Dr. Martha Beck

Christopher Kabakis (00:23) Welcome to the Inner Pioneers Podcast. Today it's my great pleasure to have with us Dr. Martha Beck. Martha, you are renowned author, Harvard-trained sociologist with multiple degrees from Harvard. You're a life coach and podcaster, you told me before, as well as podcast guest, course, obviously, and an expert in a way in transition moments in helping people navigate through

Martha (00:42) Yeah.

Christopher Kabakis (00:52) shifts, inner shifts. So the perfect guest for our podcast. So welcome today.

Martha (00:57) Thank you so much for having me.

Christopher Kabakis (01:00) ⁓ And so my first question would be, we always like to start with something personal. So what is kind of shifting for you currently in your life?

Martha (01:09) Oh, it's really interesting. I moved to a new location about nine months ago, which is always an interesting event. But also I've been dealing with the fact that the pace of change is accelerating so dramatically in my life, but also the lives of my clients. It used to be that everybody could take a deep breath between major life transitions. And now it just seems to be as, as my partner. Ro puts it, she said, it used to be that change occurred, time seemed to go on pretty slowly and now it's just Christmas, Christmas, Christmas. Time is speeding up so much that it feels like a year is a week long instead. So that's been really interesting to help people. How do you go forward with intention, purpose, groundedness in a time when change is so, so, so fast? Yeah.

Christopher Kabakis (02:00) Hmm. And do we need to slow down to also change time ourselves in order to be able to deal with this? Or do we need to speed up to match kind of the pace of change? What would you say?

Martha (02:11) Mmm! Absolutely do not try to speed up. That is the worst thing you can do. I used to talk to a crisis management specialist and he told me in a crisis the first thing you must do is slow down. It's so counterintuitive, but that's the way our brains work best. I once read about a violinist who was practicing these runs on the violin that were too fast. for her nervous system and her teacher said, you cannot speed up to match that pace in the music. So you have to stretch time. And she said, all right. And she stretched time and she could play within the time she'd stretched. And it came out as if she were a recording that could be sped up. And I was fascinated by that because I mean, she was a real person. and I started to think, how do we stretch time? And I actually think it's by stepping backward, figuratively stepping backward. And then I know this sounds ridiculously simple, but you do it with your breath. When something's really, really pushing you and you want to speed up, whether it's business or whether it's something you're doing that is very immediate and small, stop for a second, take a deep breath and slow down your perception of what's happening. and you breathe more slowly when you do this. And it's the breath, I swear. It's the breath that changes the brain, that changes our perception of time. So that's, I mean, it's a very odd skill to be teaching to entrepreneurs, but I love teaching it, yeah.

Christopher Kabakis (03:50) Yes, extending the exhalation. so I, of course, I read your books, some of them at least. mean, not all of them. There are too many. The North Star, back in the old days and... I didn't read Integrity. It's still on my reading list, but I did read the largest part of this latest book, Beyond Anxiety. And there you also, it's kind of one of the skills you introduced to...

Martha (03:58) ⁓ huh. There are too many. There really are. I've got to stop. That's

Christopher Kabakis (04:18) calm down our nervous system, right? To get away from anxiety or the anxiety spiral, as you call it, with the breath. are there other, which other ways are there for us to kind of calm ourselves when we're anxious about the pace of change or about what's happening in the world? I mean, a lot is happening. So we can maybe then, I mean, we get later to it, hopefully get to the creative creativity spiral.

Martha (04:20) Yeah. Yep. Mm-hmm. Right. Right, right. So modern culture really sees time as being linear and very unidirectional, right? It only goes one way. If you stop and step back and breathe, then you can see time as more of a spiral. And I talk about this a lot. We could talk about it in a minute, how transformation always goes in a spiral. not in a straight line. So if you go to your breathing, you slow it down, get your nervous system a little bit calmed down. And then the first thing you do is you stop believing that you have to charge forward. And then you notice your own anxiety as if it were a frightened animal. And this is where people make a lot of mistakes because we are taught to think of the brain as a machine. And if we're anxious, the machine is broken. So what do you do? You put medicine into it. You know, do interventions to fix it. You try to end your anxiety. You stop it completely. But if you walked up to an animal and said, I'm going to end you. I'm going to stop you completely. I'm here to stop you. That animal would not get less anxious. It would get more anxious. Yeah. So when you've stepped back and got your breathing calm, it affects your entire nervous system. This again, sounds silly. Talk to yourself in a low. slow, calm voice. Because your nervous system evolved to respond with calm to this kind of voice. And we all know how to do that. We all instinctively know how to calm a frightened small animal. We don't have to learn about brain chemistry or anything. If you found a puppy near your front door, all shivering and dirty, how would you talk to it?

Christopher Kabakis (06:37) With the cons, who's the voice? Yes.

Martha (06:37) What would you do? Exactly, and you don't say, wanna stop you, I wanna end you. You say, you're okay, I've got you, it's all right, I've got you. So even if you don't believe it, saying things like, you're okay, it's all right, I've got you, it actually moves you into the part of the brain that knows how to calm the animal. And then the animal part of the brain calms down. And I used to think that was so, I call it, kind internal self-talk. So the acronym is K-I-S-T or kissed I think I'm gonna use some kissed now. And I would start talking kindly to myself and I thought I will never tell anyone about this because it's so corny. They would kill me at Harvard for kissing my own brain. But I swear to God Christopher, it works like magic.

Christopher Kabakis (07:26) Hmm. Yeah, I mean, I think about some entrepreneurs or CEOs who might be listening and they might think like, I'm not anxious. Why should I talk to myself like a frightened animal? I'm not frightened. But, like sometimes I then would prefer to talk about stress because people like to talk more about stress than about anxiety. but is there another way to kind of realize when we are actually, ⁓ anxious? because some people might not recognize it and they might not know that they are in this state.

