attended their wedding, this particular person's wedding, I was like, oh, I was like, my work is done.
And I got to enjoy and still get to enjoy the friendship with the whole family.
Yeah. But it really showed me how much the whole relationship, so much of the relationship had been about like trying to make sure the other person was okay.
You make it your job to make them happy.
And it is never your job to make another person happy.
You can not do it. Happiness is an inside job.
You cannot make another person happy.
You can't be, you can't go far enough into someone else's sadness to make them happy.
You can't go far enough into their sickness to make them well.
You have to get out of your own sadness and your own sickness and then stay in your integrity with love for them and model what it is to be in your own skin.
There's the only one you're ever going to have.
Well, my oldest child, as a teenager, I was so over-involved in everything and they gave me a song called Let Me Fall by a man who had fallen from a tree and been a broken spine.
He was a paraplegic. And he just says, the one I will become will catch me.
Don't catch me anymore.
And it was so hard as a parent to let my child have, you know, suffer this wings and arrows about rage and fortune and what they were telling me they're they then pronouns.
Was that this is my life and my suffering is my birthright.
And I am here to figure it out as I go.
And you are not loving me when you shove yourself into my affairs to try to take away my suffering.
Let me fall. What a mature and generous thing for them to say they are.
It sounds like it. This is your oldest.
The contrast and I think what drives a lot of what we're really talking about here is codependency.
Oh, yes. For those that don't know the name, we're having caught on.
Right. Exactly. Is that sometimes when we cut people off or we just say, hey, I can give but only to this point.
Yeah. Or you can get this aspect of me, but not these other aspects, especially if they've been receiving them before.
They get. Oh, yeah. Pist.
I mean, this is, I mean, and it's unclear, especially if the relationship had been different up until then that, you know, like if that's why it sometimes feels unfair to do.
It's like, oh, yeah. You know, it's one thing to invite someone over for a drink then to discover that they're an alcoholic, continue to fill their glass, enjoy the exchange and then one day realize they're an alcoholic.
Yeah. And I guess that term isn't used anymore.
I've been told by many audience members.
Oh, forgive me. It's alcohol use disorder.
I said that too. I'm sorry.
No, quite all right. I think that field of addiction medicine is nascent enough that we're still making the transition.
And I don't say this, by the way, for political correctness, I'm not a politically correct person.
I've had to learn to reframe these things for the specific purpose of trying to bring more people into the conversation.
Also, I like the sound of, I don't like the idea, but the words alcohol use disorder, the disorder piece is also controversial.
Right. But what I love is that as soon as we start to name things and rename things, we're all talking about those things.
And then there's no way out of the conversation.
So that's my, that's my like kind of jujitsu going out of out of the, so that means we have to talk about it.
Just like autism spectrum disorder or autism or, or neuro typical atypical, guess what folks now we're all talking about it and it needs to be talked about.
So in any case, at some point, there's the idea like I'm cutting you off and the person says, but this is what we do.
Yeah. This is the kind of promise that you made.
And so then we find ourselves in like the other scripts of like, well, now I'm like being bad.
I'm doing the right thing, but I'm breaking a promise, which we're told from like the time we're little like you don't do.
But only in the eyes of the other person, if you come back into your own integrity, okay, is, did I promise to always give more than I can?
Well, I did buy my actions.
I established a precedent.
Isn't that a promise? They say it's a promise.
No, or if I did make a promise, I was in error.
I apologize. I made a mistake.
I promised something I couldn't really give.
Have you heard the term extinction burst?
In the notion of galaxies developing or something like that?
No, it's when pigeons are about awesome.
I am way out. I'm like trying to be Elon Musk here and you're telling no, it's about pigeons.
I love pigeons. I even have a pigeon tattoo.
I love all the animals. Anyway, if you give pigeons, they pick a lever and they get a pellet and you know, unpredictable intervals, which is highly motivating.
It's the most highly motivating thing they can do.
