Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I made huberman, and i'm a professor of neurobiology and opposite logy at stanford school of medicine. My guess today is doctor Matthew c.

Doctor Martha beck did her undergraduate masters in P. H. D. 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 benefit from maths teachings, and I assure you that during today's episode, you will benefit from maths 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'll hear rich discussion about how to frame the thoughts in the emotions around any topic, including pain pots in life, as well as your goals in 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 doctor Martha that 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 desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, unlike the think sponsors of today's podcast, our first sponsor is Better help.

Better help offers professional therapy with a license therapies Carried out entirely online. I've been doing weekly therapy for well over thirty years. Initially, I didn't have a choice.

IT was a condition of being allowed to stay in high school, but pretty soon I realized that doing regular therapy is extremely important to our overall health. There essentially three things that go into great therapy. First of all, you need to have great report with a therapist, so you need to be comfortable with that person.

You need to be able to trust them and talk to them about all the issues that are relevant to you. Second, and this is what people Normally think of when they think of a great the therapist s needs to provide you support in the form of emotional support or directed guidance. And third, excEllent therapy has to provide very useful insights, insights that you can apply to be Better, not just in your emotional life, in your relationship life, but also your relationship to yourself.

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If you'd like to try Better help, go to Better help dot com slash huberman to get ten percent off your first month again, that Better help dot com slash huberman. Today's episode also brought to us by helix sleep. Helix sleep makes mattress and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs.

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Today's episode is also brought to us by element. Element is an electronic light drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electoral lights do you? Magnian and potassium in the correct ratios, but no sugar. A proper hydration is critical for the optimal functioning of all the cells in your body, and that's especially true for the neurons, the nerve cells. In fact, we know that even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish both cognitive and al performance.

So to make sure that i'm getting proper hydration in electrolier ts, I personally dissolve one packet of element in about sixteen to thirty two hands of water when I first wake up in the morning, and I drink that or sipped that across the first half hour of the day or so. And then I also make IT a point to drink another packet of element dissolved in an equal amount of water. So sixteen to three, two hours at some other point during the day, and maybe even a third.

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If you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element dot com ash huberman to claim a free element sample pack with the purchase of any element drink mix. Again, that drink element dot com slash huberman to claim a free sample pack. And now for my discussion with doctor Martha bec, doctor Matthew c. welcome.

I it's so good to be here. andry. 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. No, it's true, does not compute. It's true.

I I won't name all of them, but you know 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 did not think, oh yeah, at times. And your life stories, an amazing one. So we have a lot to cover today.

So i'm not going to spend any more time talking about why I feel that way because it's going to just become a parent in our discussion. But I do want to say that you have really been ahead of your time. I mean, your triple degree is from harvard.

You have these academic credentials. And yet you were one of the first people to be public facing about the mind body connection in a way that is Operationalize ed, what we sometimes call in in around this podcast protocols. You've offered some practices that have absolutely transformed my life and other people's lives, and I gave them through reading your books. And that's not a standard book advertisement, but all of your books have been transformative for me. One of the exercises that has had a profound effect on my life is the .

perfect .

day exercise. no. And when I first read about IT, I I thought, you know, what could this possibly be, you know? And as I recall, IT involved taking a little bit of time, maybe ten minutes, maybe thirty minutes, and just sitting your line down, closing one's eyes and just imagining, with no limitations, yeah, once perfect day. And what's so wild about this exercise is that several, not all, but several of the things that I imagine in that exercise, yeah, have amazingly come to be reality that IT works. I don't .

know how, why IT works, but IT, i've I used to have people send me a postcard. This is how a long i've been doing this stuff. Now it's ils and text.

But I say, okay, we just did your ideal day. You've got IT all written down. Now send me a notification when that day happens, and I get a lot of notifications. K, well.

i'm giving you a notification right now because at the end of that exercise, and I ended up doing IT several times and I go IT all the time, okay, that's that's good to know. I wanted know about the frequency there. I love to sit down and talk to Martha bec what I wouldn't do.

So i'm in a pinch me moment right now. So it's wild. It's like reality weaving back on its life.

Listened to your podcast about that guys really cool.

And here I am moved by by that. So let's just talk about this exercise for a cx, yeah, clearly, uh, we could come up with scientific explanations for why would work. You know that the brain as a predictive machine, you know, once IT understands that something might be possible, maybe IT looks for avenues for that.

Unconsciously, we could come up with the whole native around that. But just for sake of those listening, what is this exercise? How would you suggest somebody try IT?

So the first thing is that you don't make up something I used. People would always tell me they would make up a day where they woke up in our White room with White sheet and windows, with White curtains, and then they would put on White clothes and drifts around.

And I realized finally that these people were just tired, and they were, they could not project anything, that a sort of blankness that I ve finally realized meant that they just pushed themselves too hard. So I stop doing this with people until they were well rested. Then you don't make IT up.

You see that happen. That's the key thing. You allow IT into your mind, not as that though you're reaching with your imagination, just as though IT emerges.

So I talk people through IT. Um you the first thing is you wake up in the morning, you're perfectly refreshed by a beautiful sleep in your imagination. Don't open your eyes, but listen, what do you hear? So you don't make IT up. You listen for that. What do you hear?

For me, the first thing I hear is like just feeling how comfortable my body is on the bed yeah, something that I don't do enough, right?

What about the sound of someone or someone's breathing? Yeah.

someone next to me breathing and .

they're still sleep. lovely. A dog breathing .

on the front of the back. That's soring. I'm going to get another dog soon, so I would like a dog that breathe with less snowing. Then costolo, although I I must say I I miss his dog, is like incredibly deeps snorts. The early versions of this podcast, the early episodes, we kept him in the room snoring. And and by the way, these the watering up promise, these are truly tears of joy and I said in a at the beginning of the podcast, I said, listen, abble dog, he's getting told the end of his life so we're going to keep him in the room. And so if when you hear that breathing in the background that's snowing, it's called what IT is um he's he's in here like so sorry, not sorry so anyway so yeah so there's some bulldog breathing .

and you can many dogs the room you want just listen and maybe you hear birds outside, maybe who 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.

I like sound of .

kids playing sweet, okay, so smell the air. What's IT like how humid is IT put the temperature.

You know, i'm a california in IT hard. I like I like IT in the seventies and eighties here and not too humid and I don't it's weird that I don't jump in, but there's something about the the sound of airplanes flying over and and always depresses me. IT must be some pair association from some time. Like.

I don't like that. Okay.

no planes. So birds, bird chomping, who doesn't like birds chopping?

And by the way, for you, for listeners, this is not one magical day that you'll never live again. This is a typical day, but your life is not perfect. So it's an ordinary day, but in your perfect life.

So we put IT out three years, five years, whatever makes IT possible for you to allow that your idea of life could form in that time. You'll find, as you do that many times, the time necessary for that to happen becomes much shorter anyway. So you get up, look, 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 get another bulldog, but I did the best. They're like the the essence of efficiency, of metabolism, meaning they do as little as possible and they experience as much joy as possible. There are hidden. I really want.

you need a wise heads yeah in your life, right?

And and they are capable of protecting if they need to. But I honestly don't care about that. You know, all that stuff like all that like my bad dogs.

I don't care about something.

tells me you could protect yourself. And good so I .

look around the room. What color are the walls? What pictures are are hanging there, if any .

yeah i'm a wise thing and White .

fan which one? And well .

the recently I saw caption, I don't know if this is true or because I was an instrument post that um the woman in the field .

interesting .

this world that um yeah yeah I didn't know the name of thank you that this was a neighbor of theirs that had a degenerate yeah neural condition yeah and rather than use a wheelchair of sorts, SHE insisted on crawling everywhere um and so that image is actually of her falling out into the field happily to enjoy the field because my impression of of the painting before was that somehow because she's seed out that looks like in my mind I projected onto IT that there seems like desperation. There is something to get back to the house, but that's not IT at all. Turns out this is a woman who preferred to move with her own agency, even if you meant crawling to enjoy nature.

A magnificent painting.

It's a magnificent painting. So it's on the there. Yes, maybe not the original, although that would be awesome. And then i'm waking up in in the man and .

also just noticed that you're creating a theme, which is and the theme is I will go out as myself and and I will reach and strive for things. And I i'm not not here to be helped. I'm here to do hard things and to do them for the joy.

But so that's what that painting is, strong symbol of who you are. So get out of the bed and your partner still sleep in. Dogs 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 ever realized that I just went out to builder 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. 嗯， and there's water like .

a river, the river.

they've got great rivers there or the little streams. I like the dreams that they have there because the rivers are so loud. Yeah, the rivers are really loud when they yet going. yeah. and.

Yeah, so are you looking at a small town, a city, or just do just live out in the mountains by yourself?

Definitely small town. I can be too isolated if i'm gonna in a city, i'm gonna in manhattan like it's all or none. So i'm going to be in sure, I want to be in nature um a small .

town beauty false. I just look around, smell that pine aspin air and then you go into your perfect bathroom and 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 cards.

So take a look at yourself in the mary. Your body is absolutely perfect course in your case, that's not an aspiration tional thing. You're already there but make IT even Better .

yeah for me that that means being cleared. People who listen this podcast know that I came up through neuroscience standing a number of things, but the visual system, and you know these two bits in the front of our scholar pieces of our brain yeah, the only pieces of our brain outside of our kull. And and they, yes, they may be the windows to the soil if people want to refer to them that way. But to me, like just feeling like my eyes are clear, yeah, you know and and there's a certain tone or something that like, okay, like there is a real thing I .

see that I don't know if you've worked with people who are dying or who are really ill. Sometimes you'll see a shift in there. The transparency of their eyes. There actually seems to be a radiance coming from the eyes, gathered around the eyes. That's what i'm sort of thinking .

as you talk yeah and I think is the boss that talked about know is someone who's at the level of their eyes, at the level of their skin, so like right there as a sunk back into the, yes, you know and then of course, some people are like really forward leaning resting. But is what I also happened to work on the intersection between the visual system in the automotive system. You so stress or calm.

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 pupils zing.

All of this stuff, I do believe, has been understood in other traditions and ancient traditions through a kind of unconscious genius where they're recognizing all the symbols integrated of, you know, clarity of the eyes and level of the skin. And you, of course, we can measure the stuff in the lab, but that's just isolating variable. So for me, you looking in the american, like, okay, my eyes are clear.

This is so interesting because my friend was guilty of eat, pray, love, fame, that SHE wrote something before he was famous, where SHE dressed as a man for a week and and walked around, and she's tall and broadshouldered and has a great chin, so he could get out what he could look, male.