Martha (07:57) Right, exactly, because what it does is it triggers something called the defense cascade in the body. Anything that you feel slightly threatened by, and that means anything unfamiliar, by the way. The part of your brain that is primitive and ancient and doesn't really know the things that you know cognitively, it's gonna respond to anything alien or strange with the defense cascade, and that involves all the fight or flight mechanisms. So someone coined the term the fight or flight mechanism, but there's more than just fight or flight. There's also, well, let me just say, a lot of your entrepreneurial listeners might be going to fight instead of flight. So they see something unfamiliar, they're experiencing a radical change and they get irritable, angry, furious at it. And they think that's gonna make it, everybody who goes into an anxiety response thinks it's gonna make things better. If I stay tense and focused on worry, that'll make sure I don't do anything wrong. If I'm aggressive and go in there and win, it will make sure I don't do anything wrong. Actually, it makes you much more likely to make mistakes. Anyway, the other responses are faint, where you just don't want to, you just go rigid and frozen. Another one is flop, where you just feel completely out of energy and don't want to do anything. And then finally, there's fawn. F-A-W-N, which means that you get very ingratiating and you try to please people and you flatter people, you lie. And you might find yourself doing this with another person who frightens you, becoming very hyper pleasing. And you might even say to yourself, what is wrong with me? I don't even believe what I'm saying here. I'm just flattering this person. that's a flight response. That's to keep you safe with other social predators. Dogs do it, right? They're ingratiating to bigger dogs. So all of those things, fight, flight, freeze, flop, fawn If you're doing any of those, it can really help to take a step back, breathe quietly, and I know it sounds stupid. Talk to yourself in a slow, calm voice. Try it. You know, hear me now, believe me later.

Christopher Kabakis (10:12) Yeah, I know this from somatic experiencing. Peter Levine with trauma patients, he talks about vuvu-ing, you this vuvu sound, the vibration that calms people's nervous system down in like therapy settings, of course, which sounds a bit similar.

Martha (10:16) yes. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yep. And yes, and Peter Levine also talked a lot about the shaking response. And that is something that can actually calm your nervous system and regulate it too. You wouldn't think this was true. But if you allow yourself to shake when you're anxious, it actually moves the adrenaline and the cortisol through your body. So one of Peter Levine's students was living in Lebanon when it was being bombed. And he was at the site of several really dangerous situations. And what he found was that sometimes he shook violently after say a bomb dropped close by. And sometimes he didn't. Sometimes he got control of himself and was like in there helping people. But after the times he didn't shake, he would have nightmares. He had PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. Yeah. So he makes his, his name is David Berceli and I did a few sessions with him. One of the things he does to help people cope with change, cope with alienation, to cope with bad things happening or good things happening too fast is allow the natural shaking response that all animals feel. The whole thing about anxiety, Christopher, is that we try to pretend we're machines because our culture treats us like machines. Once you accept that you're an animal, it's not so weird to let yourself shake. or to let yourself lie down and be limp for a while, or to be kind to yourself in the way you'd be kind to a beast. It's a simple shift and it makes all the difference in the world.

Christopher Kabakis (11:49) Mm-hmm. Hmm. And how would you say, so, it, how can we tell, if the activation that comes with, fear is good or productive and when it's unproductive holding us back how, how do we know? mean, you could even say sometimes in some conditions, the fight mechanism, I mean, it might be a productive, no. how, how can we tell one from the other?

Martha (12:03) Mm-hmm. Absolutely. All of these. Yeah. So yeah, good point. All of these are useful in certain situations, and you should have full access to them. There's a fear response that is absolutely crucial to your survival. But the whole difference between fear, which is healthy, and anxiety, which is not, is that in most creatures, the fight mechanism, fight-flight mechanism shuts down when the danger is passed. So I wrote about watching a wildebeest walk up to a pride of lions in Kenya, because wildebeest are not smart. Like they would lose a battle of wits with a walnut, right? So this wildebeest walks up and he starts going gong, gong. And the lion, sometimes I'm like, are you gonna make us kill you? Like, what is happening? They had just eaten, they were very full. One lion gets up and he says, I'll do it. And he goes over, he starts moving toward the wildebeest and the wildebeest is like, ⁓ gong gong woo. And then the lion goes down and they get really low and then they start to charge. And the wildebeest went gong gong gong and just sped up to like 60 miles an hour for about 300 meters. And then the lion gave up. He was just like, this is too much trouble. Immediately in that moment, boom, the wildebeest stopped running, went, and started eating grass. The lion was right there. He just realized the lion wasn't coming for him. So the fear response went away. That's what's healthy. What we do is we take a fear response about a situation that may not even be dangerous. And then we replay it and we say, my God, there are lions everywhere. I can never let down my guard. Ooh, what am I gonna do to protect myself against the lions the next time they come? And we get into a thought spin, which is very, very unhealthy. It keeps triggering the fear response. Right? So how do you know when it's healthy versus not? Here's the thing. If you're afraid and you're having like, you feel all jazzed up and trembling and, or, or you feel like running or you feel like fighting, just ask yourself, is this causing me to be more creative? Is it opening me up or is it shutting me down? Does it have the effect of narrowing my attention or of broadening my attention? Cause being present, with what's true and real broadens you. So that's really the difference for me is the difference between shutting down and opening up.