So, and then if the pellets stop coming, the pigeons go bananas.
They pick it a lot more. They pick it angrily.
They insist that the researchers promise them those pellets.
And then they just give up and go away because the pellets stop coming.
When you have been giving too much and you realize that and you say to stay in my integrity, I have to pull back and care for myself.
And that's where I stop.
The other person will put on an extinction burst for sure.
And your job is to stay inside your integrity until they stop pecking.
And they'll be much more healthy.
I had a golden retriever once who would just come and bark to be petting.
A big, huge dog, but he was young.
And it was so annoying and we had to get a dog behaviorist to come in because he was just barking at everybody constantly to be petted.
And she said, when he does that, get up, walk across the room, go into another room and shut the door in his face.
And we were like, that would be cruel.
She's like, it's not cruel.
He'll understand it. And I'll never forget watching him bark.
It's on. And they got up, walked out, shut the door in his face.
He went, he stood by the door and it ruff.
And he went, you went over and laid it down.
He was like, all right, well that didn't work.
And you know, that's ultimately what happens when you stay inside your integrity and don't let people play with you that way.
Don't want to tug you around.
Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because with work, it's like I love learning, organizing information, having conversations like this and sharing them with the world.
It feels kind of like the relationship to a dog.
It's like this reciprocity.
And if people don't like it, okay.
And if you like it great and if you love it, even better.
But I would be doing it anyway.
That's like I'd be doing it anyway.
Like there's no, there's no feeling of loss.
Yeah. There's no metabolizing of self.
Any of that. Yeah, I know.
And I call it what I, what I, in the book that I just wrote called Beyond anxiety, I talk about when people like you live that way from their joy.
They begin to create economic ecosystems.
You create so much value that in multiple ways people start to, you can get streams of income.
And people pay me to do this.
And I still can't believe it.
I come in here and I talk to my producer who's also my business partner and my closest friend Rob.
And I'm like, I can't believe they pay us to do this.
I can't believe it. And that's also how I felt about science the first time I looked down the microscope and saw a slice of a particular brain area called the Dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus.
And we had labeled this around I turned to Barbara Chapman my graduate by is there and I was like, this is amazing.
And her response was so funny.
She was also Harvard trained Radcliffe to be specific.
And she said, yeah, brains are really cool.
They're kind of like, well walnuts.
And I was like, so Barbara, the smartest people I ever met.
She was like, and I was like, and I thought, and then I looked around her lab.
I was doing rotations where you get to sample different labs and you hope they'll take you.
And she had green counters in her lab instead of black counters.
Oh, cool. And she had pictures of mushrooms.
Mm-hmm. And she had picture this picture of a cat coming out of a farm silo.
It's like it's hat. And I thought, I really like this lady.
Oh, that's awesome. Like I want to work here.
I want to do my PhD here. Yeah.
And I had already committed to another lab.
And I started sneaking into her laboratory at night to do a part of the other lab.
And she got over it. So in the professional domain, I'm a completely different animal when it comes to these things.
I walked into the other woman's lab.
I mean, she's done tremendously well without me.
So I just said, listen, I'm going to join this other lab.
But I have no trouble doing that in the work domain.
None. It's like, you know, when I started the podcast, sure there were these voices in my head.
One of my colleagues doing the thing, this and that.
And you know, I was like, yeah, I hope they're living their best life.
I'm going to live mine. Yeah.
And I see them and some love it, some hate it.
And some, you know, like really I can tell, like I hear the judgments.
And I also hear the, like I love it, you know, that kind of thing.
It's a mix. Because public facing anything is going to evoke different responses from people.
And but I'm sort of like, you do you?
I'll do me. And we'll both be good.
We live in this weird economy where you're supposed to get a job.
And it's all based on factory work.
You're supposed to go to a place and do something you don't really like to get your little allowance.
And then you go home. And that is only existed for the last couple hundred years since the industrial revolution.
Before that, people existed for hundreds of thousands of years doing what?