And SHE got herself self all dressed up male, and they faked a beard and everything and then SHE had her friends come in the a male friends said, you were no lives. Pull your, pull yourself back, sticks inches away from your own eyes and SHE did IT and he said, now you're looking like a man and he walked around that way and he said he was the loneliest statist week she's ever experienced like, yeah, people gave her more respect in certain ways. But SHE said when they told me to back away from my own eyes, I was like my soul and dim. Ow, and that's really, really interesting that you would say that .

exact distance like a retraction of our humans. And I don't never recall the kid, dad or or my mom or anyone telling me like where to place my my vision and I probably guilty of being 嗯 more expressive， uh emotional um effusive than um then certainly the uh traditional male stereo time right.

Like if I love something people are going to hear about IT and and i'm not shy about the fact that thinking about costolo or my graduate device or people I love like all well up and I okay with that, but I think well to to flip that one around. Do you think that that's a real thing that I have no idea to cultural conditioning that that men and women tend to kind of be either more? I don't know.

There's no language for this. I have an end of two u and less gilbert. But I think it's very interesting that you said that, that you're forward in your eyes and the the idea that the eyes are the parts of our brains that are showing, it's fascinating that he had that experience to so I would love to i'll be asking people from now on, if you're designated mail 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 um 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 um there is a sentiment sen to the world by your fully present that I know I had to shut down like when I was in the other league IT was I had to pull myself back and sing down and that's a typically male environment. I think things about materialism and conquest and oppositional thinking as much .

as gender actual yes yes, like taking what's out there and holding IT in actually can do IT. I know how to do yeah.

I know how to do visible.

yeah. I I probably just learn 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 um i'm very, very um aware with that distinct change in internal state that .

accompanies. But so that was so interesting that you just did that. wow. Okay, back this. The problem i'm having now is that I have, and I quote an interest based attention system, I ve A H D, which means I pay attention to things that interest me, which means that I literally squirrels away from business meetings.

I have, I have paper in plan here. And it's okay because the art, because the art of podcasting, in my opinion, is that we can spend a couple different plates and return to them because it's like conversation othe wise. We might as well be a highly produced traditional idea show.

So so we're I look, see are clear, like i'm clear and present. okay. And of course, for those listening, you should all be doing this exercise for you, right? yes. okay. Um okay.

And now you go to your closet and you're going to get dressed, open your closet, which is the closet of clothing you have in your ideal life. And just look at the different outfits you have, the different like how many kinds of shoes are there .

is free running because I definitely have my ideal wardrobe, which is very sparse. I've always owned one year. So of these button down black shirts, like for work purposes, I like t shirts that are super soft.

And because I have a short torso in long arms like that, they have to like, fit right. And so I find the ones that fit right nightmare, trying to get them once I get them, adore them, because I was on two belts or so. One watch black genes, the shorts I like.

I eat teeth for wearing male man shorts but they are actually the costco purchased mail or like k mark purchase like male person shorts. They fit best um for me and and i've always warned a deas so yeah, i'm happy there. Oh yeah, I own a pair, let proper leather shoes.

I have a suit. I actually won a tuxedo. Oh, I own those things and I like, I like my closet.

I've always liked IT. If is very safe in there, I like, I like IT. And then i've always kept a couple photographed s of people that I love in my closet. sweet.

So whose photographic are there? Do you see any photographs you don't recognize at this moment?

It's my sister.

is my grandfather.

And then I think that's IT. Yeah, I don't apology pology .

obvious my parent.

obvious my parents and anyone else forgive me. okay. Yeah.

okay. So then you go through the whole day, and I I can spend at least an hour going through this with someone. You, and the important thing is that you do something I call the three ends.

You notice what comes into the field of your imagination, but you don't try too hard to see IT specifically. And then as you go through, you sort of narrow up down what IT might be. And if the name of that thing comes up, you can then name IT.

But for example, in one of my ideal days, I was writing short pieces of writing, and I was interacting with people very regularly about IT. And I I couldn't even imagine what what kind of job that wasn't. Then an editor in an manhattan knocked over a man he script at written and SHE got SHE was editor of a woman's magazine.

And SHE called me anonymity to be a colony. I was like, I always was a magazine columns for, like, twenty 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 complete t shirt, very cool black jeans. Your one wants your belt. You're editors, 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 caught, quote, work is like reading in teaching and talking about stuff on the internet, which is podcasting. But what I got a flash of is i'd want to work on my fish tanks with my kids.

Oh yeah, see, no, I thing. Yeah, you go down to breakfast and see if you've got a family.

I do. Yeah, i've always wanted kids and try the time that correctly and with the right person. So yeah, I I like tending to my fish tanks.

I have kept fish tanks since I was a kid. I haven't had one for a few years now. But I, like, I am always setting them up for other people. And interesting, I always go place in real life. I .

go see.

will you let me? And then i'll set IT up. And I love setting up fish tanks.

It's like, who know kids are helping you? How many there?

realistically?

No, in your imagination. You know, twenty.

if you two. For some reason, I got obsessed with numbers for a while, but I was saying, like, five years, that not too.

You never know IT could happen. The important thing about this exercise is you don't get logical about IT. You don't think what's manageable and what's probable and you just see who's there.

Yeah too feels good. All right, who feels good? And yeah, there's so much life in a fish tech, the plants, there's the food, there's who, how the fish are interacting with one another, who's chasing who, who's nimbly, who's hiding, who's dominant, who's like being kind of unruly and like, you know, I mean, I must have seen the finding nemo movie, especially the second .

one like .

like twelve times fabulous. Like twelve times crazy as an adult .

is not crazy. This is wonderful.

So good. Like, I just loved the personalities. I mean, any any movie where William to fall the voice of a fish, you're like, okay, like, so I said, we tend to the fish tanks, which is which is great pleasure. And then for me, it's become here and sit sit down with you and hang out with these guys in my team and and share what I like know to be really cool, useful, 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 um certainly directed attention.

You're now like a guide and missiles that knows where it's target is or at least what the target looks like. And we all make countless decisions every day. You think of that is a lot of little wise branching out.

And if you got this in your mind really clearly, you're gonna 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, there are all these symbols on both sides of the board, in the middle in brackets. He says, miracle .

occurs. My dad are theoretical physicists, so, but he will delight in that. As many of you know, i've been taking A G one for more than ten years now, so i'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast.

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I mean, there are all these low things um that also go into my private day that we don't have to go into every every detail about like working out in the whole thing. But I just want to mention a point of contrast that served as one of the reasons why I did this practice in the first place was that in real life, I was waking up and sometimes still do wake up with this like underlying, like tension, like something thing is not right. I don't feel good.

I wasn't anxious. I wasn't like, but like thing's not right. yes. And I went through years of kind like noy and scratching at different things that, you know, I quickly discovered you like going out for a couple of drinks with people make me feel worse. I don't judge people drink what so ever like.

I don't like this like IT doesn't like it's just but this unease, and this is like a restlessness, yeah, that lived inside to me for so long and still can surface as a signal that like this is not the right life. And at that point, at a aborted ory wow grants, we're publishing papers like all these things that I loved doing and that I loved the trajectory that I took to arrive there and the people that were in my life. But like I just knew, I could just say, like somethings not right.

And I felt terribly guilty. The reason I I felt terribly guilty, like I owned at home and I was in my mid thirties and IT IT wasn't an expensive home. So I not by today's standards, but I was able to buy a home my own.

I was um my dog. I had you know people in my life, but I was like this IT was almost like a gear that was trying, and that was the stimulus for expLoring this perfect day. My life looks completely different now and is far from the 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 that the source of all of my work and I was that was getting my doctor at IT. However, i've gotten my bachelor's there. I'd been there since I was seventeen and half way through my doctor. I during that time, i'd gotten married, how a child, my second child, was primarily diagnosed with dann drome and that I was six months into the pregNancy almost and I had like two weeks to make a decision and i'm politically very protocol um and I would I never judge anyone who made the other decision, but I couldn't do IT.

I was already through bonded to him and I kept asking the question of myself, what makes a human life worth living because the doctors at the Harry medical clinic and all my advisers told me, you have got to at the very least institutionalize ed this child, the this born institutional, oh yeah, for sure. They said, you're throwing your career away. The head of the obstetrics community, there were five objectives.

And the chief dude came and and then I was sitting on a bed in my little hospital. Np, in. And he said, this is like a cancer is tune. You've got to let us take IT out. IT will rule in your life.

And I just looked at him, and I had the weirdest experience under, I looked at this very intimidating guy, and i'm there, sort of Young and naked and pregnant. And suddenly I was like, I could see two faces on him, and one was this very, very knowledgeable doctor, and the other one was a terrified child, terrific. And IT was so striking that I, like, started looking at him strAngely.

Ly, i'm sure I thought I was completely not, but I looked at him, I thought you're afraid, you're afraid of this baby. And I realized that's when I realized that a lot of people don't go to harvard because they know they're smart. They go there because they're afraid, stupid and really true.

a lot of education.

And I thought he's afraid of the in quotes stupid little boy inside me because he's a friend of the stupid little boy inside him. He's terrified of being the person he's worked so hard not to be. He is 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. We're having a great time. Adam, adam, my son adam.

I only know his name through your books, of course, but I feel like I know him a little bit, because I love the story about him peeing on the doctor.

Yes, the very first thing ever did in this life was the doctor pulled him out of my body, and I saw this art of urine goes straight into the doctor's face. And I was, like, so proud of my child at, I thought, if only I thought to .

do that wanted just if, for lack of a Better way, to put a double click on two things. First of all, I 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 what why I told that long story when I had to make that decision. IT was the first time I had drought. Everything conscious and logical from my mind and come from a place that was, I believe it's part of our neurological APP aratus.

But the cognitive structures are so, you know, cognitive function is just a tiny fraction of what are whole nervous systems are able to detect and tell us. And for the first time, I was making a decision from every celin my body instead of just by, you know, neocortex. And I realized my life is not meant to go like his life.

and. The person in the next bed, their life isn't meant to be like mine, but we all have this IT 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 latines means integers one thing. So if we we're born knowing who we are, but 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, and I had a great life. I had a love, I had a dog, I had a house. Those are all socially recognized items that say your life is working, but they have nothing to do with your personal destiny.

right in that, in my case, again, I loved and I still loved doing science. I mean, my love is certainly wrong. I, everyone, I got to make sure people got placed in jobs in faculty positions.

That said, i'm still involved in some clinical trials. But you one thing that pained me about the work of just come clean about this. thanks. When I throw lock up a bit. As 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 my laboratory was on animals and at some point I was approximately halfway through um my first position. I realize that I was like I I don't like this yeah and we could talk all day about animal research, non animal research. I decided work on humans instead because they they didn't consent and they house themselves.

But, you know, so there were some pain points, but I think my unconscious was pulling at me. Yeah, like, this isn't good. This isn't good. And for me and I do think that the conscious mind and the logical mind, as you're referring to IT, it's very tactical and IT. Part of the problem is that works so well, works in quotes yeah to move us forward on matrix related to that exactly.