Christopher Kabakis (14:46) Hmm. Yeah, I like that. It makes sense. And also I like this realization that because of cultural conditioning, guess most often we have kind of lost access to the natural responses of our organism to deal with stress or with, I mean, dangerous situations. And so we push it up into the mind and then try to resolve it there. And then we kind of get caught up there and we can't get out of it. Right. And,

Martha (15:01) Thank Yes. Yeah.

Christopher Kabakis (15:13) you already mentioned it, it's the creature part in us, the animal part of us, but that we have abandoned or ⁓ unlearned, forgot how to let it be, shake out, for example, the stress and then move on until we get into those loops. And can you talk bit more about this? do we get from that anxiety spiral, the creature part maybe?

Martha (15:23) Yes. Right.

Christopher Kabakis (15:35) to the creative part, which is kind of the next step, right? Also in your book.

Martha (15:38) Right. OK, so a lot of times people say to me, I really, you know, I couldn't be effective if I weren't anxious. wouldn't I wouldn't try to help anyone. If I'm not anxious, what would move me? What would I be doing? And what I say to those people is if you, God forbid, fell out of a fourth story window and you survived, but you broke like 12 bones and you smashed some organs and they took you to the hospital. Would you want to be treated by doctors who were in a panic? Or would you want to be treated by doctors who are kind of interested in what was going on inside your body and were like, they're there because they're fascinated by helping people heal. Which group of doctors would you rather have dealing with you? So, and what you see is that anxiety is not nearly as productive as functions that cause us to lean forward into things because of fascination. So anxiety makes us run away from the danger or try to keep the danger away, keep it away, keep it away. It's about separation and avoidance. The opposite side of the spectrum is about being moved towards something by anything from fascination to all out falling in love. And that is handled on the other side of the brain. So everything we've been talking about with anxiety happens in the left hemisphere of the brain. The only way we keep the anxiety running is by thinking in language, which is something almost completely dominated by the left hemisphere. And yes, I know they're always both working together, but if you have a left hemisphere stroke and you lose all language, you don't have any more anxiety. I heard this from multiple people who'd had left hemisphere strokes. Anyway, if you go over to the right hemisphere, the mirror mechanism of anxiety is something I call the creativity spiral. and what that does. anxiety starts with shock and avoidance. my gosh, there's something new I have to change. And then goes into the defense cascade. On the right hemisphere, what happens when you see something new is, that's new. Whoa, I got to see what that is, man. I got to look at this. And you can feel it. Most of us have had the experience of driving past an accident and slowing down to try to see what happened. Have you had that?

Christopher Kabakis (17:56) Yeah.

Martha (17:57) And I always were like, I shouldn't be staring. Like, why am I staring at these poor people? That is such a deep evolutionary compulsion because when you see something where someone was hurt, the potential for learning about how to avoid that tragedy pulls you into a kind of fascination with the accident, even if you're just horrified by it. So that feeling of, we call it rubber-nacking, yeah, of leaning into something and trying to see, that's the first impulse that takes you out of anxiety. So it's curiosity, essentially. Then you get into a part of the brain that is curious, calm, confident, clear, creative, courageous, connected, and compassionate. Those are the eight C words that describe... a part of the brain that one therapist calls ⁓ the self with a capital S. And once you get really curious, they've shown that people who are very bigoted against folks from other cultures, say somebody's wearing a turban and you've never seen that and it freaks you out, the initial response is fear and then, that person's not like me and it's separation. But if you ask them one question, And the question that they used in some research is, figure out what this person has for dinner at night. The moment they started trying to learn about the other person, the fear and the rejection and the othering dropped almost to zero. The person's anxiety at dealing with newness, difference, change, dropped to zero and they were suddenly able to begin understanding this other person. The same thing if you're an entrepreneur dealing with a rapidly changing market, which we do all day. I mean, that's where we are, folks. Things are changing so fast. And if you go, my God, I've got to get, I've got to handle this. I've got to attack it. I've got to run from it. I've got to guard myself. You're not going to survive. But if you say, ⁓ my God, holy smokes, what is causing this? Where's it going? What's happening to people? And you go into it. You start finding ways to understand things like what's happening to your demographic that you're trying to sell to. What's happening to the industry that you're in because of AI. And instead of freaking out, you're like, ooh, what can I do with that? The AI thing is huge right now. People are terrified of it. I'm freaking fascinated by it, aren't you? I hear you say.

Christopher Kabakis (20:35) Yes

Martha (20:37) It does things. So if we can approach it that way, we're going to deal with every change so much more competently.

Christopher Kabakis (20:46) Okay. So, ⁓ so the key is activating our natural curiosity, what's going on, and then follow that. And it might be even at the beginning, focusing on something dangerous, like, know, say the fascination with an accident but then it might extend and move to other things as well. And into something that is not focused just on danger, but on potential and, and, ⁓ something we can create, right. and.

Martha (20:50) Yes. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Christopher Kabakis (21:11) What else? how, like is that all that is to change moving out of what can become an anxiety spiral to a creativity spiral through curiosity or are there other elements that are important?

Martha (21:24) Yeah, I mean, that's an initial thing if you're dealing with a shock. But what happens when you activate that part of the brain, you go into this creativity spiral. And in that creativity spiral, you start to notice more and more things that make you happy, that please you, that fascinate you. So people who are not anxious are incredibly curious. We humans have an interesting ⁓ genetic mutation. It's called neoteny. In most social primates, which we are, like chimpanzees, orangutans, whatever, the babies are really, really quick learners and very playful and very exploratory. In most primates at puberty, these changes kick in. The brow gets dark, the teeth get much bigger, they grow in, the jaw gets really huge and powerful. And also the creature stops being as playful and curious. But human beings have this mutation which makes us look like baby apes our whole lives. So our faces are relatively flat, our teeth are small. We're like baby apes and we didn't lose the curiosity. That means that adult humans, even old humans like me can be extremely playful and exploratory if we give into that impulse. But again, we're locked into a culture that number one, tells us to be anxious. Number two says treat it like a machine. And number three says, don't be curious. Learn what I have to tell you and then don't go away from it. Like don't do anything outlandish or weird. But if we can be as playful as we are designed to be, what happens after we get curious is that we start to learn and learn and learn and learn the way a toddler does. We start to be more like toddlers. Did you know that children under the age of four laugh about 400 times a day? And how often do you think adults laugh at it? The average adult? What would you guess?