Hunting, fishing, gardening, weaving, singing songs, telling stories, doing the things that we do as hobbies.
But we have this weird mindset that says, no, if I do things that bring me joy, like a hobby does, the things that people have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years.
And I just put my joy out there and see what I can do with the wild new creations of our particular time.
If I don't do the job, I'm being weird somehow and it won't work.
But what I'm seeing is the economic structures of this society are all being fractured.
They're falling apart around us.
And it's people who are afraid, I used to watch this video of a tsunami that hit Sendai, Japan in 2011.
And I think it was, and this wave comes in and it eats a city in six minutes.
This one wave, and you watch the whole city, like, be ripped to shreds in six minutes.
And people are running into the buildings and then the buildings start to collapse.
And you know there are people in there.
And I watched this and I thought there's so much change in our culture.
It's like that wave has hit us.
And then accidentally I hit something in YouTube or whatever and it switched to Mike Parsons surfing one of the biggest waves ever filmed.
It was a rogue wave and it went up like 70 feet.
And the camera pulls back and here's this, a man, basically naked man on a board with a wave that is like the wrath of God.
And he's this tiny little figure, the wave is seven stories tall and he comes riding down the face of that and it breaks over him and you think, oh, he's dead.
And then he shoots out of the spray, just like shouting.
And I thought those are the choices we have right now.
We can run into the institutions that we think will keep us safe and change will crush us and drown us and kill us.
Or we can deal with the fact that there's a huge wave of change in our society right now and everything's changing at an accelerating rate.
And we can risk running out naked and just with our joy and just balance on our joy and let the wave take us for a ride.
You're surfing, that's, you know, you are an example to the world of someone who is balanced in his joy except in relationships, but you'll get over that anyway.
It's taken some work. It's taken some work.
There's a woman hanging on to the end of your surfboard.
It's not going to. Unfortunately, it's a lot more complicated than that.
But I am seeing a portal toward, I guess what you're calling, like true integrity where in the back of my mind, I have this like very vestigial understanding of what all of that relationship stuff actually looks like when it and feels like when it's right for me.
I just, I think it's not going to look like the way I try to script it out.
Do an ideal day with that relationship and it could be the weirdest thing you've ever heard of.
It will work. I promise you, I have a very weird relationship life.
That's reassuring to me.
One was the very first relationship I ever had with a woman that was 20 some years ago.
And then I was living on my ranch and meditating all day and my partner, Karen, came to me and this Australian poet, Rowan, was staying on our ranch with some other people.
And Karen said, maybe now she said, already, I have to tell you, I'm having very strong, I don't know, maybe maternal feelings toward Rowan.
I was like, no, they're not maternal, I'm not getting a maternal energy.
And I got hit by this blast of joy, joy, joy.
It was like that white light thing.
It was like, and I said, you're in love with her.
This is amazing. Tell her to come in.
I'll go to the guest room.
You guys can have the, I was just like, happy, happy, happy.
And I looked for jealousy and I looked for, I was like, this isn't supposed to work this way.
So Rowan came up and we all sat around talking and we sat around talking a lot more.
And we all sat on the same couch talking going, this isn't weird, is it?
And after a couple of weeks, we realized everybody was in love with everybody and we couldn't live without each other.
And so that's how you, that was eight years ago.
And we have a three year old, named Lila, who's delightful.
Awesome. And it is, we call it feeling good by looking weird.
And you can cut it out on podcast if it's too.
No, we have no, we have no, no master, no overlords.
Are you kidding me? I mean, what we're not, I mean, what we're talking about here is love.
First of all, like, and let's just be, you know, of all the, of all the things to cut out of a podcast.
We're not going to cut love out of a podcast.
Oh, I love that about this podcast.
There's a lot of people would.
Yeah, well, not me. And for people that like, bulk at that or, or creates internal friction in them, then I just invite you to, I don't know, visit your compassion.
It wouldn't itself. See if it's still there.