But I mean, there are very few people that I know who are truly aligned with there I guess what you've called essential self one who um unfortunately to be good friends with you just so happens to be famous for like a Better word who resonates with a lot of what we're discussing is the great rick ruin. The music producer is produced all these different types of yeah music. And one thing that's really interesting about rick, I spent a lot of time with rick, communicate all the time.

And one thing that is very interesting about him as he he has incredible powers of observation. He can really feel the energy ah of a musical artist or any. He produce other things too he does great documentary is got his own great podcast but he doesn't get absorbed by IT.

And I wanted to talk you about this because I you know I think for people that are very feeling very sentient um or really in touch with that, the ability to like feel music, to feel other people's emotions, to really um that's a beautiful life to taste food. But there's a threats beyond which we kind of lose ourselves in the experience of others and what's going on. Yes, rick can go right up to that and really see IT and enjoy IT, but he doesn't absorb him in a way that he he has a place that he returns to that in him.

And the reason I discovered this, as I I said, wait, you don't drink alcoa he said, no I said, no drugs he said, no doesn't judge IT, but he does not do IT I said, did you ever said no and I said, who comes up through music? Yeah and never takes a sip vocal, goes to college and never took a sip vocal, tried any drug. And again, you I don't judge.

I've talked about psychological on this podcast. They're talked about my own relationship to those what I think are very interesting in clinical trials and into that sort. 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 is like this ability to move back and forth seems to be the most um the best definition of like a great life yeah in my opinion, to because we need to do things .

each day so you don't even have to go back and for if you can do at all at once, you can feel, you can think and you can stay in the driver seat, not be overwhelmed either elections or emotionally. But I think IT has a lot to do. You were talking about asian eastern like meditation practices.

Um there's a little exercise I D like to do a people where if they're struggling with a bad habit, I say, imagine the part of you is always doing the bad thing, like smoking twenty packs a day or whatever and imagine them as a wild thing in your left hand and then imagine the part of you that hates him and to 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 when the wild child part is not thinking is just feeling, the controlling part is not feeling is just thinking. And if if I can get people, and I haven't even put their hands out because I know it's gonna activate both sides of their brains, and then I have them wish these people well, maybe, well, be happy when they can feel compassion for both sides of themselves.

Then I ask them, so who are you and who you've become is a compassionate witness, which is not thinking and it's not feeling in the way we is. Not emotional email. The word emotion means movement disturbance. This part of the of one's being is not ever disturbed or moved. Its totally still and totally peaceful and completely compassionate.

It's like the .

ultimate parent yes, IT is and dick shorts who who came up with the model of internal family systems there. I don't know if we've had him on the show 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, and then people are applying this addiction as well. I'll get his name from you later.

Richard shorts. Anyway, I was talking to him and he said, there is this part. We all have different parts as 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 through all the world, whatever your parts. So he talks to people about these different parts and men sometimes, as they say all there's i've just come up against, there's someone here who's very still, who's very huge, who's very kind. And he calls itself with the capitals.

And he says, after thousands of patients, he'll say, he'll say, what part of you is that? And they say of 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 log into that self, I am immediately swept away by my emotions in my brain, just like in the gale force wins. So I have to be very not grounded, but centered and identified with this self before I can even leave the house.

How do you go about doing that? And one of the reasons i'm asking this, because I think everyone, including myself, would do well to be able to access this compassionate witness self, but also because so many people are on social media nowadays, where you can almost fill yourself getting pulled down these on these trajectories, like the gravitational pull of a battle or or a video, or or even something that's delightful. But then you find like two hours went by and you you over consumed and .

yeah and another created and something .

goes nowhere, a goes where. So do you have a practice that you use to make sure that you're in that place?

I do. And it's called suffering .

is very reliable. My best .

friend suffering. I have a deeply love, hate relationship with suffering. If i'm, for example, I can barely look at instagram because I will watch a monkey nursing a kitten, and then I will be down that rabbit hole so far in eight hours later.

And but I will start to suffer. I will start to physically feel cramped, my eyes will start to hurt and water, and I will start to feel what you were saying. The groundwork of a the gear that is wrong, that machine isn't, is not in structural integrity, is like when your car starts make enough funny sound and you're like, I should not ignore that.

And IT always feels like discomfort, tension, anxiety and anger, any of those things. And then the practice of my life is to notice those sensations at a finer and more granular level, so that the moment I am off true, I can stop and say, I who, out of integrity. okay.

Now I mean to anxiety, because the divided person is always anxious. So do you get away from that? From anxiety and back to true? I use the body, sit back straight my spine, take a big breath, do other things that i'm sure you do when you meditate.

And then I sink into that part of myself that I was just trying to pull up for people with with the two hands exercise. And I believe you can probably tell me the truth of this. I believe that I ve wired a pretty strong super highway in my brain that goes, ooops, suffering, find self with the capitals.

And i've done IT so many thousands of times that I think I have like a highly million and circuit that just goes, they are shot. And then no matter what's happening, I can usually just find IT feel like and IT it's an exquis sensation. It's like coming home completely over and over again. It's and now when I do an ideal day, everything else is incidental. The key is i'm in that self.

So the state .

is what's key and is so much fun in this world.

And so you can walk around in that state. Oh yeah you can. So to be um sure I understand so say I wake up in the morning and i'm just like not feeling right or something triggers to me or I just like a off center right you take that sensation of of suffering yes and you don't fear IT you don't amplify IT you just can't pay attention to IT you pay attention to IT.

And here is here is the king thing. This isn't my new book. I cut this a secret because IT sounded so silly, and I thought this would never go in the ivy league.

But it's something I call kist K I S. T. And it's stands for a kind internal self talk. So what do you call yourself when you think to yourself? Andy, andy, what you call yourself.

you yeah just so .

you would 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. People talked 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 is go, how are you? How you doing? Not great.

okay. So there's some anxiety. Oh, your sinuses are block too. Let's see, what could we do for here. Let's to 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 that makes you so compassionate to other people because you're not fighting the suffering in yourself.

You have people in pain um are usually agitated and grumpy. 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 and I do think that most and we hear about inner child stuff, I think in our child work is very interesting. I also think that as a biology to spend the early part of my career and developmental neurobiology like the same neural stuff is repurposed yeah and the doll hod like that, that's something that is kind of obvious.

but we overlook, right? And like i've got some .

inner adults here who aren't very happy to the notion 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 it's like, no, it's crazy. We repair, pose them.

So we working were working in an adult landscape with child based algorithms. And depending on how childhood went, that either can be spectacular or so so or a complete disaster. USA comment.

However, I would bet my last time that he was still working on the same circuit he used when he was five. And they were pretty scary. You like, so yeah, we all have um multiple causes of suffering, but we also have I wouldn't actually call IT in your parenting because that is basically implies that only parents give that to to children.

And I think it's just humane if you are truly humane, if you are truly in in a state of self with the capital s, there is nothing in you that wants to cause suffering for any other being, and there is nothing in you that doesn't want to help ease the suffering of the entire world. So again, now into a kind of asian modality of there's a body thought, my prayer, that goes for as as long as space injure and as long as sentient beings exist. May I also abide that I might heal with my heart the miseries of the world.

And that part of us is in everyone. And if we become those people, IT won't just be parents being kind of children. IT will be humans being kind to each other, the earth and all other beings. And we may actually make IT into .

another century. Yeah, no, it's looking. It's looking sketchy right now. I mean, things are tense. IT sounds like IT starts with self, love, compassion, like like only from that place of compassionate witness self with a capital s. Excuse me, can we be at our best for others?

And I believe it's actually the only part of us that's real. I talked them. And to go about people who are dying, they they drop the pretense.

They don't need the pretense of belonging to the material world or the material body anymore. And the that radiance begins together in their eyes. And it's not new.

It's what they came in with. If you've looked into the eyes of a Young child, a little baby, you see the same thing. And it's only when people die that they put down everything else and less. As I got to this, says, you die before you die, and learn that there is no death because itself does not feel physical. IT feels .

matter physical. If you would, let's drill into this a little bit more because this is a high level but at the same time, basic and yet abstract concept and um it's not often on this podcast if we talk about abstract concepts, we probably don't do IT enough. We get like I like talk about protocols, sunlight on clear days, and I love that stuff too.

But as probably people realized by now, I I think a great life is is bridging as many things, at least for me, as as possible, and seeing the overlap in the v diagrams. So it's the only part of us that's real um meaning the other parts are conditioned. I think .

you said are impermanent. They will vanish everything as shake experience, everything will just disappear and leave, not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on. There is an experience that is common to individuals all over the world, in different cultures, at different times, where they start to say, they feel if they awaken from a dream play.

Or did IT with his cave analogy, he said, you know, imagine that we all live chained in a cave, and there's a fire behind us, and we see shadows on the wall, and that's what we call reality. And then someone gets out of the cave and goes outside and seize this three dimensional world. Where are everything's bright and mobile and goes back as as people that this is the shadows on the wala real they're al shadows, but they are not the ultimate reality.

You should come outside and see that. And play said everybody would say, say he was crazy and that's what academia is. Now you're crazy if you've ever had an experience where you felt like there was something real than your physical self. You're crazy like really play to what's .

interesting because a few years ago um so many concepts that I was intrigued breath work, for instance, psychedelics, meditation. I mean now people get federal grants to study this stuff and we do reductionist work to try to understand. In fact, I had to disguise breath work as restrained physiology, which we did, and we did clinical trial, you know, long and behold certain patterns of breathing shift your internal state and your sleep in your anxiety.

It's like a because I got giant that but I IT was scary territory for a while and now, you know, psychodeviant s have kind of broken through as I mean that, I mean, I just have to say this would like while touching my forehead and like, like that they are just neuromodulators just like, but differently then a certain drugs are just neuromodulators and everyone except IT. So the idea of changing neuromodulators to change conscious experience, and in that altered experience to be able to achieve neuroplasticity is like, it's also a big yeah course. IT works that way. But six years ago, you'd get fired from the university if you said, well, maybe suicide de and 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 self serve and especially .

if you're depressed but not without supervision, but if you get really, really good at IT, i'm not saying doit either, but i'm not saying .

don't do IT right and and there and if you're you know more, don shine 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 guess the point is that I feel like academia kind of coming around probably do to the suffering of people in IT, where then they know somebody who achieve some relief through meditation or some benefits of meditation. So now, you know, everyone, I think, except like meditation, can be very useful for lowering stress and altering conscious experience. This is not new stuff.

As as everyone knows, it's come back thousands of years. So IT sounds like getting into the capital itself, the compassionate witness is step number one. And so I just want to make sure that we make clear how one does that. Yeah.

it's one step. Step number one is suffering OK. We all have that you may have never felt good in your life listening, but you have suffered.