Christopher Kabakis (23:21) No, I didn't know. Depends on who they are, no different characters, much less. mean, like a dozen times, hopefully. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah.

Martha (23:34) Yeah, yeah, around 15, good guess. And it's not because we're, it's not because we've lost our sense of humor, it's because we've lost our sense of curiosity and play. So we could start becoming curious about everything that's happening in our business, in our market, in our personal lives. One of the things that I've done my whole life is I see what fascinates me and then I turn it into a product. So I like horses. Never had a horse, didn't know how to ride a horse, really like horses. So for a while, I worked with a horse whisperer and we would, because working with horses is incredibly powerful at teaching you how you're putting out energy so that other people react to it. Other people will keep themselves stiff and straight, right? Like they won't shake if you're scary, but a horse will shake if you're scary and they're big and they give you a lot of feedback. So for two years, I bought a ranch with the money I made doing horse workshops with business leaders. You know, I like going to Africa to see the big animals, turn that into a week long course. People fly from all over the world. Like get curious, get creative, and suddenly everything you love can be part of your business.

Christopher Kabakis (24:44) ⁓ So teach what you want to learn. That's what they said. And now you say, yeah, make a business out of the things that make you curious, which is a variation from that.

Martha (24:59) Yeah. Yeah. Same thing really. Yeah. Cause what you want to learn is the curiosity and teaching as a product. Yeah.

Christopher Kabakis (25:06) So I think, yeah, I feel that it's really important to connect to that, child energy for each of us in our culture, right? to rediscover that place of joy, natural curiosity and so on. And, I think we have, like also to the programs that people come, ⁓ that we organize, ⁓ it's, it's often a, but I lost and feel stuck.

Martha (25:13) Okay.

Christopher Kabakis (25:26) What they often report is, when I connected to what I used to love, what I used to do, like one medical doctor, he said, I loved music so much as a teenager and I played music. And, then I stopped, I don't even know why, the studies and then the work and so on. And he got lost the joy for everything because he lost the joy to those things that he really cared about. I think it's...

Martha (25:31) Yeah. ⁓ no. Yes. Yeah.

Christopher Kabakis (25:54) It's crucial to kind of connect to this young part of the monkey, the baby monkey you said, that kind of knows how to just follow its curiosity and laugh and so on.

Martha (25:59) Yeah. Yeah. you're so right. And it's such a razor's edge, Christopher, because here's the thing. They've shown in studies that even a slight amount of sort of social pressure to ⁓ produce something will kill the creativity and put you back in anxiety. So they would do things where they'd give somebody a creative task, like here are three objects, make a candle holder out of them or whatever. And they would start working like little kids and they would be curious and figure things out. Then they'd say to people, okay, here's another creativity thing. And if you do this one right, I'll give you five Dollars, which is not that much money. You can't even buy cup of coffee with $5 in America. Not a good one. But they would say, okay, $5. Their creativity just went to zero. And suddenly they were anxious. Not because someone had a gun to their heads, not because someone was yelling at them, because someone was paying them. That is interpreted by our nervous systems as terror to charge for something. So what we have to do is find that place where we're doing it for play and we can market and exchange it for something of value without freaking out. And that is quite, that's quite a trick, but we can do it.

Christopher Kabakis (27:21) mean, many people would probably say, yes, but I need to make a living, right? I have like, have a mortgage. I have to support my family. I can't just quit my job and do whatever I love. How would you respond to those people?

Martha (27:25) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, I always say, stay in your horrible soul murdering job as long as you can. Just stay there. Because yeah, if you don't have any other way of thinking, you have no other ideas about how to make a living, that's gonna be catastrophic. I remember teaching a group once, there were about 100 people. And this woman got up and she said, I'm in the military and I hate it. It's horrible, I've hated it. for 20 years, but I've only got five more years to go. And then I get my pension, so I can't leave. But I swear, every time I go to work, I get violently ill. But there's no other way for me to make a living. And I said, really? No other way? And she was like, nope. I got to stay in there for my pension. And I said, can anyone in here think of a way that this lovely person could make a living aside from being in the military? Not a single hand. I'm like, she has to be in the military? Yes, she has to. They all accepted it without. And then I said, how many of you are making money? Everybody raised a hand and I said, how many of you are in the military? Nobody. I was like, now can you think of a way she might live without being in the army? Nope, can't think of anything. my God, it's insane. So if you have been so conditioned that you literally cannot think of anything, like, I don't know. getting a horse and doing a seminar with it or something like that. There's got to be something you can enjoy, something that makes you laugh more like a toddler, something that makes you curious. If you go into that and you find something of deep, deep value to your experience, that something will also add value to other people's experience. There is a way you can turn it into an exchange for money or other things of value. You can do this. I came back from Africa once, I'd been doing this seminar. There was a woman, I went to the grocery store, resupply. I did this big shop and she said, wow, that's a lot of groceries. And I said, yeah, I just got back from a month in Africa running seminars to help people change their lives, you know, with out on safari. And she said, ⁓ my God, how did you get that job? And I was like, it's not a job, I just made it up. I just made it up. Your creative capacity is infinite and you let them shut it down to I have to do this for five more years. What? You have a human brain. It's the most powerful thing in the world. Use it.