But it's still there. Then, you know, hey, I actually believe that humans partially based on developmental wiring, like experiences, but also just differences in wiring.
I could just fundamentally believe in this.
You know, I mean, my, one of my closest friends, my third postdoc, my third advisor, who is my postdoc advisor at Stanford, is that now, unfortunately, he died of pancreatic cancer.
He was the late Ben Barris.
He was born an identical twin girl.
Wow. Okay. Then went up through medical school, living as a woman, graduates, girls, a woman, and then transitioned to Ben.
Pretty late in life. So I only met Ben.
Ben was a close friend. And then unfortunately had probably because he had the Bracketou mutation, died of multiple cancers, but that initiated by pancreatic cancer.
First transgender member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Wow. I wrote his obituary for the journal nature.
We were very, very close.
And just an amazing, very quirky dude, you know, and didn't have a romantic partner, at least not at the time when he passed or in the time that I knew him to my knowledge.
And you know, Ben used to say, like, there are components of our wiring that are ubiquitous.
The parts of control breathing, you know, the parts of control hard.
And then there are parts of our wiring that are just different.
And to me as a scientist, like, it makes perfect sense.
Like, the notion that any of that would be controversial is like, what?
Like, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever that one would like not believe that people have differences in wiring.
And because most people want to believe in differences in wiring when it's like convenient for themselves.
So I really appreciate that you're sharing this.
And because, yeah, every which version works.
And I also learned from my graduate advisor, Barbara Chapman, she used to say tolerance has to go both ways.
So I also, like, love and applaud, like the whatever traditional nuclear family is still still call that.
And I got to, yes. But I would love you to really sit down getting incredibly authentic with yourself and say, honestly, if I had the perfect romantic life, what would it look like?
And be what you will call very selfish.
What I would call very much in your integrity.
Don't tell yourself any lies about what you really want.
Yeah, it's very strange.
But both Karen and I felt like there was a tremendous absence before in a couple of years before a row came into our light.
And we're just, it's like we're a three-legged stool, two-legged stool.
It does not make sense to us.
They fall down. Whatever comes into your vision of joy, whatever makes you feel free, write it down and read it often.
And when you get into a relationship, read it even more often.
Maybe have the other person read it.
That would be, that I can do as difficult as to have certain conversations.
I could certainly write things down and just slide in the envelope to tell you.
Here's what I'm after. Don't let me do the things in column B.
It won't end well. I love it.
And I really appreciate that you shared that.
And I know people listening will as well.
And if not, I read a book by Samantha Irby, a wonderful comedian.
She says, here's what you say.
When people tell you that you're horrible and you're doing something awful.
You say, I like it. One of the reasons I oriented very young towards and still love punk rock music, like that genre is because to me, it could be wrong.
Maybe classical music being an exception.
But to me, it's the only genre of music where all the versions of self and emotions are welcome.
There's angry music. There's like political music.
There's sad music. There's music about friendship and camaraderie about loss.
And you look at the community, like a really into this stuff.
So look at the community, like that, like good friend to my Armstrong has created around certain bands.
He's going to be on the Mount Rushmore punk rock or the great Joe strummer from the clash political music.
Yeah, yeah. You know, or Laura Jane Grace, like one of the first transgendered, like outwardly facing transgendered people in the punk rock community and does amazing music.
It was against me and then Laura Jane Grace.
I'm like, she's a hero of mine.
One of my short list of here.
I love, love, love her what she's done at so many levels.
And it's like there's like this tapestry of all the different humans and human experiences in a kind of single single genre.
Yeah. And I don't know much about other genres of music, but I don't see that.
Yeah. Like maybe across the totality of rock and roll or whatever, but you know, and so like if ever there was a sector of life that's like all inclusive.
Yeah. It's that, but not because it's loud.
It's fast and it's anti.
It's like so much of it is like pro social.
Right. You know, so I think there's a big misunderstanding around that.
So that ethos is something that's always resonated.