That's for sure. This first truth of boot sm, there is suffering in this life. Pay attention to your suffering without fighting IT allow IT to be there.

I do this meditation. If something physically painful or emotionally painful, I used to say, let go. Let go to myself in work.

So one day I said, all right, you can stay. Let IT stay. And so I do.

Or let's stay meditation. If there's paying, let IT stay. If there, let IT stay.

And as soon as I let IT stay, IT begins to change. So first step is suffering. Second step is compassionate attention to one suffering with no resistance.

And the third step is to follow the compassion that is naturally being directed toward that suffering until you find yourself centered in IT. And that is a huge relief. And i've done this in massive physical pain.

I've done that when i've just lost people. I love IT. It's a very powerful, maybe not a panache, but not that far from that. If you can get there, you still suffering, but there's a piece that holds the suffering so lovingly that is no longer concerns you.

So on one level that you're suffering, and on a different level, which feels more real to me, there is only piece and compassion and wonder, enjoy. And somebody asked me once, if there's a mean of physical reality, why is they're suffering? And I just heard coming out of my mouth because because the self loves experience and it's not afraid to suffer.

So it's not afraid. So then staying in that is highly motivated by the sufficing you feel when you leave. So to me, that first step, suffering.

Second step, pay attention to suffering. Third step, follow compassion to its origin. Fourth step, never stop doing that.

And every day.

every minute, yeah.

yeah. This is very relevant to me. I, I have always wondered about, like, do you push back against the feeling? Do you live with the feeling? You let IT amlie y IT there's so much contradiction yeah in inside of the typical discussion of these kinds of things and one of the reasons I love work so much as that um you don't tell people what to do but you provide paths absolutely you do absolutely i'd like to talk about two things.

You know, before came in here, I did meditation. I do this before every episode. But today I I just had like took only like a minute because I came to me so fast. Which is the two words, the pop to mine, where you know what's real? What is true I mean, I think so much of what we're talking about and so much of life is like, what's real?

What's true yeah certainly out in the world, but in us yeah like what i'm hearing is that at some level we need to not trust our thinking, yes, but of course there 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. True sometimes about us.

I think there's all this childhood programing, right? How do we search to sort through this? I am guessing that has something to do with being in that compassionate witness place.

Yeah but but let's say, well, you've experienced in your life, I know because you're written and talk about this and I certainly have now that by some interesting twist of fate I am a public facing person people saying things about you are about me that are not true 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 being told they are stupid. Sometimes they are being told they are brilliant, and they know they're not brilliant. You know, this can go in every direction. Yes, 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 cells? Well.

I would get I reverse IT and talk about what's true first. So I remember sitting when I was seventeen in the lamont library at harvard, contemplating ending my life, and like, yes.

yes. And looking .

at the equally miserable scratching the others teenagers and put in the wood there. And I thought, okay, they say, the truth will set you free, right? right? I'll give me a try.

And I just started trying to find out what was true. And I I read through all the works and the of the greatest philosophers until I got to a manual count. He says, everything is screen through our perceptions so we can know that anything is true for soon. And I was, I felt such relief.

Okay, I can't intellectually know what's true then if it's not true, uh, if I can intellectually know something true because everything is subjective, what's useful, what feels like truth to the body? And I was interested a that, for example, polygraph machines work um because the body hates to lie um starts to send up a whole bunch of you know activation of stress systems and puts you in fighter flied and everything when you tell a lie when you keep a secret so I just started thinking, all right, what makes my body contract 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 scientists because the body is incredibly wise. So I just started letting myself test things like I was raised morman and very, very moment. So, okay, mormonism whole boy, that must 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 collab. Ah, 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, far more sophisticated, has spent far more time being tinted with by evolution than my human ability to think in language. So IT has a response to truth or falsehood that more subtlely 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.

So, so that all the american indians are descended from a group of israel, zed, who came across in six hundred B. C. In a boat to the america's. okay.

Does the math work? What does the genetic evidence say? No, they came over the illusion straight and down um into the americans when I was living in new talk. They excommunicate A A DNA expert from the warm and church for doing the the the date for finding the data that said the mormonism that mormonism 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 heart.

I don't know this. Ara at mahalia. Ed, one of my favorite yoi, says 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, your body, and don't make logical sense. And some of those are things that our cultures very, very fond of, like everything has been measured or is not real. Is that true or so?

Sound like chAllenging or sitting with doctor and labels and stories that we've heard and that maybe we've internalized and internalized yeah and systematically expLoring how those make us feel in our body yeah.

I'd like to take .

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And you can always fit meditation into schedule, even if you only have two or three minutes per day in which to meditate. I also really like doing yoga eja, or what is sometimes called non sleeve deep press, for about ten or twenty minutes, because IT is a great way to restore mental and physical figure without the tireless est that some people experience when they wake up from a conventional nap. If you'd like to try to wake up APP, please go to waking up dot com slash huberman where you can access a free thirty day trial.

Again, that's waking up duck com slash huberman to access a free thirty day trial. I recall the inverse of the perfect day exercise was another one that I did, which was like, just caught what I was. I was like the the sucky day, like the shady day, right? Like or just where you imagine something really terrible and then how IT would cause the body to contract yeah and to recognize you know the other side of the coin yes, you're right.

And and just learning that relationship between the body and thought, yeah, I mean, I can say from my own experience that one of the biggest mistakes I ever made was teaching myself to be more resilient, ent to certain forms of stress. Really one of the worst mistakes I ever made. I mean, I in my lab study 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 or nothing.

The ability to module stress is incredibly powerful and useful, I believe that. Yeah um for sure. But um when I was a kid, I wasn't the kid that was going to hold the fire cracker to the last second.

I wasn't the kid that would do the really daring thing. I friends like that, and I felt kind of cheapish about that. Those friends .

are probably dead.

but they're not doing well. That's true. And I grew up in the then a very parent's community of skateboarders that we a lot of us were really while we were very free, which I love the freedom part but there was a lot of maham and craziness, especially back then yeah um and it's a beautiful culture and still friends with a lot of those folks um but those cultures I split off basically in the third over time about a third deter and jail about a third doing incredibly well personally and professionally incredibly well the third doing well but they're not like um still as ambitious about that.

There are more focused on their personal lives, and I hope that's what they want to be doing. So that kind of power broke down. But I remember as a Young kid and then in that culture, like learning to push myself yeah past the feeling of like this is dangerous to the point where as I got older and my body eventually got stronger, because back then I was always getting hurt, which is why I left.

That sport wasn't very good. For the record, I wasn't very good, good enough, but not where I wanted to be, that over time, I remember when I start doing science, I realized this is crazy skateboarding. You fall, you hurt yourself so badly, you can't do IT anymore.

That doesn't happen with studying. So i'll just study until I collapse. Yeah, i'll just work until i'm sick. I just, you know, like that person down the hall puts in eighty hours. Well, then i'll do one hundred and i'm not a competitive person by nature.

And or even worse, you in my in my mid forties getting into like stupid stuff like k jx, ic, great White shark diving to the point where I had an area failure. I mean, this is all, you know, this whole thing. And then coming back to them, the life, like, what am I doing and what what had happened is I learn to over de the signals of the body.

And IT was like, when is enough? Enough is like when the when the river comes, you know. And so I think that if we don't listen to the signals that our body said yes, and we learn to override them repeatedly and systematically, we can place ourselves into real psychological, emotional and.

Danger yeah and and I just like I don't know why, I just felt like this was a need to do this in order to grow up. And now I trying to the exact opposite. It's like and then I feel bad.

I feel kind of lazy. I'm not like running at five, sleeping at five. I'm doing yoga nedra. I'm doing yoga nedra at seven am because I didn't feel I sleep enough. And then our friends in the public facing health health space are like they push so hard and and lazy and then um so he can go too far.

Well we have this culture of push, push, push, produce, produce, produce. One of my favorite heroes, along with all over sex, is in my girl cries at oxford. I love that I made some he may wake up someday, just defined me, crowd on his bed, watching him sleep. He's like.

he's not just a nerve.

Yeah, not in a creepy way. Not in a creepy way, sir. But he talks about how our particular culture for the last few hundred years has veered toward stuff that is preferentially favoured by the left hemisphere of the brain.

IT has to do with grasping things and producing physical things and getting things to happen, controlling them where the right side of the brain. And of course, it's all i'm oversimplifying massively, but functions like meaning, synthesis combinations of different bits of knowledge. We're moving away from those.

And one of my good friends is still bolt Taylor, who had, he was a harvard neuron atomic. And SHE had a massive left time for a stroke. And so SHE suddenly SHE watched her left hemisphere go off.

SHE had a brain bleed, and that would pulse, so her left hemisphere would be there. And you say, everything is solid and measurable and a verb. And then IT would go off, and he was in a world where he 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 dissolved into fields of energy. And you were talking about energy earlier, SHE said.

By the time her left hemisphere had shut down completely, SHE managed to get a phone call. Mage SHE couldn't talk. By the time the phone calling through, SHE got to a hospital to create years to come back full functioning.

But he said, during that time, I did not know people's names, I didn't know the word person, but boy could I feel people's energy. And as SHE healed, SHE didn't model 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 lightest book and it's great.

Um but in the girl ris talks about how when we don't use the whole brain, his book the master and his emotion is the part of the brain IT knows meaning should be the master and the data collector is just the necessary but the data collector has taken over in western society um western educated industrial and is rich democratic if you wanted, get technical. And so what you were doing to yourself was completely rational, completely. You, you should get the Darwin award for taking yourself out of the G I was like.

stupidest thing. I remember thinking, like, what am I doing? And of course, we used IT to get virtual reality for our life.

We get a bunch of things that I put were useful that we transmitted into studies on stress. And um so there was always, as a purposing, a story that could justify being there. There is no and one that was really rooting in goodness and adventure. I love adventure and super curious.

I think that is 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 um like a pair of scissors could be really useful.

But when you're like trying to redire the baby, you put the scenes 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 I was Bruce 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 hearts in IT and when your heart is not in IT, when yourself is delighting in the adventure and oneself is no Andrew peace, be still you know enough.

Yeah yeah. I think that's a perfect segway. 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 and opening versus what feels contracting is the booty used to say.

He said this often that wherever you find um the ocean, whatever IT looks like, you could know IT because the ocean always takes of salt. And wherever you find awakening or enlightenment, no matter what he looks like, you will know IT, because IT always tastes of freedom. So not, it's not that you stop suffering, is that you are free.

You are free to interact with your own suffering in a new way. And that is peace. So you look, and IT literally physically affects the body as not free, free. And if ever anybody out there listening, go to a really rough time in your life and imagine IT, I mean, go to that time in your life when you were pushing yourself.