Christopher Kabakis (30:11) But so would you say, is this anxiety, ⁓ or is it something else? Because so there is like kind of, a social layer to it, maybe, most people around us might not do it. And so we also think we cannot do it or so. don't know. what would you say to people who, who feel like, they feel stuck in what they're doing, maybe they look for what's next. But they wouldn't say, ⁓ I, I'm afraid of.

Martha (30:21) Yes. Yes.

Christopher Kabakis (30:34) of trying out something new. It's just like that they don't know what.

Martha (30:37) Yeah, so this is why they should Way of Integrity. Way of Integrity was the book I wrote right before Beyond Anxiety. And I thought it was the last book I would ever write because it was everything I know. And it boils down to if you are in alignment between your mind, your heart, your soul, and your body, if you're doing things that make all those parts of you relax and feel grounded, you will have Total integrity, so integrity just means being one thing, undivided, not two things. That's duplicity, this is integrity. So if you can find integrity, you will have no more sufferings, a psychological suffering of any kind. And I put it out there and people came back and said, okay, I'm in integrity, but I'm still afraid. And I realized that they had internalized the social messages around them so deeply that they could not see that they were lying to themselves. So here's the deal, we're all born completely true to ourselves in total integrity. By the time we are five months old, we are already shaping our responses to please other people. By the time we're five years old, we're hearing all these messages all the time about what we're supposed to be. If those go along with our true nature, fine, absolutely great. But if we're being socialized away from our true nature, we start to sell out our nature and go with our culture. And we internalize things like there is no other way for you to survive than by getting your military pension. And we believe it as if it's real. It's not. And if you are in psychological suffering of any kind, including coming from your soul murdering job, it's because you are innocently lying to yourself to please the people who socialized you. and recognizing that I am suffering therefore what I'm doing is not true for me, that's regaining your integrity. And when you do that, you'll not only leave situations that are bad for you, but you'll start to know what to do next. But if you don't do it, nobody can help you.

Christopher Kabakis (32:49) So that's the key question. So what's true for me? And be honest about the answer. And then the anxiety will come up probably anyhow. And then we need all the advice we can get how to move to a feeling of calm and safety again. had the breathing and grounding exercises, the calm voice.

Martha (32:56) really honest. Yes, it does. Yeah.

Christopher Kabakis (33:13) kissed the kind internal self-talk and so on, to kind of self-regulate so that we can grow the space for this play, the exploration.

Martha (33:23) Yeah. Well, so that we can do things that we were not socialized to do. And that creates huge anxiety. OK, quit your job. I wasn't socialized to quit my job. I'm terrified. I started my quest for integrity when I was 29. I made a New Year's resolution that I would not lie for a year, not in any way, not for any reason. And I kept my resolution. And during that year,

Christopher Kabakis (33:29) Yeah.

Martha (33:51) I lost or walked away from my job, my industry. left academia. My religion of childhood, which was massive for me. I was raised Mormon, very, very Mormon. So I left my religion. That meant losing my family of origin, which was huge. It meant losing every friend I'd had before the age of 17. It meant like I moved away from my home, my everything, everything I was doing. was so connected to my socialization that it was wrong for me. And when I simply stopped lying, which I do not recommend, it was awful. When I stopped lying and did what was true for me, I pretty much threw away the life that I'd had and I got the one I wanted. And that is gonna be true for everybody, but don't do it the way I did it. Do it very gradually and softly.

Christopher Kabakis (34:41) And get support, no, along the way. ⁓ I think what one of the elements that you also mentioned the importance of finding a community or like-minded others, right? So probably you had to move away from your community of origin in a way to find new like-minded people to develop that and cultivate that new life that you were building, right? And at the end of the book, ⁓

Martha (34:43) Yes! Yes. Yeah. huh. Mm-hmm.

Christopher Kabakis (35:03) you mentioned constellating an ecosystem. And can you talk a bit more about this community aspect of managing or navigating change and yeah.

Martha (35:06) Yes. Yeah, so I love the idea that and you talk about this, you said a lot in the podcast that your job, your environment should be treated like an ecosystem. Again, the machine thing comes up. We're taught to work like machines and we're taught to work in machines. Even a corporation is sort of pictured as that assembly. It comes from that assembly line image of people sitting and doing a specific task over and over and then you put them all together and they make a big machine of productivity, Henry Ford created that when he did the first assembly lines for Model T Ford's and he's famous for that. Also, everybody hated him. His factories were so awful that he had the turnover rate was 90 % per month. He had to hire 55,000 workers a year to fill 14,000 spots because Being treated like a machine is horrible. So treat yourself like an animal and treat your business like a garden, like a forest, like something that grows naturally. So an ecosystem in nature, every place there is space and energy and water, there is life. There's an ecosystem that grows. Even at the bottom of the ocean on the heat vents, because the heat vents provide energy and it's underwater, you get creatures living in. unbelievable depths in pitch darkness and they're happy there. an ecosystem, think I said in the book, correct me if I'm wrong, I think I said the equivalent of a space for an ecosystem to grow is your time, the time that you have left in this life. That's the equivalent of the space where an ecosystem will come into being. The water is your creativity. The energy is your passion. So if you have passion and creativity and time and you put them all together just sitting in a room, if you activate your creativity and your energy you are going to start making something. Everybody in a state of relaxation makes something. When you start to make something and you really allow yourself to be in a child's state of exploration, but with an adult brain, with everything you've ever learned in your life, what you make will be fabulous. doing it either, that's all I've ever done. I either sell the things I make or I sell training in how to make it. People are interested in both. once I had to speak to a group of life coaches, and they asked me, what's your marketing strategy? And I truthfully told them concealment and evasion. I run away from people. I'm very shy. I just want to throw a book at them and run. But they keep following me and throwing money at me so I can teach them something. It's weird. But then when I do teach them to follow that, people start offering them money too. It's like magic.