And I feel the same way about like relationships where on social media, one of the reasons I can go on social media and not have it like spike my cortisol constantly.
Because I'm there and I'm like, okay, there's some like mentally healthy people here.
Some mentally unhealthy people here.
People are here to fight people here to love people here to find partners people here to flirt people and you know what?
People here to attack me like cool.
I'm glad I'm giving you a purpose for your morning.
You know that kind of thing.
I try and just approach it all that way where you just made all of this very clear in a much more succinct way where you just said like, great.
I like it. Yeah. I like it.
It's awesome. Yeah. Yours with it with with the real real genuine sense of joy.
Yeah. Like no like, well, I like it.
There's no there's no friction in that statement.
It's just I like it. I really like it.
I like a lot. I love that you like it a lot.
And you can say it that way.
Who can't like if it's all love.
Nobody can really you can out love almost anything.
You're furious at me. I like it.
I just out loved you. And I think that's why Jesus said, you know, charity never faileth.
It's not that you're going to win everything if you are a loving person is that no matter what happens.
It's like that self. You're suffering your pain, your codependency, whatever.
It loves it all. Bring it.
It loves it all. And that means that no matter what you come at me with, I can hold that in a field of love.
And my experience is love.
What was the quote from Jesus?
It's I don't know if it's from Jesus, but in I think it's in Paul says charity never faileth.
Love never fails. And it's because I can say I hate myself.
Yes, but I love the part of me that hates myself.
Just out loved you. Were you all well, of course the answer is going to be yes.
I was going to ask were you always like this, meaning that you could hold this position on the balance beam.
And then I feel like you've taken this balance beam and like created this big mace of for others to stand on.
So, because it's a really stable place to be once you're there, but getting to this place of like essential self and the path to integrity.
I mean, can I just say it the way I feel it?
Yeah, it's fucking difficult.
That's what I was about to use that same word.
I think in order to be to become stable.
I always say that the raw material for any good experience is its opposite.
So I was messed. I was effed up beyond belief.
There's snafu. These are both military turns.
Snafu means situation normal all fucked up.
Fubar means fucked up beyond all recognition.
I was Fubar. Now I occasionally get snafu.
But I was so Fubar that the suffering was so intense that when I learned to come home.
The contrast was very sharp.
And I never ever want to.
I never want to leave the consciousness that that light is always with us and we can feel it if we're honest.
And that's all we have to do.
Be honest and there it is.
Boom. It's goddess. I feel like it starts with the scope of self.
Like we have to do this for ourselves before we can do this with and for other people.
Yeah. And then at some point the fantasy in my mind, right, it sounds like my mother, my mother.
From the youngest age I can remember in myself was talking about trying to heal the world.
And I've seen the toll it's taken on her.
Like she'll call sometimes.
I was like, how's it going?
And like something will have happened in the news.
Like I can just tell it really wears on her.
And it's hard for me to hear and see because I've you know, like I feel it too.
It's like goodness. Like do you feel like there's hope for our species.
I mean, I'm trying to not throw the whole the whole problems of the world at you.
But like I mean, like what I'm almost 50.
I feel like at this point, I've seen enough like there's so much goodness in people.
Yeah. But there's also like the capacity for so much like misunderstanding bad.
You got the developmental wiring.
You got the hurt people hurt people.
Yeah. We're all everyone's doing the best they can.
Everyone's safety and acceptance and they're just trying to find it this way.
And like. You're truly bad actors because they're either miswired or whatever.
And they're like creating havoc.
Like is there any real hope for like a different version of things that's persistent.
The first time I remember worrying about this, I was four.
And I'm 10 years older than you are.
But I knew at four that I was here to try to help with something.
And as I grew up, it just wouldn't go away.
This feeling that I was supposed to help with something.
And in my teens, it became I need to help change the way people think.
I don't know. And then I started noticing other people who seem to be like me.
And I would be like, I think they're on the same team.