And you can actually remember the tightness in your throat, in your back, in your, it's contracted, and then remember the best moment of your life and what was happening then. And all your muscles will loosen, relax and open. And that is my gage of truth.

Does IT set me free. The truth sets you free. So whatever sets you free is the truth.

Then reality is, is gonna start changing for you with her, without psychodeviant s and I remember sitting, and I had this overwhelming obsession with meditation when I turned fifty, and I just bought this place in the woods in central california, and i'd go out and springle myself with birdseed and meditate in the forest, and they want the chip. Months came in, the birds would land on me. IT was amazing.

And about six months into really meditating for hours every day, I kind of had an experience like gill mult tailor in the shower. Whei was in the forest with the chip month mbs, and then I was just light. And I was like, IT was so startling.

IT was like a fAllen off a Cliff, like, I couldn't see the, I couldn't I and then I said, and then everything was back. And then I started happening a lot. And I read, in shamanic traditions, they call this experience stopping the world.

And IT can happen through the guidance of a shaman or a planter, or whatever. IT was happening to me, through meditation and in that space of light, which I stopped fearing after a while. IT looked as if this thing we're doing now is a video game.

If you in our city and playing a video game, you would choose a character, I would choose a character you'd stabbing with a sd. I'd hit you with a mass, and we would say, you are hurting me. You are killing me.

But really, we'd be talking about characters in the video game. And then somebody would come say, let's go get lunch. And we would put IT down and go stop staring each other and be friends.

IT feels to me as if this is more like a game than reality, the whole physical everything, and I call this you me, and you call that me, and I call IT you. And when the game stops, however that happens. There is a level of reality as different from this one as a video game is from three dimensional life.

There's a world outside the cave. And I don't know what that is. And I maybe wrong. I don't care.

Love IT a mini mention. Rick rubin, again, a few years back, I called him up and I said, like rick, I can believe this. And I really did 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 on earth about their life being completely different than IT had been presented and their business was failed like the whole thing just collapsed and wrote back he said, um back to nature the only truth that's very rick like that's how he talked exactly said he said, well, I actually sorry I was preceded by he said, I said, did you read this you see this I can't believe this and I know this person really well and like I can't like for a very long time .

and he just said it's all .

lies back to nature the only truth and I just like, and I just like that tatooed in my brains because so much of what we see and like in the shock and like I can't believe in and I think he was referring to something similar. He also has said, and you're going to get a kick out of this, I think so. Rick loves professional rustling.

He watches ten hours a week of professional restless. why? Well, first, all he believes is the only thing that humans have created. That's real.

why? Because everyone agrees that it's not real, it's big, and that he likes that no one gets hurt. But I mean, people actually can get hurt, but that no one is trying to actually hurt the other person.

They're collaborating in this of shake experience, dance what they do, and you have different characters. And so I went to see professional restrooms with rec thinking, like, what am I doing here? Like, like out in the flames.

And was like, not a seen, I would Normally take myself to on a friday. And I was so much fun, mostly because of how delighted rick was in seeing IT and his son as well. So we can distinguish, or like really identify what's true through this pack.

As close as we can't ever know completely. What's the whole? The macedonian method is, accept nothing until is proven true.

Well, we can't prove anything true. We could all be dreaming this. So I decided that I would accept everything in time, convinced that it's false. So I don't really believe anything, but i'm willing science.

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 haven't had a really, really sick, weak body most of my life.

And IT became a big part of my navigational system. I now think I have the the mcs, a mass al activation synergy OK. You put out a pycke on that. My daughters 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 system it'll protect you from cancer .

does IT really well IT.

Turns out that people that run kind of more torch auto immune conditions, like people who have skin conditions that are automated, une based, have fewer skin cancers because the immune system is combatting all these invaders. So there's yeah, there's an upside. This is the basis of a lot of logic, relate to immunity apis for cancers, is trying to have the immune stem fight off these mutations that are always occurring in the background. So i'm not i'm not trying to take away from the suffer its created.

but that's not and my mother had, and I just wish he had lived to see that the diagnosis even exist. But might daughter called me from england the other day, we were talking about the fact that he has that diagnosis, and he said, I am, I am allergic to my own god down emotions. And I was like you, we both are.

And my whole journey has been really, really accelerated by the fact that if I go off true for myself, emotionally, psychologically, metaphysically, whatever, I immediately get physical symptoms of some kind. But when I am true to myself, they all subside and I get this unbelievable health. So i've been told that I had five different progressive, incurable diseases. I don't have any symptoms, but if I allow myself to be untrue myself, if I allow myself to get out of integrity, eyes 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, um 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 as SHE died, IT was like, I don't know whether that I was feeling something that was real but that's as close to the truth as I can get. And if I see right now what what's happening to me, i'm getting into this cell. And as i'm talking about this dog, I feel that dog and I can feel bring the sound crazy no.

you get not not if you tried about dogs feeling, I know might make me cry, because i'm thinking about, no, because I think I can sense IT. Yeah, I think I can send IT. And forgive me if i'm like, like, like now sounding like totally crazy.

If anyone's listening like this, I will say, and I have just to be blunt, I got a lot of training in their own decades of training. And i'll tell you, the notion of energy is not mysterious at all. I mean, neurons are electricity and chemical exchange and that happens locally and IT happens at a distance.

Ah we are forms 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 scanner in different locations. And I know that sounds like people, oh no. Like what are you you talking about? This is like spoon bending stop.

no. The idea that fought in emotion at one location can impact thought in location. Other one is that magnetic reception has been published in the journal science.

Yes, so we're not outside the bounds of reality. We are like actually finally, as a field, starting to acknowledge that this stuff exists and starting to poking prd around in there. But people have known about this. So for you that the sensing of your dog passing, or 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 years later, I started talking about that dog. I feel IT again.

And IT is, I have IT. Okay, so when I was pregnant with my son out am, 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 blue apart. My understanding of reality, my husband, the time was traveling in asia a lot.

And when I would think about him, what happened 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 thunder storm in an airplane, and i'd see these very specific things, very specific. And then he would call me like the next day and said, I was walking down the street in japan, and I saw this very specific banner, and I flew over a thunderstorm, and I, lightning was amazing.

And I started to realize I was picking up information that he was seeing, and I was testable. IT kept happening. So what is that? He would have been so nonscientific of me to say that is completely and significant, don't pay any attention IT just was too weird.

And so that's when I decided, I believe anything in tota convinced its false. And that throws your whole mind open to understanding the universe is being far more mysterious. Then we that our culture likes to say IT is and yes, there's a danger of getting woo and crazy. But as I said, the map has toward to and you're just telling us how the neural physics of energy are being tested and found to be Operative IT is it's not well is just to the outside edge of what our cultures willing to accept in the instruments .

we have to measure things are just not there yet um but the same was said about most everything that has been clearly discovered and is rocks oit over the last fifty plus years at least in neuroscience. I can help IT just briefly share when I put costell down because I did that myself, which so yeah, but I did. I mean, so the that they came to the house, but I was home and I was right there.

I did I didn't do the injection. No, no, no. Originally I thought I would because unfortunate, because of my previous job, I had to do that a number of times. Yeah, not an accident.

No, so but what was interesting as like he let out a big like side right there, the end, but the wild dest part of IT was an swear IT sounds like i'm making this up, but I at the moment he went, I thought my heart heat up. I thought I was going be crushed like a broken heart and and I swear I felt as if he was giving me all this energy. And it's because i've been spending so much time.

He was up in middle the night a lot, and he must have some demands, a or that kind of thing. And I mean, I had that dog on everything I was injecting, method one for the last five mini healthier folds. Don't let your dog breed, you know, and discriminative. But like i've got my theories about, you know, the other stuff in horror and animals that lot of its are aligned with me on this one talk. Your vet not told progressive that, you know, I had him on a bunch of different drugs.

I had him he was he was really unhappy so letting IT was the right thing to do and i'll stopped talking about because I i'll get to worked up but um forgive me but the but that feeling IT was like, wow and I can still feel IT it's like he gave something back that now I think enough time to pass I go get another dog like IT IT was almost cycle here here's all this resource and and like gratitude and so these things sound kind of woo right? yes. Could you do an experiment where you put me in the label, I go through that? sure.

Would you see huge physiological change? sure. I don't see the point of that kind of experiment because I think enough people have experienced these kinds of things that is not necessary. and. In any case, I want to talk about integrity and your book way of integrity u an a very interesting experiment that um Frankly is going to sound little scary to some people and maybe do and maybe reflective to other people um which is I think there was one year of no line yes but like no lying of any kind not even to yourself no and especially .

not myself right?

And previously on the podcast we had my colleague, doctor on a empty who runs our dual diagnosis addiction clinic is a tremendous service to the world, talking about all the various kinds of addiction. Diction as a disease, yes, but also something that people can overcome. And one of the things that I love so much about honest message SHE went the book documentation.

But yeah, a wonderful book is he talks about how recovered addicts are actually her heroes, because they've learned to navigate this internal process that most people, perhaps, who are in addix, we don't think they are, are constantly being yanked around by these dope systems. But they've learned to conquer their own dopamine system, right? So they represent the heroes of her world. You know, I love that model because we tend to look at addix and think about is like like there's all this judgment on IT.

But now I think I think it's amazing. I think that s 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 and the society says, you know um like I talk to people, I interviews people who for this book who would go to there one woman went with her husband to the psychiatrist.

They said, you know, she's not happy doing the traditional wife role and they SAT there and talk about what medication would enable her to fulfill this social role that he just didn't like IT IT never occurred 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 when they find an activity that gives them relief. And so they use IT because there are a lot of pain and one until IT .

becomes the source of .

pain yeah and IT always doesn't. It's horrible. But one addiction specialist diospolis like they're standing on a nail and trying to take enough drugs to stop the pain. And that that is not what you need to do when you're selling on a nail. You need to take the nail out.

And the nail is the part of your life that you are 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.

Now, I spent a lot of my life there are confessing it's super unpleasant. It's always LED to like shady things.

How possible is IT you took what the culture told you was good and bad. God, you learn to do IT.

And when we tell ourselves stories like, well, if we achieve certain things, then we will be in a Better position to do more for other people. Like there's the modern m version of the two. The reason I brought up honor was he was the first to alert me to these studies that have been done about how military and growth of the preference tal cortex is actually accelerated when people tell the truth, especially around truth, that are somewhat uncomfortable.

And it's a beautiful literature that small but starting to really emerge yeah and um and a big part of the recovery from addiction is people first like acknowledging the truth to themselves and then other people and again, all of that kind of shrouded by how we think about addicts like you know sadly in any major city and even small towns now you can see the bent over for or ice and like we we judge would like oh you know where we say it's so sad or but that's just um you an example how far gone people can get in that particular addiction honor offers an interesting idea which is that the more we tell these little microprobe, the more connected to reality we are. Yes, and in the way of integrity, you talk about this experiment that you did integrity clans ah what so an integrity clans. So maybe 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 um I guess I meant to start with the woo story. Um 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 the long story, wrote about IT in another book.