Christopher Kabakis (37:57) Hahaha Hmm. Hmm. I also, I like the ecosystem also because it's kind of, you create a space for something to grow and no, you can't make the plant grow. It's you have to collaborate with reality as it is. And, this process that it's not just, you have to do everything, right? It's you alone in the world have to do the things. so

Martha (38:26) Yeah. Yes!

Christopher Kabakis (38:34) but it's more like, okay, how can I participate in this creation and maybe carve out a little space, my little garden, and then put a little water and trim here and there and so on, and it can grow and blossom. this is, it feels very right-hemispheric when you say it like so. Like ⁓ it's such a joyful exercise, right? And so different from, I mean, how most organizations operate or how most jobs are structured in.

Martha (38:39) Yeah. Yeah. It is. It is. Yeah. Yeah, like I tried in academia, I tried to like keep that artificial system running, keep turning out journal articles that nobody would ever read that were boring to me as well. It just nothing happened by itself. It was a dead desiccated thing. It's so funny that you say this. I just moved to upstate New York, which is we had a terribly cold winter. But in the middle of my family and I decided we wanted to grow some tomato plants. So we took these tomatoes, we ate the tomatoes, we put the little seeds in the little starter things. And sure enough, in a couple of weeks, these little plants came up. This was around Christmas time. At this point, there was an entire room in my house absolutely full of these gigantic tomato plants. They're just like, how are they doing this? They just keep getting bigger. We hang lights over them to give them light. And like in a day or two, they've grown above their lights. It's frankly a little alarming, but you're never supposed to grow tomatoes at that time. But we're like, who knew this would happen? Anyone who's ever grown a plant knew this would happen. That's how I feel about business. You put a seed in no matter how tiny it is and you water it with your creativity and your energy. It just goes bomb.

Christopher Kabakis (40:06) You

Martha (40:19) And you don't, you're exactly right. You don't have to feel like you're dying of overwork and that your soul is rotting away. It's just like, this is how nature designed me to be. Yeah.

Christopher Kabakis (40:34) So this is like, mean, I love this idea of the ecosystem thinking, let's say, or cultivating ecosystems and, and working with nature also, in a way. you mentioned also in your book, and I, reminded me of somewhere else where I'd heard it, kind of this idea of through me. And I wanted to ask you about that because again, like this, this idea, I mean, I can be in the victim mode, life happens to me. I can be.

Martha (40:43) Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Christopher Kabakis (40:57) ⁓ I'm the creator of everything, like by me mode, which is functional and productive. mean, nothing against it. ⁓ Or I can move into this kind of through me mode or even as me. And maybe that's the final part of your book where you talk about the creation and also awakening or yeah. And can you talk a bit a bit more about that? It feels like it's the final.

Martha (41:01) Yeah. to an extent.

Christopher Kabakis (41:22) stage, the most fulfilled stage of living in the creative life, let's say.

Martha (41:28) Yeah, yeah. So on the left hemisphere of the brain, that anxiety spiral, goes tinier and tinier. Your life gets tinier and tinier. People who really give into their anxiety sometimes end up, you know, unable to leave their homes. And this is not their fault. I'm not saying they're bad, but that's what anxiety does if you let it just have its way. On the other side of the brain, there's also a spiral, but it opens up as it goes forward. So at first it goes into the arts, it goes into connection with people in a community, it goes into love and compassion. And if you keep creating and you keep connecting and connecting things, connecting people, connecting things in your business, if you keep doing that from a space of curiosity and love, self-love, other love, it gets so huge that there's a point where psychologists identified maximum human fulfillment. it's a state that a researcher named Csikszentmihalyi he called it flow. And it's where you're producing the maximum amount of dopamine and serotonin and feel-good hormones. And it's right at the edge of impossible for you. But when you get there, it's as one philosopher said, when you get to the top, is easy, even though it is hard. If you keep going, like that violinist who was fully into that music, magic starts to happen. You can stretch time. You can expand the way you see until your creativity absolutely dazzles people. And as you move forward, it starts to feel like it's not really you doing anything. There is a sense that there's a broader intelligence that is vast, much bigger than who you are as an individual. And you start to lose the sense of separation from that vastness and it starts moving you. So in China, the Daoists were, you 5,000 years ago, they started talking about this, that the Dao, this benevolent flow of force, of energy, not force, but of this powerful benevolent energy. It sort of picks you up and starts to move you as if you're floating in a river. And sometimes the river gets very, very fast. There's a Daoist story about these scholars who are walking by a waterfall, huge waterfall, it's white water everywhere, and they see a dead body in the water, and they're like, ⁓ we have to get it out and give it a proper burial. So they say, how are we gonna get in there? What do we do? And as they're talking, this little old man pops out of the water, towels himself off. and walks off down the road and they run after him and they say, how did you do that? We thought you were dead. And he said, it's really easy. You go up when the water goes up and down when the water goes down. And they're like, what? That was where the Chinese wisdom traditions kind of poked gentle fun at the way we do things as machines and by rote and we're gonna memorize in force. That was the scholars. And those who live in harmony with the way things are get moved into the next thing. And it can look as if you're going incredibly fast and working incredibly hard and undergoing terrible changes. And to you, it's a joyride. It's just fun. You're not doing it. The water is doing it. The Dao is doing it.