I'm on. And I was like, what team?
What am I talking about?
And it all came to a head when I was in South Africa and the wilderness.
And I had a dream that my ancestors were coming to visit me.
And I thought it was funny.
So I told it to some friends from the Shangan tribe who reacted like this.
And then they ran. And I was like, what are you wrong?
And later that night, we're all sitting around the fire.
There are lions wearing.
They bring this little woman from Mozambique.
And she's the song. She's a shaman.
And she did her divinatory system, which is she threw the bones for me.
Because if you had dream, I had, you have to see us on goma right away or bad things will happen.
So she said stuff about me that was true, but she could have googled it, you know.
And it was weird when she looked at me.
I felt like these ice needles going through me.
It was not cute, but it was very intense.
And what she said was there are people being born to be healers all over the world, just like there are in the traditional tribes.
You need to go find them and tell them what they're here to do.
They're here to heal the world.
And they need the wisdom that the traditional people had.
And they need their technology.
And it was interesting because she was like confused.
She acted very frightened and confused by what she was saying to me.
She had to get a group of people behind her who would chant, we agree.
We agree. Because she was freaked out.
But I think that in every traditional group of 100 to 150 people, there were a few healers that were recognized by the elders as people who were the, they were highly sensitive.
And they were interested in nature and science.
They were interested in animals.
They were interested in the mystery.
They were interested in the arts.
They were performers, but they were also very like introverted and I think you think it's an archetype of healing of medicine person, the coaches, I coach, I call it wavefinders, which is a term from an anthropologist.
And that archetype, if you have that phenotype, I believe it's a phenotype.
And I believe it crops up in every 100 to 150 people several times.
And our culture has no word for it and no path for it.
But if we are going to save the world, we will draw on whatever was born into us that makes us want to heal things.
And we will use the technologies we've developed and we will use our joy and our refusal to participate in the nonsense of our culture.
And we will hold firm and we will try to change the way humanity lives on this planet.
And I don't know which way it's going to go, but I'm in the game.
And I kind of think you are too.
I'm feeling I'm too. And I'm certain that I'm in it thanks to you.
And seriously, in large part, you know, I've told the story earlier that the path I'm on and the fact that anyone's listening to this and watching it is the consequence of having read your books and done the exercises and we'll continue to do them.
I must say there really aren't words to express how much this means to me that you would come here, take the time to share with us your wisdom and to delve into some topics that are particular interest to me.
Because I like everyone else and work in progress who's curious about the best ways to move forward.
And every time you speak and just when you show up someplace, it's an incredible thing.
Everybody learns, everybody gets better and everyone walks away with tools and empowerment.
And I just just want to say thank you so much.
There's really not a whole lot else.
Thank you. It might be the only podcast ever in tears.
Thank you so much. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr.
Martha Beck. I hope you found it to be as informative and as meaningful as I did.
To learn more about her work and to find links to her many excellent books, please see the links in the show note captions.
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For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out.
It's my very first book.
It's entitled Protocols and Operating Manual for the Human Body.
This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience.
And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control protocols related to focus and motivation.
And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included.
The book is now available by pre sale at protocol's book.com.
There you can find links to various vendors.
You can pick the one that you like best.
Again, the book is called Protocols and Operating Manual for the Human Body.
If you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms.
So that's Instagram, Twitter, now known as X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science related tools, some of which overlap with the contents of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the contents of the Huberman Lab podcast.
Again, that's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms.
If you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter, our neural network newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes what we call protocols, which are brief one to three-page PDFs that cover things such as neuroplasticity and learning, dopamine optimization, how to get better sleep, things like deliberate cold exposure.
We have a foundational fitness protocol.
We have a protocol all about habit forming and much more.
To sign up, again, at completely zero cost, you simply go to HubermanLab.com, go to the menu function in the corner, scroll down to newsletter, and you provide your email.
I should point out that we do not share your email with anybody.
Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr.
Martha Beck, and last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.