Point is, during the surgery, I regained consciousness and SAT up and looked at them CoOperating on me, which was surprising because I was lying down there and I was, like, very disconcerted. And I lay back down, and I looked up between the surgical lights. And between them appeared this ball of light that was much, much, much brighter than the surgical lights, which are very bright.

And IT was so beautiful. I like you, just you can't describe, but it's outside the cave. And I was just completely obsessed by IT.

And then I started to grow. And when I touched me and IT filled things, IT didn't bounce off things. IT filled them. When IT touched me, this incredible joy and love and warmth flooded my body, and I started to cry, and my body was crying.

And the surgeons noticed these tears coming out of my eyes, and they freaked out because they thought that I was feeling the surgery. And crying was the only thing I can do about IT. So they were panicking, and the anesthesiologists, they told them, you know, pump up the medication later, because I grilled him later.

What did you give me? What the side affects? What happens? Can I have some more? He said afterward that he, when he went to increase the medication, he said, a voice said to him, don't she's crying because she's happy? And he said, I just did what I said and he was White and shaking.

And he said, did I do the right thing? So I kind of told him a little of the story. Anyway, this light was there yeah and I was just like a home, home, home and I said, yeah, okay, so this is, this is what you really are and you're about to have a pretty tough time for a while.

But just remember, I am always here, even though you can see me this. And so I came out of that surgery and I thought, I will not allow anything to mind life that doesn't feel like that light. H, that's what IT wasn't like to use language.

But IT said, this is not the way you feel after you die. This is the way you're supposed to learn to feel all the time. So in your body, out of your body, doesn't matter.

This is how you meant to feel and believing. When I worked with hero antics, they would describe their first high. And IT was as close to that as anything i'd heard people describe.

And I would say I believe you're meant feel that way and also keep your teeth, you know. But so I didn't tell a life for a year I came out of IT and I thought were lying is definitely not going to feel like that that White does not lie. So no lies ever of any kind.

even though the microlight like winning. You be home and you know, it's twelve minutes and and you say ten.

say that, say twelve. Do you like my my outfit? No, I do not. I mean, I found ways to, I would sort of tried to soft in the truth.

Did you mean also telling every truth that was in your head, you would keep certain .

things to yourself? no. In fact, IT felt untrue to say certain things to certain people. IT felt invasive or offensive, and that didn't feel true. Sometimes silence was the greatest truth I could tell.

But I, I didn't even know that that was the case until I started my experiment. So I did not live for that year, and i've done IT many, many times since. But I would not recommend jumping into a one hundred percent from a life that has already been pretty examined.

What honor has said, and I think in the backdrop of what you're saying, is that everybody does these little microbe investments or and you ve said constantly and you've said that this is largely to smooth social interactions, that most of lying is to smooth social interactions .

that shows that most people live at least three times within ten minutes of meeting another person, they lie to them. And a men are social and condition to tell lize that make them seem a little bit cooler than they maybe think they are real. And women, people identify as women, are socialized to tell lizer that make other people feel good about themselves.

So IT takes you in different directions. But I just wasn't gonna 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 um with the religion went the family of origin um every friend I had growing up because to leave more mechanism is worse than murder in that community. I was cast into outer darkness. My marriage realized I was gay. Oops, I hadn't figured that out at .

twenty nine as a realization in that year. Yeah okay. IT must have been in your unconscious some place prior. Yes, they're never been. There had never been a kind .

of like knock. No, okay, no. I was so bent on being a good person according to my socialization, the same way you were bent on being A A brave, strong mail 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 x husband was gay as well. So um 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 held, but the marriage did because of that. Lets see what else happened.

Oh, oh yeah. I quit a academia. So my industry, I think i've gond all those years of school for my job means of support. I left my, I was living in new talk, the time, and I sort of fled for the boris. I lost my home.

How are you feeling .

in Better and Better .

and Better? 喜欢。 Think I excited to be like, I was orrible you like, no.

Better and Better kind IT was, but not this horrible .

of staying in all those things. And the part that intrigues me um at the moment is like the losing of friends, like losing of people and the structures that we relied on also for safety. Yes, that's gotta hard.

Oh, it's it's very yeah for for parts of the psyche that are. Um you know very attached to socialization and attached to people that are familiar to you is heartbreaking, really heartbreaking. But that light gave me a full on experience of the self. And that I just I didn't told me was it's always there. My son, who was down since on one day, told me after his friend's mother died, we're coming on from the funeral.

He said, I didn't cry and I said, okay, if you cried, 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 I was very garble and I was like, what a light came and open your heart. And I said, when did this happen? He said, may tenth is like, this year? No, I was thirteen.

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. Kids with down son don't have easy lives. And IT touched as hard and he said, since then, nothing goes as as hard.

And I said, you know, I saw IT too and I said to me that it's always with this, even though we can see that and he said, oh, I can see that and I I was you can and he was like, yeah, like he was sort of disappointed in me and said, well, where is IT is IT like up there, down here in your head, in your heart? He just looked to me. He said, mom is 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 in the heartbreak and everything, those parts of me were dissolving, and I was becoming more identified with that life. 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 life never going back there.

Did you feel as if you had to accomplish certain things, degrees, that set of first, in order to allow yourself this? I hear this a lot. You in the backstop of this entire conversation, I have one little piece of neural real estate, which is, like, devoted to the audience, that is saying, okay, I can do these things once I have a job, once I have blank, once I have the resources.

But at the same time, I do want to highlight for people that everything that we talked about in terms of practices and things to do, like you just do them there. There's no there's no purchase like it's inside of us, right? Like there's no looking to something in a package or in a even a program. It's all within us. Like so you can be done IT really anywhere and with any count of resources or lack there of .

but but be gentle with yourself. Don't quit your drive. 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'd go running in the snow. I remember once I bought running shoes that were too small, and all my tone nail came off during that run, and I just kept running, and i'd stop and take off another tone ail and keep running. I was able to be very brutal to myself.

Just living in boston is brutal.

Well, know, on the plus side, my feet were completely no because the cold. So 我 给点钱。

But at me, so you have some, you have the capacity for extreme resilience. yeah. And IT IT perhaps to took you too far.

yeah. And I think that's why I did. I did this massive integrity clans when I was at a place where I was far, far away from my true self.

And because of that, he was a kind of violent breaking of connection. So now if i'm coaching some media, 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 will end up some place very different.

So just gently move away from what causes you to suffer. Get yourself the hot cup of tea in the morning to soothe your throat. Listen your own sorrow. Cancel the meeting because you just don't feel like doing and 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 am a so that truth about everything and I don't care who hates before IT, that was just my way.

And inevitably, a much kinder, more generous version of ourselves emerges. When were living our truth? I mean, for foregone inclusion, but still worth stating. Yeah, I can personally say that most of my suffering has been the consequence of the fact that I love, love and and i'm blessed with many great friends and things of that sort, business partners, IT said. But I have a tendency to get into relationships quickly and ending them and feels near impossible and cause and also others too much suffering yeah, you know.

And so a lot of that is the reason raised this is that it's about holding two truth at the same time, which are 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 or haven't been able to like I can accept that people die um all three of my academic advisors, 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 I got took me a long time to realize this might not be my fault, you know, I know it's crazy, like how 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 and so to try to make the most of IT but the idea that people would move apart yeah even um in circumstances where death doesn't separate them here to me is like it's so painful .

yeah was IT kids who said that of all the ways they are to lose a person, death is the kindness st like that yeah yeah .

and this has roots in in all sorts of things in me, of course. But the reason I raise IT is that I think that when we have two incompatible truth, no, that's when we feel stuck, like we love people, we wanted take care of them. Maybe we want them to remain in our lives, but we have to like the .

letting go process cks be incompatible truth. This, I think what happens is that you and just tell me where I am wrong OK I could be completely full of crap IT sounds to me like you're one of the people who who have a huge chart, who sometimes confused love with self abandonment, who love so deeply that you want the joy of the of the beloved IT more than you want your own .

joy one hundred percent .

and that is not love. That is a hostage situation okay like um there's something I call spider love. If you say to a spider, how do you feel that flies? I would say I love them. And IT expresses that love by a mobilizing them, wrapping them up and injecting with poison and and sucking out their life force whenever IT needs them. And IT loves those flies you, but love always sets the beloved free.

okay? So there's a consumptive love and when you are a fly and you meet a spider um and you give your whole self to this person who I really that you find yourself starved of your own your own validation, your kindness to true self and you've given IT all to the other person and that's when IT will not work. And you may be missing the people who aren't looking for flies or who want to just i'm not going to extend this metaphor any further who just wanted be with you as a whole human who want to know what your limitations are as well as their own.

Who will say to you, I have a new friend who I had monier, and I wanted to talk you on the phone and I told my assistant, I don't care if I have not and SHE called as he wrote me a text and he said, do not impinge on your own health because you want me to feel loved. I don't like IT. I want you to be healthy and well. So I would examine the moment where you become so entrance with another, that you stop caring about yourself and try to feed your whole life to them, because that is not love. It's of something our culture defines us love a lot of parents of their children that way, but you have to be able to know exactly what you want to communicate to the other person and to have them say, I completely respect that or you don't have a love situation of codependency.

It's very useful. Thank you. And I know we will be very useful to many people. What what is the suggestion for people um that are trying to figure out what they want or need or both? I'll related .

to this relationship thing because it's IT applies across everything that it's hardest and 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.

So if you 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 this 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. Yes, like this. Fe.

exactly. And you you just crushed right over that boundary, that very sensitive inner vigiLance, that saying, this is how we stay whole and this is how we stay in integrity. So most people with a job, with a relationship, with any choice they make, they can trace IT back when I pick up the pieces for the ears later.

All that. I know that the first week and I stayed in there for twenty 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 is like I was the the I can member's named, won the nobel prize for literature at me, and you know, I would crawl down the avenue, black and blue to show my love, to make you feel my love and it's like, okay, that's not showing me love. You don't hurt yourself to show me love but maybe that's why you have to pull back since inches from your own eyes, to brutalize yourself for other people that matter archetype it's not IT doesn't worm yes it's caused me and and I think .

others a lot of suffering because I think what ends up happening is that um when we get separation from that person then we do a little bit of self recovery but then it's like i'll fractured and repeat .

now and .

repeat right, exactly what you just described as extremely helpful.

I'm curious, in your rollers, a coach to many people, how often are romantic relationships, partnership type things, whatever form that takes for people? How often is that like the 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 and in the wrong life professionally you know if you had give us like the the non peer reviewed studies.

but I kind of crude break down, yeah, I think because they identified me as a coach, they go to with therapists, with relationship things. But people come me with my life, just start working that feeling.