Christopher Kabakis (44:51) Hmm. And how can we ⁓ help people get into this alignment with the system, bigger, the high intelligence or the ground of being the, the Dao ⁓ you said you just keep doing the stuff that interests you. follow, follow your curiosity and your creativity. I also know that. ⁓ like the ultimate end of this opening can be like this experience of unity or oneness feeling really at one, right? And it can also be an extraordinary state of consciousness, not just the flow state, but also, ⁓

Martha (45:28) Mm-hmm. Yes, that's at the edge of what science accepts and beyond that is the mystery. I'm here to tell, that's why the first third of my book is about anxiety. The second third is about what science acknowledges. And the final third is about what happens in the mystery and the magic of a life that is beyond what our culture tells us is possible.

Christopher Kabakis (45:51) And, ⁓ I mean, I have some ideas, but, I wanted to ask you kind of how can you help people move into the magic? ⁓ because there's a great, I mean, yearning, think for people to, to, ⁓ it's like, sometimes I think it's like a spiritual void or so left by the demise of religion in Western culture. And, ⁓ someone said like, we have a God shaped hole in our hearts.

Martha (46:10) Yeah. Yes.

Christopher Kabakis (46:17) And then we try to fill it with substances, with ⁓ distractions, with money, with status and so on. And the hungry ghost, right? It's never enough. But actually what you're looking for is this deep sense of connectedness, Or union. like, is it possible to read your book or have a ⁓ life coaching experience and move towards it? Or is there something else?

Martha (46:17) Yes. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. think it's an act of courage that everybody has to do for themselves. The one thing we can do to help other people is to really commit to it. Commit to our own integrity, commit to our own joy, our own creativity, and take the steps that lead toward that joy. Another thing I would say is cultivate stillness. What you just said about the God-shaped hole in our hearts, I think that Freud, Freudian theory was obsessed with sexuality because his culture, Freud's culture, was very repressive about sexuality, which is natural. It's part of us. These days, I mean, I did three degrees at Harvard and had three children along the way. And that experience, especially because my second child had Down syndrome, it shook me right out of the whole social setting I was in. I had to look at what made it worthwhile to keep raising children in a place where I was very, very conditioned to think that that was silly and that was my personal life and Harvard didn't want any part of that. But even more, it didn't want me to have any part of a non-materialist worldview. So what we have now is a deep repression of spirit. not sexuality, a repression of spirit, which is a natural part of ourselves. So if were if Freud were here today and he, you know, came up with a system of analysis, he might be looking at dysfunctions around repression of spirituality. And it's even religion represses spirituality. Mormonism repressed my spirituality hard because that wouldn't it. As soon as I got spiritually left. So, yeah, there's this incredible need this ache, this yearning to be fulfilled. And even people who are madly successful as business people, the money doesn't do it, the success, even the fame does not fill that gaping absence. But the pursuit of our own curiosity, creativity, compassion, those take us into the state of union. And there you find that You have enough. There's a story about Joseph Heller, the writer Joseph Heller. He was at a party where there were all these billionaires and socialites and famous people. And another writer said to him, wow, gosh, it must be weird. You're not that rich and everybody around you is rich. Don't you feel a little out of place? And he said, a little, but I have something they'll never, ever have. The other person said, what? And he said, enough. I have enough. And you can see the rapacious appetite that people have where they're just consuming vast amounts of money and it's never enough, never enough. When you find that unity outside of all anxiety and beyond even the creativity. There is a sense of satisfaction, of enoughness that is like drinking from a spring of clear water all day, every day. There is genuinely a state of bliss that will make you know you have enough. And it will also through you make sure you keep having enough, materially, so that you can go on realizing you are not material in your essence. And you can experience the world beyond form while still in form. And that is just an ongoing state of magic.

Christopher Kabakis (50:19) Hmm. Yeah, this, yeah, very nice. speaks to me, ⁓ the, when you said courage, of course, it comes from cœur from the heart to, live from the heart. And, I think too many people in our culture and also me when I was younger, ⁓ living very much in the head, reducing uncertainty, right? Helping you to navigate, the systems that humans have created and the, ⁓ ⁓ living more heart oriented in a more heart based way, I think is part of it. I love the stillness moving into stillness. So, space to slow down, to quiet down meditation and all the practices that people know. Right. and then the final thought that came was, so this, okay, I will be taken care of. Life will take care of me.

Martha (50:45) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Christopher Kabakis (51:06) This is an enormous leap of faith for most people, It ties into the anxiety, like the scarcity paradigm, right? I might not have enough now to provide for my family, but also later in old age, my pension. And so people live in those systems of fear, basically, right? And so I wanted to ask you about the social dimensions of your work, the cultural dimensions of your work, and how can we move from an...

Martha (51:07) Yeah. Huge, huge. Yeah. Yeah.

Christopher Kabakis (51:33) anxiety oriented culture, basically a scarcity based economic system, at least to more, a creative and connected, or way of being.

Martha (51:38) Yeah. Yeah, yeah, have to be a, yeah, we have to be a traitor to suffering. We have to not just decide that our culture is right when it says you have to do things that make you miserable because you've got to feed your family, you've got to make your pension. I am number one, the primary breadwinner for my family, have been for decades. Number two, I'm old. So I can tell you something. I left my job. at 29 with no prospects, nothing I could do. I had three children under the age of five. I was chronically ill. I couldn't walk, stand or move my hands. Spent most of my time in bed in so much pain I could hardly move. And that went on for 12 years. And I kept saying to myself, I've got to get out. I did things. You I crept onto campus and I taught my classes and I wrote my papers. For a while, I had to type by putting a pencil I had casts on both hands, so I would put pencils between my fingers and hit the keys with the eraser ends. Like, I was not well. So that's why I decided not to lie for a year. It it healed me. But that's another story. But I kept telling myself, I've got to do what people say to do, because I've got to provide for my family. I've got to provide for myself in old age. But I could not. I was given the incredible gift.