Yeah, the most things .

is 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 about anybody. Anything we do that's dsf unctions for any part of ourselves is dis functional 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've never complained, you're going to end up telling me that you're in a horrible marriage with this spouse is awful, but you never complain. The 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?

no. What's interesting that you say that I feel like professionally, it's like there's like a gravitation 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 the tropical fish store, then IT was birds, then IT was skateboarding. Then I was just want to be a firefighter.

Like whatever eventually was neuroscience and is podcasting you know it's just like I can miss when I say that I mean, I can keep myself from doing what I really want yeah I would say likewise with friendships, unfortunately, to have a great relationship to my biogen family, though he was rock really rocky for a lot of years. But it's like, cool. The work is paid off and they've done a lot of work in romantic partnership.

It's like a car. Vw, it's been much more chAllenging. I've had some amazing partners and partnerships like amazing still on excEllent terms with many of them.

And then i've had some like really, really brutal, like barbed wire just like and you know, i've had to take a look at my role in that too, right? So in this case, for me it's like a car vote. I think of IT is like this, like weed shape carved. I just seem 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 frg um wherein 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 now the things aren't 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 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 gonna kill animals at your job, you know the people at your lab aren't going to a to be hard broken. 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 you changing a 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, I know how. 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, an obviously the right thing is often another thing that makes people feel best, IT said. I said, you know but um how do you work with that? So there are .

different ways of reframing IT. And one example, since you know a lot about addiction, um if if somebody is addicted to you pleasing them um you are pleasing them and going out of your integrity to please them, to give them whatever they want that please your addiction as a code dependent is giving them that emotional energy, whatever they whenever gets them high and their 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 no idea how much i'm suffering.

And the thing I have to do in an intervention is, no, is the alcohol that's doing the hurting you is the overriding. 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. Any addictive powder doesn't mean that we wouldn't be together in the great self and that we're all oneself, and we can all love each other forever.

But IT is not kind to feed someone is addiction to eating your energy that make sense? Yes, it's not. You have to do some tough love .

yeah the compassionate thing is to, yeah.

yeah this is not helping you and they say, but I want more of reviewing to say, now, 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 loss to us and I was like, no, I was always a game on morman. You know, I was just feeding you the story that I was a straight morning girl, you know, and I can't feed you that anymore.

It's making new 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 i'm probably still are really happy and think i'm going to hell, what about that?

But I did. You know, I find IT .

alert as, I mean.

sorry. Uh, not sorry. No, that was. I just nothing to do but laugh there. Goodness, yeah. I think this notion of things ending because we realized that we were telling lives yeah and god shit even hurts to say, yeah, yeah it's like because we weren't trying to tell lies. I didn't know we were telling lives yeah.

Innocent mistake to me.

That often grows from what I think of as empathy. Probably not, certainly not the best form of eastern yeah but I think that there's A A human finot pe 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 delighted ed IT so IT feels good to us to you feed the addiction.

It's not like it's like, oh, here I am, Martin like i'm bleeding out, bleeding out, bleeding out. But it's not in line with this essential self. And here I guess the the lovin yet 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 empathising with them means like double the love, like we love them and we can feel their love. And it's like a perfect, I just bills like a perfect circle.

And with people that can happen to, I imagine all that a few. I certainly feel that in my friendships, I fill that with my sister and i've felt IT in a few of my romantic relationships, but the empathy for the others pleasure can go too far. Yeah and then we when we couldn't lose ourselves, I think it's because there's a component of ourselves that is like not attached to the part that still has .

our own needs to here's the thing, you don't your dog expect your dog to pretend it's not a dog you don't deter. You don't expect your dog to stop loving walks and chasing ball and just being a dog. And when it's tired, i'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 maximum ly thrilled with us. And I know exactly what you're talking about. I throw like, I love to give money to .

people and make them happy.

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 never give, because someone is said there saying I need 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, but I will get an extra job to give money yet people of that I don't want to give money to after at the first little while. So we ve bend ourselves out of our true being.

And I think the reason we love dogs so much is that they love, they love, truly 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 year 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 like example.

If you got hit by a car, you're lying, their screaming and english. And I felt your feeling so strongly that I couldn't cope and I late. You don't fell down in a fame, had a client once who has passed away.

Now i'll tell this and a note. And her husband was like you, he would give himself away, and he gladly consumed all his life energy. And one day he had a heart attack and their 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 he is said, I told him, he said, I can't be there for you right now.

I'm having a heart attack and she's said you're not the one whose husband may be dying from a heart attack SHE was so into consuming his energy that he actually said that with a straight face, SHE was expecting him to give empathy. That's long empathy. That's selling yourself out.

Empathy acknowledges self other awareness. They're four components to real empathy, self other awareness. I am not you as iron kv, one of my favorite spiritual teachers is my favorite thing about separate bodies, is that when you hurt, I don't, it's not my turn.

So good, so good.

yeah. Another one is emotion regulation. So you see something as horrific, and you can like this is where you can use your skills dealing with your emotions.

You bring IT down. Okay, i'm a surgeon. I'm dealing with a horrible E.

R. accident. I can't feel that I have to get to work. So that's emotion regulation. You can do that. So either awareness, emotion regulation, two other components, but those are the two that I think we really need to focus on. If you heard, 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 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 palm by half, is who was a thirteen century person. Poet is 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 unhelpful. 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 in the domain of work, in with my friends and largely with family, um you like giving feels great and then people are really sated ah and then they go on their way.

But I noticed the contrast um with romantic partnerships when as I said, I maintain good relationships with a couple of girlfriends and I had you know in some cases of good friends with husbands like they actually won just came to visited with her sister and her kid recently and like on just great platonics or but for years I like I didn't worry about them but I felt like I could still feel the energetic poll even though they weren't asking for anything right. And then when I attended their wedding, this particularly person's wedding, I was like I was like my work is done yeah and I got to enjoy and still get to enjoy the friendship with the whole family yeah. But IT really showed me how much that the whole, really so much of the relationship had been about, like trying to make sure the other person .

was OK you make IT your job to make them happy. And IT is never your job to make another person happy. You can 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 to someone else is sadness to make them happy. You can go far and off 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. Where is the only one you're ever going to have?

My oldest child as a teenager, I was so over involved in everything, and they gave me A A song called let me fall by a man who had fAllen from a tree and broke his spiny. He was a paradip, 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 like, let my child have you suffering this link and arrow about rage's fortune and what they were telling me that they then pronounce um was that.

This is my life and my suffering is my birth, right? And I am here to figure that out as I go. You are not loving me when you shot yourself into my affairs to try to take away my suffering. Let me fall.

What a mature and um generous thing for them to say they are ordinary IT sounds like IT this is your oldest. That the contrast. And I think what drives a lot of what we're really talking about here, code dependency. Oh 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 i'll get hh I mean this I mean and it's unclear especially if the relationship had been different up until then, that you know like that's why it's sometimes feels unfair to do.

It's like, oh, 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 realized there are an alcoholic yeah ah and I guess that term isn't used anymore. I've been told by many audience members forgive me its alcohol use disorder. I said no right right um I think that field of addiction medicine is nicer enough that we're still making the transition.

And I don't say this, by the way, for political correct inness, i'm not a politically correct person and they just i've had to learn to reframe these things for the specific purpose of trying to be more to bring more people into the conversation also right? I like the sound of, I don't like the idea, but the words alcohol use disorder, the disorder piece, is also controversial. But what I love is that as soon as we start to name things and reading 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 judge doing out of out of that means we have to talk about IT, just like autism spectrum disorder, autism neurotypical a typical will. 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 is but this is what we do. This is the the kind of promise that you made yeah and so then we find ourselves in like the other scripts of like, well, now i'm like being bad i'm i'm doing the right thing but i'm breaking a promise which we're told from like is the time were a 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 by my actions.

I established a precedent. Isn't that a promise basic? It's a promise.

no. Or if I didn't make a promise, I was in error. I apologized. I, my mistake. I promise something I couldn't really give have you heard the .

term extinction burst um in the notion of, uh, galaxies developing .

or no it's pigeons are well, awesome and I might trying .

to be elon moser and in your notes about pigeons .

cool it's about i've .

been have a pigeon tattoo yeah .

I I love all the, anyway, if you give pigeons, they pack a lever and they get a pallet 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 .

benni percent pick back.

back, back pack. They pick IT a lot more. They pick IT angrily. They insist that the researchers promised in those pelts, and then they just give up and go away, because the palace 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 stopped.

And the other person will put on an extinction burst for, and your job is to stay inside your integrity until they stop pecking and they'll be much more healthy. I D A golden ary driver once, who would just come in bark to be paid. Big, huge dog.

But he was Young and IT was so annoying, and we had to get a dog behavior is to come in because he was just barking at everybody constantly to be pet. And he 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, that it's not cruel.

He'll understand that. And i'll never forget washing in barkeep on rap and they got up, walked out, shut the door in his face, he went, stood by the door and rough, you went over and lay down. You say, I know 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 them tug you around.

Yeah yeah. It's interesting because with work like I love learning, organizing information, having conversations like this and sharing them with the world that feels kind like the relationship to a dog. It's like this reciprocity and the 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 not like I be doing IT anyway like there's no there's no feeling of of loss and there's no metabolite ing yourself any of that yeah.

I know. And I call what I I in the book that I just wrote called beyond anxious. I talk about when people like you live that 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 the income.

People pay me to do this. And I still can't believe that I come in here and I talk to my producer is also my business partner and my closest friend, rob. And like, I can't believe they pay us to do that.

I can't believe that, and that's also how I felt about science. The first time I looked down the microscope and saw slice of a particular brain area called the dorsal general nuclear, we had labeled this. I turned to Barbara chap in my graduation zor there.

And I was like, this is amazing. And her responsible, so funny. SHE was also harvard trained radCliff, to be specific.

And he said, yeah, brains are really cool. That kind like, well, well, mets. And I just like, so barbera, smartest people I ever made, I 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 it'll take you and and SHE had Green counters in her love instead of black counters of, and he had pictures of mushrooms. And SHE had to this picture of a cat coming out of a farm celo. It's like his hat.

And I thought, I really like this lady, like, I want to work you. 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 the heart of the other lab.

SHE got over IT. So in the professional domain of a completely different animal, when IT comes to these things, I walked into the other woman's lab. She's done tremendous. Ly, well, without means. So I just said to listen, i'm going to join this other lab but um like I have no trouble doing that in the works domain none it's like know when I started the podcast sure there are these voices in my head when my colleagues do not think this and that and no I was like, yeah I hope they live in their best life. I'm a live mine yeah like and I see them and some love IT some hate IT and like really I can tell like I hear the judgments and I also hear the like I love IT you that kind of thing. It's it's a mix because public facing anything is going to be different responses from people and but i'm sorry, like you do you i'll do me and mobile be good.