Christopher Kabakis (52:45) Yeah, well.

Martha (53:03) of absolute disability. And what I have learned is that I could have trusted the whole time. If I had known then what I know now, if I'd gone back to myself at the age of 30, and I would say, look, what you are is enough. What you do for the joy of it will provide for your family. What you do for the love of other people will pay for your old age. I'm in charge of this and I don't know what I am. The universe, whatever you want to call it, my higher self, but I've got you. We're fine. You know, the reason you're miserable is that you need to find the things that bring you joy. Put that first and you'll always be provided for. I know it sounds stupid. I know it sounds impossible. That has been my experience for the last 33 years of my life. even when I was completely disabled. So again, I went from faith, which is a kind of gripping sensation in my mind, believing in what you don't see, to trust, which just has a different connotation for me. So instead of keeping the faith, I would say cultivate trust in the benevolence of the universe. It wants to treat you as well as you would treat yourself if you were. given your entire, if you are absolutely mentally healthy. So experiment, trust, see if it works. I promise you it will.

Christopher Kabakis (54:39) So, and would you say then if we follow our joy and we trust that we create different lives for ourselves, and that this way we change the world, the world, I mean through the ripples we have directly, in all the interactions we have, but maybe also on an energetic level, what I know, is this kind of the way to change, to

Martha (54:42) Sorry. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Christopher Kabakis (55:04) and then to reach maybe a tipping point of people who are not anxious. And then it has really a phase shift in society. How would you think about

Martha (55:10) Yeah, I like that you call it the phase shift. I swear I was born knowing that I was here to help with some kind of a transformation in humankind and I would live to see it. And I grew up knowing this. I couldn't say it to anybody. They were all Mormon, you know, like, and I was a girl. Girls don't do anything in Mormonism. They have babies, you know, but ⁓ breed well in captivity, I used to say. I knew that I was here to help with something and I would see people sometimes and I think, ⁓ you know, you're one of us, you're one of them. And I didn't know what I was talking about. And it wasn't until I was in graduate school that I started to notice that some people very rarely, they said things that sounded familiar and I'd think, wait a second, you know? By the time I was, I'd been coaching for about 10 or 15 years, I realized, All the clients coming to me were people who already knew it. When you talk, we've never met before. When you talk, I'm like, he's part of it. and again, I have no, there's no testable, you know, I can't do any research on this. It's just that a strangely prevalent group of people that I've met in my life all have the same idea that we're here to be part of a phase shift. for humanity in general and that it's happening now. It's happening now. I spent so many years going, when do we start? When do we start? We've started. And this podcast is part of it. So if that resonates in you, let that be the thing you trust. And trust also this, that if you follow your joy, if you follow it all the way, No taking two steps and then running back to the culture. Okay, I've imagined something better. Now I'm going to run back to my job. Doesn't work that way. Go all in. Trust what you trust in yourself. It was Goethe who said, when you trust yourself, you will know how to live. And for all of us today, when we trust ourselves, we will know how the planet gets to keep us alive for the indefinite future. We'll turn it around from its destructive course and we'll save our own lives in the process. Win-win.

Christopher Kabakis (57:26) That sounds wonderful. Sometimes it feels a bit like we're regressing also. I don't know if it's a normal, like a pendulation movement of the world.

Martha (57:34) I think it's more. Do you know what an extinction burst is? OK, an extinction burst. If you have a pigeon that's been trained that if it pecks a lever, it's pecks a button. And at unpredictable intervals, a bit of food plops out. So this is one of the most reinforcing strategies you can have. Intermittent, unpredictable reinforcement. The pigeon will just peck away like crazy. If you stop giving it pellets, it goes absolutely insane. It just pecks and pecks and pecks and pecks and pecks. They call this an extinction burst. And then it will go, whatever, and give up. If you feed your dog from the table, it will come and beg and beg. And if you stop, it will beg harder. I know I've done this with several dogs. And then you say, no, no more table scraps. And you don't do it. The dog goes bananas. pushing and pushing and then he goes, ⁓ whatever and gives up. Right now what I believe, what I hope we're seeing certainly in the government of the United States and other places around the world and in the economic sphere is an extinction burst of the old mechanical soul destroying socioeconomic system. It is dying. And so it's frantic and it's screaming and it's terrifying and it's dying and the shift is what comes next.

Christopher Kabakis (59:03) On that note, what else to add? I mean towards, yeah, let's hope that this shift towards more soulful, creative, joyful, meaningful living ⁓ happens for more and more people and more quickly. can't wait. And glad that you're part of that journey. I love your work, your books, and I hope our listeners will too. If they want to learn more about you and your work, where would you point them? I guess to...

Martha (59:28) Martha Beck.com. Yeah.

Christopher Kabakis (59:29) Maserbeck.com and we mentioned already the books. mean, beyond anxiety, talked a lot about your latest work, but there are many other books as well. And I can from my whole heart recommend them. I will also, to many of my friends, I thought about them when reading that. ⁓ And yeah, I would love to have a follow-up conversation one day and we go deeper on those topics. There are so much we didn't explore now, but yeah, I want to be kind of contained in this interview also.

Martha (59:41) Thank you. Hmm Let's do it.

Christopher Kabakis (59:58) So thank you very much, Martha.

Martha (59:59) Thank you. It's been lovely.

Christopher Kabakis (1:00:03) Thank you and have a good afternoon and evening. Bye bye.