We live in this weird economy where you're supposed to get a job and it's all based on factory work. Use us 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, 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, if I just put my joy out there and see what I can do with the wild new creations of our particular time um if I don't do the job, I being weird somehow and IT won't work. But what i'm seeing is the economic structures of this society are all being fractured than falling apart around this. And it's people who are afraid.

Nice to watch this video of a of a tsunami that hit and japan in two thousand and eleven. And I think I was and IT this wave comes in and IT eats a city in six minutes, this one wave, and you watch the whole city, like be to reads 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 I watched this and I thought, there is so much change in our culture, it's like that wave has hit us. And then accidentally, I hit something in youtube or whatever, and it's switch to mike persons surfing. One of the biggest waves ever filmed, IT, was a rock wave.

And I went up like seventy feet, and the camera pulls back, and here's this, a man, a naked, 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 story's tall, and he comes riding down the face of that and he breaks over 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 we will keep us safe and change will crushes and drownings and killers. 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, accepting relationships. But you will get over that.

And take some work, taken some work.

there's a woman hanging on to the end of your surf. But it's not unfortunately.

it's a lot more complicated than but I am seeing a portal tod, I guess what you're calling like true integrity where in the back of my mind I I have this like very this digital 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 gonna look like the way I tried to script IT out do .

an ideal day with that relationship and IT could be the weird thing you've ever heard of. IT will work. I promise you. I have a very weird relationship life .

that's reassuring.

Believe I going to see this on this pocket.

So I have two partners. Your partners is awesome. Oh, I met. Well.

I just met one of them. A one was the very first relationship I ever heard with a woman that was twenty some years ago. And then I was living on my ranch and meditating all day.

And my partner, caring, came to me. And this australian poet role was staying on our branch with some other people and Karen at me now, he said, Martin, I have to tell you, i'm having very strong. I don't know, maybe maternal feelings toward rome.

I like, no, they're not maternal that not getting a maternal energy. And I got hit by this blast of joy. Joy IT was like that White light thing I was like, and I said, you would love with her.

This is amazing teller to come in, i'll go, go to the guest room. You guys gonna. I was just like, happy, happy, happy. And I looked for jealous ously, and I looked for, I think this is supposed to work this way.

So rolling came up, and we all SAT are on talking, and we SAT on 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 the 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, the illa, who's delightful. And IT is what we call IT feeling good by looking weird. And you can cut IT out on the long cast 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 of all the of all the things to cut out of a podcast. We're not going to cut love out of a podcast .

of that about this podcast because a lot of people .

would yeah well, not me. And for people that like bulk at that or or creates internal friction in them. And I just invite you to, I don't visit your compassionate witnesses, if it's still there, but still there, then you know, hey, I actually believe that humans, partially based on developmental wiring pt 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 post stock, my third advisor, who is my post stock advisor, stanford, is that now unfortunately, died of pancreatic tic cancer.

The late ben barrs, he was born an identical twin girl ww then went up through medical school living as a woman graduate, goes a woman and then transitioned to ban um pretty late in life so I only met ban bin was a close friend and then unfortunately had probably ly because he had the bracket to mutation died of multiple cancers but that initiated by pancreatic cancer first transgender member of the national academy of sciences um I wrote his arbitrary for the journal nature we were very very close and just an amazing very quirky, do you know and didn't have a romantic dinner at least not at the time when he passed or in the time that I knew him to my knowledge. And you know benn used to say, like their components of our wiring that are ubiquitous yeah the parts of control breathing and the parts of control hard. And then there are parts of our wire ing that is different.

And to me, as a scientist, like IT makes perfect sense. Like the notion that any of that would be controversial is like, like IT doesn't any sense what's ever that one would like not believe that people have differences in wiring ing because most people want to believe in differences in wiring when it's like convenient for for themselves. So I really appreciate that that you're sharing this and um because yeah every which version works. And I also learned from my graduate advisor, a barber, chapman, he used to say, tolerant has to go both ways. So I also like love in a prauge, like the whatever traditional .

nuclear family is. Oh.

so.

But I would love you to really sit down, get incredibly authentic with yourself and say, honestly, if I had the perfect romantic life, what would that look like and be what you will call very selfish, what I will call very much in your integrity. Don't tell yourself any lies about what you really want.

Yeah, IT is very strange, but both care and I ve felt like there was a tremendous absence before in a couple of years before row came into our light. And we are just it's like we're a three legged stools. Two legged stools do not make sense to us.

They fall down. Um whatever comes into your vision of joy, whatever makes you feel free, write IT down and can read IT often. And when you get into a relationship, read even more often.

maybe have the other .

person and let the other person read IT.

So that would be that I can do as difficult to have a certain conversations. I can certainly ite things down and just like slide.

And now here's what i'm after. Don't let me do the things in colomb. IT won't end well.

I love IT and I really appreciate that you share that. And I know people listening well as well.

I hope so. And if not, I read a book by semantic urban, wonderful comedian and SHE this, 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 pon truck music like that jona, because to me could be wrong, maybe classical music being in the exception, but to me it's the only genre of music where all the versions of self and emotions are welcome. There is angry music. There is like political music.

There's sad music. There's um you know music about friendship and come roy about loss. And you look at the community like a briled the stuff.

So look at the community like that by good friend tim armstrong is created around certain bands he's going to be on on the mount rushmore pcr the great joe drama from the clash. Political sic. Yeah, I know.

Or lower. Gene Grace, like one of the first transgendered, like outward facing transgendered people in in the puncher community. And that's amazing music, but against me.

And then large and Grace, and like, this is a hero, one of my short list of her love, love, love heart, 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 kind of single genre yeah and I don't know much about other genres of music, but I don't see that yeah I don't see that like maybe across the totality of rocks and role or what IT but you know and so like if ever there was A 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 now. So I think there's a big understanding around that.

So that ethos is something that's always resonated. And um and I feel the same way about like relationships. We're on social media, one of the reasons I can go on social media and not have IT like Spike, my court is all constantly.

I'm there not like, okay, there's some like mentally healthy people here, some mentally unhealthy people here. People are here to find people here to love, people here to find partners, people here to furr people. And you know what, people are here to attack me like, cool. I'm glad giving you a purpose for your morning you know that kind of think I try and just approach IT all that way where you just made all of this very clear and much more to sing way where you just said, like, great, I like IT yeah.

I like IT. It's awesome yeah .

yours with IT without with a real, real, genuine sense of joy yeah like, no. Like, well, I like IT there no is no friction in that statement is like.

yeah, I really like you. I like a lot. I love that.

You like IT a lot. Now you can say IT that way.

Who can't like, if it's all love, nobody can. really. You cannot out love almost anything.

You, you're furious at me. I like IT. I just out loved you. And I I think that's why you just a no charity, never fail.

If it's not that you're gonna win everything if you our 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 a done office from jesus. But in nine things in, paul says, charity never fail. If you know, love never fails and this because I can say, I hate myself, yes, but I love the party. I hate myself just, I loved yeah where you well.

of course the answers is going to be. Yes, I was going to ask where 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 myself for others to stand on. So 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 pats of integrity. And I mean, can I just say the way I didn't feel IT? Yeah yeah it's fucking difficult as .

I was about to use that same word. I I think in order to be to become stable, um I always say that the raw material for any good experience is its opposite. So I was missed.

I was left up beyond belief. That is snapper. These are both military turns.

Snapple situation Normal. All fect. Foobar means fucked up beyond all recognition. I was foobar now. I occasionally get snap food, but I was so foobar 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, Scott.

I feel like IT starts with the scope of self, like we have to do this far selves before we can do this with and four other people yeah. And then at some point the fantasy in my mind, right like something like my mother my mother um from the Youngest stage I can remember in myself was talking about like trying to heal the world. Yes and i've seen the toll it's taken on her like show call.

Sometimes I really have to go and like something would have happened in the news, like I can just tell like IT IT really wears on her and it's hard for me to to here and see because really like I feel IT too. It's like, goodness like do you feel there's hope for our species? I mean, i'm just trying to not throw at the whole the whole problems of the world at you but like like I mean like what i'm almost fifty I feel like at this point i've seen enough like there's so much goodness and people yeah but there's also like the capacity for so much like misunderstanding bad.

You got the development of hiring. You got to the hurt people. Hurt people were all everyone's doing the best they can. Everyone wants safety and acceptance, and they are just trying to find out. And like and then there are you're truly bad actors because they're either because wired or whatever, and they're like creating habits. Like is there any real hope for like a different version of things that persistent?

The first time I remember worrying about this, I was four. I'm ten years older than you are, but I knew at four that I was here that try to help with something. And as I grew up, I just wouldn't go away.

This feeling that I was able 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 liked 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? And IT all came to ahead 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 I was funny.

So I told IT to some friends from the shanghai tribe who reacted like this. And then they ran, and I was like, what did I do wrong? And later that night, we are all sitting around the fire.

There are lions around. They bring this little woman from most and b and she's the song goa. She's a shaman. And SHE did her divinations, to which he threw the bones for me. Because if you had dream I had, you have to see this on Normal right away, or bad things will happen.

So SHE said stuff about me that was true, which you got a google, did you know? And IT was weird when he looked at me, I felt like these ice needles going through me. I was not cute, but I was very intense.

And what he said was, there are people being born to be healers all over the world, just like they are in the traditional tribes. You need to go find them and tell them what they're here to do. They're here to heal the world.

And they need the wisdom that the traditional people had, and they need their technology. And IT was so interesting because he was like confused. SHE acted very frighten and confused by what he was saying to me, had to get a group of people behind her who would chat.

We agree we agree because he was freed out um but I think that in every traditional group one hundred two hundred fifty people, there were a few healers that were recognized by the elders as people who were the they were highly sensitive, they were interested in nature and science, they were interested in animals, they were interested in the mystery, they were interested in the arts, they were performers. But they were also very like um introverted and thinking thinking it's an architect of healing of medicine person. The coaches I coach, I call IT way finders, which is a term from another apologist.

If you're more in that architect, if you have that feeding type, I believe it's a fema type. And I believe IT crops up in every hundred, two hundred fifty 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 is can I go, but i'm in the game and I kind of think you are too.

I'm feeling I am too. And i'm certain that I mean IT thanks to you seriously in in large part, you know, I ve told the story earlier that the paths on and the fact that anyone's listening to this and watching IT is the consequent of having red your books and done the exercises and and will continue to do them so I I must say um there really aren't words to express how much um 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 um because I like everyone else in a work in progress who's curious about the best ways to to move forward and um yeah every time you speak and just when you show up some place 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 same to you. You're just looking in the mirror.

Thank you. Thank you. I might be the only podcast ever end in tears.

Thank you so much. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with doctor marthe's. C.

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